COLCESTER - a fictional City which takes my first three letters of my name and adds "Cester" to it, from the latin CASTRA, meaning fort or fortified place (my love of Roman sites gave Colcester a foundation in that era!) - has had several model railway layouts. Colcester MK1 was a garage-based layout on a baseboard which winched down from the ceiling, thus giving access to the garage for normal use. There were drawbacks to this layout. It could only be run when the garage had no car in it, plus the winch system was awful and constantly jammed, and the baseboard could never be extended because of weight and space issues.

The decision was made to go into the garden, and a new shed was purchased (10ft by 6ft) to house a new layout. Colcester MK2 was commenced and reached an almost completed stage with track ballasted, scenery added, buildings and even overhead wires on the tracks! But as things do, ideas formed during the building work and plans were adapted, first to create the MK2a layout and then Colcester MK2b, which was going to feature a new hidden storage yard and a partly hidden station (an idea borrowed from several seen at model railway shows) with access holes cut into each corner. Work started on this which meant alot of already finished scenery was ripped up and track was taken up too so that the revised trackplan could be put in place. Many of the features this later plan adopted were to find themselves appearing on Colcester International.

Alas, with the passing away of my father, the project lost momentum and another hobby, computers - took up the slack. I just couldn`t muster the energy to return to Colcester`s little world.

This would have been the end though had it not been for two things. Firstly, I was fortunate enough to travel on an Hitachi Class 395 from Margate to St Pancras on two occasions, and secondly, upon getting engaged and then married to my wife Joan (a former employee at Hornby`s factory in Margate) we moved to Letchworth and acquired a garden of nearly 40ft of length.

This new Colcester Layout is very ambitious, but then as a legacy to my late Father, it will finally be a fitting tribute to everything he liked about Model Railways. I`m sure that he would have loved the progress made in the field of DDC and model design, although i never remember if he preferred the steam era to the modern era - maybe he liked both. He would have been fascinated by the various products now available to control the layout and i have no doubt he would have loved to see everything from working signals to interior coach lights all set up on this layout. He would no doubt too have found ways to wire up the layout for a multiple of effects like street lights and shops. But i also like to think he would have loved the idea of controlling his own train at the same time as others running either automatically or under the control of another, such is the dream of using DCC, He would have really liked this aspect i feel.

I have included a picture on here at the top showing myself and my Father at work within the first Shed layout in Saffron Walden, which as you can see was still very much in its infancy at the time the picture was taken.

This was the layout that we started and which nearly became completed if it had not been for the grand ideas of the MK2a and 2b layout stalling the project. Then in April of 1997, the unthinkable happened and my Father passed away suddenly at home - never to see the work we had started complete.

I have said repeatedly that this latest version of Colcester is a "legacy layout" and that the time was right to get back into railway modelling. I myself am at the time of writing, not far off my 50th Birthday which will be in 2018. It feels natural to therefore find something to while away my rest days inside a shed in my garden, planning, building, hammering, drilling and wiring this new layout together, to finally do justice to all those various models purchased over the years - earlier loco`s like my Classes 90 and 91`s right up to my more modern fleet acquisitions like the Class 350, EuroStar and Class 395 Javelins... This was ideal for a new start, a new Shed / Garden railway and the start of Colcester MK3...  A legacy I hope once finished, will do justice to the idea my Father started over a decade earlier...

​

WHERE IS COLCESTER??

Colcester International is a multi-level 8 platform station sited on a fictional Hi-Speed 3 line which also serves both express and local services. The City swallowed up the quaint village of Furman Smithy as a suburb which nestles close to the Ring Road, but it isn't all urbanization as a picturesque section of the River Colne Navigation with water meadows is an idyllic buffer between the City and Furman Smithy itself. The main City Centre itself is a busy, hectic place, the main Bus Station is located alongside the main Colcester International Station building. Opposite are several Victorian buildings as the road leads up to the City Cross in front of one of the Cities many Churches and a section of its City Wall which reveals some of its Roman past. To the right of this is a City Gate from the Medieval period on the site of an original Roman one, through which a semi-pedestrianised street runs with lots of well known High Street shop names along it.

Colcester itself is somewhere just south of the Midlands somewhere between the ECML and the WCML and linked to HS2, brushing onto the Cotswolds area, in easy reach of both London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Birmingham. The local rail links serve the Capital and Birmingham, as well as places like Peterborough, York, Newcastle, Gloucester, Bristol, Worcester, Coventry, Milton Keynes and many more

 

2020 / 2021 UPDATE

The present Colcester International has met with some issues with both its running and the framework. It will have to be re-built which will require most of the scenery and features to be removed. There is a new page been added to this site in regards to the new re-build which can be accessed if you CLICK HERE