Welford Coppice 
Peter Cullen OO/OO9 gauge
Welford Coppice is a typical Ironstone railway which is set in the East Midlands of the late 1950's.
Ironstone extraction was a fairly basic operation. The topsoil or overburden, was removed by dragline and dumped in a adjacent field. the ironstone was then removed by huge excavators and transported by rail to blast furnaces such as at Corby, Bilston or South Wales. Rails in the fields were lightly laid and frequently moved and often a narrow gauge railway would bring trains of ore from outlying areas to an exchange point where they would be tipped into standard gauge wagons and marshalled into trains for onward transportation.
After the field of ore has been exhausted, the topsoil would be returned and the site would return to nature albeit substantially lower than previously.
