Lion Mills

Lion Mills is a might-have-been branch of the Great Eastern Railway in East London, set around 1905. The branch runs from a junction on the North Woolwich line at Stratford Market, to Lion Mills which is situated on a (real!) spur of the River Roding, just north of Beckton Gas works.

As well as local traffic, the branch provides an alternative route for coal traffic for the large gas works, avoiding the busy line through Canning Town.




The layout is positioned so that the viewer is standing in the spur of the river, facing south, with the front edge of the layout representing the edge of the quay. The track-work is hand-built using components sourced through the EM Gauge Society.




Points and signals are controlled from a lever frame and operated by servo motors driven by MERG Servo4 boards; everything is controlled through the lever frame with no other switches being needed.

Locomotives are all scratch-built, with compensated split-chassis, fly-wheels and as much weight as I can cram in! Rolling stock is mostly from kits with a few scratch built items. One of the advantages of the pre-grouping period is that stock is smaller, so I can have five coach passenger trains that are only about 2'6" including the loco.

Operationally, the layout is mainly about shunting and to avoid aimless shuffling of wagons, I have a Raspberry Pi which displays a clock and brief description of the current and next moves in the timetable and more importantly, decides where wagons from incoming trains should be placed and which wagons should make up the next outgoing train.

There is still a lot of detail to be added, particularly along the quay.


Passengers await the next service into London.



Their patience has been rewarded by the arrival of 140 Class no 0146, which has run round its train and is ready for the return trip to Fenchurch Street.



Meanwhile Y14 no 881 shunts the yard.



One of the things I wanted to achieve with the layout was an echo of those lovely period photographs of busy goods yards with lines of wagons awaiting attention. It doesn't look like it from this picture, but GE 5 plank wagons do make up a large portion of the rolling stock, although they probably don't dominate to the extent that they should!



Shunting complete, the Y14 waits for the road back to Temple Mills.