Castle Rock Sidings is a puzzle as well as a simple sidings.
So far the easy version of the game is that the player has to pull out three or four cards from the pile which represents the wagons that must be shunted into position, however, the player must first shunt any brake van into the train first, as brake vans are a necessity on trains. Once the train is completed, the player wins.
The harder version of the game is the player must pull out wagon-cards from the pile and put them i
(The military base is to be given a name but for now it is just ‘the military base’)
The whole town was used as a military storage area because of how relatively remote it was. During the First World War, the first military base to be built was positioned near the river and within earshot of the railway. Many locomotives, and eventually tanks, were stored at this base. The locomotives most commonly stored there were the GCR 8K 2-8-0s built for the Railway Operating Division (ROD). De
I found this photo of some tanks which take the idea of camouflage to a whole new level. They’re disguised as coal wagons!
I reckon this could be a fun thing to model and if your layout is for exhibitions then it would be funny to see if people at an event know why the wagon looks a bit weird. The tanks are hidden under tarpaulin coloured as local coal and freight companies.
Once I get a flat wagon I am going to model this for a laugh but with a rough shape underneath to be the
One of my side projects is to rebuild the Fowler diesel mechanical I had made out of LEGO. I stupidly scrapped the first one to get parts for a ship and I since regretted it. I got to building the new model not too long ago.
LEGO Fowler 2.0 has revised body work and gearbox which should improve repairs (because the gears can break and the motor used is out of date). I haven’t completed it yet since I am expecting new parts which is different sizes to the parts used now. For now the battery
Once, this Lima engine had wheels and even a tender but now it is just a plastic shell...
So I decided that, given it will never work as a locomotive again, I could use it as scenery for my layout project. I also used it as a good base to practice weathering. I’ve added rust and moss to the locomotive, but it needs a little bit more rust.
At some point I’ll make new frames for it and prop it up on some sleepers to make it look like it had been stripped for parts in the past, bef
The main colours of Castle Rock Colliery are mainly red with yellow lining. Locomotives often wore Wasp Stripes too.
The colliery was never absorbed by the NCB and ran until the 1940s. A W4 Peckett loco was abandoned in the engine sheds since nobody bought it when the colliery closed down. The little 0-4-0 was eventually barricaded inside the shed by a fallen tree until volunteers came to restore the colliery. The loco wasn’t in too bad shape despite where it was left and was returned to steam
A few WD locomotives were built at the Riverside Works, along with Tanks and Aircraft.
The biggest locos that we’re built there were four of the Riddles WD 2-10-0 locomotives. They were sent over to Greece during the end of the war. They were named 101 ‘Broadsword’, 102 ‘Valiant’, 103 ‘Courageous’ and 104 ‘Dracana’ by the Works. As you can see, their names are based on Castle Rock’s medieval past. ‘Dracana’ is the name of the Castle itself.
During their time overseas, the four WDs fou
The Riverside Works is about half the size of Swindon Works before its end.
I’ve been gathering drawings of Swindon Works to create how Riverside Works would look, given that it was the Great Western Railway who built both the works.
Even though it is smaller than Swindon Works, it still has the capacity of around 50-70 locomotives at one time with 8 engine sheds and three repair shops.
If I were to model the innards of the Riverside Works, it would have to be Repair Shop
I am quite happy the outcome of this latest progression. The wooden frame stands very well and now it is ready to add the second part in the building’s structure; the wooden back boards. The back boards are what covers the back of the wooden frame, where the plasticard building walls will cover the front.
The angle of photography is perfect too, enabling me to take pictures of larger locomotives and stock (not like I have any ).
here are some photos of my 16 ton mineral wagon. I
The Riverside Loco Works was an idea I came up with for a video game where locomotives from preservation are serviced as fast as they would have in the steam era. (I watched a 30s film where an LMS loco was under general repair and was out in under two weeks!) This idea has now been incorporated into the Castle Rock project as the sheds that the railway heritage society and the colliery society share for repairs to their stock.
I’ve created a plan to build a small part of this loco
Castle Rock has a very wide selection of locomotives and rolling stock from across the British isles, ranging from a Southern E4 to an LMS Black 5. There’s even a BR 52 taken from Germany in WW2.
Riverside Works is home to most of these locomotives, keeping them safe and in running order.
Recently two American locomotives arrived at the works as a gift from a heritage railway in America, in which the Riverside Works does a lot of boiler work and parts creation for.
These two locomotiv
It begins!
(as soon as the wood board gets cut to size I will put up the build process on a ‘topic’ for easy updates)
This is the rough shape of the buildings surrounding the photo diorama ‘Riverside Works’. They are in the shape of a building I found at Calke Abbey, which is a National Trust owned area. In this area is a stable building that reminded me of a locomotive shed, which then sparked the idea of the diorama. (See second attached photo)
The buildings will b
Once, during my many story making times, I imagined what it would be like if we started to use steam power again. A best designs would be both the Riddles WD 2-10-0 and the 9F.
For this part of the story it involved freight movements of the 2025s where the WD 2-10-0 design was built to super-modern standards and runs on recycled coffee instead of coal (I don’t actually know if this would work, but it’s a nice idea)
Since not being built for the WD, the re-designed WDs had to find a new
During the Second World War, several Great Western Dean Goods locomotives were stored at the military base in Castle Rock as backup motive power just in case an air raid scored a hit on the loco sheds of the base. When BR came to claim Britain’s railway companies, all of the Deans went into service with the BR and most returned home to the west. A few of the Deans actually remained in Castle Rock until the railway was dismantled.
It was thought that all of these locomotives were sent away f
The castle in Castle Rock has always caused debate on how it came to be. Dracana.Castle had been repaired several times in the past due to damage, but it’s original walls and parts of it’s underground areas still prevail and date back to before the Roman era which is thousands of years before the Normans built the castles across Britain. The Normans did tinker with the castle, adding their own bits, but we’re also baffled by its creation, therefore seeing it as a sign from god that they would ta
(Storyline of the main station)
The Castle Rock line was built in the late 1800s by a private company, eventually being absorbed into the GWR by 1908. In 1928 the LMS joined in with the line, making it a GW and LMS joint line. The terminus was blown up in the First World War and left as a basic station until the GW and LMS decided it should be rebuilt again as a grand creation.
However, the whole station building probably has the strangest architecture of all British railway architect
One of the most out of place locomotives in the whole railway is probably the BR 52 2-10-0 German Heavy Freight Locomotive that turns up sometimes for wartime events. Owned by the the town’s local regiment since they stole it in the Second World War and somehow managed to smuggle it back to Britain, the BR 52 is a sight to behold when being put alongside the British countryside. Often looked after by the Riverside Works, the locomotive is very much in steam. It doesn’t get steamed up often but w
I have created a cardboard cutout of the track plan to scale (hopefully). The scenic section isn’t too big as it only measures 4ft long and 1ft 6in wide. The representation of the track in the image below actually measures the edges of the sleepers and not the rails.
The layout is made of two parts, the scenic area and the sector plate. The sector plate is supposed to be removable for easy transport and also because the layout will spend much of it’s days at the end of my bed, therefore th
(There will be some changes at a later date. I’ve written the whole thing down but I can’t remember where I put it. So until I find it, here’s the basic story)
Castle Rock colliery sits in the middle of a fictional town called Castle Rock. The town has this name because when the colliery was first built it was called “Castle Rock Colliery”, since there was a huge castle in the middle of the town on a rocky hill which gives the name Castle Rock. When more and more people moved to the
(just another project rambling)
I remember my grandfather owning a whole Bachmann ‘Big Hauler’ 4-6-0. However, being the rather destructive child I once was, it got damaged. It wasn’t too badly damaged could’ve been repaired, but I didn’t get to it in time before it got thrown out.
After finding the little 2-6-0 christmas train that I was hoping to repair and convert into a narrow gauge ROD loco, I remembered the huge ‘Big Hauler’ and set about to find it on the Interweb. So
The time has come where I have realised that trying to model my first layout in O gauge without any modelling experience is probably a really bad idea, so I’ve decided to change plans and build an OO gauge layout which could also double as a filming set for the first pilot episode of ‘Bucket’ (a work in progress, as is the title)
I have some previous experience in non-permanent Hornby train sets but none more than that, which is still more than my experience with O gauge.
The O gauge l
As in a lot of my blogs, this project is one of many that might not get done until later but I thought I’d share it with others:
I’ve already seen some models of locos in BR corporate blue and, since being a writer of alternate histories, I thought it would be fun to join in.
The Riddles 9F is the main loco I’ve seen in this version of blue and it looks good on it. Considering how young they were when they got scrapped, I often wonder what it would’ve been like if BR kept them for
