B Y C H A N
A non-portable, portable layout


Bychan is a 1960s ex-GWR branchline set in South Wales that's waiting for Dr Beeching to close it. This was a bit of a departure for me since it wasn't a design that I really wanted to try or a setting or period that I had a particular interest in - it actually came about because of a number of pieces of rolling stock that I had acquired, seemingly unconnected with each other.


First off was a pair of old secondhand Farish coaches which I had intended to use as part of my (as yet unbuilt) 1950s BR layout, but it turned out they were in the later 1960s maroon livery and not the earlier crimson, so although I only paid a paltry amount I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with them. Also sitting in my stock box for a number of years have been a pair of very old Lima 'Palethorpes' Siphon wagons. I needed to remove the GWR logos and I even purchased some Farish bogies to replace the overscale Lima ones, but was having second thoughts as to what to do with these too.



I'd largely forgotten about these four items until a casual browsing of the Hattons 'Bargains' pages revealed a Dapol autocoach and 45xx Prairie tank for a combined £30. All my other steam-based stock has the earlier BR logo but seeing these two items and remembering my errant coaches and problem siphons I realised that I could gather the primary pieces of rolling stock required for a small branchline layout, so I paid my money. A couple of weeks go past and I manage to pick up another brand new, boxed 45xx from eBay for even less than I paid at Hattons.



It's not the most accurate set of rolling stock, I admit. I'm an 'about right' modeller, so while you won't see a LNER A4 going past a Railfreight Class 58 on any of my layouts you could well see that LNER A4 going past a LMS signal box simply because I like the look of the signal box design. With Bychan, the coaches are just generic coach designs that Farish churned out in a variety of liveries over the years (and being an ex-GWR line they should ideally be a 'B set'), the Palethorpes livery on the siphons should be well gone by the 1960s, and the lining across the top of the water tanks on the 45xx locos is too low down (an error Dapol themselves acknowledged), but there we go. I'm assuming there's a nearby sausage factory to justify the continued use of the siphons, and a bit of weathering should hide the loco lining a bit (since I first wrote this I've now found out that the coaches aren't as unprototypical as I had first feared - while DMUs usurped traditional loco-hauled passenger services rather quickly after their introduction it appears we're comfortably in the 'about right' area by running them).

After only a few layout doodles and revisions I arrived at the trackplan. From a design perspective it's very conventional, just a minimal terminus station with a goods shed and a coal siding (although I later decided to just make it a general storage siding), and then a run across an open Welsh hillside into a tunnel for the fiddleyard.


Wanting a long run I ended up with an 8 foot long layout that's 6 inches wide - this is in no way a 'portable' layout, I really should have made it on two baseboards because this is a big lump of wood to try and move around the house! A carrying handle was screwed to the back to aid transportation but I fear at some point in the future I will clatter it into a door frame and damage something.

The simple nature of the station meant I initially called the layout 'Small', but being set in South Wales I ran the word through an online translator which produced several Welsh alternatives, with 'bychan' appealing the most.

So click the left hand icon to go through the layout construction (baseboard, basic scenery, track and wiring), or the right hand icon to go straight to the modelling bit.