Little Bazeley
By-The-Sea (better known simply as Little
Bazeley) is the terminus of a small branch line,
originally built by the London Brighton &
South Coast Railway with great hopes of
establishing another lucrative coastal resort for
holiday-makers arriving by train.
Avertised initially as a
"seaside excursion" destination by the
Southern Railway and later on as "sunny and
bracing" by British Railways (who also, of
course, told people to travel there by train),
Little Bazeley somewhat miraculously managed to
escape the Beeching axe of the British Transport
Commission's mid-1960's modernisation plan.
Passenger services were cut back but not
withdrawn completely on the electrified branch.
The branch always had a
steady flow of freight traffic, generated mostly
by a fairly large factory and warehouse beyond
Little Bazeley station. In addition, these tracks
- commonly referred to as Little Bazeley Sidings
- are also used regularly by engineering trains.
The branch
line to Little Bazeley is, of course, completely
fictional (its name inspired by an epsiode of the 1960s TV
series The Avengers). The 00 scale
layout is designed as an Inglenook Sidings shunting puzzle and therefore
only features the freight tracks beyond the
station.
The layout,
designed and built in 2021, has overall
dimensions of 200cm x 30cm and consists of two
parts (both measuring 100cm x 30cm) that fold
back onto each other for storage.
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