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Merchiston Dairy


MacDuff999
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After something of a chequered modelling 'career' due to job changes/locations, house moves etc., I now have the opportunity to embark on a modelling project with (I hope) a sustained future. A few years ago, enthused by involvement with a fine-scale group in my local area, I started to build some baseboards, with a particular layout plan in mind. As sometimes happens while  things are developing, your ideas do too. The original plan bit the dust, and what was about to become an urban goods yard in north Edinburgh, where I lived quite some years ago, changed to a rail-connected dairy/milk bottling works on the edge of south-west urban Edinburgh. I do prefer to model prototype locations, for a number of reasons, and this idea fitted more comfortably, as I knew the surrounding area rather better. Conveniently, the dairy was no more than half a mile from Dalry Road (64C) steam loco shed. The plan would be based around a daily service, by steam-hauled express milk trains, of the bottling plant owned and operated by the Edinburgh and Dumfriesshire Dairy company. Trains of loaded 3,000-gallon bulk milk tank wagons would be brought from Dumfriesshire (either Sandquar or Dalbeattie), via Carstairs Junction to the bottling facility about 2 miles before the old Caledonian Railway terminal station at Princes Street. The main-line locomotive (typically a Black 5 or 'Crab') would be released, to make its way to the nearby shed for servicing, and the tank wagons would be shunted to and from the dairy discharge siding by - usually - an ex-Caley 0-6-0 shunter. Empties would be marshalled, along with the accompanying passenger brake van (commonly a ex-LMS Stove'R'), prior to arrival of the train loco from 64C to take them back south.  Although there is no way I would be able to portray routine traffic on the adjacent double-track main line, due to space and time considerations, the main line would feature on the layout, and I would use it occasionally as a route for 'visiting' locos to the area, to return either to Carstairs Junction to pick up a southbound train, or west to return to Glasgow or Lanark. This would create an opportunity to provide glimpses of main-line motive power such as a Jubilee, ex-LMS pacific or Britannia - often from 66A Glasgow Polmadie shed. The actual sidings occupied by the dairy were also occupied by two other commercial concerns - a stone masons/builders yard and a timber merchant. Using my modeller's licence, I have amended the plan to feature a single commercial facility, that of a storage and dispatch facility for the Edinburgh Crystal Glass works. The one-time works manager there, a certain Ken Northwood who I briefly got to know, was a railway modeller of some distinction, with his Torreyford on the North Devon Railway filling the loft at his family home in north Edinburgh. It was Ken, so I understand, who developed the technique of pin-pointing wagon axle ends - by hand with a small piece of timber, a file and paper-based abrasive !        

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  • 1 month later...

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Just a couple of very early shots of the set-up set-up so far.

 

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Still finding out how this works with photos. An expected addition to the motive power, an ex-Caley class 812 will not now arrive until September, say Rails of Sheffield!

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