An unhealthy interest

As you well know by now I can get interested in many different aspect of railway operation and want to design layouts for them. One of the most unusual things I got interested in was the transportation of Nuclear waste by the special flask trains. I forget how I got interested in them. It may well have been a series of postings on RMWeb (it's always fairly safe to blame anonymous RMWeb contributors) on Nuclear Waste transport. There are several nuclear power stations in the UK so Nuclear waste trains are not an uncommon site on Britain's railways. I even knew one of the railway lines quite well. Trains to the Trawsfynydd Nuclear power station ran along the Conwy valley line to Blaenau Ffestiniog and thence on to Trawsfynydd though the Snowdonia mountains of North Wales. Spectacular stuff. Just look at the pictures of the branch here at 2D53 to get a flavour. 

That is what inspired the above scheme. It was envisioned as a P4 or EM scale layout set in the late 70's when I remember British Rail in North Wales the best. The unusual shape of the baseboard was driven by my desire to be able to watch trains coming towards you rather than crossing the field of view.  I was very interested in being able to get the crane to work so that you could transfer the nuclear flasks from a lowloader to the nuclear flask wagon and vice versa. This would have made for an interesting feature. Several suitable cranes are available commercially as is a Nuclear Flask wagon from Bachmann So really this seemingly unusual subject matter would be rather easy to recreate.