‘OO’ GAUGE LAYOUT ‘WONTONGET’
Seasoned modeller Paul Rober ts exper tly composed this early ‐2000s layout to fit within a newly conver ted lof t space, with the onus firmly placed on play value, which is helping to inspire younger visitors.
Unless you’ve decided to model a small shunting layout, or are one of the extremely fortunate people to have a very large railway room into which you can fit everything your heart desires, there will be a difference between what you ‘want’ and what you ‘get’. That was the case for Paul Roberts, who discovered that even though he could have a railway room in his sizeable converted loft, he would still have to compromise.
“I had a large attic layout that was a loop, but the loft was incredibly cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, so when the conversion was done properly, the opportunity arose to put a new layout in there, as the old one had been dismantled. However, I made the mistake of thinking that I wouldn’t need a large one, and built an end-to-end layout across one wall, which was roughly 3 feet at its widest.”
This is still ‘Wontonget’, but it’s been extended slightly since Chris Nevard came to take the photographs. Paul is no newcomer to modelling – his layout ‘Babstown’ featured in Model Rail in 2008 (MR116).
“This build started around 2016, and I decided that since I had a lot of stock on a previous layout that never saw the light of day because of a lack of space, that this time I would put a depot at one end rather than a more common tunnel or road bridge to provide the scenic break. This would allow me to have more locomotives on show and, more importantly, they would be used.”
Set in the West Country around the year 2000, a wide variety of locomotives and stock travel through ‘Wontonget’, with Paul’s view on realism firmly in the camp of ‘I like it so I’ll run it.’
“The love of that area stemmed from a trip via Bristol Temple Meads with my son Elliott, who was only a toddler at the time. The visit helped significantly with the build. We had a 45-minute wait at the station after being diverted, and we both enjoyed looking at the sheer variety of trains from all manner of companies that were coming through. Elliott was particularly fond of the EWS trains, or as he called them, ‘the red trains’. Naturally, this has resulted in an accumulation of a vast array of different stock, including EWS, so we have tried not to pin the layout down t
