I don't know when Cyril Freezer's classic 'Minories' plan first appeared, but the earliest recorded instance in my rather haphazard index is the April 1957 edition of Railway Modeller. If this was indeed the plan's first outing, then next year will mark the 50th anniversary of this influential design.
As a child, my attention was grabbed more by the name than the plan. Minories was a short passage under the middle of Lewis's department store in Birmingham, a thoroughfare I visited frequently on my way to the toy department on the fifth floor. Later, of course, I came to appreciate the plan for what it was and the opportunities it presented, indeed still presents to this day. The author offered several variations on the theme over the years, but none fired my imagination to the extent that the 1957 axonometric drawing did. The depiction of structures and retaining walls immersed me in a railway environment in a way that a plain old track plan could never do. The later grafting-on of other trackwork destroyed the purity and simplicity of the original design for me. Very nice, I'm sure, but not really the Minories I came to imagine and love.
I wouldn't presume to second-guess Cyril's original intentions, but, whether by accident or design, for my money one of the most significant factors that has made Minories consistently attractive over five decades is it's do-ability. It's buildable by anyone, regardless of scale or gauge. It'll work with everything from set-track upwards, and uses standard pointwork cleverly, arranged in such a way that dog-legs and reverse-curves are minimised. All too frequently, published track plans show flowing pointwork on sweeping curves, artistic license painting an idyllic picture that, whilst prototypical, just isn't attainable when you start nailing the savage corners of commercial trackwork to your baseboard. In a hobby where 99.99% of plans seem to be aimed at the 0.01% who think hand-building track is a worthwhile use of their leisure time, Minories stays with the mainstream. The sharper than scale bends inherent in commercial pointwork are masked as much as possible by using them where a train needs to turn a fairly sharp corner anyway. The design works with these limitations, using them as features rather than obstacles.
I've never built a Minories, although I did experimentally tape an N gauge version to an old shelf a couple of years ago, an aborted attempt at a fully-automated DCC demonstration. I've thought about the plan a lot, though, and mulled it over yet again recently, following a thread on the RM Web forum. Perhaps one day I'll have a crack at it?
Being a child of the modernisation plan era, I've always believed Minories would be at it's best with diesel multiple units, especially the high-density types typical of commuter land. Unfortunately, this signature variety is poorly supported by the trade, even the perennial DC Kits range offering nothing. Like it or loathe it, the only contender so far has been the Lima Class 117, with it's freelance body-shape and dangly bogies. I hope Hornby don't see fit to re-release this old horror, something of a reasonable standard is sorely needed.
Apart from the Lima offering, first generation units have so far been low-density or cross-country types. Even Bachmann's forthcoming Class 108 does nothing to redress the balance, although it should still be a very useful product indeed - especially when compared to Hornby's geographically limited Class 110.
Move your modelling period forward into the post-blue years, though, and Minories starts to crackle with potential. Bachmann's range encompasses a whole host of useful products, including the ubiquitous Class 158s and 170s, plus a Class 150 promised for the future. If you're willing to rebuild old models, Lima's Class 156 (pictured above) has a useful bodyshell if nothing else, and is also scheduled for re-release by Hornby later this year if you didn't stock up first time around.
I've also harboured a Southern Electric Minories urge for a long time now, but I'm not significantly interested in these strangely-painted trams to devote the rest of my to life building them from odd bits of brass and old mark 1 coaches. I'd be seriously tempted by a good RTR release, but until then things SR will remain a dream. Curiously, one of the few EMU releases so far has been Hornby's Class 466, regrettably never expanded into a 4 car Class 465. One product does not a layout make, and the 466 smacks of the kind of bizarre release that Hornby seems to use to periodically convince itself that there's no market beyond the steam loco collector. But I can't help thinking that with a slam-door EMU to run beside it, and possibly a 465 grown from the 466, Hornby would virtually have a modern SR starter layout in a box.
There's half a Eurostar set, too, although that isn't really Minories material...
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