An N gauge modern image West Coast Main Line layout, set around 2020, 19 ft long.
Coketown is set in the Lancashire town made famous in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. Now, in the 21st century the town has been cleaned up somewhat. Many of the mills and chimneys are gone, replaced by warehouses and shopping areas but some of the old buildings are still left in the town centre near the station. The station was rebuilt in the 1990s but some of the original old parts of the station are left.
A high level line to the Pennines was closed by Beeching but the viaduct is now listed and preserved and there are several plans for the line including a cycle path, a tramway or possibly reopening the track.
The traffic on the line is predominantly from the West Coast Main Line and is fitted around the Avanti passenger expresses to and from London and Glasgow. Transpennine Express and Northern run the local services from the station.
The yard is still used for Network Rail for their equipment and their contractors. The coach sidings at the front of the station are for daytime storage of passenger trains between the peak times.
The layout is wired for DCC powered by Lenz controllers. Track is Peco code 55 with a mix of wood and concrete sleepers. The points are SEEP motors driven by DCC concepts solenoid drive boards which, in turn, are controlled from a Windows touch monitor and laptop running JMRI software. The JMRI software controls the points and signals and gets some information about the train positions from magnetic sensors in the track. The software then uses the point positions and the sensors to set the signals.
The signals themselves are hand-built from 3D printed casings fitted and wired with surface mount LEDs and in some cases mounted onto gantries from Traintronics. The signals are controlled from the DCC bus by Arduino processor boards. The catenary has some Dapol individual supports but the majority of the portals are from N Brass kits.
The buildings are a mix of kit and off-the-shelf items with some hand-built items and customisation to suit the environment. The station, for example has a Faller main building with Faller canopies and hand built steps, lifts and footbridge. The station car park is a Japanese kit from Aoshima. The large Victorian workhouse is a German coal mine kit from Kibri.
Stock is mainly Farish and Dapol but much of the newest stock on the layout has come from Ben and Mike at Revolution Trains who I have to thank for producing the Pendolino and much of the modern image stock without which this WCML layout would not be complete!
