Derwent Road 
Bill Flude O9 gauge 7mm scale
The Leighton Buzzard Light Railway inspired me to build this layout. I visited the line and was fascinated by a narrow gauge line running through a 1960’s and 1970’s housing development. The town still has a sizeable sand quarrying industry, with good enough quality building sand to export to Egypt.
My model is of a fictitious 18 inch gauge line built to the west of the standard gauge main line that would have been the destination for loaded sand trains. I decided that the mid 1980’s was a good time-frame for the model; the railway is shared between the sand company and the preservation society with sand trains still running the entire length of the railway but the preservation society’s passenger trains terminating at Derwent Road.
The baseboards are built from 6mm ply and sit on metal trestles. Derwent Road is controlled using a Digitrax DCC system; track is Peco 009 with Cobalt IP digital point motors. The control system, lights and sound are built into the two boards: this reduces the layout setup time. The photographic backdrop was produced by a commercial printing firm from a panorama of 6 images
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The rolling stock is a mixture of kits and scratch building with some items bashed from parts I have collected over the last few years. Structures are built from styrene, wood, brass and glass.
I hope that it captures the feel of the quirky prototype, the wonderful Leighton Buzzard Light Railway.
