During one of the numerous lockdown's which were encountered in the last 18 months I found myself traditional climbing on the banks of the beautiful Loch Duntelchaig. The climbing was excellent, the midges were not. 

I know Scotland very well having spent my whole life in the North East but I must confess I did not have much knowledge at all of the desolate landscape that lay directly south of the Capital of the Highlands, Inverness. I was quite taken with the dense pine forest and wide open spaces which the Oh so familar Cairngorms do not permit.

Fast forward roughly 6 months and I'm sitting in my small room in my student flat in Stirling, not daring to look too deeply into the reading which I was required to start for my Dissertation. I look down at my pretty tired looking layout, a single track continuous run affair which no matter how much I tweaked never seemed to be as interesting as I wanted it to be. There simply wasn't the space.

It was to this backdrop that the idea of Duntelchaig was born.

I had always wanted to try and model a distillery as a point of interest in a layout and basing this new concept only 20 miles or so from the rich whiskey country of speyside was all the justification I needed. I wanted to try and design a track plan which would have good operation interest without taking up the entire of my room and I wanted the Loch itself to be the central attraction. Furthermore, it had to be cheap, simple and achievable. 

It was also deliberately ambiguous, I've spent enough time in some of the most barren settlements in Scotia to understand that things generally don't change much in these rural outposts. Therefore, I wanted to be able to present the layout as if it could be frozen in any time, allowing me to run stock from pre-nationalisation all the way up to modern image. I think I'll switch out a few cars and busses on the layout as the only clue of time changing with the rolling stock. 

As well as a double siding for the distillery the layout also has two rather unusual head-shunts, in order to allow marginally longer grain and general freight trains, furthermore, these head-shunts are separated from the halt and distillery by a small portion of the Loch itself. 

This was the end result:

I have laid the track and I'm currently roughly half way through wiring, (I'm waiting patiently on point motors). I decided early on to use set track, purely because I had a heap lying around from previous projects and I don't generally get too hung up on the intricacies of track realism.

The brown section which is lower than the main section will all be allocated as Loch space and there will be a few boats and fishermen floating around.

A very generous member of my local model Railway club, Falkirk MRC, has very kindly donated to me a Faller Brewery building, which is simply lovely. This will serve as the main distillery building with a few small changes potentially. 

Power will be through a digitrax DCS51.

Roughly 2/3rd's of my stock is chipped and most of the rest require hard wiring so there might be some frustrated updates about that from time to time.

General locomotive roster is semi-prototypical with a few oddballs thrown in:

LNER 1930s:

J50, J72, J36

BR 1950s:

ex-LMS Black 5 5MT, STD 4MT 2-6-0, ex-LNER K1, ex-LMS 2MT 2-6-0, ex-LNER J39, ex-LNER pug, Class 105, Class 31,(Maybe an ex-LNER L1... Really not justifiable though, but I do love her).

BR 1970s:

Class 24, Class 31, Class 06

BR 1990s:

Class 37, Class 47, Class 60

2000s:

Class 56, Class 66, Class 156

Trains will be short passenger trains, short grain trains and the occasional mixed goods train for the village.

So that's the general jist, please feel free to comment/criticise. There's obviously still a massive amount of work to do, but its a start.

Just a heads up that updates here are likely to be dictated by procrastination of university work and are therefore likely to be somewhat sporadic.