Layout: ‘Lower Exbury’
After his wife Alison became the custodian of ‘Lower Exbury’ in 2015, David Barker explains the history of the layout and the modifications they have since made to the original.
After falling for it at a show, Alison Barker can now call ‘Lower Exbury’ her own.
Ihad been bought a layout for a significant birthday, and when Alison was approaching one herself, there were some less-than-subtle hints dropped about that gift idea being copied!”
David and Alison first saw ‘Lower Exbury’ at Railwells almost a decade ago and were instantly taken by it. Alison loved its simplicity, that despite its small size, it ‘looked right’. It was cleverly composed to give an impression of greater depth. As Alison’s favourite operating mode is shunting, she saw it would give plenty of scope for this. They were so impressed that they invited its builder, Jo Palmer, to bring it to the Southampton Model Railway Exhibition the following year.
“We spoke to Jo at the exhibition and learned that it had been built following a Scalefour Southwest ‘P4’ layout challenge in 2009 with the competition concluding at Railwells in 2011,” explains David. “Jo freely admitted that she hadn’t done much modelmaking before and took a lot of mentoring and assistance from friends and family throughout the build, keeping the track plan as simple as possible.” A few years later and the pair saw ‘Lower Exbury’ at another show with a sign on it to say that it was for sale; a few months later, after delivery had been arranged, Alison became its proud owner.
“Since only the layout was bought but none of the stock, it allowed us to slightly alter how the layout was run without making any drastic modifications to the layout itself. After all, since Jo had spent so long creating the ‘P4’ track with parts from The P4 Track Company and it worked so well, we didn’t want to go about changing everything!”
Set in southern Hampshire just outside the small village of Exbury in July 1952, Jo had run ‘Lower Exbury’ as a light railway, but Alison decided to remodel it as being under BR ownership, as most of the prototype light railways were following nationalisation.
“This worked well for us as it meant we could pick and choose the stock we wanted and, crucially, locomotives which we knew would be easy enough to convert to ‘P4’ scale with the wider track gauge. All of them have been fitted with wheels from Alan Gibson. A couple use proprietary bodies with replacement chassis and a couple are kit-built, and all of these use Mashima motors.”
NOD TO THE PAST
While the locomotives have all changed, David and Alison have retained a hint of the layout’s past with a cheeky wagon, of which head office in London is unaware!
“Now that the region has come under the Southern Region of BR, all of the rolling stock has been suitably repainted, for except one item. A lone Manning Wardle
occasionally makes its way to ‘Lower Exbury’ with a rake of wagons from the local brickworks with a brake van still in the old light railway livery. This is an agreement the brickworks has had with the local office which works for both parties, but it’s keeping it a secret from Waterloo for as long as it possibly can!”
“The size of the layout, with a scenic section of just 5ft and a 2ft 6in cassette fiddleyard, meant that building or converting stock to ‘P4’ would not be too onerous as the amount of stock required would be fairly small. This was our first move into modelling in ‘P4’. Previously we had only worked in ‘OO’ and ‘EM’. However, like most projects, we now have more than sufficient locomotives and stock, helped in part by a friend turning up one day with half a dozen or so wagons!
“There are three cassettes in the fiddleyard and each one is capable of holding a locomotive and two coaches, or a locomotive and four or five wagons, depending on its size. This is a very rural line terminus right near the south coast; there is never going to be a large amount of traffic at any one time, which suits us completely.”
PAINSTAKING DETAIL
It’s not just the hand-built track which makes ‘Lower Exbury’ such a good layout. Most of the buildings have been scratchbuilt and, at every turn, there are details you’d miss if you just took a glancing look. The cobbles, for example, have been painstakingly hand-scribed into Artec coving adhesive with a scribing tool and a compass. The DUKW, a Second World War amphibious vehicle, abandoned out of the water now that its services are no longer required, is an Italeri kit in 1:72 scale, the backscene is hand-painted, the crane a Wills kit and the grounded body is from Ratio. Everything has been carefully crafted, despite the time constraints that Jo faced in getting the layout completed ahead of the exhibition in 2011, and this has been carried forward into David and Alison’s tenure.