I have a wish-list of layouts I’d like to build, one of which was Westerdale, a secondary main line set in the Northern hills. It has been, and still is, normal operating practice to send slower trains by secondary routes to keep the main lines clear for faster, higher priority trains, even though this involves extra mileage. It does bring trains to places they wouldn’t see otherwise.

Westerdale was not particularly high on my priority list, but I saw an opportunity to recycle my old layout, Carronbridge (a Highland branch line). Over the years, I have also accumulated a lot of wagons, both modern and steam era, and I wanted somewhere to run them.

In the 1970s and 80s I worked at a depot run by BR’s Chief Civil Engineers Department. I have used the knowledge I acquired then to produce authentic looking Engineers trains, albeit orientated to the operating practice of 20 years ago. 

The layout has been modified and “improved” frequently over its ten year life span and some of these tamperings are making the layout operationally unreliable, so I am reluctantly giving up on it. My next layout will be based on a secondary main line of the New York Central which by-passes Chicago to the south, known as the Kankakee Belt line. I read an article on this line in the February 1969 edition of Trains magazine and now I’m finally getting round to building it.