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The bridge over the line would make for a good small layout / diorama to experiment with achieving grimy, weathered urban surfaces. The ramp provides a bit of visual interest without being too distracting. In the real world, one wonders how filthy those windows got back in the steam era...

In case anyone is wondering, based on Wiki's figure of 399 miles for the WCML, that would still require 1.54 real miles at 1:220 scale.

Here are a couple of versions of (I think) the logo you mean. They are taken from the Annual Reports from the early 1990s (Yorkshire Water was listed in 1989) so aren't great resolution or quality - they are scans from microfiches at Companies House - but with a bit of digital fettling might be ok, given the scale. The version seems a slightly better quality scan, and could be inverted fairly easily. You might have more joy with further research at Companies House. Note the company is now called Kelda Group.

Prototype question re the engine shed: what is the little 'roof' above the centre of the doors for? I assume to provide a bit of extra height to allow chimneys etc. to pass through (you see a similar thing on the doors to some aircraft hangars). But why did they not just build the door a little taller?

That is a superb angle, and somehow the lack of stock (of the rolling variety, not the bovine...) just gives you an opportunity to take in the peaceful scene and all its little details. There's really very little that gives it away as a model.

That factory will make some lovely flats 80 years in Little Muddle's future, when the station area is the car park for a Tesco Extra.

Yes, they're used as you say to turn trains around and (sometimes) to overnight early morning services. They also have a road link so maintenance teams occasionally use them to stable track maintenance equipment. Here's a picture I found on Facebook of all places - I think a Network Rail working on this machine had taken a photo of it. Unfortunately I have lost his details so can't give proper credit.

I don't have a suggestion but just wanted to say thanks to @montyburns56 for starting this thread and to all those that have contributed. These images are fascinating - a mixture of moody, mournful, beautiful, poignant, etc. They also tell a story of a decline that we're still dealing with as a society. Great stuff.

Love the lighting and shadows in those shots Anthony - the strong directional light feels like those moments (of which there are many in Wales, even if they don't last long) where the sun breaks through the clouds in the late afternoon and throws all the terrain into sharp relief. Together with the vegetation it has captured the windswept mountainside effectively. I assume you're using some form of LED-based floodlight?

Fitting the surface I had always envisaged using a thin plywood for the surface, and in the event went for 1/8". In retrospect I should have used 1/4" as it would have required less 'underbracing' between the main spine of the boards. But it did mean I could cut it with a sharp Stanley knife. I made a cardboard mock-up first to get my dimensions, so I could trace onto the thin ply. The handprint on the garage door isn't mine, and indeed pre-dates our ownership of the house. Who knows what the last owners used this room for... ...and here's the ply version: The ply was glued and tacked down with panel pins. Around this same time, we had some builders in to re-do our pool, and the new tiles arrived in several crates surrounded on all sides by 1.5" thick polystyrene, which I saved from the tip (much to the amusement of the builders).

Baseboard assembly I decided to start making the board that contains the station first, and move 'north' up the model. There's no particular reason for this other than it's probably the most interesting board for modelling, and was going to test various of my proposed approaches to the scenic elements. The advantage of building everything in SketchUp is that you can 'flatten' out all the elements to minimise waste of plywood. Where I am located, a sheet of 15mm birch plywood can easily cost £60. The red elements are the first section, yellow are the second, and there's even space for some of the third board (the blue). Taking shape I didn't take any pictures of cutting out the plywood, because I didn't think it was very interesting. I used my circular saw, a fairly new plywood cutting blade and my 'homemade saw track' which is just a piece of plywood and a 90 degree fence. For important joints where minimising tear-out was important, I put masking tape along the cut line. Slowly the pieces took shape (by coincidence the camera angle here is about the same as the 3D model above!).

Thanks all for the thoughts on slips, double slips and suchlike. After a bit more playing in RMPro, I was wondering what you all thought of this arrangement: I have inserted two double slips - the left most one to address the issue discussed further up the chain (trains being able to get onto the GVR from Newport (green line) and off the GVR towards Newport (maroon line), and the one on the right to facilitate trains from Hereford (maroon line) getting into the bay platform / siding, and also permit bay platform trains to head up to Hereford (green line) if necessary. I have also moved the turnout that leads to the GVR (the right-most yellow turnout) 30cm (approx 23 scale metres) to the right, so there is a bit of space between the station turnouts/slips and the GVR 'junction'. In diagrammatic form this now all looks quite neat, and it seems (from comments above) to be closer to how Pontrilas actually was when it was operational. There is space to achieve this outcome solely with turnouts (no double slips) so if wiser heads than mine tell me this would be an unrealistic track plan by 1995, I will rejig some more.

Thanks Phil, you raise a good point. Unfortunately the garage is a place of many hobbies so the railway will need to come apart and go back together every now and then. We also live in a hurricane zone with a reasonably high probability that at some point I will need to ensure it is out of harm's way if the entire garage gets flooded - a much easier task if it breaks down into 150cm units.

Interesting. I have learned a lot about layout planning (and real railways) in the last few posts, so thanks for your thoughts. I can certainly move the mainline crossover back towards the left of the diagram to provide a loco's gap between the yellow pair of points (the branch connection) and the mainline ones. It might mean the mainline crossover is between the station platforms (though right at the end of them), but so be it. Thanks Philip for your thoughts. The chemical works and its associated line has always intrigued me. The only useful online source I have found about what it was up to is this report from a local historical society. I don't really have space to model it, and even in my economically dubious alternative history, small rural chemical works primarily producing naptha would have been long gone by the 1990s (in reality it was gone by the 1930s!). If this were a 2020s model then maybe The Golden Valley Ciderworks (also on the site) would have become a trendy artisan cider manufacturer with an eco-friendly railway siding. On the 1920s plan the line is still present. Its angle, plus the need to get up the embankment, must mean it joined the mainline a good distance away from Pontrilas station. One day if I get to visit Pontrilas in real life, I'd like to see if there's any remaining hint of the sloped embankment.

I have tweaked the track plan a little to move the cross-over towards the station a little and now provide a route for diverted trains to come off the GVR, cross the Hereford mainline and continue to Newport (or come up from Newport and get diverted onto the GVR. Let's hope I have enough turnouts! (The curves on the below aren't millimetre perfect.)

No floorplan - although it looks quite complicated (it is quite complicated!) it is fundamentally built up from simple shapes and a lot of copy/paste! Even the most complex structures tend to be lots of repeated shapes.

Thanks Captain, that's a very useful source of inspiration. While my model won't get anything close to that quality or scale, it will provide plenty of useful pictures as I try and bring that scene forward fifty years.

Thank you, I was thinking the same as I wrote this up, and you are right that there was a crossover from the GVL to the mainlines in the 1920s. Luckily track laying hasn't begun in earnest yet! Hi Philip - the 3D model was done in SketchUp Make - whatever the last version was before it went to a browser-only model. It's simple enough to learn and lots of resources out there. While my modelling skills are pretty rudimentary, with patience I have been able to get some decent results. Here are a couple of shots from my 3D model of Hereford Station, probably the most complex model I have made. These are all built up from basic shapes using best guesses from photos (e.g. an average brick plus mortar layer is X cm, this photo shows the ground floor is Y layers of bricks, therefore let's start there for the height and adjust as we go). They're not perfect but they are perfect for the task of taking measurements and planning. If there's interest and if I have time, I'd be happy to put together a 'building a building SketchUp from 5,000 miles away' thread one day.

Track planning As part of the planning of the model I have scoured the internet for publicly available pictures of Pontrilas and its surroundings. The aforementioned Ewyas Lacy history site has been invaluable, but for more recent pictures Flickr and Google have been useful and I now have a significant collection of images. When it came to track planning, I started in Google Earth, overlaying the 1920s track plan using Google Earth's Overlay feature. This helped place everything into context and enabled me to draw a to-scale line drawing that I could then import into RailModeller Pro. Once in RM Pro, I drew the real track plan, to the correct scale as fitted to the map. This was the result: This map requires some mental gymnastics. The left of this diagram is the south end in my Google Earth picture - the station / goods bays are above the main lines, and the goods platforms are at the top. The Golden Valley Line (GVL) loops off on the top-right of the picture. But I was never going to model the full map - too time consuming and not realistic. Even Hereford's goods yard was largely unused by the mid-1990s, so a four bay goods yard in a minor station seemed unlikely. So I kept the bay platform for the GVL service, and the outer-most goods siding. I wanted the layout's primary viewing angle to be across the station to the mainlines, and beyond to the field behind the station (i.e. from the top of the diagram below). So the GVL's curve had to be reversed, to fit with the rest of the layout. Here's what I ended up with, which felt a much more realistic amount of track for the 1990s. The colours represent what I plan to have visible - the rest of the line will be a loop (fundamentally this model is about watching trains go by rather operating to a strict timetable). One thing I have tried to preserve as much as possible here is the sense of scale. Real railways are huge and while I do not have the length in the garage to model the whole length of Pontrilas, I want to try and avoid shortening the whole thing so it starts to look like a model made to fit the available space rather than a real world railway. Into 3D Having settled on the track plan it was time to turn it into a 3D model. This was partly because I got to the above stage in the middle of last year and knew it would be several months before I could start building, and partly because my inexperience with models means I wanted to build it digitally first so I could check dimensions and get my bearings when I came to put saw to plywood. As Pontrilas is essentially on a large embankment over a field to the east and the village to the west (with the railway running north/south), I wanted to capture that vertical difference by having the rails elevated in the model. So the baseboard design I settled on used plywood 'spines' joined at the ends and (not pictured in the model below) a spine running length-wise between the perpendicular spines to keep the spacing correct and ensure the plywood top wouldn't sag between the rails. To the right, a crude approximation of the hill over the tunnel was added to get a sense of scale, and a rough drawing of the station house was created and shrunk to the appropriate scale. The total length of the model below is 490cm, but that doesn't include the fact that (per the diagram above) the tracks will curve quite sharply once the are 'off scene' to complete the loop. Those with keen eyes will note that the GVL at the left end of the model is raised slightly above the main lines, which continue into a tunnel. The current plan is that the GVL will pass through the scenic break and emerge on the other side in a new 'scene' (a 90s rural idyll) and the main lines will continue behind the scenes until they re-emerge at Pontrilas again. At this stage I'm so far from that stage of the model that I may well change my mind. So there's the plan...

Thanks Philip, I don't know how in all my years of lurking here I hadn't seen that thread (even when searching 'Pontrilas'). I will enjoy making my way through your thread. Your master plan on the first page reminds me of the layout I had planned - a square layout that combined Pontrilas as the most southerly 'scene', round the corner to the Hereford DMU depot for some minor shunting interest, round the corner into Hereford station, and then the final side of the square being the Dinmore dual tunnels at the 'northern' end for a rural run... I have neither the time nor the skill to realise that project for now, outside of RailModeller software that is. Still, one can dream. Thanks for the kind words so far. Another planning post to follow. (In case you're wondering I have got little further than planning so far, all to be revealed!).

Pontrilas Station: a true story Pontrilas Station doesn't exist any more, at least not as it used to. It was a station between Hereford and Abergavenny which at one point also served as the mainline-connected terminus for what must have been one of the most beautiful railway journeys: the Golden Valley Railway between Pontrilas and Hay-on-Wye. The GVR was described before even being built in the mid-19th Century as a line that "leads from a place of no importance to a place of no importance… practically useless and to involve a wasteful expenditure of money...". So it was: after never making a profit the shares of the operating company (face value £100,000) were sold to the GWR for £11,000 in 1899. The GWR considered closing the railway in the early 20th Century, and it was only the arrival of the war in 1937 that gave the line a purpose: a sizeable military depot (still there) and various agricultural machinery saw goods traffic return. It was not to last: the line closed and was lifted in stages between 1949 and 1954. Pontrilas Station itself closed to passengers in June 1958, and while the marshalling yard remained in support of the military base until that link also closed in 1969. Today, the station house is a well-rated B&B and the single remaining siding of the original four serves as a holding bay for broken wagons or locos pending collection, and very occasionally has been used to deliver logs to the nearby Pontrilas sawmill. There is some enthusiasm locally for having it reopen as a parkway station, but it hasn't gone anywhere yet. (For more history of the GVR, see this wonderful write up and this archive of images.) Enter the modeller For a long time I have wanted to build a layout based on the Welsh Marches line. It's a line and a part of the world that takes me back to my childhood in the early 1990s. Watching the variety of damp, grimy diesels coming through stations, or a Class 37 ticking over as it sat 'under the wall' at Hereford, or a summer holiday trip down to Cardiff or Barry Island. The line combines the rainy, weatherbeaten beauty of the Welsh borders, a broad mixture of traffic to keep anyone happy, and even today it seems 'lost in time' in a way the other lines I'm familiar with (mostly the London commuter lines) never were. This picture (Jamerail on Flickr) sums the place up to me, and while it was taken before I was born, the scene was basically the same in the mid-1990s when I was there. One day I'd love to build a layout based around Hereford station and other Welsh Marches landmarks, and have built a full 3D model of the station for when that day comes. I lack the modelling skill or time for a project of that scope just now, but having lurked for long enough on this following some great layouts and getting my thoughts in order about what I'd like to create, it's time to have a go. I think it's important to set out in 'Post 1' where my modelling preferences are: my interest is mostly in the process of modelling / building things over operator interest or getting the details exactly right. I'm not looking for exciting shunting, don't know anywhere near enough about what locomotives ran where and when, or the intricacies of signalling to care too much about getting those details spot on, at least initially. I want to learn as I go, ask where I can, take my time and have a bit of fun along the way (hopefully working with my children - 4 and 5 - where that's possible, to teach them a few things). Pontrilas Station: the fiction In the alternative world that is my garage, it's the 1990s and Pontrilas never closed, and nor did the GVR. Maybe it was due to the emergence of Hay-on-Wye as a literary and general Guardianista paradise, or maybe like the Heart of Wales Line, some connection at the other end means it has a value to the network beyond ticket sales. Either way, there's a minimal DMU service that still terminates at Pontrilas, and maybe we'll see the occasional diverted freight service (while we're keeping unprofitable lines open, let's assume the HH&BR never closed either). The goods yard was rationalised, of course, from its 1920s five-track extravagance and now just comprises a single bay platform where the Hay service terminates, and an outer siding where occasional Pontrilas log services or broken down trains might seek refuge. The space where the old goods shed once stood will probably be the station car park. While the Newport end of Pontrilas is helpfully adjacent to a tunnel mouth (every modeller's dream!), the Hereford end is actually raised over the surrounding landscape in an impressive embankment. To accommodate the reality that my garage is limited in size, we'll do some terraforming and probably end up in a cutting. What I hope you can expect from this thread Slow progress! I have a busy job, lots of travel, two small children, and I live in on a small island where we have no modelling shops and everything has to either be ordered airmail, shipped or collected when visiting the US or the UK. This will slow progress down significantly, but I expect to use the time between deliveries to try things out in 3D models, experiment and generally take my time. Amazon takes several weeks to arrive here, so I will need to compromise with materials, paints, etc. and plan carefully what specialty products I need in one go. On periodic trips to the UK I'll need to load up on RailMatch and other such things that are hard to ship. Lots of history about the line, pictures (mostly from other people's Flickrs, hopefully always with credit!) Probably more questions for others than advice from me! Misuse and misunderstanding of railway terminology, correct signals, electronics, etc. that will doubtless drive those to whom those things are a key part of their modelling experience mad. No offence will be taken, I look forward to learning from you. Trains that might not be technically correct. I know HSTs generally went north out of Hereford and not south to Newport, but I can't promise one won't pass through for no reason other than I like the shape of them and they scratch a nostalgia itch. Long posts, apparently. Looking forward to it.

Hopefully this link works: https://goo.gl/maps/LMeWLajV6zwk3cH18 Here's a Google Map view of the Hut / Engine Shed in Jamie's picture above, in case it helps position things on the map (I know I do all my prototype mapping in Google Maps!). Coordinates are 53.2625143,-3.9679377 if you have another mapping software you prefer.

Ok, confession time. As a firm believer in publishing one's mistakes so someone else might learn: the issue was with the power supply. Not the Gaugemaster, but the step-up transformer (I live in a 110V jurisdiction). It was set to accept an input voltage of 220V, rather than 120V, so wasn't stepping up enough. As soon as the right breaker was inserted, everything worked fine. Thanks again for all your help.

Many thanks all. I refitted the blanking plate and the same issue presented itself, suggesting this is probably a loco issue rather than a power issue. It definitely tries to proceed, but doesn't seem to be able to. At the expense of sounding like someone who gives up far too easily, I expect this will now go back in its box until I next have an opportunity to work out whether I have the skills and the interest in tinkering with it. Of the two pre-owned locomotives I bought, one had a broken chassis which meant it was unusable without major repairs, and the other is this one...

As an initial foray into getting back into the hobby, I bought a DCC fitted loco from Hattons (a Bachmann Class 37). It is a pre-owned locomotive, but in very good condition. I also bought the basic Gaugemaster GMC-COMBI controller, not wanting to splurge on a DCC setup at this time. I have connected the controller to the track via the DC output, as suggested in the handbook. When I sit it on my track and power up the track, the running lights will come on but the engine will sit there making a soft humming sound. As I turn up the power, the lights get brighter. With a little encouragement it will creep along the track very slowly. What am I doing wrong? I had thought that a DCC train will run on DC track without modification, albeit with a tendency to shoot off at speed. Do I need to take out the chip and re-fit the blanking plug (which I think I have in the box)? Any suggestions gratefully received.