Long Melford is a village in Suffolk that has a very special place in my life, and it’s railway, although long closed by the time I was born, was an enduring feature in my childhood.

Long Melford was also the modelling focus of Bill Blackburn, a stalwart member of the 2mm Scale Association. Bill’s layout was his magnum opus: an almost-to-scale model of the sprawling junction station between the Great Eastern Railway’s Stour Valley Railway from Marks Tey to Cambridge and it’s branch to Bury St Edmunds. Bill sometimes referred to the layout as ‘Short Melford’ because, to begin with at least, he took the decision to leave out the actual station.

The layout is a landscape to watch trains pass through: the beautifully modelled bridge over the River Stour at Rodbridge, open meadows, and the complex junction that shows off the possibilities of finescale track (using Bill’s own design of chairplate track). Bill had planned a further board depicting the station (in a compressed form), which would have made the full layout 5.8m or 19′ long!

Sadly Bill died in December 2016. He had completed all but one board worth of track (the junction), and only one scenic board (the river Stour). When none of Bill’s other friends was able to take on the completion of the layout, I decided to had to step up. With help from other 2mm Scale Association members, the now late Mike Randall, and Alan Smith, we visited Bill’s purpose-build garden workshop and crated up the layout, and drove it south of the Thames in Mike’s van.

‘Short Melford’ has spent the last few years in my garage in south London, where it can be fully set up (if everything else in there is packed away). Progress has been intermittent, to say the least. The focus of work has been completing the junction to get the

Further posts will explore Bill and his plans; taking stock of the layout, and progress that I’ve made towards getting it running.