Saltash History and Heritage
Building Bere Alston Station 4mm
A retirement project to build a model railway in five years; sounds easy enough but should it be a fictitious location or a real location. The decision was ‘a real location’. It had to be somewhere I could get to easily, somewhere that was compact, somewhere that had interesting traffic and somewhere that would be interesting to research and would fit into the space available without losing the character of the real place.
Bere Alston fitted the bill and as the station and most buildings still exist what could go wrong.
A visit with a camera and a tape measure began an adventure that after six years is still far from finished. What I didn’t realise was that the research would be as interesting and as time consuming as actually building the railway.
The Track plan of Bere Alston Station
The station and sidings at Bere Alston.
I intend to model this section of the station to scale with very little compromise to the track layout. This diagram shows Bere Alston Station layout as it was in 1920. At that time the island platform was used by two railway companies, LSWR and PD&SWJR. The line along the centre of the platform shows the area controlled by each company.
The bottom half facing the main line controlled by the LSWR and the top half controlled by the PD&SWJR. It wasn’t until I decided to build a model of the platform and took a close look at it that, although the two companies combined in 1922 and amalgamated all their facilities in 1926 the centre line of the platform is still easily seen.
Some photographs from the last six years
Because all of the station buildings would have to be scratch built I left them till last but used some buildings from an old layout to fill the gaps. Now there is only the main station building to do I have started replacing and upgrading other parts of the layout as better alternatives and techniques become available and my skill level improves.
