Naming a Fictitious Location

[Steamport Southport]

46 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

 

 

-gate as a street name is also Norse, though it was sometimes used much later (my home town once had a street named Enginegate - because that was where the town's first fire engine was kept). 

 

 

 

 

Gate can also mean goat.

 

Gateshead is named after the goats and there is a place near mine called Gateacre which is literally the field for goats. Pronounced Get-eh-ker not Gate-acre, those trying to be posh say Gat-a-car.

[Michael Hodgson]

53 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

And the M&GN as already noticed, was forced to name one station after a drainage ditch (Counter Drove) and another after the surveyor's plot number (Twenty)

 

So "Thirty Foot" (or whatever your baseboard length is) or "Mickeldyke" are both possible Fenland stations

 

Thirty Foot is another Drain - also called thew New Bedford River. 

And while you're measuring ditches, there's always the Sixteen Foot Drain and the Forty Foot Drain - the chaps who drained the Fens seem to have been a little lacking in imagination.  

And the former station at Six Mile Bottom still stands as a private residence next to a line which still sees trains.  It gets its name from the distance to Newmarket racecourse.

[Nearholmer]

I'm pleased to report that Wikipedia agrees with me that the Sussex 'combe' and the welsh 'cwm' derive from the same celtic root. I think that some of the Sussex ones have acquired an extra 'o' as pronunciation has drifted over time from something like 'kwm' (proper Sussex way) to 'koomb' (phonetic pronunciation by not-locals).

 

Need to be careful in some of this discussion to distinguish between formal 'physical geography' meanings (e.g. cwm as meaning specifically the bowl-shaped ice-scrape at the head of a formerly glaciated valley) and the 'traditional' meanings (cwm meaning a valley in a more general sense).

[Michael Hodgson]

23 hours ago, Derekstuart said:

I know someone who is modelling based on Leicester. I shall suggest 'Leicester On Sea' to him.

 

Joking aside, with no connection to modelling, I was looking up Ravenscar on the North East coast, between Whitby and Scarborough. It used to be simply named 'Peak' on the basis that it was the highest point of the line (650ft above sea level). So there's any number of similarly themed names for just about any reason you like.

Ravenscar is a town that never was, but the station was not fictitious.  Land in the area was bought up by a Victorian speculator with a view to building a holiday resort served by the station, but the tourists never came.  He built a hotel/shop next to the station and you can still see the roads which were laid out for the failed development.    The location is so exposed location that the station's waiting shelter was blown away once.

[fezza]

Has anyone considered suffixes? Some companies seemed to have distinctive endings to station names.  Anything with Exchange always seemed to me quite LMS, anything with Road quite Southern.  Street always seemed GER, although there were exceptions.  Victoria could be used anywhere for important stations but only important stations.  Interchange and Parkway are of course very 1970s PTE...  Someone must have written about this once???

[Paul H Vigor]

2 hours ago, Dungrange said:

 

I guess a lot of these on-line translation tools are not that great when we stray away from commonly used words.

 

Going back to the Welsh 'Y Bawddwr', if I split 'Bawddwr' into 'Bawd dwr' (with a space), then Google Translate gives me 'The Water Thumb'.  'Y' being Welsh for 'The' and 'dwr' being the Welsh for 'water'.  That would suggest to me that the origin of the name is perhaps derived from the shape of the watercourse or it's position relative to the other watercourses in the area.

Try splitting the name into its components - 'baw ddwr'. This is an historic local nickname.

[Dungrange]

1 hour ago, Paul H Vigor said:

Try splitting the name into its components - 'baw ddwr'. This is an historic local nickname.

 

Okay, Google Translate translates the word 'Baw' as 'Dirt' and the word 'Ddwr' as 'Water'.  I could therefore assume that if you put the two words together you'd get 'Dirt Water', but for some reason Google Translate thinks 'Baw ddwr' translates as 'Water fouling'.  Ask it to translate 'Water fouling' into Welsh and it gives 'Baeddu dŵr'!!!!  However, give it the English phrase 'Water dirt' and it does produce 'Baw Dŵr' as the Welsh equivalent.  Interestingly, there seems to be various alternative spellings that translate to water and I note that Wikitionary refers to ddŵr as being a soft mutation of dŵr (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ddŵr#Welsh).

 

I don't know why I care, because I have no intention of calling my layout Dirtwater, although Foulbrook sounds better, even if it has a similar meaning.

 

 

[Butler Henderson]

Old names for places is another source - I give you an East Midland location of Snotingeham or Snotingham with its Midland, Victoria and London Road (both high and low level) stations

[Paul H Vigor]

5 hours ago, Dungrange said:

 

Okay, Google Translate translates the word 'Baw' as 'Dirt' and the word 'Ddwr' as 'Water'.  I could therefore assume that if you put the two words together you'd get 'Dirt Water', but for some reason Google Translate thinks 'Baw ddwr' translates as 'Water fouling'.  Ask it to translate 'Water fouling' into Welsh and it gives 'Baeddu dŵr'!!!!  However, give it the English phrase 'Water dirt' and it does produce 'Baw Dŵr' as the Welsh equivalent.  Interestingly, there seems to be various alternative spellings that translate to water and I note that Wikitionary refers to ddŵr as being a soft mutation of dŵr (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ddŵr#Welsh).

 

I don't know why I care, because I have no intention of calling my layout Dirtwater, although Foulbrook sounds better, even if it has a similar meaning.

 

 

Fair enough.

[Fenman]

15 hours ago, fezza said:

Has anyone considered suffixes? Some companies seemed to have distinctive endings to station names.  Anything with Exchange always seemed to me quite LMS, anything with Road quite Southern.  Street always seemed GER, although there were exceptions.  ...

Our friends at the M&GN often used “Road” suffixes. Their problem was a lot of their stations were built a long way from the settlements whose name they bore, so “Road” was code for “not very convenient and you might have a long walk when you get there”. 
 

But they also used this technique as a marketing device: for example, the station in the centre of the albeit tiny village of Roydon was actually called “Grimston Road” after the much bigger village a couple of miles away.

 

Their terminus in Norwich was built after Victoria and Thorpe, so they named it City to emphasise its centrality and convenience (but then bizarrely treated Norwich as the terminus of a minor branch line from Melton Constable, instead making Yarmouth the main easterly focus of operations). 
 

Paul

[Fenman]

17 hours ago, Ravenser said:

...

And the M&GN as already noticed, was forced to name one station after a drainage ditch (Counter Drove) and another after the surveyor's plot number (Twenty)

...

You’ve created a new name by mashing-up two lovely M&GN station names:

North Drove

Counter Drain
 

The third station between Bourne and Spalding was the other you mentioned, Twenty. This gave rise to the schoolboy joke which relies on the now archaic way of expressing numbers: “How many stations are there between Bourne and Spalding? Two and Twenty”.

 

Counter Drain, incidentally, serves the delightfully-named Fenland hamlet of Tongue End. 
 

Paul

[Middlesea John]

We did it a simple way.  We looked at the area where our layout was set, found a few place names that weren't served by the railway than had a vote.  The group chose "Ladycross" so we have had to adjust geography by about a mile.

[boxbrownie]

On 03/10/2020 at 19:47, Nearholmer said:

It’s from the same root as Leake in Yorkshire, and Leek in Staffordshire.

 

 

Piddle and Leake/Leek are very closely related 

 

My layout is based quite closely on the classic Bredon but I have changed it slightly so wanted a new name but keeping some connection so I have recently decided on the name and made some name posts and as we are now in Cornwall have called it Trevallan, being a traditional Cornish name.......but as a nod to the original Bredon on the sign is the added text “change for Bredon”........I thought that quite apt.

[Ohmisterporter]

I fancied a station on the Lancashire - Yorkshire border serving the two villages of "Hutton and Washbrook". Older cricket fans may get this. 

[greatcoleswoodhalt]

On 02/10/2020 at 21:38, Ray Von said:

I was just pondering how people go about naming their layout, I'm quite interested in words and their origin - prefixes (nor,ham,ox...) and suffixes (gate,bury, ford...) that have long forgotten lingual meaning etc.

I wonder to what lengths people have gone to in order to authentically christen their fictional locations, and create a believable "word" with some kind of "history."

 

An interesting topic given all the different approaches - my micro, Great Coles Wood Halt, was inspired by the names of local woodlands.

 

Quote

The name Great Coles Wood is entirely fictional and an amalgamation of two woodlands near East Grinstead, West Sussex.  Great Wood (TQ 3718 3783) and Coles Wood (TQ 3751 3764) can be found between the former Three Bridges & Tunbridge Wells West and Lewes & East Grinstead lines.

https://www.greatcoleswoodhalt.com/background

 

Those familiar with the Bluebell Railway will recognise much of the history of the Nuthatch Line - predominantly for health reasons I created a website to give myself something to concentrate on of an evening and found the research, etc very therapeutic!

[Bill Radford]

Here's a few -

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/wallpaper/borsetshire_1024.shtml

[Andy Kirkham]

1 hour ago, Bill Radford said:

Here's a few -

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/wallpaper/borsetshire_1024.shtml

Interesting to see that the Borchester is smaller than Felpersham and without a railway. Is it still the administrative centre of Borsetshire?

 

Is the Blackberry Line supposed to be a heritage railway?

 

(You can tell that I'm not a follower of The Archers)

[steve1]

9 hours ago, Bill Radford said:

Here's a few -

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/wallpaper/borsetshire_1024.shtml

 

Ray & Cida Earl used most of those names for a series of EM layouts in the late 1980s and 1990s.

 

steve

[Bill Radford]

22 hours ago, Andy Kirkham said:

Interesting to see that the Borchester is smaller than Felpersham and without a railway. Is it still the administrative centre of Borsetshire?

 

Is the Blackberry Line supposed to be a heritage railway?

 

(You can tell that I'm not a follower of The Archers)

Yes, that is strange - I'm not a follower either since the days of Walter Gabrial way back in the 60s!

 

I thought it may be a heritage line myself.

 

A few more may be gleaned from here -

 

https://www.linkscorner.org/courses/index.php

[Paul H Vigor]

23 hours ago, Andy Kirkham said:

Interesting to see that the Borchester is smaller than Felpersham and without a railway. Is it still the administrative centre of Borsetshire?

 

Is the Blackberry Line supposed to be a heritage railway?

 

(You can tell that I'm not a follower of The Archers)

Apparently: "The Blackberry Line, which features in The Archers, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Severn Valley Railway."

[wombatofludham]

On 05/10/2020 at 12:51, Dungrange said:

 

I guess a lot of these on-line translation tools are not that great when we stray away from commonly used words.

 

Going back to the Welsh 'Y Bawddwr', if I split 'Bawddwr' into 'Bawd dwr' (with a space), then Google Translate gives me 'The Water Thumb'.  'Y' being Welsh for 'The' and 'dwr' being the Welsh for 'water'.  That would suggest to me that the origin of the name is perhaps derived from the shape of the watercourse or it's position relative to the other watercourses in the area.

Beware of Google mis-translate when it comes to Welsh.

Some place names will be derived from Old Welsh which has no modern equivalent meaning in a literal translating tool like Google.  Take the Welsh name for "Lichfield" (yes, it does have one).  It is derived from the Latin name for Wall, the ancient nearby Roman settlement on the A5 which was "Letocetum", or "Grey Wood".  The ancient Celts gave Lichfield the name "Luitcoyd" or "Greywood", and even today Lichfield is "Caer Lwytgoed", or the "defened place of the greywood" despite the modern Welsh word for grey being "Llwyd".  If you put "Caer Lwytgoed" into Google it'll have a hissy fit.  Also, Google mis-translate can have a mare when it comes to the infamous Welsh "Treigladau" or mutations, where the first letter of the word can change depending on it's position in the sentence, or whether the preceding word was a preposition, or the gender of the word.  It also struggles with sentence order.  

My old exhibition layout was named after the location of the old TV series "Crossroads", which was based in the village of "King's Oak", whilst my current layout, "Wednesford" I came up with from combining "Hednesford" and "Wednesbury" but it turns out I was beaten to it by Midlands author Francis Brett Young who based his novel "My Brother Jonathan" in a fictional Black Country town of the same name a hundred years before my brainwave.  Ah well, great minds and all that...

[009 micro modeller]

On 13/10/2020 at 11:07, Paul H Vigor said:

Apparently: "The Blackberry Line, which features in The Archers, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Severn Valley Railway."

 

Although perhaps confusingly, the Derwent Valley Light Railway is also sometimes known as the Blackberry Line.

[faulcon1]

You could take long place names and change them about or subtract parts of place names and add others for example, Hazelbrook and Woodford two villages near to where I live could become Hazelford and Woodbrook. Does it really matter what a place name means?. Here's a good one taken from an old movie from a Welsh colliery layout Hafoduwchbenceubwlllymarchogcoch.

[Johann Marsbar]

For my OO layout, which incorporates some features from the railways around Ipswich, I just picked the name of a (non rail served) village on the towns boundary - Rushmere.

My N gauge, New England(ish) layout has the name of a village in Suffolk - Bredfield - which fits in nicely with all the other East Anglian settlement names that were re-used by the original Colonists over in the US.  As far as I know, there isn't actually a place of that name over there, even with the ones that were slightly changed in their spelling (eg Framingham, Massachusetts, founded by someone from Framlingham in Suffolk, but with the L dropped!).

[6990WitherslackHall]

I'm trying to think of a name for my OO gauge modern yard layout. The only part of the name I have come up with so far is Yard and Sidings (because that is what the layout basically is).

 

I've posted some pics of my layout below: