Sankley - Woking Miniature Railway Society Modellers
1883 Challenge Entry
Commended
Sankley is an attempt to create a workable small country terminus in a confined space. To accommodate the interests of the builders it had to be “all things to as many people as possible”. After some research, it was decided that the location should be in the region where Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset meet. A fictitious place was created a few miles to the north of Gillingham and east of Wincanton. That was an excuse for having a Southern station at the end of a branch from Gillingham, with connections to the Somerset & Dorset at Wincanton and the Great Western at Bruton.
By choosing to set it in the 1948-50 period we could justify running locomotives and carriages in four liveries: late Southern, the London Midland & Scottish as the Somerset & Dorset had become by that time, and Great Western, all waiting to be repainted to match the stock already in the new British Railways colours. Goods stock could have come from anywhere.
In our imagination this “might have been” town was in a prosperous agricultural area. Freight movements reflect this but all trains are relatively short, being limited by the length of the station (and the fiddle yard sector plate behind the backscene). Passenger trains have to be no more than two carriages with push-pull and railmotors arriving quite frequently.
