Kensington Addison Rd 7mm/O
Twickenham and District Model Railway Club
Addison Road is nowadays known as Kensington Olympia, on the busy West London route between Willesden and Clapham Junction. Because this was a joint line, formerly involving the L&NWR, GWR, LB&SCR and L&SWR, it has proved to be a good choice for a club project. Our O gauge fine scale model shows the station as it was around 1925, enabling us to run trains in both pre- and post-grouping liveries. As you face the layout you are standing on the site of the Olympia exhibition halls, with Willesden Junction and the north off to your left; at the right-hand end of the layout the tracks disappear southwards under Hammersmith Road bridge towards Earl’s Court and Clapham Junction. The terraced houses of Russell Road form a natural backdrop to the station.
Most of the trains running through the station at this period were general goods, coal or milk trains and our operating schedule is designed to provide a balanced representation of these services. For passengers, a frequent local service ran from the bay platform to Clapham Junction. The main lines were electrified in 1914 (3rd and 4th rail 630 volts DC), and the layout features models of the distinctive ex-LNWR 3-car electric sets which ran an intensive service from Willesden to Earl’s Court.
Look out for the ‘Sunny South Special’, a through train which linked the northern cities of Liverpool and Manchester with the southern resorts of Brighton and Eastbourne. A Southern loco took over the southbound train at Willesden and our model shows the distinctive D213 carriages still in L&NWR livery; these had to be built from scratch.
Amongst other items of interest on the layout are servo-operated scratch-built models of the original LNWR signals and the use of the MERG CBUS system to operate the layout from Kensington South Main signal box without the use of section switches. Both the signal box and the platform canopies were constructed from laser-cut ply and MDF to our own drawings.
The layout has been constructed by members of the Twickenham & District Model Railway Club and is our largest and most ambitious project to date. You can find further information on our club website http://www.tdmrc.org.uk/ and on the Addison Road page there is a link to the forum on RMweb which included progress updates during the construction of the layout.
The layout was featured in BRM magazine in July and August 2018. In 2019 we won three out of the five categories in the Model Railway Competition organised by the LNWR Society. The layout received an award for the best 7mm layout at the Warley National Model Railway Exhibition in 2022 and has won trophies for ‘best in show’ as voted by the public at Tolworth Showtrain 2023 and Taunton Railex 2024.
Photos courtesy of Tony Wright, BRM magazine.
