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The Dingwall & Skye Railway
The Dingwall & Skye Railway – A Pictorial Record of the line to Kyle of Lochalsh.
For those of you that are aware of my main exhibition layout you will be aware that it is based very firmly on the Dingwall & Skye Railway, which is the name of the line we now call either the Kyle line or occassionally the line to Skye.
I have to confess that the layout is heavily influenced by my memories of family holidays to the line in the early 1970s – we were dragged up there by my father and I at least (it all appears to be lost on my brother!) picked up a bug for the railways west of Inverness. This bug seemed to have been passed to me by my father and he was in turn infected in the late 1950s when he first made his visits to the area.
Based on his love of the line to Kyle of Lochalsh, my father’s latest book is upon the line. It does not seek to be a strict history of the line (Rails to Kyle of Lochalsh does this) but is instead a review of the line on a station by station basis. It is full of photographs (literally hundreds of them) and also a substantial number of drawings of the engineering and architectural infrastructure apparent on the line as well as around it. This covers station buildings, water tanks, bridges, sheds, signals, water columns, water tanks, cattle docks and indeed many other aspects of the line. There are historical reviews of aspects of the operation of the line, the exploration of alternative schemes that did not come to pass and some of the quirky storys of the past.
It is thus for those that like a coffee table picture book, a historical review of the highland railway, those that are interesting in modelling tbe line and those that simply are caught up in the nostalgia of the “line to Skye”…..
The Dingwall & Skye Railway – a pictorial record of the line to Kyle of Lochalsh, by Peter Tatlow ISBN 978 1906 537463 @ £27.95 by Crecy Publishing Ltd. For those of you who are members of the Highland Railway Society, you will find that your membership entitles you to a significant discount if you buy from the society. Thus if you are waivering about joining the society, you will be do well to do so if only to buy this book!
The Road Overbridge – Part 1
The bridge is in fact modelled on the one at Killiecrankie, but there were very similar ones at The Mound, Kyle of Lochalsh, Keith amongst others. Heres a picture of the Kyle one:
Copyright by Ben Brookshank and reproduced under a creative commons licence
The advantage of using the Killiecrankie bridge is that I had previously modelled one for a layout of this station and whilst the abutments are still firmly attached to some mothballed boards, the deck could be reused. The deck has a nice skew to it to make it a bit more interesting and utilises lattice girders; which few seem to bother modelling. This is what it looks like:
In terms of abutments, most Highland (and indeed this is common to most scottish lines) had bridges with curved wingwalls swept back from the face of the abutment. To give the layout some locational character, this was something I wished to produce. This is where we are at presently with the abutments:
Typically, the random or dressed stone ranges from Wills are my favoured mediums but seeing Andy G making a good go utilising Slaters 7mm coursed stone I thought I would have an experiement with this. This is because many of the later bridges on the Highland used the same coarsely dressed stone; like this one at Dalwhinnie:
And these show the bridge deck on the abutments as they stand:
_________________ Mark Tatlow
highland miscellany 