Introducing Nogg.

Nogg is a concept I’ve had circulating in my brain for a couple of years now. You will have seen some musings in a previous blog entry. 

Nogg mine is real. It’s an old, probably Roman, Lead Mine in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Not far from the famed Cromford and High Peak Railway. The name also conjures up childhood memories of the old television cartoon, The Saga of Noggin the Nog. Nostalgia like that is too good to pass up. 

After the successful appearance of my square foot halt challenge layout at the Granite City Train Show, I started to muse on a replacement for it. As it wouldn’t be fair on the paying public at that show to see the same tiny layout on consecutive shows. I was definitely looking for something different, and my thoughts started drifting back to the larger scales. I remembered the fun I had working on the 7/8ths Facebook group micro layout competition project. Even though the items were much, much bigger than I expected, and after a while I balked at the amount of work I had to put in. Then I saw Jez Kirkwood’s 16mm scale Ropehouse Level Freemine layout, set in the Forest of Dean. This was an interesting interpretation of a subject I knew nothing of. 

Subjects that I know nothing about are very attractive to me. I spent three or four hours one Sunday morning researching Freemines in the Forest of Dean. I particularly admired the Freeminers ability to create equipment from things they found elsewhere. I realised this obscure subject was something I could get into, so I decided to try to put my own Micro Layout spin on the subject. 

I made contact with Jez. He was very helpful with his advice and research material.  This enabled me to start to come up with ideas. I began by creating what I call “inspiration sheets” to help me translate what I saw in the photos into the reality of a model. This is a new planning idea that I’m trying to develop to try to help me piece the different elements into a coherent scene.

Inspiration sheet one deals with the overall feel.

Inspiration sheet two deals with the wagon tippler and pit props as a view block

This early sketch shows the elements I’d like to incorporate. A short section of shipping container becomes a workshop for working on locomotives and stock, complete with a detailed interior, removal of the end enables layout viewers to see inside. An automated wagon tipper at the end of the short siding would empty wagons loaded with coal for the all important working feature. A stack of pit props obscures an exit offstage.

Just like that, Nogg mine moved from the windswept Derbyshire Peak District to the Sylvan woodlands of The Forest of Dean. This first sketch should give you a feel for what I'm after. The L shape and size is dictated by the baseboards that I built for the 7/8ths project (waste not want not). Items in this scale are big and my unfamiliarity with the size may well cause me to change things up before track laying starts. For example, You will see shipping containers on the first inspiration sheet and they have found their way onto the model. In 16mm scale, one of those has a depth of about 5” Almost half the baseboard depth. I have ordered one from a seller on that well known auction site, so I can get a feel for the space that one will take up. I have a feeling that it will be sliced up to make a low relief model on the finished layout.

There are a few "small" indoor layouts in 16mm scale and fewer micro layouts. Jez's Ropehouse Level. Steve Bell's The Adit. (NG&IRM Review 89). Mark Sayers micro (coming up in the Spring issue of the Micro Model Railway Dispatch), and Roy C Link's Crowsnest Tramway are the only ones I currently know. I'd be happy to learn of more. 

There's a lot to keep me occupied, so stay tuned for further developments.