Whitchurch Town
‘0’ – GUEST
Whitchurch was a station on the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway, opened in 1885. The DNSR was absorbed into the Great Western Railway in 1921, and the station re-named 'Whitchurch Hants' to avoid confusion with the GWR station in Whitchurch, Shropshire. It was re-named 'Whitchurch Town' by British Railways in 1950, to distinguish it from a second station a mile or so away on the Waterloo to Exeter route. The DNSR line was closed to passengers in 1962, but oil trains from the Esso refinery at Fawley continued until 1964. So far as possible, all locomotives and rolling stock are replicas of vehicles that actually ran on the line, from Victorian engines of the 1880s to BR standard classes of the 1950s.
A wide range of stock enables us to run the layout as GWR ('Whitchurch Hants') or as BR Southern Region ('Whitchurch Town'). For a 2-day show we can run one day of each!
The model includes a 1/12th scale lever frame. This has full mechanical interlocking, so that signals can only be operated when the correct route is set. At the 2015 Warley exhibition, it won the Signalling Record Society's 'Best Signalled Model Railway' award.