‘N’ GAUGE LAYOUT SETTRINGTON
Regularly driving past the site of Set trington station gave Kevin Smith enough of a modelling itch to recreate it in miniature.
As the saying goes, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. Numerous variations of the phrase have been coined over the years, and now there’s a new one for model railways. When life gives you a regular road journey that goes past a former station building, make a model railway of it. Admittedly, it may not be quite as catchy as the original, but for Kevin Smith this is how his latest ‘N’ gauge layout, ‘Settrington’, came to be, as it’s based on the location of the same name.
“Every time I drove down to Hull from home I would pass the station site, so I started to research the line, coming across a book from Warwick R. Burton titled The Malton & Driffield Junction Railway, which detailed the Malton to Driffield line and included information about the stations on it.
The line was built as a single track in 1853 and was one of the lines absorbed into the North Eastern Railway, originally with the provision for double track so that trains could go from the quarries straight down to the docks at Hull. Money, however, was tight, and therefore the double line was scrapped in favour of a single track with three passenger and one goods train per day. The book also proved invaluable when it came to plotting the position of the coal drops, platelayers’ hut and other notable features, as you just can’t see them from the road, and the station building is now a private dwelling.”
