Destroy all Canards

On the Ngauge mailing list, a new poster asked for advice on what sort of model railway layout to build in a 15' x 2' area. One regular poster, a steam age modeller came up with the following...

A steam era layout is much better than modern image for a small area if you want shunting interest (lets face it, there is no shunting on the current railways), as it is much easier to justify lots of different facilities in a small area.

This oft-repeated canard needs skewering with extreme prejudice!

If you choose an appropriate location, there are plenty of opportunities for shunting in a post-1968 layout. Wagonload freight may have diminished a bit since the end of Speedlink in 1991, but still isn't completely extinct even today. Rather than the hackneyed rural branch line terminus, there are plenty of opportunities for focussing a model on a single industry that uses multiple types of wagon. Combine that with all or part of a passenger station and/or a through route with passing traffic, and you'll get a pretty interesting layout.

Some obvious examples for the industry:

• A cement works, in incoming coal either in HAA hoppers or MEA 'box' wagons, and outgoing cement in a mixture of bulk powder wagons, and bogie vans carrying bagged cement.
• A steel terminal, with incoming steel on bogie bolsters, SPAs, ferry vans and telescopic roof steel carriers.
• A paper mill, which receives timber and china clay, and dispatches finished paper
• The inevitable china clay works, which dispatches it's product in bulk powder form in covered hoppers, slurry form in tankers, and bagged in vans.

I can think of a couple of prototypes as inspiration just off the top of my head. One is the exchange sidings at Hope in Derbyshire. Set in a highly scenic rural location, it's the point where the privately-operated branch from the Blue Circle cement works meets the Manchester-Sheffield main line. A Blue Circle owned shunting locomotive shuttles between the cement works and the sidings with coal wagons, cement tankers and bogie ferry vans, which are then formed into trains (many of them mixes of vans and cement tanks) running to various parts of the country. Through traffic on the main line includes stone from Peak Forest (using the N-gauge society RMC hopper kit), the Manchester Binliner (refuse containers) and class 158 and 170 DMUs for passenger. And it's even still got semaphore signalling!

If you want an urban, industrial setting, what about the steel terminal at Wolverhampton? This would make a great two-level layout. At the lower level you have the steel depot itself, with a variety of wagon types and a resident class 08 shunter. On the upper level you've got the double track electrified main line between Birmingham and Stafford, with a variety of traffic. There's also trams on the main road, the street-running section of the West Midlands Metro. I'd model it just prior to 2002, when the Virgin Trains passenger services were still loco-hauled.