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Ah yes, I had forgotten about those. Here is one of them:

I have had a look in the books and found a bit of info on this. Rather than shifts, horses were "resting" - though what this exactly entails is still not clear to me. According to Tony Atkins "GWR Goods Cartage Vol 1", a GWR report of 1869 found that the GWR had an average of 7½% of its horse stock "resting". This was critiqued as being lower than other companies (a private cartage agency is quoted as having 29% resting at this time). In Janet Russel's "GWR Horsepower" these figures are given for selected London stables in 1877: And here again at a much later date when the GWR had started doing more cartage of its own, and greatly increased the number of horses. No date but from the wording of the text it sounds like the 1920s (edit: just found the same numbers quoted in Atkinson, he says the following is "just before WW1"). There is a now a "sick" category, but the number of resting horses is quite low. Returning to Chris' question about number of horsedrawn vehicles, I have oddly not been able so far to find any data on this for particular goods yards. However, as the years pass by Farthing is slowly growing in my mind, from a medium sized junction station to a fairly large one. So I hope there will be room for a few more horsedrawn vehicles. If not, I'll have to invent some sort of special industry as an excuse - such as the Witney blanket industry: http://witneyblanketstory.org.uk/WBP.asp?navigationPage=Transport https://www.steampicturelibrary.com/stations-halts/london-stations-paddington-station/paddington-goods-depot-6300310.html

That was a feast of GWR structures. I assume they are built for a client. Hopefully we'll get to see them on a layout at some point. (PS: haven't forgotten your stable block pics, just haven't got around to finishing that post!).

Thinking that I had seen a chapter on railway horses in an ancient (pre-grouping) edition of the Wonder Book of Railways, I looked it up. Unfortunately it didn't answer the question of whether they worked shifts, but it gave a great description of the GNR's horse hospital at Kings Cross. Did Farthing have any shunting horses? They could take up a stall or two.

Mikkel, Does 'Resting' mean not working that day, rather than a few hours off?

Beautiful work, as always!

Surely the best excuse in the world. You deserve to be knighted for your services to the future of the hobby Looks like good progress on the pannier. Using a second chassis as a jig is clever stuff.

Some (most? all? at least 11 ) of the Canadian Flowers had artwork on the 4" gun shield. They're like nose art on ww2 aircraft. Mainly cartoon characters , a ferocious sailor holding an aircraft and a corvette, (HMCS Arvida), a cat in sailor's uniform with it's paw in a goldfish bowl with a submarine in it (HMCS Shediac) and Snowberry has Donald Duck holding a depth charge. Impressive build indeed. I'm getting some inspiration here to put some more detail on mine, there's some painted components in plastic bags waiting to be fitted. One feature that's come out well is a good joint between the edge of the main deck (under the gun mounting and bridge) and the top of the hull. On my one, because the deck has to be removable to get at batteries etc, it was a real fiddle to get a reasonable fit. Lots of plastic and wooden beams underneath it... Looking forward to next installment, especially how you do the handrails.

Well done. They look very realistic to me although I'm no farmer. Robert