Brake Compo

Yes just looked a couple of photos - there should be reservoir on both sides - will PM you some photos through, although might take a few days as I am pushed for time at teh mo.

Shouldn't there be an air reservoir running along the footplate on both sides for a PP fitted O2?

So glad that my small contribution has been of some help - very nice to see the parts put to better use than sitting in my scrap box. May you have many happy hours of fun with her.

Utterly superb!

Looking good George - the coal went into two small semi-circular bins on either side of the cab internally at the front, each with internal lids and their own coal hole door. In the first of the photos below, a coal hole door is the thing with the chain on it at the far side of the cab. In the second photo a bunker lid can be seen at the extreme right of the photo (it is the thing with the knob on). Given that the coal capacity was tiny (Bradley quotes 10cwt!). It is perhaps not surprising that additional coal was stockpiled on the tops of the tanks - I agree it is something that is commonly seen in photos, although given the notoriously rough ride of B4s how much of it stayed there is another matter!

I siuppose that there might have been bans on weight grounds on some lines - a 15T batch of pillbox brake vans were built, of course, for lighter duties and lines, although the 10T axle loading on a standard BR brake van hardly seems excessive - even a Terrier had a greater axle load than this on the rear axle, and they got across Langstone Bridge.

There are a couple of photos in King that are fairly clear (including one close up), albeit in black & white. But somewhere I have seen a photoset of all of the signs, but am wracking my brains to think where, possibly in a Railway Magazine of the period?

Sorry I cannot recall where this came from it is fixed in my mind from somewhere, but I know not where. Thanks for the advice that it is not in Glould or King - that saves me some effort! There was a very good article & plans of these in the MRC c1971-72 I will dig my copy out from the mag stacks in the loft and see if this is where the idea came from, although my suspicion is that it came from reading on the ops side somewhere. Sorry to be so vague.

Going back to the original question (unless I have missed the answer in the discussion), my recollection is that the three ferry brakes for the Night Ferry(running Nos 1, 2 and 3 if I recall correctly) were the Van As. If my memory is still working correctly at this time of night, these were the first passenger brake vans built by the Southern, hence Van A.

Yes this is a real can of worms with many people arguing furiously over exact shades of green. There were at least two shades of both 'Olive' and 'Malachite'. If I may I will direct you to HMRS Livery Register no. 3 LSWR and Southern for the most scholarly treatese on the subject (and it is reasonably priced too)! But what all the disputants fail to appreciate is how much these colours weathered over time - Olive goes brown and Malachite turns blue, and quite quickly as well. Eventually olive will weather into a kharki colour and rapidity with which malachite turns a distinctly bluish tinge is amazing. Compounding that was the Soutrhern's prediliction for varnishing coaches every couple of years, which again after several coats would have changed the colour again. Yes, because of all the revarnishing coach liveries could last a long time, there are reliable reports of a handful of coaches running in the mid '50's still in pre-war olive! For example it is belived that none of the BRCW-built Bullieds (built 1947-49) ever received the carmine and cream livery all going straight from malachite into southern multi-unit green. Then of course we have the war - there was a national shortage of green pigment by 1942 (resulting for example in green being dropped from the Western Approaches camoflage scheme for warships), as a result what repainting took place used whatever stocks of old paint that could be found, including reversion to unlined olive. There are reliable reports of coaches being turned out in grey paint in this period.

I don't really think that there is any simple answer to this question: some specific sets were allocated to particular workings, others were special traffic sets which wandered wherever the need took them, but most were rostered in diagrams that could be amazingly complex and required only a particular type of set rather than a specfic set, resulting in sets wandering - the example usually quoted is that given on pages 106 to 108 of SR150, which gives an example of how complex the rolling stock diagrams could be, and one that is hard to better. Stock utilisation varied wildly, while some sets worked intensively around the south east, others only made trips between Waterloo and the West of England on summer Saturdays, travelling out to say Illfracombe one Saturday, spending the week sitting in the carriage sidings there before coming back the next Saturday - some new coaches that the Southern built were used on only about a dozen summer Saturdays days a year. It is a vast and fascinating subject, about which most of us wished that we understood more...