Picking up the story again
Entry posted by whart57 in Thai railway layout
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How time flies. I last added to this blog over two years ago, so it's probably time to pick things up again. I have worked on the layout, though progress is probably not as spectacular as might be expected after two years. My involvement in the Great Model Railway Challenge did mean it gathered dust for a year, but since the end of 2019 some steady progress has been made.
In earlier blog pieces I described individual features that I had created, now I think might be the time to describe the framework in which they sit.
Like many layouts, this one is an exercise in nostalgia. I have acquaintances who have built models of the railways they remember from their train-spotting youth, typically these are late BR steam or blue diesel layouts, choice depending on the age of the builder. Others try to recreate a past “golden age”, perhaps Pendon is the foremost example of that. For me it is about recalling the perks of what were the best years of my working life, when I had the opportunity to travel to far-flung corners of the world. And of those my favourite was Thailand. Between 2003 and 2016, when I retired, I had the opportunity to visit Thailand something like a dozen times. Most visits were short, generally a weekend break in the journey back from somewhere else. The fact that there are no direct flights from the UK to Australia - all require a refuelling stop in Asia - or the Philippines, helped in this. However this did mean that I rarely got the chance to venture outside Bangkok.
For a railway enthusiast, or railfan as the international term seems to be, that wasn't a major problem. Within Bangkok and its neighbouring provinces there are quite a lot of things of railway interest. The famous train through the market at Maeklong is easily reachable from Bangkok using a couple of SRT commuter services, and at a ticket price of 40 baht (less than £1) there and back. Other draws were the marshalling yard at Bang Sue - now being rebuilt as Bangkok's main railway station - the terminus at Hualamphong and various relics around the city. At that time there were still abandoned steam engines at the Ekkamai museum, at Makkasan locomotive works and left rusting away in a coach park on the Kamphaeng Phet Road.
This little Krauss 2-4-0T was literally rusting away when I saw it in 2010. I'll be surprised if it is still there ten years later.
The main attraction though, and one I returned to on nearly every visit, was Thonburi station on the west bank of the Chao Praya river. Once I found it was easy to get to using the BTS "skytrain" to Saphon Thaksin bridge and then a river boat from there to the Siriraj hospital pier, I made the trip regularly.
Thonburi was the original Southern Line terminus and thus the start of Thailand's meter gauge mainline network. Thailand's first railway was meter gauge, but this was the short, and isolated, line from Bangkok to Pak Nam, only a dozen miles or so long. This line was electrified and became an inter-urban tramway in the 1920s and then closed in the 1960s, a sacrifice to King Car. Ironic then that the Bangkok metropolitan authority is now spending billions of baht on extending the BTS to Pak Nam. After that, the first mainline railways in Thailand were standard gauge. Thailand's leaders of the time manoeuvred to retain their independence from European colonial rulers by playing off the European rivals against each other. With British pressure coming up from Malaya and French pressure coming from Indochina, then asking the Germans to build the railway network was a sensible plan. So German engineers planned and laid the lines going north from Bangkok and they chose standard gauge. For the lines going south this would not prove to be a good idea. The British in Malaya were building railways to Penang and Butterworth and these were meter gauge, conforming to the standard being applied in India for second grade lines. Thailand had already lost territory in the south to the British so it was imperative to get better transport connections to the border before the British found another excuse to move the border north again. A century or so ago the concept of international borders outside Europe was a lot looser and was based more on where tribute was traditionally paid by border peoples than on agreed lines on maps. A southern line was needed, but as it would inevitably link up with the lines in British Malaya, it would have to be meter gauge. It was also have a different terminus from the German built lines as it would approach Bangkok from the other side of the Chao Praya river. Hence the station at Thonburi.
During the 1920s the northern and southern railway networks would be united under a single management and a bridge would be built across the Chao Praya. The standard gauge lines were regauged (a decision now regretted given the interest in hooking up to the Chinese railway system) and Thonburi would become a backwater.
The final change at Thonburi would come in 2004. The government was interested in expanding the Siriraj Hospital next to Thonburi station, but there was a shortage of land. So it instructed the SRT to donate the land Thonburi station stood on. The small halt at Bangkok Noi, half a mile down the tracks, was renamed Thonburi and became the new terminus. The locomotive depot remained as did the carriage stabling. The goods depot was closed as was the original Thonburi terminus. However the buildings weren't demolished but were repurposed for use as a museum to medicine. When the building work for Siriraj was complete, the Thonburi station pier was reopened and a park laid out between it and the old station buildings. Former SRT loco number 950, a 2-8-2 Japanese built locomotive from 1950, now stands as a monument to its railway past.
Elsewhere in the museum the original platform canopy has been retained and refurbished
Within the museum grounds the tracks have been lifted. Outside however they remain, the old line simply cut off leaving the bizarre situation of a fully functional level crossing with lifting barriers and lights still in place despite the last train having passed this way over sixteen years ago.
I've heard other rail enthusiasts describe Thonburi as railway heaven. And I certainly thought it was a place where anyone interested in trains could have a good time. There were only a limited number of trains a day but that meant the staff were quite relaxed about crazy farangs wandering about with cameras. Goods traffic, whatever there was, ended when the goods station disappeared into the Siriraj hospital complex, but the yard was still used to stable old rolling stock. Thonburi also had a small locomotive depot which, a bonus this, was also responsible for housing and maintaining the small fleet of steam engines the SRT use on special occasions. These are out in the yard along with the diesels used for day to day services.
Initially I just did research on Thai railways, photographing and measuring rolling stock and some locomotives and producing drawings and articles for Continental Modeller. I also made a few models so inevitably I began to consider building a layout. The layout would have to be more freelance than an accurate portrayal of a place, not least because I wanted to be free to create my own idealised picture of my experiences in Thailand. However layouts need a trackplan and it soon became clear that Thonburi offered much as a location to base that trackplan on. Bangkok offered a number of stations. Hualamphong was clearly too big and complex as was Bang Sue. Wongwangyai was too limited, it was merely a single line terminating at a single platform and only saw diesel railcars, and Makkasan had a nice station building but was dominated by the works. Nowadays it is also dominated by the concrete pillars holding up the Airport Express line.
The advantage of modelling Wongwangyai - no pointwork to build. The disadvantage - look at all those figures that need painting!
There was also Mae Nam, a freight only station in SE Bangkok. If I wanted to do an American style freight line layout, then the Mae Nam branch with its range of sidings and industries served would fit the bill, but I lack the large basement a layout like that demands. The image below is from an uncompleted article on Bangkok's stations
Thonburi however ticked many boxes. It had a good range of facilities, it had a limited train service - a serious consideration given that all rolling stock would have to be handbuilt - it had a loco shed and the more I looked at it, the more I was convinced that it could be compressed into a buildable track plan. I based the plan on a screenshot from Google Maps
It's possible to make out the individual locomotives and rolling stock and that gives some idea of scale. To do this to scale in HOm would require some 10 meters length. I could shorten that by modelling in my preferred scale of 3mm to the foot and that would only require a bit over 8 meters. I had four meters available. That would require a fair bit of compression but it's doable. Some compression is achieved by using model railway geometry on the turnouts, but serious compression requires the number of sidings to be cut back. The loco shed was reduced from a five road shed stabling twenty locos to a three road shed stabling six and the number of carriage sidings cut from five to three. But a workable trackplan was achieved.
I retired from work in 2016 and that meant I had the time to really crack on, as well as the space as I no longer needed my home office. A start had been made on building baseboards but by the end of 2017 the baseboards had been built and the track laid and wired. How things went from there is something for the next blog.
Edited by whart57
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