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.