Cheshire Railway Modellers

 Wisconsin Rapids

This American HO scale layout was originally intended for home use only but has been popularly received at the Crewe Heritage Centre fundays and therefore adapted to be operated from behind when in exhibition use. The layout uses scenic flats to keep the space to a minimum and offers some interesting shunting moves despite its compact size.

Click on the thumbnails for larger images.

Wisconsin Rapids

Wisconsin Rapids

Wisconsin Rapids

Wisconsin Rapids

Wisconsin Rapids

Wisconsin Rapids

American N gauge and possibly one of the more unusual layouts on this website...

The scenic section, just 3'6" long and only 4" deep, is made of cardboard and started life as a Christmas decoration with a narrow gauge train shuffling back and forth along the single line with white polystyrene scenery.

When I became interested in American N-gauge I only had a desk on which to fit a layout. The Christmas scene was "moved" to the Californian desert and a loop for continuous running made out of track pinned to assorted scrap chipboard. The opposite side of the loop now has a 4 track fiddle yard. The layout has been slightly expanded since then, sufficient to run around the perimeter of a paste table.

The name comes from a humourous trucking song, the real Wolf Creek Pass is actually in Colorado and has no rail connection as far as I can tell.

You can see from the photos the line has one loco and one boxcar of its own, most of the traffic coming from the large number of other roads who seem to have trackage rights - i.e. locos I like to run!

By way of a complete contrast to the portable American layouts my home layout is based on Conway on the north Wales coast. The layout is a long term project that will eventually create a model of the station, the castle walls and one end of the tubular bridge.