The model was designed and built by Iain Rice for and with Don Leeper. Sadly, Iain and Don are no longer alive, and we are indebted to Pauline Leeper for allowing us to become custodians of the layout on condition that we finish and exhibit it.

Featured in Iain Rices ‘Creating Cameo Layouts’ book ,  it was built as an experiment to see how the integrated cameo format worked on a larger foot-print, in this case for a unitary scenic model 2m long x 0.75m wide, with inbuilt backdrop and presentation/display.

Longwood Edge is a real place, high up on the western fringe of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. Nowadays it’s a leafy suburb, but a hundred and more years ago – the period in which the model is set – it was a village with its own identity. True to its name, the ‘Edge’ clung to the shoulder of a side-valley of the river Calder, a situation replicated in the model. Other than that, Longwood as depicted is a pure fiction.

Our Longwood boasts a cluster of textile mills and associated industries, ranging from an eighteenth-century ‘weavers’ row’ to a mid–Victorian mill producing high-grade woollen suiting. The industries around Longwood are served by a short side-branch of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal which terminates in a basin, together with two railways. At the lower level is the Longwood Town branch of the L&Y (Lancashire & Yorkshire), which we postulate as a southward extension (via a fictional tunnel under Lindley Moor) of the (real) Stainland branch – a short but heavily-engineered line from Greetland Junction on the L&Y main line.

On the model, a small L&Y wayside station (Longwood Basin) and a goods depot serve the canal basin and associated industries. At the higher level is Longwood Edge station, terminus of a newly-built suburban branch to the L&NWR (London & North Western Railway), a speculative venture intended to open up areas to the north and west of Huddersfield for residential development. The period is set in 1910.