A place called Nogg.

It's there. It's real. It's on the map. Nogg mine.

Nogg is a great name. For me, the name conjures up childhood memories of TV series Noggin the Nog. It would be foolish to pass it up.

It's in the Peak District of Derbyshire, in the hills above Middleton and Steeplehouse. Photographs of the windswept locale can even be found on the aditnow site. 

Nogg mine was a lead mine, I have no idea when it operated. Roman times maybe. But it's a good starting point for a layout history to help flesh out the idea for the layout.

So let's get the imagination going and see what we can come up with.

Let's assume a small quarry was operating in the same area as the mine, and a short, standard gauge railway line meandered down from the area, where it interchanged with the Middleton branch of the Cromford and High Peak Railway, that served the Hopton wood quarry. 

Hopton wood produced very high quality Limestone, often known as "Englands premier decorative Limestone". The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey all used Hopton wood stone.  There are also several other quarries in the area as you can see on the map. So we have plenty of rationale for such an industry and railway line to serve it.

A map of the line to Nogg.

In the above map, the line to Nogg is shown in Red and the Cromford and High Peak Railway is shown in Black. The red dot indicates a possible location for the scene depicted in the model. 

A sketch of the model (the area of the red dot on the map)

Operation of the model would centre around wagons of stone being brought down from the quarry on the line on the left behind the hut. These would be left individually on the wagon turntable to either be pulled into the structure at the rear, purpose undecided - perhaps a finishing shop. Or to be collected by a loco, ostensibly from the Cromford and High Peak Railway that arrives on the line front left. 

Empty and loaded wagons would be switched around like some kind of fox, chicken and bag of corn game. Another possible wagon load could be a gunpowder van for blasting in the quarry.

You could operate this small layout with no more than 6 wagons and two locomotives. 

All in all, this scheme offers a lot of possibilities in about 40" x 40" in 7mm scale.

In the beginning...

There was O gauge.

Even though my first proper model railway experience was with a OO scale Hornby Freightmaster train set I was given for Christmas in 1976. The first model railway item that I remember, was an O scale coach that a dentist in town had. 

As a child, I had a dental condition called Hypomineralisation, where my baby teeth were chalk like and broke easily (or so I am told). I made many visits to dentists over the years to deal with this condition and the aftermath. 

This gentleman had some O gauge carriages on display in his waiting room and I latched on to them. I can clearly remember holding onto a coach for dear life as I underwent some tooth removals. I think he even let me take it home for a while as I recouperated.

The first model railway item I remember may have been something like this

There’s no doubt about it. O gauge does feel different. Sure, OO scale is nice and it’s relatively small, so you can get plenty in a small space. It’s a grand starting point for the model railway enthusuiast.

But O is different. Items have a heft and feel that OO items don’t have. An item of rolling stock really does click as it goes over a track joint. Sprung buffers really do give way as stock bumps up against each other. 

I have wanted to model in O for many years. From when I was growing up in England through to living in Minnesota now. I even have a couple of US outline items of rolling stock hidden away in a drawer somewhere that were waiting for a project. 

But over the years, I’ve come to realize that even though I live in the USA, American trains mean little to me, and I’m better off modelling what I’m familiar with. 

Those who know me, are aware of my many model railway blogs, made for charting the progress of layouts. The good and the bad. This one will be much the same. 

I do have another project on the go right now with an exhibition deadline to meet. So, for a while this blog will be a place of musings and cogitation about what I’ll do. 

Nothing is set in stone yet. I have some ideas. Some quite interesting ones. So we’ll see where it all goes.