Cuckmere Haven - a very small slice of southern electric.

[St Enodoc]

6 hours ago, Mol_PMB said:

Agreed. And Egrets weren't common here in the 1970s - they're a recent import.

If those were Little Egrets, I'm glad I've never met a big 'un.

[phil_sutters]

7 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

If those were Little Egrets, I'm glad I've never met a big 'un.

If I was VERY elastic with the timeframe for my Highbridge Wharf diorama, I could have Great Egrets wandering around the harbour basin there. They are flourishing on the Somerset Levels, but again are a fairly recent phenomenon. https://www.birdguides.com/news/great-egret-thriving-in-somerset/

Edited March 21 by phil_sutters

[Mol_PMB]

19 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

If you look at the Holmethorpe thread on here, there are a couple of shots of two women with a child in a pushchair looking at wagon labels on some (pre-TV-era Sunday afternoon stroll?); they appear in the background of various photis of ‘Dom’ and ‘Gervase’, and on Derek Hayward’s site in his Redhill set there are wagons that may be for sand, or possibly CE spoil. That Redhill set is crammed with nostalgia for me, because I used to trek all the way over there during school holidays to watch shunting with a pal (not that I was a dull child, you understand) and to see the WR freight train come in and do its thing.

Ah yes, those do look rather like former private owner coal wagons. The higher-sided ones would have been intended for coal and would have been overloaded if filled with sand (but could have been only partially filled, of course). They have too many doors for a specialist sand wagon - they certainly have side and end doors and very likely bottom doors as well. Sand tended to leak out of doors, and many specialist sand wagons had few doors, or no doors at all. In the case of the hoppers converted for sand traffic, I believe that rubber seals were fitted around the bottom doors.

Here's a specialist PO sand wagon, no side or bottom doors, just one end door, and relatively low sides so it could be filled without overloading:

BR-built sand wagons had no doors at all, sorry this is a link to a model photo as I can't immediately find a real one online:

https://peco-uk.com/products/br-18ton-sand-wagon?variant=7435680514082

Incidentally I found this while browsing:

 

[Nearholmer]

Yep, that’s as I remember it, but not all the wagons were the same, there were many variations on a theme, and they leaked sand wherever they went!

[Mol_PMB]

These days Network Rail have a premium track access charge for 'dirty wagons' that leak payload!

[phil_sutters]

Was there much sand collected at Cuckmere? The beaches thereabouts are more shingle than sand. There certainly is sand further out. The current aggregates plant at Newhaven Marine grades the dredged materials and there is definitely a sand component. As can be seen in my album - especially the most recent pics.

How was the aggregate extracted?

[Nearholmer]

EST&T had a grading plant and sold “beach”, “gravel” (the small pebbles), and coarse sand.
 

In my alternative universe they found a specialist market for the sand in the abrasives industry.

 

I think it was sea-dredged gravel, combined with worries about coastal erosion, which killed-off the various Sussex coastal sand and gravel works, this one, Hall & Co at the Crumbles and Rye Harbour, and the various concrete works there too.

 

Marine aggregates, the fancy name for the graded sea-dredged shingle, started to go by rail in large quantities c1970, notably from Cliffe, in Kent. The sand from Holmethorpe was much posher stuff, used for glassmaking. 
 

 

Edited March 21 by Nearholmer

[5BarVT]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Yep, that’s as I remember it, but not all the wagons were the same, there were many variations on a theme, and they leaked sand wherever they went!

 

2 hours ago, Mol_PMB said:

These days Network Rail have a premium track access charge for 'dirty wagons' that leak payload!

Back in the early 80s, sand traffic was routed off the ECML onto the GN/GE route between Doncaster and Peterborough because leaking sand was causing too much delay on the main line.  (Got into the clamp lock point mechanisms and ground them away til they failed.)

Paul.

[Oldddudders]

15 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

The sand from Holmethorpe was much posher stuff, used for glassmaking. 

10.32 Redhill - Ravenhead

[C126]

Re  Holmethorpe sand trains, please see the green lines on the part of my diagram thus:

 

Hope of use.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

I’m a huge fan of your diagram; just my kind of thing!

 

Well, this lot is all nailed down now, and the main baseboard joint fidliness dealt with (the EST&T line into the scenic bit of FY still to go).

 

 

00 is definitely proving expensive/disruptive though. I got so annoyed by not being able to see what I was doing that I booked an eye test, which resulted not only in the need to order a new set of specs (annoying, because the current ones are only just two years old), but a swift referral to hospital for further investigation of the ongoing deterioration of the retina in my right eye (not a new thing), and the beginnings of a cataract in that eye as well! This, I know, will result in the ophthalmologist stroking here chin, and saying “Hmmm …… we need to keep an eye on that; see me again in a years time.”.

 

 

Edited March 22 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

Looking the other way.

 

There’ll be some sort of shrubbery between the main line and siding at the entrance to the FY.

Does anyone have one of the Horny 48DS? If so, I’d be interested in how it runs without the conflat attached. I’m actually slightly more tempted by the 88DS, which seems a bit more likely for these loads, by this date, so knowledge of that would be useful too.

[Geep7]

My friend has a 48DS running without the conflat, however, it's converted to EM, but I don't think he's done anything else but turn the wheels down a bit and moved them out on the axles.

 

It runs perfectly fine, and this is all day on an exhibition layout. But unsure how it'll run on OO though. I'm tempted to get one too....

[phil_sutters]

On 22/03/2024 at 20:50, Nearholmer said:

Looking the other way.

 

There’ll be some sort of shrubbery between the main line and siding at the entrance to the FY.

 

Make sure you have it bent in the right direction!

Please note that this was taken when the wind wasn't blowing.

Edited April 1 by phil_sutters

[Nearholmer]

Onward toward the FY/sand hopper.

 

This is only a tiny step forward, but I’m using this thread to record the entire process.

 

Observant readers may notice that EST&T now have a loco, but close inspection will reveal that it isn’t really a very appropriate one. I went to the shop to look at both 48DS and 88DS, and when I encountered the famous (to railway enthusiasts of a certain age) ‘Shunter 20’, it sort of leapt off the shelf into my hand. There really is no credible excuse for it being in Sussex, since it spent all its time at Reading, and as someone wrote in another thread “….. went nowhere, and lived under a bridge.”, but it was a loco I saw several times.

 

 

All the 48DS they had in stock were in overly flamboyant liveries, so no temptation there, but I have remembered one that I saw in still in service late in the day, being used on the construction of the DLR by a track contractor, and apparently Hornsby have issued a model of that, so there is a danger that this could drift into becoming “all the shunting engines I’ve ever known”.

[5BarVT]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Observant readers may notice that EST&T now have a loco, but close inspection will reveal that it isn’t really a very appropriate one. I went to the shop to look at both 48DS and 88DS, and when I encountered the famous (to railway enthusiasts of a certain age) ‘Shunter 20’, it sort of leapt off the shelf into my hand. There really is no credible excuse for it being in Sussex, since it spent all its time at Reading, and as someone wrote in another thread “….. went nowhere, and lived under a bridge.”, but it was a loco I saw several times.

 

With my user name, I can do nothing but approve, having walked past it on many an occasion.

Paul.

[Flying Pig]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

apparently Hornsby have issued a model of that,

 

Freudian slip there.

[Nearholmer]

Another slip too.

I managed to bngger-up the cutting of the very last track-across-baseboard-joint, damaging the track in the process, so I’m going to have to re-do a section somehow. It’s such a short piece of rail, between the board crossing and the FY turntable that I think I’m going to have to put in a line of brass pins, and solder the rail to the heads of those, possibly using ply sleepers. Is that “Brook-Smith Method”, or is that a form of artificial respiration? I can imagine the section concerned might need to be heavily dosed with spilt sand, and heavily overgrown, for cosmetic reasons!

Edited March 24 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

51 minutes ago, 5BarVT said:

With my user name

What is the significance of your username? I read it as a voltage transformer, but is that what it means?

[5BarVT]

33 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

What is the significance of your username? I read it as a voltage transformer, but is that what it means?

The last incarnation of the GWR locking frame built at Reading signal works.

Obvious to signal engineers (particularly WR) and meaningless to almost anybody else !!

Paul.

[WFPettigrew]

3 hours ago, 5BarVT said:

GWR locking frame built at Reading signal works.

5 bar vertical tappet?

Edited March 24 by WFPettigrew
Spelling, well, number spelling..

[Northroader]

Oh, right, there’s me thinking…

 

https://www.bart5.com/bar-t-5-home/

 

 

[Nearholmer]

That was looking sort of maybe OK for a laugh, until I got yo the picture of the dinner. What the dickens is that!!??

[Northroader]

“If you see something that doesn’t look right……”

[Flying Pig]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

That was looking sort of maybe OK for a laugh, until I got yo the picture of the dinner. What the dickens is that!!??

 

It's why people kept heading West, away from last night's dinner.