Thornbury is built to British N scale, 1:148, using 9mm track gauge. The layout is based on the LMS terminus of Thornbury, a small market town in Gloucestershire, England, at the end of the branch line from Yate.

The real station was closed to passengers in 1944 and freight in the 1950’s. Very little remains of the station area today, having been redeveloped with a Tesco supermarket, carpark and some housing. I have distorted history by imagining that passenger trains are still operating and have a few more years to go before they finally succumb to road competition.

The scenic section of the layout is 680mm wide by 2400mm long. The track plan and station layout have been shortened and narrowed slightly to fit the space but otherwise matches the real station faithfully.

The track is entirely constructed with PCB sleepers and code 40 rail, a task that took around eight months to complete. Locomotives are mainly RTR with a couple of kit built examples. Freight vehicles are a mixture of RTR, kit built and scratch built. Shunting operations are carried out using DG couplings fitted to all vehicles and strategically placed home-made electromagnets. Locomotive control is by traditional DC.

The loco shed is scratch built from plastic while the rest of the buildings are kits. The last major task to do is replacement of the kit buildings with scratch built models based on the prototypes.