Continental Modeller August 2025

We were delighted to welcome music legend Jools Holland to Peco recently. With concerts with his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra in Weymouth and Torquay on successive evenings, his route between the two would pass very close to Beer. So an invitation for an informal private visit was issued – and accepted. Arriving mid-morning, after meeting the team responsible for the magazines and other office staff, Jools (along with his tour manager Steve Taylor) was taken through the Peco factory by Ben Arnold (Managing Director) and Michael Pritchard (Chairman), accompanied by the Editors of RM and CM. He happily chatted with staff in all departments about modelling and music, and said he was very impressed by the well-organised production facilities from design through to packing – and the fact it was…

This attractive layout is fictitious but largely inspired by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée stations of Lods (a terminus) and l’Hôpital-du-Grosbois on the Loue Valley line in Haut-Doubs, in the Doubs department in eastern France. The chosen period is the 1950s-1960s. The layout has been shown at around thirty exhibitions in France over the past five years, culminating in major events such as Meursault (December 2022), Chambéry (October 2023) and even Intermodellbau in Dortmund (April 2024). The layout measures just 4m x 1.6m and represents a single track standard gauge secondary line leading to the terminus of Saint-Bernard-du-Grosbois. The location The name comes first from the l‘Hôpital-du-Grosbois which inspired the model and whose main elements (station building, goods shed, loco shed and turntable, as well as the track plan) were arranged to provide…

The largest bridge on the narrow gauge in Saxony (De gruße Brick in the local dialect) was 180m long and spanned the Greifenbach Valley near Geyer at a height of 36m. It was first used in timetabled service on 1st May 1906. After the first section of the Schönfeld – Meinersdorf (SM) line was opened to Geyer in 1888, the section on to Thum had to wait another eighteen years before operations began. The Keller & Hildebrand company from Großluga (now Dresden-Niedersedlitz) built this bridge at kilometre 10.661. Work began in 1904 with the clearing of areas on both sides of the stream. After the space had been created for building, the abutments were built first on the Geyer side and later on the Thum side of the valley, plus…

The well-known modeller of the Saxon narrow gauge Jens Petermann got to know Siegfried Seidl and Jochen Klinger when they exhibited their HOe layout of Ehrenfriedersdorf station in the town hall of that mountain town in the Erzgebirge where they lived. They talked about the modelling possibilities of Thum network. One possible project was the Greifenbachtal bridge, but Jochen Klinger only saw the difficulty – not the structure itself, but the many trees! Master tree modeller Jens responded that that was the least of the problems, and so a firm modelling friendship was formed. They intended to model the Greifenbachtal bridge exactly to 1:87. Jochen had already worked intensively on and perfected the drawing of files for laser cutting components for the Schützhausbrücke Ehrenfriedersdorf HOe layout, so this technology was…

Location and layout background You may well ask why this layout is called Arcadia Pennsylvania Terminal, especially given that Arcadia is a small township of approximately one hundred people, going back to around 1900 as a coal town in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and does not have a railroad connection. The layout was never intended but in early 2016, during a visit to my local model shop, Arcadia Models, I happened to see an immaculate Atlas O Pennsylvania ALCO RS-1 diesel locomotive on the so-called ‘bargains table’. At the time, my main interest was focused on European HO/HOm and American HO, and the gradually improving British OO stock was also beginning to appeal. So there was absolutely no interest haunting me about O. Indeed, my wife, who jointly operates at shows,…

This layout is tinged with not a little sadness as it was built and named for my wife Margaret (Meg to most of us) who passed away in July last year. Meg was an integral part of our layout building and exhibiting. She loved snow scenes and thus the setting of Megsdorf could not be anything else. The general picture The layout depicts a small station and freight yard on a truncated branch line somewhere in southern Germany. An additional source of traffic is provided by a small brewery accessed by a private gated siding. It is certainly an exercise in minimalism, measuring just 2.1m x 0.4m (approximately 7' x 1'6") on two boards. The main scenic area is a laser-cut plywood canopy board from Grainge & Hodder. The second…