I.K. Brunel wrote the following, in a letter to T. E. Harrison on 5th March 1838: “... let me call your attention to the appearance - we have a splendid engine of Stephenson's, it would be a beautiful ornament in the most elegant drawing room and we have another of Quaker-like simplicity carried even to shabbyness but very possibly as good as engine, but the difference in the care bestowed by the engine man, the favour in which it is held by others and even oneself, not to mention the public, is striking.”

 

My own models of early GWR engines are no more than ‘ornaments’ but, as such, have given me a great deal of pleasure. They have led me to take a greater interest in those very early days of the railway and its hesitant progress through the many set-backs experienced at the time. Members of the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) may have read my brief accounts in that society’s recent Newsletters.

 

Four ‘early’ GWR Engine Models

 

The GWR was conceived initially as primarily a passenger-carrying enterprise so, after the engines, the first vehicles needed were carriages for first and second class passengers. At that time, there was no concept that ‘ordinary’ people had any need to travel any distance from their own towns or villages. The model for these early carriages was the road-coaches of the time and, indeed, one of Brunel’s justifications for his ‘broad gauge’ was that it would allow large wheels to be placed outside the main body of the coach, as in the case of contemporary stage coaches. This was quickly found to be impractical, since large wheels blocked the entrances to the compartments, but the overall construction methods initially followed road vehicle principles.

 

I decided to make a model of one of the earliest types of 2nd-class carriage, to help me appreciate the differences between it and later designs. The most obvious distinction is, of course, size but it is clear that the dynamics of railway vehicles was not understood at the time and the choice of a 6 foot wheel base for a vehicle intended to run at speed on 7 foot gauge track seems unfortunate, to say the least! It is hardly surprising that the rough riding of these carriages caused sufficient concern for them to be ‘ordered off the line’ following a Board Meeting on 12th July 1838.

 

In creating my model, I followed my usual practice of extruding the various components from a reference drawing – in this case, Data Sheet 102 from the BGS.

 

Creating my 3D model in ‘Fusion 360’
 

I have often advocated breaking a model down into smaller parts, to reduce the time needed to print each part so that any necessary corrections can be applied quickly. As in most things, it is best not to be dogmatic about this, especially in the case of a small model like this carriage, where the overall printing time is quite short anyway.

 

In fact, I discovered with this model that printing the body in one piece produced a better surface finish than was obtained by printing the sides and ends separately. This may be down to the settings I use with my printer but the sides that I printed flat on the printer bed showed much more surface grain than those printed upright, as shown in the examples below:

 

Sides and Ends printed flat on Printer Bed

 

The time taken to print the above set of parts was 56min.

 

For comparison, the time taken to print the complete body was only 1h 32min, including internal partitions between the compartments, which resulted in a rigid structure with a fine surface finish. I printed the chassis separately as shown below:

 

Body Printed in One Piece above Separate Chassis

 

In this case, printing the sides separately would be a poor decision, as the time saved is insignificant and the surface finish is poorer – and there is the additional need to align and assemble the various components after printing.

 

Early Carriages in Context

 

Another member of the BGS brought to my attention the historical engineering collection held in the National NetworkRail Archives  Amongst them, I found a rather perplexing set of drawings of Maidenhead Depot. When the first section of line opened to the public from Paddington, the original terminus was on the East bank of the River Thames near Taplow, where the bridge across to Maidenhead had not yet been completed. According to James Wyld’s ‘Great Western Railway Guide’ of 1839:

 

“The Great Western Railway Company have a considerable station here, 42 feet above the level of the London depot, with engine-house, police station, and the usual offices. There is a jail for debtors and felons. The principal trade is in malt, meal, and timber, and the passing traffic derived from the Great Western road and the railway”

 

All this seems to have disappeared, once the bridge across the Thames was completed, but the Archive drawings include one of foundations for what appears to be a carriage shed, with a central traverser to serve several bays. There is also a base for a small turntable, with a note on the drawing stating “This Turnplate to be carried as far West as the Solid Ground will allow”. I assume that this refers to the embankment leading to the yet-to-be-built bridge across the River Thames.

 

Out of interest, I took this drawing (Ref.NRCA161489) and used ‘Fusion 360’ to create a 3D rendering, as shown below. I added some of my 1837 carriage models, to show how well they would have fitted within the planned structure.

 

3D Model of Carriage Shed Foundations with 3 Carriages

 

Whether this shed was ever built is open to conjecture since these early carriages did not last very long.

 

Rapid Carriage Development

 

One of the reasons why I like to build these early vehicles is so that I can use them to demonstrate how rapidly the designs evolved as they began to move away from their road-coach origins.

 

Sometimes, there seem to have been backward steps before ideas moved on towards our modern concepts. For example, according to Whishaw ‘The Railways of Great Britain and Ireland’, 1842, the GWR rapidly abandoned the use of closed 2nd-class carriages, in favour of open sides, because they were thought to detract from the numbers paying for 1st class!

 

Here are my models of the 1837 carriage next to the slightly later ‘open’ 2nd, showing the overall increase in dimensions, together with the use of six wheels.

 

My models of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ 2nd class carriages

 

The difference in scale, when compared with more ‘modern’ practice (in my context, the late 19th century!), was really brought home when I placed my model 1837 carriage alongside one of the well-known Tri-ang GWR clerestory models!

 

My 1837 model against a ‘00’ Tri-ang Clerestory coach.

 

Mike