Quarry Halt is a small "00" gauge layout featuring a small halt on a single line somewhere in the Midlands in the 1950s and early 1960s. The local mill and output of a nearby quarry are the mainstay of the traffic, along with milk products from the local farms to the creameries in the conurbations. The halt was constructed primarily to serve the needs of workers at the quarry. Operation is conventional DC, with points and signals now upgraded to work with servos, see below.
This layout is available for exhibitions, contact us on aandcmrs@gmail.com
Latest: Once again QH appeared at Amersham Heritage Day on the 6th September 2026. And again it was a popular exhibit with families starting to have a look long before we were fully set up. Following its upgrading for the 2025 Heritage Day very little work has been done on it since. Although it performed satisfactorily this year, with few faults, we didn't have time in the setup to deploy Tim's signals and we are working with a six track traverser at one end and a three track one at the other. This unbalanced working meant the established running schedule wouldn't work.
Previously: We had taken the layout to the Chesham Exhibition on March 2nd 2025. We had been invited by the Chesham Model Railway Society to participare in their 50th Anniversay Exhibition.
We had had several further issues with the layout at the Amersham Heritage Day in September 2024, and it was decided that we would refurbish the layout for Chesham. This involved adding signals and starting the move to replacing point and signal operation by servo motors. The idea behind this 'automation' was to reduce the operational load at an exhibition. Signals that are controlled by the routes set by points, and returning to 'off' as the trains pass would save operators having to remember to operate them during bustle of an exhibition.
We decided to opt for modules from the the Model Electronic Railway Group, a society of like minded model railwayers who have developed a 'bus' system that enable quite complex operations on four wires laid around the baseboards. RogerPr and MikeB developed a system and got to grips with all the programming that is needed to make the whole system work.
Tim had spent several months making up signals to populate the layout based on advice from an ex-BR signalman. They are all servo controlled and are built on a brass base that carries the servo and can be 'plugged' into square holes in the baseboard. This avoids damage to them when we are transporting the layout to exhibitions. Each signal structure is then connected to the controlling electronic modules. PeterS improved the scenery where it had worn badly with help from additional trees from RogerPr. There was a lot of work to do before the Chesham Exhibition and not everything has been updated.
Not all the 'automation' worked for the exhibition, but these were mostly behind the scenes issues which we don't think impacted on what the audience saw. Certainly we seemed to have been a popular layout to visit.
Following that experience, further work on the 'programming' and a new six track traverser at one end was completed and the layout was successfully shown at Amersham's Heritage Day in September 2025.
Not much work has been done since, mainly due to the uncertainty around our continued occupation of the Club's locationm and discussions with the local council, the landlord. The exceptionally hot summer of 2026 with its repeated heatwaves meant many working sessions were cancelled. However the layout was shown at Heritage Day 2026 and worked satisfactorily.
