South Wales Valleys in the 50s

[The Johnster]

 

The weighbridge, with ‘bottom pilot’ W4 Forest No.1 propelling loaded wagons one by one on to it.  The actual scales can be seen to the left of the 8-plank 21tonner, and the clerk can read them through the window. 
 

Photos show up faults you hadn’t noticed,  and the inward bowing of the 8-planker is most obvious.  Actually most of my wagons do this to some extent but the photo has alerted me to the fact that, as Edward VIII said whenever there was a reporter around ‘something must be done’.  Pity his idea of what was to be done involved handing the country over to the Nazis…

 

Perhaps a bit of hot water treatment to get them to bow more realistically the other way, the wagons I mean not the Duke of Windsor.

Edited August 28, 2022 by The Johnster

[1466]

Was life as a guard as good as this , Johnster ?

[The Johnster]

It was, sometimes!  Not so much fun in a rocker van trying to hold on and stop up the draughts on a freezing winter night, with the lamps being constantly shaken out, but it had it’s moments.  Sometimes it was so good it was a shame to take the money, not that I ever gave any back…

Edited September 1, 2022 by The Johnster

[The Johnster]

 

Silurian, awaiting her nameplates and you can sea where the old plates were, sitting beneath the NCB water crane shortly after delivery from Kilmarnock, or in reality picked up from Lord & Butler this very afternoon.  Will have a trial running session later, after this cuppa!

 

The loco is a Kingdom Kits product from the 1980s, well made and a lovely runner in the shop.  It represents, not completely accurately by all accounts, an Andrew Barclay 16” ‘Fife Special’, the difference being a lengthened wheelbase and longer boiler and saddle tank over the standard AB 16”.  The round spectacle plates and apparently the cylinder covers are wrong but I’m not bothered much by this.  
 

There is a little work to do, glazing for the cab windows, replacing of a bent front shunters’ step, t/l couplings for use at Cwmdimbath, and I want a brass whistle or at least to paint the existing one brass!  A brake block and the springs seem to be missing from the leading axle; can prolly cobble these up from scrap box.  Some wiring is visible between the bottom of the tank and the footplate, which needs blacking out. 
 

I’d been thinking about using nameplates for the Peppercorn A1, suitable in style for the nominal 1949 build date, but 4mm might be a bit overpowering and 2mm a little malnourished, so current thinking is to use tranfers to make up a painted name.  The loco is numbered 5 and has a crew already.  I might paint the motion red or leave it as is; there is a satisfying patina of age over it.  The slide bars are dry and could prolly do with a spot of lube, both for performance and appearance!  

[The Johnster]

 

Identity crisis sorted, lettering from a Cambridge Custom sheet originally intended for Siphons.  

Edited August 31, 2022 by The Johnster

[The Johnster]

Anybody know if the boxes either end of the running plate are sandboxes.  If they are they need pipes and lids, but if they are toolboxes they need to have the lid gap scribed and a padlock provided! 

 

Running tests yesterday evening show that all is well but a serious cleaning is needed for best performance, and that the loco is too big to pass beneath the washery loader frame unless I can drop the trackbed (fair play, the building is a Faller kit not really designed for 00 locos) a bit, so as intended it will be 'top end pilot', with Forest no.1 and the as yet nameless Horich Pug being 'bottom end pilots'.  The Horwich is going to have it's workings replaced with a High Level chassis, which I am girding up my lions to start on...

[The Johnster]

Summer evening, that lovely warm light, and Silurian is bedded down for a night in the open in light steam; tank has been topped and fire dropped, and the driver is making sure she’s in mid-gear, regulator closed, and handbrake firmly screwed down before signing off and ambling over to the Forge where the fireman has already called his well-earned refreshment in over the bar. 
 

 

This side-on viewpoint gives a good impression of the bulk of this loco and the extra length of the ‘Fife Special’ specification.  

Edited September 1, 2022 by The Johnster

[ianathompson]

On 27/08/2022 at 21:56, The Johnster said:

 

Perhaps a bit of hot water treatment to get them to bow more realistically the other way,

 

 Many years ago I scratchbuilt some similar open wagons for my NG system

They quickly warped to a grotesque shape.

 

Ever since I have deliberately cut the sides into sections and then stuck them together.

In this way the sides can be made to bow outwards.

 

 

Whichever decrepit wagon is in the foreground illustrates the point.

The ones behind it follow the same principle but are less of a caricature.

 

Ian T

Edited September 1, 2022 by ianathompson
typo

[The Johnster]

I corrected the hourglass figure on the wagon in the picture, an ancient Hornby LNER 8-plank 21tonner, by pushing a suitable spreader (actually the top of a superglue tube; you want about 2mm longer than the internal width of the wagon) about amidships by force, and filling the wagon with boiling water.  Left for about 10 minutes, water emptied out, spreader removed, omg I've ruined my wagon.  No, actually I haven't, because over the next few hours the sides destressed themselves into more or less the correct bowed out shape that most wooden minerals assumed after they'd run a few miles.  I will repeat the excersise on more wooden wagons when I identify a suitable spreader; 2mm is a bit much for a short wheelbase wagon but I have a feeling that 1mm will not make much difference.  I like distressing XPO minerals, though, and this is going to be fun...

 

Probably not a good idea to do it to kit-built wagons. as you've got a good chance of pushing the sides apart, not to mention possibly disolving the glue in the boiling water.  It works on plastic RTR wagon bodies, though.

 

You need to place your spreader towards the top of the wagon so that as well as bowing outwards, it assumes a taper higher up.  It's actually quite a complex shape, something that you might be able to explain better if you were into ship hull design, but the boiling water method gives a pretty good result compared to photos of trains of XPO mineral wagons in early BR days.  I'm old enough to remember them, just, and the swaying and flexing of the sides of them in a moving train, even a quite slowly moving train, as viewed from a bridge was quite alarming; this sadly cannot be modelled!

 

As this is becoming a claim society and obsession with health and safety is increasing, I have to point out that there are inherent scalding risks in pouring boiling water over model wagons and in handling them afterwards.  Don't do this at home, children, get a grown up to injure themselves instead...  I put mine in a washing up bowl, and picked it up after the 10 minutes with an oven glove.

Edited September 1, 2022 by The Johnster

[MrWolf]

Some time ago I bought a job lot of PO wagons, a couple of which had loads permanently fitted and were badly warped inward. It turned out that the type of glues used (some kind of expanding foam and a contact glue) had attacked the plastic.

Attempts to remove the mess revealed that the solvents had degraded the plastic and even the underframes simply crumbled.

 

 

[The Johnster]

Luckily I've managed to avoid these sorts of chemical disasters so far, despite using pva to contain liquid lead ballast in loco spaces, something which can apparently expand and burst boilers; I know better now!

 

You'd have thought that an expanding foam would have pushed the plastic outwards, a not undesirable result, but the determination of plastic bodied wagons to distort inwards seems to be far too entrenched for that to happen. 

[MrWolf]

The solvents in such things cause the plastic to wilt, as the wagon is open, expanding foam just takes the path of least resistance, ie, upwards, but the solvents just sit in the body until they evaporate.

[The Johnster]

 

Bit of progress in the colliery bottom yard, after delivery this morning of a gantry crane from jwlikestrains on eBay, a 3D print.  Took acrylic paint readily enough and sits in the scene satisfactorily.  I’ve cut up a Ratio nissen hut to form a low relief office and gunpowder stores next to each other; the low relief building top centre is the woodwork shop and pit prop stores.  
 

Good bit of groundwork, track weathering, and so on still to do, but this far end of the colliery is taking shape; a useful evening’s work that started off as assembling and painting the gantry crane but sort of took on a life of it’s own.  Some of my best modelling happens in this sort of spontaneous unplanned way

[Northmoor]

Nice use of a Nissen hut split in half.  I know attitudes to safety in the coal industry in the 1940s were sometimes "sub-optimal" but would a gunpowder store have been adjacent to an office?  Logic suggests they would have been built remotely form other buildings, although I appreciate Cwndimbath isn't blessed with space.

[The Johnster]

Yes, you’re right, explosives were stored away from the main buildings: my thinking is that the ‘office’ is simply where the material is signed in and out and generally accounted for by those authorised to use it.  A Nissen makes a pretty good powder store, the roof would  blow upwards away from the surrounding area. The main admin and manager’s office building is elsewhere, out of sight behind the cluster of pithead buildings near the road entrance gate, as is the signing on desk, locker room, and lamp room, and the pithead baths and canteen that are under construction.  There needs to be a general purpose stores somewhere as well. 
 

Pithead baths were a massive improvement in living conditions for the miners snd their families, as the previous method was the tin (alright, zinc) bath in front of the kitchen stove.  Heating water for this on soad stove was a laborious, time consuming, and fuel-expensive task for Mother, and had to be done every day, and, along with the concession coal provided by the NCB from 1947, meant a very considerable boost in miners’ standard of living.  Not sll aspects of nationalised industries are bad…

[1466]

4 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Yes, you’re right, explosives were stored away from the main buildings: my thinking is that the ‘office’ is simply where the material is signed in and out and generally accounted for by those authorised to use it.  A Nissen makes a pretty good powder store, the roof would  blow upwards away from the surrounding area. The main admin and manager’s office building is elsewhere, out of sight behind the cluster of pithead buildings near the road entrance gate, as is the signing on desk, locker room, and lamp room, and the pithead baths and canteen that are under construction.  There needs to be a general purpose stores somewhere as well. 
 

Pithead baths were a massive improvement in living conditions for the miners snd their families, as the previous method was the tin (alright, zinc) bath in front of the kitchen stove.  Heating water for this on soad stove was a laborious, time consuming, and fuel-expensive task for Mother, and had to be done every day, and, along with the concession coal provided by the NCB from 1947, meant a very considerable boost in miners’ standard of living.  Not sll aspects of nationalised industries are bad…

Re minimising the effects of explosions ( your use of a Nissen  hut ). I worked for the  British Oxygen Company ( aka Butlin’s ‘Oliday Camp) and there was an acetylene producing plant on site  . It had strong walls but a fragile roof for the same purpose .

On tin baths in front of the fire . It was also a fuss to empty the bath , bowl by bowl until you could lift the near empty bath .

[Michael Hodgson]

On 23/08/2022 at 23:22, Compound2632 said:

 

The 600,000 or so PO wagons inherited by BT at nationalisation would stretch from Euston to Glasgow Central and back, and then from King's Cross to Glasgow Queen Street and back.

You would have needed to double-head that train with two Accurascale Deltics !

But I think the weight of the rear of the train might have snapped some couplings on Shap and Beattock.

[Northmoor]

2 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

You would have needed to double-head that train with two Accurascale Deltics !

But I think the weight of the rear of the train might have snapped some couplings on Shap and Beattock.

Loose coupled, the locos could have been approaching Gleneagles by the time the last wagon lurched forwards......

[tomparryharry]

On 01/09/2022 at 14:59, The Johnster said:

Anybody know if the boxes either end of the running plate are sandboxes.  If they are they need pipes and lids, but if they are toolboxes they need to have the lid gap scribed and a padlock provided! 

 

Running tests yesterday evening show that all is well but a serious cleaning is needed for best performance, and that the loco is too big to pass beneath the washery loader frame unless I can drop the trackbed (fair play, the building is a Faller kit not really designed for 00 locos) a bit, so as intended it will be 'top end pilot', with Forest no.1 and the as yet nameless Horich Pug being 'bottom end pilots'.  The Horwich is going to have it's workings replaced with a High Level chassis, which I am girding up my lions to start on...

Assuming you have 4 boxes, then it's most probably sand. The leading box goes behind the slidebars & crosshead, and the trailing box will bow out slightly, and reach down just in front of the injectors.

 

[tomparryharry]

The switchgear rooms at Blaenavon Drift are also designed to blow out in case of accident. The transformer stand is likewise in within its own enclosure.

[The Johnster]

1 hour ago, tomparryharry said:

Assuming you have 4 boxes, then it's most probably sand. The leading box goes behind the slidebars & crosshead, and the trailing box will bow out slightly, and reach down just in front of the injectors.

 

Yes, 4 boxes in the right position for sand.  Just need to make lids for them and the pipes. 

[The Johnster]

My eBay North British Playcraft D2705 shunter arrived yesterday, a week earlier than the estimated and in a chocolate cake box, resulting in some disappointment from The Squeeze when I opened it...  It runs, quite smoothly and acceptably slowy for such a crude mech, but needs a bit of a cleaning and one of the motor feed connections looks a bit ropey and will be resoldered.  My soldering iron died on the weekend and a new one from the 'zon is to be delivered later today.

 

On one level, this is a crude toy to an odd scale (3.9mm to the foot apparently, but the buffers are at H0 spacing) and with outside frames and axleboxes rather than the correct jackshaft 0-4-0 drive.  On another level, it is a plausible 1950s industrial NB diesel hydraulic, with a very 1950s appearance, that can be worked up a bit (new buffers correctly located, cab glazing, proper handrails, lamp brackets, horn, proper diamond works plate for a Queen's Park ex Dubs works loco, moulded on the cab rear), I've already carved the moulded numbers off) and potter around the colliery occasionally.  It wouldn't pull the skin of a rice pudding, what do you expect with a single driven axle. so I've put some lead under the bonnet.  I reckon 1948-58 is a little early for wasp stripes, so there'll be a repaint, probably blue to match the Hunslet 18" and Horwich Pug or maybe dark army-style green and a military backstory.

 

At some distant future date, I may build a jackshaft drive chassis for it and put the motor under the bonnet, which will allow cab detail, or replace it with a Judith Edge kit.  Toy or not, it's typical of the period and has a lot of character.  I've got a mad plan for all-wheel drive with a rubber band around the axles, which might improve tractive effort a little.  It's wonderfully free-running, almost like a crown-and-pinion friction drive push-go toy, and you can turn the motor by gently fingerpushing it.

[The Johnster]

Started on the NB 0-4-0 today; repaint in darker green covering the wasp stripes, which feel a bit too 60s for Cwmdimbath; the raised numbers are already gone.  I’ve decided to leave the buffer beams black for now.  I’ve blackened everything inside the cab and ballasted, a more complex job than my usual ‘cram as much in as I can’ approach.   Haulage is an issue with this loco, so ballasting will improve matters but too much and she just sits there with her wheels spinning, a question of squeezing as much t.e. as possible out of a rather feeble mech.  Lining it up against an old Triang Nellie chassis block in the scrap box shows that the axle spacing is the same, so this block might be the basis of an inside frame chassis rebuild at some time.

 

Later this evening should see the glazing done.  I wanted to paint the brass wheels black, but the brass does not want to accept the paint.  I will give it a wash in case it’s a bit greasy and try again.  Some sort of work with xfers to denote NCB ownership, and it can go back to work…

[The Johnster]

Worklist, not necessarily in this order, stuff mentioned above, attempt to drive the leading axle from the trailing with a rubber band, think I’ve got an old sealing ring from an aquarium filter that might do (the chassis has a plastic relief under the floor of indeterminate purpose which I’ve removed because it is in the way of this proposed rubber band drive), new oval buffers (a first for Cwmdimbath motive power), replace handrails.  The cab steps are correctly modelled with a backplate (they’re moulded), but the front ones, also moulded, will have to be carved off and replaced, as will the moulded front ladders, which have grab rails on the roof at the top.   I’ve already fitted my experimental mineral traffic hook’n’loop couplings. 

Edited September 7, 2022 by The Johnster

[The Johnster]

Glazing is done, which has made a significant difference to the look, but b*ggered if I can find the transfer sheet that I wanted to use for the NCB initials, which I've decided should go on the cupboard doors on the side of the bonnet.  It'll turn up when I'm not looking for it of course.

 

Playcraft/Jouef apparently described this as a H0 model, and the buffer positions bear that out, but it seems pretty close for 00 and according to a previous thread here on the subject is actually at 3.9mm to the foot, close enough for jazz and Rule 1.  The body tooling isn't the worst toy from that era, or from Playcraft (it looks a lot more like what it's supposed to be than the Class 21 and the steam 0-4-0 was a complete fiction).  Plenty to complain about, mind, the cab plastic is too thick, a lot of the detail is moulded, but most of it is there.  The only errors I can see are the lack of handrails at the tops of the moulded ladders at the front of the bonnet, and the grilles on the second cupboard door from the front on each side are different from the others on the prototype but not the model, and I can live with this.  I'd like there to have been 'NORTH BRITISH' lettering in the raised panel above the radiator grill, but there isn't.  The buffers are wrong, the usual pathetic 60s RTR baby mushrooms, but this is no problem as I'm replacing them with the correct ovals anyway (I think Warship spares, if I can source them, will be ok).  Not much can be done about the motor-filled cab until I attempt a rebuilt chassis, and, again, I can live with it for now.

 

Which segues neatly into the chassis.  Of course, this is a complete fiction, absolute rubbish, and should be an inside framed 0-4-0 with jackshaft drive from behind the cab steps.  There's not much I can do with it for now, beyond providing axle box covers for the open axleboxes. 

 

There should be an exhaust port somewhere on the bonnet top, I'm guessing on the raised section ahead of the cab.  The round thing on the cab roof is probably meant to be a ventilator, but is actually a recess for the top bearing of the motor; pretty sure it isn't there on the prototype.  There is what looks like a coolant filler cap above the radiator, a bonnet roof panel (presumably to drop the engine in, but I'd have thought it was easier to take the bonnet housing off) that I cannot find a photo with any details of, and the plastic moulded horn is in the wrong place, should be roughly amidships offset to starboard at the edge of the roof panel.  So far as I can see there was only one horn, pointing only one way, not much use with the loco running cab first!  There are footsteps on the buffer fairings each end just below and outboard of the buffers, which can be fabricated from old bits of brass, and I'll need lamp brackets.  The prototype had no external electric lights, but lamp brackets are moulded on the cab rear.  There are no windscreen wipers to worry about either.  The BR locos had vacuum brake equipment and hoses, but this will not be necessary for an NCB loco...