Hi again.

Back to the A.V.R. When constructing the Aire Valley stock and locos the drawings I used were very simple, not much more than basic dimensions . The early items of stock were built from card and details were drawn straight onto the card. OXO tin locos were built on the cut and fit method..All this is a bit hazy now. It is going on 60 years ago. Anyway stuff did get built to what I considered reasonable for the time..At some point I thought it might be a good idea to make "official" drawings of all the stock. These were not working drawings but drawings of the completed items. These were done on paper with pencil. There's a total of 25 drawings. Locos and passenger stock were done one to a sheet, freight stock up to four per sheet. The paper size is 8"x5" which may have been half foolscap =A5? Early Railway Modeller article drawings were done on paper and pencil but that's another story. These stock drawings have have kept very well, maybe because the were not exposed to light but they are not suitable for reproduction Then at some point I discovered what I call blue print paper. It's a good quality blue tinted tracing paper. Possibly the most interesting drawing was the one for the Gears on Aire Valley article. This was drawn double the size of the R.M. page. The scale of the drawing was 8mm to the foot except for the NTS items.. When reproduced the drawings were 4mm to the foot...I'm guessing this was not new One never knew how C.J.F. felt about you doing something like this The layout drawings, I preferred to call them surveys,a term cribbed from the Madder Valley, which I did for the Aire Valley Adventure series and the Redevelopment in reverse article were done to a scale of 2" to the foot. Big headed I know but I like to think these drawings helped to to define the articles. That's as maybe. These two surveys were taken to new height by Hero member tee bee. He is a bit of a computer whiz kid, though I use the term kid loosely. He took the 1971 drawing of the whole survey and removed the old Saltaire. and replaced it with the 1974 survey of the rebuilt Saltaire. When I first saw the new combined survey I didn't twig it and had to have it pointed out to me. I'm not sure if this drawing has had a public airing so I will attach it. Thank's Tom for this icing on the cake. Returning to the stock drawings. These have all been copied in ink on the blue print paper. These are on roughly A4 size paper and have been reduced to a total of ten drawings plus one small supplementary one. I am attaching the first two sheets.

I did a blog last night on the above. I thought I had inadvertent lost it. If you get two versions of it, my apologies.

Cheers. Derek.

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