As a companion piece to the other station on the layout, I will lay out the background to Helmsdale, about half way between Wick and Inverness, and an important staging post in steam days. It has the usual two platforms, typical HR goods shed with minimal goods facilities, but most interestingly for modellers, an engine shed where the Dornoch locos were maintained and some elderly pre-group engines were used for banking and PW duties. Until the end of steam, some services started/terminated here, so there was often a Black Five around, and the mail coach and restaurant car were removed from northbound trains, so spells of activity did occur.It was latterly a crew change-over point, but until the Black Fives arrived, with the capacity for a full run to and from the end of the line, engines were changed here on nearly all trains, so with some modellers licence, some extra interest can be added to the workings.

The railway was the employer in Helmsdale- I have seen the figure of seventy quoted, shared between motive power staff, PW, and the usual station requirements. This local site has some interesting photos showing the station in its heyday- http://www.helmsdale.org/station.html - the second one shows a dozen enginemen; the title stating that these are only some of the men from there. Certainly the shed was better equipped than most wayside depots- it had a fitter and boilersmith to attend to the branch engines, washouts and running repairs were looked after, with apparently little need for visits to Inverness.

A couple of photos to set the scene.

I have omitted the main station building and half the platform length to fit the space available, and also to get some openness at the north end, rather than have the whole area filled with platforms- the shed site is as it was but different! Due to the room, I have had to move the turntable further up into the shed area and reposition the sidings somewhat, but it does retain something of the real thing.The shed building was a real one-off - the Highland tended to have "house" styles for their buildings, but this shed conformed to nothing- it was a hotchpot of horizontal weatherboarding and corrugated iron, with seemingly random apertures placed in no order. The roof and vents are often seen in a tattered state and doors appeared and vanished over the years. As a result of this, I decided to not bother with a scale model of the shed as such, but based the model round the Ratio curved roof as used on their coal shelter and carriage shed, and used board and batten as the woodwork, in common with every other HR timber building. This sin apart, all the other buildings are copied from photographs and,apart from some corrected mistakes along the way,are passable replicas of the originals. The turntable at Helmsdale was replaced in 1948 with a 60' model- mine is a Roco model, Anglicized as far as practical due to a lack of a decent UK version.

From my studies of this station it seems that the shed facilities underwent an upgrade in 1948, with brick messsheds and huts being built, along with the new turntable. The mess shed is similar to those erected by the LMS in 1943 at Aviemore, Tain and Wick to improve conditions for loco crew on lodging turns, and must have been appreciated by the engine crews, but by the time they were built here the need for them had largely vanished, with the increased traffic workings gone, and the long decline of the railways beginning.Post war allocations saw the last of the Small Ben's and latterly one or two of the Pickersgill 4-4-0's here, along with a Caley 0-6-0, and I am broadly going along with this- there is not a lot of scope for what-if's here, although I suppose I could imagine a distillery trip working - Brora has a distillery, and perhaps the brickworks and coal mine might generate some traffic as well.Helmsdale had a fishing fleet at this time- nothing on the scale of Wick or the east coast ports, but there was a loading bank at the south end of the station for fish vans- these would have been attached to through freights, I imagine, but perhaps sometimes a special working might have been needed......

Edit

 The layout thread was so compromised by the forum image loss that I closed it and might do something about it if I find the time, but a parallel thread was posted on Your Model Railway, with the same details as here, so the whole story can be found there, if in an attenuated form. Also on Western Thunder from about seven years past, again from now and again. with the same titles.