LLANIDRIS (O)

Through mountainous mists, under overcast skies, this interpretation of a would-be railway in decline paints a more workaday vision of Wales.

It all goes back to family holidays around Aberdyfi in the early 1960s. I loved the dramatic landscapes of Mid-Wales, with mountains disappearing into clouds, and dappled sunlight casting shadows on the hills when it wasn’t raining. I was intrigued that many buildings seemed to grow out of hillsides, often with more storeys at the front than the rear. Old slate cottages were to be seen decaying quietly into their natural surroundings, leaving no scars on the landscape. On the same holidays, we would visit the Talyllyn Railway and see the trains, which inspired some of the characters from Rev. W Awdry’s books. Walking one day with my Dad near the end of Penhelig Tunnel, we heard the sound of a train and waited. It was a 'Manor' pulling the 'Cambrian Coast Express' and it became an indelible memory as it burst from the tunnel mouth. That was it; Mid and North Wales seemed like the perfect location for a model.

In 1993, I read an intriguing book; A

Return to Corris, which mentions that there really was a scheme to convert the Corris Railway to standard gauge and extend it to a junction at Brithdir on the Bala to Barmouth line. It was never built, though apparently, there was an 1862 Act of Parliament saying that it could be. So, I could build a station incorporating all the features that drew me to the area. The tight clearances and sharp curvature of a railway passing through villages like Corris seemed very “modellogenic”.

Although I admire greatly the knowledge of people who build accurate models of real prototypes, I've always felt more excited by fictional models. 'Wyndlesham Cove' by Barry Norman, 'Ditchling Green' by Gordon Gravett and 'Abermynach', a Welsh diorama by Jurgen Mehnert were some of the favourites, not to mention the astonishing layouts at Pendon Museum.

Re-imagining history

In my world, the village of Llanidris developed rapidly in the late 19th Century somewhere near the area now known as the 'Mach Loop'. This followed the development of new slate quarries, the purchase of the Corris Railway by the Cambrian Railways in 1865, and the completion of the standard gauge line from Machynlleth through to Brithdir in 1868. As well as being home to local slate workers, it was also the location of junctions with the two narrow gauge slate lines that sprang up.

At my station, it is always 1946. The railway has decayed during the war years

and the two narrow gauge lines have withered with the decline of slate traffic. Now, only one of them is struggling on, though it has to transfer its slate loads to lorries near the former exchange sidings north of the station. A catastrophic flood in the last year of the war has truncated the line beyond the station, destroying the northern end of the passing loop and undermining the track in the exchange sidings. This could have spelt the end for the line, but a large army training camp nearby needed regular train services for troops and supplies. Army engineers stepped in and built a makeshift passing loop within the platform area by inserting a crossover at the northern end. This leaves just enough room for a modest tender locomotive to pull forwards towards the buffer stops before reversing through the loop. Train services consist mostly of autotrain passenger workings from Machynlleth and short local goods trains. There are also occasional coaches detached at Machynlleth from longer distance services following the Cambrian Coast Line.

Preparation

I had never been satisfied with my previous layouts, so I tried to approach this one in a more methodical way, with a long time spent planning and making many sketches before. Luckily, at the time I was doing the planning, a house move was imminent so I wasn’t tempted to start before I was ready.

My layout works as a simple end-toend, terminus to storage turntable system. There is a scenic break at the northern end, in the form of the road bridge. At the southern end, the line enters a tunnel. The trains are turned off-scene on a 5ft long turntable, which is pulled out from beneath the tunnel on casters. The support unit for the turntable, built from CLS timber and melamine chipboard, locks into place against the wall of my shed once the trains have been turned. The tracks are aligned and connected electrically with bathroom door bolts. I'm pleased with how well this has worked as I knew it would be a crucial element of the layout.

The baseboards are built more or less following Barry Norman’s methods, outlined in his book Landscape Modelling. They stand on simple legs made of CLS timber (excellent stuff!) at the front and rest on a narrow ledge attached to the wall at the rear. They are aligned with metal alignment dowels and are bolted together. Some of them are very heavy and would need two people to move them safely so this is definitely not a portable exhibition layout. Plain track is by C&L and pointwork is built to O-MF standards from C&L components on templates drawn in Templot. The points are operated by Tortoise motors, which have been 100% reliable. The standard gauge trains are controlled by an NCE Powercab controller and the narrow-gauge line is operated with a very old ECM Compspeed CF controller.

Setting the scene

Many of the buildings are loosely copied from prototypes in and around Corris, Aberdyfi and Blaenau Ffestiniog. As well as some very enjoyable research trips to the area, I've made extensive use of Google Street View to look at details. My model is set more than 70 years ago, so some caution is needed! There would be far fewer cars, a very limited range of paint colours on buildings and no modern double glazing.

My cottages and buildings are mostly built from card, covered in DAS clay. The card structures are coated in knotting so they are resistant to water and oil paint penetration. I first used this method about 40 years ago, and a station building that I constructed in that way is still sound and in use on my grandsons’ layout. The DAS clay is rolled out with a rolling pin and applied over a thin layer of PVA glue. I do most of the scribing while the clay is still fairly soft. When the clay is dry, I finish the scribing and rub the surface lightly with sandpaper to even out any bumps.

Some of the buildings have ornamental brick arches over their windows. These are drawn in Adobe Illustrator and printed on thin card. The roof slates are drawn in Illustrator as well before being cut from thin card. Some buildings, such as the station, are constructed over a box of 1.5mm Perspex so that the glazing is already in place when the card walls are applied as laminates.

Many of the buildings are in low-relief or are completely flat. I usually make paper maquettes to work out what shape they should be, which only takes a few minutes and allows me to chop and change them to see what looks right.

When I’m using a forced perspective, the buildings take on very odd shapes if they’re seen from the side or from above. Some can draw attention to themselves more than others. A viewer looking at the layout from a particular angle may notice that one of the buildings is distorted, but I try to disguise this by putting something else in as a blocker or distraction.

The station building and goods shed are based on those at Llanbrynmair on the ex-Cambrian main line. Llanidris is like a shortened mirror image of Llanbrynmair and my goods shed is only an approximation of the one at Llanbrynmair.

The narrow-gauge engine shed is loosely based on the style of the one at Maespoeth on the Corris, although it is much smaller.

Scenic details

The bridge over Caeswyn Street is inspired by Copperhill Street bridge in Aberdyfi. I used to like looking up at passing trains rumbling over the bridge and I’ve tried to recreate that from plastic card and brass angle strips. The handrails are from wire, soldered together in a card jig to set the upright posts at the right centres. The abutments are made from thin plywood covered in a mixture of materials including some small pieces of Wills’ 4mm:1ft scale scenic sheets and DAS modelling clay.

When I complete a model, I find I can quite easily forget what I used in building it, because many materials can be made to look similar with the right kind of painting.

I textured the road surfaces with fine sand sprinkled onto PVA before painting, and the more finely textured surface of the platform was textured with sprinkled pepper – an idea I borrowed from Gordon Gravett’s 'Llandydref ' layout, featured in Railway Modeller from March 1986.

For the grass, I used B&Q “Cocoa Bean” gloss paint and sprinkled grass scatter material into it, sometimes repeating the process to build up denser areas. There is still much to do in this area from mossy walls and weeds to bushes and trees.

Large chunks of landscape, such as the hill above the tunnel, were built with carved Celotex foam blocks, covered in pasted paper and/or thin layers of ready-mixed filler. Some of the dry stone walls were built, one stone at a time, with rolled-up lumps of DAS clay, which is slow but quite therapeutic if you're listening to an interesting radio programme! Rocky outcrops in the ground were mainly made with roughly torn pieces of very thin plywood poked into the landscape and covered with filler. Tony Hill’s book Simply Scenery – An Insight into Landscape Modelling was helpful here. The rocks begin to come to life for me when they are painted, and here, I mix materials freely.

Running trains

When I started building Llanidris 10 years ago, I hadn’t yet committed myself to DCC, though I knew I might. I installed heavy copper bus wires the whole length of the layout in case I went the DCC route but I also installed switching for DC operation. Consequently, there is a lot of redundant wiring spaghetti beneath the layout even though there are only six points and six uncoupling electromagnets. I can't identify every wire, but fortunately, I made a sound job of connecting them and I've had no electrical issues to speak of.

My standard gauge locomotives are all ready-to-run. In the past, I have managed to build 4mm scale loco chassis myself, which worked reasonably well, but I recognise that loco building is a huge undertaking and I don’t have the skills or the time for it. When I see some of the model locos made by scratch-builders I am in complete awe. However, these days there are some lovely ready-to-run models available.

My trains are coupled with Sprat and Winkle couplings, though goods wagons are divided into vehicles with hooks and loops, and vehicles just fitted with loops. This makes uncoupling over the electromagnets buried in the track more reliable in my experience. They are not the most discreet autocoupling but if they ever become misaligned through rough handling, it's simple to fix them by comparing them to a jig I made with a horizontal strip of brass fixed at a standard height at the end of a piece of track mounted on a strip of wood. I have to be conscious of which vehicles have no hooks when I am shunting goods trains, so these are marked with a painted 'chalk X', which looks like the sort of markings railway staff might have used. I believe some other people using Sprat and Winkles have a hook on just one end of each vehicle, which is fine unless the vehicles are turned as they are on my railway.

At the moment, the narrow gauge slate line has only one engine. It is very loosely based on Kerr Stewart No 4 of the Corris Railway, familiar to many as Peter Sam in the world of Thomas. I built it using a Hornby OO gauge 0-4-0 chassis. Recent Chinese versions of this chassis are much better and it's difficult to see quite what they've changed to make them so much better. It's very smooth and controllable with a useful speed range. I added crossheads and slide bars, which were spare parts for a Hornby

OO gauge 28xx. This was at the suggestion of a video on the “TeacherTiger's Trainset” Youtube channel. The body was made using parts of a Hornby 'Pug' type body with new components made of either sheet brass or nickel silver. Someone very kindly offered to turn the brass spectacle frames for me on their lathe, and I used Microscale Kristal Klear liquid for the glazing – this is much easier than trying to cut circles of transparent plastic. The model has a lot of extra weight inside it and it is very reliable. It normally resides in a one-track storage area below some buildings at the back of the layout. It’s quite awkward to access this track but the loco never seems to stall, so that’s not a problem.

I drew the lining on the boiler and cab in Adobe Illustrator and printed it on

Crafty Computer Paper printable decal sheets. Some of the body colour is on the decal sheets, so I matched the rest of the locomotive to this when I painted it with Humbrol paints. Although the model is very crude by scratch-builder standards, it does seem to capture the feel of the little locomotive that I wanted and it’s just as satisfying to operate (even without sound) as the large standard gauge engines. Standing next to a Kerr Stewart loco running round its train at Sittingbourne & Kemsley Light Railway, I found it to be almost silent in operation, so having no sound seems OK.

I scratch-built the plastic card body for a Corris-style brake van, mounting it on top of a Peco flat wagon. I think that its blue livery owes more to Beatrice the brake van from the Skarloey Railway than any prototype on the Corris railway.

Final thoughts

Much of the layout is done in a “broadbrush” way. I’ve tried to develop the whole picture first, before spending time working on small details. The layout needs more detail in most areas, but I have no deadline to complete it so I work on it as the mood takes me.

Plans for the future of Llanidris involve completing the low-relief buildings in the background, adding a small signal box near the station throat and developing the scene up on the hill above the tunnel. Here there are some derelict cottages inspired by real ones near Tanygrisiau. I’ll be adding vegetation and trees as well as a few human figures, road vehicles, fittings and equipment around the station and good shed. I don't have room for much more rolling stock, although I expect there will be a few more goods vehicles over time on both the standard gauge and narrow gauge tracks. If somebody produces a ready-to-run outside frame 4-4-0 such as a 'Dukedog', 'Duke' or 'Bulldog' I would probably find it irresistible.

The layout has given me a lot of pleasure and enjoyment both building it and using it, particularly with my grandsons who have also got the train bug.

A goods train leaves 'Llanidris', with the chapel, painted on the backscene, looming over the village.

The railway was built as a through route to the same standards as the Cambrian main line and can accommodate larger locomotives such as this Churchward ‘Mogul’. Its crew need to damp down the coal before running through the tunnel tender-first.

The two coach autotrain sets off towards Machynlleth from Llanidris. The 48XX locomotive is a model from Dapol which runs beautifully.

The road overbridge beyond the platform was modelled loosely on Rifle Range bridge near Towyn and is now the end of the truncated line, due to major water and landslip damage further along the line.

GWR 'Prairie' No. 4575 shunts its train in front of the Llanidris and Ratgoed Railway engine shed. Behind, the little KerrStuart style locomotive is partly scratch-built on a Hornby 0-4-0 chassis.

The Llanidris and Ratgoed locomotive lingers underneath the derelict viaduct of the disused quarry line. Nobody has seen fit to complete the demolition of the viaduct so its broken arch juts out menacingly, overhanging the tracks to the goods yard.

Although the baseboards are only 2ft 6in deep at this point, I wanted to create a sense of depth, so I used forced perspective in the models and 'aerial perspective' in the backscene painting.

GWR 14XX No. 1467, a Tower Brass model, that I brush painted, stands in front of Llanidris station, which is based on Llanbrynmair. I drew the artwork for the bargeboards with Adobe Illustrator and sent them off to be laser cut.