The Meifford Story

I suppose the first question is how did the idea come about - why a narrow gauge model railway and why Meifford?

I have always been a fan of narrow gauge railways, particularly like a lot of others, the Welsh variety and in fact belonged to the Ffestiniog Railway Society way back in the 60's! I did dabble at the time in the relatively new 009 and even managed to build a small section of track from scratch, but that was it, then as with so many others, life and family took precedence.

Some time later.....

I did retain my passion for making models however, just for some reason, not trains! I became a professional model maker of collectors model cars (any scale) for more than 10 years, then life took a different turn and I didn't make a model of any sort for about 20 years! In my mind though, like others I had the 'retirement years' coming up in which to do something and in particular, a model railway.

...and much later

Well, I retired, I moved to France and I gained the thing that I had missed for many years - space for a layout, in a dedicated railway room. So, no excuses as I also had the time, I had to do something! Next questions would be -

1. What scale ?
2. What gauge ?
3. Location and era ?

Now, I'll confess and rivet-counters beware, I don't know much about full size railways and I have little knowledge about loco types and so forth - and it doesn't bother me! I do however know how to make a realistic model. So, prototype location is out, the more I thought about it, standard gauge didn't hold that much interest and thinking about the articles in the model press that held my attention (Madder Valley, Craig & Mertonford being two that stand out), then light railway or narrow gauge seemed the obvious choice. It's quirky too! I could enjoy making things for this layout.

Having decided on 7mm scale and narrow gauge it became obvious that I would have to make almost everything myself either from kit or scratch built. That is the joy for me - making models. So I had it, Scale was 7mm, gauge is 16.5mm and all I needed was a location and reason for the layout.

Deciding on the where

Because of the past interest, my inspiration was always going to be the Welsh Narrow Gauge railways, but I didn't want to base it on a real location. So, fictional then...... Meifford it is and somewhere in mid Wales. I looked on Google Earth and found an area that gave me the right landscape, the canal I wanted (or rather it could have been built there) and the opportunity to include slate traffic as well.

It's Meifford!

Meifford is effectively a small terminus / interchange. A small town with station, facilities for maintaining the Locos and a goods facility. Most of the traffic is slate (raw or finished product), general goods for the town plus the daily passenger train. Typically a single carriage is attached to one of the goods trains, out on the line to Llanfyllin (the upper line), or out via the canal interchange for Lydiarth.

The canal is very important for the town as this is where a lot of the goods in or out starts or ends up, transported via barge.

So, location, reason, plus a pretty good idea what it should look like - now all I had to do was to build myself a layout!