Cheshire Railway Modellers

Members' Layouts - Dave Skipsey

Dave is one of the founding members of the Wirral Finescale Railway Modellers. The group has two layouts available for exhibition, Charlotte Road and Widnes Vine Yard.

Charlotte Road (P4)

Charlotte Road was originally a branch terminus but was converted to a through, roundy roundy, layout a couple of years ago.
It is set in the near West country and is to P4 standards, as is our standard the layout is completely computer controlled and has full working signals.
The extension pieces to convert to continuous run were made in the US of A (from aluminium) and shipped to Wales where the layout resides.

Widnes Vine Yard (OO)

Widnes has been on the go for 10 years now, it started life as a reasonably accurate model of Widnes No.1 (orig. Vineyard - hence the name) as it was around 1980 just prior to closure (its now a supermarket next to the Widnes expressway). As usual the number of trains required by the public exceeded the capacity of the single line so whilst keeping the original concept the layout was extended somewhat. The track is all Peco - chosen for speed - but all the visible points have their mechanisms modified to improve the appearance. They are all operated by Tortoise motors. Signals were scratch built, based on Chester prototypes, by one of our (Wirral Finescale Railway Modellers) overseas members. The layout is computer controlled with two workstations - one for the fiddle yard and one for the station, they communicate with each other using a wireless LAN and are fully interlocked.