Category: Prototype Railroads

Posts about prototype railways.

The Penrhyn Quarry Railway

The Penrhyn Quarry Railway was possibly the first two foot gauge railway in the world, the quarry it served the largest slate quarry in the world, the slab mill and inclines the oldest in Wales. All this makes this iconic railway of national, if not global, importance. After 167 years of service, the Penrhyn Quarry Railway was closed in June 1962, most of the locomotives finding new homes throughout the world.

To give you a feel about the PQR near the last days of its operations, the following Youtube video shows some vintage footage from the 1950’s:

Sixty years later, here are some of the preserved engines and rolling stock of the PQR running on the Llanberis Lake Railway.

Back Story on the Marchlyn Quarry Railway

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:

  1. the Ffestiniog Railway
  2. the Talyllyn Railway
  3. the Padarn Railway
  4. the Penrhyn Quarry Railway

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.

Maps: Port Colborne Harbour Railway

In the past, the best way of understanding how the Port Colborne Railway was set up was from their parent company website: Trillium Railway. It had maps, photographs and information about the companies who ship via the PCHR. Unfortunately as of 2021, the website has been rebranded and much of the information has disappeared. I was able to make a screen capture of the original maps, focusing on the lower part of the PCHR, where my main interest lies:

Southern Part of the Port Colborne Harbour Railway

To get a better feel how these are physically located, I’ve created a Google Map with the key parts of the PCHR marked on it:


View Port Colborne Harbour Railway – Trackage Map in a larger map

An excellent resource for photos of the PCHR is Paul Duncan’s Niagara Rails website. Paul has divided his photographs up into two groups: one for the physical plant and one for trains on the physical plant. Here are the direct links for each of the sections of the PCHR (called spurs by the company):

Cayuga Spur: Track
Cayuga Spur: Trains
Covers Feeder East to Feeder West to End of Steel

Canal Spur: Track
Canal Spur: Trains
Covers Feeder West to WH Yard to Forks Jct to Dain and points north

Harbour Spur: Track
Harbour Spur: Trains
Covers Forks Jct to Fielden Jct to Macey Yard

Government Spur: Track
Government Spur: Trains
Covers Fielden Jct to End of Steel (ADM and Southpier)

Videos: Port Colborne Harbour Railway

There are a few videos of the Trillium Railway on the web. The following two videos from 2005 show Trillium Railway Engine #110 working the Canal Spur north of Dain City towards St Catharines. While they are not of the southern part of the PCHR, they do give a good flavour of the line circa 2005. The last two minutes of Part II show #110 crossing the liftbridge on the Canal Spur just east of Forks Junction.

Trillium Railway Part I (2005)

Trillium Railway Part II (2005)

The next two videos show trains shows trains moving strings of covered hoppers from Port Colborne. Unfortunately the video quality is not very high but you can see the types of covered hoppers used in the area. The first video highlights engines #108 and #168 while the second is engine #1859:

Trillium Railway #108 and #168 on Park Avenue, Port Colborne (2008)

Trillium Railway #1859 on Park Avenue, Port Colborne (2011?)

The Trillium Railway


I’m a big fan of Lance Mindheim‘s modern-era modelling. If you haven’t had an opportunity to check out his website featuring his HO scale East Rail and Downtown Spur layouts, please take a few minutes to do so.

I’ve looked at a couple different prototypes over the years for such a layout. The Port Terminal Railroad Association in Houston has several scenes that would fit the bill. The CSX Sarnia Subdivision is another, with the advantage that I actually worked at one of the industries served by the line for several years. In the end, both are a little too large in scope for a small layout.

Then, I found the Trillium Railway in Port Colborne, Ontario. Cobbled together from several railway lines in the Niagara region, the Trillium Railway was tailor-made for the Mindheim approach.

Paul Duncan’s Niagara Rails website contains a wealth of information on the PCHR including its history, its current state and a large number of photographs. Trillium Railway‘s own website contains a great amount of detail on its locomotives, current customers and current trackage. In addition, there are numerous photographs and videos floating around railway photo websites and Youtube. The southern part of the Trillium Railway, also known as the Port Colborne Harbour Railway, has the highest concentration of industries so I will concentrate on documenting it first.

Don’t worry; I haven’t abandoned garden railroading. The Marchlyn Quarry Railway is in the plans to scratch my “narrow gauge live steam” itch, while the Trillium will allow me to explore the “operations prototype-modeling” arena. I currently don’t have room for either, so I’m just collecting information and equipment for both right now.