16MM SCALE

Photos by Author

Heading shot: A typical Pigsty Brewery railway train.

Top: Works train about to enter the new mixed gauge section.

Above: Fitting radio control in a Very Small Locomotive.

Above Right: The two junctions of the Pigsty Brewery Railway.

THE YARD CRANE This, the sole luxury of the PBR, was built from a Back 2 Bay 6 kit. It’s a very nice kit without too much flash on the whitemetal castings. I assembled it as non-working, on the grounds that it’ll be sturdier like that for outdoor use, but it can be made to work. For me, the main problem (apart from my multiple thumbs) was that I don’t know a yard crane from a whooping crane, and identification of the parts often eluded me.

Eventually, wikipedia.com on the Internet proved my friend, but an annotated photo of the parts would have been very useful. I now know a pawl from a ratchet, but I very much doubt that I’ll ever need the knowledge again. On the whole, excellent value at 35 quid, and it’ll save a lot of manual labour at the PBR siding.

By the way, I assembled it without safety guards over the gears because Elf and Safety hasn’t reached this part of Cornwall yet, and it looks better that way.

OPERATION – THE BEER MUST GET THROUGH In day-to-day use, the 32mm section of the railway forms the Pigsty Brewery Railway. The points are set to direct trains off the circuit into the PBR bay at Pigsty Hill and to the ‘brewery’. It is operated by IP Ezee Range and other small locos and stock on an out-and-back push-pull basis. This style of operation was typical of small industrial railways up until quite recent times.

In standard model railway fashion, the brewery is imagined to be out of sight behind the miniature trees. The same applies when I am running the PHLR in radio-control out-and-back mode, where it represents Mevagissey and Pentewan and, indeed, the rest of the known universe. I had initially thought of using mechanical reversing (think Hornby and Big Big Train) to facilitate this kind of running, and made this work with some success. In practice, though, the line

ARDEN G Rail

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