After reviewing my last few posts here at Trains @ Station Studios, I realized that while I talked a lot about engines and rolling stock, I have not done a good job of explaining the back story of the Marchlyn Quarry Railway. So let’s fix that now.
I first ran across the narrow gauge slate railways of Wales back in 1988. I lived in London, England for three years in the late 1980’s and my cousins from Canada visited for a couple of weeks. While we spent a lot of time seeing the sights in London, we rented a car and drove to Wales for a week. We started in the south of Wales in the Brecon Beacons area and made our way north. When I learned that there was a narrow gauge railway running down from the hills at Blaenau Ffestiniog to the seaside at Porthmadog, I convinced the others that we had to go for a ride on it. It was a memorable experience.
After I returned to Canada, my modelling interests moved onto other things like the PM&TCo. But as I started to get more and more interested in garden and live steam railways when we lived in Texas, it was not long before I was coming across the Great Little Trains of Wales and the myriad of opportunities to use them as a theme for my next garden railway. My purchase of a 7/8″ scale live steam engine and three slate cars back in 2011 sealed the deal.
I thought about going pretty much fully freelance in the design but have always liked basing my model railroads closely on real prototypes. So I started to investigate the various slate railways that ran into the 1950’s. The most well-known four were:
I made the following Google Map to show where each of these railways where and the slate quarries each of them served (you can expand the map to full screen and zoom in to see the details more closely):
There is much to recommend to use any of the four as a basis for a garden railway, but in the end I think the Penrhyn Quarry Railway had the most interesting combination of operations, engines, rolling stock and buildings. To give myself some room to take inspiration from the other three railways, I chose not to use the Penrhyn Quarry name. Instead during my research I found that there was a short-lived slate quarrying operation lying just to the south of the main Penrhyn quarry. It was named the Marchlyn Quarry and so I chose to use it as the name of my 7/8″ scale railway.
So there you go: the back story to the Marchlyn Quarry Railway. There are several good online resources on the Penrhyn Quarry Railway which I’ll share in the next few weeks.