Whitley South Dock - 4 mm Scale OO Gauge

Whitley South Dock is not a club layout, but is owned by one of our club members, Michael Thomas.

Whitley South Dock is a fictitious industrial coastal port set in the North East of England in the mid/late LNER period. The builder has attempted to model something different and has included coal staiths and a dry dock. The wooden coal shipping staiths dominate the rear part of the layout and facilitate the rapid trans-shipment of coal from hopper wagons down chutes into the holds of colliers berthed below. This type of staith was once a familiar sight on the River Tyne and in other North East coastal ports. A range of other rail-served buildings on the lower quayside deal with fish, grain, steelplate, dry dock and timber traffic. Most structures are based on prototypes found in the Tyneside area and are largely scratch-built. Trackwork is Peco Streamline code 100 and ships are kit bashed items by Lindbergh. Locomotives and rolling stock are either kit built or detailed proprietary items with Sprat and Winkle automatic couplings.

So let us take you back seventy years when coal was king and the riverside scene can be summed up as staiths, ships, steel and steam!

The layout featured in the April and May 1999 and March 2001 issues of the Railway Modeller and won the Railway Modeller Cup in 1999.