Milton Street Motive Power Depot
By Spencer Anderson
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Milton Street MPD is set in Motherwell’s Daisy Park area in North Lanarkshire, and is in fact the name of the street I was brought up in. The layout represents a medium sized engine shed with associated workshop, coaling stage and stabling roads. An additional feature to the railway side of things is the recreation of an industrial, a street scene and a used car sales lot. Built to 4mm/OO Gauge standards using Peco Code 75 trackwork and controlled by NCE Powercab DCC.
All buildings are scratch built, mainly by myself, the shed being based on Glasgow’s Polmadie with the workshop from Grangemouth attached, the sand house is also Grangemouth based whilst the coaling stage/water tank is of a Lancashire and Yorkshire design which I rather liked the look of! The factory buildings are freelance, whilst the tenement with associated wash-house (steamie) is based on local Glasgow/Lanarkshire architecture. |
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The backscene, a collage of photographs of the sadly now demolished Ravenscraig Steel Works (“The Craig” as it was affectionately known), was printed onto foamboard before being mounted on plywood.
The decision to have all the shed roads feeding from the turntable was based on the LNWR shed at Lancaster in the North West of England, and although this does offer a more spacious feel to the layout, it is not something I would do again as it makes the turntable central to all locomotive movements.
The motive power featured on Milton Street is typical of the locomotives seen in the Motherwell area at the time. Mainly ex-LMS and BR Standards, but there are also some representatives of the LNER. Locomotives range from humble 0-4-0 Pugs to 4-6-2 Pacifics and 2-10-0 freight loco’s. Despite the attempts of Joe, Milton Street MPD remains a diesel free zone (except when my back is turned!)
The loco’s are all detailed, weathered and DCC chipped and although mainly from my collection, others come from the 12AD members.
With the input of ideas from the other group members, different scenes sprang up across the layout, from the gossiping ‘wifeys’ outside the wash-house, to the used car lot, to the seagull perched upon the stove chimney on the lean-to. A lot more ideas for further details have been bandied about and these will make their way onto Milton Street in due course. A recent addition to the layout is a small wagon repair works, accessed only from the turntable.
Milton Street made its exhibition debut at Perth in June 2013, since then has attended a number of exhibitions both North and South of the border, most recently at the Preston show on 2/3 March 2019. Milton Street MPD has also appeared in print in the April 2014 edition of Hornby Magazine and in the December 2015 issue of British Railway Modelling Magazine.
For more photo’s of Milton Street MPD, please see the Gallery Page.
12AD Model Railway Group 