Braxted is a Fine scale Model Railway Layout designed and built by the author. It represents an imaginary small, country branch line terminus, situated somewhere along the Essex/Suffolk border in East Anglia, as it may have appeared in the mid - 1930's.

This was Great Eastern Railway territory. In 1923 the G.E.R. was absorbed into the London and North Eastern Railway, but apart from the change of name and livery, the system appeared unaltered, and the essential character of the G.E.R. lived on!

I have always lived in the Lea Valley area and so I became very familiar with the Liverpool Street to Cambridge main line, especially in the 1930s to 1940s when I started riding on the trains for two hours every day to school and back.

I became fascinated with some of the little branch line trains which I saw daily. Bishops Stortford to Dunmow, Elsenham to Thaxted and the Audley End to Saffron Walden branch, which was the only one on which I actually rode both ways, on the occasion of our school swimming gala, at Saffron Walden in the summer term of 1939. I believe our locomotive was the very last Great Eastern 'G4' class, which was scrapped the same year.

Upon retirement fifty years later, I found that some '0' gauge kits were available, to enable me to construct models of some of the little branch line trains that I remember so well; class 'J69' and 'J15' locomotives and G.E.R. six wheeled coaches as well as private owner goods wagons. So now, with time on my hands, I thought about building a layout.

The only one of the three branches mentioned above to have a terminus was the Thaxted branch, but to construct a scale model of it would require more space than I had available, so I would have to invent a location of my own.

One of my classmates at school told me on our first day that he lived at "Broxted", but he had quite a strong country dialect, and it sounded like "Braaxted", so "Braxted" is what my layout became - in memory of young Carr, aged eleven years. I never did know his first name, we only used surnames. I progressed from being Smith III in 1938 to Smith II and finally Smith I, by which time (1943) there were four pupils named Smith (three younger than me, none related).

I decided that "Braxted" would have been added to the railway network at the instigation of local gentry and businessmen, similar to the actual events that brought about the existence of the Thaxted branch.

First, I constructed the fiddle yard using some old shelves and chipboard, then the two layout boards, each six feet long and two feet wide, using 2" x 1" planed timber and again, chipboard top, on which 1/8" cork sheet was laid under Peco track and points. The track was wired up and tested before granite chips were glued down to represent ballast.

Buildings were constructed using photographs of the original buildings at Thaxted (station buildings, engine shed and water tower). These were sited to suit my track plan, which included a single faced platform, run-round loop, three short sidings and a short spur to loading and cattle docks. The engine shed is reached by way of another spur and has facilities for coaling and watering locomotives.

The entrance to the fiddle yard is hidden by a road bridge which is made of plywood covered by plastic card which is embossed with bricks, and suitably painted. Station buildings were painted to represent timber structures, but the engine shed and water tower were covered in brick paper which I embossed to make the bricks stand out. The embankments were formed by gluing blocks of polystyrene packing material to the baseboards where required and then carving them to shape with a bread knife.

Bleached carpet underfelt was glued upside down to the polystyrene and when the glue had 'set' the underfelt was ripped off, leaving a 'hairy' residue on the polystyrene which was treated with water colours to represent grass, undergrowth etc. Finally many small details were added - mainly of white metal, squirrels, rabbits, birds and fencing to the embankments, station name boards, seats, fire buckets, passengers etc. to the platform. Also, timetables, posters, notices etc. The last kit was the Great Eastern signal kit which I managed to install complete with lamp and full operating gear.

This layout has given me a great deal of pleasure to design, construct, operate and exhibit, and I hope it has given pleasure to many who have seen it at exhibitions over the last fifteen years.

At the age of 81 I am just putting the finishing touches to a new layout, which I hope to exhibit quite soon!