John Pilgrim's 'Darwin Landing'

Here at Railway Model Store, we teamed up with John Pilgrim in order to run a brilliant competition where our customers had a chance to win a £100 voucher! Here is what he had to say about his stunning East Coast themed modern image OO Gauge model railway!

Darwin Landing started out as a standard 8ft x 4ft OO gauge roundy-roundy tail chasing layout located at the top of a stairway in a space under the rafters at the top of the landing – hence part of its name, the other part taken from the street in which I lived on at the time.

Due to the limited space, I quickly had filled the board with track and scenery and run out of space - so my attention turned to how I could modify what I had already by being be creative with my modelling. After watching plenty of videos of the Miniature Wonderland layout in Germany I began to add animation to the scenes with working playgrounds, cranes, photographers, dispatchers and level crossings using my knowledge as a computer programmer with growing skills in electronics using the Ardunio platform.

A house move meant the layout was to be dismantled and all the abilities I had learnt and experimented with could then be used in creating Darwin Landing in its current 27ft x 18ft form which I started in April 2020. It is still a roundy roundy tail chaser but a lot less obvious due to the large size of it. Its still in the rafters but above a triple garage running right around the perimeter of the room to give a picture of its size.

As it runs around the room, each side of the layout has been named north, east, south and west but with the mainline running right through above each of them.

The twin track mainline is based on the East Coast Main Line between Peterborough and Newark, which is local to where I live. It is dominated by LNER rolling stock as I loosely base the time period around 2019 which allows me to run Class 91’s, Class 90’s, Class 43’s and Class 800’s in unison as they were all hauling passenger services for LNER during that time, with the odd bit of modern image freight also thrown into the mix.

The east side of the layout contains a 2 track ‘regional’ themed layout based on the poacher line between Grantham and Skegness which intersects the area of the ECML I’ve based it on in real life, with most of the rolling stock based on what you would find on there, including plenty of East Midlands Trains multiple units such as Class 153, 156 and 158s as well as the odd HST and the occasional Boston Steel freight train.

Darwin Landing East station, boasting four platforms and showing a selection of East Midland themed trains, including a Bachmann Class 158, Realtrack Class 156s, Hornby Class 153s and the Hornby HST.

Over on the west is a heritage railway to give me a bit of creative freedom to have a ‘wildcard’ and run anything else that doesn’t fit into the modern image on the central and east lines. Steam and some classic diesels are frequent runners over there. The wildcard also applies to scenery as Hogwarts Castle can be seen located high up on the hills.

The magnificent Hogwarts Castle seen high in the hills, providing a stunning backdrop to the layout.

The south of the layout is where the doorway into the room is located, so while there is no separate railway on that section, there is another station for the heritage line as well as a removable bridge to cross the doorway with a slide in and out river scene, which I’ve added some automation to using a similar system to Magnorail but on a bit of a cheaper budget. With this I’m able to add movement to fishing trawlers, windsurfers, ducks and rubber dinghies by attaching magnets and them being dragged around via the chain located underneath the water surface.

Steam Generator fitted locomotives seen at Darwin Landing South. The playpark features moving swings and roundabout, and the fountain is also functional!

With two young children they are drawn to the ‘gimmicks’ on the layout. I go by the thinking if it moves in real life, it should at least have some movement on the layout. Along with the boats mentioned, there’s moving chickens, cows, trees, diggers, drills, combines, cement mixers, wind turbines scattered around the layout in which the kids love to activate themselves with their own accessories controller. There’s even a moving whomping Willow up at Hogwarts with Harry and Ron’s Ford Anglia stuck in it.

A late addition to the layout which I hadn’t planned for in my initial thoughts was the faller car system which runs from the north east corner over to the west and down to the south west corner. Again allowing some movement of vehicles alongside the trains with a level crossing located mid-route which is fully automated to detect trains, close gates and stop vehicles without any manual intervention. This seems to be very popular on my online posts as the `Kamikaze bus` as its become to be known has gained plenty of followers due to its erratic driving styling and getting flashed when passing through the speed cameras.

The side with the least development is the north which is home to the Darwin Landing Central mainline station above the hidden fiddle yards for the west and east. From the station trains can switch from the central line to the east or west lines allowing the full layout to be connected. This is the area I’m currently concentrating on detailing with the platforms now being installed its adding some finer detail where I hope to be able to add some working elevators to the footbridges on the platform. There’s still plenty to do an as the kids start to grow up I’ll start moving on from the ‘gimmick’ side of things and concentrate more on the finer ‘serious’ detail but I’m pretty sure the layout will never be finished – they’ll always be something else I would like to add or rebuild!