Buffers and space for couplings on sleeper-built buffer stops.

[BroadLeaves]

I'm considering using some of these https://www.ancortonmodels.com/product/oobs1-wooden-sleeper-built-buffers-laser-cut-kit-oo-scale/ but something that's immediately obvious is that if a model wagon runs up against one, the couplings, which on models always protrude beyond the plane of the buffers, are going to hit the "front wall" before the wagon buffers hit the buffer beams on the same wall. That will potentially damage the coupling, the buffer or both.

My (as yet completely non-existent) layout will be a mid-1930's GWR and I'm struggling to find any pictures of sleeper-built buffer stops that aren't models themselves. Leaving aside that it's G scale, https://www.hattons.co.uk/13837/lgb_10310_buffer_stop_sleeper_built_with_working_light/stockdetail solves the problem with a "hole", but to my mind looks awful.

One option is to add some actual buffers onto the buffer stop, basically treating the two red areas on the Ancorton model linked above like the buffer beam on a locomotive, but is that just daft?  Did anyone do that with sleeper buffers in that strange place known as "the real world"? I realise that using a rail-built buffer solves all these problems, but I quite like the look of the sleeper-built kind and one thing I'm hoping to do is to add red lamps to them and completely hide the wires, which will be much easier with a kit-based sleeper buffer "block" than an open-frame rail-built one as I can simply run the wires down inside the block as part of the build.

Basically, I'm thinking of something like this https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-railway-buffers-13353593.html but for sleeper- rather than rail-built. 

Of course, I can just apply Rule 1...

Apologies for a text-heavy and graphics-light post, but having read

not sure that I could post the actual images I've found, or a mockup of what I'm suggesting. 

[33C]

How about the grounded iron mink type with buffers and draw gear mounted on the end?

[Paul H Vigor]

28 minutes ago, 33C said:

How about the grounded iron mink type with buffers and draw gear mounted on the end?

I recall seeing one of those in the goods yard at Machynlleth, c.1976 - adjacent to the former Corris Railway transshipment wharves. 

[Steamport Southport]

40 minutes ago, Paul H Vigor said:

I recall seeing one of those in the goods yard at Machynlleth, c.1976 - adjacent to the former Corris Railway transshipment wharves. 

 

Yes. With a hole cut in the roof and filled with concrete ISTR.

 

 

 

Regarding sleeper built bufferstops. I think they had mostly gone by the 1930s. It was only in very rural areas where they survived. I remember seeing a photo of one still in Scotland in the 1950s.

 

One solution to the couplings issue is doing what PECO do and having a bit of a recess.

 

https://peco-uk.com/products/buffer-stop-sleeperbuilt

 

Also don't paint it as coal. It would be old used ballast, builders rubble or soil.

 

 

Jason

Edited January 2, 2022 by Steamport Southport

[Wickham Green too]

..... or a cunningly disguised  sprung or weighted flap that pushes out of the way.

 

 

( Or change to three-links, of course ! )

[Compound2632]

I recently scratch-built a sleeper-built buffer stop for our club layout. I simply left a hole two sleepers wide below the level of the buffer-beam sleeper. This hook of the tension-lock coupling disappears into this but the 2 mm thickness of the buffer beam is enough that there is room for the bar of the coupling with a wagon's buffers up against the beam. The hole is barely visible.

 

I based mine loosely on a Midland Railway design, making it 48 mm long and with a length of bullhead rail wrapped round it to hold it together - in fact the Midland ones used two. These things had to be pretty solid; as they're built of sleepers, either 8'6" or 9'0" long, and buffer height is around 3'5", there's as much sleeper below rail height as above - so a good 3'6" - 4'0" buried in the ground. I did a bit of a search for photos of the real thing but apart from this Midland type I struggled to find real examples. I came to the conclusion that the classic stepped-down-towards-the-back type is a bit of a modeller's fantasy that owes more to Reginald Dalby then any real railway's engineer's department. As for the one linked by the OP - what was the designer on? It's got hardly any length to it so one built like that would collapse backwards at the first impact, and what is the purpose of all that timber extending above buffer beam height? Ridiculous.

 

I also looked into the iron mink as buffer stop idea and came to the conclusion that the Machynlleth pair were the only ones.

[BroadLeaves]

@Compound2632 Thanks for those links.

Glad it's not just me who can't find any photos. I'm sure there is a quite a bit of "modeller's licence" being applied to the design. The Ancorton ones are 45mm long apparently, so not too much shorter than yours. What's interesting from the Midland Railway documents is that it says "top to be turfed" which to me says that they would be, if not filled with, at least covered in earth to a decent depth. Maybe there were some shorter ones that actually were filled with ballast. That would be heavier than soil so would need less volume for the same "stopping power".

I did come at this from a "how do I hide the wiring" angle and this is was one of the solutions - I have the LEDs and the lamps already and the wires are *really* thin, so the less exposed they are and the less sharp bends they have to make, the better. With one of these I can mount a lamp, with the tiny LED inside it, directly on the buffer unit and have no vulnerable wires exposed at all. Glue two bits of copper to the inside and solder the wires to those and then the connection down through the baseboard can be made using standard gauge wire also soldered to the copper strips. An arrangement like that should be nice and robust, but would be impossible to hide with an open-frame type buffer.

I may get one, and in a bout of Rule One, stick some old rolling stock buffers on it to see what it looks like. The layout is "sleepy rural end of branch line" much more than "busy mainline station", so something knocked up by the locals and not quite standard may not appear too out of place.

I can't see it in a station or goods yard, but a grounded mink van or similar

might work for one of the scruffier sidings.

[jim.snowdon]

19 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

I recently scratch-built a sleeper-built buffer stop for our club layout. I simply left a hole two sleepers wide below the level of the buffer-beam sleeper. This hook of the tension-lock coupling disappears into this but the 2 mm thickness of the buffer beam is enough that there is room for the bar of the coupling with a wagon's buffers up against the beam. The hole is barely visible.

 

I based mine loosely on a Midland Railway design, making it 48 mm long and with a length of bullhead rail wrapped round it to hold it together - in fact the Midland ones used two. These things had to be pretty solid; as they're built of sleepers, either 8'6" or 9'0" long, and buffer height is around 3'5", there's as much sleeper below rail height as above - so a good 3'6" - 4'0" buried in the ground. I did a bit of a search for photos of the real thing but apart from this Midland type I struggled to find real examples. I came to the conclusion that the classic stepped-down-towards-the-back type is a bit of a modeller's fantasy that owes more to Reginald Dalby then any real railway's engineer's department. As for the one linked by the OP - what was the designer on? It's got hardly any length to it so one built like that would collapse backwards at the first impact, and what is the purpose of all that timber extending above buffer beam height? Ridiculous.

 

I also looked into the iron mink as buffer stop idea and came to the conclusion that the Machynlleth pair were the only ones.

Like you, I am inclined to think that the sleeper-buit buffer stop is much rarer in real life than in it is in the world of modellers, where it has become rather hackneyed. So too is the notion that every buffer stop has to have a red light mounted thereon.  On tracks used by passenger trains may be, but not as far as I am aware always; on goods sidings, very rarely, if ever.

 

As regards the iron mink stop blocks, Harold Gasson in his books mentions something very similar at the ends of the wartime sidings at Moreton, east of Didcot.

 

[Trog]

Also for buffers adjacent to running lines where a red lamp could be mistaken for a tail light, a white lamp could be used to avoid the risk of a driver needing to do a laundry stop.

[Steamport Southport]

A lamp would be used when shunting in light conditions that needed it. More so you can see where the buffer stop is than anything else.

 

I'm thinking trains such as an early morning pick up goods when you are picking up/dropping off wagons en route. Probably lit by the local signalman.

 

I doubt you would light one if it wasn't needed as that costs money and we all know the railway companies were a bit stingy. 

 

 

Jason

[jim.snowdon]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

A lamp would be used when shunting in light conditions that needed it. More so you can see where the buffer stop is than anything else.

 

I'm thinking trains such as an early morning pick up goods when you are picking up/dropping off wagons en route. Probably lit by the local signalman.

 

I doubt you would light one if it wasn't needed as that costs money and we all know the railway companies were a bit stingy. 

 

 

Jason

A lamp (hand) used by the shunter to signal to the driver when to stop, not least because the stopping point is probably dictated by the presence of wagons parked on the siding between the train and buffer stop (and it isn't normal practice to hang lamps on the drawhooks just for that).

 

[Ken.W]

Also, please remember that even where lamps were provided they were lit by small paraffin lamps, not the electric ones we're now used to.

So, from scale viewing distance, unless you're operating the layout in the dark, if you can see they're lit then they're far too bright.

When l see illuminated semaphore signals on layouts l usually think that l wish the real thing had been that bright, they usually look more like colour lights.

 

The timber buffer beams on the bay platforms at Newcastle had old loco type buffers on them

[Rivercider]

When I worked at Barton Hill 1999-2007 I walked past a wooden structure like that at the west end of Barton Hill yard.

It was covered in brambles by that time, whether it is still there I could not say.

It was located approximately behind the loco in this photo from Flickr

  

 

Photo by Rail and Landscapes taken July 1992

 

cheers

Edited January 3, 2022 by Rivercider
spelling

[LMS2968]

Something which I haven't seen mentioned is the the stop block's main purpose was to mark the end of the siding; you didn't normally stand anything against them but would stop short. Where you actually stopped was up to the person directing the operation, shunter or guard, and he would leave a space between the stops and the vehicle(s). I can't recall seeing a lamp on a stop block in any sidings except terminus passenger stations; any lamp in a goods sidings would require maintenance and would probably have a very short life anyway.

[Compound2632]

Well, if you need to use every inch of space for wagon storage:

 

 

Peterborough Wisbech Sidings, 1905. [NRM DY 2801 released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

The Midland's standard rail-built buffer stops, here ballasted with rubble. I suppose one could argue that sleeper-built buffer stops the length of a wagon would take up too much valuable space here, given the clearance needed for the yard headshunt line. 

 

The elegant curve of the sidings here was forced by the curve of the M&GN Joint Line up the embankment to the right before sailing over the Midland and GN main lines. The GN's New England sidings and engine shed are away out of shot on the left.

 

My advice to @BroadLeaves would be to quit the realm of modellers' fantasy and use genuine GW buffer stops. These are what we have used on the ex-GW part of the club layout; the sleeper-built buffer stop is on the private sidings side of the fence. Using a model of a genuine GW item will enhance the realism of the layout. Whose dictum was it that you should be able to identify to which pre-grouping company a layout pertained* without there being a single item of rolling stock on it?

 

*including grouping era and BR steam layouts, since little railway infrastructure really changed very much in the 50 years from the outbreak of the Great War. 

[LMS2968]

Many, many years ago, BRILL did a feature on Bamfurlong Sidings. These were on the Down side of the WCML a couple of miles south of Wigan. One view shows the wagons hard up against the stop blocks. Well, more accurately, it showed the wagons hard up against where the stop blocks used to be, the blocks themselves being heaps of wreckage in front of the wagons. Which is why you stop clear of them: it's very difficult to judge the stopping distance of a raft of unbraked wagons, so you try not the find out the hard way!

[Wickham Green too]

Some stops are a little more resilient : - 

 

Edited May 18, 2022 by Wickham Green too
Photo reinstated

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, LMS2968 said:

Many, many years ago, BRILL did a feature on Bamfurlong Sidings. These were on the Down side of the WCML a couple of miles south of Wigan. One view shows the wagons hard up against the stop blocks. Well, more accurately, it showed the wagons hard up against where the stop blocks used to be, the blocks themselves being heaps of wreckage in front of the wagons. Which is why you stop clear of them: it's very difficult to judge the stopping distance of a raft of unbraked wagons, so you try not the find out the hard way!

Yes, many a Shunter did find out that the hard way and it wasn't unusual to find a gap between where the rails of a siding ended and the place where the stop block (still in one piece) had been shoved to.   Don't forget that almost anyone shunting a yard regularly knew exactly how many wagons every siding could safely hold and provided he could count he'd stop wagons before they hit the blocks.  Unfortunately some Shunters were either 'distracted' or forgot how many they had counted and the occasional thump happened.

 

There was at one time a nice story going the rounds av bout the Bristol Yard at Severn Tunnel Jcn where almost every siding had a gap between the end of the rails and the by then isolated stop block so all teh sensible Shunters made sure they stopped anything shunted int the siding well short of the gap.  This allegedly toa rather b naive newbie suggesting that all the sidings could be shortened in order to save money because their full length was never used. 

 

Yard sidings didn't generally have lamps on them - firstly they didn't need them and secondly if they had them they would cost money to look after.  but - as already noted - lamps were provided on stop blocks at stations  where trains would run towards them.  And they were also supposed to be provided on refuge siding stop blocks as people unfamiliar with the siding could be controlling a train being shunted in towards that block, but even that idea was very much observed in the breach in many places by the mid 1960s.

[Ken.W]

On 02/01/2022 at 19:36, BroadLeaves said:

Basically, I'm thinking of something like this https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-railway-buffers-13353593.html but for sleeper- rather than rail-built. 

 

In the OP it's unclear if the stops are intended for sidings or a terminal platform.

 

The stops in the link that I've quoted are however, quite similar in principal to those l mentioned above in the bay platforms at Newcastle. On these though, the whole of the beam was painted red, and instead of the rail built structure they were mounted on two timbers set vertically against the end wall. The buffers fitted to them appeared to be a mix of LNER and NER loco type.

[Compound2632]

Having been so down on timber-built buffer stops, I came across one that's a dead ringer for the one I'd built, seen here at Shrewsbury.

[Chris Turnbull]

I can't help with a sleeper-built buffer stop but on the right of this photo there is a concrete version.  There is no "hole" for the coupling and I suppose that the idea was to protect the bridge.  If a coupling was bent whilst shunting that could be easily repaired unlike the bridge.  This was Thurston on 24th September 1970. 

 

 

Chris Turnbull

[Compound2632]

2 minutes ago, Chris Turnbull said:

There is no "hole" for the coupling and I suppose that the idea was to protect the bridge.  If a coupling was bent whilst shunting that could be easily repaired unlike the bridge.  

 

... but the full-sized railway has never used tension-locks!

[BroadLeaves]

1 hour ago, Ken.W said:

In the OP it's unclear if the stops are intended for sidings or a terminal platform.

Well, neither really. I've been out of modelling for a long time, so I'm starting (very) small and initially just building a "test track" sort of thing...

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/169058-first-steps/

The main idea behind this is that it can be a "try one of everything" test bed - laying and ballasting track, static grass, weathering, landscaping, adding buildings etc, without embarking on some massive 8' x 12' monster that ends up being some half-laid track and no further progress for the next five years.

One of the "things" in "everything" was lamps on buffer stops. Not because they're prototypical, just because I thought (and I still do) that it would be a nice way to practice some modelling skills before starting on something a bit more ambitious. They're fiddly, difficult to paint, probably difficult to mount in a way that hides the wires - a nice modelling challenge. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[phil_sutters]

I wonder how often 12"/1ft rolling stock actually rests against buffer stops. I guess that there is often less room to manoeuvre on model railways, which are often quite severely compressed to fit in the space available.

With regard to the lights, I am sure that there are kits around for buffers stop lamps. LED and fibre optics both can be used to make very tiny lights these days.

[LMS2968]

16 minutes ago, phil_sutters said:

I wonder how often 12"/1ft rolling stock actually rests against buffer stops. I guess that there is often less room to manoeuvre on model railways, which are often quite severely compressed to fit in the space available.

With regard to the lights, I am sure that there are kits around for buffers stop lamps. LED and fibre optics both can be used to make very tiny lights these days.

See my posts from Monday at 08.39 and 11.23. It was an absolute that you kept clear of the hydraulic stops at terminal stations, and the reason for the gaps in goods yards is already explained.