Narrow gauge railways aren’t all short-distance affairs with tiny locomotives. DAVID WALLER explains how this delightful Welsh Highland Railway layout was created in ‘OO9’ - complete with its mighty Garratts. Photography Mike Bisset.
BUILDING A model railway can sometimes be quite a long-term process – even more so when the railway you’re modelling hasn’t been built yet!
That’s a large part of the reason why the Bron Hebog you see here is the culmination of a 20-year project. It was conceived as a follow-up to the tremendously popular layout depicting Dduallt station on the Ffestiniog Railway (FR), with its unique spiral track plan at the start of the deviation which reconnected the line to its rightful terminus at Blaenau Ffestiniog when the original route was flooded as part of a hydro-electric scheme.
Having ‘done’ the Ffestiniog Railway our attention turned to the (at the time controversial) project to rebuild the long-abandoned Welsh Highland Railway (WHR). What ignited the spark was the arrival on the market of a ‘OO9’ scale brass kit for the South African ‘NG’/‘G16’ locomotives, of which a trio were being repatriated to the UK as the intended prime motive power for the line.
I’ll say more about these kits later, but the …
