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About this blog

This blog complements my Pre-Grouping Blog by covering my modelling activities in the Broad Gauge era of the Great Western Railway.  As with the earlier blog, I intend to cover the various methods by which I construct elements of the Broad Gauge scene.  For more background see https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blogs/entry/17705-a-different-type-of-railway/

 

Entries in this blog

General

A Change of Gear

The ‘gear’ I’m referring to in the title is my 3D-printer, which I have just replaced.   As I mentioned in my previous post, my Geeetech E180 is no longer supported, with essential items like replacement print-heads not available. I have therefore bought a Prusa Mini+ as its replacement. The E180 was cheap and took me some time to optimise, following a rather shaky start, but eventually performed very well, until key components started wearing out.   My choice of the Prusa ma
MikeOxon

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Broad Gauge Covered Van

Because of various distractions, I’ve not had much time for model-building recently. I have however been spending quite a lot of time thinking about those very early days of the GWR when those first engines, which I modelled last year, were being delivered. Some of these engines were delivered by canal to West Drayton, where it seems that the first depot of the GWR was established. At that time, the way ahead was far from certain and concerns about the desirability of adopting Brunel’s proposals
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Broad Gauge Mail Coach - part 4

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time thinking about undergear for my Mail Coach. Apart from building a kit for an N6 Horse Box, which included fairly detailed brake gear, this is an aspect I have tended to ignore in most of my scratch-built models.   I have described myself as an ‘impressionist’ modeller but, somehow, now that I am exploring the Broad Gauge and an earlier period, I feel a certain responsibility to try to be more historically accurate.   The Broad Gauge Soci
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3 - BG Wagons - Sheep, Coke, & Coal

I shall round off my modelling of the early wagons, produced for the GWR during the formative years before 1840, by considering three types intended for specific duties, rather than the ‘general purpose’ wagons described in my previous two posts.   Sheep Truck 1840   A sheep truck is one of the types mentioned in Whishaw’s ‘The Railways of Great Britain and Ireland’, published 1842. He described these ‘trucks’ as having high sides, four wheels, and to weigh 8,237 lbs. Apart f
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Broad Gauge Trio – 2nd Movement

In my previous post, I described modelling of some of the earliest wagons ordered for the GWR in the late 1830s. At that time, much of the railway was still under construction – the complete route from London to Bristol was not opened until 30th June 1841. Information on these early wagons is sparse, although we are fortunate to have several illustrations by J.C.Bourne, which are sufficiently accurate to indicate the main features.   Bristol Goods Shed – J.C.Bourne 1842  
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Aeolus Chassis and Tender

I constructed the chassis for my Aeolus model from several separately printed components:   Outside frames, with rivet detail Inside frames, with splasher tops Front Buffer beam, linking frames Rear drag-bar and footplate, linking frames   After printing these parts, I fused them together by welding the seams using a fine-tip soldering iron set to 200°C. This proved easier than I expected, partly because the PLA plastic has low thermal conductivity, so i
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Bodies & Components

I’ve had one or two messages from people who say they have enjoyed reading through my blogs. I should therefore sound a note of caution, especially in the field of 3D printing – my posts follow my own, often halting, progress along a learning curve and I still feel myself to be a long way from an end-point. I was looking back at some of my earlier designs and although they came out reasonably well in the end, my methods were something of a ‘dog’s breakfast’. I hope you won’t repeat too many of m
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‘Sir Watkin’ for Bullo Pill

As the end of another year approaches, I’ve been looking back over the last few rather strange years, very much influenced by the Covid-19 virus. As it happens, 2019 was also the year when I acquired my 3D-printer and embarked on a new phase of model-making. Lock-down provided me with ample opportunity to practise 3D-model making.   A couple of years before that, I had moved my attention to the Broad Gauge era of the GWR, following the discovery that several of my wife’s ancestors work
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Broad Gauge Horse Box

My ‘Geeetech E180’ printer seems to be performing exceptionally well at present, so I have been cracking on with some items from my ‘to do’ list.   After the poor results I was getting last year, I made a point of going through the long list of adjustable parameters in the ‘Cura’ slicing software. I suspect that the most significant change I made was to the ‘line width’ setting. The default setting matched the print-head diameter of 0.4 mm but I reduced the setting to 0.3mm. Since the
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Hinged Doors for a Luggage Box

By the end of the previous post, I had completed the chassis for my planned Luggage Box. I expected the Luggage Box itself to be a simple construction: two panelled ends, two sides, and a roof.   Following my now usual practice, I created each of these parts as a separate ‘body’ in ‘Fusion 360’, so that each could be laid flat on the printer bed and could be printed in a few minutes, to the required panel thickness. A wave of a 200° soldering iron to seal the joints and that would be t
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Waverley - Between the Frames

Looking at the frames of my ‘Rob Roy’ model, I realised that there is a very visible ‘yawning gap’ between the frames, which really needs to be filled with something. It never bothered me with ‘narrow’ gauge ‘double-0’ models but a 28 mm gap is a different matter altogether.   The instructions for the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) kit of the Gooch Goods, on which I have based my model, contain very little information beyond: “note: the kit provides for two slidebars per cylinder but it was
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GWR Posting Carriage - Part 2

I hadn’t expected to make quite such rapid progress with this model – I must be getting slightly more proficient at using the ‘Fusion 360’ CAD software!   In part 1, I showed how I created the rather complex profile of the sides of the Posting Carriage by extruding a drawing of one end. I drew the end profile as a series of straight lines and arcs, traced over a drawing contained in one of the very useful Broad Gauge Society data sheets.     While this process gave
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‘Fire Fly’ class - Research

Introduction   One thing leads to another and what, for me, started as a small project to build the interesting-looking ‘Posting Carriage’ from the early years of Brunel’s Broad Gauge railway, for the GWR, rapidly extended to include a Luggage Truck and Horse Box.   All these vehicles appeared in some of the beautiful lithographs by J.C Bourne, published in 1846. In particular, his illustration of Bristol Temple Meads Station, shows an engine of Gooch’s ‘Fire-Fly’ class headi
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An Ugly Duckling - 3

If my last post was about ‘making choices’, the subject of this one is definitely ‘rivets’. These earlier engines seem to have been covered in the things so, thank goodness, 3D-printing software tools have come to my aid in reproducing them all. In fact I only had to draw one or two and all the rest were produced by tools such as ‘pattern on path’ which instantly created long rows of the things, following the contours of the surface on which they are placed. There must be at least 350 rivets on
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An Ugly Duckling – 4

Now, wake up at the back there, @Mikkel, this is a new post on this subject.   At the end of my previous post, I wrote “Next, I shall turn my attention to designing and constructing a suitable chassis.”, so that’s the subject for today.   Frames   The frames of these early engines were rather unusual in that they stopped short in front of the leading drivers. The front bogie was attached directly to the boiler in traction-engine style. The frames were also quite lig
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Wooden Goods Brake Van

In a previous post, I commented that I felt I was getting the hang of 3D-modelling. That didn’t mean that I can’t still get into a mess and sometimes things happen in ‘Fusion 360’ for which I have no explanation. For example, I was approaching the final stages of the chassis I shall describe below and found that one of the complete axle-box assemblies had moved about a centimetre from its proper place on the sole-bar. Back-tracking through the history made no difference, as the software seemed t
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Broad Gauge Cattle Train

Now that I have completed my research into, and constructed models of, the Mail Train that is described in the BoT Accident report of 1868, regarding the collision near Bullo Pill on the South Wales line, I am turning my attention to the Goods Train.     my Mail Train models, based on accident report from Bullo Pill 1868   According to the accident report, the goods train was headed by the locomotive ‘Tantalus’ and comprised 20 cattle wagons, plus a third-class carr
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Cautionary Tales – 2

Last year (October 2021) I wrote a post under this same title in which I referred to the need for caution, when making models based on published drawings. In some cases, even manufacturers’ drawings, especially in the early days, can be suspect, since the finished product was based more on the skills of individual craftsmen, who trusted their practical knowledge over that emerging from the drawing office!   When I designed my recent model of ‘Vulcan’, I derived the dimensions from sket
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Broad Gauge Mail Coach - part 2

My previous post in this series ended on a 'cliff-hanger' – how was I to escape from the 'hinge' problem?   After a little thought, the solution proved very simple. I used my jewellers' snips to cut a 1mm strip from the edge of some brass sheet and then folded the strip to make three staples, which pressed into the slots on the adjacent compartment doors. It was fortunate that the doors were hung 'back to back' so that the staples could be kept quite short.   I did discover a
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Adding Cladding

In commenting on an earlier post, Michael Edge pointed out that the visible diameter of a locomotive boiler is greater than the diameter of the metal boiler itself and he suggested that I should have bought a larger diameter tube for my model of 'Tantalus'.   I had already been thinking about how to add the visible boiler rings and then had the idea “why not 3D-print the boiler cladding?” After all, the prototype boiler was metal, whereas the cladding was initially of wooden planks, th
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‘Fire Fly’ class – Part Three

It has taken me a considerable amount of thought before deciding how to proceed with the next stage of building my my ‘Fire Fly’ class model. The obvious method would be to construct a strong frame around the outside, as I have done for previous models, but it doesn’t really work with this prototype.     Fire-Fly replica at Didcot showing Boiler Support   As I showed in the previous post, the prototype was built with four short frames linking the smokebox and firebo
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From the Stars to Fire Fly

It’s been a wet Bank Holiday here and, stuck indoors, I found myself thinking about what it was that made the ‘Fire Fly’ class so special. The following notes reflect my musings:   After all, these engines looked very similar to their immediate predecessors, the ‘Stars’ that the GWR bought from R Stephenson & Co. This similarity is obvious in the first engine photographs ever taken, which include ‘Polar Star’, outside Cheltenham shed in the late 1840s.   ‘Polar Star
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3D-Printed Cattle Wagon - 3

Building the Chassis   This is an addendum to my previous post about building a Broad Gauge cattle wagon body. Although I built a chassis at that stage, I found the construction was too light and would not support wheel-sets adequately. I should have remembered that I had the same problem with the first design I did for a carriage chassis, so this post is an aide memoire to help me avoid the same mistakes again.   My chassis is basically a rectangle to fit under the body, wit
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Six-wheel Luggage Van - 1861

One of the vehicles I need for my planned 1868 Mail Train is a Luggage Van, which was the last vehicle in the train that was involved in the Bullo Pill accident.   When I noticed that the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) has launched a new series of laser-cut plastic kits, which included an early luggage van, I thought it would be interesting to try building one. As readers of my blog will know, I like to scratch-build as much as possible but there is always a lot to be learned from building
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Broad Gauge Mail Coach - part 5

My progress, since the previous post in this series, has been slower than anticipated, mainly because of the need to build a chassis that deviated from that intended for the BGS kit. I also took a few false turns, which led to a significant amount of re-work.   In the comments following my first post about this coach, I said that I prefer scratch building to kits. I suppose what I really meant is that I like to do things my own way. The down side of the scratch building approach is tha
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