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Yesterday I was able to see a little more of the exhibition ....

 

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Above we see Halesworth South, a Suffolk might have been, which assumes the GER took over the Southwold Railway (and we see the SR house style in the station buildings) and met and extended Mid-Suffolk.

 

It was voted best layout by a Darlington MRC member by the visiting exhibitors. 

 

 

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57 minutes ago, Annie said:

Thanks for the excellent pictures James.  I do like that Southwold Railway 'might have been' layout.  Very much my kind of railway.

 

Yes, it was interesting to discover that a Darlington member was a Great Eastern man.  He now knows he is not alone!

 

I think he was as surprised as I was.

 

Well, anything to oblige a lady .....

 

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The layout is set 1945-1948, but you'll notice a Buckjumper in ultramarine on the bridge where the GER line crosses the line.

 

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Interestingly, he has built the Scalescenes church, using the flint option, which i have also purchased with a view to plundering for St Tabitha's.  Next door is that very attractive Petit Properties cottage.  

  

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There is a lot of Suffolk/East Anglian flavour to the layout. It is always important to capture 'place', and this layout very much does so to my mind.

 

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2 hours ago, Annie said:

Thanks for the excellent pictures James.  I do like that Southwold Railway 'might have been' layout.  Very much my kind of railway.

I was lured out by your pictures for a 3 hour 'quick dip' down to North Road museum Darlington yesterday afternoon from home and I found it all a most spectacular experience interspersed amongst the permanent exhibits. I am ashamed to say it must be over 10 years since I last visited North Road station. 

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It was interesting listening to others as they moved around the layouts, most frequently I heard people comparing notes about the cameo details they had spotted or had missed.  Crinan scored very highly on on this,

  • not only because visitors asked one another if they'd seen the swing bridge swing.
  • nobody could come up with a reason for the cameo of the two in the bottom left hand corner of the above detail concerned about the floating of the model 5" gauge (?) loco. 
    I wondered if they were trying the Hedley Wylam experiment of powering a boat with a loco.

Breaking News Leak on Crinan:

A trade exhibitor told me he had sold a "puffer" to Signaller Martyn who'd never found a model quite accurate enough until this week-end. So keep a watch on Crinan's lock

dh

 

EDIT

Gosh !

I'd only just arrived at the Halesworth layout as a furious cloudburst of Hale hail outside (at about 3.30pm) must have overcome a valley gutter in the 1840s station and water began pouring down over the illuminated church !

Fortunately we found a litter bin to hand, five heavies hauled the trestles out into the middle of the Meeting Room and someone had the presence of mind to disconnect the electricity to the fully illuminated layout. 

I do hope no lasting damage was done.

At home we had exactly the same issue with hail 10 days ago as water poured down three flights of our carved Jacobean staircase, having over come a parapet gutter. In 40 years this is only the second time this has ever occurred.

Edited by runs as required
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15 minutes ago, runs as required said:

I was lured out by your pictures for a 3 hour 'quick dip' down to North Road museum Darlington yesterday afternoon from home and I found it all a most spectacular experience interspersed amongst the permanent exhibits. I am ashamed to say it must be over 10 years since I last visited North Road station. 

 

So glad you could come.  It was a great show; everyone had a blast!

 

15 minutes ago, runs as required said:

 

  • nobody could come up with a reason for the cameo of the two in the bottom left hand corner of the above detail concerned about the floating of the model 5" gauge (?) loco. 
    I wondered if they were doing a Hedley Wylam experiment of powering a boat with a loco.

 

Well spotted!

 

15 minutes ago, runs as required said:

 

Breaking News Leak on Crinan:

A trade exhibitor told me he had sold a "puffer" to Signaller Martyn who'd never found a model quite accurate enough until this week-end. So keep a watch on Crinan's lock

dh

 

 It has appeared !

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47 minutes ago, runs as required said:
  • nobody could come up with a reason for the cameo of the two in the bottom left hand corner of the above detail concerned about the floating of the model 5" gauge (?) loco. 
    I wondered if they were trying the Hedley Wylam experiment of powering a boat with a loco.

 

Looks like a scene from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Little_Railway_in_the_World with Stuck Drawbridge.

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I’ve enjoyed virtually attending the exhibition - we don’t get to see so much of Scottish and NE modelling down here, presumably because it’s too far to bring layouts.

 

I was free on Sunday, and thought about coming up, but then I looked at travel durations and got sensible!

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The Halesworth layout man has a very mixed chronology: quite apart from the GER blue Buckjumper, he also has a couple of Spillers vans – Spillers didn't operate their own vans after about 1911 (I'd have to check the exact date) – and they used ventilated Iron Mink type vans, not repainted gunpowder vans. Plus, though he gets brownie points for using local POs, they would be long gone by 1945-8.

 

More details in the "PO Wagons of East Anglia" published c2026 (if I live long enough to write it)...

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A permanent S& D Darlington, and to me, most instructive museum exhibit (I think it may be called a Diorama), is under a perspex protective cover perhaps 20-30 metre long. It is a model of a complete length of the S & D as built from the Brusselton incline to beyond the the Skerne bridge and onto Stockton. I'm not clear about the scale but James said the scratch built models of the early locomotives once worked.

2

And this temporary exhibition gallery show also caught my eye:105971959_dressingup.jpg.be8ee66d6c53b6f4314cc022da36a3e6.jpg

I liked these ephemeral paper models of the last century. My sister always played with those cut -out dolls dresses - she and her friends would compete in drawing their own dress designs and outfits with tabs for the shoulders. We all teased her when, eventually she started cutting full size stuff out to wear herself, she never really remembered about covering her own backside either.

I thought the military aficionados of CA might enjoy the boys version top right where an alluringly magnetic slim young man (standing in the centre) is able to be clad in any one of an array of uniforms (unlike poles attract remember)

The lower left exhibits attracted me - particularly theDrummond Sou'west' express fold out which could be 'dressed' around with cut outs in the foreground - and perhaps too in the background?

In front of this were the Micromodels advertised in the late 1940s Meccano Magazines I read.  Though only costing a few pence, I never knew any kids who actually made them

dh

 

 

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15 minutes ago, runs as required said:

In front of this were the Micromodels advertised in the late 1940s Meccano Magazines I read.  Though only costing a few pence, I never knew any kids who actually made them

 

They rediscovered them in later life and built them. There are a few threads on here, e.g.

Also: 

 

 

 

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21 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Re Stamford East goods shed ....

 

North Road goods shed, 1833, is said to be the pattern for all subsequent sheds in as much as it broke from the previous practice of loading road carts below rail level, adopting the now familiar arrangement of a single storey structure.  

But Stamford SER goods shed was double-storey.

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20 minutes ago, Regularity said:

But Stamford SER goods shed was double-storey.

 

I was hardly claiming that all goods sheds had to be single storey after 1833, just that, apparently, it was the North Road shed that represented the shift in general to the common single story arrangement.  Ultimately it's not my claim, but the museum's, but it makes sense to me.

 

In any case, the material point was the change to loading carts on the level, not loading from above, so Stamford does not represent a return to this early railway practice. 

 

In any case, as North Road is on the NE, it's not a goods shed but a warehouse!

 

Here is the gen ...

 

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The Darlington Railway Preservation Society gives the impression of being totally, profoundly and  determinedly inactive. They once did something; they apparently own a couple of locos on preserved railways, which bring in an income, but the Society is otherwise known locally for its visible lack of progress.  If anyone knows anything about this apparently moribund effort and its invisible membership, I'd be interested to hear; I would not wish to appear unfair! 

 

To my mind this magnificent goods warehouse, with its classical clock tower, needs to be taken in hand and made a key feature of the museum site.  There are not that many intact railway structures of this period extant and this one is of evident architectural merit and historical significance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Edwardian
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I’m sure we’ve linked to this before, but it’s so very useful in this context https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/railway-goods-shed-and-warehouse-in-england/the-railway-goods-shed-and-warehouse/

 

After talking about earlier designs, it says:

 

The 1827 Darlington shed’s 1833 replacement, the Merchandise Station (Fig 8), still stands, the earliest single-storey goods shed to survive. Designed by Thomas Storey, Engineer to the Stockton & Darlington Railway, the Merchandise Station was extended in 1839–40 when a handsome Classical clock tower was added. The layout did not influence the future design of goods sheds in that access for rail traffic was via a series of short sidings entering the building at intervals along its principal façade rather than a line running through the shed. Constructed of sandstone, it comprises eight bays separated by pilasters and with large round-headed iron windows.9 Its Grade II* listing reflects its substantially unaltered condition.

Edited by Nearholmer
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52 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I’m sure we’ve linked to this before, but it’s so very useful in this context https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/railway-goods-shed-and-warehouse-in-england/the-railway-goods-shed-and-warehouse/

 

After talking about earlier designs, it says:

 

The 1827 Darlington shed’s 1833 replacement, the Merchandise Station (Fig 8), still stands, the earliest single-storey goods shed to survive. Designed by Thomas Storey, Engineer to the Stockton & Darlington Railway, the Merchandise Station was extended in 1839–40 when a handsome Classical clock tower was added. The layout did not influence the future design of goods sheds in that access for rail traffic was via a series of short sidings entering the building at intervals along its principal façade rather than a line running through the shed. Constructed of sandstone, it comprises eight bays separated by pilasters and with large round-headed iron windows.9 Its Grade II* listing reflects its substantially unaltered condition.

 

I assume that the numbers of openings along the facade facing the line were for lines to enter at right angles from wagon TTs?

 

That is how I interpreted it, but I have not seen a track plan from the 1830s.  

 

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The railway tracks are all located to the left of the above scene.  There's a pretty obvious lack of an opening in the end wall at the left. 

 

The house to the right of the picture is also extant.  It was the Good's Agent's house and now houses our club rooms. 

 

 

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5 hours ago, runs as required said:

nobody could come up with a reason for the cameo of the two in the bottom left hand corner of the above detail concerned about the floating of the model 5" gauge (?) loco. 

 

Possibly a "woosh" moment but it looks like a cameo of the moment a G scale loco was floated across the Canal on a "ferry" in the C4 Model Railway Challenge to run a train from Fort William to Inverness.

 

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1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

 

I was hardly claiming that all goods sheds had to be single storey after 1833, just that, apparently, it was the North Road shed that represented the shift in general to the common single story arrangement. 

Well, no, you weren’t making such a claim, so I wondered what North Road goods shed had to do with Stamford goods shed.

Your elision suggested there was a link, but I am happy to accept that the mention of Stamford goods shed was irrelevant, but that goods sheds in their own right sparked off a thought.

just thought that being a lawyer, you would be keen on careful use of words... ;)

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Exhibition looked good, I like the early RhB layout. I've been to the past couple but decided against this one due to a combination of illness/lack of cash/nothing on the layout list really grabbing me. Perhaps next time I'll be there again. The setting amongst the locos always gives it a certain atmosphere.

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12 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I’ve enjoyed virtually attending the exhibition - we don’t get to see so much of Scottish and NE modelling down here, presumably because it’s too far to bring layouts.

 

I was free on Sunday, and thought about coming up, but then I looked at travel durations and got sensible!

Nor down here...

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Browsing Facepest at work earlier (it was a very slow day!!) I came across a group dedicated to the Midland & Great Northern Jt Railway. In there was a rather interesting discussion on the M&GN’s proposed Blakeney branch line, plus a couple of photos of maps of the proposed line. 

 

Not great photos of the maps sadly, but they were rather interesting, and I thought that members of the Parish Council may wish to peruse them as I did:

 

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 Having sent us off topic on the subject of Norfolk Railways, I shall now return to adding transfers to my Furness Railway wagons :) 

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On 02/09/2019 at 17:28, Edwardian said:

 

I assume that the numbers of openings along the facade facing the line were for lines to enter at right angles from wagon TTs?

 

That is how I interpreted it, but I have not seen a track plan from the 1830s.  

 

 

Wymondham (Norfolk, GER) goods shed has its axis at right angles to the main line. Difficult to tell with the modern alterations, but I'd have expected there to have been several sidings entering the arches.  However this doesn't seem to have been the case, at least at the period of the 1906 25in map:

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There were a number of early Great Northern stations - in Lincolnshire I think - where the goods shed was at right angles to the usual orientation and was accessed by wagon turntables so I suspect this may be the same. No doubt in later years the wagon turntables were found to be an inconvenience so the access re-arranged. Apologies that I can't give a GN example by name - I'm remembering a Martin Waters article from a late 60s MRN that is buried deep in a box somewhere...

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