Pebblestone

Welcome to Pebblestone, the terminus of the CWAF Railway, located not far from the sea — close enough for a sea breeze, but thankfully not close enough for the tide to affect the timetable.

Trains trundle into the station from behind the engine shed, serving the small but loyal number of passengers who still use the line on a regular basis. Both passenger and goods traffic can be seen, although, like many narrow gauge railways, Pebblestone is perhaps not enjoying its most prosperous period. “Gently declining” may be the polite way to describe it.

Despite this, Pebblestone remains a surprisingly busy little place. The engine shed is often full of activity, with wagons and locomotives being repaired, moved, shuffled, discussed, and occasionally even put back where they belong.

Almost every item of rolling stock and every building on the layout has been scratch built. Can you work out how many hand-cut bricks were used to construct the buildings? We stopped counting some time ago, possibly for health reasons. Alan, our master scratch builder, has built all the structures on the layout, many of which can be seen in the photographs on the right-hand side of this page.

The layout has recently been extended to include an interesting feature: a traverser at the end of the line. Rather than using a large turntable, we decided to do something a little different — partly for operational interest, and partly because making life easy would have been far too sensible.

Overall, Pebblestone shows just what can be achieved in a large scale within a relatively small space, provided you have enough patience, imagination, and tea.

This layout has been a long time in gestation, but at last we are making progress — whatever that means!

We welcome new members who would like to get involved, especially those with an interest in 16mm scale narrow gauge modelling, including battery-powered, radio-controlled and live steam locomotives. A sense of humour is not essential, but it may prove useful.