Banbury 
Ian Lampkin N gauge 2mm scale
Banbury station is located on the busy cross country route midway between Birmingham and Didcot where the route combines with the Great Western mainline into Reading. The Chiltern Railways mainline towards London Marylebone diverges a few miles south of the town at Aynho Junction.
There is a lot of freight traffic, mainly container trains heading to and from the deep sea terminal at Southampton. Chiltern Trains operate the majority of passenger services plus Cross Country have two trains an hour each way. First Great Western get in on the passenger action with a local service that terminates at Banbury. Until January 2011 there was also a locomotive that hauled Wrexham and Shropshire passenger trains operating into Marylebone. However Chiltern have now introduced locomotive hauled on weekdays between London and Birmingham.
The non scenic section of the layout was built originally for a different model railway. So the scenic section for Banbury has had to be designed to fit within this fiddle yard.
Peco fine scale code 55 track has been used with SEEP solenoids to operate the turnouts. All buildings have been scratch built from plastic sheet and are as close to size as can be achieved from scaling of photographs and from pacing out the walls. We have also used Google maps and Google Streets to check proportions and locations of buildings relative to each other.
Rolling stock and locomotives have been detailed and are from a number of manufacturers such as Graham Farish and Dapol.
Trains are controlled via Digitrax DCC system with turnouts operated via stationary decoders. All movements are made using ipods and iphones running an app called Wi throttle. This then communicates with the DCC system via a wireless router connected to a laptop that runs the free software JMRI. The laptop is connected to the DCC command station using an interface called Loco Buffer. Touch screen PC's are used for the track plan and turnout control and showing their status.
