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 for the ‘broad gauge’. were still being hotly debated.

Illustration from Measom’s Guide to the GWR 1851

Whereas we have quite a lot of information about the early locomotives, the other vehicles – carriages and wagons – have received much less attention but, fortunately, the late Eddy Brown of the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) collected a lot of information about these, which was produced as a series of Data Sheets, available to BGS members. I have already made models of several vehicles, which I based on the information from these Data Sheets but I also became aware that there are gaps that were either omitted altogether or received scant attention in these documents.

For example, when I built my ‘Coal Wagon for Bullo Pill’, I couldn’t find anything about 12-ton coal wagons in the BGS Data Sheets. Fortunately, however, I found an article in the BGS Journal ‘Broadsheet’ No.9 (April 1983), which described such a wagon and included a sketch. That same article included the comment that “The basic coal wagon shown featured many detail differences such as door types, number of doors, number of planks etc. In one case the addition of roof and sliding door produced a lime truck.”. That set me thinking about other variants and recently I discovered a list of OPC/BR drawings in ‘Broadsheet’ No.8 (Jan.1983). These drawings cover the short period from 1852 to 1854/5 and include a group of wagons sharing a standard design of underframe with various types of body. One that caught my attention is described as “Covered Goods Wagon, Henson's Patent Slide: Sliding side doors, patent sliding roof door, no breaks shewn. Body of wood with outside framing of wood and iron to accommodate sliding doors. Body side planking extending beyond the corner posts.”

Covered vans seem to have been rare in early BG days, since most goods (and third-class passengers) were carried in open wagons, often fitted with hoops to carry a canvas tilt cover. I was intrigued by the reference to ‘Henson’s Patent Slide’. Henson is better known in connection with the LNWR and, according to the ‘Steam index’: “In 1841 Henry Henson was a civil engineer in charge of the Camden workshops of the London and Birmingham Railway. When the L&BR became part of the L&NWR Henson continued to hold that position and in 1847 he was appointed head of the wagon department of the Southern Division.”  Possibly, members of this community with more expertise about LNWR matters may be able to shed more light on the nature of Henson’s Patent.

Henson’s Covered Wagon – Proc.Inst.Mech.Eng.,1851

I also realised that, just as in the case of the coal wagon I modelled, this van was the subject of dimensioned drawings in Alan Prior’s book ‘19th Century Railway Drawings’. Thus, I had the basis for constructing a model by following my usual method of copying over a printed drawing using ‘Fusion 360’ software. To re-cap, I imported the drawing as a ‘canvas’ into ‘Fusion 360’ and then drew a series of rectangles to represent the outlines of various body features.

Next, I extruded the areas enclosed between the rectangles by appropriate distances, to create solid bodies of the depths needed to represent framing components, as shown below:

For the roof, I extruded the arc cross-section from one end and then added braces underneath to maintain the shape. I also added surface details to represent the roof hatches.

I use the ‘pattern on path’ commands in ‘Fusion 360’ to create regular structures, such as the cross braces and the planked sides of the van, automatically.

The underframe was of the same design and wheelbase as that I made before, for my model coal wagon, so I only needed to increase the length of my existing model to match the new body.

So, that’s the hard part done and the next thing is to transfer the design files to the ‘Cura’ slicing software, which prepares the ‘gcode’ files for my Geeetech E180 printer. I printed the various components in four separate print jobs. For the record, the printing times were:

• Roof 70 mins.
• Sides X2 73 mins
• Ends X2 31 mins
• Chassis 65 mins

As I have mentioned before, I prefer to break the printing into several parts, so that I can check each part separately for any problems, without having to wait for the entire job to be completed.

3D-printed Components

I was very pleased to find that the roof printed well, despite having no ‘honeycomb’ helpers to support the hollow underside. My basic FDP printer successfully bridged the 10mm gaps between the cross bracing, saving both time and material.

3D-printed Van Roof

All that remained was to fuse the components together by running a 200°C soldering tip along the seams between the parts:

3D-prnted Covered Van – assembled

As usual with my models, there are various details to be added but I feel it has captured the appearance of an unusual prototype from the early 1850s.

Mike