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“BEYOND DOVER”


Northroader
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Looking at the associated pipework, you’ve got electric lighting for the headlight with conduits back to the box and the cab, then in the box there’s a steam turbine generator lurking. The exhaust from it is going up the side of the chimney. The best place to see them is on late build LNER locos, which weren’t boxed in, just in front of the cab on top of the boiler.

agreed the cab roof circular ventilator is different.

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DANISH GOODS WAGONS

 

 

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Thanks for the information on likely wagons for a coal load, Mikkel. I must admit the PF/PFR build look really nice prototypes, and if you’re used to British pregroup opens with a body length of 16feet (4.880m), a wagon with a body length of around 7.660m (25’) looks.. well.. er.. foreign. Then the PFR has a brakemans cabin, which I’m very partial to, and it’s interesting that there were 1061 PFR built with the cabin to 1539 PF without, as well as 667 PF for privatbaner. They’re the right time line, starting to appear from 1896, tying in with similar long body types on Prussian Railways from 1891. It’s just balancing body and wheelbase lengths, as I just happen to have some gash Rivarrossi chassis of around the same block hole. More temptation...

 

 

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There is a PFR drawing on p5 of this PDF of the erstwhile magazine "Lokomotivet" (warning: long download time): https://www.signalposten.dk/download/Lokomotivet31.pdf

 

Also in that mag have a look at page 27: A photo of some of the first Tuborg wagons (built  1889/92, pictured ca. 1902). I know you like beer wagons :)

 

Meanwhile on this webpage, a Sainsbury's container on a PF wagon, illustrating nicely British dimensions vs continental ones: https://www.jernbanen.dk/forum2/index.php?mode=thread&id=11798

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I’ve got no excuses now! The Tuborg wagon looks nice, change from the ubiquitous Carlsberg jobs. It is a striking contrast with the container, never seen one of those before, either. Thanks for digging that information out, don’t expect to see results for a while, though.

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FRENCH PRIVATE OWNER WINE WAGONS.

 

After the Ostend trip I was telling you about, we thought we’d be a bit more ambitious next time, so the first Friday morning of June 1979 found us on a boat train from Victoria to Folkestone, thereby sabotaging the title of this thread. Then across the Channel, it was either using the Hengist or the Horsa.

 

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At Calais we joined our train near the back end, and off down the NORD main line, as per the strip maps. We stayed in our coach at Nord station, a Baldwin yaya came on, and we went off on a trundle on to the Ceinture down the east side of Paris. Curve off at Bercy, and propel into Lyon station, on to the top of more coaches. We had a short walk back a few coaches to our new coach, a couchette. The kids were knocked out by this, a compartment with three bunks either side, right up into the curve of the roof. There was no trouble settling them down, as the train started to roll southwards on a pleasant summer evening by the smart suburbs along the Seine.

We came to around Marseilles, and between toiletries, stood in the corridor looking out. Getting to the Mediterranean was like reaching a different planet, the warmth, the brilliant sunlight, the warm colours. We got out at St. Raphael, had time on the beach, then took a taxi out a few miles to a campsite, where we had a rented caravan. We had an idyllic fortnights holiday, the campsite had an outdoor swimming pool, and the kids swimming came on by leaps and bounds. We managed to visit a lot of the centres using public transport along the French Riviera.

 One afternoon a trip was arranged to a nearby vineyard, a few old buildings amongst rows of vines stretching off in all directions. We were ushered into a dim shed, and against the back wall was this ancient barrel. Looking back, it must have been all of fifteen feet across at least, on its side with an end facing us. The staves in the end had joins plastered with clay, presumably to stop leakage, I wouldn’t mind betting it was there when Napoleon was a lad. Folks with us in the know had brought bottles to take home, we just had a two litre pop bottle, and this was filled with a nice medium red out of the barrel for a few francs, and we worked our way down it for the rest of the holiday after the kids were settled in an evening. It was explained to us that most of the barrels contents was bottled, and sold to fancy London restaurants for rather more than we paid.

One thing I’ve gathered is that a Frenchman regards it as his birthright to wash down the main meal with wine, and a lot of the old railways traffic was meeting this need. It was carried in wooden barrels on a rail chassis, generally owned by merchants who gathered the products of the vineyards like the one we visited together, and sold them off in the North. For colourful private owner wagons, Britain had coal wagons, Germany had beer wagons, and France had wine wagons, so no old French  layout is complete without at least one, or perhaps more with this hypothetical PLM goods yard we’ve mentioned. The wagons were either monofoudre, (one barrel) or bifoudre (two barrels), the latter being more popular. There was a bung at the top centre of the barrel through which they were loaded and emptied, a hose being used. A lot were fitted with a hand pump to help loading in small sidings, and a sheet metal cabinet housing hoses for the same purpose. (You never hear these oenophiles rolling the wine round their tongues and bringing out high flying exotic fruits and flower tastes to describe it, mentioning India rubber)

@Jonhall has already given the best link where there are plenty of pictures and the odd drawing for these wagons,

https://forum.e-train.fr/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5424

so I’ll post a picture first of the one Dennis Allenden made, then a drawing I prepared, and one of my own:

5D0931F3-185D-4E26-AF8D-916DE0DDB9B8.jpeg.37cf0f18e48c7bd6b3b35fec3b77ac70.jpeg764F1088-0580-4CE5-BDF3-F47454D21CA7.jpeg.94207edbb6b4ef31a1c1d025fad46e95.jpeg9BB9096A-5B52-488B-A9F5-DBC0CEC2C2A6.jpeg.01e230c10a95790f7bec71ae95145c27.jpeg

 

The chassis is brass bars soldered up, plain sailing, but the barrels are fun. If you’ve got a wood lathe and sharp tools, great, and I suppose you could do it with new fangled 3D printing (I should say I’m talking O scale, you can buy RTR in HO) I got some blocks of gurjun, a straight grained hardwood, drilled the centre, mounted them on studding and “turned” them on a power drill, bit messy. Then there’s the bands, which need to be slightly curved, as they go on a tapering surface. So I’m not doing too many of these.

 

A votre sante!

 

Edited by Northroader
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You mention the PLM which was a major shipper to Paris, Quai de Bercy IIRC.  However all of the examples you show are from Midi sourced towns.  

That is something I have also found and I find it strange that few PLM PO wagons seem to be published.  Was it because the PLM and wine was like the NER and coal? I don't know.

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Well, on my drawing the David and Foilard/ Francis Negre are PLM based, and the Pujas, although it has a MIDI home station, lists some PLM bases. A trawl through the link should find some more, and then there’s also wagons giving Seine department locations, agents working from the Paris end, either PO or PLM Bercy.  You can also get national tank car firms emerging, which might be hogging PLM output.

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Wonderful wagons. This one looks like something Lewis Caroll has thought up. Pass through this door and enter a magical world of mellow intoxication.

 

6 hours ago, Northroader said:

C09187A7-1810-41F1-887A-57DD84C52BE9.jpeg.ee720ebac949711dfaee4bf2b7184964.jpeg

 

 

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In the 1896 film “arrival of the train at Ciotat” on the PLM, there’s a bifoudre parked in the goods sidings to the left at the start of the film. (At first I thought “what’s a GWR bonnet end wagon doing there?” Then realised what it was.)

 I wondered if the reason there were more MIDI than PLM wagons is that the Deep South area of the MIDI, due to soil / climate conditions, produced what we drinking classes refer to as “plonk”, which was more conducive to bulk transport for Joe Public, and the PLM areas could produce a greater volume of better stuff, which got bottled? But then if you look at the activity at Paris Bercy, a town in its own rights, https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepôts_de_Bercy

it looks as if the bottling was done there rather than at the start of the journey, as required from arriving foudre wagons. Local distribution of the cheaper stuff was either to corner shops, or by street vendors, in small barrels, and bought by the jugful? Or did it all go out in bottles? How much bottling was done in the South?

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14 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Where were there the right materials for glass bottle manufacture? Was here a deposit on bottles? I can imagine that return of empty bottles from Paris to the south would have been uneconomic. 

Within my lifetime I have only known deposits on 1 litre bottles for low quality wine. They were characterised by having a plastic stopper and stars moulded into the glass. I suspect that they would have been filled at bottling plants across the country with the wine arriving in bulk.

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Just as an aside, I wonder how many folk spotted that the name on the side of the Dennis Allenden bifoudre has also been used for a murderous criminal character in an episode of ''New Tricks?'  [A fake identity, which trapped the real culprit well & truly]

 

Back to the wine?

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SPANISH EXPERIMENTS.

 

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Beunas noches amigos. May I draw your attention to the Tridentine Liturgical Calendar, for tomorrow, October 28th, is the Feast of San Judas Tadeo.

He is “el santo patron de causas dificiles o imposibles” (I must start lighting candles at his shrine) Is he also “patron de los ferroviaros”? Consider:

First Railway in Spain, Barcelona toMataro, opened 28/10/1848.

First Railway in Portugal, Lisbon to Carregado, opened 28/10/1856.

For a lover of Iberian Railways, Es muy importante, Una fecha muy auspiciosa!

 

”Vino para mis hombres! We ride at dawn!!”

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So, were those opening dates chosen because St Jude had been nominated patron of railways, or was that added to his portfolio owing to the coincidence of the dates?

 

As patron saint of lost causes, he should perhaps more properly be the patron saint of railway investors.

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BUILDING 0 SCALE MODELS FOR 5’6” GAUGE.

 

Rather a strange coincidence, I’m sure, but it adds to the colour of the theme, don’t you think? Back on page two, Mikkel and I agreed that a model of Spanish Railways would be very tempting, and well, I started to think about ways and means, and cooking up test pieces, and here we are today, the 28th October.

Modelling in O scale, I regard 7mm to the foot as a good rate of exchange, so a 5’6”  gauge comes out at 38.5mm. I use Marcway, of Sheffield, track components, in this case nickel silver flat bottom code 124 rail, and 6mm sleeper strip, copper clad fibre glass. Chop this into 68mm lengths, rub away an insulation break in the middle of each with a half round file (not a nick with a Dremel,- stress raiser) then solder up, with the track laid to the configuration needed. To get the point geometry I had a photostat of a Peco point which I chopped across the middle, then along the length between the rails. The crossing part of this was stuck on paper, the flanking portions stuck on either side at the new gauge, and the line of the rails extrapolated towards the switch blades, and these were then stuck down to line up.

you'll see the wider gauge makes for longer points, not too bad for 5’6”, but 7’ is a nuisance. I had a standard gauge point which has got converted, using the plan, Marcway do cast brass point crossings, and these take all the fiddle out of setting up the frog end, so broad gauge track laying isn’t really any problem at all.

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Turning to vehicles, I needed broad gauge wheelsets, and I adapted some Slaters open spoke wagon wheels. Looking at such old photos I could find, it seems as if fourwheel coaches used the same size. The axles are 1/8” diameter, and these were hacksawed across the middle, then dressed up with a small file. I’d estimated the back to back dimension at 35.4mm, and cut some 5/32”o.d. brass tube to this length. The two wheelset halves had some 24hour araldite smeared over them, and pushed into each end of the tube, then left to set. The coach and wagon chassis are formed from brass strips, with angle reinforcement, and commercial white metal castings for the axlebox assemblies and buffers, these from off the Invertrain site, although not quite as close to the Continental appearance I wanted. For now I’m using a plain drawhook with a single loose link, I was watching a video Mikkel made of shunting on the Farthing line, which makes me want to cobble up some hands off job.

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Now, the tricky bit, the engine. The Slaters wheel sets were done rather like the wagon ones, using 7/32” o.d.brass tube on 3/16” axles. (Both sizes of brass tube I quote can be obtained from either Eileen’s Emporium or Squires Model Supplies)  However, the surplus araldite needs to be cleaned off the axle ends, then the machined squares must be lined up for quartering. I had two spare large diameter drivers on the cut axle ends, with a spot of paint on the flange crest directly in line with the crank pin, then just lined these up. The axles still need to run in brass bushes, but these need to be opened out to the new tube size with a running fit, from my vast array of blunt drills, and holding the bushes whilst drilling was messy.

The standard procedure is to make the frames from brass strip, with nicely machined spacers, but this time, no spacers available. Folks are building chassis in plastikard, so I thought I’d try this, doing the tender first. The side frames were two thicknesses of .080” plastikard, with three layers between them acting as spacers, running along the top under the platform. The adhesive was Humbrol plastic cement, and this also secured the axle bushes. Doing a chassis like this is simple and cheap, and I particularly liked being able to add plastic blocks around the motor to support it, and the fact that the frame was insulated from the pickups (28s.w.g.phosphor bronze wire “whiskers” -Slaters) but I have qualms about dimensional stability, as when I stick two bits of plastikard together, they warp. The tender frames have already been revisited because of this.

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The loco I’m building is nice and simple, an 0-6-0 inside cylinder long boiler Mammoth, using the drawing off page one of this thread. Comparing photographs with the drawing, it is quite a close match as to the chassis. When I did the EST version, I did remember that the drawing is copied from a full size one. The problem with long boiler locos is the centre and trailing drivers are very close together, and you should allow for model flange depths. This time I forgot, and in the end I rubbed the drivers down to S7 sizes, which I’m not keen on, as S7 isn’t so forgiving on poor track. This also led to some opening out of the side rod holes. The gear frame and gear also needed opening out, and I was becoming concerned that all the machined clearances were becoming eroded. When I tried it out on the track I was really pleased that it did run fairly smoothly, and stayed on the track, after all that.

(Addition: I’ve had to recreate these pictures following the Great Photo Loss, and in the meantime the loco has had its wheels and motor pinched, so it’s not as complete now as in the original post!)

 

Edited by Northroader
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On 13/10/2020 at 22:17, Andy Hayter said:

You mention the PLM which was a major shipper to Paris, Quai de Bercy IIRC.  However all of the examples you show are from Midi sourced towns.  

That is something I have also found and I find it strange that few PLM PO wagons seem to be published.  Was it because the PLM and wine was like the NER and coal? I don't know.

Bercy was the official entrepôt for wine supplied to Paris, mostly on barges, long before the railways arrived. It was where duties were collected and was of course on the Seine. So, though its extensive internal railway sytem was next to and connected by wagon lifts to the PLM main line into Gare de Lyon, it would have received wine from any of France's wine growing regions. 

 

The Herault was the traditional Département from where the more ordinary types of wine were shipped with vast acreages of vineyards on rather poor terrain. Exporting trainloads of this stuff in wooden barrels and later lined steel tank wagons , some for supply to the army,  was a major part of the C.F. de l'Herault's business  and, looking at the railway map , that may have reached Paris via the PLM or the PO.  Wines from Burgundy, Beaujolais, Rhone and Provence, as well as French North Africa and the eastern part of Langeudoc would almost certainly have been shipped to Paris via the PLM, but Bordeaux, the South West and possibly western Languedoc would have used the PO/Midi; wines from the Loire the PO and Etat,  and Champagne the Est.

Before railways started shipping it north in large quantities, wine probably wasn't drunk that much outside the main growing regions by ordinary people who would have been more likely to drink whatever could be produced locally; beer in the north and grain growing areas and cider in Brittany and Normandy.  Before Phyloxera, Paris did though get quite a lot of local wine from the banks of the Marne.    

 

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Thanks for your comments, David, it’s another instance of the civilising influence of railways that they could reduce the transport costs of an expensive commodity sufficiently for lower income groups to enjoy it as well.

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1 hour ago, Northroader said:

Thanks for your comments, David, it’s another instance of the civilising influence of railways that they could reduce the transport costs of an expensive commodity sufficiently for lower income groups to enjoy it as well.

The French railways were probably rather less civilising in that regard. The country had long had a major problem with rural isolation and it was said that, in most of deepest rural France,  you'd be better off with Latin than French; you would at least be able to converse with the local priest but nobody would be able to speak French. When the railways came they were built by private companies but according to  a government plan that basically connected Paris with the provincial cities and to some extent those cities to one another.

 

Many villages had grown up along the imperial roads (later National N roads) but the new railways by passed most of them and, with the long distance traffic and diligences (stage coaches) removed from the roads  those roadside villages became even more isolated. It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that a programmes of local roads, railway branch lines (which the major companies didn't really want to build) and later local light railways were promoted by the government (notably by Charles de Freycinet, the minister of public works and later prime minister whose Plan Freycinet also rationalised the canal network with locks that could take standard barges).   Whether branch lines with three trains each way each day, two of them probably timed to connect with the Paris express,  or meandering metre gauge roadside tramways running two or three times a day at ten miles an hour really did that much to open up la France profond to its own people is debatable. Compare that with the service offered by even the meanest pre-Beeching British branch lines-. They did  though do something to help the development of agriculture by making it easier and cheaper to  get crops, including wine, to market. 

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FRANCE C.F. De HERUALT.

 

Regarding the Herault region, and remote rural lines, I wonder if you’ve come across Roger Farnworth? He does place links on RMweb to his site. He’s a priest with a breathtaking capability of research for  a wide range of railway topics. (At the tail end of this link are some more facts about the transport of wine)

https://rogerfarnworth.com/2019/03/18/railways-of-herault-route-a-saint-chinian-to-beziers-line-part-1-saint-chinian-to-cazouls-les-beziers/

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Back on page two, whilst discussing potential for Spanish lines, I offered up a sketch plan for a small station in Catalunya at San Pol de Mar.

 

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I really liked this plan, being nice and simple, and it related to an actual location in its early days, much easier to visualise. It’s been boiled down in length and width, and in the process becoming a terminus rather than a through station, although this isn’t too obvious. It’s also small enough that you don’t need to enter the problem of where do you place a second platform, between or outside the tracks?

Theres a main line serving the platform, a loop line, with a short siding leading off it. The fiddle yard is composed of cassettes, and the entrance to the station is screened by an A4 size view blocking sheet. There’s a scenic back behind the station, curved at the ends. The two tracks converge at the other end on to a small turntable. At present I’m treating this as a sector table, but a turntable is more use in increasing the angle of divergence of the tracks, and balancing the loco when standing on the table. In this use the table is screened by a tunnel mouth.

I've been really mean on the width of the line, there’s no foreground, and it would gain a bit more in having some space at the back, the station building will need to be semi-flat construction.

Heres the formal plan:

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I'm always amazed at the speed with which you move from first thought to actual results.

 

I like the revised trackplan very much, it is now resting safely in my secret folder of stolen ideas :)

 

Interesting how the loco and stock already have a continental flavour, even at this stage. I'm wondering: IIRC you have a Mammoth already, so why build another? 

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Ones standard gauge, 32mm, t’other is this new fangled 5’6” gauge, 38.5mm, I like to stick with O scale, 1/43, for the lot, rather than keep to a standard track and juggle with strange scales.

Im glad you like the plan, I’m quite sold on it for a small space job to cover what I like. In bullhead rail, high level platform, one of those 517 rebuilds like Graham’s done, a Saltney wagon, a D299wagon (must have one of those) what more could anyone wish for? (I bet it would fit in your flat comfortably)

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