Chiltern Route v4

[docmartin]

Paddington.jpg

For those of you who may be interested - or possibly still interested - in my Chiltern route, I have just released v4. The route is still a work-in-progress. Version 4 adds the scenery at Paddington including the Main Line station and the suburban station alongside it. This means that whether you start (or end) at Marylebone or Paddington the whole 69 miles of the principal Chiltern line is now sceneried. I am continuing to work on adding scenery and have now reached the London Transport station at Preston Road in the northwest of London located on the line that runs roughly parallel to the Chiltern route proper, between Marylebone and Baker Street to Woodford Halse.

For those of you who do not know the route, it represents the two main lines of British Railways passing through the Chiltern Hills to London as they were circa 1960. These lines are the ex-GWR/GCR from Banbury to Marylebone and Paddington via Princes Risborough and High Wycombe and the ex-GCR/Metropolitan from Woodford Halse to Marylebone and Baker Street via Aylesbury. Portions of the London Underground are also modeled where these cross or run parallel to the BR lines.

v4 can be downloaded from GitHub by following this link:

https://github.com/DocMartin7644/Chiltern-Route-v4/releases/tag/v4.2

Martin

[slipperman]

Good Evening, Martin,
Many thanks for the update.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of interest, although I must admit I haven't run the previous version for a while

Cheers,
Ged

[JSMR]

Oh, I love steam but would it be appropriate to run some Class 37's along this line? Gotta love the 37.

[Orbita]

Awesome! Been getting into the UK content very recently. Definitely worth checking this out.

[docmartin]

I very much appreciate all your responses. Any further feedback would also be much appreciated.

Regrettably, I have no evidence for Class 37 ever having been seen on the Chiltern line. I imagine they were too hefty for the Chiltern route loading. However, around the timeframe of my route several different classes of diesels were quite common. I have photographic evidence for the 1960s of Classes 33, 41/42 Warships, 45, 47, and 52 Westerns. By far the most common were the 47s. The latter were still to be seen as late as the 1980s - indeed, I used to commute to work in London from Bicester in Oxfordshire on the Chiltern line (the line being much neglected by then and but a pale shadow of itself even only 20 years earlier) and would occasionally ride in a 47-hauled train. If you wanted to stretch the timeframe of the route to the 1980s, then you could add classes 56 and 58. And back in the 1960s, don't forget the Birmingham Pullman.

By the way, I forgot to mention that for the time being I have left in the Activities bundled with the route some very short activities that I used for testing out the results of my scenery additions. The names of these activities are prefixed with "Test" and they allow you to inspect the scenery at Paddington and at Preston Road.

Martin

[docmartin]

Further research has thrown up the following information re the Class 37 where England (as opposed to Scotland or Wales) is concerned:
"Widely used in East Anglia (InterCity services), Yorkshire, the North East, Humberside, the Eastern Region, and the Settle and Carlisle"
No mention of the Western or Midland Regions or the Chiltern line. The Chiltern line at the time in which my route is set came under the Western Region, though earlier in its history it had fallen under the Midland Region and even at one stage under the Eastern Region, though the latter was long before the days of dieselisation.

I had a number of reasons for choosing the period circa 1960 as the time setting of my route. One was that this era was before the draconian cuts to the whole BR network made by the Beeching Commission. The Chiltern line suffered very badly with many stations being closed and parts of the line axed to single track only. So I wanted to model the route as it more or less was in its heyday. Secondly, for British Railways the early 1960s was an interesting period as far as motive power was concerned. Diesels were becoming quite common but steam was still much in evidence. If I recall correctly steam survived until 1968, though not everywhere on the network of course. But my timeframe allows for a good mix of different types of motive power.

Re downloading my Chiltern route, I should also have mentioned that if you have GitHub Desktop, you not only can download the route but can use Desktop to keep abreast of any further edits/changes/additions that I might make on an ongoing basis. The big advantage is that Desktop will download for you only the recent changes made to the route. You can thus keep up to date with developments without having to download the whole route again and again each time I have released an updated version. Highly recommended.