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Old station photo - but where is it ?


ThePurplePrimer

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Well spotted! A curious arrangement for the coal drops, being fed, in part, by a track passing through the engine shed.. There is mention of a 'gas works' next to the engine shed in the text, but it looks more like a sand-drier to me.

The platform road curving away makes it appear that the line was originally intended to continue to somewhere- I wonder where?

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I would not wish to disagree with Roger Griffiths, but that must be the tiniest gasworks ever constructed.

 

Edited: to add that the line of trees just behind the chimney marks the bank of the river Swale, and on the 1893 OS map, the gas works was about a mile to the southwest of the station, and on the opposite bank of the river.

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I would not wish to disagree with Roger Griffiths, but that must be the tiniest gasworks ever constructed.

 

Edited: to add that the line of trees just behind the chimney marks the bank of the river Swale, and on the 1893 OS map, the gas works was about a mile to the southwest of the station, and on the opposite bank of the river.

The building still exists and it was a gas works.   There is a very similar one in the triangle at Arthington.  It was apparently a standard NER design for a gas works to serve the station.  We used the Richmand one as the prototype for the gas works on my Long Preston model which has a simialr size town gas works alongside and below the main line.

 

Jamie

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I would not wish to disagree with Roger Griffiths, but that must be the tiniest gasworks ever constructed.

 

Edited: to add that the line of trees just behind the chimney marks the bank of the river Swale, and on the 1893 OS map, the gas works was about a mile to the southwest of the station, and on the opposite bank of the river.

 

Many years ago, I was poking about in the remains of a big country house (I won't say where, 'cos I probably wasn't supposed to be there) when I found, some distance from the main house, what appeared to be a small gasworks, presumably for the domestic supply. It was very small. I can't remember much about most of the equipment, but I was particularly struck by the tiny gasholder which, memory tells me, was only about 6 ft high and 3 ft across and of proper telescopic construction, just like a real one.

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Oh well, I must defer to those with the more intimate knowledge and accept that it is the tiniest gasworks.

 

I have no idea how they installed all the gas making equipment in there, but hey-ho.

You will when you've read this and it does specifically mention railway stations as users of very small gasworks

  http://www.eugris.info/newsdownloads/CountryHouseGasworks.pdf

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I'm embarrassed that I didn't get this. I knew a chap called Jim Armstrong who had a model of Richmond. He died a couple of years ago, and had been involved with the CMRA and organised the St Albans exhibition for some years. He could be irascible, but had a heart of gold.

 

Does anyone else remember him?

 

Ed

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Thanks for that Mal. I didn't know about Google's image search function- now I do and it may prove very useful  :D

 

It's quite incredible how they do it, but if you're using Chrome, you only have to right click on an image and the search option is right there.

 

Mal

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You will when you've read this and it does specifically mention railway stations as users of very small gasworks

  http://www.eugris.info/newsdownloads/CountryHouseGasworks.pdf

 

Fascinating.

 

Given some of the dimensions quoted, it makes me wonder if what I found was a petrol gas or acetylene plant, rather than a proper coal gas works. My memory isn't all that good these days but I do remember the gasholder and, although the dimensions I mentioned may not be entirely accurate, it certainly wasn't as big as the coal gas units described.

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Everybody else beat me to it but as soon as I saw it I recognised it as I built a model of that very gasworks for the late Malcolm Crawley's "Thompson's End" layout quite a few years ago. I can't remember what date the real gasworks became redundant but Malcolm's layout was set in the mid 1930s and the gasworks was modelled as being closed down, with boarded up windows and a bit of wear and tear to the roof.

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On the joke thread, I've said how stupid I am, so here's more proof!

 

What is the Google reverse search and how does it work?

 

Phil

 

Instead of searching for an image, using text keywords, it searches for an image you provide, and finds web pages that contain that image or ones that have a similar appearance.

 

If you use Chrome, you can right-click on an image, and the pop-up menu will contain a link to search for it (which is what I did with the OP's image).

 

Or you can go here:

https://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&gws_rd=ssl

 

Click on the little camera icon, and then either paste in a url, or upload an image from your computer.  Google will then go off and try to find it on the web.

 

Presumably they have a way of indexing image content by colour, pattern and shape and return the closest matches as the results.

 

HTH

 

Mal

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You will when you've read this and it does specifically mention railway stations as users of very small gasworks

  http://www.eugris.info/newsdownloads/CountryHouseGasworks.pdf

Thanks for posting this fascinating link. I'd heard of 'big houses' with their own electricity generating facility (Cragside, Armstrong's place near Rothbury, for example) but never the gas works that preceded them. 

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Thanks very much. Very informative and a subject I knew nothing about until I read it.

Nor did I but it explains the reference I found on an old map to a gasworks on a large farm south of Greenford. I presume that even these very small gasworks have left a legacy of contaminated land.

 

This is much larger than the type we're talking about but it is interesting.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/one-man-gas-works-issue-title-is-house-full/query/Arthur

The information in these two educational models could also be useful as the basis for a more finely detailed model. I doubt whether the small town one would need its own siding and the country house example doesn't look to be a lot larger than the building at Richmond

 

http://www.eugris.info/newsdownloads/Early%20Small%20Town%20Gasworks%20%28NAIC%29.pdf

 

http://www.academia.edu/1735489/Country_House_Gasworks_Model.

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