‘OO’ GAUGE LAYOUT LAUGHTON
As his modelling evolved, so did Colin Chisem’s layout, and his focus shifted back in time from a GWR branch line to a fantasy pre ‐Grouping scenario.
Model railways can go through many iterations in their lifetimes, either with an alteration to the trackplan, season, era or location. When you’ve had a layout for 20 years it’s natural to want to change things slightly as the years go by, and that is precisely what Colin Chisem has done with his ‘OO’ layout ‘Laughton’.
The real railway never reached the East Sussex village of Laughton. Instead, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway made a large triangle around it, from the major towns of Lewes and Polegate to the south, merging just to the east of Crowborough about 12 miles to the north. Colin has modelled a ‘what if’ scenario of a single line branch from Lewes terminating at Laughton.
“Construction began when I retired in 2003, just before I turned 60, when the extra time allowed me to take my railway modelling a little more seriously. I had built the odd layout before, but nothing to this scale, filling the entire wall of a room at just over 24ft. I was more interested in the real trains rather than modelling when I was younger, and can remember spending the day sitting on a bank overlooking the East Coast Main Line watching the ‘A3s’ and ‘A4s’ thunder past. It was only when I retired that modelling came to the forefront. The first iteration of ‘Laughton’ was a Great Western branch line, as prototype images of Great Western locations were much more easily accessible than those of other companies from that era. It then got altered to a Southern-based layout when Hornby and other manufacturers started to release models in those liveries before becoming a pre-Grouping layout relatively recently. I chose the LBSCR as I had spotted Hornby’s 4-wheelers in dark maroon when browsing one day and liked them so much that I bought a couple. That then opened the way to a pre-Grouping layout, and once I’d paired those with the Hattons genesis coaches, the ‘new’ layout was really taking shape.”
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