Pete Kelly uncovers a treasured cache of Alphagraphix buildings from his OO-scale ‘Slagdyke’ layout that was dismantled and boxed up almost five years ago.
While rooting through boxes and boxes of OO-scale buildings from my stored ‘Slagdyke’ layout recently, I came across a number of almost-forgotten structures that I’d built up from Alphagraphix kits.
Run by Roger Crombleholme, Alphagraphix has been around since the 1980s and specialises in 1/43 (7mm-ft) and 1/76 (4mm-ft) construction kits in card, cast metal and etched brass.
As well as offering a wonderful range of attractive and unusual buildings, many based on Ireland and the Black Country, Alphagraphix offers etched brass kits for many 19th and early 20th century small locomotives and period rolling stock, and the 7mm Brumtrams range of trams and 4mm scale canal narrowboats also come under Roger’s portfolio.
With 2018 marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of light railway legend Colonel Holman F Stephens, a small range of 7mm scale rolling stock kits was introduced in celebration.
A brass kit for a Wainwright South Eastern & Chatham Railway P class 0-6-0T, of the type so well-suited to hauling lightweight trains of four-wheel coaches on the Kent & East Sussex and Bluebell railways, is now in the Alphagraphix catalogue at £120.
A similar type of kit for Gervase, which started life as a conventional Manning Wardle 0-4-0 saddle tank but was rebuilt in 1928 with a Sentinel vertical boiler in the cab and a two-cylinder vertical engine unit at the front, has also been introduced depicting this condition at £90.
First preserved on the K&ESR in 1962, Gervase has since been restored to full working order on Yorkshire’s Elsecar Railway.
My ‘Slagdyke’ layout, which appeared in Railway Modeller some years back, was of an entire industrial Lancashire town that ‘just happened to have a railway running through it’.
The construction involved building street after street of terraced houses and shops, and when I’d repeated just about everything in the Metcalfe range, I turned to Alphagraphix simply to add to the variety.
For the full article and to view more images, see the January 2019 edition of Modelling – available now!
For a complete list of stockists and how to get your copy, visit: www.railwaymagazinemodelling.co.uk/distributors
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