“BEYOND DOVER”

[Northroader]

REMEMBER THE OUEST.

 

 

I came across this picture the other day, an old OEUST Buddicom 2-4-0, very much a French version of a LNWR “Crewe Goods”. It looks as if it’s waiting the scrap man, so probably 1900s, but a lovely prototype.

I was pushing the OUEST system back on pages  18 - 19  of this thread, also a link to Clive Lammings pages back on page 4, so here’s an essay of his on this theme (including wagon drawings):

 

https://trainconsultant.com/2023/10/30/la-compagnie-de-louest-et-son-histoire-ephemere/

 

and while I’m at it another one of his on “Bicyclettes”, “Boers”, and the OUEST suburban lines:

https://trainconsultant.com/2022/01/10/il-etait-une-fois-dans-louest-la-bicyclette-mais-pas-le-velo/

There are still two OUEST tank engines waiting for their superstructures in the railway room, also for a layout to run on. Last year was a writeoff for such progress, maybe this year.

Edited April 15 by Northroader

[burgundy]

8 hours ago, Northroader said:

REMEMBER THE OUEST.

 

I came across this picture the other day, an old OEUST Buddicom 2-4-0, very much a French version of a LNWR “Crewe Goods”. It looks as if it’s waiting the scrap man, so probably 1900s, but a lovely prototype.

 

Whereas the Chemin de Fer de L'Est still appears to have had some Cramptons in service at this time!

Best wishes 

Eric 

[Northroader]

Here’s a “square on” picture of one of those 2-4-0s. The main difference with a Crewe Goods is the “long boiler” configuration.

 

 

and here’s a OUEST wagon which has seen better days! (Wonder what colour they were painted?)

Edited April 19 by Northroader

[Andy Hayter]

3 hours ago, Northroader said:

 

and here’s a OUEST wagon which has seen better days! (Wonder what colour they were painted?)

 

I really must invest in a copy but the publicity suggests a mid brown

 

https://www.gehf.fr/inscriptions-et-couleurs-des-wagons-de-marchandises/

[Donw]

3 hours ago, Northroader said:

Here’s a “square on” picture of one of those 2-4-0s. The main difference with a Crewe Goods is the “long boiler” configuration.

 

and here’s a OUEST wagon which has seen better days! (Wonder what colour they were painted?)

 

 

I look forward to seeing your model of that wagon.

 

Don

[Keith Addenbrooke]

Just now, Donw said:

 

 

I look forward to seeing your model of that wagon.

 

Don

Most of the rolling stock I’ve tried building looks quite like that…

[Northroader]

ALPHABETISCHES VERZEICHNISS DER EIGENTHUMS-MERKMALE 1896

 

Andy, thanks for the link to that French book, which looks highly tasty. At present I’m trying to keep expenditure down, (although I have gone mad and bought a pair of points), because we haven’t yet succeeded in selling the house we moved out of last September, but if and when we do, that book does look irresistible.

Having said that, I’m wondering about the OUEST wagon in bauxite brown. I fancy it might be for Regime Accelere, when a lot of bauxite wagons appeared. Originally I thought they were done umber brown, like the LSWR/ SR shade, because that’s how the Reseau  Breton did theirs, the RB being the OUEST wearing a metre gauge hat. But then there’s this book I borrowed out of Dresden reference library, which categorically states “OUEST: grau fur guterwagen”.

Most interesting reference for the European scene in 1896:

 

https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/113339/1

 

Now, modelling the open wagon, get a set of wheels with flower petal spokes from Slaters, and two drawings, one of which has appeared before on this thread, funnily enough, and the other is of a breakdown wagon using the same chassis, lifted out of Lammings article linked above. Time is the only thing holding me back, Don.

 

Edited April 19 by Northroader

[Donw]

Well Bob extra time always seems to be 'out of stock'. Interesting wagons should make good models.

 

Don

[Northroader]

NORWEGIAN PRESERVED TRAIN VIDEO.

 

There’s a very good video doing the rounds on RMweb, posted by both James, @Edwardian, and Fred, @sncf231e, (thank you, gentlemen) and it’s really ought to go here as well, a very well made film of a vintage train outing with a preserved loco from the Norwegian State Railway Museum.

 

 

The first line in Norway was built with Robert Stephenson as engineer, and using locos built by his firm, and one of these has survived. It does look quite small, and I was trying to compare the loco weight with a LSWR Beattie 2-4-0 for goods, which it does resemble. Probably mixing metric with imperial, working order with empty, but I got the idea it’s roughly 2/3rds as big. As with Sweden, the early railways needed to be built with light section rails to keep the construction costs down. To a modeller like me the appearance of the trains back then is very attractive as a result.

It’s a jaunt with early coaching stock, through larch, birch and pine woodlands on single line, and snowy ground. The padded clothing the train crew have hints at much colder operation than we’re used to. All very fascinating…

The Norwegian lines were subsequently engineered by Carl Pihl, who introduced 3’6” gauge lines, and Beyer Peacock motive power. Over time the inconvenience of break of gauge led to their being upgraded to standard gauge, but it does look like a fruitful topic for research, with an eye to a model.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Abraham_Pihl
 

 

Edited May 12 by Northroader

[Keith Addenbrooke]

1 hour ago, Northroader said:

NORWEGIAN PRESERVED TRAIN VIDEO.

 

There’s a very good video doing the rounds on RMweb, posted by both James, @Edwardian, and Fred, @sncf231e, (thank you, gentlemen) and it’s really ought to go here as well, a very well made film of a vintage train outing with a preserved loco from the Norwegian State Railway Museum.

 

 

The first line in Norway was built with Robert Stephenson as engineer, and using locos built by his firm, and one of these has survived. It does look quite small, and I was trying to compare the loco weight with a LSWR Beattie 2-4-0 for goods, which it does resemble. Probably mixing metric with imperial, working order with empty, but I got the idea it’s roughly 2/3rds as big. As with Sweden, the early railways needed to be built with light section rails to keep the construction costs down. To a modeller like me the appearance of the trains back then is very attractive as a result.

It’s a jaunt with early coaching stock, through larch and birch woodlands on single line, and snowy ground. The padded clothing the train crew have hints at much colder operation than we’re used to. All very fascinating…

The Norwegian lines were subsequently engineered by Carl Pihl, who introduced 3’6” gauge lines, and Beyer Peacock motive power. Over time the inconvenience of break of gauge led to their being upgraded to standard gauge, but it does look like a fruitful topic for research, with an eye to a model.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Abraham_Pihl
 

 

Thank you @Northroader (and others as mentioned).  I’d not seen the other postings of this video, so have only just watched it: beautiful is the word that springs to mind (the train, the setting and the video as well I’d say).  A lovely interlude this afternoon.  Very enjoyable, Keith.

[burgundy]

Agree. Thanks to @Northroader and others for posting this.

That would be an "interesting challenge" to model in HO. Just watching the film, it looks as though the bottom of the boiler is set well below the footplate and the top of the boiler is not a great deal above head level - say 2 metres?

Did someone have the contemporary fixation with a low centre of gravity?

Best wishes 

Eric

[Northroader]

I think it’s just that the boiler is a very small diameter, Eric. The pictures inside the cab show how low the top of the boiler is, and it would help keeping the weight down. It certainly produced enough steam to keep the coach set rolling along. I fancy doing it in any scale and you’d struggle to fit a motor in, but still worth a try.

The brakes look interesting, a two pipe vacuum system. Watching the train going along there’s a continuous banner of steam from the pipe running up the side of the chimney, which presumably is from a small vacuum ejector.

Edited May 12 by Northroader

[Dave John]

Excellent video, so glad someone decided to preserve it.

Modelling it would be fun, I think it would be a case of motor in the tender and a some sort of cardan shaft drive to the engine ? 

 

 

[pete_mcfarlane]

On 18/04/2024 at 20:42, Donw said:

 

 

I look forward to seeing your model of that wagon.

 

Don

There's a 70s Railway Modeller where someone modelled one of the LNER cattle wagons with a 9' wheelbase complete with the banana shaped chassis they quickly acquired. These days you could draw the wonkiness in CAD and laser or silhouette cut it. 

[Andy Hayter]

On 18/04/2024 at 21:37, Andy Hayter said:

 

I really must invest in a copy but the publicity suggests a mid brown

 

https://www.gehf.fr/inscriptions-et-couleurs-des-wagons-de-marchandises/

 

Well true to my word, I invested in a copy of the above book, which arrived this morning and first glance says this is a fantastic reference source for pre-nationalisation French wagon liveries.

 

To the question of the livery of the Ouest wagon with the deformed if not broken back, This will have been a PV (petite vitesse = low delivery speed) wagon.  The tome says that PV wagons carried what they call dark grey (but I think looks to be at the darker end of mid-grey and is certainly far away from colours like anthracite grey),

sorry dark grey from 1855 - 1890 and then phasing out until around 1902.

This was replaced by a lighter grey phased in from around1888 until being the standard from 1897 - 1913 (by which time the Ouest had been absorbed into the Etat - 1909) and was phased out from then until around 1918.

Red Oxide was phased in from around 1903 to 1908 and was then standard through to the 1930s by which time I would expect that Ouest PV wagons would have been life expired.  Etat colours at that time for PV wagons was also red oxide.  

 

So I think we can be fairly sure that the wagon shown would have been grey as you guessed/ surmised @Northroader.  Darker or lighter?  Choice is yours but lighter is probably safer.  Inscriptions would have been white (yellow on the red oxide).

 

[Northroader]

Thanks, Andy, looks like I have a few wagons to repaint! Very covetous of your new book.

[Northroader]

PKP Tkh 0-6-0T.

 

Lovely day for a trip out, and so I got down to just East of Bristol, the preserved Avon Valley Railway, (new to me), three miles of the old Midland Railway line to Bath. I was expecting to be hauled by a WD 0-6-0ST, but instead found this little beauty:

 

 

Well, it’s “Beyond Dover”, although built in Poland post WW2 for heavy industrial use, so not really qualifying for this thread, but it really is a smashing little engine. It’s based on a preWW1 Austrian design, which did see branch line work, and I gather it’s a workhorse on several of the preserved lines, the Nene Valley, and the Spa Valley, besides the AVR. There’s the story behind it here:

 

https://www.avrht.org/karel

 

 

Edited May 19 by Northroader

[pete_mcfarlane]

The one at the Nene Valley is the larger 0-8-0Ts from the same builder. You can see the family likeness.

 

 

Until recently it was their only 'foreign' steam loco in service, which was a bit of a shame given their past history of running interesting European locos. They now have the Danish 0-6-0T in service as well, and very nice it is. 

 

The Churnet valley also have a couple, this is no. 2944 "Hotspur" a few years back when it was still in ticket (with bonus S160).

 

It's surprising how much European steam you can ride behind in the UK if you check the loco rosters carefully. 

[Northroader]

COLDITZ. - KSachsStB.
 

A while back I put in a link for the “Disused stations” site to San Remo, in Italy. They’ve recently strayed abroad again, to a very popular place for British Interest, in Old Saxony:

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/colditz/index.shtml

 

 

Edited May 21 by Northroader