Nether Madder and Green Soudley Rly

[Martin S-C]

Your St Enodoc to Wheal Veronica gradient is my inspiration in terms of both design and construction. Its the kind of thing I'm aiming for on my branch line. If I can get nearly 28 feet of 1:67 gradient smooth and consistent I'll be very happy. I can probably manage it if I can accurately cut wooden risers each exactly 1/4" taller than the one before and get them spaced exactly 16 3/4" apart.

[ian]

A clinometer app for your smart phone will help - with the gradient nearly right and risers held with clamps you can tweak it a riser at a time, screwing them in once it is spot on.

[Martin S-C]

Unfortunately I don't have a smart phone. My old phone will let me speak to people, act as an alarm clock and it accepts texts (it can't send them!), but I'm happy with it.

We actually tried using one of those before on the first layout and it wasn't accurate enough.

[Nick C]

Another method of making an inclinometer is to cut a suitable length of wood and add a spacer on one end so it looks like this: ¬

in this case a 1/4" spacer on the end of a 16 3/4" timber, as per your calculations above. Then rest that on the incline, and place a spirit level on top, and adjust until that's level.

[Martin S-C]

I understand. I am just concerned about a curved incline where the maths is different.

[St Enodoc]

10 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

Your St Enodoc to Wheal Veronica gradient is my inspiration in terms of both design and construction. Its the kind of thing I'm aiming for on my branch line. If I can get nearly 28 feet of 1:67 gradient smooth and consistent I'll be very happy. I can probably manage it if I can accurately cut wooden risers each exactly 1/4" taller than the one before and get them spaced exactly 16 3/4" apart.

It doesn't matter whether the risers are exactly 1/4" different in height - just adjust the spacing accordingly.

 

9 hours ago, Nick C said:

Another method of making an inclinometer is to cut a suitable length of wood and add a spacer on one end so it looks like this: ¬

in this case a 1/4" spacer on the end of a 16 3/4" timber, as per your calculations above. Then rest that on the incline, and place a spirit level on top, and adjust until that's level.

I find that it's too hard to judge when the bubble is precisely in the right place.

 

9 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

I understand. I am just concerned about a curved incline where the maths is different.

That's quite true but if there is room on the inside of the curve to set the gradient out along the chords instead of the arcs that would be OK - just adjust the gradient to suit (e.g. if the arc length is 670mm but the chord length is 650mm then set the gradient to 1 in 65 along the chord, which will give you 1 in 67 along the arc).

 

However you do it, don't forget the transition between level and gradient at the top and bottom - this must be gradual, not a sharp angle.

Edited July 1, 2021 by St Enodoc

[Martin S-C]

Yes, in the past we've cut tongues of ply and eased them up (or down) to get the start and end of the gradients. With the right support in the right place that seems to work well. Useful info about chord to arc ratios. I'll keep that in mind.

Did you use any superelevation on your curved inclines, John?

[St Enodoc]

36 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Yes, in the past we've cut tongues of ply and eased them up (or down) to get the start and end of the gradients. With the right support in the right place that seems to work well. Useful info about chord to arc ratios. I'll keep that in mind.

Did you use any superelevation on your curved inclines, John?

Yes I did, more for visual effect than anything else. Short bits of 1mm Evergreen styrene strip between the outer ends of the risers and the track base, so a cant of about 1 in 40.

[Martin S-C]

12 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Yes I did, more for visual effect than anything else. Short bits of 1mm Evergreen styrene strip between the outer ends of the risers and the track base, so a cant of about 1 in 40.

Ah, so under the incline structure itself, not under the outer edges of the sleepers?

[1ngram]

To return to hay transportation for a moment.  Huge amounts were transported to feed the many thousands oh horses in France during WW1.  In what "shape" was it transported?  Were sheaves just thrown into the (mainly) French closed wagons they were moved in when they reached France or were they in rectangular bales and loaded in an organised fashion. Presumably in the UK  in both open and closed cans it would have been the same.  Loose sheaves or an organised shape? 

 

I want to represent wagon loads of hay and oats as per the photo in Aves second book on the ROD.

[Nearholmer]

Automatic balers don’t seem to have come into widespread use until the late 1930s, first in the US, then spreading to Britain (were they part of the WW2 mechanisation drive in this country?), although there were automatic binders well before that, so my guess is that in WW1 hay would be in bundles at best, and possibly loose. The archetypal picture of a pre-grouping period load of hay in a railway wagon is something like Boris’s hairdo, with a big tarpaulin roped over it. Handling by pitch-forks?

 

PS: I just skimmed several of my books about military railways, which focus heavily on narrow gauge, and found a few WW1 photo showing oblong bales of hay. A German view that includes a wagon stacked high with oblong bales of hay, all looking very shaggy indeed, presumably from multiple transshipments; an entire train of wagons similarly loaded on a US-operated line; and, two wagon-loads on a British section. So, perhaps balers were more common than I thought at that date, even if they didn’t automatically tie the bale up. There are also lots of bulging loads under sheets, which look like loose straw/hay, and lots of big sacks, some of which are probably oats.

Edited July 22, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Caley Jim]

As a boy in the mid 1950's I spent a lot of time helping with the harvest on a local farm (my father was the village school headmaster). It wasn't until c1956/7 that the farm got a baler.  All hay and straw was loaded by hand with a pitchfork (would an 8 year old be allowed to use a pitchfork these days?).  The binder was used for cutting oats and bound it into sheaves which we then had to build into stooks of 6 or 8 sheaves leaning against one another to allow the wind to blow through and dry it.  It was all very labour intensive with anything up to 12 or 15 people working in a field.

 

When we moved to a country area just over 20 years ago I said to a local farmer that I could rick hay and stook corn, if he ever needed any help at harvest time.  'Not much call for ricking hay and stooking corn these days!', was his reply!

 

Jim

[Nearholmer]

I reckon that the WW1 bales were made in a stationary bale-press, located in a farm yard, or dragged out to the field, probably driven by a ‘portable’ steam engine or a horse-gin, and hand-tied, rather than being from a wheeled, automatic baler.

 

There are videos on YouTube showing ‘horse-drawn balers’, but they show either old-style reaper-binders, which make a bundle, rather than a bale, or modern machinery adapted for horse-haulage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 22, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

10 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I reckon that the WW1 bales were made in a stationary bale-press, located in a farm yard, or dragged out to the field, probably driven by a ‘portable’ steam engine or a horse-gin, and hand-tied, rather than being from a wheeled, automatic baler.

 

There are videos on YouTube showing ‘horse-drawn balers’, but they show either old-style reaper-binders, which make a bundle, rather than a bale, or modern machinery adapted for horse-haulage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several stages to the process: - cut - turned - stacked into haycocks - carted away and built into a haycock in the yard, that would be thatched over

 

Cut I imagine was still by hand scythe.  Turning was done with pitch forks, but sit-on horse-drawn turners were introduced. A help because turning was a process that had to be repeated. Would be nice to see one on a model railway.  Then it was all back to pitchforks.

 

But what about hay to be used off farm?

 

I've often wondered if provender wagons were anything more than a railway version of a hay wain, or whether there was some form of tying and baling to make it more space efficient and easy to load and unload.

 

I can quite believe the practice had to differ in order to supply all that wartime fodder overseas.

 

I'd love to see how that was done.

[Nearholmer]

The degree of mechanisation varied from farm to farm.

 

If you look at the dates for the first use of various bits of machinery, they are probably something like:

 

- horse drawn hay rake, ancient in its simplest form of a bar with a load of spikey bits, but wheeled rakes and tedders were I think C18th or early C19th;

 

- horse drawn reaper 1830s (random side issue: by way of another invention, these evolved into lawn-mowers, as well as agricultural machines, which is how Ransomes became lawnmower kings, and how The English Lawn emerged as a thing, it didnt really exist before);

 

- static baling press driven by a gin or a portable engine, mid C19th, ditto elevator for making ricks;

 

- horse drawn combined reaper-binder 1872;

 

- tractor-drawn automatic baler, late 1930s (one of these needs too much power to sensibly be horse-drawn, although the Amish seem to do so using large teams, and some users seem to fit small supplementary petrol engines to relieve the horses of work).

 

Now, a prosperous, super-advanced, probably very large, farm, on open ground, would adopt each of these within a very short time, but a small farmer, working just above subsistence, especially on steep ground with small fields, might never adopt any of them (there are places in the Alps, Carpathians etc where even now the whole lot is done manually).

 

I’ve given it away, but I did have a huge tome  about the history of narrow gauge railways in farming in Germany (was I the only person in Britain to buy this??), and that contained photos of highly mechanised farms on the eastern flatlands dating from the 1880s onwards, and there were similarly ‘high tech’ operations in France (there were experiments in 24/7 harvesting in the 1880s, when floodlighting first became possible). I only know of a few really highly mechanised estates in Britain pre-WW1 and some of them collapsed under the weight of over-capitalisation very quickly …… Farming in Britain suffered very badly due to imports from the mid-C19th, so generally couldn’t afford to invest.

 

All of which gets a long way from a bale of hay and risks diverting Martin’s thread (sorry!), but it is interesting.

 

 

Edited July 23, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Tom Burnham]

Some, perhaps all, railways would send out gangs of platelayers to cut the grass along the line and then load it into wagons. This served the dual purpose of reducing the risk of fires and supplying provender for the company's horses (the Kent & East Sussex sold their surplus hay). A hay train on a summer evening would be an unusual feature of a pre-Grouping layout. Between hay cutting, controlled burning and accidental fires, steam age linesides looked much different from the linear woodland or scrub of today.

[Edwardian]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

static baling press

 

[1ngram]

18 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Automatic balers don’t seem to have come into widespread use until the late 1930s, first in the US, then spreading to Britain (were they part of the WW2 mechanisation drive in this country?), although there were automatic binders well before that, so my guess is that in WW1 hay would be in bundles at best, and possibly loose. The archetypal picture of a pre-grouping period load of hay in a railway wagon is something like Boris’s hairdo, with a big tarpaulin roped over it. Handling by pitch-forks?

 

PS: I just skimmed several of my books about military railways, which focus heavily on narrow gauge, and found a few WW1 photo showing oblong bales of hay. A German view that includes a wagon stacked high with oblong bales of hay, all looking very shaggy indeed, presumably from multiple transshipments; an entire train of wagons similarly loaded on a US-operated line; and, two wagon-loads on a British section. So, perhaps balers were more common than I thought at that date, even if they didn’t automatically tie the bale up. There are also lots of bulging loads under sheets, which look like loose straw/hay, and lots of big sacks, some of which are probably oats.

Which book on WW1 shows hay in bales?  Nothing in either of Aves books but I've not looked at narrow gauge in France.  Do tell.

 

 

[Martin S-C]

If we are discussing WWI and fodder for army horses I would imagine this would be sourced by government or army contactors in France. I think the need for shipping to send over critical supplies like ammunition and such would preclude their use for mundane high-bulk low-value goods like horse feed that could be sourced locally.

One thing I think a good few modellers miss is how very late in the 20th C mechanisation came to farming in Britain, as well as to other walks of life. As late as the 1960s there were more horse drawn vehicle miles made in London than there were motor vehicle miles. Just think about that. Yet how many horse drawn vehicle models do you usually see on layouts set in BR steam periods?

I recall seeing horse drawn farm wagons in the 1970s and we had a rag and bone man with a horse and cart come down our road until about 1969 or so. And that was in a "decent middle class" suburb of Croydon which was one of the big modern growing urban centres in the south east.

Magazine articles showing mechanical farm machinery were probably demonstrating the latest cutting edge machines just coming into use, a bit like magazines in the 70s were full of "cars of the future" with wings and such.

Yes, we received tractors from America in the 1940s but only a very small minority of farms would have used them. Seeing tractors on flat wagons on WWII layouts always makes me smile.

You might have detected a slight rant tone in this message! I have strong issues with unrealistically modern vehicles on layouts, Britain was a horse drawn society much later on than we suppose.

Edited July 23, 2021 by Martin S-C

[Nearholmer]

16 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

would imagine this would be sourced by government or army contactors in France

Yes, my working assumption was that the bales I found in photos were from fairly nearby farms. I wonder whether any farmers were selling to all combatants simultaneously. I can’t imagine that farmers in territory captured by the Germans weren’t selling to the Germans, because the alternative would have been to let crops rot, and have no money to buy seed for the next lot.

[Martin S-C]

I'm sure they did, though I think it likely that the French farmers would sell horse feed to whatever local community they were a part of, same as they would in peacetime. An army of the size of the western front would need a lot and maybe the Germans did train theirs in from Germany, since its relatively easy to bring supplies in when there isn't a sea in between the source and the units who need it.

I imagine though a good deal of French farm produce would be sold to the invaders army. Some would resist of course but not all.

[1ngram]

I'm sure the British army were indeed supplied with hay from French farms but there is documented evidence that both hay and oats were ferried across the channel as well.  Photos are also said to show some at least of this in square bales

[Nearholmer]

We stayed a couple of weeks on holiday in a the Aisne valley, about 20km west of Compiegne, in I think 2015. It was an area where the WW1 front line moved back and forth several times over several years. There were a lot of commemorative information displays, walks to follow etc, plus a big display in the town hall, showing that history in great detail. The thing that struck me was the weird juxtaposition of normality and carnage that was traceable, with some villages metres from the line continuing near-normal, with troops from one side, then the other, dug-in at the end of the street, while other villages nearby got obliterated. The zones of destruction were surprisingly narrow in that locality, because the fight was solely about obtaining control of the edges of plateaus overlooking the river from N and S, and command of the few bridging points. We saw photos of machine gun nests in the middle of fields of cabbages, with the locals hoeing the weeds out. I guess when you are completely dependant upon the land, you can't simply up and leave it.

[Edwardian]

Square hay bales on the western Front ...

 

 

[1ngram]

How big do you think those are? 4'x2'x2' ?