Layout: Shirebrook
The Hunnisett family’s ‘N’ gauge re‑creation of Shirebrook depot allows for scale‑length coal trains and delights exhibition‑goers with its bleak, atmospheric setting.
The Hunnisett family’s re-creation of Shirebrook depot is a favourite at exhibitions.
Some depots are home to glamorous machines and their names trip off the tongue – Haymarket, Laira, Finsbury Park, to name just a few. However, dozens of depots never hosted glamour machines. They serviced the humdrum, workaday locomotives that kept the railway going.
One of those was Shirebrook. It provided the motive power to keep the coal trains moving from the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mines. But the decline of the coal industry spelt the end for Shirebrook; the depot closed in 1996.
Located north of Mansfield, Shirebrook is a former mining town whose own colliery closed in 1993. But it’s the railway infrastructure that inspired the Hunnisett family’s garage-filling layout. Family patriarch Duncan was a railwayman who even spent a short period working at Shirebrook but, as he explains, that wasn’t what prompted the 1:148 scale build.
“We lived in Rotherham, and my son Carl and I were searching for potential locations to model. Shirebrook wasn’t the first place we looked at, but when we got there we realised that it fitted our requirements almost perfectly.
“It offered interesting operation with a depot and station that were not so big that they would fill all our available space. We also wanted to run scale-length trains, one of the many advantages offered by ‘N’ gauge.
“We decided to model a winter scene because that was the time of year we visited Shirebrook.
“Shirebrook wasn’t the first place we looked at, but it fitted our requirements almost perfectly”
It presented us with some scenic challenges, but it makes a refreshing change from the usual verdant summer green layouts.”
EXPANDED LAYOUT
Originally, the Hunnisetts only modelled the section from the Station Road overbridge to Sheepwash Viaduct. Then they added Shirebrook Junction, where the link to the former Great Central Railway’s Chesterfield-lincoln line diverged from the Midland Railway route from Mansfield. A further extension, which brought the layout up to 25ft, enabled the Hunnisetts to add Shirebrook Colliery’s slag heaps to the layout’s southern end. They conveniently hide the tight curves around to the 12ft long, 16-road fiddleyard.
Despite its size and complexity, ‘Shirebrook’ is still
analogue controlled – that means a lot of track and point switches!
“We have an operating team for exhibitions,” Duncan explains. “Two of the five control panels control the storage yard. The points here are operated by push-button route setting through diode matrices.
“One panel controls the depot and the other two are for the Up and Down lines. That makes it a real team effort to operate.”
‘Shirebrook’ was built with exhibitions in mind. Duncan purposely designed it so that the track was right at the front, allowing people to take up-close photographs, have a true lineside view and feel fully connected to the model, without having to lean over the scenery.
He says, “Not only does this mean that there is less risk of something getting damaged but it also allows
“We decided to model the scene in winter, the time of year we visited Shirebrook”
us to portray the open landscape, with plenty of space between the track and the backscene.
“The lifeless brown and grey winter fields go right to the back of the layout where they meet the backscene (painted by Ted, another one of our children), portraying the Vale of Meaden. This open vista helps to draw the viewer’s attention to the highly detailed station/depot area.”
Duncan is now a CAD designer and has used his skills to design the trademark buildings that the layout needed. He’s particularly proud of the etched metal footbridge at the northern end of the station, where it’s almost impossible to see the separate layers with the naked eye. Another of Duncan’s designs is the depot building itself. He studied numerous photographs to make it as accurate as possible.
Away from the buildings, the rolling hills are created using a polystyrene base coated with
lightweight filler. The short, three-arch viaduct over the stream catches the eye. Duncan made the stream that flows underneath using Noch Easy Water, but in reality it was anything but!
“When I first poured it on it only flowed about halfway down,” he remembers, “and it needed a lot of encouragement to fill the area set out for it.”
It isn’t just the big details keeping exhibition viewers interested. There are plenty of small details in this small scale that are worth shouting about. There’s the obvious railway infrastructure, the signals and the point rodding. There’s even an S&T compound on the Up platform, which was built by Mark, one of ‘Shirebrook’s’ operating team. But take a look at the farm and you’ll see some washing on the line, blowing about in the cold, winter air.
One detail that’s worth mentioning is the lineside fencing. This was painstakingly assembled by Duncan’s wife Janet.
“Janet made about 30ft of fencing,” he says, “from Plastikard posts and very fine copper wire. She used a special jig that I made that resembled a guitar fret board.”
Shirebrook was once a mecca for enthusiasts and many still mourn its loss. The tangled network of
lines has shrunk, whereas the mining industry they served is long gone. But thanks to the Hunnisett’s skilled modelling, the days when the Derbyshire/ Nottinghamshire border country resonated to the rumble of Class 20s, 56s and 58s are still alive and well at ‘Shirebrook’.