Saturday Variety

… and the shopping street, Rye Lane, runs North South. However you look at it, the station entrance on Rye Lane is not inviting.

There is a sign on the wall …

… but the entrance looks like it is just a shopping arcade.

Because that’s what it is.

We can see this track plan in reality c/o Google Earth, Here is the junction area to the west …

… with the station area on the far right.

… and the station building now far left. You can just make out the line on brick arches  flying over the line on steel girder bridges.

… and it was a most splendid edifice.

This somewhat fuzzy picture shows the station platforms and shelters atop of metal framework abutting the brick arches on the viaduct. The fence in the foreground delineates a pleasant square where, no doubt, passengers could alight from their horse-drawn carriages to continue their journey on the new cross country lines to London. A slightly later photo maintains that layout.

Later the station lost its canopy over the entrance and gained a bookstall. It also appears to have grown an external staircase.

This staircase originally led to the station’s billiard rooms.

Note that the pleasant open area has now gained shops on Rye Lane; the entrance is now very much “round the back”.

But what is happening to the station as we see it wrapped in a large plastic bag.

Ferroequinological Frustration!

One of the most useful bits introduced aeons ago by Peco (factory and shop at Beer just along the road from fbb mansions) was a pack of insulating rail joiners. To join rails together on the real railway, you use fishplates …

… but for small model railways they are much simpler.

They are usually called rail joiners because they join rails. Clever eh?

So your plus electricity is coming down the left hand rails at the heel and your minus is coming down the right hand rails. So when your minus comes in along the right hand rail, you can see it joins at the “V” of the pont (the frog) with plus coming in on the left of the other route. POOF! Short circuit.

Clever eh?

In order to mitigate this possible point failure crisis fbb had joined several lengths of track together so it could be removed as a “unit” if it were ever necessary.

Having got the plank that forms to tunnel top in place, and having placed the scenery modules thereupon, your frustrated modeller looked along the tunnel and saw, to his horror that the joined track (joins reinforced by plastic tabs glued firmly to the sleepers) had come undone.

Try joining everything back together with a wobbly left hand and ARMD problems with the eyesight!

Leicester Nostalgia

And Leicester Corporation Transport printed a smaller but equally useful timetable book?

Both operators were publishing them in the 1930s; Midland Red …

… and the Corporation.

So when will be see a Leicester Buses timetable as part of the chummy “cooperation” that now exists on bus stops, with the route map and with more on-road cooperation?