Twickenham & District Model Railway Club

Creating model worlds

Beijiao

H0 – Chinese

The layout has three China Rail lines in the foreground and an independent industrial railway at the back. The freight train approaching the level crossing is on a local bi-directional line in front of a double track mainline which runs through the centre of the layout linking BEIJAO with Beijing. In the background is what we know in the UK as a ‘USA tank’ running downhill on a steep grade with a maintenance train.

BEIJIAO is my Chinese HO exhibition layout and, as far as I know, it is the only Chinese exhibition layout in the UK.
People often ask me why I built a Chinese layout and the reason is that I visited China fifteen times to photograph the last place on earth where steam engines were still in everyday operation on the mainline, and that ended in the autumn of 2001.

Chinese freight trains are long. One of our signature moves is to have a 38 wagon tanker train, hauled by two QJ class 2-10-2’s, snaking across from the bi-directional line onto the southbound mainline, while a train going in the other direction is held at the signal.

I have many photos of double-headed 2-10-2’s hauling long freight trains thirty-three years after everyday steam action died in this country, and I wanted to bring that story, that excitement, to a wide audience. The layout is set in the Spring of 2001 when there was just one remaining area of mainline steam action left in China and that was in the extreme NE of the country. As we view the layout, we are just a few months away from the end of steam on China Rail.

The vast majority of the photos I took were of steam trains in open countryside, but the layout is set on the outskirts of a big city. Pollution caused by coal-fired power stations has affected the older apartments in the background, whereas the newer ones, in the foreground, are still relatively clean.
By the end of steam, virtually all the surviving locos were QJ class 2-10-2’s and the other loco in this photo is a DF4 in the green freight livery. The DF4 was the Chinese equivalent of British Rail class 47.

The three above photos were taken by Trevor Jones for HORNBY Magazine (copyright Key Publishing) digitally enhanced with smoke effects and expanded backscenes in order to present the layout in the style that magazine editors expect these days.

Note.
All of the above pictures are copyright as noted.
They may not be reproduced without permission.

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Twickenham & District Model Railway Club