James Harrison

Further work; the previous iteration of the plan needed boards a metre deep in places - not ideal - and I thought the passenger side of things looked just too cramped with that middle road. So, I had a play around and found that Iain Rice's 'Harestone' take on Minories would work better. Well, that got me this: But that didn't really do much about the depth of the boards. So I revisited the goods yard, asking really what I needed as a minimum. The list I came up with; - Coal sidings - End loading dock - Livestock dock - Goods warehouse/ shed Well not all of that needs to go in the main yard; the livestock dock and the end loading dock could be an ancillary platform across from the island. The goods warehouse only needs one or two sidings, ditto the coal yard. And after a bit of moving tracks around, I came up with this; Which looks like it would be suitably challenging to work. The elephant in the room is that the MSLR and GCR didn't go in for single track particularly, my justification for it could well be that the Worksop - Rufford route was built by an independent company that the MSLR bought up in the 1890s. Now if I say that, that gives me a route to having a Midland 1400 class 2-4-0 in GCR livery - having been sold on, and then included in the inventory the MSLR took ownership of.

I had a chat with the Peco representatives at the Stafford show yesterday and I asked about whether they had any plans to expand the bullhead range. I was told that they whilst haven't decided what they're going to do next, curved points, a Y and a three-way are options they're looking at.

I visited with a few friends yesterday and happily spent the whole day at the show (from opening time to the 15-minutes-to-closure call). We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, so many thanks to the organisers for putting together such a great show.

Picked up at the Stafford show today, a Ratio Midland 2-4-0 kit (or rather, part of it - the loco body only). I've also got- bought previously - a whole Ratio 2-4-0 Midland 2-4-0. My plan for the complete kit was either 1. Build it out the box, fit it with GCR boiler fittings and describe it as an imaginery Parker 2-4-0 (basically a smaller version of the Class 2 4-4-0) 2. Just build it out the box as a Midland engine 3. Use it as the basis of a kitbash for a Sacre 2-4-0 Each of these had drawbacks 1. I've found no evidence that Parker planned a 2-4-0 version of his 0-6-0 goods or 4-4-0 express passenger types; 2. I'm not modelling the Midland Railway; 3. I tried something similar years ago with the Ratio Midland 4-4-0 kit and... it wasn't the finest of results. However now, having bought the body only- for a very reasonable price I might add- option 3 comes open again as if it goes wrong I'm not ruining a whole kit and wasting my time. This still leaves of course what exactly do I do with the complete kit....

Another clue in the hunt for the last brown and cream carriage. In volume 4 of Paul King's 'Railways of North East Lincolnshire' there's a photograph of 'City of Lincoln' hauling a boat train near Grimsby in the summer of 1913. At least two of the carriages in the train are very distinctly two-tone and the remainder of the rake looks like it could well be the same.

Partial answer to to my quandry about the dates when various GCR carriage liveries petered out; Issue 88 of 'Forward' has, as its cover, a photograph taken near Sheffield in about 1910. It's a Manchester-bound train hauled by a Robinson atlantic and is composed of only three carriages. The first is a brown and cream clerestory, the second is in teak and the third is in French grey and brown. The caption states that it's an 'unusual' photograph, but there we have it - proof that the three liveries coexisted and actually ran together in the same train at least once...

I'm afraid I can't find anything for 452/1873 in Dow. There are a couple of MW 0-6-0s listed for which the works number is unknown, so it could quite easily be one of those. Typically if the works number is listed as unknown, then driving wheel diameter and cylinder diameter and stroke is also absent.

Thanks - Dow records 'Bismarck' as an 0-6-0, works number 747, bought from Logan & Hemingway in May 1880 for £1,100. Given MSLR number 455 and scrapped March 1905. Works number 707 is recorded in the same source as being a Manning Wardle 0-4-0 bought in September 1880 and scrapped October 1907, MSLR number 457 (later 457C). Darn, this looks like I'm going to be in the market for two of them. One as a contractor's loco and the other as a GC shunter.

The GCR bought a number of Manning Wardle 0-6-0s for use at Grimsby Docks. Frustratingly, the records given in Dow Vol 2 are incomplete. I wonder if any of them were L type...

What passes for The Alhambra in your neck of the woods? I think you deserve a night there after that endeavour.

Model Railway News, March 1965. 7mm scale drawing of the Sacre 2-4-0 tanks.

Ah, I've 'accidentally' ordered a second rake after seeing the GCR samples. No idea how that happened... 🤣

That's one of those photos that makes you wish time travel was possible.

Ahh, earlier than my collection goes back then.

Lowhead and Stoking Madly, January 1998 RM, built by Brian Pratt? Two stations, face to face, with a very short mainline. Each station had more sidings than you could shake a stick at.

I'm sure it will keep getting tweaked here and there, of course, but at the moment I think this is quite satisfying. The separate headshunt in the yard has gone (I thought that was making the goods yard entry look quite short and visually compressing the apparent distance between the station and the junction). The weird dogleg siding has been cut back and its neighbour has been omitted, and this gives me room to fit a decent-sized goods shed and office in there. The next siding down does double duty and acts as a headshunt for the two kickback sidings. Quite what function those sidings might fulfil I'm not entirely certain, you could run a narrow road up alongside them and put a derrick or a small overhead crane in there but it would be cramped. Or some sort of loading dock, maybe. Somewhere for livestock pens? In any case in terms of buildings for the yard I'm probably looking at a warehouse and office block, stable (already to hand), bothy (already to hand), weighbridge, coal merchants office...

I'm already a member- I didn't realise the back catalogue had been digitised! Thanks for the heads-up.

Parker and Pollitt 4-4-0s, the earlier Robinson designs and even some Sacre types hanging around, with a mix of carriage liveries, in a semi-industrial north-east Midlands urban setting. It's going to be quite recognisably 'all my own work'- when I get around to it.

My thought was to put the coal merchants simply because, at that point, the board is going to have to be quite narrow. Some coal bins and a small office is likely all that I'm going to have room for there. As it usually is, about half an hour after wrapping up that iteration of the plan I started seeing how I could improve it, so that long siding with the weird dogleg in it is going to be revisited. Those are a couple of useful examples to fall back upon in lieu of any specific GCR coach-painting data. (I'm also buying up as many back issues of 'Forward' as I can lay my hands on to see if somebody gave a definitive answer to the question back in 1983 or whenever). I think investigating the single track option is really moving the design away from a 'modern' mainline and more toward a middling secondary route or even branch line approach, and I really don't see that as a bad thing. For all that the likes of the Sam Fays and Directors are amongst my favourite locomotive designs, the conclusion I've been coming to is that to run them convincingly means a layout which can accommodate rakes of 5 or 6 60' carriages- which is something I just don't have room for. So if they're off the table the raison d'etre for my 1913-1914 period is gone, and at that point I might as well decide to set the layout in 1910/1911, and not have to worry about exactly when the brown and cream disappeared.

Under my filing system, this is iteration #8 of the plan. However I suspect if we were to go back over the 40-some-odd pages and 6 and a half years of the thread to date, it would be more like #20. I always seem to struggle when planning out a goods yard, either I end up with a very space-hungry cats cradle or alternatively a ladder of dart-straight sidings, which is fine except for it's not exactly the most visually exciting of arrangements (also I have a 'thing' about lots of parallel straight tracks, especially if they're parallel to the board edge). I usually end up with something unacceptably weighted toward either the passenger or freight side of things too. What I've tried here- and I really don't know why it's taken me so long to think of it- is to take my entry road (and therefore by extension the reception road and loco release run-round) on a 'scenic tour' around the outer perimeter of the yard. The yard itself then sits inside a triangle formed on one side by the platform roads and on the others by the run round. Whilst, yes, that yard is (again) a ladder of straight sidings, somehow (I think because every element is at an angle relative to its neighbours) it looks more interesting. Couple that with one siding being somewhat longer than the others, and a couple of (very tight!) sidings coming off the run-round itself - to a small coal merchants yard, I imagine - and it has the makings of something that answers the trinity of being compact, visually interesting and operationally satisfying, whilst still being of a scale comparable to the more formal passenger side.

Thank you for your reply, t-b-g - I understand (and sympathise) with your point of view. If you ever happen to bring it down to the West Midlands area any time I'll be sure to come have a look.

Whilst I've got far, far too much going on at the moment to start building RLS (or even progress with the various locomotive and rolling stock builds that are paused midway), I do have time, occasionally, to interrogate my concept and tweak my plans. What generally happens is I draw something up and come back to it a few weeks later and ask, 'is that really what I want? Am I satisfied with it?' The latest thought is, do I really need double track throughout on the main line. If we look at the full extents of the GCR, there are stretches of single line; -From New Holland to Barton-on-Humber has always been single track; -The last mile or so to Wigan Central was single track; -Various of the branches in Lincolnshire would appear to have been single track. My thought is, as the whole concept of Rufford is as a point where two branches terminate, is double track appropriate? For all that I've been talking about the occasional long-distance express coming in and a healthy level of local traffic, I don't see that the timetable would justify it (at least, not double track throughout- much like the Wigan line I imagine both routes becoming double track a few miles out- as we've discussed previously for the Mansfield branch). So I've been roughly sketching out what a pair of single lines would look like. I think this has a fair bit going for it. You've got a stretch of double track (well it looks like double track, could be used as formal double track, but could equally well be two adjacent single lines), an interesting junction which I think I've laid out on prototypical lines (even if much compressed), and I've started to sketch in a lead-in to a goods yard (I always seem to struggle planning that aspect, either I end up with a cats cradle, or a fairly boring-looking ladder of sidings). The whole thing just looks a little less... quart in a pint pot?

Do you have a thread for your layout, @t-b-g? I'd be interested to follow progress. (From what you've previously mentioned it sounds like it has much the same concept as my own project).

My flippant answer would be 'affordable'. My helpful answer would be to suggest gaps in pre-Grouping ranges. I can't think of one pre-Grouping company for which we have a range that takes in shunter/ pilot, small goods, heavy goods, passenger tank/ small passenger tender loco and express passenger. I'd suggest locos such as the GCR N5, the GNR J6, the GER Y14, I'm sure others can identify similar gaps...

Just out of interest Richard, I assume the D7 is a kit? - Who makes it? (I'd love a model of 567 for my layout, considering I'm a member of that project).