Okay, here we go...

At one time or another, I've been into N-gauge modern (when "modern" meant "1982"), 3mm finescale Great Central Railway and N-gauge Union Pacific. Through much of that time I didn't pay much attention to what was happening on Britain's railways. Back in 2002, though, I travelled down to London for work and returned to Liverpool in the evening. I was quite surprised by the number of freight trains that I saw; and particularly impressed when my train stopped at Stafford alongside a container train. Immediately outside my window was a KTA "pocket wagon", something that I'd never seen before, and I was hugely taken with the sight of the brake gear all clanking away in plain view on top of the end platform. After that I started looking out for freight trains a bit more; then "considering" modelling some of them until eventually I decided to switch over entirely to modelling the contemporary British scene.

One day, I'd like to build a layout based on Edge Hill, the first station out of Liverpool Lime Street, as it was in the period between 2000 and about 2006. This would be a huge undertaking, but that's what I'd like to do. In the meantime, I have several layout ideas based on the Bootle Branch, which runs from Edge Hill to Liverpool docks. These would give me somewhere to run trains which could later be used on an Edge Hill layout, if that ever came to pass. Building these trains is going to be a long business, for two reasons:

(1) I don't max out my credit card on vast fleets of RTR wagons and locomotives, because I don't have the disposable income to do it and I'm not really the kind to go over my pretty rigorously-enforced budget on model railway bits; and

(2) I don't assemble large numbers of scratchbuilt or kit-built stock all that quickly because I work quite amazingly slowly, as may become apparent as this blog goes on. It isn't just time: people with less time than me seem to get on quite well. I'm just a very slow worker, end of story. I'm kind of hoping that writing this might encourage me to get on a bit more, but only time will tell on that one.

Over the last few years I've assembled a varied collection of N gauge stock, nearly all of which was appropriate to the dock branch, without ever getting very near to assembling any complete trains. Earlier this year I decided that this was no good and that I would separate my rolling stock requirements into particular groups and concentrate my buying, at least, on one of those groups at a time. I'll still build odd things "out of sequence" for light relief but the bought-in stuff will be in accordance with The Plan, unless there's a good reason to do otherwise.

The first group I decided to concentrate on was the steel coil traffic. At the moment these trains only run a couple of times a week, often combined with scrap metal workings, but they used to run more or less daily. Trains of empty wagons would work across from Warrington, collect loaded wagons from Gladstone Dock steel terminal and return. The empties would be loaded in time to form the following day's train.

From the train formations that I'd seen myself or had seen photographed or recorded in the Liverpool-Rails Yahoo group, I settled on three. These were formed:

1. BYA (x4), IHA, KIA, IHA, JSA (x2)

2. BYA (x5), KIA (x3)

3. IHA (x2), KIA

(all the links above are to Martyn Read's very splendid UK Rolling Stock fotopic site)

I chose these for several reasons. They're all prototypical, they cover the extremes of length for these workings and although they're varied, they include almost all of the coil wagon types generally seen on the branch - they're reasonably typical in that BYAs (and the externally-identical BRAs) are the most common types on these trains. They also have a good balance between available RTR (the BYAs from Farish and the KIAs from Dapol) and what would have to be scratchbuilt. As much as I enjoy scratchbuilding wagons, even producing the six wagons required here is likely to take me months.

The KIAs are all on hand (courtesy of Hattons' recent sale), as are most of the BYAs, so I've started on the IHAs. The prototype model is based on Robert Stephens' article in the August 2006 Model Rail and the drawings that used to be published - but aren't any more, sadly - on the SNCF website. The most striking thing about them is that the underframe is longer at one end than the other. The end platform is at the long end, which should make it a bit easier to attach the etched (by TPM) platforms. I did take some photos, but they didn't come out too well: I'm going to try again in daylight tomorrow and see if I can do better.