The entrance hall is now under construction. The walling is complete but the roofing and canopy have to be added.

The name ‘Great Western Railway’ was used at the top of the building until the period following the railways nationalisation in 1948.

This photograph shows the progress made on covering the walls of the GWR General Station. The custom stonework covering was designed and produced using MS-Word – together with the windows and the single door seen in the middle foreground.

The booking hall entrance which should be in front of the building and its canopy are yet to be constructed. Similarly, the side of the building facing the platform will need a lot of preparation – something to keep idle hands busy over the winter period!

Red brick walling has been positioned to the right of the subway. All structures are being temporarily placed in position to assess correct sizing. The main entrance lobby area in front of the main building is to be added next.

Some experimentation of ‘stone covering paper’ on the buildings will be required to match the style of the General station. A commercial product is not available – so some home crafted solution is needed. The photograph below shows the effect of one sample stone covering used on the subway entrance.

Building work has started on and around the Leamington GWR station.

The above photograph shows the main building on platforms 1 and 2 – together with the public subway in the foreground that linked the GWR station to the LMS station.

The reporting board ‘V06’ has been created and added to the front of GWR locomotive ‘Clun Castle’. This replicates an image on the Warwickshire Railways website taken in 1951 of this locomotive pulling a Paddington bound express service into Birmingham Snow Hill before going onwards to Leamington Spa General.

The first letter of the reporting board for long distance trains identified the region in which they travelled. The letter ‘V’ was allocated to the Western region of the country.

The photograph below shows The Black Cat Tavern (fictitious) standing on the corner of Bath Street (to the left) and High Street (to the right). The tavern is a Kingsway model and has a suitable shape to fit in this position.

Further detail is shown below with a view up the High Street. The terrace houses need to be completed with their porches and most of the pavement is currently missing.

The two streets join at a crossroads under the LMS & GWR railway bridges. Constraints imposed by the track layout mean that the bridges are positioned on a curved section of track, and this has required some artistic licence to be used for the road layout.

The photograph below shows the southward view from the end of Leamington General platform 2, with GWR ‘Priory Hall’ about to pass the Leamington South signal box pulling a Paddington bound express whilst a north bound coal train is rounding the curve before entering the station.

The engine in BR colours pulling the goods train is the GWR 4-6-0 locomotive number  6809 ‘Burghclere Grange’. This is the latest arrival at the Leamington engine shed.

Here is a photograph showing the construction of a set of Georgian terraced houses that exist along the High Street in Leamington leading away from the girder bridges – the houses sit immediately alongside the railway lines.

The building is a cardboard kit from Kingsway models. It has been reduced from eight properties to six to allow it to fit the available space. Further work is needed to complete the model including porched front entrances and paving to the kerbside. A backdrop behind this building will disguise the difference in ground levels.

After building the ground base for downtown Leamington, it seemed appropriate to spend some time ‘mocking up’ the girder bridges used by both GWR and LMS lines south of the Leamington stations. The photographs below show some crudely shaped pieces of hardboard to represent the bridge sides that have been temporarily positioned on the layout.

 

Down GWR express approaching the bridges prior to entering the Leamington General station.

The mock-ups are being used to check the accuracy of the bridge sizes (when compared to photographs available on the Warwickshire Railways website) and to establish the directions of the roadways under the bridges.

 

 

The two LMS signals at the Avenue Station have been wired to the control panel and can be operated OK. The bay platform signal does not move through its entire travel distance and this will need some further investigation. The platform 2 signal is fully operational.