Warley Model Railway Club

Railway modelling in most scales and gauges

Warley Model Railway Club, Unit 1F Pearsall Drive, Oldbury, West Midlands, B69 2RA

Registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) Charity No: 1153792

Exhibited for the first time at The Warley National Model Railway Exhibition in 1999, this layout follows the ethos of the original Far Twittering & Oysterperch Railway. A circular layout, topped by a multi-coloured umbrella, together with coloured lighting.  

All stock and scenery is based on the imaginative and humorous drawings of Rowland Emmett in his book “Far Twittering”, which reflect the eccentricities of British rural railways of the early to mid 20th Century.  When asked how he came up with his strange designs, Emett is quoted as saying "It is a well known fact that all inventors get their first ideas on the back of an envelope. I take slight exception to this, I use the front so that I can incorporate the stamp and then the design is already half done.” Not much different to how a number of model railways are designed then!

The first model railway to Emmetts design was a large scale passenger carrying line “The Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Branch Railway”. It ran in 1951, at the Festival of Britain and was one of the festival’s most popular attractions,

Our model keeps alive the tradition of a series of smaller scale models. The first well known smaller scale layout was built by Eric Fox and featured in Model Railway News in January 1967.  Fortunately some of the original stock from that first and subsequent layouts still exist in the club collection. This stock has been renovated to operate on the layout and benefits from changes in technology, along with more recently constructed complementary rolling stock. The drawings of the locomotives for the first layout by Fox are owned by a member of the club.

The layout spent the summer of 2001 at The National Railway Museum, York

Far Twittering and Oysterperch Railway - Odd Scale