Mad Carew

The first place to consider is Haserabad. This is the fictitious garrison town that the Governor and the military fear will not hold out until a relief force can reach it. This is the reason why the Indian boy-prince and the Governor's wife are evacuated at the last minute. In the film Haserabad is depicted as an ancient Indian walled native town, with the railway passing through inner and outer gates in the medieval walls. I could not find a precedent for this, and I reckoned it more likely, in any case, that the railway would run, not into an old native town, but into the military cantonments of a garrison town. My 'Haseradad' does not, therefore, resemble the film very closely, and I chose the garrison town of Kohat in Peshawar as my inspiration. To give some idea of what I mean, I have drawn up a very crude plan. The scene is framed on the left by the fort. This is not an ancient Indian fort, but a British-built fortification. The station building is to be based upon Kohat Cantonment Station. The engine shed along the lines of Wazirabad. I like the idea of passing through the walls and, in order to retain the essential feature of the film's Haserabad, there are inner and outer walls. The walls, like the fort, are of modern, if decorative, British construction. The inner wall gates take as their model the blockhouses found on the fortified bridges of the province, such as Attock Bridge. The outer gate looks to the road gates at the outer limits of Kohat cantonment. To the back of the scene could be the Governor's Residence, garrison church and cantonment bungalows. The metre gauge line runs across the front of the layout. I am a beginner, and I realise that my layout design will leave much to be desired, so any comments and suggestions would be welcome.

This will be a layout thread that will probably take a good while to reach the construction stage. Rather, I expect that it will be largely taken up with refining the concept, questions or research, the practical implications of the plan, help sought and gratefully received. The gentleman responsible for this project is Mr Paul Lunn of this parish. We learnt from Model Rail issue 218 that the 1959 classic film North West Frontier is one of his favourite films. It is also one of mine. Without his article, however, I would never have considered the film as the inspiration for a model railway. Now, I can’t stop thinking about it. If you have neither read the article nor seen the film, I encourage you to do both. In the meantime I would simply introduce the concept of a native rising in British India’s North West Frontier Province in the year 1905, which leads to a motley band in a little old train fleeing 300 miles along a mountainous railway route pursued by rebellious tribesmen. British India was vast, and there are any number of real places that could provide the setting for the fictitious places in the film. In 1905 the British were still building forts to control Northern Waziristan. To the South East was Balochistan, where railways fanned out from the town of Quetta, probing towards the Afghan border and one of the passes through which invasion might come. The area included some stunning railway set-pieces such as the Khojak tunnel (4th longest in the word) and the Louise Margaret bridge across the Chappar Rift. To the north-east of the Province, the great garrison town of Rawalpindi, and lying between it and the Afghan border, Peshawar, with numerous garrisons, forts and cantonments, and railways! Beyond Peshawar, the Khyber Pass. There were no railways through the Khyber Pass at that date. In these various regions, the mainline network of the North Western Railway, built to Indian Broad Gauge of 5’6”, was supplemented by narrow and metre gauge lines. To include one would be to add interest and, in a strange sort of way, actually reflect the film, where the characters’ train changes gauge during the filming as a result of using locations both in India and in Spain! If, like me, not having known that, you have watched the film and failed to spot the gauge discrepancy, use OO gauge for your 4mm standard gauge models, as EM and P4 will be wasted on you! My major challenge, the one thing that could stop this modelling journey from being fun, fun, fun, all the way, is my decision to stick with the familiar 4mm scale, and to hand-build track and re-gauge RTR locomotives to represent Indian Broad Gauge. The one concession towards practically would be to adopt a 21mm (as for Irish Broad gauge of 5'3") rather than 22mm gauge track, because I might to find track components and axles to suit in this gauge. So, perhaps it is time to post some inspirational shots of the old NWR: