Reply To: Orchard Wharf (the Model Railway Club)

Part 2. Subject and setting

Our previous layout, Empire Mills, was set in Cornwall and depicted sidings serving a clay dry. The season was winter. The mood of the times in the MRC was for London, specifically London dockland; roughly at the same time a Scale 7 team was coalescing around a proposal to build a very truthful model of part of the North London Railway’s Bow Works (just south of Bow Road, between Mile End and Stratford): this layout is now under construction and has taken the name Bow Junction.

Our layout is truthful to the historical spirit of the area rather than the letter. It’s a former Great Eastern line, a sort of mixture of the Blackwall line and the North Woolwich line. We imagine a double track high level route, admitting that in contrast to many inner London routes the real lines in the area were at ground level, and that it (probably) crosses Bow Creek ‘offstage’. Traffic on this British Railways route includes commuter traffic running in and out of Liverpool Street and a succession of goods trains.

At a lower level is a rail-served dock operated by the Port of London Authority (PLA). Access from the high level is via a steep single-track incline. The very front of the layout is water (earlier thought to be the tidal Thames). Along the quayside run tracks for easy transshipment of goods between rail and ship and a transfer shed allows perishable traffic and parcels to be transshipped. Surrounding and interposing into all this transport activity are characteristic buildings, as far as possible drawn from local prototypes: housing, a brewery and a factory.

Orchard Wharf itself is a real place, right next door to the East India Dock entrance, and aerial photos have given us lots of useful information. In our period (which is split into three phases, but in outline very late forties to end of sixties) this was an area that was gradually being affected, directly or otherwise, by the decline of shipping on the Thames. These days the wharf itself awaits its next purposeful use while the wider area, which has taken the picturesque and once-truthful name, is covered in high-rise apartment buildings.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Ben Weiner.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Ben Weiner.