Nellie's New Railway - A 1963 BLT

[Nearholmer]

Maybe I’m not making my thinking clear: The real Woking & Bagshot LR was authorised as a rural, electrically powered one. I’m not talking about an adjunct, I’m talking about assuming that it was completed as such, rather than assuming that it was left half-finished and without electricity.

 

Think Manx Electric, Kinver LR, Grimsby & Immingham etc.

 

 

Edited January 18, 2020 by Nearholmer

[uax6]

I can see a Crooked Mountain Lines kinda theme coming on here, and I have to say it is really quite appealing to see an early electrified line being modelled. It would just need a decision on motive power, either trams for passengers and EE steeple cabs types for freight, or just steeplecabs for everything. I suppose the big question is what sort of traffic is suggested to make the differing motive power cost effective? Or does the freight stay steam powered?

 

But as this is supposed to be for Nellie, maybe a bit of a mix, with a triang steeplecab on the electric bit (maybe some sort of interchange?)

 

 

Watching with even more interest now!

 

Andy G

[Nearholmer]

Well, Nellie could always stay on as backup in case of power failures.

 

A steeple-cab with railway-type draw gear for goods, and a couple of bogie cars for passengers, maybe.

 

Anyway, track first, trains later.

 

 

Edited January 18, 2020 by Nearholmer

[ian]

Tram for passengers. Steeple cab for freight and Nellie for PW  / OHLE / Thunderbirrd / special trains (and pottering about the yard).

Edited January 18, 2020 by ian

[Nearholmer]

These electric light railway cars look for all the world like trams, and some of the Grimsby & Immingham ones had been trams in a previous life, but there is often a subtle difference: street tramcars usually have exceedingly tiny wheel flanges and very narrow wheel-treads, and even if they are the same nominal gauge as railway stock will have trouble with railway point-work, a bit like a P4 wheel running on Triang Super 4.
 

Classic electric LR have railway-type wheels, and the track is railway-style. In fact, they are railways, electric railways.
 

Street tramway track is different, using ‘grooved rail’ ...... imagine a shallow groove in the head of a railway rail, in which the flange runs.

 

Some street tramways conveyed through wagons from the main railway systems in urban areas, but the tramway was then to a slightly smaller nominal gauge (Glasgow was one such, I think), and the wagons rode on their flanges, not treads, while on the tramway.

 

It is even more confusing nowadays, because the term ‘light railway’ is used to mean both a classic LR, typically built or operated under the terms of the 1896 Act, and multiple different forms  ‘other guided transport system’, ranging from a fully segregated and automated system running MU trains, like Docklands LR in London, to Street tramways that have significant lengths of reserved (but not fully segregated) route in the suburbs. The whole metro-supertram-light railway realm is a minefield in terms of nomenclature, which is chosen by marketing bods rather than geeky engineers.

 

The basic thing to remember is that it is a tramway if it is driven ‘on line of sight’, and some sort of railway (whatever it might call itself), if it uses some form of block working (and modern metros use moving block, which is almost ‘line of sight driving by an all-seeing computer’).

 

Right Away Driver! Ding, ding!

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, ian said:

Nellie for PW  / OHLE / Thunderbirrd / special trains (and pottering about the yard).

 

... and for exchange traffic with the "Big Railway"?

[Nearholmer]

A picture to illustrate the terminological confusion that I was rambling on about earlier.

 

This is the Dearne District Light Railway, built under an LRO, but really a street tramway with reserved sections of route.

 

Have a look at the rail-heads. This is grooved rail - see how shallow the groove is.

 

 

Curiously, photos of the Grimsby & Immingham LR seem to show some bits as grooved rail and some as conventional bullhead track, so I wonder if the wheels were wide tread, shallow flange, or if the points on the bullhead sections had specially set clearances.

 

The Kinver LR started with railway-type track, and wheels with railway-type profile, but that was kind-of useless because it was 3'6" gauge, so couldn't receive through railway traffic, and within a couple of years was converted to grooved rail and tramway-style wheel profile to permit through-running of cars from urban routes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 18, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

Far, far OT, but this is the sort of railway that I’d really like to create https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemins_de_fer_départementaux_de_la_Haute-Vienne

 

it is famous for having a staff telephone system that shared wires with the high voltage distribution, the ‘phone boxes’ being mounted on big slabs of slate so that the user was safe, like a bird on a wire.

[Joseph_Pestell]

28 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Far, far OT, but this is the sort of railway that I’d really like to create https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemins_de_fer_départementaux_de_la_Haute-Vienne

 

it is famous for having a staff telephone system that shared wires with the high voltage distribution, the ‘phone boxes’ being mounted on big slabs of slate so that the user was safe, like a bird on a wire.

Only the French could do electricity like that!!!

[Northroader]

That was the line that served Oradour, scene of the infamous SS massacre. The village was totally abandoned and left as a memorial, so there’s bits of the tramway still there left running through the village.

Theres a tale of Nazi gold linking into this, with a Briton getting incarcerated by the French Revenue service, but that will have to keep, and let Kevin get some track down.

[Nearholmer]

That’s how I came across it - we were on holiday not far south of there, and I read about Oradour, then saw a big book about the railway on a secondhand stall in a market (too expensive to buy at the time, unfortunately).

 

Off to a family birthday outing in a minute, so no track today, but this gives clues as to next planned activity.

 

 

 

Very CJF, eh? None of your modern copperclad bits here.

 

 

[Donw]

Brass screws have the advantage of being height adjustable without packing before soldering the rail on.

 

Don

 

 

[uax6]

Shame about that tiny bit of rail from the fishplate at the point toe to the screw, are you going to solder the fishplate up on this bit?

 

Andy G

[5BarVT]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Very CJF, eh? None of your modern copperclad bits here.

Please accept my seal of approval. Those are my fiddle yard screws, scenic areas get smaller No1 heads.

2 hours ago, uax6 said:

Shame about that tiny bit of rail from the fishplate at the point toe to the screw, are you going to solder the fishplate up on this bit?

No need, solder track and wire to screw (the wire is what the slot is for!!!).

Paul.

[Nearholmer]

Something to give a bit of context.

 

This is very roughly what the real proposal looked like, with a mixture of reserved routes across country, roadside rural sections, and street tramway in Woking (which was still quite small and new then).

 

HG Wells would have found this convenient, because the urban section was to run ‘one street over’ from where he lived in Maybury Road, if he hadn’t moved away several years previously.

 

Traffic would have been passengers, with plans in hand to build more houses as to expand Woking, the usual coal and ‘smalls’, and I think a lot of fruit, veg and cut flowers to London, because the area was a centre of market-gardening and nurseries. Probably also milk, from the pastures on the damper bits.

 

 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

Track pinned-down, ready for soldering the bits across the baseboard-joint and to start wiring.

 

The Nellies are standing in the carriage shed, and the road that goes off top-left will have a loco-shed/Workshop part way along it.

 

Im still thinking about the fiddle-zone (bottom left): I may create sliding-cassette-things, or just leave it as a piece of track ...... we’re not talking an intensive service of highly varied trains here, or fragile super-detailed stock that can’t withstand being played with.
 

I quite like the St Andrew’s Cross track arrangement, because it looks spacious, but uses all four corners.

[Nearholmer]

Went to buy some wire earlier, and asked the chap in the shop if he remembered who made some plastic kits for trams about twenty or thirty years ago.

 

”Like these?” says he, bringing out three rather faded boxes!

 

I bought two, which contain enough of the difficult-to-make bits to give a massive head-start on either an electric car or a Dick-Kerr type petrol car (can decide later). The mouldings are pretty basic, but perfectly useable, the water slide transfers are well past it, but I won’t need those, so no loss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Northroader]

Mmmm?

http://irishrailarchives.ie/index.php/2019/05/03/dublin-blessington-tramway-archive-photo-feature/

[Nearholmer]

You really are the worst kind of trouble-maker, aren’t you?

 

Here are conjoined Nellies.

 

And, just to prove that the electric bits weren’t dull either, a wooden steeple-cab.

 

 

 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Annie]

22 minutes ago, Northroader said:

Mmmm?

http://irishrailarchives.ie/index.php/2019/05/03/dublin-blessington-tramway-archive-photo-feature/

Why am I only allowed to click 'Like' once?  I want to click 100 likes.

I was working on a steam tram in 1/2 inch scale before I had to give up modelling.

[Nearholmer]

Mind you, our local one got pretty eccentric it’s later years.

 

 

[Donw]

1 hour ago, Northroader said:

Mmmm?

http://irishrailarchives.ie/index.php/2019/05/03/dublin-blessington-tramway-archive-photo-feature/

 

I was thinking of building a steam tram engine rather like that but in SM32 for use in the garden. I have a Binnie motor ( twin double acting oscillator to run on steam) . What is the strange structure on the top?

 

Don

[Edwardian]

The Nellies appear to be breeding.  You really ought to have a blue one now too. Like the track layout and the fact that it avoids being parallel to the baseboard edge.

 

The tram kits look promising.  Funnily enough I was recently toying with the idea of using similar - Hales or Keilkraft IIRC - plastic kits and using the bodies to for the basis of little 4-wheel tramway coaches for the Bishop's Lynn line, rather like, say, Lambourn Valley's, or those NG versions at Launceston.

[Compound2632]

9 hours ago, Edwardian said:

The Nellies appear to be breeding.  You really ought to have a blue one now too.

 

Blue = Nellie, the classic one, R335B

Red = Polly, the jolly one, R335R

Yellow = Connie, the rare one, R335Y

Green = 27, the common one, R335G (see what they're doing there!)

 

Then there's also 7178 in faux-S&DJR colours:

 

 

R255, bucking the trend. (And isn't our Nellie a big girl?) There was also another red one, 25550, stablemate to the Lord Westwood? - R455.

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by Compound2632

[Nearholmer]

Yes, all those Nellie-variants are knocking at the door, but, I am the sort of chap who could easily collect ten ten-pound locos, spend hours tinkering about until they all run ‘just about Ok most of the time’, when a more sane option would be to buy one one-hundred pound loco that works perfectly, and is exactly to scale.

 

Willpower!!!