“Maam Road” or “Bóthar an Mháma” in the Irish language (meaning road to the mountain pass) is a fictitious layout depicting a small West of Ireland through station with an adjacent goods yard. The striking backscene of a wild mountainous landscape strongly resembles that of Connemara or Mayo through which - now closed - railway lines actually ran. The railway buildings have all been designed based on Irish prototypes and scratch built using advanced CAD/laser wood-cutting techniques. All rolling stock has been scratch built including Irish tender steam locomotives and diesel locomotives with examples of Class 121, 141 and C Class in a range of Irish (CIE) liveries. Some goods wagons have been produced by advanced CAD/3-D printing, scratch built or from kits. Passenger stock is all made from scratch or metal kits.
The trackwork includes a passing loop to enable locomotives to run around their train in order to proceed in the opposite direction. A goods shed and cattle dock are served by sidings/head-shunts at the rear of the layout allowing for shunting of wagons. The scenic area is 8.5 feet by 2.25 feet and is fed from a fiddle-yard at each end allowing through trains to operate. One fiddle-yard is a train turntable and the other a traverser (each fiddle-yard is 4 feet in length). This adds to interest for the viewing public.
Operation of locomotives can use either DC or DCC as appropriate but points, semaphore signals and background sounds are remotely controlled by DCC (Roco/Fleischmann Z21 system).
The use of a photographic backscene, mirrors at each end of the scenic section, careful placing of trees/foliage together with background country-side sounds gives the layout a spacious atmosphere of being in the open Irish landscape.