Wold Farm Mushrooms

Wold Farm Mushrooms is a strange thing indeed. For some reason I became fascinated with miniature railways. I found some pictures of some very interesting prototypes on the internet. Things that I just felt I had to build. I knew that 9" gauge lines were a popular tourist attraction and I wondered if a 9" gauge line could have a viable industrial purpose. To that end I created Wold Farm Mushrooms. Based on the premise that a rail enthusiast farmer built a line to serve his mushroom farm in a disused railway tunnel on the Lincolnshire wolds. One thing that really appealed to me was the idea of really small trains entering a standard gauge tunnel mouth. Construction on Wold Farm Mushrooms is ongoing and is entered in the RMweb small layout contest for layouts under six square feet. As this contest has ended here's some new updated pictures for you."Quirky and so darned attractive" is how it has been described. I like that.The layout was built on an unusually shaped piece of pink foam. I went for a strange shape as a backlash against rectangular baseboards with all the track parallel to the front and rear edges. The shape was inspired by another entrant in the RMweb competition. Who unfortunately didn't get their entry finished. The tunn el mouth was built first and looked huge until I got it embedded in the railway cutting. Its built from my standard method of 6mm foamcore board faced with embossed styrene sheet. On which a recreated an engineers blue brick finish. The ground covers as usual are Woodland Scenics products. The only structure on the model is the model of the LNER concrete platelayers hut. Which was built from off cuts of mounting board purchased from an artists suppliers for a fraction of the price of a full sheet.