adrianbs

Hi Jon That's odd, the other pictures were bmp files although much smaller !! adrianbs

Hi Jon it is a bitmap image named concretebeam4a from my scanner Adrian

Hi Jon, Not much luck, when I try uploading the picture (952kb) it tell me I am "not permitted to upload this kind of file" !! ?? More bright ideas required !! adrianbs

Hi Jon, Don't have photoshop or much else of that sort, tell me more about how to resize images without and I will post a few more of the really interesting ones. The concrete beams were labelled "ANOTHER ANGLIAN CONCRETE PRODUCT" but I am not sure where they came from although as Fat C says Norwich, that would tie in with east ANGLIA !! Below is the formation of Train 1 that I photograped. Loco- BR Banana vans x7 - B.909650,906026,905106,909600----909651,906022,905108,909601----909659,902023,902019,090609---- 908001,907228,E.217295----908012,922436,908010----908015,924564,98019----909652,901003?,909602 + Brake van The load carrying wagons were labelled "concrete beam" and the intermediates "concrete beam spacer" I was,of course trespassing on the goods yard but a friendly (at that time) station manager said "If I don't see you I can't tell you to go" The main problem was getting into a position to take the photos, the sets were so long one had to be a long way away to get them in and taking close-ups of each wagon when the cranes were swinging 85 foot girders around was not advisable.They were also stabled on adjacent tracks with Blue Circle bulk cements on the other side on some occasions !! No doubt Paul B will be able to give chapter and verse of the wagon types but my notes do give some of this anyway. The beams were about 16" over the head and 36" over the foot and 51" high with the web 7" like oversize F/B rail and at a rough estimate weighed nearly 30 tons each. The biggest problem was getting the lorry out of the goods yard round a tight 180 degree bend. Until I saw them do it with the rear steer bogie I could not believe it was possible. If you want more you had better put some ticks in the "like" box Regards Adrian

Hi All Well that was a bit of a struggle, thanks Jon. don't know how to downsize photos to a specific resolution so the above are very poor having gone from 11 Mb to only 27kb. If you want more perhaps you could advise, I send my photos from My Docs to Email when I can reduce them and then send them back to My Docs under a new name. I am willing to bet there is a better way and that each photo could be reduced to under 1Mb for posting. Come on you geeks. That's it for today though adrianbs

Hi all Not sure if it has worked, I have uploaded 3 photos which were originally 11 Mb but have downsized via the Email to 26kb. Not sure if I have actaully posted them though, We will know shortly. adrianbs

Hi all, I have extracted my digit and found my album of concrete beam carrier photos !!. There is a notebook which gives the exact formation of the trains. My memory has dulled with age, I think the photos were taken in the 1970s and in fact there were 4 trains in total each with 7 (not 8) beam sets. The BR banana vans were actually I preseme a fitted head as most of the other wagons were not fitted or piped. I assume the total weight of the train must have been in the order of 900 to 1000 tons of which only the 100 plus tons on the vans would have had brakes. The train would of course have had a very low speed on the line. If you want to see some of the near 100 photos tell me how to upload them as I cannot seem to move them from my documenets file to the forum. Bye all adrianbs

Hiall I am trying to add some pictures of the concete beam trains but havig trouble, will the geeks please take one step forward ?? Regards All adrianbs

Hi all Having read all the posts thoroughly ESPECIALLY that from the manufacturers in October 2009 it is quite clear where some detail errors came in. They have used the Diagram 1/573 drawing to make a Dia 1/575 model and not checked whether there are any differences. They have presumably assumed that when the early wagons were vacumm fitted that the upgrade was done without moving the Vee hanger position or that the 1/575 wagons were built with the same Vee position as 1/573. From Pauls photos it would appear the underframe was brought fully into line with the later design which differed significantly to the original, itself only a minor reworking of the design used on the GWR. The technical design faults and other errors are less explicable and it would be interesting to know if they originate with Flangeway or whoever did the actual production. Although it appears Dapol produced the snowploughs I have not seen any mention of who made the Mermaids. Have fun adrianbs

Hi All Aprops the crane loading the Galloway boiler I think it may be unloading the boiler into the barge , Galloway had their own sidings alongside the GC near Manchester and made these large boilers for factory use in the days when steam engines drove all the shafting from a single powerplant. I spent a very fruitful afternoon in the bowels of the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology looking through the Galloway files. This had nothing to do with my desire to make a boiler model but I knew the files contained quite a few pictures of railway wagons with boilers on them. I came away with a very interesting selection indeed. The wagons in this photo are GC Twin Implement wagons specifically made for this traffic and pictures appear in Tatlow's volume 1. I could not track down the drawing I wanted at York but deduced another diagram might be very similar as indeed it was. There were 4 variations 2 are single Imp wagons and 2 are Twins and the designs seem similar with a larger axle loading on the later sets The generic name for these boilers is "Manchester Boilers" and they came in a wide range of sizes with one or two firing doors. A preserved one complete is to be found at the Ellesmere Port Canal Museum. Whilst there is little of railway interest there it is a worthwhile visit just to soak up the Industrial Archeology atmosphere. Regards adrianbs

Hi All Just a few points and for those who model, I have scratch built models in 4mm of both a 13,5" rail mounted gun and a 9" made by a friend with some help from me which he generously GAVE me when he downsized and moved !!!!!! Now you are green with envy !! The Gun mountings for the WW1 14" railguns are actually 15 axles - 3 bogies with 4 and one with only 3. Not quite sure why they did that unless to keep the overall weight down a bit. I did get confused on this till I got the drawings from the IWC many moons ago. In fact the IWC has a quite large scale model of one of these and that has 4 x 4 axle bogies but I have seen no full size photos like that.. Most of the Gun sets were built in such a way as to be usable for other purposes and often were split into two. The GWR Pollen E now at Didcot was their contribution to the WW1 war effort and the outer pair (with headstocks) were used for long loads like bridge girders etc. Later the inner pair were modified with bolt on headstocks to double up the stock as originally they were only coupled with links. Bob Essery in MR wagons has got one of pictures wrongly identified as it is not the wagon described, The CR also contributed a heavy gun set of 4 x 3 axle units and the NER had a series of basically standard 6 wheel tender underframes which could be used singly or paired or as a triple. None of the pregroup .SR companies built any although the SR bought a second hand Railgun chassis (without gun! ) to use as a transformer wagon, does anyone have a photo ?? We only know what it looked like before they got it. There must have been quite a few Concrete beam sets as I photographed every set that came to Poole many years ago and there were 3 complete trains with BR Banana vans as barrier wagons and 8 beam sets each with 2 x 80' plus concrete beams roughly flatbottom rail section but rather larger. They were a motley collection of cobbled together plate wagons, trestrols with the well flame cut off and various spacer wagons either 4 wheeled or bogie. Totally Knackered now so off to bed Adrian BS

Hi All HELP!!! I cannot find the reference to the original information this forum/site refers. The photos are of great interest and especially some of the videos as well.. I have been researching some of these wagons for many years but until recently access to the Photo files a York was not possible. I have a copy of the recent drawings lists and have been to the study room to try and track down some of the drawings which have been made available from the Darlington archive. I am still trying to find the drawings for the Gun barrel cradles used on the NER "FLAT Q" 6 axle plate wagons. which when used with all 3 Flat Qs enabled gun barrels up to 160 tons to be carried. The Flat Qs are the wagons also used to carry the weight relieving beams either side of the HUGE stator wagon. This was originally built by the LNER with optional well wagon centre section or two horizontal beams which could be used to trap the largest transformers between. In the video with the LNER Garrett the well wagon is shown but behind it, on a pair of bogies, are the two transformer girders. When used for gun barrels over about 100 tons,ie 12"; 13.5"; 14"( these were the WW1 rail guns with non standard RN barrels ) and 15", two of the flats were bridged by girders carrying the 100 ton breech end cradle and the third flat carried the muzzle end cradle up to 60 Tons. Those in the know will say that there were no battleships in WW1 with barrels needing 160 Tons but the wagons were built for a "Proposed" 18" naval gun!!. I believe one or two barrels were made but it was decided not to build a battleship to use them. Jim Russell's "Freight wagons and Loads ------- " has some great pics of some of the LNE wagons and LMS including the LNE "WELTROL N" in its well wagon guise. I think the LNE, either just before or just after,WW2 found that stators had become so large they could not be carried in the Weltrol N as they were too high so a high strength beam was produced which could be threaded through the Stator and then attached to the beams and the two special twelve wheeled bogies of the Weltrol N. The relieving beams had boxes at the other end to take weights needed to equalise axle loading G.P. Keen had a model of the NER 160 ton Gun set but, apart from one poor photo, alas I know nothing more about its history or possible current where- abouts. Does anybody have any info ?? In BR days another two batches of Flat Qs were built, the last three with Roller bearings, to almost exactly the NER drawings of about 40 years earlier and that was why no one could find the G.A.s in the NER or LNER files. I eventually found them in the BR files at SERCO with the help of Bob Essery !!!!!! I was lucky enough to see some of them at POOLE station, and take photos many years ago, when they were in use with many other rare wagons moving concrete beams to build a new flyover locally. Hope someone reads this (probably the moderator !!) and gets me hooked up with the original photo list so that I can follow the comments in the forum. which I cannot fathom out as yet. Regards All AdrianBS.

I have obtained one of the Mermaid models in black with a view to using it on "Ashbury" my 18.83 -EM wheel standards layout built by Martin Finney many years ago based on Ashburton but named "Shaftesbury" which I have dated in the very late 30s/early war years. My reaction to the model was "thank goodness I don't want a fitted BR dia 1/575 or 1/573 as rebuilt from unfitted to fitted. To convert to the original GWR owned batch (No known diagram !!) involves removing almost all the brake gear detail, only leaving the Vees intact and adding pushrod (RCH 1923 style ) brakes to one side with morton type brake levers, possibly splicing into the original levers above the axleboxes although the handle ends are not in the correct position. Buffers will be replaced and so will the very overscale chain for which I have a stock of 40 links per inch chain. It may actually be better to replace the chain with very fine twisted wire, two pieces of 0.2mm would probably do. The W irons are a real problem as they neither look like the GWR "W" type or the BR Plate type and the spring shoes are very rudimentary. The ballast weight, sitting into the top of the chassis, is a real disappointment, hiding the open chassis detail and unnecessarily lowering it to allow it to sit down below the solebar level. Why on earth it was not recessed into the bottom of the body I do not understand as that has been made much to deep. The floor of the body is in line with the the TOP of the body frame, lining up with the bottom of the opening doors. If the floor were where it is modelled about 25% of the ballast would not slide out!! The fitted brakegear is seriously incorrect from the undersized brakeshoes, they should be nearly twice the size, to the Vee hangers which should be offset by about their full width towards one end. This means that all brake linkage, brake levers, vac cylinder etc ,etc are incorrectly positioned for a dia 1/575 and looking at Paul Bartletts photos the rebuilds look to be similar. This has also resulted in one of the rail clamps being far to long on one side, presumably it was spaced away from the Vee hanger by the correct amount but the Vee hanger was about 6mm to far away in the first place. Just to round off the main problems, the guides on which the body rolls/tilts are far to small. they should be deeper and/or protrude further over the solebar according to photos. My sample also has a pronounced sag in the body whichI is unlikely to have been found on the real thing and about which I doubt I can do anything. The manufacturer has assured me they know these wagons well and that they have photos to indicate the model is correct but I have not received them as yet. There are other niggles and I feel modifying a Cambrian kit would, even for the GWR or unfitted BR variant, be almost as much work as this model entails. Such a pity when most of the faults were avoidable and nothing to do with tooling or production constraints. A