Layout History

Early in 2020, I had a total brain failure, and, on impulse, because it seemed like a good thing to do at the time, I purchased a diminutive Hornby 00 scale 48DS diesel shunter. Lovely model, but totally unsuited to my favoured scale/gauge/era combinations. As it was in Army livery, I decided it needed somewhere to run it in the form of some sort of military establishment. So, I came up with the concept of "MOD Sutton Craddock". The story is that after WW2, the redundant RAF station at Sutton Craddock in Ryedale, North Yorkshire, famed for being the wartime base of the legendary Mosquito aircraft of 633 Squadron was "repurposed" (hate the 21st century phrase!) as a depot for MOD supplies and engineering, already having access to a convenient British Railways line from Malton to Thirsk, running close by, and being central to many other military establishments. And the rest is (fictional) history, so they say....

The baseboard already existed from a previously cancelled project, I already had the track, either new or salvaged from a previous layout; point motors and switches on the standard gauge are similarly salvaged and still work even after 20 years or so of disuse in far from ideal storage conditions! I decided to add an internal narrow gauge system in addition to the standard gauge facilities to assist in the distribution of goods around the large site.... and because it gave me an excuse to run some of my 009 models. It is a very straightforward micro shunting layout, but it should give me a bit of fun. I have planned to employ automatic couplings and a bit of electronics to add some interest!  And I should be able to find some of my teenage-years military vehicles, I used for wargaming with my brother, to put on display!

Layout Description

MOD Sutton Craddock represents a very small corner of a military stores and engineering depot in North Yorkshire with it's own  large internal railway system. The timescale is somewhere around 1950/60's but rather vague..... Two warehouses and a loading dock are served by this spur, with a transfer facility to the internal narrow gauge system. The  facility, based on an old RAF airfield, has been developed on ad-hoc basis as requirements changed and developed, and so a variety of building styles can be seen. Military supplies are brought in and out by the standard gauge connection to British Railways, transferred to and from the depots internal narrow gauge system, .or loaded on to/unloaded from road transport.

The buildings are mainly of card, either scratch-built or utilising downloadable kits from Scalescenes and Scale Model Scenery, and the backscene buildings are images downloaded from textures.com . Other huts and structures are from plastic kits. Operations are obviously fairly limited by nature of the space available, but a variety of wagons can be seen being brought in and taken from the depot on both the standard and narrow gauge lines. Motive power is a mix of steam and diesel on both lines as the time period is one of transition between the old and the new. It's not prototypically accurate, but is hopefully representative of the spirit of this type of depot. Peco loco lifts are used in the fiddle yards to facilitate stock transfers.

Layout Specification

Exhibition Details:-

Layout Size - 4' wide. 20" deep. Operating space approx 4' deep required behind layout.

Operated from rear, viewed from front

Scale 4mm/ft,  00 & 009 Scale

No. of Operators - 1

Layout has integral lighting structure

Programme Description - MOD Sutton Craddock represents a very small corner of a military stores and engineering depot in North Yorkshire with it's own  large internal railway system. The timescale is somewhere around 1950/60's but rather vague..... Two warehouses and a loading dock are served by this spur, with a transfer facility to the internal narrow gauge system.

Exhibitions Attended:-

Llandudno (Colwyn Model Railway Club) July 2023

Machynlleth (Corris Railway) August 2024