I got my first Big Big Train Set in 1970 when I was 6, over the years my Dad bought accessories from Beatties Toy Shop in Holborn London, and over the next few years at Xmas & Birthdays I was lucky enough to receive, the Barrel Loader, The Level Crossing and the Gantry Bridge, and of course several of the “Y” Points.
However, I noticed that my friends that had Horby OO were able to get left & right hand points, diamond crossings, turntables and lots of other accessories. As a naive kid I never understood why Triang did not offer left & right hand points and diamond crossings etc. (I now know why, i.e. that the tooling was so expensive, and for a temporary railway with possible garden use that this level of layout was never intended by the Lines Brothers).
However, I have never stopped wondering about creating sidings, crossings and track geometry that more closely resembles other model railways….so I finally decided aged 60 to create some for my own layout!
So I designed left and right hand points, with the curved section equal to a standard BBT half curve, and the straight part is equal to half a standard straight (with new half straights too). I made the my left & right hand points in Red, Black and Blue for BBT, Lima and AMF/Red Rocket Tracks. I also designed an “outer curve” that has a greater radius than the standard curve, to allow parallel tracks to run next to each other around a curve, with “station” width maintained around the curve between the tracks.
I decided to keep going and so designed two different Diamond crossings to be half a standard straight and angled at both 22.5 degrees and 45 degrees. Then onto re creating the “hydraulic buffers”. I have created a protype turntable, using part of the Gantry Bridge, and plan to reproduce the original Gantry Bridge design too. Does anyone else have any new designs for their BBT layout? Paul Holden Farnham Surrey Jan 2026
.
