Morton Stanley 0-16.5

Photo: M. Campbell

Morton Stanley was a 7mm scale narrow gauge micro layout built in a space of 45x12" with the addition of a small storage yard at one end. The entire thing designed to fit on a standard 6' exhibition table. The baseboard was built from 6mm MDF using an inverted tray design reinforced with timber blocks. The track was hand built using 6mm wide copper-clad sleepering and redundant Peco Code 100 rail which was left over from previous OO gauge projects.

Rolling stock
The locomotive stock is a mix of kit parts such as chimneys and domes combined with scratch-built plastic bodies running on inexpensive Hornby chassis mostly the 'Bill and Ben' locomotives which provided the large saddle tanks as a base. Goods and passenger stock was built using a mix of kit parts and scratch built bodies on Hornby or ancient Tri-ang wagon underframes. The two main buildings were scratch built - the station building (above) is almost entirely from card while the large warehouse is a plastic sheet base covered with card strips to represent clapboarding. The water tower (above) is pure scrap using bits of Wills vari-girder, rocket sticks, track pins, wire and parts from and Airfix Pug kit.

Following appearances at numerous exhibitions, the layout has now been dismantled, (see Dury's Gap) but the buildings and rolling stock have been retained for a possible future layout.

The name came from John Morton Stanley as in 'Dr. Livingstone I presume' and is nothing to do with knife blades as most people assume.

Morton Stanley was featured in Railway Modeller April 2017.