Alastair Green certainly recreates the feel of the latter days of the Cromford & High Peak Railway with his scene, which looks even better sitting on top of a Derbyshire hilltop!
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Ladmanlow Sidings
Scale/Gauge: 4mm / 00
Size (to include any fiddle yards): 8ft x 20 inches with fiddleyard, 6ft as displayed
Era/Region: 1960s BR(M) Cromford & High Peak Railway
Layout type: end-to-end shunting layout
Control: DCC
The Prototype
Ladmanlow Sidings attempts to capture the look and feel of the Cromford and High Peak Railway, which was built expressly to connect the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge (near Manchester) with the Cromford Canal at Cromford (near Derby) and provide a through route to the South for raw cotton from Manchester to the textile industries in the East Midlands, and for minerals and other manufactured goods back to Manchester.
The C&HPR is unique in being planned by canal engineers, rather than railway engineers, and its architecture reflects that, with comparatively level sections of railway interspersed with rope-hauled inclines (the analogues of series of locks) to tackle changes in elevation. It was one of the highest standard gauge railways in Britain, with a peak elevation of 1,266 feet (386 metres) above sea level at Ladmanlow. By comparison, Ais Gill, on the Settle to Carlisle line, stands at 1,169 feet (356 metres).
The first part of the line between Cromford and Hurdlow was opened in 1830. To put that in perspective, Stephenson’s Stockton and Darlington line opened only five years earlier in 1825. The final section between Hurdlow and Whaley Bridge opened in 1832, making it, at the time, Britain’s longest railway, at 33 miles. The first steam locomotive was introduced in 1841, although some of the inclines had stationary steam winding engines from the outset. By 1860, there were 7 steam locomotives running on the sections between the inclines.
In 1889, a new section from Harpur Hill to Buxton provided a through route north without any inclines, and so in 1892 the section of line between Whaley Bridge and Ladmanlow was closed. The line was taken over by the LNWR in 1887, who extended a new branch to Ashbourne, with a junction at Parsley Hay. At grouping, the line passed to the LMS, and then became part of BR(Midland) after nationalisation.
The line remained in operation until 1967, when it was finally closed by BR, as increasingly the mineral traffic on which the line now depended was taken over by road transport.
The C&HPR was the epitome of the railway-in-the-landscape, mostly single track, with tight curves (including Gotham Curve, the tightest on a British standard gauge line at 2.5 chains radius (55 yards) ) and limestone embankments, and constrained throughout by dry-stone built walls with rolling upland fields to each side for most of its length.
The Layout
The trackplan utilises 5 Peco Code 75 long points, and some C&L Flexi-track to join them together. A single-entry road from the left leads to a small run-around loop and a siding, with a further kickback siding and headshunt at the front of the layout. From the start, I wanted to avoid the flat-earth look, so the rear of the layout rises with some small grassy hillside, and the front of the layout drops away, with a lane leading up to the yard, giving the impression that the yard is very much carved out of the landscape.
The track is laid directly onto the 6mm plywood base, with the sides and ends of the board being 18mm ply for rigidity, as most of the front edge is cutaway to form the contours of the landscape.
I chose not to ballast the layout conventionally, as looking at photos of the C&HPR it seemed that most of the time the track was sunk into a compacted ash surface up to the sleeper tops (and sometimes covering them). Instead, I used 3mm cork sheet to fill in the spaces between the tracks, and I painstakingly cut round each sleeper so that the cork would form an infill and bring the ground level up to the rails. I then painted all the cork in grey emulsion, and rubbed in a mixture of ash and real stone dust to get the final surface.
I wanted to capture what I considered to be the key features of the C&HPR: the feeling of bleak open countryside, slightly forlorn and uncared for, and the limestone walls and green fields surrounding it, so to that end I didn’t stuff the layout with structures, choosing to have a stone-built weighbridge office at one end, and a brick-built shunter’s hut at the other, both of which were scratch-built. The remains of a lineside crane (from the Peco kit, much mistreated) rust quietly by the bottom siding, and grass is slowly encroaching on the whole yard.
I looked around for walls that looked right for the scene, and couldn’t find any that matched my perception, so I chose to build them myself. I took some 6mm x 2.5mm styrene rod and cut it and whittled it into something approaching limestone chunks, and then built my own dry-stone walls (sneakily glued together with MEK). You can see my proficiency improved whilst I was doing this, the first wall I built, to the right of the layout, is much more amateurish than what I achieved by the time I’d got to building the wall behind the weighbridge hut. Ever a glutton for punishment, I committed to building all the walls on the later extension to the layout as well, which was a daunting task, but one I’m glad I did, as the end results are better than any ready-to-plonk walling would have been.
I also made some gritstone gateposts, very much a feature of this area, and built some wooden gates out of Evergreen strip. I used brass tube and wire for the hinges so that the gates would actually open and close. So as not to interfere with the open feeling, the boundary of the yard at the front is delineated by a wire and post fence, from the Scale Model Scenery laser-cut range.
For ground cover, I used my preferred mix of Woodland Scenics mid-green 2mm, and WWScenics patchy 1mm static grasses, for quite a dull look, with some 4mm WWScenics summer applied sparingly to lift certain areas with a brighter feel. Around the walls, I added some 6mm fibres to create an unkempt look, and some purple foliage to suggest buddleia or other flowering shrubs.
For the stock, I have heavily weathered all of it, both wagons and locos. The Cromford and High Peak was never a high budget operation, and most of their stock was second or third-hand hand-me-downs from the LNWR, LMS etc, and it looked it. I use a palette of four Humbrol weathering powders: Smoke, Dark Earth, Rust and White, to achieve what I hope is a convincing state of decrepitude.
I am very much indebted to John Evans for giving me permission to use his colour photos of the C&HPR to illustrate my RMweb thread to compare my modelling with reality, and as a reference for most of the weathering.
Key Details
The primary design decision for the original layout was that it must fit on the kitchen table and be a single board. This decision was taken in the hope that I would actually finish the layout, if I aimed for something small, as I have a number of unfinished previous projects due to being unable to set them up and work on them. I settled on a 4ft-long and 18in wide board, which was sufficient to fit on the track layout I envisaged.
Rolling stock is a mixture of modified RTR and some Parkside kits, and all the locos are either Dapol or Hornby J94s, except for one DJM. The C&HPR had a very limited range of stock, due to the physical constraints of the line, and therefore it is easy to build up a representative collection. Short trains of 4-wheel wagons and vans, and small tank engines are all that are required. As I’m modelling the closing years of the line, nearly all the locos are J94 Austerities, although I would like to build a sample of the 0-4-0ST Kitson loco. One final need would be old locomotive tenders re-purposed as water tanks, which were a very common sight on the line.
Buildings (such as they are) are scratch-built using embossed styrene sheets over plain styrene base structures, with roof slates from individually applied paper chads. Most scenic features (walls, gates etc) are also scratch-built from styrene.
The scenery is mostly open grassland and rolling hills, and I really wanted to try and capture the feeling that the railway was built to follow the landscape. Limestone walls are a consistent feature of the line, so those were incorporated as well. Evidence of sheep farming is also a feature, so the grass is cropped short for the most part.
Extending
The layout was mostly complete by the end of July 2019, and I did nothing further to it in the way of construction, although I played with it quite a bit. However, after the virtual RMweb event in April 2020, I decided to extend the layout with a further 2ft board to act as a scenic fiddle yard. This has a single straight piece of track, and is constructed to represent a limestone embankment, one of the signature features of the C&HPR (although much compressed). This extension features heavily in the photos accompanying this article.
Socially-distanced photoshoot!
The idea to take the layout into the countryside to photograph it stemmed from my dissatisfaction with the backscenes I had tried when the layout is set up in Exhibition format. I used a plain backscene, which was OK but didn’t really capture the feel I wanted. I have previously used photographic backscenes to good effect on 'Bakewell', but they didn’t really work for me for 'Ladmanlow'.
In August 2019, I took the opportunity to get up before dawn and take the layout up onto the hills above Taddington in Derbyshire, not that far from where the line used to run, and try to use the sunrise and the countryside as a backdrop for some photos of the layout. This mostly worked well, and I received some very positive responses when I showed the resulting photos on RMweb.
When I had completed the extension module with the embankment, I thought that a return visit was indicated, although on this occasion I didn’t get up quite so early! My daughter and I took a picnic, and we made the most of the chance to get out into the countryside during lockdown, in a place where only the sheep were interested.
Operation
I chose to go for DCC control using my NCE Procab, and the points are operated by Peco PL10s directly hung off the turnouts, from switches on the front of the layout. Frog polarity is taken care of using Gaugemaster DCC80 DCC Autofrog switches, which make life simple, and work even if you change the points by hand.
All the locos have DCC sound chips fitted, but the first thing I do when fitting them is set the master volume as quiet as I can. As I video my layouts quite a lot, I want the sound of the loco to appear in the distance, and get louder as it passes the camera, then disappear again, rather than be echoing off the walls of the room wherever the loco is.
When taking photos or video I tend to use three-ink couplings between the stock, but for normal playing, I mostly use the small tension-locks. I would like to investigate some other coupling option which would allow me to dispense with the hand-of-god, and I did in fact buy a load of electromagnets, but never got around to fitting them.
Future plans
As already mentioned, I am very much limited for space to set up and use the layout, and so a 6ft length (main board plus 2ft extension) is all I can really manage at home. This could possibly be stretched to 7ft at maximum. I’m very taken with the idea of building further small extension modules either 2ft or 3ft in length, each of which could be added to the main board and depicting some other recognisable feature of the line. For instance, modelling the Gotham Curve would allow me to add a 90-degree bend to the layout in a 2ft length, and still be prototypical! I would also like to try and depict one or other of the inclines, either Middleton Top or Sheep’s Pasture, which have already been ably modelled by Geraint Hughes and Robin Whittle, but to do that justice I would need a longer board, I think.
Summary
'Ladmanlow' is my favourite of all the layouts I have built, primarily because it is the first layout that I have made which I can set up and play with, without a major domestic upheaval. Ladmanlow also meets my needs from a modelling perspective too, more than anything I enjoy trying to recreate a recognisable scene in miniature, and I think I’ve managed that.
About me
I live in the Peak District of Derbyshire, and when I returned to railway modelling in December 2012 after many, many, years away I decided to model railways local to me.
My first layout was of Bakewell, on what used to be the main line between London and Manchester, which sadly closed in 1967. I chose to model Bakewell as it was my local town, and the station building itself is particularly distinctive. 'Bakewell' was a big roundy-roundy, but was built badly, with poorly laid track and dodgy DC electrics, so although I could sit and watch trains go round the main loops, shunting was an exercise in frustration.
By the time 'Bakewell' was substantially complete, I was enjoying the process of modelling, and I looked around for some other local station I could have a go at. I hit upon Grindleford, on the Sheffield to Manchester line through the Hope Valley, a line that is still open, and therefore afforded me the opportunity to model some modern image stock.
I spent some time on 'Grindleford', but sadly realised I simply hadn’t got the room to do it justice. I’d completed two 4ft boards and needed to do another two just to get to the end of the station approaches, so I put that on hold. In the meantime, I had developed an interest in the Cromford and High Peak Railway, a line famous for its steep inclines, tight curves, and the bleak open moorland setting in which it mostly runs.
I started to build a 6’ x 3’ model of the Cromford Wharf area, which sits at the bottom of the Sheep’s Pasture incline, next to the Cromford canal. I had made a good start, but then sadly, in 2017, a sudden change in my domestic situation meant that I lost the available space to complete it, and also lost any interest in modelling for a time.
Towards the end of 2018, I was inspired by Rob Gunstone’s 'Sheep Lane' to get back into modelling again, something small and minimal, but with a distinctive character. I wanted to keep the Cromford and High Peak theme, so I settled on a small 4ft by 18in layout, which would portray a typical C&HPR scene.
I chose the name 'Ladmanlow Sidings' as Ladmanlow used to be the summit of the Cromford and High Peak line, situated just to the south west of Buxton, in Derbyshire. However, the layout in no way resembles the actual track-plan of Ladmanlow, which was quite a bit larger in scope, and used to be quite a busy station and goods yard.
Follow Ladmanlow Sidings on RMweb
Thank you to Al for some further images taken on a foray onto the top of the White Peak area!
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