Peter Bartlett and his Layout

[Julian Evison]

A fairly early member of the Society was a gentleman called Peter Bartlett. He lived in London before moving to near Killarney in Ireland. Unfortunately he died about 5 years ago and his widow died recently. His niece (an executor) has contacted me to ask if we know anything about his layout, which may have been called 'Cray Valley Railroad" (but this is not certain). He was a BBC camerman and producer before retirement.

Apart from confirming that he was indeed a member, I haven't been able to find any more so far. Can anybody add any information about this gentleman and his layout?

Thanks, Julian

[Jeff Schumaker]

The Cray Valley Railroad was HOn30, and was written up in one of the US model magazines. I may have the issue, and will check.

Jeff S.

[cp.409067]

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Peter Bartlett's "Cray Valley Railroad" was quite well known among UK modellers. I am sure on occasion it was mentioned or featured in OO9 NEWS.

An article was published in Model Railroader, August 2004. The track plan can be found here.

https://www.trains.com/mrr/how-to/track-plan-database/the-hon25-cray-valley-rr/


CP

[Julian Evison]

Jeff, Christopher,

Many thanks for the leads provided so far and I have now found some articles on H0n30 modelling in 009 News authored by him.

More information gratefully received from you or other members!

Julian

[JulienW]

For a time there were some of his locos in the 009 Society's 'Display' collection  - essentially nice models that caught the eye of Brian Guilmant that were 'diverted' from sales for a period of time for use by the publicity officer for display before being sold.

I certainly recall a Baldwin 2-6-2 built from the Chivers kit and there may have been one or 2 others.  There presence suggests that at some point Peter sold / broke up the layout, but that would have been 15 or so years ago...

[clayliner]

I can confirm that he was well known to Brian Guilmant, who spoke highly of him.

David.

[garrywhiting]

Peter Bartlett's Cray Valley Railroad Bibliography -------
1.  009 News September 1997 p11 -p18
2.  Continental Modeller July 1998 p282 -p287
3. Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazette  July/August 1996 p48 -p53
4. Model Railroader 08/04  p90 - p93    (  Is this August 2004 or April 2008 ???? )

The H0n30 Cray Valley Railroad is inspired by the Maine Two-Footers , and is named after the Cray Valley area in Orpington south east London.  I believe Peter lived in St Mary Cray as a child & teenager.  The locos ( and some of the rolling stock ) used on the layout were not exclusively Maine 2ft prototypes and included many other examples of 009/H0e/H0n30 locos collected over the years from the USA , Japan, South Korea and Germany.

Peter worked for the BBC , joining as a teenager as an apprentice cameraman, later becoming both a cameraman and producer, and laterly as an independant tv producer when the BBC changed how they did things in the early 1980's.  One of his early BBC credits is as cameraman on Peter Watkins' nuclear holocaust drama/doc "The War Game".

Working for the BBC enabled Peter to "volunteer" for assignments abroad. He purchased some of the first offerings from Eggerbahn whilst in Berlin in 1964 and in the late 1970's and early 1980's a trip to Japan enabled to meet Shozo Inoue of Flying Zoo Models who acted as a marketing agent for Sango & Joe Works. It may well have been Peter's contacts and influence that enabled Victor's Models to commision the Cranmore kit from Joe Works. 

Peter died in May 2018,  we last met up at Expong sometime about 2010 -2012 , we had first met about 1977, and it was because of his influence that I adopted a black livery for my Dominion Goverment Railway locos.

Garry

[cp.409067]

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Garry

As above - Model Railroader August 2004.


CP

[Julian Evison]

Garry,

Thanks for filling in many gaps. I will let his niece know more about her uncle's modelling activities. The article in 009 News shows a very extensive and impressive railway.

Julian

[MickT]

There used to be an online album of Peter's Cray Valley loco collection - several hundred locos if I remember, but the address that I saved some years ago has sadly gone.
However, a quick Google Images search has found a link to a Flikr site that is still active including a photostream of over 200 photos of Cray Valley stock.

Not sure if this will work on here, but here goes:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cray_valley_rr_-_stock/albums

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cray_valley_rr_-_stock/

Not exclusively HOn30 American stock and loads of kitbashing ideas spotted!

Mick

[cp.409067]

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Mick

That is a wonderful discovery - thank you. As you say "loads of kitbashing ideas".


CP

[Julian Evison]

Thanks Mick - some absolutely lovely modelling there.

Julian

[NeilMac]

Excellent set of photos here, I had not realised that there were so many available. I am already planning some rolling stock conversions and locos based on the ideas in those galleries.

[Tom Haythornthwaite]

[Perhaps this investigation demonstrates how we could benefit from a complete indexing of the NEWS archive?]

[Graeme Dunbar]

[Perhaps this investigation demonstrates how we could benefit from a complete indexing of the NEWS archive?]

Being able to search an electronic archive would be something I'd be interested in. I'm less convinced by an index. A member of another model railway group took it upon himself to produce an index of a magazine and has and is clearly putting a huge amount of effort into it. He has all sorts of categories or sortable fields right down to what sort of wagon load is carried. For some unfathomable reason though he does not have an author field!

I guess the distinction between an electronic contents page and index should be made. I should defer to my wife for this, but as she says, I don't listen but here goes. A traditional book material type index I guess is an author or editor  defined single keyword search facility and depends on their knowledge of the content to choose appropriate appropriate words, which is a task after the event, but trying to choose suitable words to meet future needs is difficult. Then there is cross indexing related but separate words.

I can see the merit in producing a searchable '009 Abstracts' giving a sort of potted summary of each article, but apart from the time and effort involved, the skills and discipline needed to produce such a thing is enormous.

The most useful variant I can think of is a full free text searchable archive and even that would still involve a lot of work correcting automatic text recognition (OCR) scans of issues for which there is no known original electronic copy. However it should just require a direct comparison and correction of words and not an interpretation of meaning. I've done it myself on a few pages, issues even of 009 News and even with a domestic scanner and software it works pretty well.

I and others of another model railway group I'm a member of with an electronic archive (PDF) of their output are able to do free text searches of content and it can be quite handy.

Current search facilities that come with (say) PDF readers are quite primitive word and phrase based but I imagine future versions will have the facility to learn context.