My name is Barry Cott and I’ve been interested in trains and model trains since I was a little kid. It must be because my mother’s father and brother both worked on the New York Central in St. Thomas, Ontario.
My first real model railroad was a N scale layout I built while a teenager. I then moved to O scale narrow gauge and later to large scale garden railroading while living in Texas. After living in Europe for nine years, I’m back home in southwestern Ontario.
Today, my main active modeling project is:
The Marchlyn Quarry Railway is the next evolution of garden railways for me and will feature a Welsh slate railway theme. In 2011, I’ve stepped up to 7/8″ scale (1:13.7) after buying two new locomotives.
In the past, I’ve built and documented two significant modeling projects:
The Lost Hollow Railway was a 1:20.3 garden railway using live steam locomotives that I built during our time in Texas (2005-2008). It was completely freelanced and featured small rolling stock. The Marchlyn Quarry Railway will take its place in the future.
The Pakesley Mill and Timber Company was a On3/On30 model railroad loosely based on the prototype Key Valley Railway. I actively worked on it in the 2000 to 2003 time range and it was featured in Model Railroad Planning 2003. The PM&TCo remains packed away.
My prototype interests are:
The narrow-gauge slate railways of Welsh have interested me since I first rode them in the late 1980’s. They are probably some of the best documented and preserved steam railways in the world.
The Key Valley Railway (KVR) was a standard gauge railway that ran between the villages of Pakesley and Lost Channel in Ontario between 1917 and 1933. It was constructed to transport logs, lumber and people to and from the company’s lumber mill at Lost Channel.
I’ve also been looking into the Trillium Railway as a possible short line to model.