Inspired by a visit to Yorkshire, this compact Scale Seven layout depicts a typical industrial scene of the 1970s, as its creator TONY KELL describes. Photography, Mike Bisset.
Above: A loaded mineral train hauled by the Class 20 departs from Burdale Quarry. The Class 20 is a Just Like the Real Thing kit which has a Zimo Activedrive sound decoder installed.
BURDALE QUARRY is my latest foray into building transportable layouts in ‘O’ gauge. Initially, I created two layouts depicting the London and North Eastern Railway just before nationalisation, but in recent years I have been building American narrow gauge layouts. However, I decided I needed a change of scene once more.
In doing so, I came back to British Railways and the 1970s as this is what I remember as I am only a youngster of 60! This meant building all-new locomotives and stock, so I took the plunge into Scale Seven at the same time. Scale Seven is a finescale approach to 7mm scale, ‘O’ gauge, modelling. It uses a scale of 1:43.5 (7mm:1ft) and a true to scale track gauge of 33mm between the rails. Standard ‘O’ gauge finescale models, such as those produced by Heljan, are designed to run on 32mm gauge track including the ready-made products by Peco.
