Grizzly's Model Railway

Ay up, everyone!  It's Hanley Bear, doing a couple of guest posts on Sonning's blog about two of my favourite things - football and Grizzly's model railway.

While our human guardians have been doing 'lockdown', us bears have had to have adventures at home.  

Some Saturdays, BBC Radio Stoke has played a recording of a classic Stoke City game, so I persuaded the other bears to put on their red and white scarves and pretend we were all going to the match.  In fact, we go downstairs from our Bear Hunt window to Grizzly's railway workshop, so we can listen with him.

It's like going to the match, because we're in a miniature version of Stoke-on-Trent in the 1950s, with streets of terraced houses, potbanks, factories, pubs, canals and even an oatcake shop.

Grizzly says there's still lots of work to do, like making the canal look like real water and fixing the roofs on some of the buildings - once he has put some lighting and some little people inside them.

Although most of the buildings were kits that Grizzly put together, he 'scratch built' the main station buildings himself from match-sticks, chicken wire, balsa wood and plastic packaging.

There is a very fancy station building that goes where I am standing, when Grizzly has finished making the awning for the platforms.

 

The layout isn't quite like 'real' Stoke, because the canal goes right underneath Grizzly's station but, in 'real' Stoke, the canal goes under the railway before you get to the station.  We have some more landscaping to do near the pub and lift-bridge, although the gap makes a good place to rest a plate on biscuits as it is!

The canal runs between two 'potbanks', which is what we call pottery factories.  You can see two of Grizzly's bottle kilns in the picture on the left, one enclosed in a building (which they often were).  They were 'thrown' on a wheel for Grizzly by a man called Gary at the brilliant Gladstone Pottery Museum.

Grizzly has put a very deep lock in the canal, to take it down to a junction.  Look at that tiny little Trent and Mersey canal bridge he made from scratch!  I am standing where there was once a junction with the Newcastle Canal, which went to Newcastle-under-Lyme, but that has all disappeared now.

Usually, I'm not allowed on the track, in case I get fur in the points, but Grizzly said I could stand up here to show you where the main line runs along above the canal junction.  There are four lines, plus sidings, so Grizzly can run both fast and slow trains in both directions.  It's very exciting when we have four trains running at once!

I like to help Grizzly when he has extra details to add.  Here, he is adding some new destination boards to the carriages for his Stoke to Leek train.  Excitingly, there is now a campaign to reopen that line for real!

After helping Grizzly, it's time to tune in to the match.  Last weekend, we had Stoke in action in the Europa League in 2015, before I was born.  They played a Turkish side called Besiktas and it was a very tense game, with the away team scoring first. 

Mr Peter Crouch equalised for us, though, and right at the end Mr Jonny Walters took a penalty - and he scored!  2 - 1 to Stoke City!!  Yaaayyy!!

Then it was time for our afternoon snack.  Polar said we could only share Grizzly's biscuits if we were good bears and ate some apple first but we don't mind, as we like apples, though not as much as biscuits.

Then I showed the other bears my bear-sized Stoke City colouring book that Polar had printed off for me.  You can get a full-sized one here.

I'll show you more of Grizzly's layout and some of his locomotives and rolling-stock in another blog post very soon.