Barfin Road 4mm P4
Barfin Road by Dave Roome
Set in the late 80s to early 90s, somewhere in the Midlands, is Barfin Road. Barfin is a small town with a railhead for fertilizer traffic and a stabling and fueling point for locomotives serving the nearby Barfin station. The layout has an industrial feel, featuring brick buildings alongside more modern steel structures.
The layout is built to P4 scale (a high-accuracy 4 mm:1 ft model railway standard), and all the track is hand-built. The control system uses an NCE power cab with an SB5 unit (a digital command control system for trains), and points are operated with Cobalt point motors (mechanisms that switch track direction). The stock includes a large variety of wagons, many of which are either scratch-built or designed in CAD and 3D by me, giving the stock a unique feel. It also includes a large variety of ferry vans running on the layout, along with standard BR-designed vans.
On the locomotive front, the use of 08 shunters and class 37s and 47s run into Barfin road and occasionally class 26s locomotives from north of the border. All of the rolling stock has been rewheeled to P4 and fitted with screwlink or instanter couplings. The locomotives are fitted with DCC sound chips, stay-alives, and are highly detailed and weathered to give the layout a high-end atmospheric feel.
A lot of time was spent adding small details to give the layout a sense of reality, with small touches of workmen chatting, cats wandering, and pigeons preening on nearby buildings. Fertilizer bags are loaded and ready for telehandler loading at the railhead. The layout is very compact but packs a punch, showing what can be achieved in a small space, and offers plenty of shunting opportunities. The layout only arose by accident when I managed to dislocate my right ankle and fracture it. While in a cast, I managed to prop myself up in the garage, build the boards, and get them transferred into the dining room. There you had it: a layout built in six weeks flat, from flat wood to a complete, running, finished model.
