I see that we’re now in the 10th year since I started writing my pre-grouping blog. Looking back, I realise how much my approach to railway modelling has changed over that period. There have been two major technical innovations and one significant change of emphasis in my interests.

 

The first technical innovation, which occurred soon after I started exploring the earlier period, was the Silhouette Cutter, which opened up the possibility of creating complex panelled carriage sides. Since this cutter could also register cutting patterns with colour printing, it also made it possible for me to reproduced the complex liveries especially popular in the 19th century.

 

My late 19th-century train using Silhouette cut and printed carriage sides

 

A few years later, I made my next technical step into 3D printing, which allowed me to move away from ‘decorating’ essentially flat surface and to create all sorts of raised details onto components such as boiler cladding and riveted frames, as well as more complex vehicle shapes.

 

My 3D-printed Broad Gauge train from the 1840s

 

My interest in railway history received a major ‘nudge’, when I discovered that members of my wife’s family had starting working for the GWR almost from the beginning, progressing from general labourers in 1840 and working up the long career-road, through cleaners, firemen, and eventually succeeding as 1st class enginemen. Their employment records provided me with many interesting details about where they were employed and which engines they drove.

 

Since that discovery, my interest in the early history of the GWR and, especially the broad gauge era, has continued to grow, which led to the creation of several models to help me appreciate more completely the ‘look and feel’ of those early railways.

 

It has also meant that I somewhat lost track of parts of the ‘world’ I initially created around my fictional station of ‘North Leigh’ , on the planned but never built branch from the OW&WR ‘Cotswold’ line to Witney.

 

Looking back over some of the comments on my posts, I realise that I did create some links between the Wilcote family in North Leigh and my later interests in the area around Bullo Pill in Gloucestershire, where members of my wife’s family once lived. In a reply to a comment by @Mikkel, I ‘discovered’ that Lady Wilcote*, before her marriage had lived at Flaxley Hall, a little to the West of Gloucester. The remark was made in the context of a ‘luggage truck’ and it set me thinking about how the move from Gloucestershire to Wilcote might have been achieved.

 

Flaxley Hall, Gloucestershire, (DAP ‘aquarelle’ painting)

 

I thought about my model of a ‘pantechnicon’, which could have been used for the job, but then realised that I never completed a model of the ‘road van truck’, needed to transport the pantechnicon over the GWR. It was a quick and easy lengthening of the ‘carriage truck' that I’d already built for Brunel’s Britzka’.

 

3D-printed components of Road Van Truck

 

Once I had printed the new version, I had everything needed to create a train to transport all the newly-wed Lady Wilcote’s goods and chattels to North Leigh station. The key vehicle was ‘Knee’s Furniture Van’. This vehicle, when loaded on to the GWR road van truck, took full advantage of the generous BG loading gauge.

 

My model ‘Pantechnicon’ on GWR road van truck

 

I like to set up my models as a ‘diorama’, by photographing them against a plain background and then superimposing a suitable back-scene by means of ‘Photoshop’. As shown below, I assembled a complete ‘house removal’ train, comprising a luggage truck, then the pantechnicon on its truck, followed by my recently-constructed closed van , all brought up at the rear with a horse box  and carriage on its truck. The whole train is in the charge of the Gooch bogie-class 4-4-0T ‘Aurora’.

 

My diorama of a ‘removals’ train headed by 4-4-0ST ‘Aurora’

 

As a slightly more ambitious ‘montage’, I have also superimposed a photo of my ‘removals’ train onto an engraving of Ealing Station, derived from Measom’s Guide to the GWR, of 1851. I’m not sure what route the train must have taken but it seems that it first travelled to Paddington Depot and then made a separate journey out to North Leigh, via Oxford.

 

My ‘removal van’ train passing through Ealing Station

 

Mike

 

*footnote:

I know a little about Amy Wilcote's mother - she was born in 1849 at Flaxley Abbey, into the family of the Crawley-Boevey Baronetcy, and married Lord Wilcote in about 1870.  Flaxley Abbey is not very far from Bullo Pill and she once commented on the accident there, saying "all those poor cows".