St Holdens

St Holdens is very much an EM layout in progress, though dreamed of for 30 years and started 7 years ago; modelling skills and sight issues mean progress is very slow !
Although exiled in Hampshire for the past 30+ years, happy memories of Messrs Holdens’ ancient locos and rusting infrastructure remain strong from my teenage years living, schooling, engine spotting and eventually working in the North Essex/ Cambridge area.

The Malden, Braintree and Saffron Walden Railway was proposed and passed by Parliament in the 1840s. In the event only the Malden East to Braintree via Witham section were built.

St Holdens is a fictitious town in the Sampfords area of the Essex/ Suffolk border, typical of the area for its traffic of coal and grain in, and malt and agricultural produce out.

St Holdens assumes that the railway was extended from Witham via Braintree to Cambridge, joining up with the Colchester to Cambridge ‘Stour Valley’ line near Haverhill, and via a push pull served branch to Saffron Walden. It was also the junction for the now closed line from Thaxted (which my 1912 Harmsworth atlas genuinely shows as extended to Castle Hedingham !). The old Thaxted J68 still hovers around in the yard.

It is now late Summer 1955.The line is currently truncated with no service South to Braintree, as a result of an unfortunate nuclear incident at the nearby Wethersfield USAF base (a.k.a. lack of space in the railway room).As a result St Holdens has become a temporary terminus, supporting a sub-shed of 31A Cambridge busy with servicing the visiting locos.  In view of the USAF incident, a short branch spur from the Saffron Walden line has been quickly laid into RAF Debden, in order to assist the carrying out of all sorts of secret MOD goings on. A J70 tram loco, which has somehow been rescued from the Stratford scrap line, runs a mixed traffic service to handle RAF personnel and stores passing through.

Rolling stock is a mixture of converted RTR and kit built. Infrastructure is a mix of scratch and laser cut.

Fixing  the small matters of lack of ballasting, point rodding, catch points, signalling, etc will hopefully happen as time appears over the horizon.

I am extremely grateful for the ongoing advice and practical help given me by friends and colleagues at Winchester Railway Modellers and South Hants clubs, and of course, the GERS.




St Holdens engine shed, a shorter version of Ongar, based on drawings kindly supplied by Mike Senatore
Never mind the lack of chimneys, if you wait long enough someone may produce a decent laser cut Large GE 1865 station building. I did. It has. Now in the pipeline for building later this year.




RAF/ MOD personnel gather on the platform awaiting the Debden branch mixed train service, the empty stock of which is hiding behind the Saffron Walden train in the bay platform



A D16 hauled passenger train from Cambridge coasts past the maltings, while the J69 shunts the yard



General view of St Holdens goods yard




General view of St Holdens looking towards Braintree. The grain store in the foreground is a cut down version of the one that stood at Ware. Likewise the attached goods shed, still waiting for conversion from cornflake packets to something a bit more prototypical