York has held a fascination for many years, I have no idea why, and for 30 years it was just a pipe dream. That all changed when we found a house with an outbuilding previously converted into a garage, providing a space of 31ft x 26ft.
The few models of York that I have seen in the model press tend to focus on the southern end, with its conventional station throat, but I always felt the northern end, with the divergence of lines to Darlington and to Scarborough over the Ouse Bridge and the Waterworks Crossing, presented a more interesting challenge. It did, however, require a squarish room - which I now had.
Having worked out the bare-bones of the scheme and critically, the radii of the roof spans and the four through lines, I started to build the trackwork for the northern end in late 2019, not really expecting to cut wood for years to come. And then came lockdown, and work proceeded at pace.
‘York’ is not finished by a long chalk. What you see here is a snapshot of progress to date, and I will send in updates over the years to come.
Making compromises
The layout is set in 1958, for all the usual reasons - the wide range of locomotives and stock that can be run, and the availability both of
