NewFangledNonsense

I don't know if I can legitimately comment on this, as I have a lot of idea but none of them have made it to completion (yet). But I find a lot of inspiration in disused-stations.org (among many other things), and also works of fiction with imaginary railways in. For eg (and most unseasonally) we'd lent the book 'Box of Delights' to a friend's kid and got it back yesterday after about 5years, and I've been leafing through it, and its first chapter has a very well-described fictional railway system in it, with how it fits into the lansdscape (it seems to be somewhere on the south or west side of the Midlands to me, which would make sense as he was born in Ledbury, Herefordshire, and lived various places around the hilly bits of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire)... Another place I'd like to see in model form is John Buchan's Bradgate, Kent (the location of the 39 Steps, and apparently a composite of Broadstairs and Ramsgate).

I'll just leave this here... Have a look at the section on outremer locomotives on derbysulzers.com

Hadn't been very aware of the Kent cement railways before -- they certainly did throw a lot of darts either side of the 4ft gauge target without actually hitting it (3'9 and 4'3 being used a few times alongside several others)...

Depends how strapped for cash they are, but might they have looked West and bought up the Class 80 or 450 'Thumpers' off Northern Ireland Railways when they were disposed of in the early 2000s??? Or, if more money was available to them in the 80s (EU funding?) they could have continued their earlier experiment in making single-unit railcars based on heavier-bodied multiple units and been running single-car Sprinters, possibly in multiple on the heaviest-traffic / hilliest gradient routes. If you do have an electrified line, there's the question of what current / transmission method is being used... How eccentric were they?

Apologies for posting late at the end of a long thread I haven't read in its entirety, but is there not an argument that (assuming the resources were available) the trick would be to find popular-ish prototypes that were not available in other scales (and particularly N, I would think) in order to carve out a distinctive niche? Working around the assumption that the scenery kits being made available bias us towards GWR branchlines (and/or adjacent companies), what about the GWR 1101 0-4-0T, and the 2-4-0T Metro tanks? both made it into BR days, and have bags of charm. You could model a range of locations from London outwards. Moving to neighbouring companies an LSWR G6 and T1, an LNWR Watford Tank, and an NLR 0-6-0T, would all be attractive locos which could appear against GWR scenery but spark off specific inspiration of their own. The Kerr Stuart Victory 0-6-0T wouldn't be out of place alongside these as a flexible industrial prototype of a similar era, and for a so-called 'celebrity' loco, you could do worse than 'Trojan' the Avonside 0-4-0ST which gives you something for the Sudrians... Too niche? Too quirky? Too pre-group / early-grouping? I suppose so. But I don't see why we need an 08, an autotank and an Austerity (or similar) in every damn scale.

Didn't mean use Brill/Met stock stock, but was thinking that Brill is an example of a light railway laid out as you describe, more like a goodsyard that decided to take on passengers, with lower platforms etc and it was an influence on Stephens, so making a hybrid between the Brill buildings layouts and the 'full on' common-carrier Stephens lines would help you flesh out your concept...

Merge elements of the Brill branch into the scenario? (Which is more rundown and freight-oriented, but did inspire Stephens)?

In fact, I could be wrong but I'm detecting some similarities to the 4ft 6in Lee Moor Tramway Pecketts... ? (which were a modification of Peckett Type M4). There were tramways local to Lee Moor which used 4ft gauge, so maybe it's not the photocopier's fault?

Beautiful little 4ft gauge loco. There were a few of them, and all full of character... (Image from http://www.oswestry-borderland-heritage.co.uk/)

I think some of those 0-6-0s / 0-6-0STs (class 25?) were built by Beyers. It's possible details were changed between batches, and as Aspinall extended and standardised some of later Bart Wright designs, was it just that there were spare parts galore available? (I know he scrapped the 0-4-4Ts). Barton Wright seems to have used a hodgepodge of builders (the newbuild 0-6-2Ts, not the rebuilds, include examples built by Dubs, for eg). I don't know if build date and builder dictated survival, and it's not clear to me who designed what and how much Horwich contracted out design work?

Coming to this exceptionally late (and in fact getting myself a new log in as an old email had lapsed some years back, so I could comment)... First, I wanted to suggest two possibly-too-obvious 'types' with Barton Wright (of the LYR)'s finger prints all over them (I don't think these have been mentioned in this thread?): His 0-6-2T design (initially a rebuild from a Jenkins 0-6-0 tender loco) ... which ended up being effectively a 'standard' Kitson design and versions thereof with the same curved tanks and bunker emerging on the TVR, LDECR and H&B... I'll paste in a link to the LDECR and HBR types LNER Encyclopedia: The LNER Kitson N6 (GCR Class A) 0-6-2T Locomotives LNER Encyclopedia: The LNER Kitson N11 (HBR Class F1) 0-6-2T Locomotives Barton wright also rebuilt some Jenkins 0-6-0s as 0-6-0ST. And then there's also what happened to his own 0-6-0s when they were rebuilt as 0-6-0STs by Aspinall... ...which it has been commented, is quite similar to the Sacre MSLR 0-6-0s rebuilt by Robinson as mixed-traffic dual-braked tanks These are not that obscure, and I don't think it's impossible to see them as 'generic' types that aren't 'owned' by either Kitson or the parent railways... particularly if your railway is anywhere north of Bristol and south of Carnforth. ...It's entire possible, I guess to mix them up and have a tender type with 0-6-0ST and 0-6-2T (and if you want 0-6-2ST) variants, all working alongside each other, and starting out as three (or four) members of the same class; and if you really want you can have a 4'6" or thereabouts coal engine 0-6-0 type, and a 5'3" or thereabouts mixed traffic 0-6-0 type, begetting a number of tank 'children' of various combinations of features. (I believe I'm right in saying that the DX Goods lurks behind all these locos as an indirect influence, but can't evidence that right now). (This all came about because I saw a picture of an 0-6-2T at Lancaster Castle station, and thought 'what's a GCR loco doing there?' before I realised my error.