July 2020 - Rev. Peter Denny's 'Buckingham' with Tony Gee

Buckingham – 70 and counting by Tony Gee

At this time of anniversaries, there is one that this article sets out to commemorate. It was in the early part of 1948, shortly before the Model Railway Club exhibition, that Peter Denny (before he became a Rev.) decided that the layout he was preparing to show there ought to have a name.

He looked out his map and followed the Great Central Railway line out of Marylebone looking for a place that wasn’t served by the railway but might have had a branch and he spotted the town of Buckingham.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I don’t think that I need to write much about the construction of the layout. One of the things that makes the layout so significant is that its builder produced articles for the model press, showing what he had done and, more importantly, how he had done it. Peter’s lifelong friendship with Cyril Freezer created a situation which allowed a regular flow of photos and articles to appear through many decades. The construction techniques have been covered in great detail by the man who actually built the layout and there is little I can add.
 

Almost every aspect of building a model railway, from baseboards and wiring, point and signal control, buildings, scenery, operation, building locos and rolling stock, were all written about in a style that was never “look how clever I am”. It was more “this is how I made something and I hope that writing about it helps you make one too”.

Those articles inspired many a modeller over the years, including your present author. I wasn’t around in the 1950s and was too young in the 1960s but my dad was a railway modeller and had many old issues of magazines that I loved looking through as I developed my modelling skills. To me, two authors stood out. Peter Denny and Frank Dyer. Buckingham and Borchester were the sorts of layouts I wanted to have (and still are).

Sadly, Peter passed away in 2009 and the layout needed a new home. Nobody was more surprised, flattered and excited that the new home turned out to be with me. I have spent many years building layouts, trying to get them a bit like Buckingham and my own modelling is very much focused on the GCR, mostly in EM gauge. To be able to stop trying to build my own Buckingham and have the pleasure of looking after the real one was a big change in direction for me but one that I have never regretted for a second.
 

With a great deal of help from some very good people, who I am proud to call my friends, we arranged to dismantle the layout, build a timber outbuilding to house it and to get it up and running. Initially, once the layout was brought here, I struggled to make it all go again and it took the help of friends to get it up and running. Although built by one person, Buckingham was never really a “one operator” layout and again, having a small gang of regular operators adds a very sociable aspect to the hobby and also replicates what Peter used to do himself. He had running sessions, usually twice a week, with various people making up teams. I am now able to do the same.

So here we are, over 70 years on. The original Buckingham layout didn’t last very long and there have been many versions, with either small or very major changes being made. It might have been a new siding, a new wagon, a new horse drawn cart but Peter was always making something. Twice, in the case of Buckingham itself, completely new stations appeared. Other stations came and went depending on the location of the layout and space available.

Although the original layout no longer exists, many parts of it live on. As far as I can tell, all the original locos, carriages and wagons are still in use, apart from one that appears in a photo, which I haven’t found. Some have been repainted, some have new motors and mechanisms but some are in pretty much original 1940s condition.

Some of them have paintwork that is so worn, sometimes with green paint that has almost turned to black, that I have had to give some thought as to whether I should be preserving what Peter himself did, or whether I should be looking to restore things to their former glory. There were three locos, all small 0-6-0T locos, which had suffered particularly badly. There were virtually no traces of lettering, many places where the paint had been scraped or worn away to reveal bare metal and they looked distinctly sorry for themselves.

Going back to the number of articles and books that have appeared, they do tell me what the locos used to look like and what their liveries and lining were like. I was able to restore them to how the used to look, in what I like to think is the “Denny” way, with brush painting, then hand lettering and lining.

The other locos, those where the paint has deteriorated but at least don’t show bare metal and you can still make out the lining and lettering, I will leave alone. If nothing else, they show just how good Peter Denny was at painting and lining. Some of it is superb by any standards.

Several of the buildings survive from the original layout too. I am pretty sure that some of the track was re-used as some of it has “Bonds O’ Euston Road” brass rail, which is dreadful stuff but just about all you could get in the 1940s. Later track, thankfully uses nickel silver rail.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a talk at a local model railway club and I gave a bit of a slide show and talked about the layout. Afterwards, a few club members came up to me and said that they enjoyed the talk but I could have perhaps explained who Peter Denny was and what Buckingham was. It had never even occurred to me that the vast majority of articles had appeared 50 or 60 years ago. I thought everybody knew about it.

I gave a similar talk a while later at another club and this time I started by asking who was familiar with the layout and who wasn’t. It was roughly a 50/50 split. By writing an occasional article myself, I hope to perhaps alter that figure slightly.

The reason why I think it should be kept in the eye of the public is not because of its value as a part of the history of model railways.

The original Buckingham was, as far as we know, the first EM gauge layout to be exhibited. It was (for the time) rare in that it used two-rail pick up, at a time when most people were still using three-rail. It was a very early example of a type of layout that has become a staple of the hobby, the fiddle yard to terminus branch line, at a time when most people were running an oval of track on a table top. It was signalled and operated in a realistic fashion, at a time when such things were very rare.

All these things would make Buckingham, in my opinion, the single most important layout in the history of the hobby. It was the very bedrock of finescale modelling in 4mm scale and showed everybody what was possible.

And yet, to me, all of that is just incidental and doesn’t get to the very essence of what Buckingham is all about.

It was April 2008 when I first visited Truro, met Peter Denny and the rest of his operating teams and saw Buckingham for the first time. It is not any exaggeration to say that my visit there was life changing. One or two people had said that the layout was looking a bit “tired” as Peter wasn’t able to look after it as well as he used to and that I shouldn’t build my expectations up too much.

Far from being disappointed, I came away absolutely inspired. I had been able to meet and spend some time with a man that had been so instrumental in my following of the hobby and had been able to spend a few wonderful hours sitting at the controls of the layout, running trains to his timetable, with him advising and showing me how the layout worked. I learned more about the hobby in that visit and in my subsequent trips and involvement, than I had learned in the previous 30 years put together.

What Buckingham does, in a way that no other layout that I have ever seen does, is to be not only a fine display of model making skills but also a superb layout to operate. It ticks every box that needs a tick. All the locos are scratchbuilt as well as most of the carriages and wagons. Many are old and use very crude motors and gears but the vast majority run superbly. You can look at the lovely buildings, you can drink in the period atmosphere, you can marvel at the superbly complex electrical systems, which put many a modern layout to shame, or you can just enjoy the operation, to a complex timetable.

There really isn’t any aspect of the hobby, or any problem within the hobby, that hasn’t been mastered on Buckingham.

I will give an example of what I mean about the electrical systems. You will see from the plan that the main terminus has 4 platforms. There are yards to either side (known as North and South sidings) plus a loco shed and some carriage sidings.

Yet there are a tiny number of electrical switches. There are three main ones, which are three position and put either North, Main or South sections on one of two controllers or isolated on a centre off. There are a few isolators in the loco shed. Everything else is switched through the signals.

The way that it works is that the main feed to, say, Platform 2, goes through the starter signal at the platform end, which happens to be lever 2. If lever 2 is pulled, along with lever 7 for the advanced starter, Platform 2 and the up main line are transferred to the Grandborough Junction controller and the operator there can run it round. The Buckingham operator can be driving anything else he or she likes while this move takes place, allowing many multiple movements if the operators are really on the ball.

If all the signals are set at danger, the platform is isolated. When a train is arriving, the home and outer home signals for coming in are pulled (19 and 22) them the Buckingham driver can bring a train in right up to the buffers. Again, put the signal back and the train loco is isolated. Then there are calling on signals, which allow a pilot or another loco to come on to the rear of the train, leaving the train loco isolated as they only energise most of the platform. Shunt ahead signals allow the pilot to draw the stock out, again leaving the end isolated.

When a train is leaving for Grandborough, once the train loco has passed the platform starter, there is an over-ride, which allows the loco trapped at the buffer stops to follow the departing train up the platform to the starter, I just need to work out where to attach the wires to make it work!

For most operations, you set the points, set the signal and turn the controller. It is simple, elegant and brilliant! When I see modern layouts with a mass of button pushing and switching to make anything go, I just smile quietly to myself and wonder why all layouts are not wired like Buckingham!

There is still, after all these years, a great deal that I am learning about how layouts should be built and operated and I am lucky enough to be able to observe at close hand the work of a real master of the craft.

Far from being just a museum piece, I consider Buckingham a vibrant, fascinating and totally absorbing layout of any era. No doubt each individual aspect of the layout may have been improved upon but as a whole, I have still never seen anything that so closely matches my vision of my ideal layout.

Although much of the layout is up and running, there is still plenty to do. Some of the photos may show where cosmetic restoration is still needed and some signals and electrical systems still need fully sorting out but there is no great rush as the layout is already giving us many hours of great enjoyments every week.

Peter only exhibited the present version of Leighton Buzzard the once but when we found the fiddle yard he built for that purpose, we decided that it would be lovely to take it out from time to time to let people see some of his work. It is entirely fitting that we should celebrate the 70th anniversary of Peter exhibiting a layout at the Model Railway Club show by bringing Leighton Buzzard to Alexandra Palace this March. Some of what you will see was there 70 years ago and is still going strong and will hopefully do so for many more years.

When I have written articles before, I have usually concluded by thanking all those who have helped me with various projects and the move and restoration of Buckingham is no exception as it wouldn’t have happened at all if it was just down to me. So, to those who arranged for the layout to come to me, helped with the move, the shed building, the return of the layout to working order and my operating crew, my heartfelt thanks.

On from Buckingham

The first part of this article, at least as far as the photographs were concerned, concentrated on the main terminus at Buckingham. Those who study the trackplan will have noticed two other stations (3 if you include the tiny halt at Bourton) so this time I will concentrate on those two, along with some of my thoughts on why this grand old layout is still relevant today.

From the earliest version of Buckingham, which had a through station, a small branch terminus and a big terminus, Peter Denny always preferred layouts with more than one station. This was partly because two of his sons, Stephen and Crispin, were interested in the hobby and they liked to have a station each to operate so they could send trains to each other. It was also because the real railway was like that. In real life, trains went from one place to another and perhaps stopped at other places along the way. What could be more realistic?

The only time Buckingham was reduced to a single station, which was when lack of space prevented anything else, it was a terminus to a fiddle yard arrangement that Peter preferred to model.

The photographs in the previous part ended where the trains go off scene from Buckingham, just beyond Bourton Halt. Here, the trains disappear into a tunnel and through the backscene. The break is only a few inches but when you are operating, that is just not obvious to either the Buckingham or Grandborough Junction operator as each one only really concentrates on their own station. At Grandborough, the double track emerges under a typical GCR overbridge and sweeps round a curve, under another bridge and into the station. This is one of the devices which makes the layout so effective from a scenic point of view. It is broken up into small sections by bridges and buildings at the front. The curved section at Grandborough contains a small goods yard, a gasworks, two loading banks plus the branch line to Verney Junction. This is a short dead-end line, which goes under the scenic break and just stops there.

Once the second bridge is passed, the platforms and station buildings are reached. Here we see how Peter used a combination of real buildings from different locations, along with freelance ones and put them together to create a fictitious but quite believable scene. The main station building is freelance but very little of that is visible behind a typical MSLR/GCR canopy, based on a photograph of Chesterfield. The island platform buildings don’t get much of a mention in the books and article but they are typical of the GCR “London Extension”. Now the Chesterfield canopy and the London Extension buildings are from two distinct geographical areas and time periods and just would not have been seen together but at Grandborough, they look as though they belong together.

It would have been much easier for Peter to put a 90-degree curve at each end and make the platform straight. It is what many a modeller does to this day. I see it all the time at exhibitions and in magazine article and it just shouts “toy train set” to me. However, Peter chose to make the platforms on a 21’ radius, with transition curves at each end. That was very rare indeed in the 1950s and not common now but it makes a huge improvement to the appearance of the station.

In front of the station, there is a small marshalling yard and a loco depot. In Peter’s mind, Grandborough was rather like Verney Junction.  Any significance it has is due to the railway choosing to build a junction there, rather than for the surrounding community. It has a tiny goods yard for the small amount of mostly agricultural traffic and a small gas works, which serves the railway community and a few nearby properties.

It is the marshalling yard that makes Grandborough Junction such an interesting station to operate. Once a day, the main goods train arrives in the yard from London. Each wagon has a small coloured dot at the end of the solebar and each of the sidings is allocated a destination. There is one for Buckingham traffic, one for Grandborough and one for Leighton Buzzard. The loco comes off the train and goes to the shed for servicing and the station pilot goes to work. The yard shunter will look at all the wagons that have come in, all the wagons already there and split them according to the coloured dots. Four colours go to Buckingham, two are for Grandborough and two are for Leighton Buzzard.  A chart on the front of the baseboard sets out which colours go to which destination on each day and at the end of each run through the timetable, a peg is moved along to remind the operator which day they are on. Each wagon has a different colour each side and the turntable fiddle yard ensure that all the wagons in the fiddle yard are turned around. Once sorted, the main goods goes on to Buckingham, wagons for Grandborough are worked across to the goods yard and the Leighton Buzzard traffic goes up the branch, or rather it will one day!

I have seen various articles on how to shunt freight trains in the modelling press over the years. Computer programs, cards, dice and all manner of things have been used but I haven’t yet seen anything that matches the simplicity, elegance and ease of use of the Denny way.

The only problem we have is that some of the colours have faded over the years, as have the colour vision of several operators. We have lively discussions about whether a wagon is red or orange, green or blue! All this has to happen in the gaps between passenger and other trains on the main line, although if we have extra operators, the marshalling yard can be switched to a second controller and worked independently. 

Peter always wanted what he called a “proper” junction. That is one where the lines can be seen to split and go off to different places. He created that at Grandborough where the lines split just beyond the “London” end of the platform. Two lines swing around to the right and go off to the rest of the railway system and a single track goes left and starts climbing to the smaller terminus at Leighton Buzzard (Linslade).

So Grandborough became a place where trains could go off in one of 4 directions. To Buckingham, Leighton Buzzard, Verney Junction or to the rest of the railway system.

After the double junction and another scenic break, which used to mark the end of the scenic section, the tracks run through a rural scene, with the Leighton Buzzard branch climbing steadily in the background. It makes it a most interesting station to operate. Or I should say it will.
 

When we dismantled the layout, we found a fiddle yard under the main boards. It was the one Peter had built for the MRJ exhibition in London in 1990, which was the first time for many years he had taken a layout to a show. He took Leighton Buzzard and I was one of the many who queued outside for hours to get in. I had made the trip because I thought it would be my only chance to see part of Buckingham.

I suggested to Stephen and Crispin that it might be nice to take Leighton Buzzard to a few shows so that people would have chance to see at least some of their father’s work.

Leighton Buzzard is the simplest of the stations (apart from Bourton Halt) and it crossed my mind that it would be the easiest to get working again. In the event, I had to do very little other than clean of many years’ worth of dust, mend a few broken solder joints and work out how to get electricity to the track. That last bit wasn’t as easy as it sounds because as in Buckingham and Grandborough, the power goes through signals and switches and there is no direct wire from the controllers to the track and changing signals selects the controller.

It didn’t take long and we exhibited Leighton Buzzard at EXPO EM in May 2011 for the first time. Peter’s sons came along and it was a lovely weekend and experience. To see quite a few middle aged and older modellers getting all emotional about the old layout was quite something. When I exhibit a layout, I like to keep things running until the last paying visitor has departed. They have, after all, paid to see the layout! On this occasion, the exhibition manger came over around 30 minutes after the show had closed to politely request that the crowd round the layout should go home!

Although the present version of Leighton Buzzard wasn’t built until the early 1970s, in many ways it is the nearest we have to an early version of Buckingham. When Peter rebuilt Buckingham into the 4 platform terminus it is now, he thought about how much he had enjoyed the earlier, much simpler versions and when he rebuilt the fiddle yard, it gave him an ideal opportunity to rebuild Leighton Buzzard, using some of the buildings and features from the track plan of the 1950s Buckingham.

The layout was later extended when more space became available and the gas works board and the street scene beyond the station were added but the original  layout was just short of 6’ long, yet contained a station with a goods yard, a private siding, a loco shed and could give many hours of most enjoyable operation.

The station building dates back to the early 1950s and is one of my favourite Denny model buildings. It is full of charm and atmosphere and has some lovely fine detail work. The loco shed and goods shed are also very early models and may date back to 1947, although there are several very similar ones on the layout and they did get altered in detail, so it isn’t easy to be 100% sure.

As on the rest of the layout, all points and signals are worked by rods and cranks with plungers and return springs taking movement across baseboard joints. The two main boards are hinged and fold together, with all the buildings fitting in between each other.

We have exhibited the layout around 15 times now and each time, the reaction from visitors to the show has really made all the hard work worthwhile. Quite a few people have been able to tell Stephen and Crispin Denny, who often come along as operators, how much their father inspired their modelling and have even brought photos of their Denny inspired models along.

What really brings home to me just how much the hobby owes to Peter Denny was brought home at the recent Warley show. We were one of around 90 layouts in the show. All shapes and sizes, with something for everybody. Yet people stayed watching us for sometimes an hour or more. Others came, watched, went away and came back, saying that out of all the layouts there, Leighton Buzzard was the one they enjoyed watching most.
 

I enjoy all aspects of the hobby, from designing layouts, to building them, building locos, stock, scenery, signals, even doing wiring! I go to quite a lot of exhibitions and I see a lot of layouts of all sorts of qualities and designs. Yet it is rare for me to watch a layout for long because the number of layouts which have anything like interesting operation is tiny.

You get the big circuit with lots of trains in a fiddle yard that rattle round. Followed by another one, then another one. You get the branch line where a train arrives, runs round and leaves. Then another one. You get the shunting layout were a locomotive pushes the same few wagons up and down all day almost aimlessly, just so something is moving. You get a through station, where everything goes through, or stops and starts. Do you ever see a vehicle added or removed? Or a train that actually terminates at a through station? Once in a blue moon!

The standard of modelling may have improved over the years, certainly in the ready to run department. The standard of operation hasn’t changed in the 40 years I have been attending shows. Yet when we go to shows with Leighton Buzzard, we get totally engrossed in operating the layout, to a simple sequence of 16 moves, which take about an hour to complete. The day flies by and I have never yet found myself bored or stale. People watching seem to be engrossed too.

If anything, that is the legacy of Buckingham. A well thought out layout design and a well thought out sequence or timetable can lift what is really a very simple layout to a whole new level of interest and enjoyment. Even adding a horsebox to a passenger train, correctly marshalled at the front (if it is loaded), just adds so much.

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