Trenton Model Railroad is an OO Scale model railway layout based in the East Midlands of the UK in the 1970s.
While Trenton is a fictitious name in the UK, it is based heavily on Nottingham, a town where I grew up and lived before I emigrated to California. (This Trenton is not to be confused with the city of Trenton in New Jersey, USA)
Because of its location in the industrial heartland of the Midlands, there is plenty of scope for modeling different scenarios, locos, and rolling stock.
Some of the buildings I am creating are based loosely on actual buildings from that era and location, and I am attempting to create a good representation of the sights and environment.
This website will cover the build including all my failures, changes of mind etc. Hopefully, it will be of interest to someone and I will place photos of the different stages of the things I am building. It’s not meant to be a “How-To” guide, more of a diary of my ham-fisted attempts. Example below.
I use my 3D printers a lot.
For my non-British readers, the East Midlands covers an area of England as shown here:
…and much more information can be found here. wikipedia.org/East_Midlands
Why the East Midlands? Well, it was an area I grew up in, worked, played, and all sorts of other things that I won’t write about here.
The river Trent flows through a good part of the East Midlands, so Trenton sounded as good a name as any. (obviously not to be confused with the real town of Trenton in New Jersey, USA.)
A lot of the towns in the East Midlands are (or were) industrial. So it gave a lot of scope for factories, grime, run-down housing, etc. and as with many industrial towns and cities in the UK, the 1970s saw the beginning of the decline in UK-based manufacturing, coal mining, and heavy industry. When I look back at pictures of Nottingham at that time, it looks tired and a bit grim. The weird thing is, I grew up around that and didn’t notice a bit of it.
The industries of the East Midlands once included:
Coal Mining – (a lot) in fact my great grandfather was Colliery Manager at Sutton Colliery, Stanton Hill just outside Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.
Sutton Colliery Circa 1960s – Photo Credit. MuBuMiner Collection
Other 1970s industries of the East Midlands included:
- Steel (Corby Steelworks)
- Ceramics (Multiple companies)
- Aerospace (Rolls Royce)
- Aggregates (Tarmac, Hoveringham Gravel)
- Textiles, Knitwear & Hosiery (multiple companies)
- Cigarettes (John Player)
- Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals (Boots)
- Electronics (Plessey, Siemens)
- Train Manufacturing (Derby Works) ex-LMS/BR
- Automotive Manufacturing (Jaguar cars, British Leyland)
As you can see above, plenty to go at there.
As Trenton Model Railroad will be based in the 1970s the motive power will be diesel. DMUs, Class 47s, Class 20s, Deltics.
….and the rolling stock will be coal, aggregates, steel, etc.
If you are into counting rivets on your models, this place may not be for you, but I’m not planning on this being some thrown-together piece of junk, I will try my best for it to look authentic. I would say my modeling skills are a smidge above beginner, so I will be learning as I go.
Thanks for having a look, hopefully, you will come back, feel free to “Bookmark” this website.
