Aston On Clun. A forgotten Great Western outpost.

[nickwood]

I work on the basis of loco, plus the coaches you intend to run, plus the length of one more coach which looks to be about what you have. Looks ok to me.

[Mick Bonwick]

3 hours ago, Adrian Stevenson said:

I think that works ok.

 

53 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

That looks about right.

 

44 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

 I'd say it looks 'spot on' 

 

5 minutes ago, nickwood said:

 Looks ok to me.

 

There's a pattern developing here!

 

I agree with all of the above.

 

 

[nickwood]

7 minutes ago, Mick Bonwick said:

 

 

 

 

There's a pattern developing here!

 

I agree with all of the above.

 

 

Well spotted Sherlock

[Tallpaul69]

1 minute ago, Mick Bonwick said:

 

 

 

 

There's a pattern developing here!

 

I agree with all of the above.

 

 

Just to stir things up a bit, when you thought you had a clear agreement!

 

Might your train ever have a lwb parcels van on the front, or tail traffic?

If you could squeeze in a few more feet (scale), so that the additional traffic above could be used with the same clear space at either end of the train as you earlier showed with your two coach train, then it would be even better.

 

However, you also need to take into account the rest of the station area. You don't want  to give the appearance of too large a station shoehorned into a space, particularly for a rural environment where land in the 1800s was cheap!

 

Cheers

Paul

[MrWolf]

Thank you all, I think that's fairly conclusive!

I have also taken into account @Tallpaul69's thoughts on the rest of the station area. Those have justified my earlier taking a leaf out of @KNP's book and extending the baseboard width by 150mm in the station area. This has allowed for a more open space between the goods shed siding and the mileage siding. It gives plenty more room to swing the proverbial cat. Also, at the prototype location, even 60 years after my imagined line closed, there's still plenty of room for a bigger station and goods yard. 

My only concern was accidentally building something akin to Paddington to serve a rural village, which is why I am keeping the buildings as small as I can whilst still providing facilities for passengers and goods.

 

Thanks again, your comments are much appreciated and that part of the build was stalling all of the groundwork on the station board.

[NHY 581]

1 hour ago, Tallpaul69 said:

Just to stir things up a bit, when you thought you had a clear agreement!

 

Might your train ever have a lwb parcels van on the front, or tail traffic?

If you could squeeze in a few more feet (scale), so that the additional traffic above could be used with the same clear space at either end of the train as you earlier showed with your two coach train, then it would be even better.

 

However, you also need to take into account the rest of the station area. You don't want  to give the appearance of too large a station shoehorned into a space, particularly for a rural environment where land in the 1800s was cheap!

 

Cheers

Paul

 

 

Thats fine but we should take into account that originally, the station was built to handle the stock of the day. Small locos and short coaches.  Coaches and locos simply got longer. As an example a 48ft bogie coach became a 57ft bogie coach. 

 

 

I still think its right as is. 

 

Rob. 

[Compound2632]

That length is good enough, I think. Platforms at wayside stations on double-track lines were typically 300 ft. 

 

As to carriages getting longer, remember that trains got shorter! A two-coach B-set might be taking the place of a four or five coach train of 4- or 6-wheelers but the seating capacity could be unchanged.

[MrWolf]

Definitely, that was the original problem that I had. Was the 220' platform too long, given that I was using bits of the Criggion branch as a yardstick?

I was basing that on the theory that when the branch was built in 1870, the locomotive would have been an 0-6-0 like those that ran on the Mid Wales Railway with a 4 wheeled tender and it's train would consist of two or three four wheelers and possibly a milk or parcels van. That still stacks up the same. If the platform had been unsuited to the larger trains of say 1890, then no doubt the Great Western would have extended the platform in 1901. In fact I did consider an obvious join / mismatch of brickwork to suggest as much. (And naturally forgot to do it!)

 

So, the platform stays at 220'0".  It's a perfectly feasible length for the expected traffic.

[Nick C]

The other thing to be aware of with the platform is height - most model platforms are too high. It should be no more than 3ft above rail level (and a lot of minor railway platforms were even lower). I've also seen a few places with an obvious change in platform height where there was a later extension.

[Compound2632]

If it was rebuilt in 1901, it might be the full 3 ft. The original platform might only be anything between 2 ft 6 in and 1 ft 6 in depending on when it was built. But if low, it would probably have been sloping towards the rails and perhaps 6 in higher at the station building.

 

This has consequences for the relationship between platform height and building threshold height. A platform raised to 3 ft might well slope down away from the rails towards the building.

[Banger Blue]

Looks fine to me but even if you didn’t have the space as long as the platform can accommodate one coach. For example Passengers for Cassington on the Fairford Branch always had to join the front coach behind the Loco as that’s all the platform could accommodate.

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

If it was rebuilt in 1901, it might be the full 3 ft. The original platform might only be anything between 2 ft 6 in and 1 ft 6 in depending on when it was built. But if low, it would probably have been sloping towards the rails and perhaps 6 in higher at the station building.

 

This has consequences for the relationship between platform height and building threshold height. A platform raised to 3 ft might well slope down away from the rails towards the building.

Lower platforms also look a bit bigger, as they dominate things less.

 

Frank Dwyer used 10mm (2'6") above rail level on Borchester Market.

[MrWolf]

1 hour ago, Nick C said:

The other thing to be aware of with the platform is height - most model platforms are too high. It should be no more than 3ft above rail level (and a lot of minor railway platforms were even lower). I've also seen a few places with an obvious change in platform height where there was a later extension.

 

This subject has been on my mind too, especially as I think it was touched upon earlier in the thread. Some early platforms were not unlike the continental type, (often raised in later years leaving steps down into the buildings) others a halfway house, and not a few had a section raised up high for loading churns or even cattle. 

 

Give me a minute, I have some measuring to do! (Followed no doubt by sawing and profanity)

[Northroader]

Dont get carried away.

[MrWolf]

I had built my platform face using bits of Wills' platform sections for several reasons. I had almost enough kicking around. The brickwork matches everything else. The flagstone top is very useful, but not in this case. The corbeling under the platform edges is very nice.

 

But the height? Wills' have manufactured them to be a scale 4'3" above ground level to the platform surface. This is actually a good idea because it caters for everything from the train set upwards. It does mean though that even though I am using antediluvian (to some) Peco code 100 track for purposes of occasional rule 1 running, the platform surface is still a scale 3'3" above the rail heads. 

 

Solution?

Carefully slice off the bottom two courses of bricks, the only tricky bit is cutting through the corbeling straight.

This gives me an above rail height of about 2'8". 

Which will do nicely.

Ofcourse I had made it awkward by not trimming the height before sticking it all together and made a scale 280 foot cut. I also had to trim back the opposite sides of the ramps which aren't quite buried in the surrounding earth.

It does give me a chance to show the difference in a photo. 

 

 

 

Hopefully I can get the platform built up tonight using bits of this and that to get the look I want.

 

But I have been politely(!) reminded that it's my turn to cook, so it will have to wait!

Edited August 16, 2022 by MrWolf
Replaced picture

[Darwinian]

I quite enjoy cooking. It’s much like model building.

Find/make up a plan.

Collect raw materials.

Chop them into shape with knives, hammers, other tools as required (Even power tools).

Apply heat (or not)

Admire artistically assembled result.

Then it goes downhill as the family demolish my work in a matter of minutes. Then I have to do it all again in a couple of days later and make a different model!

[MrWolf]

I enjoy cooking as well, over the years I have become quite adept at the timings so I can prep X whilst Y is cooking and so on. Speeds up the job. Forget the pretentious gits on TV, being able to cook is a basic survival skill that everyone should learn. Not cooking for yourself is one of the reasons we have become a nation of fat lazy b*****ds. 

Plus you know what you're getting (more or less) we have to be careful as there's certain foods that can cause the memsahib to burst into flames. 

[MrWolf]

After all your positive response, I confidently set about making the platform in its entirety. I have decided to surface the area in front of the station building with blue brick flagstones, the type which had a diamond pattern on the upper surface and are referred to in some parts of the country as "Staffordshire Blue Flags". Of course, you can't buy such things. But what I did have that was nice and thin, the right brick pattern and not required elsewhere was some sheets of Wills' bridge and tunnel arch linings. 

A simple job of slice to size, fettle so that the brickwork lines up and stick to a piece of 0.030" plasticard as a sub base.

Then have a sausage paws moment and knock over half a bottle of MEK-PAK, creating a total meltdown on the bench. A sort of OO scale China syndrome.

(Cue angry letters to the Railway Modeller and demonstrations outside the Atomic Energy Commission about the end of the world being 2.33 millimetres too small)

It has resulted in starting again. Luckily I had a stash of plasticard. I'm wondering if it's a visitation of karma for the cloning discussion on the Sheep Chronicles the other day. Miss Riding Hood would probably be less than 10% flattered and more than 90% creeped out at the idea, I thought. Surprisingly, she is willing to offer a cell sample, from her middle finger. So I am sorry to disappoint, but I think that is a no.

 

The platform surface, finally turned out like this, allowing for an area to the left of the building for milk churns, passenger parcel traffic etc, the rest of the platform surface will be compacted ash.

 

 

 

Naturally, I have complicated matters and didn't think about the combined thickness of the brick material and plasticard. Probably should have used 0.020, because the surface now sticks up above the edging stones. So I had to carve the mounting lugs off the back of the Wills platform sections. Which will mean careful assembly and adding a few corner braces. The rest of it I will cover with an ash surface so there should be no problems with levels.

 

 

Edited August 16, 2022 by MrWolf
Replaced picture

[MrWolf]

I may have gone overboard with the bracings, but I have never had much success with making a platform from a solid piece of wood. But I didn't want to build a plasticard version and have it warp into a fruit bowl shape either.

 

 

 

Roughly in place.

 

 

Edited August 16, 2022 by MrWolf
Replaced picture

[MrWolf]

Bits of work in spare moments has seen the platform cut to line up with the baseboard joint. I reinforced the ends with some offcuts of Peco slate roofing. It's quite thick and was the first thing to hand. 

 

The brick surface has had a thin coat of Humbrol 67 and will be weathered once I have added the ash surface to the rest of it. Thanks to @wiggoforgold for the recipe.

 

 

All manner of other juggling has been going on as I have been test fitting the various buildings and features in the station area. I had a good idea where most would end up. As much as I like goods sheds, a small one is all that is needed here. I modified the Wills version. The base is more bits of Wills' platform sections. This time I didn't lower the height, because in standard form, the floor of the goods shed is slightly lower than the floor of a railway wagon and slightly higher than a horse drawn waggon. Even I can't argue with that!

 

 

 

[MrWolf]

The store shed on stilts next to the goods shed is an old Cooper craft body built onto the original wooden underframe supplied for the goods shed. It's on trial for now. The goods shed will get its roof as soon as some goods arrive, thanks to @chuffinghell

[NHY 581]

Well that's coming on leaps and bounds. 

 

Very nice Rob. 

 

 

[chuffinghell]

11 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

The goods shed will get its roof as soon as some goods arrive, thanks to @chuffinghell

Glad to be of some help

 

it’s coming on a treat!.....I’d better pull my finger out

 

Edited February 15, 2021 by chuffinghell

[MrWolf]

I can't remember who it was that was having to make an oddly shaped cattle dock because the prototype was also, but it had got me thinking about what I was going to install at Aston. 

I had a Ratio cattle dock kit that has been lying around for about a thousand years or so and had thought about cutting it down from two pens to one.

I also considered doing something really basic and putting the cattle dock on the far end of the passenger platform as per Llandrinio Road on the PSNWR, but once I laid out the top surface parts of the dock, I realised that it would fit at the western end of the mileage siding as originally planned. I am planning a rough cobbled road behind the mileage siding leading up to it. 

 

Of course, I couldn't leave the kit as supplied. I replaced all of the stone embossed bits with the same Wills' brickwork as elsewhere. I also wasn't too convinced with the overhang on the platform. It was obvious that the outer run of edging stones are unsupported if I wasn't using the supplied stone supports. So I carved them off. Then I built up a brick corbeling to match the passenger platforms using strips of brick courses sliced from the tunnel lining I used for the station platform surface.

 

 

 

It's probably overkill. But I think that such details are important to create a convincing picture.

 

 

 

You can see where I sliced off the row of overhanging stones from the front edge. The top surface has had a coat of Humbrol 100 and over that acrylic raw umber with a dash of Payne's grey. This was left on for 5 minutes then rubbed off. The plan being that it looks like dark mortar stained with disinfectant. Next stage will be drybrushing with a dull orange of a similar colour to terracotta soil pipes.

 

Then I can get on with the fun part. Threading the concrete posts onto all that wire....

 

 

 

Edited August 16, 2022 by MrWolf
Replaced picture

[MrWolf]

48 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

Glad to be of some help

 

it’s coming on a treat!.....I’d better pull my finger out

 

 

I don't think that there's much hope of me overtaking you and finishing my layout first!