Castle Aching

[Compound2632]

46 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

It could be artistic license. The word "THIRD" might have conveyed something the artist wanted to, moreso than the digit "3". The interior fittings look similar and are certainly not outside the scope of artistic interpretation/memory etc.

 

I had been going to ask the experts when the Southern carriage livery changed from FIRST or THIRD in the door waist panel to a large digit on the lower panel - I would assume the markings on the inside changed at the same time? 

[Donw]

2 hours ago, Metropolitan H said:

 

As requested by Nearholmer hear is a photo of my small silver and enamel box - made by me about 15 - 20 years ago! The picture is significantly bigger than life-size, the long axis of the box is only about 50mm.

 

Now for the interesting question: - "Is the Uffington White Horse" really a Horse or is it supposed to be a Dragon"??

 

We will never know, but as the best close view of it is from the nearby "Dragon Hill" - I am led to wonder whether the old people (3000 years ago or before) were celebrating a more mythical beast, with the White Horse naming being a more recent terminology??

 

I find Uffington Castle / the White Horse area including the Blowing Stone and Wayland's Smithy a magical place and have done since first being taken there by parents on a train to Uffington from Reading or on a bus along the spring line road from Wantage.

 

Regards

Chris H

 

 

For me the most atmospheric route is walking along the ridgeway.

 

Don

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

Sheeted opens loaded so high they are higher than the cattle wagon adjacent. Animal feed perhaps since it would need to be protected from rain.

The bundles of sticks which might be for fencing or even they could be reeds for basket weaving? I can't see any lines securing them so perhaps these have been removed preparatory to unloading.

On the far left the two GE opens are probably carrying animal feed, or it could be thatching reeds/grasses. The fact its unprotected from the weather tends me to think the latter.

 

I suspect that all these loads would have been sheeted in transit; the drawback of photos of goods yards is that they show wagons being prepared for loading/unloading, not as they would appear in the goods trains we want to model.

 

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

The almost complete absence of dark colouration/dirt inside most of the opens. The right foreground one and the two GE opens this side of the thatch look like they may have carried coals or other dirty loose produce at some point - maybe beets or turnips or some animal feed with lots of soil on it.

 

 

I'm not convinced by that interpretation. I think a lot of these opens show signs of ingrained dirt - but possibly atmospheric in origin. Wagons would be swept thoroughly after unloading - see paragraphs 38 - 40 here.

2 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

I can't identify what is in the Mitchell wagon adjacent. Looks like coal but probably isn't as there's a dedicated coal siding. Big blocks of something. Peat maybe?
 

 

Could well be surprisingly large lumps of coal - not uncommon at that time. Not biscuits!

 

 

Crop from photo in Reading Museum's Huntley & Palmers collection. Probably 1890s, definitely not c. 1920 as listed (dumb buffer wagons).

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

But do we know that people in Iron Age Britain had the concept of a dragon? (The Anglo-Saxons certainly did; there's the dragon in Beowulf that I think is the progenitor of our modern popular image of a dragon, thanks to Tolkien's Smaug who was closely based thereon.) My understanding is that horses in this style are a common feature of Iron Age proto-Celtic art. And how old is the name of Dragon Hill? The popular etymology would have it as the place where St George slew his dragon - a good long way from Asia Minor, though.

 

Re. dragons, I'm having second thoughts. The early medieaval Welsh certainly had the concept - as in the story of Merlin and the battle between the red and white dragons, which goes back to at least the ninth century. Our Smaug-esque dragon - lizard-like, with snout and bat-like wings, does appear in the middle ages. I recall seeing a 14th/15th century wooden statue of St Margaret of Antioch in a museum in central Europe (Prague? Budapest? Warsaw? - can't recall which). St Margaret was sacrificed to a dragon by her local pagans (as with St George, there's a good bit of Perseus and Andromeda mixed up in the story) but miraculously burst forth from the dragon's belly - her cross having given it indigestion. She is thus the patron saint of women in labour and was especially popular in the Middle Ages - one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. That's why Margaret was such a common name at the time - there was a rather mercantile strand to late medieval religion (which eventually wound up Martin Luther); a woman in the pains of labour would invoke St Margaret's intercession, offering to name the child Margaret (if a girl) in the saint's honour if mother and child survived. Anyway, in the museum, there's St Catharine with her wheel, St Barbara with her tower, St Lucy with her eyes on a plate, and St Margaret with the cutest little dragon sitting on her outstretched palm - the very image of Idris: "not one of your lumping great fairy-tale dragons but a small trim heraldic welsh dragon glowing red hot and smiling". There - railway connection!

[Metropolitan H]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Back to Standon: I've had a squint at the maps. 

 

New corn mill, built adjacent to the railway sometime after 1896 (1901 on a date-stone over the door - it is a block of flats now, rather nice two-bed flat for sale at £350k if you fancy living in it), served by the siding in the foreground of the photo. It looks to me like a "railway age" steam mill, supplementing the older water mill on the other side of the river. The overgrown bit of track isn't shown on any edition of the maps, but the outline of the water's edge was tidied-up, possibly from bank to wall, to fit everything in, so my "temporary track for engineering purposes" theory seems plausible.

 

I think that the photo must have been taken from an upper floor at the back of the 1901 mill, and I even wonder whether the company photographer got sent down there to record the new siding installation for the staff magazine or or a goods brochure ("pack the sidings with wagons; make it look busy"). Everything does look very new around the siding.

 

 

Also worth noting that the overgrown siding is outside the railway boundary fence - so within the boundary of the new mill. So possibly only a temporary siding during river / mill race upgrade works - in between map revisions.

 

Is it possible that some form of rail mounted ecavator was employed??

 

Chris H

[Metropolitan H]

46 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I suspect that all these loads would have been sheeted in transit; the drawback of photos of goods yards is that they show wagons being prepared for loading/unloading, not as they would appear in the goods trains we want to model.

 

 

I'm not convinced by that interpretation. I think a lot of these opens show signs of ingrained dirt - but possibly atmospheric in origin. Wagons would be swept thoroughly after unloading - see paragraphs 38 - 40 here.

 

Could well be surprisingly large lumps of coal - not uncommon at that time. Not biscuits!

 

 

Crop from photo in Reading Museum's Huntley & Palmers collection. Probably 1890s, definitely not c. 1920 as listed (dumb buffer wagons).

I agree that the picture is probably circa 1890s as the loco(s) shown in that Huntley and Palmers picture are the two original Black Hawthornes of mid 1870s which were supplemented  by a new Peckett 0-4-0ST No.832 circa 1900 - and later superceded by the Bagnall Fireless locos in 1932 -that I remember from childhood journeys into Reading Southern.

 

Chris H

 

[Compound2632]

7 minutes ago, Metropolitan H said:

I agree that the picture is probably circa 1890s as the loco(s) shown in that Huntley and Palmers picture are the two original Black Hawthornes of mid 1870s which were supplemented  by a new Peckett 0-4-0ST No.832 circa 1900 - and later superceded by the Bagnall Fireless locos in 1932 -that I remember from childhood journeys into Reading Southern.

 

Chris H

 

 

The Black, Hawthorns were A and B, built in 1875. The photos on the Huntley & Palmers Collection website show them several times, including a particularly good photo of A.

 

The Peckett W4s were C and D, works numbers 831 and 832, of 1900. They don't appear in the selection of photos on the Collection website, which, together with the fact that the all the wagons of SER design appear to be in SER livery, leads me to suppose that a majority of these photos ate no later than c. 1900.

 

I've been studying those photos closely. Here's some of the fruit:

 

[Martin S-C]

10 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I suspect that all these loads would have been sheeted in transit; the drawback of photos of goods yards is that they show wagons being prepared for loading/unloading, not as they would appear in the goods trains we want to model.

 

I tend to agree. A lot of very interesting loads are (somewhat annoyingly) hidden away under sheets.

Regarding dirty wagon interiors, I think we are agreeing. Most RTR manufacturers depict open wagon insides far too dark. One tends to find that in many photographs, especially monochrome, dirt does not always show well and these older images with poor contrast can give an indication that surfaces are lighter than they were, hence why I brought attention to the three wagon interiors the image reveals have some obvious patina in them. To show up on these old emulsions they probably were pretty dark inside. By contrast the distant wagons in the long row appear almost white inside, perhaps due to sunlight.

[Martin S-C]

13 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

EDIT: I'd known for a while that it's the same wagon, No. 88181, in the second and third photos but I've just noticed that we see both sides between the two photos!

I would suggest its the same load photographed from both sides. Both photos are taken on the same occasion as the wagons behind have not moved.

Did the Midland suffer from a lack of covered vans? All these three loads look to me they'd be much better off shake-jolt wise and take a good deal less labour to load and unload if vans were available - and that's before the extra labour of the tying down and sheeting is taken into account.

When I saw the first picture with the sack hanging over the side I wondered if it was a "how not to" instructional picture, but probably not.

[robmcg]

Completely off-topic but who am I to make final deliberation...

 

First Hornby gave us this,

 

 

and now Dapol, Rails and the NRM are to offer something like this? 

 

Will this SE&CR madness ever cease..?

 

 

 

We are indeed spoiled for RTR 00 .

 

Don't mention the Bachmann C class or the P....   I have only limited energy.  I enjoyed making the full livery version, I hope people here will find my errors so I might rise above my usual hit-and-miss methods. The general effect is there, approximately. Perhaps...

Edited October 20, 2019 by robmcg
photo improved a tad

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

55 minutes ago, robmcg said:

Completely off-topic but who am I to make final deliberation...

 

First Hornby gave us this,

 

 

and now Dapol, Rails and the NRM are to offer something like this? 

 

Will this SE&CR madness ever cease..?

 

 

 

We are indeed spoiled for RTR 00 .

 

Don't mention the Bachmann C class or the P....   I have only limited energy.  I enjoyed making the full livery version, I hope people here will find my errors so I might rise above my usual hit-and-miss methods. The general effect is there, approximately. Perhaps...

 

My wallet just ran screaming into hiding.

[Edwardian]

When I posted my pictures, I did so from my 'phone, on the tiny screen of which, I could not judging the quality of the pictures.  The 'phone does not cope well with distance shots.

 

I use it because my camera is not good at exhibition/Pendon lighting, and everything comes out yellow.  Anyway, I managed to drop said camera yesterday and it does not appear to have survived that experience.

 

Has anyone any recommendations for a replacement, moderately priced, that works well on model railway subjects?

 

Off to Hartlepool shortly.  

[Nearholmer]

I use nothing bout an iPhone these days. You can judge from the photos I post whether it’s good enough for your purposes.

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I use nothing bout an iPhone these days. You can judge from the photos I post whether it’s good enough for your purposes.

 

Yes, mine is an Iphone of some number/letter.  It's not good zooming on distance shots.  otherwise, better than the digital SLR I have/had.

[Nearholmer]

I never use the digital zoom on phone. If I want just part of a view, I will snap the whole lot, then crop afterwards, which seems to give a better result.

 

Not sure why, and maybe I’m kidding myself, because the bare truth is that ‘digital zoom’ or cropping both involve using fewer pixels - only by using good quality optical zoom does one get a full image.

 

This is what my good lady now uses, having got fed-up with a hefty SLR, and it has enough optical zoom and broad enough capabilities to cover 99% of needs. Definitely gives a better image that an iPhone.

 

 

Edited October 20, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

Anotheran of the Parish and I were contemplating the MVR.   In that context, the subject of CA did come up! 

 

Ahern's buildings and compositions greatly inspire me and the castle corner at Gammon End is direct and conscious inspiration for CA.  One of the first things I realised, however, is that a typical Norfolk castle was likely to be Norman and to have the village gathered round the base of the motte, rather than form a street leading up a hill to the gate.  Had CA been set anywhere else, it would no doubt have been a more direct copy of Gammon End.

 

I only realised much later that I had most probably been unconsiously influenced by Craig castle and its relation to the line and station. I had poured over Craig and Buckingham GC and MVR in my father's 1950s RMs as a child. 

 

 

I was very grateful for a privileged squeeze behind the glass, which allowed some views not possible from normal viewing positions, and, of, course, avoided any reflections.  However, Gammon End can only be viewed from the stop blocks through the glass. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

[Hroth]

I use a Canon G11, falling back in the pixel stakes nowadays, but an excellent lens and more than enough features to make it creatively useful!

 

Phone cameras are just about useful for grabshots of locations I'd like to visit again with a proper camera....

[Hroth]

8 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

I was very grateful for a privileged squeeze behind the glass, which allowed some views not possible from normal viewing positions, and, of, course, avoided any reflections.  However, Gammon End can only be viewed from the stop blocks through the glass. 

For unprivileged access, I always have a polarising filter handy, great for cutting out glass reflections.

 

Quote

I use it because my camera is not good at exhibition/Pendon lighting, and everything comes out yellow.  Anyway, I managed to drop said camera yesterday and it does not appear to have survived that experience. 

 

You need to fiddle with the White Balance before starting shooting to correct the yellowish tinge.  The Auto setting is not always effective with some mixed lighting schemes.  However, remember to set it back to Auto once you get out otherwise outdoor shots might have an unpleasant blue tinge!

 

 

Edited October 20, 2019 by Hroth
more info

[Compound2632]

8 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

Did the Midland suffer from a lack of covered vans? 

 

 

Generally, covered goods wagons were rare in the nineteenth century. I gave the figures somewhere on my wagon-building thread but from memory, they accounted for about 1.7% of Midland goods stock at the end of 1894. There was a large-scale building programme in the early years of the 20th century, with the result that that proportion rose to 7%. It wasn't until BR days that vans achieved anything approaching parity for goods (i.e. not mineral) traffic. These Midland figures are skewed by the fact that a large part of its wagon fleet was in use for coal traffic - all those D299 wagons built to replace bought-up PO wagons. I haven't worked out the figures for the LNWR but I suspect that they had a higher proportion of covered gooods wagons in the nineteenth century, with more long-distance express goods trains; likewise the Great Western, with 4,900 iron minks out of a total stock of about 75,000 by c. 1902 - 6.5%. But the Great Western's mineral traffic was entirely conveyed in PO wagons.

[Andy Hayter]

The HMRS Journal had an analysis of open vs closed wagons for the LBSCR, LSWR and GER at IIRC around the early 1920s*.  In all cases the percentage of closed wagons was relatively small and the highest ratio was about 3.5:1  open to closed.  Given that none of these companies had major mineral operations in their operating areas (which would boost the need for opens), it really does show how few closed wagons were around at grouping.  

 

* Jan 1992.  

 

 

[CF MRC]

No comment.

In today’s Times.

 

Tim

[RedGemAlchemist]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I use nothing bout an iPhone these days. You can judge from the photos I post whether it’s good enough for your purposes.

 

4 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Yes, mine is an Iphone of some number/letter.  It's not good zooming on distance shots.  otherwise, better than the digital SLR I have/had.

 

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I never use the digital zoom on phone. If I want just part of a view, I will snap the whole lot, then crop afterwards, which seems to give a better result.

 

Not sure why, and maybe I’m kidding myself, because the bare truth is that ‘digital zoom’ or cropping both involve using fewer pixels - only by using good quality optical zoom does one get a full image.

 

This is what my good lady now uses, having got fed-up with a hefty SLR, and it has enough optical zoom and broad enough capabilities to cover 99% of needs. Definitely gives a better image that an iPhone.

 

 

 

4 hours ago, Hroth said:

I use a Canon G11, falling back in the pixel stakes nowadays, but an excellent lens and more than enough features to make it creatively useful!

 

Phone cameras are just about useful for grabshots of locations I'd like to visit again with a proper camera....

 

I also use my phone (a Sony Xperia Z5) for all my photography. 

I did have a nice camera back when I did my Photography A Level but not any longer sadly. Can't remember the model. Need to get a new one at some point, and maybe a GoPro at some point. 

Also hello everyone, been a while

Edited October 20, 2019 by RedGemAlchemist

[Martin S-C]

On 07/09/2019 at 11:37, Nick Holliday said:

I liked one of the pictures in the document which, at first sight, appears to show an early railway station immediately alongside the castle walls!

 

Complete with allotments and a row of workmen's cottages behind. Mind you some of those loops look very small...

[wagonman]

For REALLY serious stuff I use a Hasselblad with a Phase One back, or various flavours of Nikon DSLR for when I'm trying to avoid a hernia. For pretty much everything else I use an iPhone.

[Donw]

I use an Olympus SH 50 when out and about.  The Canon SLR is better but much more bulky and I use two different lenes whereas the SH 50 just slips into a pocket. It has a 24x times wide optical zoom  which is as good as the 55-200 in terms of magnification. The SH 50 also charges the battery from a usb Port which saves having to carry a separate charger. As I need to use glasses to see close up the SLR does have the advantage that the image viewed through the lens doesn't need the glasses. However once I got used the the view on the SH 50 (or the screen on the SLR) will be fuzzy if I am not wearing reading glasses,  I have found I can get most shots well composed by just  ignoring it and letting the camera autofocus. I could of course be taking the shot when someone is pulling a face but you get that with any camera as it can change just as you press the button. 

Don

Edited October 20, 2019 by Donw