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Name needed for my layout. How did you choose yours

3453 Views 27 Replies 21 Participants Last post by  bigdave
Ok so the layout is coming along albeit slowly and I am now wanting to give it a name but I'm struggling to work out what to call it.

Any suggestions welcome and also how did you guys come to the name for your layout.
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I hadn't given my layout a name. I didn't think it was neccessary.

I suppose you could make something up. I did see one in Adelaide which had names from Lord of the Rings. I suspect it was not prototypical.
I named mine after our house name; "Hightor". Then found out it was a spot in Derbyshire, then researched it a bit, then decided that I would model aspects of the real thing into my fiction. Funny how things progress.
Yeah I was thinking if it was really required as well neil but I'm sick of just calling it "my layout" so thought something would be needed.
It was easy for us - taking over an existing layout it already had a name & although extensivly refurbished, as it remained essentially the same we kept it !

We do have a name for our next project though.
I don't really refer to my layout by a name - it's usually just "the layout"! However, I did choose the fictional station names to suggest real locations without having to be held to following any prototype.

My layout is based on the Southern Region of British Rail(ways) but can "move" according to whether i want to run, for example, the Bournemouth Belle, Brighton Belle or Golden Arrow (Western, Central and Eastern Divisions, respectively). Also, I needed somethng that allowed me to run London Transport trains at the London end of the layout.

With all that in mind, I came up with High Cross using New Cross as the inspiration (although it probably represents places like Richmond or Wimbledon just as well), and Middlehurst from Midhurst in West Sussex, although the track layout bears no resemblance to that either.

I subsequently found out that there is a real High Cross, in the London area of the Eastern Region out of Liverpool Street! So, even when I'm making up fictional names I can't win!!!!
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I call my layout 'Ashboughton'. It represents a preserved railway somewhere in the southern half of England, running mostly steam, hence the 'Ash' part of the name.
It's a branch line, as most preserved railways are, giving us the 'bough'.
And just rounded off by the 'ton' to give the appearance of a real place name.

I have checked various sources and cannot find a real place with that name - so far, anyway!

Regards,
John Webb
I named my main station (Kabburg) after my Family.

Kate (SWMBO), Aimee (Eldest Daughter) Brianna (youngest daughter) and burg is a generic end name for the part of Germany I am modelling.

John

With two children its easy and the cat (Precious), the fish (Bella, Tinkerbell and Chocolate) dont get mentioned!
My layout is the 'Buffalo Pass, Scalplock and Defiance' from the tv show 'Iron Horse' starring Dale Robertson. I needed a name for it to put on my You Tube vids.
OK - confession time, my "plank" is named Fuller's Yard, which initially derived from the name of my favourite brewery. I then realised it's also the name for an ex council yard about 100 yards from where I work.

The current OO project is going to be named after a real place that used to have a railway (long since closed) and never had a station. This one does, however, have two good reasons to exist, next to a large isolation hospital (lost under a B great shopping centre) and in close proximity to an RAF station (now civilianised). For those of you with good memories you may recall I have altered my model of Tangmere to use on this project, that is not the airfield in Question!

Regards
My earlier layouts were:

1. The Glasgow Subway (based pre-1914) containing a typical station and the car sheds lifting pit and that was just called 'Glasgow Subway'.

2. The next one was a reasonably accurate representation of an Irish brach line halt called 'Dunsandle' which was the intermediate station on the Attymon Junction-Loughrea branch.

3. My first Continental one was of a Wagons-Lits coach depot called 'Ouaisne' pronounced Wayney and taken from a Jersey road map!

4. My first American one was an HO version of an N gauge layout seen in a former model shop in East Mission Street, San Francisco and I named it 'East Mission Street Yard'

5. Walmington Pier Tramway came about as a desparate measure to find a name for this layout 48 hours before its first show and the phone conversation between Exhibition Manager (EM) and myself (DC) went something like this:

(EM): We've been hit by a flu epidemic and lost 8 exhibitors, are you fit enough to bring your pier layout along?
(DC): Aaaaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!
(EM): What's up?
(DC): Its too minimalist, I'll get laughed out of the exhibition
(EM): No you won't, it'll go down well.
(DC): If you must
(EM): Great!!!! What are you going to call your layout?
(DC): I haven't a bloody clue!!!
(EM): I can't put that on show
(DC): I can!!!!!!
Dads Army closing theme was heard simultaneously on our televisions
(DC): Oh bu88er it, let's call it 'Walmington Pier Tramway'
And the rest dear reader, is history

Dave
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QUOTE (Piermaster @ 11 Aug 2008, 19:13) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>(DC): Oh bu88er it, let's call it 'Walmington Pier Tramway'
And the rest dear reader, is history
I love that story Dave!

I find it impossible to think of something to call my layout which is still at the planning stages, but as it's based on Ötztal in Austria I could perhaps use that and call it the Ötztalbahn. (Hence why my website is called Eurofima (a type of coach) Prima! ...I just couldn't make up my mind!)

Other choices are:

Gödelbahn
Putzibahn (a squirrel in a German hörspiel)
Tiroladlerbahn (literally Tyrol Eagle Railway)
Wildschonaubahn (a nice valley in the mountains above Wörgl)
Wörglbahn

So I'm clueless! I wish you the best of luck Harkins! (Harkinbahn?)
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Aslan is the lion in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books and lives in a large wardrobe!

My layout also lives in a wardrobe and is based in the southwest. My family and I went through some names from places we'd known when we lived in the Westcountry and came up with Aslanvale.

The theme continues - Jadis (the white witch) Aggregates operate a quarry terminal on the layout, the preserved railway line that terminates in the village is the Pevensie Railway and I'm sure various other things will crop up!
Sorry to be down to earth after such exciting suggestions, but all I did was look at a map of the area the layout was meant to be set and choose some similar-sounding names. So for the Manchester area I came up with Stanshaw and Worthenden for my two stations. I feel a bit disconcerted if a layout's name is an actual place, unless it is the intention to portray that place, so I checked with a mapping site that neither actually exists. Place name endings in particular tend to be specific to different parts of the country, as many originate with groups such as the Vikings or the Saxons who only settled in certain areas.
My layout name is derived from the whole process of railway modelling which generally involves quite a bit of carpentry, liberally interspersed with much f'ing and blinding when things don't quite work out the way you intended.

Hence Chipp(y)ing and Much B(l)inding) - Chipping & Much Binding.

Expat.
I generally go for a real place where there's no railway station which is vaguely in the area of the region I'm modelling (or a preferred region if you model anything and everything) and call it that, e.g. Leaves Green is the present working title for a pair of unbuilt DC Kits Tadpole units. Lazy but effective. Once, though, I did get the strangest inspiration for a layout name: Marks and Spencer had an ad campaign with a song from the 1960s about doing drugs and hippie love and buying their new summer range &c. and, since it was never off the air, I became really rather taken with what I thought to be "Itchingcombe Park" in the song. Turned out it was called "Itchycoo Park" (too good to be true, eh?) but Itchingcombe, as my poor hearing had suggested, still sounded rather nice and also very Southern (and very generic Southern: it could be anywhere, from next to Addiscombe on the trams in Croydon to near Itchingfield Junction at Christ's Hospital to a sunny South Coast resort) and so down it went! Or you can combine random aspects of place names, -ton, -ham, -wich, -mere, bury, combe, North, South, East, Magna, Parva, Great, Little, Vale &c. with either a local name from the area (e.g. there are several "-wittons" in Northumberland so one project which never got anywhere was Southwitton") or a family name &c.
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5
Kain
I found a name for my layout
after thinking about it a while
i decided enough thinking and more track building was called for, and so the name evolved from my sis's name as i would like to dedicate it to her, you know who i mean.

Called it 'MORGANTH'

After all locos are named after women so why not the layout


Keep an eye open for progress on her in the near future .......... now wheres the glue and track
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2
My layout is named after a very nasty place I went to once with a 'Flying Dutchman'


"Worldsend"


Cpt Jack
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If you want to 'place' a layout in the UK, as suggested in an earlier post it is worth looking at the form of place names in the area, and either stealing a name outright, or assembling a name from elements common to the area. I did once try and persuade someone building an extremely freelance exhibition layout , (bound to get up the noses of the serious brigade) to name it Hartheigh Framboys, entirely linguistically justifiable I should add, but he declined...
Ok so I've been thinking about this and I think I've come up with something that whilst I was thinking about work. It came to me.

What about truncheon junction which is made up from where I work at the moment and have the depot named as pava depot.

Let me know what you think.
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