Author

Mike Lloyd

Date

28th January 2014

Reading Time

< 1 minute

Update

From 2 June 2018, Empire Mills has a new home. We wish the layout well under its new management!

You can read about the EM Gauge team’s new project Orchard Wharf here.

 

Empire Mills is the Model Railway Club’s 4mm scale EM gauge layout. The basic layout depicts a small, freight-only branch line. The layout boards include lift-out modules carrying track and scenery which can be swapped to depict different industries, time periods and locations.

The layout has featured at two of the “London Festival of Railway Modelling” exhibitions at Alexandra Place configured to show the ‘Empire Mills’ china clay works somewhere close to St Austell in Cornwall in the late 1960s to early 1970s and British Railways Western Region diesel-hydraulics were much in evidence. Other options that have been considered include ‘Empire Lane Pit’, a small coal mine that might be in Somerset, or Northumberland, or the Midlands, ‘Empire exchange sidings’, depicting the transhipment area between a narrow gauge network and the standard gauge network, and ‘Empire Lines’, the exchange point between a War Department and the national rail network in the Second World War – with the lift out sections the possibilities are almost endless for industries, time periods and locations.

The layout is wired to run with either conventional DC or DCC stock.