WFPettigrew

Any for Sadler and Co out of curiosity, please?

Unfortunately the series in the Locomotive Magazine in the 1890s, detailing livery schemes company by company, is unhelpfully over concise when it comes to the M&C. The September 1897 edition included the final installment of the main English companies, the M&C and the Furness. Whereas the FR gets a paragraph on the loco livery, including lining, as well as further shorter paragraphs regarding the paint schemes of the the carriages (at the time transitioning from the older chocolate and teak to the Aslett era ultramarine blue and off white), NPCS and goods wagons, the M&C gets just a single paragraph: "The engines of the Maryport and Carlisle Railway are painted green, with black bands, lined on both sides with vermillion. The buffer beams are red with gold figures on, and the lettering on the tenders is in gold, with red shading, whilst the number plate is bright brass, with scarlet ground. The carriages are varnished teak, with gold letters and black shade." This of course does not help the question about the solebars! Nor indeed the likes of horseboxes or the wagon stock! Would seem to be a very sensible position! All the best Neil

Is this a metaphor for a wider malaise in society?!

@Coal Tank will have seen this but for wider consumption - as an alternative to compensation, there is the CSB approach which in theory should flow more smoothly through the trackwork. See https://www.scalefour.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7073&p=77876#p77876 Al the best Neil

He did, it was! And looked very nice. l came away with one of the North British wagons which is now in the kit stash awaiting its time on the workbench. All the best Neil PS @Schooner if you want to write, the address is: Blackdown Mill House Mill Lane Punnet's Town HEATHFIELD TN21 9HX PPS isn't Punnet's Town a superbly evocative name for a layout?!

For what it's worth, both Chris Crofts and John Hayes have "buffer guide" in their annotated drawings of typical RCH wagons. Chris Crofts states that the bit that "made contact with the next wagon" was the "buffer" (RCH definition) or the buffer ram (some wagon builders) but "buffer head" is used "mainly by modellers. The buffer/buffer ram/buffer head thingy is one of the few things in the John Hayes drawing that doesn't actually warrant annotation! All the best Neil

Well if you're not using it correctly, then neither am I, but I was relying on the expertise of the late John Hayes in his The 4mm coal wagon and Chris Crofts with his articles about the history of wagons and how to build them in MRJ (started in No 12 way back in 1986) - both call them strapbolts. I doubt either of those two illuminaries would have got it wrong - and @MrWolf agrees as well - so I think you're on pretty solid ground here. (Unlike curb rails vs side rails, where the debate will no doubt carry on and on...!) All the best Neil

I think @MarcD means W Hardin Osborne, who was a prolific drawer of rolling stock, certainly at least of the Furness Railway, and had his drawings published in the Model Railway Constructor way back when, 1960s possibly. He was born near Greenodd just a couple of months before the infamous storm that blew a train over onto its side on the Leven Viaduct between Cark and Ulverston in 1903, in and lived there (his father was a Baptist Minister at the little church at Tottlebank) until 1922 when his father retired from being the Minister of the Baptist Church at Tottlebank. He also wrote an article of his memories of the FR branch through Greenodd to Windermere (Lake Side) (as it was called in those days) for The Iron Horse, the journal of the Lakeside Railway Society. (I should declare a sort of interest here - the LRS is now defunct but it morphed into the Furness Railway Trust, a registere charity, of which I am a Trustee.) These were clearly memories of child/teenager, and I think back to what I can remember of railways in the 70s and 80s when I was a child/teenager, and think therefore that some of the detail might be somewhat untrustworthy, but the bigger mental images are probably accurate. In the cases of both W Hardin Osborne and RW Rush, at very best their drawings would be a "better than nothing". Or to put it another way, if someone doesn't have draughting skills, then their guesses about what a wagon's critical dimensions might be taking from one grainy photo, could be seen as being helpful. But to quote Ron Allison, the expert on Furness Railway wagons, re the drawings of WHO "Not to be relied on but treat them as nice sketches". I think that sums them up. And yes Stephen, if the "information" they contain is properly cross checked against other available information, ideally works drawings (but yes even these might not protray what was actually built) and photos, then we stand a chance of getting the model "right". All the best Neil

Sorry, no... Just Mr Rush's writings that I am wary of! The sad thing is that there are some accurate bits, it's just finding them amongst the fantasy or factually inaccurate. You can call me whatever. Mr Pettigrew was Bill to his friends... All the best Neil

Sadly Chas, the odds are not good. RW (Bob) Rush wrote a number of books, including two regarding the Furness Railway (also Oakwood Press). Let's just say that the one that features drawings of locos, carriages and wagons contains numerous sometimes significant errors. When he was asked - after publication - for the sources for some of the things in his book by Furness Railway historians, he apparently generally replied "I can't remember" and once that he probably had some paperwork on it, but it was the back of his wife's knitting cupboard, so he couldn't get to it. (??!!) So I would treat this one with a huge dollop of caution, several pinches of salt, and probably only rely on that which is backed up by a second source. Now, that was the polite review. @MarcD will probably be more, err, forthright..

I am not sure that having two diamonds next to each other really rings "authentic" - the railways generally avoided them where they could* because of the complexity of building/maintaining alignments (bit like making model ones?!). I think the three way point (a la option A) to achieve 3 sidings would be better. If that meant the WNR was faced with shorter sidings than it wanted, it would just buy some extra land. Neil * even those lines that had aversions to facing points!

I have had some just popping them onto nickel silver (to make a bolt securing a NS wire representing a handrail). Usual disclaimers (just a happy customer, no I don't know what I am doing, etc.)

Oh, keen mode activated! What a wonderful resource!! I am going in, I may be some time...

Understood. I had a google but couldn't find any month by month coal use stats for the late Vicorian - prewar period so probably best to wait til you can get back to Derby and have the time to collate the rest of the year/several years. Quick sums though - for what it's worth.. Your latest figures have 798 wagons Nov-Feb, so double that (despite the uncertainty above) and divide by ten gives us ~ 160 wagons/year/1000 population rather than 150 in Skipton. Add in up to 60 more for the gas works traffic had that come by rail would mean the equation would perhaps better be stated as 200-220 wagons/year/1000 population. All the best Neil

That's interesting, if nothing else it suggests that the Nov-Feb inclusive "half the year's demand" idea might be a bit wayward? Will there be enough pages in the ledger to get you through an entire calendar year? I guess a cold snap in October (easily possible especially back then) and another in March (even more easily possible in the NW - the worst snows we have had in Cumbria in the last 30 years have always been in March) would mess the balance up.... And as well as the weather in 1897-8, we don't know what the coal supply situation was like - it might be that the dealers of Skipton would have loved to have and extra 20 to 30 wagons in November 97, but they couldn't get hold of them because demand was so steep/the collieries they used were on strike?

Just for completeness, here are the sums for Skipton: In Oct-Dec inclusive 1897, there were 562 wagons of coal in total delivered for population of 10,000. Pro rata that would be 749 wagons for the four winter months. We need to add the same again for the other 8 months of the year (based on the statement in your thread that the four months of winter used the same as the other 8 months of the year as a rough ballpark. I know that the Skipton figures are October-December and October was not deemed a peak month (the winter four months for half the total useage were cited as November-February) but it's the best we have. So double 749 and divde by 10 (because the population is 10,000) gives you c 150 wagons per year per 1000. I rounded that up to 200 to take into account the gas works. NB - the figures are based on real wagon deliveries here, and at Cranleigh, so take into account that some wagons were only 8 ton capacity, and not many were loaded to full capacity anyway.

Looking back at my notes, your Skipton stats which mostly excluded the gas works came out at roughly 150 wagons / year / 1000 of population for coal. The Skipton gas works was serving a popuation of 10,000 and using the Appleby figure as a benchmark (1 ton of coal provided gas for one day day for 1000 people) then Skipton gas works would get through ten tons a day, so that's one or two extra wagons per day (recognising that 6 tons was more like the average load than 10). That would have given Skipton goods yard 300-600 extra wagons a year - but this is for the 10k population, so pro-rata'd down, that would be 30-60 extra wagons per year for a population of 1000. My figure of 200 wagons/year/1k populatiobn was based on splitting this difference. The number of coal/coke wagons could be higher in some places (if there was more industry, more people connected to the town gas supply, if it is supplied by a coalfield with less dense coal, etc.) but I felt 200 was a nice round figure that approximated to the data we had. I did a similar estimated uplift on the Cranleigh figure because of the wooded nature thereabouts which would probably reduce domestic coal consumption. Does this sound right, or have I got my sums wrong?

That does take the pressure off quite so many wagons coming in from the west, but you'd still need the same number of wagons serving all the communities, just going in perhaps opposite directions. And maybe Mr CA Coal Merchant would have his own wagons tripping backwards and forwards to WS, while his competition across the yard would have their coal arriving in colliery wagons the East Midlands and Yorkshire? As for "managing to survive" - the NE was still sending large volumes of coal down to the staithes on the Tyne, Wear and North Sea coast well after the era of this "fold in the map", because bulk transport is cost effective, even with the need to tranship (literally). All the best Neil

The "typical" rural and small town goods yard coal wagons per year per head of population figure is for "tyipcal" industry as well as domestic, so gas works would be included. To give an idea of the scale of demand, the town of Appleby, onetime county town of Westmorland, had a small gas works. The population there in 1911 was give or take 1000, and that got through a bit under 2 tons of coal per day on average, so one wagon load per week. Again you could scale this up for a larger populace.

And Cromer's two stations both had goods yards for a reason - and coal traffic was typically only a relatively small proportion of the overall at any goods yard. This was the flip side of my data harvesting from t'other place (D299 land), learning from Stephen probably citing Tavender re Sheffield Park, where coal and coke traffic accounted for just 8.6% of the 702 wagons received at Sheffield Park during the winter of 1899-1900. For a heavily wooded area you might expect coal and coke imports to be down, but even doubling that and a bit suggests that only one fifth of all arriving wagons in the rural goods yard will be fuel, the rest will be merchandise, building materials, empties to take locally produced goods away, etc. I don't know what the "mark up" would be for BNtS population wise for the tourists, as it depends how many boarding houses and hotels there were - but I would think that your seaside resort will be a big driver of goods traffic, or am I missing something?

I have been following the various postings over in D299 land by yourself and Stephen and others regarding the volumes of coal delivered to the likes of Skipton, Cranleigh and Sheffield Park - and did some sums to work out a rule of thumb guesstimate for how much a given centre of population might need by way of coal across a year. Stephen had stated that half the annual total was needed for the winter mnoths of November - February. Based the figures quoted I came up a very rough estimate (we don't know how much coal came into Skipton on the canal for example) which seems to match all three locations' overall demands (domestic and industry). It's more applicable to rural/small towns rather than major urban centres: 200 wagons/year/1000 population with half this coming in the winter months Nov-Feb That would work out for 15,000 population as a total of 72 wagons per working day (Mon-Sat) in November to February passing AC onto the scenic bit of the WNR, and 36 per working day March - October. Or - two whole trains worth of coal per working day in winter, and one in summer. If anyone can improve on the rule of thumb calculation, please let me know! Neil

Could still justify a MR brake van though...!

If the line from AC Junction (the one on the plan) down to under CA and the cassettes were to start dropping immediately, and you have a view blocked junction at the right hand end of the bit of the CA branch that runs parallel with the back wall to go straight on and , then with some jiggery you ought to be able to get that to continue on round, and dropping down the back to a cassette area underneath - say - BM? I would be tempted to make the hill that DA (the house) sits on to cover all railway lines in the vicinity, down to the road bridges that are on the map. So the AC S Jn would be in the tunnel, or at very least hidden in a cutting going into the tunnels (so you don't need to faff with double track junction on single lines) and the line to AC would simply disappear. Such a hill would justify the WNR having rising up from CA in order to shorten the tunnel. Hope this helps. Neil

As a journalist of over 30 years experience (though not in the model railway press), I did wonder reading whether actually this was a line fed to the magazine by the Rapido PR machine. After all, why sell one item when you might be able to sell two? Having a look at the current spiel on the Rapido website, this certainly makes it clear that the D1666 was as very important wagon: "A staggering total of 54,450 wagons were built to this design – designated Diagram 1666 by the LMS – up to 1930. There were more Dia. 1666s built than the total number of goods wagons on the Southern Railway!" I don't know whether this was what Rapido put out in their initial announcement - certainly web pages can easily be updated though this one still talks about the wagons in the future tense: Our models will feature independent brakes and correct wheels as appropriate. But even if Rapido put out in their PR every word that is on the website, it does still sell the product rather short. There is no mention of the ubiquity of open wagons due to pooling throughout the Grouping era nor of the fact that British Railways of course as a single operator perpetuated this "go anywhere" practice. Stephen, your D299 line that "every pre-grouping layout should have one" should surely be mirrored here to explain that while they were built by the LMS, they were used from day one across all of England, Scotland and Wales, and that given their huge numbers, they should be seen from Mallaig to Margate as well as Wick to Weston - and in significant numbers on that GW BLT that for some reason only seems to have smaller "GW" logo wagons present... But yes it doesn't help when the magazines don't understand how the railways operated.

According to a list in an article by Mike Peascod in - I think - the HMRS Journal (my source of this was a scan of the two pages on the Caledonian Railway Association Forum), which was based on RCH lists from 1874 -1890. There were the odd change for some companies during those 16 years - the MR being one of them with the scheme below from 1882 - but I don't know whether there were further changes before 1923. Probably not, but without evidence... Anyway, to answer your question, Midland Railway wagons had one tarred strand in their ropes - so one black and two white. I am fearing that for a 5 inch wagon, you'll be having to start making your own rope.... 😬 All the best Neil