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LAYOUT SPOTLIGHT - Allenton

On 3rd and 4th September the South of England’s biggest free Model Railway Exhibition is back; The Gaugemaster Model Railway Open Weekend.

In the run up to the show, RIGHT LINES we will be looking at a few of the many superb model railway layouts being exhibited over the weekend. This issue, it is the turn of Allenton - an HO Scale American layout built by father and son Ian and Sam Burford.

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Allenton is set in a fictional part of the real area of Allenton, St. Louis County, MI. The Cotton Belt is an area that covers most of the south-east of USA, unsurprisingly the areas where the most profitable arable crop was Cotton. The Cotton Belt Route (the nickname for the St. Louis Southwestern Railway) ran through Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas, from 1891 until it merged with Union Pacific in the 1990s.

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Allenton is fully scenic, and built to US Modeller John Allen's famous 'Timesaver' track plan, a shunting puzzle layout. The plan was originally featured on the November 1972 issue of Model Railroader, and gained in popularity when Russ Cain wrote an article for the October 1976 issue showing how to build the layout with economical Atlas Snap-Track and Kadee couplings.

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From the outset, Ian and Sam decided to scratchbuild as much of the layout as their skills and operational reliability would allow. The buildings are either scratchbuilt or kitbashed, with painting and weathering in various media including oil paints, watercolour, and pastels. The majority of the trees on the layout were handmade using twisted wire and modelling clay, together with wire wool and flock for the foliage.

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The rolling stock used on Allenton is all RTR from Atlas, Kato, and Model Power - all weathered and fitted with Kadee couplings to allow for automatic coupling and uncoupling by magnets imbedded in the track, most hidden as crossings or walkways.

Members of the public are invited to try and solve the shunting puzzle as part of their 'Junior Operator Program', using switches on a custom-made panel for point motor control and locomotive direction.

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The layout is run on analogue power, and fitted with SEEP point motors and CDU, with power coming from a single Gaugemaster controller. The controller is set to a pre-set speed to allow public control via the switches on the control panel.

Allenton is being exhibited at the Gaugemaster Model Railway Open Weekend on 3rd and 4th September 2016, one of nearly 20 layouts on show in many different scales, depicting railways from around the world. Entry is free, with free parking, and you can learn more about what else is going on by clicking HERE.

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