Naming a Fictitious Location

[The Johnster]

I took a real location that never in reality had the colliery, village, or the railway that I’ve modelled to serve them.  Cwmdimbath (cwm, say coom like look, not room, dim means no or none, bath means to bathe; a river you are not to bathe in for some reason) is a tributary stream and valley to the Ogwr (say og oo er quickly), and in it’s upper reaches as remote and devoid of evidence of humanity as anywhere in the county of Glamorgan.  There was plenty of coal under it, but it was literally undermined by pits from the valleys either side of it; I’ve given it an alternative history, but the steepness of this particular valley means that industrialisation was never likely.  
 

You can access it’s lower reaches via a small lane, Dimbath Lane, off the A4093 at Glynogwr, and where this crosses the Dimbath stream there is a footpath leading northwards into the wilderness where the mountains get higher and press closer.  The place is one of the very few to preserve the sylvan loveliness that must have characterised most of upland South Wales before coal put paid to it, the land covered by spoil heaps and the trees gone long, long ago for pitprops.  It is worth a visit, lockdowns permitting, especially at this time of year with the autumn colours, but the industrial wasteland of my alternative history is what I model.  
 

 

[w124bob]

My current plans are for a diesel depot layout based on the ScR circa 1970, however I've decided to call it Conduit street. The tenuous railway connection is that it was the home of the first club I belonged to back in the mid '70's and it is the road that runs down the side of Leicester station towards what was locally known as the birdcage. There's even an ScR connection as Leicester was the home of some of the class 27's in the early to mid '60's. A layout set with an urban background can quite happily be named after a local street or road.

[Paul H Vigor]

23 minutes ago, Captain Kernow said:

So what's the origin of Piddletrenthide and all the other Piddles?

 

"The unusual name of the village is derived from its position on the River Piddle, combined with it having been assessed for thirty hides in the Domesday Book. The name sometimes prompts amusement and discussion,..."

 

'Pidele' - Old English river name meaning fen or marsh.

 

Note: some 'Piddles' became 'Puddles'!

[eastwestdivide]

8 hours ago, sir douglas said:

basics of welsh i know, double F is like V, double L is like a "thle or kle" sound such as the Llanberis slate museum is "Klanberis" but the Talyllyn is more commonly pronounced as "Talythlyn". double D is like "th"

Surely it’s single F that’s a voiced vee sound? And double F unvoiced, hence the Welsh (2 Fs) and English (1 F) spellings of (F)festiniog being pronounced the same. 
Double D is voiced ‘th’ as in English ‘then’, while TH is voiceless as in English ‘thin’. 

The double L is technically a voiceless lateral fricative, ie something like a puff of air out of the sides of the tongue causing a bit of friction en route. A ‘kl’ rendition is a bit of a cop-out!

 

[Paul H Vigor]

13 minutes ago, w124bob said:

My current plans are for a diesel depot layout based on the ScR circa 1970, however I've decided to call it Conduit street. The tenuous railway connection is that it was the home of the first club I belonged to back in the mid '70's and it is the road that runs down the side of Leicester station towards what was locally known as the birdcage. There's even an ScR connection as Leicester was the home of some of the class 27's in the early to mid '60's. A layout set with an urban background can quite happily be named after a local street or road.

Just up the Valley from us is a delightful, short terrace by the name of Chemical Row!

[w124bob]

Happened to come across pictures of two stations in Scotland which appealed to the school boy in me, Fairlie High(electrified and still open) and the sadly now closed Glenwhilly! 

[Nearholmer]

55 minutes ago, Captain Kernow said:

So what's the origin of Piddletrenthide and all the other Piddles?

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

 

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Zomboid]

According to "The Greater Meaning of Liff", Piddletrenthide is when you use your coat to cover any kind of splashing/ spraying incident which occurs in the gentlemen's facilities.

 

Personally I can't help but laugh every time I think about Throcking from the same source...

[Adam88]

Another source is regional fiction.  The late Tom Harland's Bramblewick is closely based on Robin Hood's Bay and the name Bramblewick comes from the novels of Leo Walmsley who grew up there as a boy.  There have been numerous layouts with a Wessex tone drawing names from Thomas Hardy's works and many other examples spring to mind.

[steve1]

Layout names don't have to be place names. I have built two layouts called Heavy Traffic, one of which was German so became Starker Verkehr. They were both set in industrial parks. The name came from that of a Status Quo album and it was used to describe the amount of railway activity.

 

A layout I have under development at present, is called Rectory Farm Sidings and is just that, Railfreight and PW sidings on the outskirts of an unarmed medium sized town. My US layout is called Duncan's Mine 2 as it is of a mine loading pocket in North Michigan.

 

There are plenty of other examples of non-place names layouts about from other builders, e.g. The Gresley Beat.

 

No need to be shackled to geography. 

 

steve

 

 

[Northroader]

Nice simple way to reach a satisfactory name without stretching your brain too far is give the layout a saints name.

[TheQ]

11 hours ago, Fenman said:

Another option in this part of England (Norfolk) is to use the names of lost medieval towns and villages. Not so far from me you can use names of abandoned villages like Babingley, Bawsey or Burgh Parva; or there are settlements lost to sea erosion including Shipden (a very significant port in its day), Ness, Foulness, Waxham Parva. 
 

Wikipedia has a handy list here. 
 

And there’s a nice map here. 
 

 

Paul

That "nice map" says a village is deserted... It ain't, I live here, with 5 houses this end of the village a large gap and about 20 houses the other... 

[mike morley]

A lot of surnames derived from the places from which the bearer originated, so things like voters rolls and telephone directories (if such things still exist) can be useful.

I was a postman for 16 years and always kept an eye out for potentially useful layout-names from the names of the people on the envelopes I was delivering.  Best one I remember was Fulbrook, perfect for a layout set in the Forest of Dean.

[PMW]

We have literally just this minute agreed on a name for our new layout, so world exclusive folks ..... WAVENHAM. 

 

How did we come to it? I really don't know, perhaps some kind of amalgum of Waverley in Edinburgh made famous to us by the Fish song "Waverley Steps", The River Waveney in Suffolk which we love, and some kind of settlement suffix, hence "ham" the saxon word for village. 

 

So our new layout will be based around the fictional village and station of Wavenham. 

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by PMW

[Del]

I found out recently that the most common name for a settlement in the UK is Newton, closely followed by Newtown, and that's before you add the suffixes, like Aycliffe or le-Willows.

And there have been more stations named Newport than anything else.

So, if you're the kind of person that has a lot of different interests, all your different layouts can be Newton (or Newtown, or Newport), but they don't have to be the same one!

[TheQ]

30 minutes ago, PMW said:

We have literally just this minute agreed on a name for our new layout, so world exclusive folks ..... WAVENHAM. 

 

How did we come to it? I really don't know, perhaps some kind of amalgum of Waverley in Edinburgh made famous to us by the Fish song "Waverley Steps", The River Waveney in Suffolk which we love, and some kind of settlement suffix, hence "ham" the saxon word for village. 

 

So our new layout will be based around the fictional village and station of Wavenham. 

 

Waverley station is named after novels by Sit Walter Scott ,

Looking it up  

Waverley itself is derived from "quaking aspen tree"

Waveney is derived from quagmire and running  water

So your layout is a town at the site of shaking tree in soggy land,  by a river.. 

 

That should be an interesting animation on the layout... 

[Richard_A]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

I took a real location that never in reality had the colliery, village, or the railway that I’ve modelled to serve them.  Cwmdimbath (cwm, say coom like look, not room, dim means no or none, bath means to bathe; a river you are not to bathe in for some reason) is a tributary stream and valley to the Ogwr (say og oo er quickly), and in it’s upper reaches as remote and devoid of evidence of humanity as anywhere in the county of Glamorgan.  There was plenty of coal under it, but it was literally undermined by pits from the valleys either side of it; I’ve given it an alternative history, but the steepness of this particular valley means that industrialisation was never likely.  
 

You can access it’s lower reaches via a small lane, Dimbath Lane, off the A4093 at Glynogwr, and where this crosses the Dimbath stream there is a footpath leading northwards into the wilderness where the mountains get higher and press closer.  The place is one of the very few to preserve the sylvan loveliness that must have characterised most of upland South Wales before coal put paid to it, the land covered by spoil heaps and the trees gone long, long ago for pitprops.  It is worth a visit, lockdowns permitting, especially at this time of year with the autumn colours, but the industrial wasteland of my alternative history is what I model.  
 

 

i always thought cwm was welsh for valley, but i am an English man living in Swansea so I'm always wrong to the Welsh.

[Oldddudders]

O Level geography in the early '60s said a cwm, aka a corrie or cirque, was an amphitheatre-like valley formed by glacial erosion.  

[PMW]

52 minutes ago, TheQ said:

Waveney is derived from quagmire and running  water

 

As in the river it is taken from the Anglo Saxon waney meaning meandering. I would like to get the river into the layout, but no so sure about the quivering tree

[Paul H Vigor]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

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

 

 

How about Leek in Tesco??

[Paul H Vigor]

1 hour ago, mike morley said:

A lot of surnames derived from the places from which the bearer originated, so things like voters rolls and telephone directories (if such things still exist) can be useful.

I was a postman for 16 years and always kept an eye out for potentially useful layout-names from the names of the people on the envelopes I was delivering.  Best one I remember was Fulbrook, perfect for a layout set in the Forest of Dean.

Always thought Dwarf Holes (Moseley Green) in the Forest of Dean was too good a name to waste!?

[Paul H Vigor]

2 hours ago, w124bob said:

Happened to come across pictures of two stations in Scotland which appealed to the school boy in me, Fairlie High(electrified and still open) and the sadly now closed Glenwhilly! 

One could imagine a rack railway up Brown Willy - the highest hill in Cornwall??

[Fenman]

2 hours ago, TheQ said:

That "nice map" says a village is deserted... It ain't, I live here, with 5 houses this end of the village a large gap and about 20 houses the other... 

 

Maybe you were all out when they made the map?

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, Del said:

And there have been more stations named Newport than anything else.

 

I thought Acton held some sort of record in that respect.

[009 micro modeller]

Alternatively, you could use earlier/alternate forms of real place names for similar locations. For example, I could have a partly fictionalised ECML layout named ‘Everwick,’ from Old English ‘Eoforwic’ - the Anglo-Saxon name for York, later replaced by Viking ‘Jorvik’. Although really such a place name would be more likely to occur on a layout set in the South-West...