Entry posted by Gingerbread
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I recently stumbled across an interesting article covering old Toads. It was written by John Lewis, apparently published in January 1983 in a publication called "Scale Trains" (which I don't recognise), and formed the first part of a five-part series. A couple of copies of these articles are available in the files section of the Yahoo GWR-elist, in different formats. It provides some useful background information for the one I modelled, so I thought it worthwhile to summarise that here.
The type of Toad which I modelled is referred to by John Lewis as the 1882 type.
The earliest type covered is the 1871 type, which was of the same general design (wooden outside frames for the body), but with wooden underframe and only 15'6" long with 9' wheelbase. Axleboxes were grease, and brakes were of wagon type, with four wooden blocks. Initially they had no roofs to the verandahs, but roofs appear to have been added to some of them between 1880 and 1885. Various heights were recorded in the register, between 5'6" and 8', but it's not clear whether this represents variation in construction or just in method of measuring (inside/outside, including/excluding solebar, etc).
About 300 appear to have been built, and typically they lasted until about 1900. Photographs are rare.
Next comes the 1874 type, where dimensions increased to the same as my model - namely 18' long, 11'6" wheelbase. In other respects they seem to have been like the 1871 type - wooden underframe, grease axleboxes, initially no roof to the verandah, and probably wooden brake shoes, though some roofs fitted later, and later vans built from new with verandah roofs and probably with iron brake shoes.
About 220 were built, generally withdrawn over period 1890-1914, though one lasted until 1922, one found its way to the Kent and East Sussex Railway (via Shropshire and Montgomery?), one to London & India Dock Co, one to Burry Port and Gwendraeth Valley Railway.
The 1882 version switched to iron underframe - initially 9" bulb angle, later 9"x3" channel. Whereas the earlier versions appear to have retained grease axleboxes, most of these appear to have switched to oil around 1900.
Just under 400 were built, over the period 1882-7, and generally lasted until the 1920s and 1930s.
An unknown number were upgraded and given the diagram number AA16 around 1915-22, which involved switching to self-contained buffers and/or clasp brakes. These generally lasted until the 1930s, with one lasting to 1950.
Some were converted to tools vans for the Signals Department, 13 such examples are listed, typically converted in the 1920s and lasting until the 1930s, with the last one condemned in 1946.
Though not specifically mentioned in the text, photographs suggest that the AA16 and Engineers' versions had extra handrails, and the handrails changed from grey to white - not clear if these changes were specific to those versions or were general by the later date. I think Richard Brummitt suggested earlier that the handrails became white around WWI.
I was impressed by Missy's model of a toad (of the more modern variety) at St Albans recently - complete with hollow chimney. My earlier variant appears to have had a conical cap (presumably to keep out the rain?), so I'm not convinced that a hollow chimney would be justified for me.
Currently the main challenge is that I think my toads should be branded "Wellington", which seems rather a long name to squeeze into the space available - not that it's likely to be very legible at that size, specially in an italic script. Perhaps I could justify using "Crewe" or "Oxley" instead.
Unfortunately only one picture in this blog entry - the quality of the pictures in the copy of the article is poor, and their copyright status isn't clear. And there's not enough progress on my models to justify a new photo - but I included one anyway, mostly to show the initial stage of my next project, an S9 4-wheel third coach from Worsley Works on a David Eveleigh underframe.
I blame Mikkel's recent blog post for inspiring me to tackle this one from my pile of outstanding kits. 
But I don't think but his painting techniques are going to work on this particular model as the cream areas appear to be too small to "flood fill", so I'm trying the "start with cream upper works and add chocolate lines" approach, with limited success. There's a couple of brake thirds with much larger areas of cream which look promising for a trial sometime later...
David
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