"James Street" started life as a terminus to fiddle yard layout built for my dad, James, in the mid-1990's. When he sadly passed away I took on the layout as a replacement for "Lynford Junction', which had been sold in 1998. In it's first form with Dad it consisted of just the terminus and a two track line out on an 8' long board.

 

When I took it on and began to build what was to become "James Street" in 2000. I wanted to make sure when it was made into a larger layout there was a lot of operation, but without a lot of the problems that had plagued "Lynford Junction".  By 2002 I had added on the dock area and extended the two track main line around to the rear of the layout, along with the front part of the four track main line and what is now Kendall station. This upper level included a fiddle yard where the goods and carriage sidings are now, but had the reversing loop which runs through Iona station. It took a long time to build this first version of the layout as I was also occupied with "Bethany Wells", an American N Gauge layout of my friend Pete Laxton. I was also building baseboards for a terminus based on St Pancras as part of a bigger plan to build a joint exhibition layout with Dave and Martyn, where we would have our own layouts that were capable of being joined for exhibition purposes. This never came to fruition sadly.

 

By 2010 the layout was basically complete in the original form, but I found the dockyard difficult to operate, as all trains had to come into the reception roads by the main goods yard at James Street, then be shunted across all running lines into a run round loop, after which shunting could be done. I decided to turn all of the reception sidings, which were originally stub end, into loops, and added a 6" section to the side of the layout to allow this. I had to move the garage doors out by the same amount to make it possible! The first outing for this original "James Street" was in 2012 at my local club's show in Chelmsford, but I quickly came to the same conclusion that I had with early versions of "Lynford Junction" in that the fiddle yard took up a lot of valuable space and could be opened out to provide an all round layout. Fiddle yards are often where most of the cost is in a layout (points and track) plus they hide away all the expensively collected stock. I also had problems with the trailer that transported the layout and had to buy a replacement which just happened to be larger, meaning I could fit a larger layout in it.

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I started to rebuild the layout after this show, and had the boards and track completed fairly quickly, followed by three months of wiring. The first exhibition outing for the current version of "James Street" was at the Shoeburyness MRC show in 2014, where it ran well and got lots of positive comments, but only the front boards had any scenery as the rear boards were still bare plywood at the time.

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It was finally completely sceniced to a basic level by 2017, and then a second pass of detailing commenced, including buildings and other structures to a better standard than the originals. Scalescenes brick papers were used extensively, and a lot of Metcalfe papers were replaced. I also placed ads for more operators, resulting in being able to field a full experienced team for Warley in 2017 where it was awarded both the Calvert Cup for Best N Gauge layout and the Railway Modeller Cup. In January 2018 we went to Erith and won Best in Show there too, as well as receiving lots of positive comments from the public.