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Dare Viaduct, Vale of Neath.  Type CLB3(Y) 

DareViaduct.jpg

 

Oh dear.  I shouldn't research things.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss.  While reading holy writ 'Brunel's Timber Bridges and Viaducts. by Brian Lewis I discovered that the Brunel viaducts on the West Cornwall Railway were of the CLB3(Y) type which were of a different construction to those on the Cornwall Railway CLB4(A).  No doubt three spans instead of four were used due to the West Cornwall's adoption of the heretical Stephenson coal cart gauge and the used of weedy small narrow gauge locomotives instead of proper ones.

Perhaps if I hit myself on the head with a brick I'll forget what I've read and then I can use my CLB4(A) viaduct model with a clear conscience.  Or I could simply say the West Cornwall was laid to the Broad Gauge right from the start so CLB4(A) viaducts were used.  (Oh wow, - my membership application for the Flat Earth Society has just arrived in the mail.)  No pictures of the Chasewater viaduct exist so who can say I am wrong and if they do more bricks can be found.

 

And as you might have guessed I'm in a slightly silly mood this morning.  The swelling on my lower jaw due to that rebellious infected tooth has gone down and I'm feeling a lot more well than I have been over the past week.  I haven't wanted to do any work on my Cornwall Layout (or anything much at all) while the infection was still rampant, but this morning my old enthusiasm is back again.

So yeah, I'm going to have to use the wrong viaduct.  Having already done much puppy eyed pleading at Steve Flanders to get the CLB4(A) viaduct model I don't fancy my chances with pleading for a CLB3(Y) model.  So I shall go ahead with using the CLB4(A) model and anyone wants to have a purist hissy fit over it I shall send them detailed instructions on how to hit themselves on the head with a brick.  Afterall many world leaders seem to have applied this therapy to themselves and it never held them back from causing absolute mayhem  advancing their careers.

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There's this awful place along the way with installing a Brunel viaduct on this layout where I find myself thinking, 'What the heck have I done?'

By the markers I placed before I started I could make the valley deeper than this.  The original Brunel viaduct was 53 ft high, but I think this will do since it looks about right.  Not that anybody really knows of course since no photos exist and such information as there is in Brian Lewis's book is based on educated guesses.

Now comes all the tidying up of the devastation I caused, but having carved out the valley from the slight dip in the ground that was there before some things on the OS map start to make sense.  There's a footbridge marked at one point crossing the valley serving a farmstead and now it's all too plain why a footbridge was needed.  

There's another bridge/viaduct crossing a gap in the landscape before Chacewater at Jolly's Bottom which doesn't seem to be mentioned at all in any of the reference texts I've looked through.  So unless I'm too thick to see it or it has another name I'm a bit stuck at the moment.

 

8yM9ASL.jpg

 

g7sRKcE.jpg

 

 

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1 hour ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

Why did they name a place after Mr Jolly's bum?

In this part of the British Isles a valley was called a 'bottom' and since it was a Mr Jolly who was the landowner it was known as Jolly's Bottom.  All over this old OS map there are places named xxxxx's Bottom or xxxxxx Bottom.

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Brief visit to Truro before going off to build Brunel viaducts at Chasewater.  Any thought of building up the 1880's city is still a total no-go for me at present.

 

3bHXD1y.jpg

 

 

Edited by Annie
fumble brain
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3 hours ago, Annie said:

In this part of the British Isles a valley was called a 'bottom' and since it was a Mr Jolly who was the landowner it was known as Jolly's Bottom.  All over this old OS map there are places named xxxxx's Bottom or xxxxxx Bottom.

 

Good thing it didn't belong to someone named Spanking. :)

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A common thing, at least where I grew up, was the use of “End” to signify a part of a town, hence “St. James” is known colloquially as “Jimmy’s End”. Thankfully it wasn’t named for St. William...

There is also an ancient part of Northampton now known as “Boothville”, because when the town expanded as a “New Town” the Londoners who moved there objected to living in “Buttock’s Booth”.

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11 hours ago, Annie said:

In this part of the British Isles a valley was called a 'bottom'

And in Kent somewhere around the Maidstone district you'll find Prattsbottom.

 

I love the humour in the Peak District where the high craggy up in the couds places are called Low, hence Hindlow and Hurdlow on the Cromford and High Peak.

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So has this become Annie's unusual regional place names thread then?  I'm not complaining since it's all very interesting, but the other thing I'm finding is that the spelling of some place names has changed since the last quarter of the 19th century which means that trying to find sites on the OS map gets a bit difficult when reference books are using 20th century spelling for some place names.  Usually I can figure it out, but with the NLS search engine often being set up to use the old spelling form typing in the 20th century spelling tends to come up with nuffing, nada, no such place & etc.

Modern photos taken along the West Cornwall line to Chacewater are another source of confusion since the photos are more often than not captioned incorrectly with the names of viaducts being freely interchanged for each other and it's only because I've spent far too long staring at old maps that I can pick up on this.  Mostly though modern photos are dead useless anyway since so much has changed in the landscape.

 

And there is still the question of the Jolly's Bottom viaduct not being referenced anywhere.  I can sense that the hideous mind rot that afflicted me when I started to rebuild Truro is starting to wave at me from its shadowy corner.  Not having the information I needed back then proceeded to bring me to a state where I started to hate this layout I'm building so I just gave up.

The sensible thing to do now is just to install a Brunel viaduct there and not worry about it.  If I can't find any information about it, nobody else is likely to know anything about it either so what the hell am I tying myself in a knot over it for.

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The thing about place names in England is that due to the different linguistic influences consequent on lots of different invaders during the first century (and a bit) CE, they tend to be extremely localised and due to the somewhat fluid nature of spelling, largely phonetic but unfortunately without any agreement on the phonemes, plus corruption over time, what you start with and end with can appear to be very separate things.

Brythonic into Latin, into Anglian and Saxon (not the same, some places got both!) via some Norse (especially Northern and Eastern parts), plus an overlay of Norman French... it’s amazing the English language isn’t even more fouled up than it is!
And that’s before we get to place names! If you grow up in an area, the place names are normal to you, but move just a few miles away, and they can seem very weird.

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I'm finding all this absolutely fascinating Simon since with New Zealand being a former British colony we don't have any of this.  Colonists arrived gave places names generally ignoring the names given to them by Maori in most cases and the names have remained as they are, - a snapshot of 19th century attitudes towards naming things with what was essentially a common language.  (And true enough there has been controversy over extinguishing Maori names for places ever since and will be so for many years to come before it's sorted out)  In Britain where groups of people of diverse origins over long periods of time named the places where they lived in their own language and then as the language gradually changed so did the names for places also change is a whole area of study I could see it would be easy to get lost in.

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Then you get the real oddities:

Northampton is derived from north and hamtune, meaning home farmstead, later Hampton by common usage.

Hence the shire is Northamptonshire.

Southampton is derived from south and originally hamwic, which became Hampton (not hamtune), where the hamm  means “land surrounded/enclosed by water”. 
Here, the county name comes to be Hampshire, not Southamptonshire.

Despite not being formally listed as one of the five Danish burghs, Northampton and most of the county (I.e. north and east of Watling Street) was within the Danelaw. Northamptonshire is the only East Midlands county with a “soft a” (barth rather than bath) and the River Welland, which forms the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire and a bit of Lincolnshire is the isogloss for the north/side divide. But Watling Street is also the boundary for the east/west isogloss to the extent that if you speak to old boys in places like Pattishall/Fosters Booth, there is a marked difference in their accent depending on which side of the A5 they grew up on. West is very “oo-ah”. (As indeed was Berkshire until recent times.)

You also get a mixture of Danish and Saxon place name elements either side of the A5, indicating that no matter what the Treaty of Wedmore said about the boundary being Watling Street, the border was a bit porous, so you can see, for example, Abthorpe to the west of Towcester (fort on the Tove: saxonised Latin) but Gayton just to the east. People tend to ignore governments when it comes to day to day living!

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9 hours ago, Annie said:

So has this become Annie's unusual regional place names thread then?  I'm not complaining since it's all very interesting, but the other thing I'm finding is that the spelling of some place names has changed since the last quarter of the 19th century which means that trying to find sites on the OS map gets a bit difficult when reference books are using 20th century spelling for some place names.  Usually I can figure it out, but with the NLS search engine often being set up to use the old spelling form typing in the 20th century spelling tends to come up with nuffing, nada, no such place & etc.

Modern photos taken along the West Cornwall line to Chacewater are another source of confusion since the photos are more often than not captioned incorrectly with the names of viaducts being freely interchanged for each other and it's only because I've spent far too long staring at old maps that I can pick up on this.  Mostly though modern photos are dead useless anyway since so much has changed in the landscape.

 

And there is still the question of the Jolly's Bottom viaduct not being referenced anywhere.  I can sense that the hideous mind rot that afflicted me when I started to rebuild Truro is starting to wave at me from its shadowy corner.  Not having the information I needed back then proceeded to bring me to a state where I started to hate this layout I'm building so I just gave up.

The sensible thing to do now is just to install a Brunel viaduct there and not worry about it.  If I can't find any information about it, nobody else is likely to know anything about it either so what the hell am I tying myself in a knot over it for.

 

Well, latterly it has been a 7-arch stone viaduct (1888).  Could that at least give you the number of piers?

 

If it's only 53' high, presumably nearly all the height will be taken up by the trestles as with Stonehouse Pool (57').

 

1881091789_StonehouseViaductCornwall.jpg.f9e4e17aaeb67d0ca337856acf4f8e8a.jpg

 

 

 

 

Edited by Edwardian
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3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Well, latterly it has been a 7-arch stone viaduct (1888).  Could that at least give you the number of piers?

 

If it's only 53' high, presumably nearly all the height will be taken up by the trestles as with Stonehouse Pool (57').

 

1881091789_StonehouseViaductCornwall.jpg.f9e4e17aaeb67d0ca337856acf4f8e8a.jpg

 

 

 

 

Brian Lewis says 7 piers James which is what I will be going for.  At the moment the viaduct is too long and needs one pier taken off each end which is fairly easy to do.  The type of viaduct that should be there has timber spans 41 ft high, but the one I'm using has spans 34 ft high which certainly makes a difference to the height of the piers.  When I was carving the valley about I guessed I may have made it a bit too deep, but I was still getting over that infection so I was starting to run out of steam at that point.  When I go back to it again I'll take some measurements to set the valley depth so that should make things a lot more clear.

Your picture of Stonehouse Pool is most probably somewhere close to what I should end up with so thanks for posting that.  The landscape of the original layout in this area was horribly hacked about and bodged so it's been a lot harder to fix as compared with the line to Falmouth.  (Though I do still have a viaduct on the Falmouth line to put in that's going to be fairly horrible to do.)  With Brunel viaducts being such a feature of Cornish railways I really want to get them close as I can to being correctly placed.  I'm starting to feel better now that the infection has been knocked out so hopefully I can get this properly sorted once I go back to it.

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11 hours ago, Annie said:

I'm finding all this absolutely fascinating Simon since with New Zealand being a former British colony we don't have any of this.  Colonists arrived gave places names generally ignoring the names given to them by Maori in most cases and the names have remained as they are, - a snapshot of 19th century attitudes towards naming things with what was essentially a common language.  (And true enough there has been controversy over extinguishing Maori names for places ever since and will be so for many years to come before it's sorted out)  In Britain where groups of people of diverse origins over long periods of time named the places where they lived in their own language and then as the language gradually changed so did the names for places also change is a whole area of study I could see it would be easy to get lost in.

 

We have quite a lot of aboriginal names for places in Australia, a great many of which date back to the colonial days. They are politely understood to mean something descriptive in the local language of the place but I suspect most can be translated from the original to "Piss off white man:) 

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7 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

We have quite a lot of aboriginal names for places in Australia, a great many of which date back to the colonial days. They are politely understood to mean something descriptive in the local language of the place but I suspect most can be translated from the original to "Piss off white man:) 

 

Many language problems arise in Wales, such as this well-known example:

 

JAC35.jpg

 

More examples at https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/road-sign-makes-no-sense-12606633

 

The second half translates into English as "I’m not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

Edited by MikeOxon
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Somebodiy's left over tropical storm went through over the weekend and busted part of the guttering outside my bedroom so I ended up with a water feature inside my bedroom.  A really lovely local tradesman is going to be repairing things this afternoon which should put an end to the sound of water gurgling down my bedroom walls.  That's good, but there's all kinds of water damage to things I really did not want to get wet and of course the carpet in that part of my bedroom is well soaked.  As you might predict digital trainsets are on hold for the duration since I need to put my minimal ration of daily energy into attempting to clean things up. 

My daughter as always is being very helpful, but being an invalid herself she can only do so much.  If nothing else this is a good time for me to stare hard at things I have been hoarding and throw them out while busy with rescuing the things I (a) want, and (b) am likely to do something with in such a future that is available to me.

 

Apparently the type of guttering is a design that some bright spark devised during the 1970s-80s that proved to be a howling failure and when it fails will leak/pour water inside the building it's attached to.  Being quite used to things being devised in the 1970s and 1980s being howling failures I'm not surprised.  This was all kindly explained to me by the local tradesman who will be undertaking necessary repairs and it seems that this design of guttering swiftly vanished after a storm of complains about it, - but unfortunately it was never removed from the extension added on in the 1980s to my nice 1930s workman's cottage.  It was basically a timebomb waterbomb waiting to happen.

So in between cleaning up I will make a little dolly and stick lots of pins in it.

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On 27/05/2020 at 18:22, MikeOxon said:

 

Many language problems arise in Wales, such as this well-known example:

 

JAC35.jpg

 

More examples at https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/road-sign-makes-no-sense-12606633

 

The second half translates into English as "I’m not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

 

In other words, "Do as we say, not as we do". 

The Out of Office message should have been bilingual too. Anyhow, I suspect that to most (all?) HGV drivers, the Welsh part might well have been written in Klingon.

 

 

2 hours ago, Annie said:

So in between cleaning up I will make a little dolly and stick lots of pins in it.

 

Sorry to hear that you've been afflicted by rubbish design and a cast off weather system.  Choose well-rusted pins for improved effectiveness!

 

 

Edited by Hroth
Because!
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2 hours ago, Hroth said:

Sorry to hear that you've been afflicted by rubbish design and a cast off weather system.  Choose well-rusted pins for improved effectiveness!

 

Thanks Mr Hroth.  My biggest concern was for my 'O' gauge tinplate collection , but it seems to be fine and hasn't suffered.  Some boxes containing my paints, brushes and materials did get wet, but I was was able to rescue most of the important stuff.  Some things fell into the 'what am I keeping this for?' category so they went straight into the rubbish bag.

 

The 1970s and 1980s seem to have been the age of the architectural dimmits because around the same time many of the original old and quite lovely churches in our parish as well as in the surrounding parishes were demolished and replaced with the worst that the 1970s could provide.  Our local parish church has a roof that leaks like a sieve in heavy rain due to its appalling design and it's only the fact of it being a strange massive octagonal thing made of concrete and brick that prevents any structural damage taking place.  So I'm not really surprised that one of these graduates from the school of architectural stupidity and general tastelessness thought that flying in the face of proven established designs when it came to rainwater gutters and doing something completely dopey might be a good thing.

 

And yes I'm sure I can find some nice rusty pins.

Edited by Annie
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The house mending tradesman is back again this morning so hopefully I'll soon be able to stop nervously studying weather maps.  It's nice and fine at the moment, - though there might be some showers later in the day.  I've been told that the job is going to be done in such a way as to avoid leaving anything open to the weather just in case any passing rain clouds want to play 'SURPISE!'

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This fascinating little engine is available from Cameron Scott of Darlington Works and this is his information video.

Unfortunately it's not compatible with TS2012 or else I would have devised some completely implausible excuse to run it on my GER Norfolk layout, - so I may have think about something for it to run on in either TANE or TS2019.

And yes I know the MET coaches aren't exactly prototypical, but with there being yawning gaps in what is available for the pre-grouping era in Trainz I guess Cameron used what he could find.

 

Edited by Annie
can't spell for toffee
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Maybe you have a few more rusty pins for the guy who added the annoying music to this otherwise nice video? :biggrin_mini2:

 

I've been reading this thread for month (in fact most of the 142 pages) & found lots of inspiration for my own Trainz projects. I was slightly concerned when there were no new postings for more than a week, & I'm glad to see that at least 2 of the main contibutors are alive & well.

Next time I'll write something about my own layouts, or rather other people's layouts more or less modified by me.

Meanwhile, take a look at the newest railway painting by Paul Lloyd:

 

spacer.png

 

https://greater-albion.com/2020/05/29/taking-water-from-the-troughs/

 

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1 hour ago, Jake The Rat said:

Maybe you have a few more rusty pins for the guy who added the annoying music to this otherwise nice video? :biggrin_mini2:

 

I've been reading this thread for month (in fact most of the 142 pages) & found lots of inspiration for my own Trainz projects. I was slightly concerned when there were no new postings for more than a week, & I'm glad to see that at least 2 of the main contibutors are alive & well.

Next time I'll write something about my own layouts, or rather other people's layouts more or less modified by me.

Meanwhile, take a look at the newest railway painting by Paul Lloyd:

 

 

 

https://greater-albion.com/2020/05/29/taking-water-from-the-troughs/

 

Hi Jake, glad you are finding some inspiration from this thread.  After I got a sudden water feature in my bedroom I had to put my limited amount of energy into rescuing things from getting ruined so there's not much happening with my digital trainsets at the moment.  I will be starting back with things fairly soon though.

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On 04/06/2020 at 02:19, Annie said:

Somebodiy's left over tropical storm went through over the weekend and busted part of the guttering outside my bedroom so I ended up with a water feature inside my bedroom.  A really lovely local tradesman is going to be repairing things this afternoon which should put an end to the sound of water gurgling down my bedroom walls.  That's good, but there's all kinds of water damage to things I really did not want to get wet and of course the carpet in that part of my bedroom is well soaked.  As you might predict digital trainsets are on hold for the duration since I need to put my minimal ration of daily energy into attempting to clean things up. 

My daughter as always is being very helpful, but being an invalid herself she can only do so much.  If nothing else this is a good time for me to stare hard at things I have been hoarding and throw them out while busy with rescuing the things I (a) want, and (b) am likely to do something with in such a future that is available to me.

 

Annie, just catching up (it's been a bit of a week), and sorry to hear of your biblical deluge.  I how the worst is over and it's fixed without too much lasting damage.

 

On 04/06/2020 at 02:19, Annie said:

Apparently the type of guttering is a design that some bright spark devised during the 1970s-80s that proved to be a howling failure and when it fails will leak/pour water inside the building it's attached to.  Being quite used to things being devised in the 1970s and 1980s being howling failures I'm not surprised.  This was all kindly explained to me by the local tradesman who will be undertaking necessary repairs and it seems that this design of guttering swiftly vanished after a storm of complains about it, - but unfortunately it was never removed from the extension added on in the 1980s to my nice 1930s workman's cottage.  It was basically a timebomb waterbomb waiting to happen.

So in between cleaning up I will make a little dolly and stick lots of pins in it.

 

Reminds me of the '70s buildings at one of my schools.  Flat roofs; always leaked.  Every classroom had at least one bucket deployed.  Fixed and re-covered a hundred times.  Never stopped leaking.  probably won an award. 

 

 

On 04/06/2020 at 23:35, Annie said:

 

This fascinating little engine is available from Cameron Scott of Darlington Works and this is his information video.

Unfortunately it's not compatible with TS2012 or else I would have devised some completely implausible excuse to run it on my GER Norfolk layout, - so I may have think about something for it to run on in either TANE or TS2019.

And yes I know the MET coaches aren't exactly prototypical, but with there being yawning gaps in what is available for the pre-grouping era in Trainz I guess Cameron used what he could find.

 

 

Ah, you know this is the prototype for WNR No.1?

 

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