Welcome to Redhill

‘Redhill’ is (or rather, will be) a 4mm/ft scale model of an urban area with operating railway and road traffic.

Time: 1976

Area: Redhill is a fictional location that is set in the Brownhills area north of Birmingham. The fictional location allows me to take a number of liberties with reality and rearrange both geography and history to suit my needs.

The name? After a lot of playing around with various possible names it seemed reasonable – like Brownhills but with red buses….

Operating road traffic will be one of the major features of the layout. Whilst this is currently limited to buses I hope to add a (very) small number of cars, vans and lorries to add realism to the traffic flows. The vehicles are motorised using the Faller Road System as a basis. More about the buses...

West Midlands PTE (WMPTE) was formed in 1969 to take on the responsibility for passenger transport within the West Midlands Metropolitan area. Apart from the local rail services, operated by British Rail on its behalf, it also inherited the various corporation bus companies in the area. In 1973 agreement was reached with the National Bus Company to purchase most of Midland Red’s operations within the area, the only exceptions being long distance services that originated outside the PTE’s boundary. In consequence a number of Midland Red garages and vehicles were transferred to the PTE. A handful of services were transferred the other way – mainly rural services from Wolverhampton into Staffordshire and Midland Red was left with an operating area not dis-similar to a Polo Mint – with a hole in the middle. Midland Red used some of the money from the sale of its heart to buy some smaller operators (Green Bus, Rugeley in 1973, Harper Bros., Heath Hayes in 1974) and to build a new garage at Cannock (opened in 1977) as a base for services in that area.

‘Redhill’ lies just north of the PTE boundary and has had a Midland Red garage since the early 1950s. Like Lichfield to the north this was operationally involved with Sutton Coldfield garage on services on the Birmingham – Sutton – Lichfield corridor. With the transfer of Sutton to the PTE in 1973 and loss of much of the work to the south the garage has been marking time. Its days are numbered as it is to be closed when the new garage opens at Cannock in 1977.

At the height of the railway building boom Brownhills had two stations, three lines passing through and a number of colliery lines. Now it has an unused set of sidings on a stub end branch. Redhills benefits from a regular passenger service funded by WMPTE from Lichfield to Walsall and thence either to Stourbridge or Wolverhampton – I haven’t decided which yet. A small amount of freight traffic also uses the route to avoid the more congested lines towards Birmingham.

Being a former mining area a number of disused canals are to be found in the area, all are branches of the Wyrley & Essington Canal which used to carry coal off to the industries of the Black Country.