[A North Staffordshire Railway D9 van.]

If anyone is inclined to question the presence of a Knotty van in Glasgow before the Great War, point them to Lt.-Col. Yorke's report on the accident at Gretna in the early hours of 14 May 1891:

https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BoT_Gretna1901.pdf.

Wagons in a southbound Caledonian goods train, Gushetfaulds to Carlisle, derailed, fouling the northbound line. (Which way is up, there?) A northbound Sou' Western goods train, Carlisle to College Goods, Glasgow, ran into this; fortunately there were only minor personal injuries but there was much destruction of stock, which is duly listed in the appendix. Damaged vehicles in the GSWR train were all GSWR and MR but the victims in the CR train bear witness to the goods traffic on the WCML: 10 CR, 5 NER, 6 LNWR, 5 L&YR, 1 GWR, and 1 NSR wagon. The latter was No. 2781, perhaps more likely to have been an open than a covered goods wagon.

[OO Gauge MR 700 Class]

1 hour ago, AlfaZagato said:

I need to renumber my 812.   I plan to renumber it to be 'Donald' in about '32.

 

Ah, yes, I remember noticing that the twins carried the next two numbers after the real last class member, before they 'lost' them.

[OO Gauge MR 700 Class]

16 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:

Are those sandboxes hanging off the outside frame?

 

Yes, those are only a feature of engines rebuilt with D or E boilers, and retained when those boilers were exchanged for the G7 Belpaire boilers. The D and E boilers were second-hand off Johnson 4-4-0s that were being rebuilt with the larger H boiler and were a bit longer than the B boilers originally carried. The 700 class were built without any sanding gear but once steam standing had become standard (from the mid-1880s) they were fitted with sandboxes under the front framing, with sand pipes to the leading wheels. I suppose that these got in the way of the modifications needed to fit the D or E boiler, or possibly it was felt that with the increased power of the rebuilt engines, better sanding was needed. Johnson's earlier 0-6-0s were also built without sanding but the later engines had sand boxes from new, either side of the centre driving wheel; these were of the same pattern as those fitted to these 700 Class engines but being mounted on the inside frames and partly hidden by the footplate valence, were rather less prominent.

[OO Gauge MR 700 Class]

Quote

If anyone remembers, I have a penchant for ugly locos. 

 

An off-topic comment if ever there was one!

 

That looks like a nicely-built example of the K's kit; you're lucky to have it. You might want to consider renumbering. 2849 was one of a handful of 700 class engines rebuilt with the type D boiler in 1908/9, which did result in a degree of uglification:

 

 

[Embedded link to catalogue image of Midland Railway Study Centre item 82417, 2849 approaching Trent with a through goods train c. 1920.]

 

It went straight from this condition to a G6 Belpaire boiler in 1923, a type it retained until withdrawal in 1947:

 

 

[Embedded link to catalogue image of Midland Railway Study Centre item 99-0683, 2849 outside Derby No. 4 shed c. 1925.]

 

Tenders are a bit of a nightmare. By the 1920s, many 700 Class engines were running with either Johnson tenders off withdrawn 2-4-0s and the like, or with Kirtley tenders with rebuilt tanks, as in these photos of 2849.

 

An example of an engine with round-topped boiler and unrebuilt Kirtley tender, i.e. in the condition of the model, is 2834, renumbered 22834 in 1935 (2849 was renumbered 22834 around the same time). 2849 was a Derby engine for most of its life; 2834 was allocated at Leeds or Normanton up to 1930 but was at Birmingham in 1933, ending its days as part of Bournville shed's antique collection.

 

[Ref. S. Summerson, Midland Railway Locomotives Vol. 2 (Irwell Press, 2007).]

[Pearson 4-2-4T – Part Two]

One wonders what was the basis for the 1910 The Engineer drawings. E.L. Ahrons had been a Swindon apprentice in the 1880s, so may well have had access to first-hand information about these engines.

[Pearson’s 4-2-4T – Part One]

I'm not sure one should read Pearson's baptism in the C of E as evidence of his not being a Quaker. Although Quakers did not practice baptism and were, with Jews, exempt from the Clandestine Marriage Act, 1753, which made marriage in the C of E the only legal form of marriage, there were all sorts of social and economic reasons for occasionally conforming.

[NER P5 hoppers with automatic working bottom door]

Could do with a bit of TLC...

[NER P5 hoppers with automatic working bottom door]

Did these wagons have the Midland / RCH type of bottom door release catch?

[About time too!]

Absolutely worth the wait - superbly-finished vehicles.

 

On 08/03/2024 at 07:02, Mikkel said:

The U14 is one of those six-wheelers that could have been a four-wheeler (perhaps it even became one, can't remember). Which makes me wonder why six wheels were chosen in the first place. Better riding?

 

14 hours ago, wenlock said:

Yes they did seem very keen on six wheelers around the 1880s, but by the late 1890s four wheelers seem to more prevalent.

 

I believe it was the case that a four wheeler gave a better ride than a six-wheeler. I think the earlier use of three axles and later conversion to two had chiefly to do with journal, bearing, and lubrication technology. In the 1870s and 80s, the weight of these carriages was too much for four of the bearings of the time, but by the 90s, larger journals were being used with better designs of oil axlebox. Compare Churchward's 70-footers with four-wheel bogies, built at a time when other companies were putting carriages a few feet shorter (but possibly heavier) on six-wheel bogies. 

 

Back in the late 1870s, when Clayton was first building bogie carriages on the Midland, a decision was made that in future, all new carriages would be either bogie or four-wheeled but that didn't last long. A large number of 28 ft and 29 ft carriages built in the first few years after Clayton's appointment as four-wheelers were converted to six-wheelers in the early 1880s. 

 

Apologies for introducing the Midland but it's not so far OT - it seems to me that Clayton must have initiated the style of panelling used on these Great Western carriages shortly before he left Swindon for Derby, where he introduced essentially the same style. So one suspects other details of construction were related, too.

[An early CR horsebox, part 1]

14 minutes ago, Dave John said:

The compartments at the RH end of the model are described as dog boxes so the CR envisaged some traffic to hunts as well as races. 

 

I don't think one would take one's own dog to the meet - the hunt would provide the hounds. Did the Caledonian have any hounds vans? Perhaps not really foxhunting territory.

[An early CR horsebox, part 1]

36 minutes ago, WFPettigrew said:

I would slightly take issue with "country cottage"

 

Joke. But measure Holker on a scale where Chatsworth is your average family home!

[An early CR horsebox, part 1]

1 hour ago, WFPettigrew said:

The other thing to remember is that there was a lot of horse traffic that had nothing to do with racing: the movement of working horses, sales, the wealthier taking their horse with them when they and their household went away, etc. 

 

Cark-in-Cartmell, Cark, or Cark & Cartmel is the station for the Duke of Devonshire's Lake District country cottage, Holker Hall. When the Seventh Duke went there for Christmas 1883, there was sent from Chatsworth - dispatched from Rowsley - four private carriages in covered carriage trucks, nineteen horses, and three dogs, at a total cost of £43 14 s 6d. [G. Waite & L. Knighton, Rowsley, a Rural Railway Centre (Midland Railway Society, 2003), p. 65 - un-numbered figure reproducing ticket counterfoil.]

[An early CR horsebox, part 1]

I've found 3D printed wagons to be very variable in sharpness of finish and brittleness of material; it seems much depends on the printer and material used - the ones that are printed resin are generally the best. But painting often makes a big difference to how you feel about the material!

[Broad Gauge Trio – 2nd Movement]

I've become a bit puzzled by how the bearing springs work on these wagons. They appear to pass below the axleboxes, so rather than transferring the weight of the wagon by the wagon resting on the springs which in turn rest on top of the axleboxes, they apparently pull down on the axleboxes, which seems mechanically unsatisfactory. It's perhaps a consequence of the relatively large wheels.

 

On further reflection, though, it's the way the bearing springs were later commonly arranged on inside-framed locomotives.

[Midland Railway D299 Open]

Yes, you can - should - range much more widely. 

[Midland Railway D299 Open]

Indeed, I'll go further and say I look forward to a train that includes no ordinary GW opens or vans. Is he brave enough? 

[Midland Railway D299 Open]

24 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

https://mousa-models.co.uk/product-category/4mm-scale/4mm-lms-resin-wagon/

 

I expect that @Compound2632 would instruct me to do another D299, but it's tempting to add a bit of variety with one of the other MR diagrams in that range instead.

 

By no means. There were plenty of the blighters still about but if you want to put a post-war stamp on your train (rather than looking as if you don't understand how pre-pooling goods traffic worked) I think you should go for a 10 or 12 ton open to D663A. Although Bill describes it as a coal wagon, they were at first officially "goods and coal" like the 8 ton wagons, with bottom doors, but later lots were without these. If it were me, I'd pitch the date at c. 1924, so you could have a new LMS 12-ton open, D1666, to complete the family. That just post-grouping date will give you the maximum range of types of wagon and liveries - so you can have the same wagon in, say, LNWR and LMS livery.

[Christmas 2023, observing the signals.]

Condensing Jumbo? I didn't know. I'm struggling to think of another example of a condensing tender loco.

 

Merry Christmas!

[God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen]

Lovely top see the video pinned in RMWeb's RH column. Nothing like a bit of Brio to get one down to the fundamentals of railway modelling.

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

[Fifth bite: The station building]

11 minutes ago, David Bigcheeseplant said:

Nothing unusual about the bricks between the window they are queen closures (quarter bricks) they are used at all corners door and window openings.

 

As seen here in an English bond corner, but also used in the same way at a Flemish bond corner:

 

 

Note how each course switches from stretchers to headers on going round the corner.

[2-4-0s, and the Armstrong era in particular]

1 hour ago, JimC said:

rebuilds which had significant chassis changes!

 

By which I take it you mean new frames (were there changes of wheelbase?) and / or new cylinders?

 

Did the outside-framed engines also have inside frames? I'm familiar with the Matthew Kirtley arrangement whereby the outside frames carried the axleboxes for all three axles but the inside frames also carried additional axleboxes for the middle, crank axle - hence they were referred to as double-framed (DF) rather than outside-framed. In Kirtley's earlier designs, the inside frames were not full length but fixed to the front of the firebox - a hangover from very early design practice where the boiler was treated as the main structural component of the locomotive. But by the 1860s it was realised that this was a Bad Idea. 

['Special'- unique photo]

"Restore images"!

[Early GWR 'Absorbed' Engines]

The OWW nearly fell into the hands of the LNWR - hence the Yarnton curve onto the Bletchley-Oxford line - and during the period when it was on worst terms with the GWR, worked a Eurston - Worcester - Wolverhampton service, The W&H was largely backed by the LNWR and MR. What with MR interest in the B&E and lines west of that, the GWR was really rather fortunate not to end up confined to London to Bristol and Birmingham. 

[2-4-0s, and the Armstrong era in particular]

On 10/11/2023 at 20:43, Miss Prism said:

106, apparently ex-Birkenhead Railway. Date unknown. I don't know the original loco builder - the body as updated here is mostly Wolverhampton, but the frame front end is a dead ringer for a Metro tank. The tender is strange, springs mounted low, Swindon-looking toolboxes, but it doesn't have a footplate. Looks more LNWR than GWR to me. (The Birkenhead Railway had feet in both camps.)

 

Southern Division (McConnell) rather than Northern Division (Ramsbottom) - curious.

[GWR ‘Sir Daniel’]

43 minutes ago, JimC said:

But correct me if wrong.

 

No. on reflection, you're right about that. It's the conversion of linear to circular motion that creates the uneven vertical force through each cycle.