In my previous entry, I mentioned some of the research that I have been doing into Brunel's 'Broad Gauge' railway. There are several old books that provide a detailed survey of the early days of the GWR. One that I found particularly useful is the 'History of the GWR' by G A Nokes (2nd edtion, 1895). The preface begins: "I would remind the reader that it is 'The Story of the Broad Gauge' that is here chronicled, so that while in the first thirty years or so of the Great Western Railway's existen
Despite what I wrote in my previous post , I decide to add a ‘rolling’ chassis to my model of ‘Edith’, to help me assess the overall appearance of this little engine. Printing and assembling some of the very small parts created some new challenges.
Our heating system failed last week, just as the weather turned colder. I had not noticed before how sensitive my 3d printer is to the temperature in my work room. For the first time, I experienced a fractured filament as it wound off the
In my previous post in this blog, I described my chance discovery of the former narrow-gauge system that linked the farms on the Buscot Park estate to a distillery and other works, located at a wharf on the upper River Thames.
This was especially interesting to me because I had introduced an imaginary narrow-gauge (NG) line on my ‘North Leigh’ layout, to serve the local quarries for Cotswold stone and the sawmills around Wychwood Forest, by connecting them to a railhead at North Leig
North Leigh Station, with Goods Yard and Narrow Gauge System Beyond
When I first decided to attribute the location of my small layout to North Leigh in Oxfordshire, the only basis I had was a map dated 1849, which shows a branch line from the OW&WR main line running south from near Stonesfield to Witney. Of course, this line was never built and Witney was eventually served by the now closed Fairford Branch described at http://www.fairfordbranch.co.uk/ , from which website the fol
(the following explanation is intended to help any new readers to find their way around this blog)
Since I started this blog in 2013, I have used it as a diary to record my progress in creating a Victorian GWR branch line. Since the blog follows the meanderings of my mind, it has no real structure and this 'introduction' is, therefore, an attempt to help a new reader to find his/her way around.
There are two main strands: firstly, the documenting of my exploration of the
I find it hard to believe that more than six years have passed since I started to build a model of one of the early standard gauge engines, transferred to the GWR when they acquired the Oxford, Worcester, & Wolverhampton Railway (The Old Worse & Worse, as it was colloquially known)
I have been reminding myself of what is in this, my older ‘Pre-Grouping’ blog, before I changed over to (became obsessed with) the Broad Gauge! My model of No.184, shown below, was the last model
