Waddon South

Hello. Waddon South is an imaginary terminus set in the mid to late 1950's. It was never intended to be a terminus, or be called Waddon South! My original plan was to model an imaginary station on the West Croydon-Wimbledon line. The problem was that the layout is built in a small L-shaped box room and fitting in two workable fiddle-yards proofed to be impossible, so the plan changed. Even now the fiddle-yard space is very restricted. The layout is built along two walls of the room and measures 6'6" by 7'6" and is 12" wide, widening out to 3' wide at one end.
Construction
Baseboards are made from 6mm ply mounted on 2x1 battens and attached to the walls with large shelf brackets.
Track is Peco Code 75 with live frog points. The 3rd rail bits are also Peco. Control is DC using a small Gaugemaster controller and the point motors are a mixture of SEEP and Peco.
The majority of the buildings on the layout are from the Scalescenes range of downloadable kits, all modified in some way to suit their locations. The barn in the rag & bone mans yard is the old Superquick kit recovered in Scalescenes building papers. Most of the buildings have interior details and lighting fitted.
The backscene was made up from images found online, resized to fit, printed out and, after carefully cutting out, stuck onto a Gaugemaster sky backscene.
All the figures are either Dart Castings, Scalelink or Mike Pett.
Signals are Ratio, and the other bits and pieces on the layout are from various manufacturers.
An Imaginary History
I like my layouts to have a back story and to fit in to the real world, so I always come up with some sort of 'might have been' scenario. In my fictional history, the area to the south of Croydon became built up much earlier than it actually did (during late Victorian times rather than the 1930's), which led the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway to build a single track branch line from the West Croydon-Epsom line near Waddon station to the the new development at what became known as Waddon South. The line had steady commuter traffic but limited freight until the 1920's when Croydon Airport and the Purley Way Croydon bypass were opened nearby. With the bypass came a host of new factories bringing a lot of freight to the line, along with extra traffic generated by the airport. On the layout there is is no room to model much in the way of goods facilities, just one factory and a coal yard, so it is assumed that most of the freight is handled off-scene with goods trains reversing at the station and heading off down a goods only line back to the fiddle-yard. With the ever increasing commuter traffic the line was electrified in the 1930's.
A Description of the Layout
The fiddle-yard consists of three roads for the main line, a single goods line and a very short line from the on-scene factory. As I say, it is very restricted and lots of hand shunting goes on! There are two shelves beneath the baseboard with three unpowered tracks on each which serve as an overflow.

This is the entry point to the fiddle-yard. The main and goods only lines run beneath the brick bridge, whilst on the left is the Standard Steel works with it's own siding also heading into the fiddle-yard.

The line then passes the signal box and P-Way yard.

A sharp curve passed Alston's factory takes the line into the station, passing over a culverted stream.

The station itself consists of a single island platform, a carriage siding and loco stabling siding, and a small coal yard (still under construction).

The station forecourt.
In the town scene I have tried to capture what I remember of that 1960's South London atmosphere.

The end of the line