Penmaenbach 
Chris Hopper OO gauge 4mm scale
ERA/LOCATION: BR Railfreight/Speedlink (London Midland/Western Region) 1980s/90s
Penmaenbach is a self-contained shunting layout built using a custom-made Grange and Hodder baseboard kit and Peco Code 75 00 Bullhead track. It is a simple set of sidings which can be used as an “Inglenook” shunting puzzle (using wagon cards if required) as well as a connected branch line and small halt to add operational interest. The buildings are a mixture of scratch-built, plastic and laser cut kits. The bridges are made from styrene sheet. The overall setting is inspired by the railways of North Wales but the layout gives us an opportunity to use a wide variety of rolling stock from the 1980s and later when the BR Rail Blue era was ending and colourful Railfreight liveries were appearing. Other stock including Civil Engineers wagons or more contemporary DRS locomotives and nuclear waste wagons may appear from time to time.
The layout is controlled with an NCE DCC system and many of the locomotives are sound chipped. The couplings are Kadees which are operated using fixed magnets. We try to operate “hands off” as much as we can.
The locomotives are mainly detailed and weathered ready-to-run from Hornby, Accurascale, Bachmann and Sutton’s Loco Works and the wagons are mainly Bachmann, Hornby or kit-built although a number of newer manufacturers are now producing suitable wagons and locos. I’ve tried to add suitable loads to some of the wagons.
Questions are welcome.
