Brandon station opened in July 1985 at the town of Brandon in Suffolk, England, when the Norwich & Yarmouth Railway’s extension to the west joined the Eastern Counties Railway’s route from Ely to the east. (In fact much of the station complex is in Norfolk.) This provided the first rail link between Norwich and London, via Ely and Cambridge. In 1846 the working of the line was taken over by the ECR, and the route passed into the ownership of the Great Eastern Railway in 1862 and, in 1923, became part of the London & North Eastern railway.
In 1967 Brandon became an unstaffed halt and the station buildings are now derelict and boarded up, although there are plans to refurbish them for community use. My model is based on photographs and measurements of the derelict station kindly supplied by Paul Kay, to whom I am grateful, together with additional information from the internet and from Eastern Main Lines - Ely to Norwich by R Adderson and G Kenworthy (Middleton press, ISBN1 901706 90 7).
Photographs of Brandon pre-Beeching are rare, although there are a few in the book mentioned above, from1911, the 1920s and the 1950s. No photographs of the road side of the buildings before they became derelict have been found.
The model has been constructed to depict Brandon when it was an important station with an extensive goods yard, using the available material plus some conjecture and simplification, the latter being needed to keep memory requirements as low as possible. However, it must be remembered that the model consists of five separate buildings, and is thus more elaborate than my earlier models for Trainz.
The road side of the building is some 16” lower than the platform side, suggesting that Brandon began (as did many stations at the time) with a low platform which has subsequently been raised. This is confirmed by the steps down into the buildings from the platform. The model includes a forecourt to provide a smooth transition to Trainz baseboard level. Read more ...
