St Holdens is an EM gauge layout dreamed of for 30 years and very much still in progress. It grew from Richard Gower’s teenage memories of the ancient locos and rusting infrastructure of North Essex and Cambridge, where he lived, went to school, spotted engines and eventually worked.
The Maldon, Braintree and Saffron Walden Railway was authorised in the 1840s, but only the Maldon to Braintree section via Witham was built. St Holdens imagines the line was finished: a fictional town near the Sampfords on the Essex and Suffolk border, with coal and grain coming in and malt and farm produce going out. It assumes the railway ran on from Braintree to Cambridge, meeting the Stour Valley line near Haverhill, with a push-pull branch to Saffron Walden and a junction for the line from Thaxted.
It is late summer 1955. Services south to Braintree are suspended after an “unfortunate incident” at the nearby USAF base (otherwise known as a lack of space in the railway room), so St Holdens has become a temporary terminus with a busy sub-shed of 31A Cambridge. A hastily laid spur serves RAF Debden, worked by a J70 tram engine somehow rescued from the Stratford scrap line.
Stock is a mix of converted ready-to-run and kit-built, and the buildings a mix of scratch-built and laser-cut.
