Saint Blazey and King Coal: Sheds in small spaces…

“Modern locomotives are too big for micro layouts. Modern locomotives on modern prototypes, todays railways are boring, no shunting, modern layouts are all diesel depots”. Against this backdrop of perceptions from the hobby in general I began trawling my collection of rail freight books for inspiration to use the forthcoming Accurascale and Revolution Class 66s…

What follows is not ground breaking, the results will perhaps just mildly tempt you to do further digging and for myself, the plan is still to build Albion Yard (Modern Goods from this post). With that said, it is interesting to consider the effects of photography of the prototype be our modelling. Where a long telephoto shot can compress distance we have only our composition. That said, the feelings such a photograph can evoke within us could be channelled into one or similar schemes.

The bulk of these large locomotives can be exploited. In our modelling we can use them to fill a scene, to make a layout feel even more intimate. In small layouts our only constraint is train length, yet finding prototypes that give us both short trains and compact intimate settings is a real challenge. To contrast two approaches King Coal considers longer trains and a modicum of operation all driven from that photograph by Paul Shannon (top right) where the telephoto compression has made things feel modellable. 

St. Blazey on the other hand has been somewhat butchered and used as pure inspiration rather than a nuts and bolts build. I’ve taken the character of the scene infront of the wagon repair depot and the tight confines of parts of the short branch to Par harbour and combined them giving us snatched moments of train movement where the bulk of the 66 is in sharp contrast with the CDA wagons and steam era infrastructure.

The wagon repair depot (something we’ve looked at before) offers the greatest potential for interesting operation in today’s modern railway. The EWS facility at Toton is another (perhaps obvious) setting where through careful reorganisation and balance a great cameo could be crafted. You all know the real railway as well as I do though, where else should we / could we look for intimate spaces that these mundane but massive locomotives work? I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, have a good weekend! More soon…

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