Creating a believable freelance pre-Group company

[Edwardian]

I took a blue liveried, 1970's era, Hunslet Austerity up the club once and placed it alongside someones Scottish Blue Diesesal. After shouting at me for doing this, he was promptly told how prototypical the scene looked! Then someone showed him a photo of one of the 1923 VOR tanks in blue... he didn't know what to say! Then he said "It goes chuff therefore it's boring" to which I commented that my Bulleid West Country was less of a box on wheels than his class 27...

 

Steam is Steam and Diesel is Diesel and never the twain ....

 

With a lot of effort I can just about imagine why someone might be interested in diesels, despite their relative lack of character, dull grating noise and rather nasty smell.

 

What I cannot understand is how anyone with any love of railways, or anything by way of a soul, could fail to appreciate the sound, sight, smell, beauty and romance of steam.  Yet, there are some poor benighted creatures that dismiss steam locomotives as "kettles".  Though, to me, there seems to be something more than a little defensive in this deliberate antagonism, as if, deep down somewhere in what passes for their souls, they fear that the diesels and electrics that they crave are, after all, intrinsically dull.

 

That was Rant for Today by the Right Rev. Righteous Blastpipe DD

 

In all seriousness, I think this mutual incomprehension argues merely for acceptance that we worship in a broad church, and that that is Okay. I cannot understand why Brother Dieselhead loves what he does, but, I see that he does love it, and I must leave him be to make obeisance to his deity of choice.  After all, a successful or worthwhile layout is not determined by scale, gauge, period or geographical setting, and, so, it is rare that I do not find some reward for studying a layout, even if thereon diesels have gone forth and multiplied.

[whart57]

Speaking personally, it's a question of experience. Steam disappeared from my neck of the woods when I was seven years old, I don't really remember steam in daily use. The only steam I know is preserved steam, steam engines in the chocolate box environment of the heritage railways. Diesel on the other hand is a real experience, the noise, smells, dirt and grime of locomotives that are working for a living.

 

But there again I am modeling a railway which may be diesel powered but still has brake vans on the end of goods trains, its guards still use red and green flags, there is still a lot of mechanical signalling and a lot of single track sections managed with classic token exchange equipment. It is a railway I experienced for myself a little bit, which I never could with pre-Group steam.

 

Now don't get me started on the tedium of SR Electrics .........

[Edwardian]

Speaking personally, it's a question of experience. Steam disappeared from my neck of the woods when I was seven years old, I don't really remember steam in daily use. The only steam I know is preserved steam, steam engines in the chocolate box environment of the heritage railways. Diesel on the other hand is a real experience, the noise, smells, dirt and grime of locomotives that are working for a living.

 

But there again I am modeling a railway which may be diesel powered but still has brake vans on the end of goods trains, its guards still use red and green flags, there is still a lot of mechanical signalling and a lot of single track sections managed with classic token exchange equipment. It is a railway I experienced for myself a little bit, which I never could with pre-Group steam.

 

Now don't get me started on the tedium of SR Electrics .........

 

Much, indeed, as I recall the railway, though as a trackside observer, never as a passenger!

[whart57]

 

Horsham North Street today?

[sem34090]

Indeed! The sidings containing the units that surely win the award for the most-uncomfortable-stock introduced-for-passengers-since-the-end-of-the-Broad-Gauge-era make an ideal site! You could bring the history up to the modern day by explaining that the site of the passenger station, which was closed in the late 1930's following the redevelopment of Horsham (LBSCR) station acted as North Street goods depot until circa-1970 when the yard was closed, eventually being redeveloped as engineer's sidings, with the former L&SR Goods Yard becoming carriage sidings.

 

I always appreciate good modelling and have operated several diesel-era layouts, possibly my favourite being 'Oldshaw', I was referring to an enjoyable winding up of a friend who actively despises steam locos to the extent that, the day we had 46100 'Royal Scot' come down here on a special, he didn't film that but did film the Class 47 on the ECS move.

Ah... SR Electrics. I get why people see those as boring, but I have found pre-grouping electrics as particularly interesting, simply because they are often very unusual to modern eyes, and are very rarely modelled it seems.

 

At any rate I can't even remember blue diesels other than on  heritage lines, but my modelling interests have always been pre-1967 and are now gradually slipping to pre-1965 and pre-1923. My main experience of railways is the daily commute, and previously volunteering on the MHR - the latter being especially enjoyable!

[Annie]

Having little sense of geography and being largely confused by maps (except for the old OS ones because they are really pretty)  I tend to go for the lightish small railway end of the spectrum when it comes to imagineering a 'what-if' fictional railway company.  Mine tend to be of the kind that wander haphazardly across the landscape from a coastal town with a small wharf/port to a connection with one of the mainline companies who might permit such a connection with some reluctance or if not at least permit the use of the back edge of a platform at one of their stations.  Such companies have no intention of going anywhere near London.

 

When it comes to locomotives it's such things as old Manning Wardles and ancient Sharpie singles that have acquired cabs crafted more with enthusiasm than any sense of aesthetics that take my interest.  Coaches can be almost anything from the 1870's so long as they have four reasonably true running wheels and aren't falling apart.  Wagons with brakes consisting of a block of hard wood operated with a long lever pretty much sums up other kinds of rolling stock.  As to the Grouping,- as if anybody on my railway noticed it happening, - we can largely assume that they weren't invited to the party.

 

For my last flight of fancy I invented the Sumwheir District Railways which was to spend much of its track mileage traversing salt marshes on wooden pilings providing a service to a handful of isolated villages and mostly carried fish, sea salt and sand along with the normal selection of general odds and ends folk might need.

 

 

All this might seem completely boring to anyone who wants express trains rushing to London and a complete railway network that's been seamlessly darned into a historic railway map, but this is what I like and some of my ideas for the Sumwheir District Railways will be carried over to the Foxwater Light Railway which I'm presently working on.

[whart57]

I have a 7mm scale Manning Wardle part-built for a layout like that. On the North Kent coast between Whitstable and Herne Bay there is a short pier, Hampton Pier. It has an interesting history. It was built in the mid 19th century when some business men, seeing the money being made from Whitstable oysters once there was a reliable railway connection from there to London, planned competing oyster beds a couple of miles further down the Thames Estuary at a village called Hampton. They seeded the mud flats there with young oysters, built a pier and laid a railway track from there to the relatively new LCDR mainline.

 

The venture was a absolute failure. They oysters didn't take and storms wiped them out. Worse, the pier changed the tidal flows and these eroded the land on which the village of Hampton stood. And with no oysters and no village, the long siding was taken up. One interesting snippet is that it is recorded that sail power was used there to power a light wagon.

 

Alternative history: the oyster beds were a success, the long siding was an independent tramway which had its own engine and ran a passenger service as well.

 

 

Last bit of trivia - when the Whitstable beach scenes were filmed for the BBC series Tipping the Velvet they were actually filmed at Hampton.

Edited February 25, 2018 by whart57

[Corbs]

Reminds me of the two ex-Furness Sharp Stewarts bought by the WC&PR in 1898

 

'Clevedon' which was fitted with a new cab by Avonside of Bristol (to a similar design as the industrial locos of that time)

 

and 'Weston' which kept its original cab

[Annie]

Yes 'Clevedon' is the Sharpie single that I was very much thinking of.  Its Avonside cab granted it a quite unique appearance.  

Edited February 25, 2018 by Annie

[Regularity]

[pedant]

Just unique: it means “one of a kind”, so it ca’t be “quite unique” as it either is or isn’t. There are no adjectives which can qualify unique without being redundant. Unique is possibly unique in that respect.

[/pedant]

[Corbs]

Very true.

[whart57]

[pedant]

Just unique: it means “one of a kind”, so it ca’t be “quite unique” as it either is or isn’t. There are no adjectives which can qualify unique without being redundant. Unique is possibly unique in that respect.

[/pedant]

 

Pedants sometimes lose sight of context and human fuzziness. To say something is unique is to assert there is none other like it. That is proving a negative so requires a high degree of confidence to assert that. Hence the qualifier "quite" which effectively says "I think its unique but don't sue me if you know of another"

[Regularity]

Pedants sometimes lose sight of context and human fuzziness. To say something is unique is to assert there is none other like it. That is proving a negative so requires a high degree of confidence to assert that. Hence the qualifier "quite" which effectively says "I think its unique but don't sue me if you know of another"

I think that is quite the load of rubbish. Unique is binary, it is or it isn’t. Whether that is actually physically unique or unique in one’s mind is irrelevant - as far as the speaker is concerned, they are one and the same and as you say, it is an assertion that there is none other like it.

It doesn’t require confidence, it requires knowledge, and nothing more than a touch of human humility to accept that you are wrong when it turns out that you were.

[Annie]

I slipped up, I should know better since I usually take care with word usage.  And yes I do agree that 'unique' requires no other qualifier because it either is or it isn't.  I shall now go and iron my hands to teach myself not to do it again.

[Joseph_Pestell]

I slipped up, I should know better since I usually take care with word usage.  And yes I do agree that 'unique' requires no other qualifier because it either is or it isn't.  I shall now go and iron my hands to teach myself not to do it again.

That's a bit extreme! I thought that I went to a tough school as rulers would be brought down on fingers for such solecisms. Or sometimes, board dusters thrown towards heads.

 

I don't think BTW that the word "unique" is unique in this respect.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Back on topic, it seems to me that the essence of a credible freelance railway is that it has some credible traffic, whether freight or passenger.

[sem34090]

That's where using real lines, built by independent companies, as a basis makes sense, as there was a proven traffic in real life, and all the lines (Unless we include the Guildford - Horsham Direct Railway) still have a proven traffic today!

[Regularity]

Back on topic, it seems to me that the essence of a credible freelance railway is that it has some credible traffic, whether freight or passenger.

The western USA had lots of short-lived lines built to generate traffic which wasn’t there!

[whart57]

Back on topic, it seems to me that the essence of a credible freelance railway is that it has some credible traffic, whether freight or passenger.

 

But then there are lines like the SER's Chatham Central branch which failed that test

[JimC]

I slipped up, I should know better since I usually take care with word usage.  And yes I do agree that 'unique' requires no other qualifier because it either is or it isn't.  I shall now go and iron my hands to teach myself not to do it again.

But to throw another curveball into this pedants festival, if you go down to a detailed enough level every steam locomotive was unique. They were series built, partly by hand, and it's notorious that the position of minor fittings, pipe bends and the like would vary slightly because they were generally positioned by eye or ruler, not with a precision template. And if you go down a level further then doubtless each component would have different flaws or inclusions, patterns of sand from casting, fractionally different bearing diameters and all the rest of it.  So every locomotive was unique, if only at a microscopic level...

Edited February 25, 2018 by JimC

[JimC]

And I'm imagining the Surrey Junction Railway being absorbed by the GWR, not the Southern at the grouping, the Southern not being much interested in the Cranleigh and Redhill lines, and then I can run my favourite locomotives and stock in my favourite countryside...

Edited February 25, 2018 by JimC

[Regularity]

But to throw another curveball into this pedants festival, if you go down to a detailed enough level every steam locomotive was unique. They were series built, partly by hand, and it's notorious that the position of minor fittings, pipe bends and the like would vary slightly because they were generally positioned by eye or ruler, not with a precision template. And if you go down a level further then doubtless each component would have different flaws or inclusions, patterns of sand from casting, fractionally different bearing diameters and all the rest of it.  So every locomotive was unique, if only at a microscopic level...

At some point, we will be placing a cat into the steam chest...

[sem34090]

And I'm imagining the Surrey Junction Railway being absorbed by the GWR, not the Southern at the grouping, the Southern not being much interested in the Crableigh and Redhill lines, and then I can run my favourite locomotives and stock in my favourite countryside...

OUTRAGEOUS!

 

I cannot bear this blasphemy: it was bad enough having your copper-capped kettles invading our Southern in BR days without it being inherently Western. Hence why it also blasphemous that GWR operate the line today...

[whart57]

Oh my God, what have I started ........  

[sem34090]

Don't worry Sir, I will fend off the Western threat!

 

Tin 'at,

 

Coat,

 

Chaaaaaaaaaaaaarge...

 

**Charges at the western threat. Upon being told to 'go away' by the enemy commander corporal duly does so and runs away. Exit stage right.**