Chard St James a fictitious area in Central England, situated on a busy mainline featuring passenger and heavy freight traffic.

10th July 2007

The layout itself is an oval, with the fiddle yard at the rear and sides. Now let’s take a journey around the layout, from the left, the mainline appears from underneath the rail bridge, alongside a single freight line.
The mainline split here from the platform lines, so the middle lines through the centre of the station are used as avoiding lines and pass under th footbridge linking the main platform to the island platform. The main station building has been rebuilt, with a new building a few years ago, but the island platform building has only just been knocked down and the clearing up process is nearly finished and rebuilding is about to start. The station has four bay platforms, of which only three are now used for branch lin passenger trains.
In front of the station is a small freight yard, where some trains are split for the local distridution company. The yard is connected to the mainline via a freight avoiding line, where alsorts of freight trains can be seen held awaiting crew changes, loco change or just waiting for the next available path. At the left hand end of the station you will see a bay platform used to store loco’s awaiting for there next turn of duty.
Finally we get to the other end, where the platform lines rejoin the through lines, before the mainline passes under a road bridge, also the branch line disappears under a separate road bridge. In between the branch line and mainline a small yard can be seen, now used to store engineering wagons etc. At the front of the layout a warehouse can be seen.


HST in trouble !!

Chard St. James after refurbishment, the builders still haven’t finished ! Layout’s are never finished !!

	What's going on here ?	37 697 waiting its next turn