Penrhos

These pages are about Penrhos Junctions near Caerphilly in South Wales, my model of Penrhos and my other model railway interests.

Since being a child I have been interested in the GWR; tank engines and wagons, not the big expresses for me. For some unknown reason I also liked the railways that the GWR had absorbed at the grouping, particularly the South Wales lines. I'd already thought about modelling Merthyr Tydfil, and even today there is still a bookmark in Barry Norman's MRJ article.

Inspiration to model Penrhos Junctions came from another Barry Norman article in Model Railway Journal 85, a track plan for Curzon Street; with an entrance into a goods depot and three mainlines running behind, two of them on viaducts. So I had a good look around the Great Western system to find something similar. In the end I found something similar, Penrhos Junctions, which is actually very different. But what to me were the key features of the Curzon St design; a junction and a viaduct are key features, with the added bonus of a road bridge over the tracks from which spotters used to watch trains slog up the 1 in 47 'Big Hill'.

Three society's that have been very helpful are:

The Welsh Railways Research Circle,
The Historical Model Railway Society
Great Western Study Group.

Links to these societies can be found in Exchange Sidings. PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons PO Wagons