Layout: Kinmel Junction

Wanted to focus on operations so, with the help of his friends and a fascination for railways, he struck the right balance.

Alistair Clarke guides us through how he built this mammoth garage layout.

A figure-of-eight loop is ideal for getting a long run into the same space, provided you have the room for the elevation change. What Alistair has achieved here is a layout with so much operational potential and things to see that you could be looking at it all day and not take in everything.

Often, we talk about layouts being restricted by the space available. Whether it forces us to run shorter trains than we’d like or struggle to install enough storage sidings, the space we have available is always the first thing we think about when designing a layout. This lack of space is most apparent when trying to build a model of a prototype and we have to make compromises. There are a lucky few modellers, though, who don’t need to worry about prototypes or the space available and they, like Alistair Clarke, can build a layout to fill the space rather than having the space dictate what sort of layout it is.

In his double garage with carpeted floor and heating, lives ‘Kinmel Junction’, Alistair’s 19ft by 20ft

Scottish BR blue layout. Built to make the best use of the double garage with minimal operating wells, ‘Kinmel Junction’ consists of a figure-of-eight circuit and numerous sidings, with around 70 locomotives fitted with DCC sound, and a couple of hundred more fitted with DCC, calling it home.

“I’m very much an operational modeller,” explains Alistair, “as I work 12-hour days as a truck driver and when I do get a chance to go into the garage I want to run trains. With that in mind, I knew I wanted a layout that would allow me to leave stuff running on the loops while I did some shunting, or that I could bring into the station and perform run-round operations. Ideas were flowing through my head, but in the end it was my friend Neil Cooper who I have to

“I knew I wanted a layout that would allow me to leave stuff running on the loops while I did some shunting”

thank for the plan. We worked together at the Teeside steelworks in the northeast and he was a prolific layout doodler. Almost every other lunchtime he would come to me with something scrawled on the back of a blue paper hand towel, and once I’d told him what I was after it didn’t take him long to come up with a design. There are a few tweaks but it is still very much Neil’s design.”

Alistair worked at the steelworks for 31 years and during that time there was quite a cohort of railway modellers, so much so that a few layouts were housed in the telephone exchange for a period. They had been housed in an office, but once that was needed, the modelling had to move. His love of railways goes back much further than the steelworks though.

“My dad would take me to large stations in the northeast, such as Darlington, Newcastle and York so that I could see the major locomotives of the day such as the ‘Deltics’, and in slack times, I would often take the steelworks’ offer of 50% pay for the week off rather than 80% pay to work. I’d use the money and free time to buy an all-rail rover, travelling as much of the

country as I could. Not only did I love the experience of travelling around the country but I gained a lot of inspiration for a future model railway.”

‘Kinmel Junction’ is the product of five years’ work and is a 1980s BR blue layout loosely based in Scotland, although there’s stock from across the UK in Alistair’s garage.

“One of the reasons I like the late 1980s so much is that colours were starting to arrive on the UK railway network. I model the BR blue period and when sectorisation started to appear it made everything look much more interesting. I’ve tried to replicate that on the layout and if you’re lucky you might even see one of my steam locomotives make an appearance. I have about 30 of these but I’ve ensured that they are all models of preserved locomotives so that it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that they’d be seen.”

It’s not unusual for layouts, built by ‘operational modellers’, to feature scenic aspects that vary from the prototype. At ‘Kinmel Junction’ however, Alistair has worked hard to ensure that everything looks the way he remembered it from his travels.

“To make the track as lifelike as possible I used Peco Code 75 instead of Code 100 and varied the track type depending on the line. As on the prototype, I’ve used concrete sleepers on the main line and wooden sleepers on the branches. I also make sure to not run trains that are longer than my platform in the centre of the layout, as one thing I don’t like to see is long trains overhanging the edge of the platform. With boxes upon boxes of wagons and coaches, it does mean

I have to be quite selective about what I run on any particular day!”

Working such long days has meant that Alistair has needed to go for the simpler approach in some areas, but with the quality of off-the-shelf products today, it

‘Kinmel Junction’ is the third layout 2 that Alistair has built in his garage but the only one he has completed.

Alistair doesn’t 3 have a favourite part of the layout but he loves using DCC and sound, as it allows him to stable locomotives buffer to buffer, rather than having to have isolated sections and reminds him of the sounds of the 1980s.

Alistair has two friends, Dave and Ian, who are both train drivers and who visit him to undertake running sessions. Alistair often likes just sitting back and listening to them – one drives the trains prototypically and one takes the role of signalman, talking as they would if they were doing it for real.