THE CALDER VALE MINERAL RAILWAY
As with all of my layouts, this one isn’t main line, or mainstream, but, rather than pure industrial, I wanted a passenger service to run alongside the industrial aspect, so the idea of a small system incorporating a light railway came about. The period is 1900 until the Grouping of 1923, but I’m not strict on this.
When I originally built the layout, the intention was to go as far back as the 1870s. This period is something that I have never before modelled and the reason for choosing it is that I had taken an interest in the locomotives of the real-life I.W. Boulton. Isaac Watt Boulton was an engineer, locomotive builder and hirer in the last quarter of the 19th century. Details of his business and locomotives can be found in a fascinating book that is quite well-known in industrial railway circles – The Chronicles of Boulton’s Siding, by A.R. Bennett. I had built three locomotives from Boulton’s stable and this got me interested more generally in Victorian industrials and in the pre-Grouping railway era. It is so different from the commonly-modelled era of British Rail, where decrepitude is the order of the day for industrials and where weathering is taken to extremes. Having built the models, which didn’t fit in with the period of any layout that I owned at the time, they were set aside as display pieces, but I don’t like having models that are only kept in a display case. I wanted something they could be run on.
A potted history of the ‘CVMR’ down to the year 1898, taken from the Oakwood Press book The Calder Vale Mineral Railway, by Albert Tatlock FFS.*
During the mid-nineteenth century, in the small area of the West Riding to the east of Halifax and north of the River Calder, there was a great variety of extractive
