Birmingham Knotmore Street

[railsquid]

Trigger warning: this involves non-Japanese content, so if that's not of interest please head over to Takahachikawa.

 

 

 

Right, for the rest of us, any trains heading to/from Takahachikawa will also pass this location:
 

temporary-platform-2018-06-18b by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

which will be loosely based on Birmingham Moor Street station. For those of you watching in North American, that's Birmingham, England. Which I like to describe as the Nagoya of the UK, i.e. kind of boring but famous for cars. (Yes, I did go to school there, and so did my brother, who ironically spent a year in Nagoya working for Toyota as an automobile engineer). However it's quite interesting from a railway point of view as it was served by two of the UK's mainpre-war railway systems (GWR and LMS) and the current Moor Street station has been constructed in a very retro GWR style which makes it interesting from a modelling perspective. Also the former LMS main line runs directly beneath it. So with a bit of imagination, something which is not (quite) Moor Street (geddit) fits nicely into a corner of my layout, and allows me to indulge in all those British trains I was unable to afford as a child.

Pictured here is a Class 52 diesel-hydraulic "Western", an excellent model from Dapol (well if you ignore the fact the lighting in one direction has failed, which is quite good going for Dapol) pulling a rake of (somewhat freelance 1980s Graham Farish) Pullman coaches, kind of like this.

Edited June 19, 2018 by railsquid