Stoker

So 4 years was the longest an 03 ever spent in Cornwall in active service. Not surprising then that none of the reference books in my collection offer a single photograph or mention! Perhaps this is a good enough excuse for us Cornwall N scale modellers to purchase one of Farish's rather adorable little 03s?

Definitely, a public loading wharf could generate all sorts of traffic. You'd need a platform-height (3'3") section for loading vans and flat wagons, and a 6'6" section for loading clay wagons and open wagons. Bugle had a goods siding as well as the clay wharf, it was a pretty busy and interesting little spot back in the 50s and 60s.

Interesting, I can't find any reference to them being in Cornwall, except that an 03 was used for a special up the Wenford branch, and one other anecdotal mention on the internet of one working Wenford clays briefly. Cannot find any photos of them in revenue service in Cornwall though. D2127 was withdrawn in 1968. D2129 was withdrawn in 1981. D2183 was withdrawn in 1968. So 2 out of 3 didn't survive long. I don't have any reference books for locomotive allocations that I can check against, but if they were indeed in Cornwall, they were here for only a short period of time.

There were to the best of my knowledge, no class 03s in the county. If there were, there were none in the Blazey clay area. Also, class 22s were not "unreliable" as some have said; after they overcame their teething troubles in their first years of operation they became workhorses. The problem with them initially was steam engineers and steam repair shops looking after diesel hydraulics, and just a general lack of knowledge and information as well as tools, proper depth inspection pits, and so on. Once the bulk of the class had been moved to the Western Region, the Blazey shop crews became quite adept at keeping them in good condition and the class proved extremely reliable and perfect for the branch line working in Cornwall. What killed them was NBL ceasing parts support for the class when it closed down in 1962 - reliability had absolutely nothing to do with it. Classmates were cannibalised for parts, which is basically a slow death of the class. When the Warships and Westerns came to Cornwall, the BZ shop crews were already well versed in hydraulics, and were able to keep them running very well, which is the same story as elsewhere in the country, hence they were lauded as a "success". In reality, there probably isn't a diesel locomotive on the planet that would've been reliable back in the 50s when all the shop crews only knew steam. But then people tend to like to remember the bad part. Particularly considering the dieselisation left a bitter taste in the mouth of people who saw them as symbolic of the death of steam. They wring their hands with glee when they can paint the "bad bad diesels who took away our steamers" in a bad light. Other classes that were very popular through your selected period were the class 46 - the 44s and 45s to the best of my knowledge were all kept up north in the midlands. Of course there were also 37s, 47s, 50s, 42s, 52s, 08s. Passenger services on branches were often run by class 101s, class 121s, and class 117s. Also, food for thought, have you considered a china clay loading wharf alongside your yard? A similar arrangement was used at Bugle, and was one of the very few stations where clay was loaded alongside passenger trains. The wharf is to the right, a single clay wagon visible next to it.

The bottom sash should always be closest on the indoors side - if it were the other way around, the latch to lock the sashes would be outside!

A few corrections: Levant has a cut down stack of what was originally the standard, two third granite one third brick construction. The engine house you linked to near Germoe - Wheal Grey - was actually a china clay works and also had a brick topped chimney, they are simply grey bricks. Also: This is not "missing" as such; not every Cornish chimney had this feature, known as a "cornice". Sometimes the cornice was even constructed from brick rather than granite. Your mentioning of "structural support" is baffling, the chimney is a self supporting structure and decorative cornices were just that, decorative, and served no structural function. The iron bands we see on chimneys today were all a later addition due to the failure of the mortar pointing where storms had eroded it, causing bulging. A good Cornish chimney, whose masonry is well maintained, could easily stand for decades without the need for iron banding. Indeed, iron banding has often failed and fallen off of chimneys that have then stood for decades after without their support and no ill effects. A testament to their builders. Also, no, we might not argue that the brick courses have not survived, because the height and width of the chimney do not indicate this. A chimney such as this can have only one possible permutation, and that is that of an all-granite construction. Chimneys that have lost their brick uppermost courses will appear wider at the top and less severely tapered. For this chimney to have a brick upper section, it's final width would be untenably narrow. Your assumptions and speculations in this regard run contrary to the reasoning behind the use of brick being to achieve a greater final height without sacrificing flue diameter, as brick walls could be constructed thinner than granite. Remaining with the facts will be of greater use to model makers than going on mere speculation - there is right and there is wrong, there is no "artistic license" to be had here. This is industrial engineering, the realm of truth, the last bastion of physical honesty.

There are two faults with the model that I can see. 1. The bob wall is not thick enough for the size of the engine house. 2. The chimney stack is completely constructed of granite. Roughly the upper third (but sometimes less) of the stack should be brick. These would both be pretty easy to correct. Use stone wall textured sheets to extend the thickness of the bob wall internally, and cut the chimney stack off just above the point where it exceeds the height of the engine house (the side wall, not the gable apex) and glue on an appopriate length and diameter brick chimney. While you're there you could even add a few extra little details, such as the cast iron bob loadings, cylinder bolts, and the crumbled walls of the condenser cistern or the boiler house.

I just want to clarify what appears to be some confusion on this subject. An engine house formed part of the engine. Beam engines would typically range from 20" cylinder to 80" with a few 90" engines and one 100". The cylinder size would dictate the house and bob size. I've seen tiny winding engine houses measuring 15' x 18' in footprint. I've built several engine houses in 4mm and 2mm, and they all scaled out quite nicely for fitting on your average layout. They were by no means massive, towering structures. Three storeys tall with a basement isn't exactly a skyscraper. The 50" Goonvean engine removed recently was pretty much the maximum for the china clay industry. The bob for this engine was 30' in length and weighed around 20 tonnes. Here is a drawing for your consideration: As you can see, this building was roughly 30 feet wide on it's longest side. In 4mm scale that would be 12cm. Hardly breaking the bank in terms of real estate. Hope this helps. Scott.

Nice work Jack. I'm curious to know what you plan on doing next? There's a lot of space there meaning a lot of scope for more structures and details.

A few criticisms/suggestions (picky ones, because I'm a clay geek): -I've noticed the linhay doors have no lintels! These were usually timber, sometimes concrete, sometimes brick, and a bare few steel and segmented granite. A lintel over each door will help "finish" the structure. There are a number of ways to do this on a "finished" model, but probably the easiest is just by simply gluing some thin styrene strip in place above each door to represent the timber lintel. -Also consider adding guttering and downpipes. Clay kilns had really large roof surfaces, and required quite a hefty drainage system. -The trackwork looks a little bit clogged up with ballast, on the sleepers etc. It's also patchy, deep in places, light in others. Good choice of colour however. Consider going over it with a flat screwdriver, to chisel the ballast off the tops of the sleepers, then build up any areas that are a bit thin. This should even it out. -The track immediately in front of a linhay should really be set in concrete. The only exception to this is if your layout is set quite early on, for example 1930s/40s. Plaster and fillers of various types can be used, even wood filler. The resulting effect from having set the tracks in concrete is usually very realistic. -The corrugated roofing appears to have no sheet overlaps. I know this seems trivial but it really does make all the difference. Overlaps should be set at approximately 6.5 foot intervals. The best way to achieve this is to simply cut the corrugated material into 13mm wide strips, and then use thin strip at the bottom of each strip of corrugated to give it a slight angle, as if it were overlapping a sheet underneath it. -The tracks look a little close to the kiln building. The loading edge was often a few feet away from the wagon, with planks being used to bridge the gap for wheelbarrows. Modern hydraulic front end loaders have plenty of reach. Some sites had portable conveyor belt loaders. So no need for the kind of tiny gaps at train stations. -You've modelled the buildings in half relief, but personally I would've used a bit more of the foreground space by modelling the kiln in full scale width. In N scale this works out as around 90mm wide. This allows for the prototypical positioning of chimneys and furnace rooms. -You're probably already aware of this but clay kilns were almost always built into a hillside or slope of some sort. Because of the fact that you've modelled your kiln in half relief, the backscene is very close to the foreground, so you've lost a sense of depth there, because the overall scene just terminates at a wall, where otherwise it would've been a gentle slope. -Your silo is not too unprototypical, these types have been used in the past for fine clay, such as clay from a mechanical mill. These were fed by pneumatics, augers, and bucket conveyors. Usually underneath it would be a big bulk powder bag on a pallet, with a loading tube aimed into it. The loading points for clay slurry however were basically a pipe on a gantry, with a big valve, a loader's shelter, and a flexible rubber tube. The actual slurry tanks were large, tall, floor mounted vertical tanks. These required some pretty hefty pumping equipment due to the clay thickness. -As for the oil, to the absolute best of my knowledge I don't think there has ever been oil delivered by rail to a dryer. Oil fired mechanical dryers recieved a restock of oil from a tanker lorry, and were kept topped up. These were a bit larger than the type you have on your layout. Usually horizontal, but sometimes vertical tanks of about 6 feet diameter, 25/30 feet in length, usually in a pair. These were usually sited a "safe distance" from the dryer building. -Looking at your model I'd say you would've been better off with one length of kiln building, rather than two short buildings joined. The only reason I say this is because 200 feet is basically a minimum length for most kilns in Cornwall. The few that are much smaller are really really old, or just simply not rail connected. That's about all I can think of at the moment. Apart from that, nice little concept, good overall sizes, buildings all look the right height, etc. I hope this helps anyway. Best, Scott.

My old favourite was directing tourists to "Porthemmet beach" when I was a kid. We used to send them up to Kernick mica dam! At least there was sand, of sorts.

If it was Liskeard then it wouldn't have been rock. China clay, maybe, but not rock. To the best of my knowledge, quarried stone has not been transported on Cornish rails for an extremely long time. I know Serpentine in Cornwall is generally associated with the far west, Lizard peninsula. I would imagine that various types of ferry fitted clay carrying van would be seen in the 70s.

Your blog entry strikes me as being somewhat more a passive-aggressive rant than a question, as your title would suggest. Yes people moan and often they're wrong, yes manufacturers sometimes get it wrong, yes detail is better now than it was previously. I don't see what point you're making. I know it's infuriating, I got told off for speaking out against it in the thread for the Beattie Well Tank, but it seems like it's something we're going to have to live with. Given that our hobby is stereotypically overrun by grumbling old grumpy gits in loveless marriages perhaps we should've come to expect it by now? The only thing I feel I can respond to is perhaps your mention of people who complain that models are getting too fragile to handle. I also find this to be the case, mainly from my experience of North American models. Yes I know, the US scene is terribly, terribly boring, but I went through a phase of liking it, and found like most other dabblers that it's mostly due to the materials used, rather than a lack of care. Handrails, "grab irons", and most other thin railings etc. are made from this semi-flexible material that likes to snap, sometimes just because of temperature changes, or because it's been bent one too many times. Since the UK scene has largely followed the US, Germany and Japan, a lot of these technologies have been adopted but not improved. This is a major frustration for those of us who have been happy to see US manufacturing standards come to the UK, only to find that parts of their £100 model are breaking because lessons haven't been learned. Best, Scott.

That might not be tremendously practical due to cost and the difficulty achieving the texture and detail of Cornish granite stonework using 3D modelling software. I've used a number of techniques but I found the easiest was to use Will's "coarse stone" sheets for 4mm scale models. You can also scribe styrene sheet, or use plaster and scribe it while it's setting. My abandoned engine house sadly got destroyed, but it was made using balsa wood coated in a thin layer of plaster. HTH. Scott.

Here are the aforementioned drawings.

I'm something of a Cornish engine house specialist, and have built several models myself in various scales. So if you need any advice in the design and construction of a unique engine house, please let me know. I've also got a few more drawings, one in particular of a 60" cylinder pumping engine's house that you might find useful if you are modelling large tin mine pumping houses. The best single piece of advice I can give you for your abandoned engine house is to keep in mind wall thicknesses. The wall that supported the bob could be as much as 6 feet thick, with all other walls being around 2 feet in thickness on average. The boilerhouse walls would be signficantly more ruinous than the engine house due to their average 1.5 foot thickness and lighter construction. Most ironwork would be scrapped, the slate and timbers would sometimes be robbed, but in many cases the boiler got left behind due to excessive deterioration. This would be stripped of fittings like valves, cocks, dials, etc. One other useful rule of thumb for building an engine house is that Cornish chimney stacks are usually two thirds granite, one third brick. Hope this helps, Best, Scott.

Been a while since I've modeled US outline, lets see if I can remember some of the faux pas. A grain elevator. A "ranch". A walthers gravel/cement/coal industry. Emergency response vehicles. A demolished/burning building. A church with a wedding. Road works. Haunted house/graveyard. Very few people execute the whole grain elevator thing very well, but I remember there was this one guy who did an amazing job, and set his layout in autumn to boot. Rust stained weather beaten grain elevators against fall colours is a pretty tall order and he managed to not only pull it off but set a real nice atmosphere going. I think so long as you do it "right" you can pull off anything - fire trucks are no exception, and yours does look great.

This is looking really good. Tracks in hard-standing is challenging to model accurately but your technique seems to have done quite well. I'm glad to see you're still gradually working away on this layout. Scott.

Agreed. I've probably gone through just about every single method now and it's still not perfect. Even though the ratio sheets are great, they're no good for windows, because the plastic is too thick. So I mainly only use it for roofs and windowless walls. Ratio, in the same product line as the corrugated sheets, do some good stone sheets, probably the best I've seen in N for doing Cornish stonework. Good luck with it anyway. Regards, Scott.

For the sake of your sanity in future, may I recommend this product? http://www.mikronmod...orrugated-Sheet I now use this for all my corrugated structures in N. It's great stuff, takes a while to learn the tricks of using it, but once you get the hang of lining up the sheets the detail is excellent. Don't get me wrong though, what you've done so far does look great, but I think you're going to have to move past this cladding stage fairly soon before you start to get fed up with this project. Hence why I'm suggesting something that has done the overlaps for you. However, I am relieved to see that you've decided to just go along with horizontal strips, rather than attempting to apply the cladding in prototypical individual sheets. Believe me once you've weathered it, you won't notice any mistakes or lack of detail - and it's so small anyway that it's not exactly like it stands out. We're talking a tenth of a millimeter detail depth of overlapped sheets. That's shallower than a coat of paint, and quite simply just wouldn't be visible to the naked eye. Regards, Scott.

I would personally hate to see what would happen to an aluminium bodied hopper once 10 tons of coal has been dropped from 20 feet down into it. I imagine that it would at least be a rather different shape afterwards! Scott.

They are actually galvanised steel. CDA's are in a constant state of flux, getting sandblasted, repainted, covered in clay dust, rained on, covered again, rained on again, etc. and I have got many many photographs of rusty CDAs. By the way Pete I didn't take your post as being arrogant at all. I fully understand that every modeller has his priorities when it comes to making compromises. My priorities are with the clay works themselves, as that's what my interest revolves around. The OOV is indeed a mevagissey model. It's woefully inaccurate however. Scott.