Build an incline diorama

peter Marriott takes a fresh angle on narrow gauge modelling with this winding house diorama.

Sometimes a model or an accessory piques your interest, and Bachmann’s Scenecraft Incline Winding House (44-0049) certainly grabbed my attention. What on earth was it? My knowledge of narrow gauge railways is very limited, and I only had a basic understanding of the role that the winding house played. Conventional adhesion railways can only have fairly shallow inclines. If a gradient is too steep then you have to raise and lower trains using a cable. Trains in and out of Euston were rope-hauled, using a pair of stationary engines, until 1844. The Cromford & High Peak Railway made use of cable incline planes until the 1960s. The Bowes Railway, near Gateshead, is the last standard gauge rope-worked railway in the world.

STEEPED IN HISTORY

But winding houses similar to the one depicted by Bachmann Scenecraft proliferated in the quarries of North Wales. If the slate was up a mountain, the only way to get it down was to lower it on a cable. I didn’t really know much about slate quarry railways, but once I began to dig a little deeper, I was intrigued by the huge inclines that linked different levels (called galleries). Here, little steam locomotives (sometimes horses, people or even overhead electric locomotives) moved loaded wagons to the head of the incline and took empty ones away to be filled with freshly quarried rock. In some quarries, the incline was cut into the landscape like a conventional railway, just steeper. However, in the larger quarries such as Dinorwic or Penrhyn, the inclines were built on large slate slab embankments. Browsing images on the internet, I was soon captivated, especially by the images of disused quarry equipment which seems to litter the mountains of North Wales. The arrival of Peco’s new ‘OO9’ slate wagons meant that a small incline diorama was just begging to be built. Inspired by the images of the derelict quarries, I decided to make the diorama as it might look today, with the incline no longer in use and with weeds pushing their way through the compacted slate waste.