‘EM’ GAUGE LAYOUT LOCHTY
Remote beauty
Bleak and with relatively fewer features than most layouts, ‘Lochty’is everything that it needs to be – nothing more nothing less.
Words: Chris Gadsby
Photography: Chris Nevard
“What makes this layout great?
The beauty of this layout isn’t so much in the build as it is in the models. Andy has modelled such a reserved location that his models can do all of the talking.”
L ochty. It’s not somewhere you’ll be keen to go on your holiday. It’s not a town or even a village, just a settlement, and if you were to look at it on a map it would appear as though the extent of it is one farm. Not exactly prime real estate for a railway, but in a very quiet area of East Scotland, a thunderous LNER ‘A4’ class ‘Pacific’ could be found travelling up and down a three ‐quarter mile stretch of track. The history of John Cameron, Union of South Africa and the Lochty Private Railway is one with which some of you may be familiar, but before that there was another railway at Lochty and it is here that Andy Cundick has based his ‘EM’ gauge layout.
We featured Andy’s Irish narrow gauge layout ‘Castlederg’ in Model Rail issue 309, but his fascination with the obscure didn’t stop in the Emerald Isle. After realising that his collection of ‘EM’ stock was getting close to numbering in the hundreds, he decided that it was time for an ‘EM’ gauge test track so that he would have somewhere to run his kit-built locomotives and rolling stock.