Nether Madder and Green Soudley Rly

[runs as required]

I'd like to see CJF design a layout to fit in a cupboard under these stairs.

 

2000px-Impossible_staircase.svg.png

I'm ashamed to admit it took me ages once (trying to help someone design his logo) to work out how Escher pulled this illusion.

Nowadays I find my 10 year old grand children designing Escher patterns for maths homework!

dh

 

Ed link inserted

Edited September 27, 2018 by runs as required

[DonB]

I'd like to see CJF design a layout to fit in a cupboard under these stairs.

 

2000px-Impossible_staircase.svg.png

At work many years ago, someone produced a drawing of the triangular version of those steps. took it into the works tool-room where we produced our own press tools. He laid it down on the foreman's desk and said that he had been told that was impossible to make... red-rags-to-a-bull time.... Bait taken, it was two days before the penny dropped!

[Martin S-C]

Builders finished their other job early and came round this afternoon to dig the footings for the extension.

 

Edited September 27, 2018 by Martin S-C

[DonB]

Ooh, look, a nice new shiny shed.

 

Dsc01766.jpg

 

And the garage is empty! Empty of all the crud I've dumped in it over the last 3 months since I Iast cleaned the ruddy thing out!

 

Dsc01764.jpg

 

And all the junk has been stuffed into the shed - though its not all junk - a lot of it is model buildings, boxes of kits and modelling things, like ballast, paint and such.

 

Dsc01767.jpg

 

So this means the garage is now ready for the builder's lads to begin work... this FRIDAY! Ta da!

 

(can you tell I'm excited?)

 

(today was also perfect weather for emptying garages and stuffing their contents into sheds)

Martin, A suggestion ,if I may be so bold, I think that you should consider a couple of diagonal braces on the opening shed doors to try to prevent them sagging. I notice that the Left-Hand door appears to be not quite square with the shed frame in the photo with the doors closed.

I have serious sagging problem with the door of my shed, so know how quickly it becomes difficult to close them properly.

Sorry to put a (I hope slight) damper on your day.!

[tebee]

I'd like to see CJF design a layout to fit in a cupboard under these stairs.

 

2000px-Impossible_staircase.svg.png

 

 

Maybe something like this would fit 

 

 

[Martin S-C]

Martin, A suggestion ,if I may be so bold, I think that you should consider a couple of diagonal braces on the opening shed doors to try to prevent them sagging. I notice that the Left-Hand door appears to be not quite square with the shed frame in the photo with the doors closed.

I have serious sagging problem with the door of my shed, so know how quickly it becomes difficult to close them properly.

Sorry to put a (I hope slight) damper on your day.!

Thanks Don.

 

Suggestions never dampen my spirits (although if the suggestion is that I give you half of my bag of chips I may have a different response).

 

Yes, the left door is a bit skew-whiff due to a wonky hinge. At the base is a wooden block piece that fits there so the turnbuckle that keeps the left door shut while you enter and egress via the right door, has something to screw into. This chock is hard tight against the floor when its closed so yes, it could do with a bit of a lift but I assure you it isn't and cannot sag (unless the concrete patio beneath it decides to sag in which case I may have other things on my mind than saggy shed doors).

 

I shall keep an eye on it but I think the answer is not a brace but to reposition the hinge a tad.

[Martin S-C]

Also these. The cruel photos make them look pretty ropey but I assure you that in the flesh (or plastic, or brass) they look much better. I think the weathering around the area of the running boards needs a little darkening.

[Nearholmer]

I do love outside-framed brake vans, especially 'road vans', so those are a real delight to behold.

 

Does the weathering down below really need to be darker? I'm thinking mostly iron-filings and road dust, with a smidgin of oil round the bits that get oiled/greased.

[Martin S-C]

The grey van is okay, the other two have large areas of reddish-brown running board that is all one colour., I just want to dull this down a tad.

[Martin S-C]

Ladies and Gentlemen.

I'd like to spend some serious time world-building and putting my model railway into context against elements of the real world and the world of the Madder Valley Railway (if it is practical to meld the two into one, that is; it may in fact turn out not to be).

I've encountered some wonderfully imaginative people over on Edwardian's Castle Aching thread and the level of knowledge from the denizens of that thread concerning all things weird and wonderful around East Norfolk and its wider environs - covering pretty much every subject one could think of - leaves me with a sense of helpless inadequacy and a crushed ego. I'd love to have some help with input to flesh out the NM&GSR though of course for the ultimate in off-topic pedantry of the first order I shall not endeavour in any way to attempt to equal or detract from the above thread.

My railway will be running in the summer of 1919 and is based somewhere in the Forest of Dean, or if not actually in it, somewhere close by but on the western side of it around the Ross-Hereford-Monmouth region of east Wales. I cannot place it east of the Forest since this of course places it across the Severn in Gloucestershire. Now I realise that 1919 was not a heady and joyous time what with terrible fighting ongoing in Russia (to which British forces became committed), post-war political upheaval all over Europe and the Spanish influenza epidemic sweeping Europe and claiming as many lives as the bloodletting of the previous 4 years, nevertheless in my fantasy world there is a certain joy, not to say euphoria, in celebration of the coming of peace and with many young men returning home Forest life is recovering towards a more normal pace. Nostalgia for a past age might suggest this 'normality' would lead people back to the Edwardian pre-war years and that is my preferred mind-set when approaching matters of industry, trade and rural life on the model, rather than what was probably a fairly grim reality of facing up to a new world, brave or not.

So, with rose tinted spectacles firmly in place and a warm sunny long first summer of peace upon the Forest, what kinds of things might a small independent railway company be doing? Who would be travelling on such a railway, why and to where? What industries are active in the region and what do they consume and produce that might offer traffic to a local railway system? In what condition might the railway be after four years of heavy use and little investment in maintenance? What issues might be foremost in getting things running back to normal again?

Who might the foremost persons of the region be? What do they do? The Forest is all Crown land of course, having been a Royal Estate since medieval times so large landowners in the sense of a local nobility are very few, though there will be prominent estates across the Severn and just within Wales.

The model as planned has four main stations - two are termini at the ends of a single track end-to-end run with two intermediate passing stations, both of which are junctions. One of these serves a branch which boasts two through stations (in fact halts) and both offer a passing loop where trains may cross but in reality these are more an aid to shunting than to facilitate heavier traffic. There is a small terminus at the end of the branch and the principal reason it was built was to serve a limestone quarry.

The second passing station has a junction with "the main line". This is a simple cheat that leads to what is in effect a fiddle yard, though my intent is to have it fully scenic and to think of it as a set of exchange sidings with the Madder Valley Railway, and from thence to the real railways of this part of the world (which in 1919 means principally the GWR, MR and LNWR).

As well as the aforementioned limestone quarry the branch has a wood distillation works which takes in cordwood off Crown Land and heats this in ovens to draw off various chemicals and tars some of which are distilled into powder or cake form and leave the facility in barrels, and some remain as rather noxious liquids and depart the works in tanker wagons.

Along the main line I have sketched in plans for no less than ten other industries; a wagon works, a Crown timber siding, a dairy, a flour mill, a stone yard, a colliery, a brewery, a greaseworks, a tinplate works and a coal wharf on a canal. I've tried to arrange industries that were both local to the Forest and which can interlace so that the products of one become the raw materials of another.

I need to give all these industries personalities, names and the names of owners or managers and I need to cobble together some kind of train sequence to operate the layout which I would prefer to focus 2/3rds on goods and 1/3rd on passengers. My thoughts are that so soon after the war the amount of passenger travel has not yet recovered to pre-war levels so trains need only be short, though the timetable of passenger services would have reverted to the pre-war one, probably. Guidance on this would be a big help.

As to the Madder Valley Railway as far as I'm aware John Ahern never gave a hint of where it is located. It does have a port however so in terms of fitting it into a locale that allows my railway to connect to it, this port must be on the River Severn, perhaps near Gloucester. The alternative would be south of there, perhaps around Chepstow but that then places the NM&GSR in the southern area of the Forest in the triangle bounded by the rivers Severn and Wye which offers little space to fit in several fictional communities. Basing the MVR port opposite Gloucester is also fraught with improbables given that almost all shipping trade went up to Gloucester Docks via the Sharpness canal. However I think the west bank of the river opposite or above Gloucester is a better site than near Chepstow.

If the MVR is somewhere west or north-west of Gloucester that makes the River Madder a right-bank tributary of the Severn. This places the NM&GSR somewhere west of here, towards Mitcheldean, Ross and Hereford. Conflict with real locations and existing real railway lines is not something that worries me too much, although "visiting" trains from the GWR, MR and LNWR would be nice to have. Running powers are one possibility and through coaches another.

I shall get cracking on a basic area map to help me see where places and routes might fit.

I'll leave my ramblings there and see if anyone has any nuggets of wisdom that could brighten this fantasy world or ground it better in reality.

EDIT: I originally put "smallpox", I meant to write "Spanish influenza".

Edited September 29, 2018 by Martin S-C

[runs as required]

Oh dear! This is clearly shaping up to be another one of those RMweb threads I say to myself "I'll just have a quick peep in at" as I pass by the study door in the course of keeping this great grey gaunt place standing (even as I type, I hear "She who must..&c" checking up on me from the kitchen).

 

Two suggestions:

1

I do love the history in West Wales of the sleepy "Manchester & Milford" . Also I took every opportunity as a student to ride the LNER loco and sedate teak stock from Secombe Mersey ferry terminal over Queensferry into Wales at Wrexham Central.

2

An even greater Edwardian literary challenge might be to invent a more enlightened scenario where Victoria & Albert's well-placed progeny insist their government servants avert a Great War at the 'eleventh hour'.

 dh

 

Edit 4 hours later

I forgot to say what I find incredulous about the "Manchester & Milford" is that it actually slopes completely the opposite way to a geographic desire line!

Edited September 29, 2018 by runs as required

[Northroader]

I suppose 1919 is as good as anytime, there must have been a terrific sense of relief that the war was finally over, even though everyone had been affected by tragedies close to them. I suppose the first fact to adjust to is that labour costs had gone sky high due to the war, putting the whole of the economy out of kilter, and leading to the labour unrest which was to come. The factor bursting on the transport scene was the surplus of motorised road vehicles from the armed services, so that a small local railway would soon face competition from pennypacket carters and buses.

In the meantime, what a lovely setting for a local network. Here’s Kerne Bridge, alongside the Wye, with a pushpull leaving on a run from Ross to Monmouth, river in front, forest behind. By the way, if you talk to someone in Gloucester, and they say “Forest”, it’s not necessarily a term of praise.

[Northroader]

By the way, rereading your piece, the Forest of Dean is all in Gloucestershire. the Wye forms the western boundary, between Gloucs. and Hereford down to just before Monmouth, then Monmouthshire, now Gwent, down to Chepstow and the Severn. Monmouthshire was a place which didn’t really know whether it was in England or Wales, all the 21ton mineral wagons were stencilled “ to work in South Wales and Monmouthshire”, but for me the acid test was the pubs stayed open on Sunday as far west as the Rhymney Valley.

[Martin S-C]

Thanks. I suppose I meant "the part of Gloucestershire that's not west of the Severn". Sorry to be unclear.

And yes, a terribly pretty area, even away from the Wye, especially now that the industry has all gone and only a few Free Miners still work. I do like the curious local laws and land working rights in the Forest, its culturally and physically quite a strange and separate place. Almost... what's the word...? Spooky... enchanted... I have only felt the hairs on my neck stand in one other place in broad sunlit daylight other than the Forest and that was Alderley Edge.

 

DH - wow, an alternative universe without WWI requires a huge shift of mental gears - and economic ones.

BTW, another point, the railways of my model would probably all originally have been horse tramroads and converted to standard gauge in the 1870s or 1880s when the writing was on the wall for the broad gauge. My canal has been tenuously named the Madder & Wye Canal which by my so far formative geography links the Severn (into which the Madder flows) with the Wye somewhere around Ross. I have yet to formulate a logical trading pattern that requires both horse tramroads and a cross-watershed canal in the same region.

[Northroader]

You can see the old tramway stone blocks at Bixslade.

[runs as required]

BTW, another point, the railways of my model would probably all originally have been horse tramroads and converted to standard gauge in the 1870s or 1880s when the writing was on the wall for the broad gauge. My canal has been tenuously named the Madder & Wye Canal which by my so far formative geography links the Severn (into which the Madder flows) with the Wye somewhere around Ross. I have yet to formulate a logical trading pattern that requires both horse tramroads and a cross-watershed canal in the same region.

I'd run with that - a 'Johnny Come Lately' challenger to the smug pre-groupng existing order dominated by Paddington (as I recall. the only direct contact the Midland actually had was via the spindly single track Severn Bridge).  .

CA depends on a [very deep] 'fold in the map of NW Norfolk for its plausability,

You might benefit from devising another Chepstow with a potential location (or just an ambition) for constructing a dock as a safe transhipment pont in relation to the Severn bore.  It could be another fragment of a grand LDC&ECR stitched together by disaffected locals egged on by Brum and emerging north west Cotswolds enterprises,

 

Best wishes

dh

[Nearholmer]

Its on the Wye, and I think outside the 'forest proper', but can I tempt you to this for inspiration http://www.wyevalleyaonb.org.uk/images/uploads/general/1572_OLTW_Angidy_Leaflet_V12_WEB.pdf ? worth reading the whole 'leaflet'.

 

The way the railway branch slid off from the 'main line' immediately before a tunnel, then leaps across a river, looks just like a dodgy model railway compromise.

 

I first came across this place on a school 'field holiday' in the late 1960s, when there was no 'interpretive information' available and it, and a working drift mine that we were taken a short way inside of were among the things that started me on the 'small and/or obscure' railways path. there was something exceedingly magic about the feint remains of forgotten industry, all overgrown, in a heavily wooded valley, and the mine was The Seven Dwarves pure and simple.

Edited September 29, 2018 by Nearholmer

[runs as required]

....The way the railway branch slid off from the 'main line' immediately before a tunnel, then leaps across a river, looks just like a dodgy model railway compromise...

I think, though memory is fogged by age (and I can't be Rsed to check by googling) that the GCR (LNER) Hayfield 'flyer' branch begins in tunnel just S of New Mills Central.

I stared down at it for seven years walking to school around the Tors gorges, you'd think I'd be certain enough!

dh

[Martin S-C]

Thanks all. I've walked several of the old Forest tramroads and they are such evocative places. All now silent and with nature returning, but a hundred years ago or more all a-bustle with industry. Being alone among damp woodlands as dense as some of these with the spirit of the past all around generates a really curious sensation. You can begin to understand why some people believe in ghosts.

I may be able to fit a short section of disused tramroad into the scene somewhere, indicating an old route the railway has partly overlaid and made redundant.

DH - well the "other Chepstow" would then be Madderport, so in effect I've done this but my inclination is very much to place it upriver rather than down. I don't want to go for the fold-in-the-map idea because its being done better elsewhere, so perhaps even renaming some existing settlements is a course I can follow.

However on other matters the garage extension groundwork is complete and the concrete floor is having a couple of days to cure.

 

The Hornby clerestory conversion project is moving on.

 

A fourth brake van has been added to the fleet. NMR brake van 602 which was an ex-Midland van identical to number 601 was destroyed by fire in October 1917 while undergoing a repaint in the company workshop. A workman who had been smoking his pipe and knocked this out as he went home for the night on the edge of an iron can containing oily rags was the cause. The company, being in urgent need of a brake van to replace it, acquired a ten-ton vehicle from the London & North Western Railway. This van had undergone an extremely heavy shunt and was in the cripple roads at Crewe over the winter of 1917-18. An approach by the Wagon and Coach Superintendent of the NMR, Mr Percival Apogee, secured the damaged van for a most agreeable sum. Brought by road to the Nether Madder workshops on a flat-bed trailer drawn by a steam traction engine, the van was stripped down and found to only need modest repairs to the buffing and draw gear which were carried out in some urgency. A minor warping of the frames was simply ignored - and painted over. A new stove and chimney were installed, the existing bodywork was returned to its position atop the underframe and only the very basics of paint were applied to mark the van as NMR property rather than LNWR. The running number 602 was re-used and also applied extremely quickly with larger and narrower numerals than is usual. Addition pig-iron was loaded under the floor between the frames and the van is now rated at 12 tons, entering traffic in January 1918. Due to her out-of-true frames, number 602 has a slight waddle resulting in the train crews christening her "mother duck".


 

[Nearholmer]

Boringly practical point: if you intend to paint the concrete floor to seal it, leave it as long as you possibly can before doing so, and try to get a pre- treatment to do whatever it does to the surface layer before painting, then use the best floor paint you can find, industrial stuff.

 

I skipped the pre-treatment, and have suffered a fair bit of flaking of the paint. My brother used the treatment, and although his workshop gets much more serious use (his hobby is stripping and restoring cars and motorbikes, and he does some quite heavy metalwork) his floor has fared much better.

 

Of course, if you are having a false floor, irrelevant. But, I can’t see the point of false floors over concrete; once you’ve got decent shoes on all this business about the concrete ‘drawing’ the feet really doesn’t apply.

[Martin S-C]

Thanks. I am putting in a wooden floor. Quite a substantial one. With insulation below. And a carpet on top. I have heard that concrete in winter is cold through the feet so I am taking no chances. I want a 365 days a year railway room!

(I also like my comforts)...

[Nearholmer]

As I say, with a decent pair of shoes on ........

 

But, Rule 1 applies as much to sheds as anything else.

[Martin S-C]

I understand. I know you are right as well. I have, however, budgeted for a really luxurious railway room and am at the happy place for the first time in my life where I can splash out to a level I was never able to before so I am pitching this at the "very comfortable level" rather than at the "make do and mend" level I have endured for 40+ years! This is really the dream railway I have been thinking of for decades and I don't have any desire to cut a single corner.

Your ideas are solid and appreciated, please don't stop commenting or criticising.

[Martin S-C]

Here is something that is making me totally buzz with excitement. This is the (first) branch train for the Witts End Light Railway (and just wait until you see the second one!). The coaches are the D&S Wisbech & Upwell Tramway pair with an 1860s Great North of Scotland passenger brake van which is a Prickly Pear kit (no, I'd never heard of them either!) The train will be shunted at both ends of the journey so that the brake is at the rear ... just because its an excuse to play trains more. The livery will be Midland crimson lake or something close to it, with yellow lining as the restored GER coach No.7 is today at the North Norfolk Railway. All three kit builds are the work of Frank Bulkan and I'm over the moon with what a lovely job he has done. I have a few details to add concerning the coach roofs before I paint them.

 

 

[Corbs]

Wow! You don't mess about, do you? Makes me want to get the D&S kits I have in the drawer built ASAP.