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Stoker

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Everything posted by Stoker

  1. You've gotta do that tokyo drift thing around the corners... when the supervisor isn't looking that is!
  2. I know of both CHEP and Euro Pal. I've operated a forklift in previous work so those were included in the training. In reference to what Mike was saying, "nudging" pallets was fairly common practice - also using the forks of the machine to open sliding doors! One trick I saw frequently was using a pallet on the forks as a bumper to push another pallet further back in lieu of using a reach truck - probably done fairly frequently on the palvans I'd think. I asked on a china clay history specific group on facebook whether any of the chaps there remembered what was being used. I didn't get very many replies, but one fellow who worked in home market sales for ECC recalled that back in the 60s and 70s they had some issues with customers getting confused between "palletised" and "pelletised". He felt fairly confident that forklift handling was something the company was doing at the time. I agree with him, back in the 60s Alfred and Judy were often pictured double headed handling fairly long rakes of palvans.
  3. With all due respect that all sounds extremely unlikely, and I'd like to try to keep the pie in the sky speculation to a minimum in this thread as I'm trying to gather historically accurate information for a model project.
  4. According to Paul Bartlett they rode poorly due to their suspension, which was the cause of derailments, not uneven weight distribution. The load would've been distributed evenly inside as a matter of economic viability, the end doors simply meant that it could be loaded right to the ends without the need for a pallet truck inside. The downside being that the forklift would've needed to drive around to the other side of the wagon to load the opposite end. Some were fitted with better suspension and later refitted with air brakes, lasting well into the 80s.
  5. That's what I figured, forklift on the dock (or ground), pallet truck in the wagon. I'd imagine you could only fit a maximum of 6 pallets on a BR standard van anyway, so your two at either end could be positioned with a pallet truck, and the furthest middle pallet either positioned with a reach fork or just pushed into place using the second middle pallet as a bumper. Frowned upon now but I know it was common practice back in the day. Then some inflatable or timber dunnage between the pallets. I know that Palvans had doors on each end on opposing sides, so as to make loading easier. I have seen a photo of a palvan being loaded with a forklift around 1961, but not sure how common that was at the time. My main problem is that I'm not old enough to have been around to see any of this stuff! This 1958 photo showing the interior of the bagging plant at Goonvean & Rostowrack's eponymous Goonvean siding shows large sacks which were loaded from here into vans. These were 2 hundredweight bags, so the 9 bags in the foreground would've been almost 1 ton. As far as I know the men just used a sack cart to get the bag as far as the van, and from there would handball it into position. Heavy work once you got past the first layer of bags! Goonvean were about 20 years behind ECC in terms of technology. My period is late 60s early 70s, capturing the end of the class 22. By this time I'd be surprised if forklifts weren't in use, but believe it or not I actually don't have really any photos or information regarding the use of pallets or forklifts in this time period.
  6. I'm looking for information and any photographs regarding the use of forklifts for loading BR vans in the 1960s/70s. Specifically I want to know whether forklifts were commonly used, and if so were they driven into the wagon to place the load as with the more modern bogie vans, when the transition happened between using sack carts to manually load jute sacks into vans and using forklifts to load pallets, and really anything else about this subject as it seems there isn't much information out there. If pallet jacks were common back then, I'm assuming folding dock ramps were used as well to bridge the gap between the loading edge and the wagon floor... Any help would be much appreciated.
  7. Love the era and setting Trevor, looks like this is going to shape up to be a cracking layout. Anything in Cornwall with Class 22's is a win in my book. Scott.
  8. The joint-last coal fired clay kiln to operate, alongside the one at the end of the Carbis branch, was Lower Bostraze, which closed down in 1993. I'm sure if they'd had access to a railway they would've been using it. Likely would've been fairly low output though, maybe 3 or 4 hoods a day at most. In the last decade or so they'd drive a kubota mini-excavator onto one of the travelling bridges inside the dry, using the bucket to clear the clay off the hot pan, and the arm to slide the bridge along. Much better than shovelling it off by hand! Lower Bostraze was one of the few drys to have a pan level with the linhay, so when the excavator was done taking clay off the pan it was trundled into the linhay to load lorries. Not sure where the lorries went from there, but I'd imagine one of the local ports capable of hosting a small coaster. If you can restrain the model building urges for long enough, I'm working on a short series of articles on layout-friendly clay works prototypes which will be posted on my Rosevear blog. There will likely be some information there that you could use as a basis.
  9. Stoker

    Hendra

    Bill, I will have a look through my photo archives and see if I have anything from the 90s in high res and colour that could be used as a more appropriate background. I think I might have some shots of the Nanpean and Carbis areas that could work.
  10. Stoker

    Hendra

    Looking good Bill. I notice your chap in the workshop has donned a more appropriate uniform! ;) I recognize the photo of the dryers in the background, that's Trelavour, at the far end of Parkandillack. The steam rising from the chimney is from the dryer that Goonvean constructed here in 2001, sadly shut down after just a little over a decade of use when Imerys bought Goonvean. The dryer was a band dryer from Mitchell dryers, a company that Goonvean had been purchasing from since the 1950s. Their first Mitchell band dryer was built at Goonvean siding, just east of Treviscoe, processing 2.5 tons per 8 hour shift. Boots the pharmacy used to buy 10 tons per month from there for use in their cosmetics, and the dryer had originally been used to dry dog biscuits!
  11. Stoker

    Hendra

    Hi Bill, Just checking up on progress since I last posted and thought of some suggestions for details. Your man in the workshop made me think about uniforms that ECC issued over the years. The blue trousers he's wearing would be accurate for the mid 60s to 80s, and they also had a blue jackets and blue overalls back then - these were all made of denim and were issued to everyone who worked in the pits, linhays (but not dryers), refineries, and fitting shops. In the dryers they wore white overalls. By the early 90s the uniform had switched to orange trousers, orange shirt/jacket, and orange overalls. This applied across the board, with the exception of offices and labs. Once Imerys took over, the orange became high-vis orange, and they added retro-reflective stripes and high-vis vests. Looking at your rolling stock you're definitely in the 90s, so your chappie should be wearing orange trousers, an orange jacket (no yellow vest with silver reflective stripes), and unless he's a manager or supervisor his hard hat should be blue or red. The below photo of an ECC employee operating P403D Denise at Crugwallins siding in 1993 clearly shows the uniform of the time. Another detail you might like to include is tree screens. ECC planted rows of Cypress Leylandii in an attempt to buffer noise and screen the view of their works in deference to their neighbours. Why this species in particular you ask? Because they're evergreen, meaning they provide screening year round, and they're the tallest of the dense "hedge" conifers. They're really easy to make, you can just lay hemp rope fibres, plumbers hemp, or whatever you have to hand between wires and twist them together to make an armature, which can then be shaped and flocked. For a Cypress you just have to give it a more columnar shape and pull the armature through your hand a few times, from trunk to tip, so that the branches incline upwards. This guy has a good video demonstrating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMw11tcZa-8 An alternative method is to cut a scotch-brite pad into small squares and stack them onto a bamboo skewer - this can then be shaped with scissors and flocked. The tree screens I'm talking about are visible in the background off to the right hand side in this photo. One other detail that is extremely common around clay works is plank fencing, which can be seen in the photo of Fal Valley Dryers at Treviscoe below. These were made up of 6" x 1" x 72" boards with about a 1" gap between each board, fixed vertically to two 2x4 horizontals that were fixed to 4x4 fence posts. Very easily done with basswood strip. Lastly, one final detail is height restriction chains. These are really straight forward, just two 9" diameter posts set in concrete in a barrel, or set into the ground, standing either side of an entrance to a works or at any point where the max headroom changes. Spanned between them is a chain set at the max headroom level. This is to allow clearance under electricity wires, pipelines, covered loading areas, conveyor bridges, and entryways. Here's one at Treviscoe.
  12. I agree and I think this is why most of the best model railways are (with the exception of some prodigious individuals) usually collaborative efforts. For instance, those at clubs, where the expertise of many individuals can come together to build something much more life-like. Your example of the bridge reminds me of a layout I saw quite recently which had a scene where a JCB was digging a hole in the road to install pipes... the only problem was it was on a bridge! I think you're right that in some cases ignorance is bliss, and for those people I tend to just leave them alone. If people ask for information I give it to them, but otherwise I just try to make the information available to those who are looking. This is why in the opening statements of my post I mentioned the chap on here who wanted a smaller dry than in existed in reality. Rather than tell him all the reasons why this would be wrong, I just let him get on with it. If he's happy to make that compromise then so be it. However I will say that forums, books, and the internet are just another way that a layout can be a collaborative effort rather than a solo project. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that. Without RMweb I doubt I could build a layout at all... my knowledge of trackwork, signalling, and accurate railway operational practice is woefully lacking. For instance not too long ago I had to ask some really basic questions about couplings! But the great thing is that RMwebbers are always more than happy to help out, and I am eternally grateful for their assistance, even if at times we don't always see eye to eye. And that's fine, people build stations in the same manner, and if you're happy with it then fine. The only problem I have with this, and the motivation for the post, is that to me it's just a crying shame of a missed opportunity if this is the only thing anyone ever does with china clay on a layout. But there needs to be more than me just saying that, I think I need to actually show people what can be done by building my own layout, and that's just what I intend to do. I've pretty well resolved to write a book now - I had planned to do so years ago, however at the time I was thinking to use archive photos and simply couldn't afford the licenses to publish them. But upon rethinking, I don't think archive photography are really what's needed, I think an example layout is what's needed, and then lots of drawings, diagrams, and written information will be more helpful.
  13. The problem with having this attitude is that trains do not exist in a vacuum, and if you become too narrowly focused on them, you just end up with yet another peco-on-plywood. If that's what you're happy with then by all means don't let anyone stop you, but this post or indeed really anything I've ever posted on RMweb aren't really aimed at those people. The fact is that (some) people care enough about structures not to put an LMS signal box on a GWR layout, and they care about scale enough to want platforms that match realistic train lengths. If you ignore the interplay between structures and trains, what operational interest do you really even have? Trains have to come from and go to somewhere... unless you're content to watch a roundy roundy. Now personally, I suspect that the real reason for the lack of good representations of the trackside element of the china clay industry is entirely down to the lack of good reference material on the subject, and very little else. If you want to know how long and wide the average station platform is, or find drawings for a standard GWR signal box, guaranteed you can find that information in more than one book. But to the best of my knowledge there is no single source for similar information as it relates to china clay trains. The whole point of my efforts on RMweb have been to try to provide some of this information, but maybe I really should just take it a step further and publish a book, both in print and as an e-book. That way the info is there for those who want it, and those who don't give a toss can simply give it a miss and carry on.
  14. Yes they did. The 3' gauge steam worked Gothers Tramway brought clay from the dries at the Gothers works to a loading wharf along a section of the St Dennis branch back when it used to connect with the Newquay branch. The 2' gauge Simplex diesel worked Hendra Light Railway brought clay in Hudson/Jubilee type skips from the dry at the edge of New Hendra pit to the Quarry Close loading wharf siding on the St Dennis branch just west of Nanpean wharf. There were also many loading wharves, with at least one on every clay branch in Cornwall. These were basically just platforms built to around 4' to 6' above railhead, and allowed clay to be brought a short distance by road from smaller drys that lacked their own siding. When I say smaller drys, I mean some were really small. The absolute smallest I've seen was a building just 100' long, and 30' deep, with a single settling tank to the rear, and internally a drying pan a mere 9 feet in width and 80 feet in length. This is roughly 50% of the size of the smallest directly rail served dries. A layout built around this operation would be able to fit into a small space indeed, and would also have additional operational interest in the form of public goods, coal, and timber.
  15. I have noticed that modellers have a tendency to be attracted to the same works over and over again (Wenford, Carbis, Pontsmill, Kernick, Blackpool) I suspect because they appear in "atmospheric" photos that are perhaps more widely circulated than others. These are often works that would be quite far to the bottom of the list of works that I'd recommend to modellers due to their size or lack of operational interest. Other, much more reasonably sized works existed, however it seems that the vast majority are simply unaware of them, and true enough usually few existing photographs of them ever made it to print. One confounding factor here is that of copyright... historic photos that can't be published because the copyright owner is holding it to ransom for some grandiose and unrealistic sum. Thus most of the books we have on the subject come from those who either have a large personal archive, or friends who do and don't object to publication. All, of course, much the detriment of modellers and historians. You also bring up the issue that china clay works can sometimes be more interesting to look at in romantic John Vaughan kodachrome format than to actually experience in (model) reality, and the problem only gets worse the further back in time you go. In the days of manual handling, standard procedure was to simply park a rake of wagons in front of a linhay, and then leave them there for however long it took for them to be loaded with wheelbarrows. Things only got more interesting once wheel loaders, bagging machines, mills, and chemically graded clays entered the scene starting in the 1930s but thanks to the war not really becoming widespread until the 50s. One of the things that I have been doing over time is creating some china clay layout plans based on works that I think would make suitable candidates based on a criteria of interesting operations, wagon and traffic variety, and minimal compression in a small space. These designs are mostly based on a single 8' x 4' sheet of plywood cut approximately in half to give baseboard depths of around 2' to 2'6". I still have a few more of these to do, so I think once I have a reasonable number I should put them all in a future blog post.
  16. That's 64cm deep when including the settling tanks and the single track siding in front of the linhay. Were it to be reduced to just the building, the structure would've been 1 metre by 20cm. I hadn't really thought about producing any kind of kit of a clay works until you mentioned it. My 3D CAD drawings are simply used as a scale reference mock-up - I find it's easier to build a 3D model where errors can simply be deleted, and if I'm modelling a prototype as the model progresses it can be compared against photos to ensure the correct dimensions have been captured. I have considered in the past producing a series of smaller, Cornish themed resin buildings, ala Scenecraft. For this kind of thing I'd mostly be making Cornish cottages, mundic bungalows, Cornish Units, etc. To produce a kit for a china clay dryer, I'd really only be able to offer it as a craftsman kit, basically just all the raw materials required and a set of templates and instructions. This is most certainly something I'd be willing to offer if people would be interested. That would be Carlyon Farm dry, the prototype still stands alongside the former Trenance branch. Built by John Lovering, as evidenced by his signature square plan chimney stacks, it was announced in press statements to be the "largest dry ever built". It actually wasn't! Great Treverbyn dry at Par (served by Alfred and Judy) had the longest drying pans. For continuous rows of conjoined pans with furnaces and chimneys between, both Blackpool (back before it was modernized) and Wenford held the record jointly, roughly 1/3rd of a mile of drys. The smallest drys served by rail were a handful of drys that were under 250 feet, but over 200 feet in length. All were roughly 40 to 50 feet in building width, and had settling tanks that extended anywhere from 60 feet to 120 feet behind the building. If you were to compress the settling tanks out of the equation, a realistic coal fired dry (circa 1890 to 1960) can be had in a space 1 metre long by 16-20cm deep. The loading edge by the way was usually divided into multiples of 20 foot lengths, because that was the length of one china clay wagon, buffers and all. Without at all meaning to sound condescending, I think it's really interesting and informative to see the point of view of a person who knows nothing about the industry and what questions they have, and I thank you for commenting. The difficulty of being a teacher is remembering what it was like to know nothing, and reading your comment it very much takes me back to the days when I was a curious child who had so many questions about how the industry worked. Although I have made a few topics on the subject and answered questions wherever they cropped up on the forum, perhaps having a single reference source would be more useful to people. I'm considering starting a separate blog detailing the industry, with all the topics divided up into individual blog posts for easy reference. Is that something that people think might be useful?
  17. Anyone know if any of these ever worked down to Cornwall on clay traffic, or if they were strictly a northern/steelworks thing?
  18. Roger that, I'll see what I can come up with. Would you be open to the suggestion of a loading wharf, with clay being trucked from a nearby kiln? If you have limited space and want a simpler smaller kiln, that arrangement would be more prototypical, and would allow for some nice scammel lorries. The trenance and goonbarrow branches both had small wharves fed by small kilns. Some of the kilns were just 100 feet long, which would be well within your target 18 inches. Although if it's sited away from the tracks with clay brought to the wharf by truck, you might be able to site it on a part of the layout that isn't as tight.
  19. Blackpool is huge. Including the Cornish Kaolin and Methrose sidings, it's a half mile long. At one time there were 7 dryers in the complex (1 Spray dryer, 2 Buell dryers, and 4 rotary dryers) which had a total maximum production capacity of 500,000 tons per annum, roughly a quarter of the industry's peak output. There was a chap at St Austell Model Railway Club, Tony Prideaux, who built a near full size model of Blackpool dryers. The layout had to be in it's own room because it was so huge.
  20. I spent some time putting together a 3D model of Wheal Rose dry. It isn't 100% accurate, I had to fill in a lot of blanks because there really aren't any photographs online. However I did manage to find some aerial photos from 1930 which gave me an idea of what was where roughly. The model file is in Sketchup Make 2017 which is a free program, so if you download that and install it, I can send you the file and you should be able to view it. The model is built to scale, so you can just use the ruler function to measure anything you need. The model also has a full interior, so should you wish to include this in the model it's there. The furnace end has a small coal platform that was loaded from the Wheal Virgin air dry/Boss Allen's timber wharf siding, which curved off to run 90 degrees perpendicular to Wheal Rose. As it stands, a scale model of this dry including the coal platform and settling tanks would be approx 106cm (frontage) x 60cm (front of linhay to back of settling tanks). If you cannot fit this in, I could come up with a modified design that has the required compression, I would just need to know the exact space it has to fit into. If anyone else would like a copy of this 3D file, please let me know via PM and I'll email it over. Regards, Scott.
  21. Ah yes Wheal Rose kiln, one of the slightly more unusual type with the double pile roof - basically one roof over the pan, another roof over the linhay, and a valley between. This was a very early style that had the linhay floor almost level with the pan, which made stacking the dried clay more labour intensive. I think it actually might have been the longest lived of the double pile roofed kilns. I visited it once while I was tracing the old Carbis branch, but strangely didn't take any photos. Immediately next to the kiln was Boss Allen's Timber Wharf and Wheal Virgin air dry. I know the air dry would've been out of use by the 50's, but I'm not sure about the timber wharf - there is some info about it in one of Maurice Dart's books (I think it might be East Cornwall Mineral Railways) . I'd need to get hold of some photos first, but if you could give me the details on the space you'd like to put the building in, I could draw up scale CAD drawings that you could work from.
  22. I would be more than happy to assist with this if you wish. Are you doing coal fired or oil fired? There was a bit of both in the 50s.
  23. Well since it's open season, I might as well add my two cents. I've been in this hobby for about 25 years now, maybe more. Growing up with Hornby and Lima, what was available off the shelf were not really "models" at this point, they were toy trains. The model railway hobby elsewhere in the world had legitimate RTR offerings, but not the UK. To be a "real modeller" back then you basically had to build brass, resin, a spare few injection molded kits, or scratch-bash the toy trains into real scale models. This was not easy for everyone, some took to this aspect of the hobby better than others. I'm sure I'm not alone in having vivid memories of one particular Model Rail magazine staffer who had a bit of an obsession with etched bogie steps, but always botched them! Although I spent most of my life in Cornwall, I went to a boarding secondary school in Hampshire, which gave me an interest in SR 3rd rail slammers, but apart from a few kit manufacturers you were absolutely buggered if you wanted to model any of it, which was very frustrating for a 13 year old who lacked the skills to scratch build! I still remember being absolutely extatic to find cast whitemetal N scale 4cep and 4cig cab ends at an exhibition for converting Grafar mark 1 coaches. I had no bloody idea how I was going to motorize it, or what I'd do about the bogies, or the driver's side windows... but damnit it was a start! Once we started getting solid RTR offerings from the late 90s onward, it became obvious that the hobby was becoming a more open field. While all the kit and scratch building was commendable, it did drastically slow progress on many layouts, and acted as an insurmountable barrier to entry for others. I liken it a lot to the diminishing returns between EM and P4 - while EM will get you "right" looking track, much finer pointwork and wheels, without really holding up your layout building much, P4 will require significant bogie rebuilding and the addition of compensation... all for the sake of 0.64mm. For some those diminishing returns don't matter, the satisfaction of being "dead scale" makes up for it, for others it isn't worth it. Neither approach is "wrong", but by the same token, neither approach is "better", just different. Without the barrier to entry or the requirement for kit building and scratch building, those who would otherwise have given the hobby a miss started participating in it. Some of those became very proficient detailers, weatherers, and a few even went on to scratchbuild some of the most impressive model buildings I've seen in this hobby. None of them have much desire to kit build a locomotive though, and that's fine. Over the years I have observed that some of the "I have something you don't" elitism that came from those who did have the skill to scratchbuild has sort of morphed into bitter "it's not real modeling if it's RTR" now that their models are no longer exclusive to them. It's not everyone, but this is an aspect of the hobby that I've never liked. Now that I've been doing this for so long, I basically have the ability to scratchbuild anything I want - for me the idea of being motivated to scratchbuild something just to get a kick out of other's envy is abhorrent, as is any kind of elitism once a RTR model is inevitably released. Here in Canada, we basically have a RTR model of everything, all to extremely high standard. Athearn's Genesis product line has amazing detail going right down to things like rotating axle caps. Despite this, there are still some people who build entire locomotives using Cannon & Co doors, cabs, noses, fans, exhaust ports, brass lift rings and grab irons, etc. on a styrene sub assembly. They use photo etched walkway tread, and brass handrails threaded through cast brass stanchions, the end result is extremely impressive. Believe it or not, despite this and the growth of the Proto 87 group, many in the North American hobby also lament "nobody builds anything these days, it's all RTR". But I don't think it's necessarily true that these aspects of the hobby can't coexist. In fact, I think it's probably more true that the one needs the other. Over the 25 year period that I've been doing this, I always read all the magazines, and if anything I'd say the absolute best work I've seen in the British model hobby has been in the last 8 years, and the "best" keeps getting better all the time. With the internet becoming faster and more accessible than ever, I'm also starting to see way more prototypical layouts. I've long been an advocate of prototype standard for china clay, and you have no idea how frustrating it is to see the potential of that prototype wasted as "just a shed by the tracks with some white stuff in it" with barely a second thought or so much as a second closer look at any photos of the real thing. These days I find myself answering some very detailed questions from people who have come online to do research, and the results speak for themselves. Some of the best china clay based layouts I've ever seen have come up on here in the last 5 years or so, even a few full scale non-compressed models of real life clay works. Funnily enough, most of that work has coincided with many of the wagons that were once the preserve of scratchbuilders being released into the RTR market. Also there are now way more tools to research prototype. It used to be the case that the only people who modelled a period "a long time ago" were those old enough to have lived through it. Now with the magic of the internet we can access aerial photos taken 90 years ago, industrial archaeology through GIS mapping, take detailed measurements using Google earth, and access archives of old maps and photographs. The internet is like a free time machine! So in summary, I believe there's no reason to panic or mourn the death of the hobby, quite the contrary I think now is the time to rejoice what I see as a renaissance. More and more young people are taking it up, something that was once predicted would never happen. This is the best the hobby has ever been and it's only going to get better.
  24. Clive, That's a pretty big can of worms mate, maybe better discussed in a separate thread, out of respect for St Enodoc's thread. Also let's not be too negative, eh? Horses for courses and all that. All the best, Scott.
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