Manor Powis drift - a NG NCB diorama

[Dunalastair]

I have been guilty of drifting other people's threads with mentions of my ideas for a diorama of the little known 2' 6" gauge surface railway connecting the drift mine with the main pit at Manor Powis colliery near Stirling in Central Scotland, near where I grew up. So it is about time that the topic was given a thread of its own.

 

The NG line was used to haul power station coal for Longannet to the screens at the deep mine and onwards by the SG railway. There were also NG manriding trains as the mine was in a remote location by the banks of the Forth. The prototype looked like this, but there are very few other photographs I have found, though there is an image taken by Norman Cadge of the manriding train in the IRS Handbook, together with details of the Ruston locos used on the system.

 

https://canmore.org.uk/site/132571/manor-powis-colliery

 

The geometry of the site was strange, with the NG lines apparently running diagonally under the loading hopper. The signal-box-like building was apparently a control room  - I did have some advice from an ex-NCB engineer who knew / knew of the site. The few old OS maps available at NLS seem to show a very different earlier arrangement, possibly before production started.

 

 

To try to have some confidence that I could fit a diorama at 1:148 onto my usual A4 footprint, I worked up a 3D design for the whole site, before breaking it up for individual prints.

 

 

After several days of printing on my filament machine, I had a lot of grey plastic waiting for the paint brush. The yellow manrider was the only print to have seen paint at this stage.

 

 

Since the photograph was taken, the drift entrance has been sunk into the surface and the contents of some of those acrylic paint pots applied to prints. 5mm gauge track (2mmx2.5') also now leads out from the drift incline. This has been a slow-burn project, due to the paucity of information on this railway. I understand that Eric Tonks book on Rustons may have another photograph of RH 476133 and RH 398118 by Norman Cadge, but I have not seen that. I bought a copy of Guthrie Hutton's "Mining from Kirkintilloch to Clackmannan and Stirling to Slamannan", which has a photograph from an elevated perspective of the terminus facilities at the pit end of the NG line. Although now possibly too late for the model, I would welcome any further information on this little-known narrow gauge railway system.

[Dunalastair]

One thing I forgot to mention is that the tubs (often known as hutches in Scotland) under the loader would probably have been moved not by the loco but by a creeper. These were chain drives between the rails more often used either underground to load tubs into cages at the pit bottom for winding or at the colliery screens, as below. 

 

https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/seaham-colliery/

 

The photograph at Manor Powis does not show the creeper as the tubs / hutches obscure the view. If I fully load the model loading road with tubs / hutches then I can save myself the issue of modelling a creeper (even if static) in 5mm gauge. 

Edited February 7 by Dunalastair

[Dunalastair]

After some painting, but rather untidily put together. 

 

[marc smith]

Hi @Dunalastair
Please don't feel "guilty" of drifting other people's threads. RMweb is all about sharing ideas, and thoughts about your own work, plus the work and ideas of others.  As ever good sir - your work seems to gather pace really well. I like this one, I like it a lot. There's plenty of features and space for detail. Nice work again :) 

[Dunalastair]

Thankyou for the kind words. Three more, probably final, images of the Manor Powis drift, with the ground colour reworked and one or two other changes. There are limitations to this style of using filament 3D printing for 1:148 NG dioramas, but hopefully these images might evoke something of this short-lived narrow gauge railway by the banks of the Forth.

 

 

 

It is both invidious and interesting to compare this static diorama approach with the finer scale and artistic approach to micro-layouts epitomised by @James Hilton. I could perhaps have used prettier Oxford N gauge diecast vehicles, but that might have jarred with the more impressionistic approach to the NG rolling stock. My rapid-turnaround small scale dioramas do help me to learn what does - and crucially what does not - work, but it does leave me with the issue of where do I put them all. Even if I don't seem to be learning to keep trains upright for photocalls. Unlike James, I do not have the option of selling or gifting them on.