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wagonman

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Posts posted by wagonman

  1. 2 hours ago, RapidoLinny said:

    The choice to paint the verticals black but the diagonals body colour on the Skinner wagon was made based on several facts:
     

    1. Many Gloucester-built private owner wagons are recorded as having black vertical ironwork, while the diagonal washer plates were painted in body colour (for example the J. Jones wagon we are producing, of which there is a photograph of the prototype on our website. Possibly related to the Gloucester company's predilection for inside diagonal washer plates?
    2. The red stripe passes over only the diagonal ironwork, but not the verticals, and it seems to me that it would be rather strange to paint the diagonals but not the verticals with a red stripe if both were green.
    3. Assuming the corner plates to be black, they look to have a very similar brightness level to the woodwork of the adjacent sheet planks.  As such, the best method available to tell whether the individual pieces of ironwork are black or body colour would appear to be whether the aforementioned red stripe covers them. 

    One of the great joys of trying to determine colours of liveries from black-and-white photographs! I suspect that until someone creates a working time machine, we may never know for certain. 

    Thanks,

    Linny

     

     Your reasoning is sound, Linny. The wagon looks good and Stanley is not around to contradict you!

     

     

    Richard

     

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  2. 7 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

     

    It seems to me that you are saying the livery was red with a green stripe, contradicting what you wrote in PO Wagons of Wiltshire:

     

     

    It is evidently upon this authoritative statement that Rapido have based their livery.

     

     

    Ouch. I seem to have changed my mind for some reason as the original text on the page proofs was in agreement with the point I have been making here! I wonder why I changed my mind?

     

    Your point about the body ironwork being the same colour as the main part of the body is a good one – the tone is essentially identical, and clearly lighter than the black axle boxes etc. Also the part where the diagonals cross the lighter stripe is clearly body colour too – though not the verticals.

     

    I think I'll shut up now ...

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  3. 13 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

     

    This wagon is an instance where the suggestion of putting different numbers on either side falls down, since there was only one of it, as far as is known. 

     

    According to the Gloucester records there was indeed just the one wagon bought in June 1932, described as secondhand 12-ton new specification (ie pre-1923) wagon on 7 years deferred payments.

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  4. A quick tutorial on the colour sensitivity of photographic emulsions:

     

    The earliest emulsions were sensitive only to the blue end of the spectrum – which makes Clerk Maxwell's demonstration of colour photography in the 1860s nothing short of miraculous. By the end of the C19 they had managed to extend the sensitivity into the green part of the spectrum (around 500nm) which they called Orthochromatic. Such an emulsion would render red dark but green light as I suspect was the case with the Skinner fils wagon. Panchromatic films, sensitive to the full visible light spectrum, were introduced in about 1906 but had not completely displaced Ortho even in the 1950s. A panchromatic photo of that wagon would render the red and green in similar tones being equally sensitive to both colours.

     

    Ortho continued in use for some commercial work as it could be developed under a red safelight, whereas Panchro demanded complete darkness – this could be useful in the days before accurate exposure meters!

     

    Alles Klar?

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  5. Another observation: the S Skinner, Melksham, wagon dates from 1932 when it was acquired secondhand from Gloucester. In its previous life it was probably used in south Wales as it has the two commode handles on the end door, a feature of wagons in that area. The official photo lacks an information board, but in my book I came to the conclusion the livery was an inversion of that used by James Skinner and depicted on the model. My reasoning was that in 1932 a lot of photographers were still using orthochromatic plates which would record red as a dark tone and green as a light one – the photo shows the middle two planks noticeably paler than the top and bottom ones, ergo the livery was red with a green band. I doubt there's anybody around who can remember the original, and unless there's some definitive notice buried deep in the Gloucester records, who cares?

     

    Richard

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  6. It's probably worth pointing out that the 1907 RCH specs weren't exactly new – more a consolidation of existing best practice so there would have been quite a few wagons built to near enough the 1907 standard from the early 1900s.

     

    Apropos Renwick, Wilton & Co 521, it is a Gloucester built wagon, according to their records one of two 12-tonners supplied in January 1909 and paid for in cash. This is a puzzle because there is what looks suspiciously like a Gloucester owners' plate on the solebar!

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  7. On 19/03/2023 at 12:45, Dungrange said:

     

    It is possibly unrealistic to expect Rapido to produce versions with both 5 and 9 leaf springs and if 5 leaf springs were more common in their later life, I can see why they made that choice.

     

     

    The artwork does say that it is 'pre-production and subject to change', so this is perhaps something that @rapidoandy or @RapidoLinny have already picked up on and it may be correct in the final production models.

     

     

    This is perhaps why Rapido haven't given details of when the livery was current.  We know that there was a wagon that carried this livery (from that photograph), but we don't know with certainty when it carried that livery and possibly Rapido don't either.  It's maybe as well to give us no information, than incorrect information.

     

     

    I suppose that this also highlights the problem that manufacturer's face when modelling the distant past.  Were all of Annesley's wagon fleet built by Eastwood & Co of Chesterfield?  It appears that it they had a fairly large fleet, so it's conceivable that some were built by other builders and it is therefore possible that some may have been built by Charles Roberts.  If that were the case, then it is possible that the general livery is correct, but the number is not correct for a Charles Roberts wagon.  That could be solved by renumbering, but to what?  I'm guessing that there is little details on the Annesley wagon fleet beyond a couple of photographs.

     

    I suspect most/many of the Annesley wagons would have been registered by the Midland in which case the answer is lying in wait for anyone who cares to spend a few days at Kew.

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  8. 6 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

     

    But remember that this is not a GW-built wagon, or one built to GW order, but a wagon on hire to the GW from Ince. In the 19th century it was not unusual for the railway companies to hire mineral wagons from the trade - the Midland was doing so into the mid-1880s - these GW and GC hires were late examples of the practice. The GW had very few mineral wagons of its own, excepting loco coal wagons, as a matter of policy; in the GC case, I imagine as a matter of necessity - lack of capital to build its own. There have been some articles on GW hired wagons in Pannier, but I don't have them. I think @wagonman can give chapter and verse.

     

    My records are far from complete...

     

     

    Richard

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  9. On 15/03/2023 at 09:14, Morello Cherry said:

     

     

     

    Further on there are references to cattle (that need to be milked) being milked. But... I am wondering how many journeys in the UK would be long enough for that.

     

     

     

     

     

    The GWR General Appendix (and presumably all the other railways' GAs too ) have detailed instructions for the care of animals in transit – feeding, watering, and milking where necessary, so they obviously assume that some journeys would be long enough.

     

    They don't seem to say anything about loading head to tail, or any other way, but where you have a full load of horned cattle it does seem to make sense – especially as they may not know from which side of the vehicle the animals would be detrained.

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  10. 5 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

    No, there definitely were wagons delivered during the Second World War, and not just non-pool ones. I'll have to go through my Turton volumes and see if I can find any.

    Jonathan

     

    Indeed there were wagons ordered and built during the war, and as Jonathan said they went straight into the pool. I have a notion that the owners were still responsible for repairs, etc.. They would often have acknowledged their ownership by having the name written in small letters in the bottom left hand corner – presumably the RCH number takers still needed an identity. The pool effectively carried on after the war (how do you sort out half a million wagons?) until nationalisation and compensation by the BTC. Pooled wagons weren't taken over until the early '50s.

     

    Richard

    • Informative/Useful 3
  11. 20 hours ago, Schooner said:

     

    It's sickening to tick off each technique from the mainstream politics playbook. Despicable Bingo. My faith in our institutions pulling through, as they have many times before, remains...but 'k me it's going to be a close-run thing.

     

     

     

     

    I think much of the damage inflicted since 1980 is now pretty much irreversible. Take housing for instance – it's going to take time, a lot of money, and even more nerve to restore a functioning housing market/social housing supply. And that's just one of the problems...

     

    I don't see the Prussian army coming to our aid this time.

    • Agree 3
  12. 3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

    I'm just back from an interesting afternoon at the Basingstoke show where I hardly looked at any layouts since most of my time was spent chewing over Great Western 4-plank wagons and related matters with @Western Star and @Chrisbr. I did get some 0.35 mm drill bits from Squires, so am, finally, equipped to tackle the Brassmasters / @Andy Vincent Gloucester wagon... 

     

    Time spent chewing over things with Graham is rarely wasted.

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  13. 1 hour ago, Annie said:

     

    Hello Richard,  the R.B.Pullin wagon was made by a member of the creator group I belong to back in 2016 and as with other PO wagons he made they were based on photographic artwork of a GWR open wagon and a fairly basic wagon body mesh so they are essentially representational only and aren't accurate models.  I'm fairly sure he was getting his information from one of the readily available series of PO wagon books as the description notes for the wagon are fairly sparse and only mention that the prototype was built to 1907 RCH specs.  So i'm afraid I can't really help you with any more information than that.

     

    VjCEOSI.jpg

     

    Ah yes, that is from the Glos official photo of the last one built and is accurate, except that the '12 tons' should be on the right hand side. 

     

     

     

    1850358635_PullinR68Torquaysmall.jpg.f548d853856b42060ce62bb858ccd9f8.jpg

     

    Why the f**k has it come out with a red screen?

     

     

     

    • Like 3
  14. On 04/03/2023 at 08:42, Annie said:

    This is a follow up to me mentioning canals for Trainz earlier in the thread. the original 'Middleton for laptops' (TANE) was specially developed so that it would run on a low end laptop.  All the models used were made to have a minimal memory footprint and were simplified in order to achieve this.

    A further development of this layout was 'Middleton with Canal' which with its simple approach to the subject makes a better job of it than some very busy and complex canal layouts for Trainz that I've seen.

    For some strange reason I had a lot of difficulty with getting enough of a reasonable video clip to show you as the screen capture software kept on pausing and juddering.

     

     

     Annie, where did you get the R B Pullin wagons from? Ralph Bertrand Pullin was a Torquay based coal merchant active from around 1924 using a fleet of ten Gloucester built 12-ton wagons numbered 50-68 (even numbers only). They were built to 1907 design/dimensions. If you have other information about them I would love to hear it!

     

     

    Richard

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