James Harrison

It never struck me that the side tanks/ cab/ bunker of the N5 are identical to those on the F1/ F2. That changes my plans a little.

I'm fairly confident, thanks to @Edwardian 's dimensions and @Bedders link above, that my room/ office sizes are in the right ballpark. So I'll draw up some more formal plans and elevations, I've got a pretty good idea of what the station building should look like.

Thank you! That's very useful information, I should be able to judge whether my own room sizes are realistic from that.

Thank you, just a rough idea of various room or office sizes would be useful. A Ducal or private waiting room, I could consider one I guess, could be squeezed in I think if I made use of the attic space in the kit.

Thanks. I'm finding a little difficult, to say the least, to find dimensioned station building floor plans (at least, any that fit the bill of being steam age and medium-sized). I ultimately settled on a drawing I found of Edwinstowe for hints of the likely dimensions of various rooms, and that only had the one refreshment room so I think it would be OK. I could, of course, look at preserved or new-build heritage examples (eg, Loughborough Central, Kidderminster Town and Broadway) but the drawback there is preservation-era alterations or plans being adapted for tourists rather than travellers. I'm mindful for instance that the new Broadway is something like half as large again as the original station, whilst Kidderminster Town is largely given over to a pub, tearoom and souvenir shop.

Going back, for a few moments, to the Triang clerestories I was working on a little while ago. I wasn't too happy with my homebrew PVA 'varnish' so I scrubbed that off and bought some Vallejo matt acrylic varnish to try out, I haven't done that yet but I have spent a little time today just touching in the final details and.... Well, for toolings that are 60 years old or so I think they're remarkably fine, even considering that the only work I've done on them has been a repaint and an interior. Moving back onto the station building, I've roughed out a floor plan today that I think should work well enough. Schedule of accommodation reads thus; 1) booking hall, 2) ticket office, 3) general waiting room, 4) ladies waiting room, 5) ladies WC, 6) refreshment room, 7) Station Master's office, 7) Porter's room, 8) luggage and parcels office. The gent's WC intended to be a separate block. I'm just wondering whether there's any reasonable function or official that I've missed in that list.

Is that the Bachmann 2-4-2 tank? I've got a pair of those myself waiting for that operation too.

Work has started on Red Lion Square's station building, in a specific and very limited sense. You may recall a few years ago I bought a Walthers 'City Station' kit with the intention of Anglicising it. Well, that remains the plan but I was struggling to get a clear idea how I might do this, what I want the station to look like, so on and so forth. I can see the signature elements of 1890s to 1900s GCR station design- there are no shortage of photograghs of Nottingham Victoria and Leicester Central I can fall back on for guidance- but if you just blindly draw up elevations you can easily end up with a building that doesn't make any sense when you start dividing it up into internal rooms. We saw this when I used the station kit from the Your Model Railway Village partwork as the basis of a goods yard office. Whilst what I want the finished model remains in abeyance however, I've recently taken delivery of a privately-published work on Leicester Central station and it looks like a real gold mine of information for architectural details, so much so that I think I can see a way of how to convincingly turn the kit into something the GCR might reasonably have built had they found themselves in need of a new mid-sized terminus in the middle 1900s. As the kit is built up as a large number of subassemblies that are then erected, what I see I can do is to build some of the larger units as-per the instructions, and then use them as scaffold or sub-base to then fit my own facades to. Or rather, half facades, as it's only the upper halves that need anything like major surgery. And I think there what I can do will be to cut some sections of plastic brick sheet to fit neatly in there, and then cut in my new window and door openings away from the rest of the model and then neatly just secure them over the kit components and cut away any superfluous material from behind afterward. So this evening...

Why am I reminded of J. Clarkson's take on a railway carriage? Straw, benches and an outside toilet and emblazoned with the name

Interesting, I hadn't considered a spreadsheet to write the timetable but can see how I might use one in the process. (My laughing response is in connection with your 'pity I can't get there by train' comment).

Right, I'm going to start trying to come up with something in the way of a working timetable. Worksop to Rufford: alignment holds at roughly the 60 - 70 metre datum line, so there are no huge gradients to cope with. With a length of string, a tape measure and a calculator I've measured the route to 10 miles. From the MSLR 1863 route map in Vol.1 of Dow I've likewise measured the distance between Worksop and Sheffield at 10 miles. From the reprinted Summer 1903 GCR passenger timetables, I can see Worksop had 23 trains both up and down on a weekday, and that those took about 35-40 minutes to get to Sheffield (stopping at all stations) or 25 minutes nonstop. Let's say, at the moment, that I pencil in three intermediate stations (at Budby, Carburton and Clumber) and therefore time between Rufford and Worksop at 30-35 minutes stopping or 25 minutes nonstop. What I need to do, as the 1903 timetable is incredibly clunky, is to try to diagram Sheffield- Worksop and then see how I can get my Sheffield - Ruffords in without disturbing any services that ran historically. Of course this is only the passenger timetable so I'll also need to look at my 1950s Sheffield District working timetable for freight movements to likewise avoid. I'm not hairshirted enough to lose sleep over mixing and matching and picking paths through timetables 50 years apart. I'll aim for probably in the region of 10 trains each way a day. Rufford to Mansfield: alignment drops from the 60 metre mark at Rufford to the 30 - 40 metre datum at Mansfield. That's say 30 metres over 6.5 miles; a ruling grade of roughly 5 metres to the mile or about 1 in 320. From Robert Western's "The Mansfield Railway" I have the working timetable for.... the Mansfield Railway, so I'll take it that the passenger services shown terminating Mansfield extend on to Rufford; about 3 services each way a day. Once out of Mansfield the only intermediate stop will be Cremorne for Pittance, so that's a 5 and 3/4 mile run for all traffic. Then theres's that single track section, which I've scaled out at about 2 and 3/4 miles. I'll need to sort out the mileages Nottingham- Mansfield to get a feel for how quickly the stoppers would have run. I anticipate also though that there will be a Rufford- Marylebone direct train, 1 per day in each direction (basically the Mansfield- Marylebone direct but started a bit further back). Rufford to Lincoln; I'll say there's an east facing junction onto the LDECR where the two cross, and pencil in a Rufford- Lincoln service. Which means recourse to the 1950s working timetable to see I don't snarl anything up there, except for High Street and Brayford Pool level crossings of course. The LDEC wasn't exactly heavily loaded, passenger wise.... maybe 4 trains each way a day? I don't envisage a direct Chesterfield- Rufford service, nor Cleethorpes- Rufford. Got to have a couple of places that you can't get to without changing trains and a long wait. So there's my first very outline thoughts on a basic passenger service to aim for, freight I think could be a lot easier as other than coal most of it will be leaving in the late evening and arriving in the early hours.

It strikes me that Birchoverham Market is almost a Norfolk version of Bewdley.

I've got this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=signalling+and+signalboxes+along+the+GCR+routes&_sacat=0 Other retailers available.

That's actually within spitting distance of my alignment, at least between Worksop and Budby.

I've dug out my Ordnance Survey maps... Explorer 270, Sherwood Forest, Scale 1:25000 Handily, this pretty much covers the entirety of the route. Starting out at Worksop, the line follows the MSLR mainline to the east for a short distance and then peels off to the southwest just after crossing the River Ryton and the Chesterfield Canal. It describes a large, lazy '?' sort of a route to double back around the south of Worksop and then start heading south. The alternative would be tear through the town... It then follows the alignment of the Ollerton Road, continues on south where that meets the A616, sweeps past the western edge of Edwinstowe and makes a large sweeping curve to the east, concluding just to the west of the A614 roughly parallel with Rufford Manor Farm. This would be the double track line built in the 1840s. Forward to 1861. Historically the MSLR submitted a bill to build a branch to Mansfield at this time, which was shelved in favour of running rights over the Midland route between there and Worksop. In my timeline, 1861 sees a line built from Rufford to Mansfield. This line would run from Red Lion Square station, skirt Pittance Park and Cremorne Wood (which in my Rufford become developed as park suburbs between the 1860s and 1910s) and then cut through the Sherwood Forest. It then, unfortunately, sequestered the Mansfield to Clipstone section of the Mansfield Railway as its own and terminated in the Midland station at that town. Being something of a branch off a branch, and with the development of the coal seams being still decades away, traffic isn't anticipated as warranting double track- yet. The Mansfield branch results in minimal improvement to Red Lion Square station, beyond the single platform gaining a bay. Forward to the 1890s and the LDECR is built. The Midland and the MSLR succeed in stifling any attempt made to run a branch into Rufford and the LDECR has to be content with serving just the outlying villages of Ollerton and Edwinstowe. At this time the MSLR's London Extension is built however the Mansfield branch remains just that. The Mansfield Corporation starts to agitate for a better rail service (this actually happened in our timeline) and approach the GCR to extend their branch to the London Extension. And are ignored. 1907 and the GCR take over the LDECR. A junction is made at Edwinstowe and now Rufford can see services to Chesterfield and Lincoln too. It's finally acknowledged at this point that the 1840s station is woefully ill-suited for this number of trains and the original Jacobean Revival building is pulled down, a second platform built, the junction between the Mansfield and Worksop lines reconfigured to allow easier reversal and new station buildings and canopies provided. 1911 and a group of people in Mansfield propose to build their own railway, to the GCR at Annesley via Sutton-in-Ashfield and Kirkby-in-Ashfield. This concludes with an end-on junction with the GC's single track Rufford-Mansfield line. Realising the potential for a cut-off, the GCR build a short length of track from King Clipstone and double the branch between Clipstone and Mansfield. Their express services can now run from the East Coast to Annesley avoiding Sheffield. All GC services are then concentrated at Mansfield Central. By the time this is done it is 1915, the railways are under government control and the area is being opened up to mining. This remains the situation in 1920. Traffic on the single track between Rufford and Clipstone is becoming increasingly heavy and plans are being made to ease this bottleneck, but doubling is still seen as being in the future when 1921 brings the Railways Act. It will be left to the North Eastern Group to complete the development of the area....