OO9 Dinorwic Slate Wagons

[Garry D100]

After a lifelong obsession with Welsh Slate quarries, especially Dinorwic I was looking forward to these new OO9 wagons from Bachmann.

 

For both the flat version and slate wagon version both 3 packs come with alternative standard loop couplings to swap into the NEM pockets.

Personally im not a fan of these and to be honest each coupling will be about half the length of the wagon so I think putting these on will look a bit strange but depends what you prefer.  🙂

 

These things are tiny and I thought Id share a few pictures.

 

First up a close up of one of the flats. The detail is very good with a nice representation of the wood grain on the planking, however I think the axleboxes are oversized and this is the only part im not keen on. But I never thought Id ever see RTR quarry stock so its a small compromise for me.

 

 

 

Nice wood effect in detail, bit of weathering will really enhance here.

 

 

 

Underneath there are some small areas to add liquid lead or something as these are very light.

 

 

The loop couplings have a very slight barb on them and there is a small click when you couple them up. It doesnt need much pressure at all , but I think ill file mine off to make it easier when on track to uncouple. Either that or im considering etched hooks and chain but ill see how it goes but I quite like them, didnt think I would tbh.

 

 

 

 

All together

 

 

 

Now some of the slate wagons (with sides as its called on the box)

 

 

 

I think the corner iron bracing was black as it was cast iron I think so i'll paint mine but then i'll apply weathering.

The slate loads add nice weight, are quite detailed and are easy to remove.

 

 

 

 

And with appropriate motive power

 

 

 

And to show how small these things are

 

 

 

And for a bit of fun OO9 meets its 16mm big brother

 

 

 

 

Peep - oh

 

 

Hope thats of use to anyone else interested in these models, apologies for the phone camera pictures. Hopefully they are not too bad.

 

Cheerio :-)

[MatP]

Hi Garry,

 

Thank you very much for sending us those pictures - I thought they were excellent! 

 

I rebuilt and painted the full size wagon that Bachmann measured up (though no doubt they used other sources of inspiration), so the fact that the strapping is body colour might be my fault.

 

When I started painting the wagon, on behalf of Julian Birley, who put together a kit of parts for the ironwork, I instinctively went for black on the buffer straps. However, I then checked and all the pictures I found (and the general opinion of the cognoscenti I talked to) indicated that these straps should be body colour. Even in the black and white photos, there doesn't seem to be much contrast between the body colour and the strap colour. So I repainted the straps red.

 

However, I am perfectly happy to be proven wrong: I don't have many pre-WW2 pictures, for a start. And they do look good in black. And they're your wagons so please do as you wish, of course!

 

The go-to paint for slate wagons at Bala is Blackfriars' Red Oxide Metal Primer, by the way - it's used to top-coat the wood, too. We're going through a programme of boring out the axleboxes and fitting hidden roller bearings as the real things weren't designed for 9-mile (and hopefully one day 11-mile!!!!) round trips on their own wheels.

 

Incidentally, does anybody reading this know when this type of wagon was introduced? There are some Victorian pictures of Port Dinorwic which appear to show wagons for finished slates with dumb buffers, a bit like the Talyllyn ones. I have a theory that the type modelled by Bachmann was introduced in about 1890, in conjunction with or coincidentally with the introduction of the Hunslets, but I can't prove it. I do however use it as an excuse for referring to these vehicles with a single 'g', that being the standard spelling by 1890, which has also got me into trouble...

 

Best Wishes,

Mat P. (Bala Lake Railway Secretary and Bala Model Show Organiser)

 

P.S. Our next Show is on the 21st & 22nd Sep 2024. We had 30 layouts in 2023 and have 13 layouts booked so far for 2024. They're all great, but I need to find some standard gauge exhibition layouts set in Wales, and they seem very thin on the ground - or am I missing something? Offers and suggestions are welcomed!

[Garry D100]

Thank you Mat for your reply.

 

Some very intetesting information there.

I might be wrong about the scuff plates being black originally , but ive got it from somewhere, not sure where lol.

 

I didnt know about the dumb buffer wagons at Dinorwic. Every days a school day.

 

Found this pic here of the early wagon

 

https://www.alamy.com/railway-trucks-carrying-slate-wagons-in-wales-image255942468.html?imageid=BDBBE88D-BE5F-4079-9CEC-C4D4733F4B06&p=183562&pn=1&searchId=e954b5a74cfa772b209d5625cee139a7&searchtype=0

 

Theres an interesting clip here showing the Duke of York having a ride around the quarry in the wagons.

 

 

 

Looks here the scuff plates might be painted in 1956.

 

Maybe it depended on who was painting or repairing the wagons at the time that decided how they looked.

As we know there wernt too many standards in quarries and it was very much do what evers cheapest, quickest and gets the job done.

 

Thanks 

 

 

[MatP]

Hi Garry,

 

You're absolutely right, I'm sure those wagons were usually repaired with whatever they had at the time. And it was the slate that mattered - unlike long-range FR  vehicles, these wagons had a certain flexibility in the design and, I suspect, were meant to some degree to be sacrificial, as long as the slate made it intact. 

 

But it looks as though they did a special job on the ones carrying the Duke and his entourage (perhaps on the same basis that, at least before WW1, standard gauge staff allegedly went round polishing the rail tops on hardly-used sidings if the Royal Train was due to go past). 

 

Your 16mm wagon looks super, by the way!

 

All the best.

Mat

[Garry D100]

So, ive been having another look at the wagons today and thought I would compare it against an RTModels kit I have.

 

Interestingly its longer than the Bachmann version.... so which is right?

Im pretty sure they were a standard size and didnt have mixes of wagon sizes like the Ffestiniog. 

 

 

 

I also, just out of curiosity, swapped one of the close couplings for the standard loop..... mmmm think ill be staying with the close coupler version.

 

 

[Garry D100]

3 hours ago, MatP said:

Your 16mm wagon looks super, by the way!

 

All the best.

Mat

 

Thanks Mat.

 

Ive actually got some real scale cut Dinorwic slates to load them up.

 

Some years ago Bob Alderman and I approached the National Slate Museum and asked them to cut them for us in return for an agreed fee/donation.

They were quite excited by this and it really tested the skill of the slate cutter, but he did it.

 

Cant remember now but I think they are scale Countess size, id have to look back on my notes from the time.

 

So my 16mm wagons will be loaded with real Dinorwic slate, cut to scale size in the original workshops at Gilfach Ddu, by a desendant of a local quarryman.

I really like that link to the past :-)

 

Cheers

Garry

 

[Jeremy Cumberland]

17 hours ago, Garry D100 said:

I think the corner iron bracing was black as it was cast iron

If you mean the buffers/scuffing plates, they were wrought iron, surely. Not that it is likely to affect the choice of paint.

 

Thank you very much for your post. It's a bit of a shame about the axleboxes being so over-size, but I expect there's not a lot that can be done about that in 4 mm scale.

 

5 hours ago, MatP said:

When I started painting the wagon, on behalf of Julian Birley, who put together a kit of parts for the ironwork, I instinctively went for black on the buffer straps. However, I then checked and all the pictures I found (and the general opinion of the cognoscenti I talked to) indicated that these straps should be body colour. Even in the black and white photos, there doesn't seem to be much contrast between the body colour and the strap colour. So I repainted the straps red.

Thank you very much for that. I still haven't made a start on painting my growing collection of 7/8" scale Dinorwic slate wagons, and have often wondered about the "correct" colour. As I am sure you know (but I'll include it here for those who don't), Boyd in Narrow Gauge Railways in North Caernarvonshire Volume 3 says (referring to all types of 2' wagon at Dinorwic):

Quote

Iron wagons were usually unpainted, or either grey or black. Wagons with wooden portions had them painted purple brown - the Quarry standard colour. Lettering where extant was white. Metal portions on wooden wagons were black.

Boyd was writing long after the quarry closed, but he undoubtedly saw the quarry when it was working, yet I haven't seen any photographs that suggest any metalwork other than axleboxes was painted black.

 

The "purple brown" is as good a description as any of the colour seen on some buildings in colour photographs from the 1950s (bearing in mind how accurate the colour rendition on the photographs is likely to be). More maroon than red oxide is my thought, for what it's worth.

 

1 hour ago, Garry D100 said:

Interestingly its longer than the Bachmann version.... so which is right?

Well, I found one wagon that was 6' long, near as damnit, at Gilfach Ddu when I visited just for that purpose a few years ago. Unfortunately my measurements of other wagons seem rather incomplete, so I am not quite sure how typical this is. Boyd's table of wagon dimensions gives slate wagons as 6' long, but the drawing in Boyd by A M Kidner shows a wagon 6' 3" long.

[Nearholmer]

“Purple brown” , by that name, was a standard colour for paint in Victorian and pre-WW1 times, even into the 1930s, one of the colours that ready-mixed paint came in once it was available, so Boyd may have meant something particular. I only know about it because apparently it was used for skirting boards etc when the HQ of the Underground, 55 Broadway, was built, and when one floor of the building as restored to “as new” condition in the 1990s the people doing the job went to great trouble to replicate the colour (which is a very drab one!).

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Nearholmer

[MatP]

Hi all,

 

This is very interesting and it is clear to see that these wagons hold a special place for many people. 

 

Unfairly I know, I don't have a lot of truck (pun intended) with Boyd, but I did use the Kidner drawing, and tried to track down its originator without success. The measurements for the wagon I built depended though on fitting new timbers around the existing iron parts - the drawbar for the length and the buffing straps for the width.  These, being handmade, no doubt had some variation in real life, and from memory my wagon had to be 1/4" wider than indicated by Kidner. We also have quite a collection of rotten bits of original slate wagon timber at Bala, which was useful for getting some of the sizes. Alas I recorded all this information on the backs of envelopes, beer mats etc. and I'm not sure where those documents went!

 

The straps were a bit of a struggle - they naturally sprang open, and the springiness also affected the curve radius, so I had to put a serious amount of sash cramps on them to close them up so that the ends were parallel, before taking any measurements. Also, the inside face of the curved portion wasn't vertical, so I had to plane the headstocks to shape in two axes. Shaping the headstocks was by far the most difficult part of the build. Most of the timber I used, by the way, was Douglas Fir from the Sandringham sawmill.

 

The floorboards were also Douglas, but they'd been stored outside in Julian Birley's car port for ages, and they had imbibed a considerable amount of moisture. When I got them back to Norfolk, where I built the wagon, I stored them in my dry garage for almost a month before using them, but once on the wagon, the Atacaman dryness of East Anglia caused them to shrink by a further 1/8" in width (on a 6" wide board!), snapping some of the screws. I suppose I shouldn't have used screws to hold the floorboards on anyway, but this was one of the mods I made to make the wagons a bit stronger, along with some hidden bracketry underneath - oh, the horror! - as there's very little in the original design to stop the wagons from going parallelogram-shaped.  

 

I also put some neoprene washers between the bobbins and the wooden 'rails', partly to stop the bobbins from grinding the rails away, and partly because the bobbins are designed for bang-on 2" thick timbers, and the only timbers I could get without commissioning an expensive bespoke cut were 47mm thick. Perhaps somebody should check if the rails on the Bachmann wagon are 6% thinner than they should be!

 

Anyway, I suppose this thread should really be about making small scale models rather than 1:1 reproductions. I hope you are all very happy with your tiny versions in whatever scale. I'd be interested to know whether the Bachmann ones were made at slightly more than 4mm to the foot, so as to keep the proportions around 9mm wheelsets with generous treads rather than dead-scale ones, or whether they've done something super-cunning to keep everything dead scale. I haven't bought myself any yet as all my modelling funds are currently going on a shamelessly derivative GWR BLT ... 

 

Best Wishes,

Mat P. (Bala Lake Railway Society Secretary and Bala Model Show Organiser)

 

P.S. Another layout's been added to our Show roster since my previous message, making 14. The next Bala Model Show's on 21st and 22nd September 2024. Please get in touch if you have a layout or trade stand you'd like to bring. At this stage the big gap in my coverage is Welsh-set standard gauge layouts, but all subjects, scales and gauges are welcome of course. We certainly pay transport costs and offer free food and a free trip on the BLR, but can't afford to pay for accommodation. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

[MatP]

Hi,

 

I've now got hold of some of these wagons and checked the thickness of the slats/rails with a micrometer to see if the non-imperial timber I used on the real one has been replicated. My micrometer is not the best but it tells me that the side ones are pretty much spot on representations of 2" thick timbers, as per the pre-preservation wagons. On the ends, the top slat seems to be thinner than the bottom one (0.6mm-ish vs 0.8mm ish). The top slat is spot on for the 47mm thick timber I used on the prototype. 

 

But these are of course wagons which would've been patched up with whatever bits of wood were available, so a bit of a discrepancy (assuming there actually is one, my micrometer is very cheap) is not a problem. And I doubt most people would be that bothered anyway. I only noticed it when looking at the wagons under magnification. I'm very impressed with them.

 

Here are some pictures of the wagons on my model of Llangower Station on the Bala Lake Railway. As usual, I've got no idea where Alice's crew has gone...

 

Best Wishes,

Mat P. (Bala Lake Railway Society Secretary and Bala Model Show Organiser)

 

 

[RThompson]

On 02/12/2023 at 15:02, Garry D100 said:

So, ive been having another look at the wagons today and thought I would compare it against an RTModels kit I have.

 

Interestingly its longer than the Bachmann version.... so which is right?

Im pretty sure they were a standard size and didnt have mixes of wagon sizes like the Ffestiniog. 

 

 

 

I also, just out of curiosity, swapped one of the close couplings for the standard loop..... mmmm think ill be staying with the close coupler version.

 

 

As the one who did the patterns for the RT Models dinorwic slate wagons, the wagons are overall bigger due to using the standard N/009 gauge wheels with their axles.

 

The problem is if the wagons was widened, they would look odd.

 

I am not the only manufacturer guilty of this within constrants of what is available to use at the time.

 

Some wagons in the RT Models dinorwic range of wagons like the Car cyrn, etched rubbish and end tipping wagons are true to scale with thanks to inside bearings and the end tipping wagon being the right width.

 

The wagons will now come with curly spoked wheels like before having comissioned some to be manufactured for me.

 

Edited December 11, 2023 by RThompson

[NigelBrooks]

Just came across this discussion while trying to find out the 'font' used for the Dinorwic numbering... Having been lent some of the Bachmann wagons, I have now progressed my own 3D printed design that I started last year -

 

Regarding the numbering, 2 things have always puzzled me.

 

1) if the numbers are indeed hundredweight, then does 8-0-0 mean 8 hundredweight ? If so, that's 8/20 ton, i.e. about 1/2 ton. But the wagons are about the same size/capacity of the FR 2T wagons, rated at 2T, and seem to have been filled to the same amount. Or is my maths out ?

 

2) If those are the 'weight rating', then why such accuracy, some at 7-3-0 and 7-2-0, just seems very odd to me to have such a 'precise' weight rating ? !

 

Any knowledge or thoughs appreciated.

Cheers

Nigel

https://www.brooks3dmodels.com

[Jeremy Cumberland]

32 minutes ago, NigelBrooks said:

1) if the numbers are indeed hundredweight, then does 8-0-0 mean 8 hundredweight ? If so, that's 8/20 ton, i.e. about 1/2 ton. But the wagons are about the same size/capacity of the FR 2T wagons, rated at 2T, and seem to have been filled to the same amount. Or is my maths out ?

The numbers are the tare weight in hundredweight-quarters-pounds. Pounds is always 0 so far as I have seen. A quarter is 28 pounds (a quarter of a hundredweight).

 

34 minutes ago, NigelBrooks said:

2) If those are the 'weight rating', then why such accuracy, some at 7-3-0 and 7-2-0, just seems very odd to me to have such a 'precise' weight rating ? !

Accuracy is needed to know the weight of the slates inside. The wagon tare is deducted from the gross weight at the weighbridge. Since Dinorwic owned their own rail system, I am not sure at what point wagons of slates needed to be weighed, unless they had to pay tolls per ton to owners of the land used for the Padarn railway. Quarrymen were paid by the gross of slates made, not by their weight.

[NigelBrooks]

Oh, so it's the weight of the wagon then, not it's capacity ! Is that the same for the FR wagons ? 2 Ton and 3 Ton ? Many thanks

Nigel

[Jeremy Cumberland]

2 ton and 3 ton for FR wagons refers to the capacity.

 

I am not sure I ever knew how the FR charged for carriage of slate. Wagons on the FR were numbered (unlike Dinorwic slate wagons), so I suppose it is possible that tare weights were recorded against the wagon number in a book. General goods wagons on the FR mostly had the tare weight painted on, in the more usual tons-hundredweight-quarters format.

[Mol_PMB]

8 minutes ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

2 ton and 3 ton for FR wagons refers to the capacity.

 

I am not sure I ever knew how the FR charged for carriage of slate. Wagons on the FR were numbered (unlike Dinorwic slate wagons), so I suppose it is possible that tare weights were recorded against the wagon number in a book. General goods wagons on the FR mostly had the tare weight painted on, in the more usual tons-hundredweight-quarters format.

The FR slate wagon tare weights were indeed recorded against wagon number in a book. In fact there were several versions over the years and there were copies at multiple FR stations.

At least two wagon tare books survive in the FR archives at Caernarfon, maybe more.