Ian Simpson

That's a very interesting track plan, looks really promising! And I'm really looking forward to more on the incline, that's a great idea.

Many thanks, Julie. I think the plan for Holloway Goods looks really good, and I look forward to following your progress. (And I particularly liked the GIF showing the train sequence, very clever!)

Thanks for the kind words, Gary. I think I might have got the idea for the traverser from a plan in Samuel Charles Brees’s 'Railway Practice', a book already mentioned by Chris in an earlier post. I certainly nicked it from some early engineer! And John Bourne's drawing of the traverser in Swindon engine shed helped a lot: http://www.heritage-explorer.co.uk/web/he/searchdetail.aspx?id=3003&crit=gwr  Talent imitates, but genius steals …

BTW I’m not a good modeller! I’m clumsy, I lack any patience and I swear like a trooper when I superglue small components to my fingers. But I just look on my failures as learning experiences, and after I’ve messed up a job a few times I generally suss out a way around the difficulty. One of the reasons I like using cheap or free materials like card to experiment is that I don't feel quite so bad when I'm making mistakes left, right and centre. So please do have a go at the things you fancy, and if your first attempt isn’t perfect just think about all the valuable experience that you have gained!

I do like the idea of the pull back section under the station roof, Chris. Perhaps I’m a bit fixated at the moment, but I can’t help thinking about it as a super-traverser!

And I’ll definitely buy some of the B&G wagons, especially given the very high quality of your kits. British HO modellers are used to adapting 4 mm items (and there’s a really good example of this on the marvellous Shelf Island blog this week:  http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/1762/entry-18065-iow-e1-Dapol-00-terrier-modified ) 

That's a very interesting description, Chris! It can be a real challenge to try and recreate early operations accurately at some stations and goods depots (although of course that's part of the fascination), and I fully sympathise about Bricklayers Arms. I think things were even worse at London Bridge, according to Ronald Thomas (1986) in "London's First Railway" on page 101:

"Until they were dismissed in September 1838, the company [the London & Greenwich] had a grade of employee known by the curious name of 'Hook Rope Men'. They had no distinctive uniform, but were supplied with rough weather coats, as were the drivers and firemen. One was stationed at each end of the line, and their job was to detach the engine from its train, upon its arrival at London Bridge or Deptford [the original terminus for Greenwich], and to re-couple it by means of a tow-rope. The engine then proceeded to tow the carriages into the station, running itself on the adjacent line to which it had been diverted, the points afterwards being restored before the train at the end of its rope reached them. This arrangement left the engine free to take another train back immediately, and superseded that of fly-shunting. The practice was fairly general at that time; on the London and Croydon Railway the men were called 'Tail Rope Men', and in June 1840 one of them, with the driver of the engine 'Sussex', was held responsible for damaging two carriages of a train borrowed from the Greenwich Railway, by getting the rope caught on the water-crane."  

The London and Croydon did have traversers at London Bridge and Croydon, but at least at the former station they were only used to move carriages between the lines.

I've never really understood why early railways were so reluctant to let their locos run into train sheds. I suspect it might have been a fear of fire rather than just the fumes and pollution (and in the fires that occurred during the 1840s at Nine Elms, New Cross, Croydon etc we can see how combustible the early stations were.)

The ticket platform outside the main station is an interesting feature. The Birmingham and Gloucester had one outside its Birmingham terminus as well, which was only to collect tickets rather than a platform where passengers could get off the train. I think they were quite popular with other railways as well. I've always assumed they were designed to stop fare dodging, as any time saved at the main terminus would have already been lost at the ticket platform.  It's interesting how early in the railway records the fare-dodger, the anti-social passenger and the stroppy commuter make their first appearances!

Some modellers have found fascinating ways to reproduce rope-shunting with threads and bollards, but that's not going to be very easy inside a train shed!  Because I use 5mm foamcore as a baseboard, I've sometimes toyed with the idea of using a magnet beneath the baseboard to move single coaches and wagons around the layout as if they were being pushed around by invisible members of staff ...

Thanks, Gary. Pressure of work means it's likely to be the middle-to-end of next week before I can post another blog entry.

I might also post it in two separate parts to get something on the blog asap: the first one on the Anglicisation process and a second, later post on adapting them to produce first, second and third class carriages.

All the best

Ian

Welcome back to modelling! The photos look good, best of luck with the layout.

Amazing! I love the thought of all these Triang Hornby Rockets working away on whizzy modern layouts.

After seeing that article, I'm sure you won't have any problems chipping the Norris.

Ian

I'll be very interested to hear what you decide. It's a rather basic motor and a bit of running-in may improve performance.

Where did you put the chip in the Rocket?

Gary, now I've looked at the tender I'm not sure! The tender body and chassis do seem to be separate mouldings but Bachmann obviously didn't expect anyone to prise them apart. To make it worse, the Norris loco seems to be the only model that doesn't have an exploded drawing on Bachmann's website.

There is quite a deep well beneath the body of the tender for the wheelsets, which is ideal for adding extra weight. My first thought was that it would be easy to fix a chip in there between the wheel flanges, but then I checked the Net and found a lot of chips are around 16 or 17 mm wide. Sorry about my ignorance of DCC, but is it possible to get a suitable chip say 12 mm wide? BTW the tender wheels are conductive: great if you want to fix extra pick-ups, probably not so good if you want to put sensitive electronic components next to them. 

Mikkel, it seems the locos were actually built at Norris's works in Philadelphia and shipped over to Liverpool as soon as each one was completed (like other loco builders at the time, Norris was struggling to keep up with demand so he didn't deliver in batches). From Liverpool they ran down the Liverpool & Manchester and the Grand Junction Railways to Birmingham. Since the smaller locos weighed 8 tons and the heavy bankers 12 tons, they could easily be handled by harbour cranes at large ports. In a couple of cases Norris even sent a fitter to England with the loco, and at least one stayed on as an engine-driver when the line opened. 

Many thanks, Gary. I'll be very interested to hear how it goes. In my experience some of the chimneys aren't glued on too tightly, and if you can remove one there's a hole beneath which lets you glue lead or other ballast inside the boiler - just don't let it run down the other end and foul the motor :-(

The photo of my wiring will already have warned you that I'm not someone to give advice on DCC! But I think a chip would probably help the running at slow speeds. Again, I guess the hollow boiler is the best place`to hide a small chip, or if it's a fairly large one there is plenty of room in the tender.

I'm away from books for a couple of days, but I will check Long & Awdry when I get home. I do remember the BGR had to pay 20% import tax on the locos!

Thanks, that is a great tip on the Brees, I will definitely investigate.

Many thanks, Chris. Yes, Brees is an extremely useful source (and for anyone else reading this far through the discussion, yes his books are also available free in PDF format on Google Books). When I saw your post on your Croydon 0-4-2 I immediately thought of Brees's drawing of the loco and guessed you were using it. I may well take up your kind offer, as I've only got PDF versions myself and they do tend to be indistinct on some illustrations. I'm really impressed that you've got the print versions!

(Wishaw also has some useful illustrations for early modellers at the back as well, for example complete plans of early Birmingham & Gloucester wagons).

Yes, I definitely should have added Bury, especially as I looked at some of his prints when trying to work out what the Liverpool & Manchester did with its ballast. We're so lucky to have these illustrations for the period.  

I was wondering what you were planning to do on Bricklayers Arms, which is going to be an amazing museum-quality layout.  I'm really enjoying reading your blog.

All the best

Ian

Many thanks, Chris, that's an excellent point! I was in two minds whether to mention fish plates in my blog, but I'm glad I did because you've now made me think more seriously about them and about ballast. I hope you don’t mind if I give a slightly long and geeky answer, but you inspired me to do a bit of checking.

Firstly, I'm going to fudge my reply and say it probably depended on the company / the engineer / perhaps even what the contract had set out for each portion of the line. As a new industry the early railways tended to copy the practice of even earlier ones, but by the 1840s civil engineers were also competing with each other to produce new and improved ways of doing things and so we see all sorts of experiments at this time, many of them spectacularly unsuccessful. 

Because the early railways were of such interest to the general public, we're lucky to have quite a few lithographs showing either stations or trains in action in this period. Some are crude sketches but by the early 1840s the best artists, such as John Bourne and John Absolon, were producing pictures that look pretty accurate. Drawings of stations with track and ballast in the foreground are quite common in the commercial lithographs and the companies' own illustrated handbooks for travellers.

Early lithographs of the Liverpool and Manchester show ballast up to the bottom of the rails in the 1830s, with the rails themselves exposed. The sketches in Drake’s Road Book of the Grand Junction Railway (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43367 ) show similar practice on the GJR, e.g. in the drawing of the track in the foreground of Stafford Castle on page 32. The early GWR also seems to have had exposed rails.

Moving into the 1840s, ET Dolby’s lithograph of a Norris loco climbing the Lickey Incline (http://railwaymaniac.com/2015/11/bankers-the-lickey-incline ) shows all of the rails and even the cross-sleepers. I checked John Turner’s first (1977) volume of “The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway” to see what the London & Croydon did, and on page 61 he wrote that “Ballast was up to the tops of the longitudinal timbers, so that the [supporting] cross-sleepers were completely buried”, which sounds as if the rails themselves were exposed. The earliest lithographs of L&CR stations are a bit too crude to be certain, but I think ballast then might have been to mid-rail height. By the atmospheric period, station drawings show the rails completely exposed. My own view is that the LCR always covered all of the sleepers and sometimes, by design or accident, the bottom half of the rails as well. 

Jumping on a decade, George Measom’s “Official Illustrated Guide”s to the LBSCR and SER (both available as free downloads on Google Books) show exposed or semi-exposed rails at London Bridge, Croydon, Merstham and Reigate. (Although Google Books has editions from around 1857 the drawings did not change between editions and most illustrations seem to date from the late 1840s or early 1850s.)

That's an extremely unrepresentative survey reflecting my own interests, and I certainly don’t want to claim that ballast never reached the top of the rails (at least on the outside of the rail). But I’ve always been dubious about the extent of the practice. Early engineers and their passengers had a dread of derailments (well, hopefully modern engineers have one as well!), and piling loose stones up against the supposedly smooth rail tops while completely hiding the short, light, comparatively fragile iron rails that could break or move out of gauge seems to be asking for trouble. But I can see that some early engineers would have believed that partially or completely covering rails stopped them moving about, much like the argument for covering sleepers with ballast.

So after all that, I just don’t know how prevalent the practice was in this period. I don’t think it’s a myth, but I do wonder if there was also some confusion because most railways were laying ballast to the top of their sleepers, hiding the bottom of the rails. My personal guess is that it was more common to lay ballast to mid-rail rather than the absolute top of the rails in this period, at least on the main lines: sidings may well have been a different matter.

You've definitely given me something to think about!

I probably should have mentioned that the models are made by Bachmann US, not Bachmann UK! And I certainly should have checked Bachmann US's website first, since I've just seen they are no longer selling the models. The models were released in 1986 and I think Bachmann must finally have sold the last of them.

The best way I've found to track them down at a reasonable price is to go to eBay, home in on the railway model section and search for "Prussia" or "Lafayette" (the names of the two versions of the loco that Bachmann produced). Other 1830s and 1840s models they produced turn up fairly regularly under the headings "John Bull" and "de Witt Clinton" or "deWitt Clinton". In the past I expected to pay around £30-35 for a second-hand loco and £5 for a coach plus postage, buying from private sellers rather than the more expensive commercial ones. But I haven't bought any for a couple of years so I may be a bit out of touch with auction prices.

Southernboy's absolutely right, filling in the gaps is half the fun. Plus it's a brave soul who insists you've got the shade of lining completely wrong on an 1840 locomotive!

For anyone interested in reading what their local railway was like in 1840, I'd suggest a look at Francis Whishaw's remarkable survey "The Railways of Great Britain & Ireland", available free on Goggle Books at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1&dq=Francis+Whishaw&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Francis%20Whishaw&f=false and downloadable as a PDF file.

Many thanks for the kind comments!

Northroader's right about the scenery. I'll probably replace the leading turnout with a Y point. This will let me have an island platform between the tracks, instead of just a measly half-inch wide platform at the rear of the layout which would be hidden every time a train pulls in. Then I can place a retaining wall along the back of the layout behind the rear track. 

Particular thanks to Gary for his encouragement. I will write up my approach to anglicising the Bachmann coaches properly, probably in a couple of weeks' time. For me the biggest issue is the lack of running boards: by the 1840s railways were getting rid of the type of steps modelled on the Prussia carriages and replacing them with a sturdy board running along the entire length of the carriage around axlebox height. A length of L-shaped plastistrut or brass strip is probably best here. I'll discuss other issues such as the curved ends of the carriages, the roof profiles and the lamp covers when I write a post on these useful little coaches.

Mention of Anglicisation made me realise that the same stock could be used for US and European railways as well. Lots of US railroads bought Norris's locos, and they were popular with early German and Austrian railways. (They had a good reputation for climbing gradients, which is why the Birmingham & Gloucester bought so many to tackle the Lickey Incline.)