I'm trying to model a small diorama in a corner of the layout based around the rural sixties. A small part wooded - part heath section just off the road leads itself to a picnic area and this has posed a small problem. What types of tables and seats were actually provided during this period for public use, surely not the sort of torture implements used today based on an 'A' frame which one almost has to climb into. I have been unable to find any sensible photographs other than the blanket on the grass and wicker hamper type.
From what I remember of the period, there weren't really formal facilities. Certainly, all our picnics of the time used the then-current chequered/tartan blanket spread on the ground. I don't recollect that we had a hamper- mum used the then newly-introduced Marks and Sparks plastic carrier bags. If rubbish bins were provided in lay-bys, they tended to be forty-five gallon oil drums, generally painted green, and seldom emptied...... Brian
Born in 1968 so not really qualified to comment first hand, but did 60s picnic areas even have anything as organised as seats ? Backache and ants in everything were considered charachter-forming. I certainly remember sitting on a travel rug on the grass at Killington Lake services (M6 Cumbria) well into the 80s before there was any attempt to provide tables, and this was at one of the more picturesque and better organised service stations, not just a rural roadside verge. Prior to the introduction of the A-frame horror most of the (later) benches I remember seemed to be variations on a thick plank nailed across the tops of two upturned log ends, not sure what the tables were like. I'd be interested to see what you turn up.
They weren't called "picnic areas" than, they were called "lay bys". It was where you waited for the AA-man when your battery melted because you forgot to top it up with distilled water.
Or even called 'Viewing Areas', so that you could stop and view some spectacular scenery. I remember there being one in the middle of Glencoe which was just a large flat parking area with gravel or scree covering, and it probably had waste paper bins, or the tubular concrete pipe waste bins. An additional feature of the Glencoe site would be the lone piper who probably made a bomb in the summer when coaches stopped :-)
OP doesn't state that his layout is based in Scotland, but if so then he could model the piper based on a woman in a skirt, bit of tartan on the skirt, stick on a red beard, blob of plasticine for the bagpipes with headless pins stuck in to resemble pipes. Just record a cat being tortured and hey presto! realistic sound effects too.
East Cambridgeshire is the basis for the main OO-Gauge layout.
Sounds exciting. Pity this poor piper. A small female figure modelled to look like a male accompanied by recordings of a tortured cat :0) And that's the easy bit. Modelling the back scene - Glencoe with any attempt at realism would be a nightmare.
Thanks to all for the advice. I now have rugs, a couple of scaled oil drums and a few rustic seats and that will have to do.
Alternative sound fx could be supplied by the Glasgow City Police Pipe Band 'discussing' the matter with John Rampling, complete with imaginative actions :-) They are seriously big guys :-)
For some reason in the mid to late 1960s all thermos flasks I can recal seemed to have a tartan pattern printed on them (I went through a lot as I cycled to school on some fairly poor roads) - Well, its a Scottish connection, of sorts.
Go on Chris - wander off topic and tell him about Napoleonics, how many men to a square, and all wearing kilts . . . I would but I am still tired from that one
As someone who's lived in East Cambs for much of the last 40 years, I can assure you that "picnic areas" is a thing we don't do. Who'd want to come *here* for a picnic? Sit on the edge of a field of sugar beet and look at, er, a hundred acres of more sugar beet? Amenities NOT, now or then, unless you're in a cute tourist trap like Ely. Which has its attractions for railway modelling (though mostly if you like modelling boats as the line's near to the river) but even so riverside park benches were your lot in the sixties.
If you want the character of the place in bygone decades, dumped Fordson vans in hedges are authentic. (If doing recent years, delete vans and substitute TWOCed and burnt out cars in laybys and fly-tipped furniture in ditches).
If we wanted to go for picnics, we'd not stop until we got to somewhere worth the effort, like Bury St Edmunds. The nearest areas that have any organised picnic sites are the fringes of Thetford Forest, and going the other way the water meadows the far side of St Ives, round the Hemingfords (which has a now-disused railway formation across it from the St Ives - Huntingdon East line, so if catching its last years prior to 1961 you could do trippers watching J15s and the odd early DMU among others - it's a cute enough scene though strictly speaking it was the old county of Hunts then).
I'm intrigued now. What aspect of East Cambs is the model based on? And what era?
Quite a lot of people actually well to West of the county certainly. I can think of at least seven well used picnic areas relatively local to the east of Peterborough. Three of them adjacent to river or lake and directly 'off road'. One very popular site locally is directly opposite the NVR station at Wansford just outside PB at the side of the river. Very sheltered and peaceful until one of our locos rumbles over the river bridge or one is disturbed by cursing anglers further along the banks :0)
I well remember that and the environment hasn't improved much it seems although now it's fridges, TVs and old Fiestas.
That's quite interesting.
From mid 50s forward to mid 80s and loosely based around March/Wisbech.
I usually model DB [German] N-Gauge outline at home but have recently caught the UK layout bug from working with the NVR model railway group who base their big Hammerton Junction layout on main line working across a whole local spectrum - including 009 narrow gauge quarry working. This has led in my case to a change of scale to OO-Gauge and a complete change of layout style. Mind you German signalling [speed based] is a damn sight easier and considerably less complex to set up :0)
But Peterborough isn't in East Cambridgeshire, by any stretch of the imagination. Historically, it isn't even in Cambridgeshire at all; it's now in the county but in the northwest of it. East Cambridgeshire is, essentially, what used to be called the Isle of Ely.
One thing to note about that period is that it was a time of major change in the agricultural industry of the area. So, if you're intending to model the surrounding area around the railway (eg, fields and agricultural buildings), then it's going to be difficult to get it looking "right" for both ends of that spectrum. At the early end of your timescale, the main produce would have been fruit (strawberries, apples, etc) and market garden vegetables (cabbages, cauliflowers, potatoes, tomatoes etc). By the end of it, you'd still have a lot of vegetables but much of it would have switched to large-scale factory farming of predominantly root crops - carrots, onions, potatoes and sugar beet - while fruit would have been pretty much replaced by grain (wheat and barley). This would have a significant effect on the rail traffic of the area, as well as the design and use of the surrounding infrastructure.
Originally Northamptonshire, then a county ("The Soke of Peterborough") in its own right, then part of Huntingdonshire, now a unitary authority within the ceremonial county of Cambridgeshire.
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