Minffordd Update: Excavations Required

It's not often you return from a research site visit happy that you're going to have to tear things apart, but that's the unusual situation we find ourselves in after our week in Wales.

One of the objectives was to have a good poke around Minffordd Yard, and run the tape measure over some of the buildings, and also to plagerise from the beautiful diorama of Minffordd which is now kept in the museum at the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway.

Our number one concern was about the Maeofferen slate sheds which are a prominent feature at the bottom of the FR's yard.

We'd reached the reluctant conclusion that we only had room to include the larger of the pair on our layout.

Peering through the perspex cover at the museum exhibit (which I believe was built by Dave Perrin) we were confounded to see that he'd managed to find room for both!

The difference, we discovered as we stood and compared with photos on our phones, was that we'd made the slope of the land down from the FR mainline far too generous, which you can see from the photos above.

In fact, when later inspecting the sheds, it become clear that the smaller Maenofferen Bach is slightly cut into the hill.

With a bit of remedial landscaping, and some repositioning of the sidings, we should be able to get both in.

Other errors came to light during our visit.

We had puzzled about the bridge over the lane which forms the scenic break for the Cambrian at the Porthmadog end, and decided that we probably wouldn't be too far wrong with a bog-standard square girder.

But flicking through a book on the shelves in the Harbour station shop, just on the off-chance that it might contain some pictures of Minffordd, I finally discovered the answer!

This bridge, before it was rebuilt in more modern times, had a bow string girder with a wooden palisade on top.

So another bit of re-engineering beckons.

And I also solved another mystery that had been puzzling me about the weigh house building which I am making.

I knew that at some point the original windows at the Porthmadog end were replaced by something a lot more domestic-looking, but I had no idea when that was.

A chance conversation in the pub with a long-standing FR figure revealed that he had scanned a collection of photographs from the 1960s, one of which was a rare picture of this end of the building.

© J Owen

This also revealed a small extra building which I never knew existed, as well as confirming the original, ornate, bargeboards were still in place.

Who said no good ever comes from going to the pub?