1. Introduction

This blog is about my model railway exhibition layout “Kyle of Sutherland”, which showed Culrain station in the former county of Ross-shire, Scotland, as it was in 1960 at a scale of 4mm to the foot with track and rolling stock to P4 standards. Trains are from the post-nationalisation period up to 1962 when the last steam locomotive left the far north of Scotland.

I started modelling in 2001 and first exhibited Kyle of Sutherland as a non-scenic work-in-progress at Scaleforum 2012, the final Scaleforum exhibition at Leatherhead. It was exhibited in revised form at the Exeter Show in 2013. The first public showing of the scenically complete layout was in September 2015 in Culrain Village Hall just across the road from the real, but now much simplified, Culrain station. In 2017 it was shown in Skipton, North Yorkshire, for the first time as a complete, operational layout, and then at Railex 2018 with a full complement of trains.

Kyle of Sutherland has featured in Model Railway Journal 243*, 253*, 263 and 267*, in Scalefour News 186, 191, 196*, 205, 207, 214* and 221, Highland Railway Journal 113, 116, 119 and 128, in Issue 67 of Far North Express, the Newsletter of the Friends of The Far North Line, and in The Northern Times, the newspaper for the North of Scotland Region. I described the scratch building of two ex-Caledonian Railway 4-4-0s in The True Line 137, the Journal of the Caledonian Association. Photographs of the layout have also appeared in Model Rail and Hornby Magazine.

* The main articles about the layout, especially MRJ 267 and Scalefour News 196 and 214

I dismantled the layout at the end of 2018 while retaining buildings, trees and smaller lineside items for use on future projects. I continue to add further detailing and improvement to Kyle of Sutherland’s trains and rolling stock (see 7. Where Next).