Tweedale - To The Docks
With the Tweemoor Yard scenery all but finished, I was ready to move on to second of the three scenes on this layout extension board. I decided to tackle the (as yet unnamed) port next. This was the starting point...
The area is 17 inches wide by 13 inches deep. The trackwork consists of a simple fork, and not a very satisfactory one at that. I had originally installed a handmade point to a smaller radius than the Peco one in order to squeeze in a capacity of 3 wagons for each siding. Unfortunately it was plagued with buffer-locking problems. I now appreciate the importance of adding transitions to curves! I couldn't face rebuilding it, so it was replaced with the Peco point after all, which set me back to a capacity of 2 wagons per siding. As one spot was required for manipulating the brake van, that only left 3 spots for revenue earning vehicles. With the 'card and waybill' operating scheme used, that equated to just 6 waybills for the entire port traffic.
As it happens I've been finding it hard to drum up much import-export business anyway. The Tweedalers are too darned self sufficient, that's the trouble, and most of their needs are provided by the dale itself. The mine and sawmill are working at full capacity so any exported minerals or timber would need to be diverted from established customers which I didn't want to do. Instead the port seems to have morphed into Tweedale's milling zone, a neglected area of enterprise until now. Anything that needs to be crushed, ground up, hammered or rendered to a pulp gets dealt with here. The railway is already moving flour, vegetable oil, animal feed and mushy peas from the port even though their respective industries have yet to fully materialize. The plan is to add a couple of modeled mills in the dock area. I'm hoping these tall structures, one at each side, will help frame the scene and funnel the eye towards the town rising up at the back.
The first steps were to embed the track in cardboard roadway and add the water. The latter simply consisted of painting a foam-board base then covering it with a sheet of clear plasticard. Although the water is dead calm and ripple free, some might even say stagnant, I'm happy enough with the result. A timber quayside has been added, which I thought would look more interesting than plain brick or stone. A start has been made on the buildings associated with one of the mills, in this case an oil-seed crushing mill.
At a major port not far from where I live, the waterside mills went in for grandiose names like Clarence, Premier, Grosvenor and such like. It struck me that they sounded more like hotels than anything, so I thought it would be fun to follow in the tradition by looking through a list of hotels in the phone book to come up with a suitable name for the mill here. The Royal Hotel provided me with the impressively sounding if slightly tongue twisting Royal Oil Mill. All I need now is to devise some fictional history to account for the name.
The foreground track supposedly continues on to other parts of the port off scene to the left. To indicate this, a low relief box van has been located at the end of the siding. The van body was cut down from an old wagon, but as I didn't want to sacrifice a perfectly good chassis just for a set of buffers, the underframe was built up from scraps of card and a couple of nails.
Here's the mill in all its glory. Its not quite finished - there are still a few gutters, drainpipes and other details to add - but you get the idea. The mocked up building at the right is not part of the mill's premises. Operated by Tweedale Oil & Cake Mills Ltd (TOCM), who took over from the former ROCM, the mill is based very loosely on structures from Ipswich and Hull. The business appears to have grown by gathering together all the tin sheds in the district. Everything has been much compressed to squeeze it into the 6 inch square footprint. The tall brick building at the back containing the silos is a very much reduced version of the original, which would have measured some 18 inches high if built to scale rather than the measly 9 inches here. By placing it behind the other buildings and hiding its base, forced-perspective properties emerged and the drastic reduction in size became more acceptable.
Inward rail traffic to the mill consists of oil seed from upper Tweedale (in the season), to augment that arriving by sea from foreign lands. Outward traffic consists of oil to Grey's paint works at Grimley and the Sunny Spread margarine factory in the Slaghill chemical park. The residue from the crushed seed is used to produce cattle cake which is sent back to the rural areas of upper Tweedale.
Cheers, Alan.
Edited by awoodford
Restored lost images
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12
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