Nick Holliday

According to R W Rush's book on railmotors, the loco units of the Furness examples were the only locomotives ever built at their Barrow workshops, presumably to Pettigrew's design. The Midland example was built in-house.

The Furness Railway, and probably others such as the North Eastern, built wooden hopper wagons for ore carrying, as produced in 7mm by the eponymous Furness Wagon Company, their Number 3. It would seem unlikely that normal 5 or 7 plank opens would be used for this traffic, as emptying the ore with a flat floor would be onerous.

I'm afraid I was not allowed to SE the links that Statuonmaster provided. One thing you can do is use the old-maps website. https://www.old-maps.co.uk/#/Map/265757/192701/13/101329 might get you to a large scale map from around 1948, and there are other dates available. You need to zoom out to see the image. There seems to be a lot of infrastructure around the station, if you are thinking of adopting anything other than the track plan. I was intrigued by the Electric Train Depot just to the north of the station, until I remembered the Swansea and Mumbles line, something different to add to the mix, perhaps.

I think it was Masokits, but the paving has, unfortunately, been removed from their most recent price list.

Although I am no expert, I think the mystery vehicle is a fairly bog-standard LNWR toplight elliptical roofed full brake. NPCS tend to fall into the crack between passenger and goods stock, and Jenkinson's book has limited info, but there is a photo, Plate 118, which matches the mystery one, and is quoted as D382. There may be a chance that it was originally WCJS, but my references on the subject are equally vague. There is also a different view in the HMRS book on non-corridor LNWR coaches, on page 114 of that volume.

Obviously the situation is much better in OO gauge, as Bachmann produce the E4 you are after. In N there is not so much choice. If you just consider LBSC locos there is the Dapol Terrier, and there are Langley white metal kits for the E2 and E5 that fit onto RTR chassis, although whether the ones they were designed for many years ago are still in production is debatable. Worsley Works also do etching only scratch aids for a couple of other classes. What you need to realise is that in the period you are looking at, LBSC locos were getting thin on the ground, and many of their duties had been taken over by LSWR or SECR locos, not to mention SR and BR standards. This means that you can look a bit further afield, such as the Dapol M7 or the various BR types available, and even Bulleid light Pacifics, which could be seen on all sorts of duties, or his Q1

If you actually go into the shopping box, most of the wagon transfers have a misleading "colour" option. This doesn't offer lettering in various colours, just the option to have white lettering or white lettering shaded black. HMRS would be wise to change this wording as you aren't the first person here to give up at that stage.

Just be mindful that US locos are much taller than UK and you may have problems, despite the scale factor, getting them under any bridges, particularly if you are trying to keep clearances to a minimum to reduce any gradients.

As the caption notes, the loco on the right is Irwell, a Hudswell Clarke tank. Currently dismantled, full details are provided elsewhere on the website.

I don't know if it has been suggested already, and having trawled though the 18 pages of this once, I am not in a mind to do it again. At the moment, in WHSmiths (other newsagents etc are available) there are at least two layout design magazines with ideas, plans and inspiration, produced by the modelling magazines themselves. They are relatively inexpensive and might help you to curb your aspirations and find something that meets much of your wishlist, and could fit in the space you have, whatever that is. As for your 2 x 4 plan, what do you intend to do with it? All I can see you doing is shuttling backwards and forwards with little purpose, or have a missed a key ingredient in your design. An Inglenook design would at last give a reason for shunting, if that's what you want. I don't understand another comment that a 6 foot long train might not be enough for a branch line - given you appear to be working in OO that represents a train of seven Mk 1 coaches, and most people would be more than happy to have that for their crack express train. Branch line coaches tended to be shorter, and a good train would be three or four coaches, perhaps just over three foot long, four foot including a loco. BTW - the range of funny looking symbols along the bottom right hand edge of each posting is intended to allow you to express "thanks" ,"like" or even a sort of "Wow!" without creating yet another post and using them will help to save a polar bear or something.

Only if you wanted a model of your model. The ratio I was referring to was for scaling from the real thing, so your layout represents 760 x 620 feet of real estate, so the scale plan, at quarter size of OO, would be 2' 6" x 2' 0". I did realise this approach would not be 100% accurate, but as the task was to create a layout plan, I can't believe absolute accuracy was necessary, as there would be compromises and redrawing required. If the subject were a building or item of rolling stock, I would have recommended scanning, but handling A1 on a domestic scanner can be a handful.

Depends what you mean by general merchandise. As Andy May has suggested, the bulk of non-coal traffic in open Private Traders' wagons would be other types of mineral commodities, whereas manufactured or processed items would probably require some form of protection, hence the use of special PO vans for salt, lime, cement, beer and gunpowder, or tanks for petroleum products, acids, molasses or milk. There were also PO vans for oddities like eggs, sausages and tents, but few and far between. Some of the hardier items above might have been bagged up and carried in opens which could be fully sheeted for protection, and beer or whisky barrels might be possible loads, but probably only as empties, since security of these when full would be an issue. I cannot recall seeing any PO wagons with sheeting rails, apart from, perhaps, some China clay carriers, so I suspect suitable railway company wagons would be preferred.

Since the original plan was at 1:200, reducing it still further would take it to 1:526. Not quite sure what scale that is! We are assuming that Stuart is working in 4mm, to get the plan to full size for that scale would require trio copying at 262% (ratio corrected once mathematical head installed!) and there aren't many copiers that can do that enlargement in one step, and the original point was that the sheet was too large in the first place. I think we need a bit more from Stuart as to what he wants to do with the drawing, to be able to give him accurate scaling ratios, but a common scale for layout planning is 1mm to the foot, giving a quarter sized plan, and that can be achieved by reducing the drawing at 65% ratio. Edited to correct miscalculation!

I agree with the Irish idea. Two of the vehicles look as if they have similar derivation, although they are subtly different. They have a lot in common with the Dublin and South Eastern Railway cattle wagons, although the central door is a bit narrower than the double doors on the cattle wagons. I wonder if the one in the pair of vehicles might be a Prize Cattle van, based on the cattle wagon, much like the LBSCR PCV's, as can be seen on the 5&9 website. I don't think either are proper horse boxes, as neither have an obvious groom compartment. Not so sure about the solo example, as it seems to have windows instead of the louvres or solid panels of the other one. The five compartment third is a bit generic, although there is a hint that the nearer end is glazed, but it could easily be a D&SER vehicle, my sources of info not being that comprehensive in this area. May I suggest that the other thread of this discussion be closed, to prevent wasted effort by others?

Why don't you take a photo of the part of the plan that interests you, making sure that you have some sort of scaling device to get things right. A scale rule would do, or perhaps draw a scale line so that it reads in units that you can deal with. You can open a digital photo in a variety of drawing packages, and then scale it up or down as you like.

Further to my previous post I was going to suggest investigating the Atlas range, bearing in mind your location, but I was rather surprised to se that it appears, even with substantial discounts, to be almost twice the price of Peco, so I won't bother! However, if you do decide to go down the flexible track route, if you have no track at the moment, I would suggest looking at adopting Peco 75 standards. As far as I can see the geometry of the small radius points is similar to Settrack but I am not that familiar with the range to be absolutely certain. You can get them with live frogs, which means better running at the expense of a bit of extra work when wiring up the layout, but there are plenty of experts here who can advise on how to do it correctly. What you will get is a better looking track, more in keeping with the Bluebell theme, even if it isn't bullhead rail.

If you are going down the Setrack route there is a little to be saved if you can list the pieces shown on the diagram and shop around. But even at a good price there are 11 simple points at around £9 each, and two curved ones at £14, so the pointwork alone will come to around £130, and it is best to buy new, don't be tempted by second hand items at this stage, as you can never be sure what you are getting. The high cost of the plain track in Setrack form surprised me. There are around 40 bits and pieces, and they appear to cost between £1 and £2.50 each, so there is perhaps another £80 there. (£1 for around 40mm of track works out at £25 per metre!) if you could take the plunge and go for using Peco flexitrack, you should be able to get enough track for £20 and have a bit left over for the fishplates you'll need.

Although they don't appear to have exactly the size you want, it would appear that all their PO lettering transfers are available in both white and white with black shading. You need to go to the "colour" option, which then offers just white or white with black shading - no reds, yellows or greens for those odd examples!

There are more choices within the Branchlines range, although you need to contact him by email, as there is no useful website, and some items aren't always available. His list includes a number of SER four and six wheelers, as well as suitable NPCS to add to a passenger train. There is also a suite of LCDR bogie coaches, and a couple of bogie SECR items, an invalid salon and a 44ft bogie composite. Roxey also have a number of SER and LCDR NPCS kits to liven up the mix.

It would be useful to know whether you want some sort of design link between these locos. The Loch has a Crewe front end, Stroudley type cab and, perhaps, yellow livery. Were the last two features the ones that suggested a Gladstone? Otherwise the B1 is almost the antithesis of the Loch design, which has a bogie for flexibility on convoluted tracks, and small wheels to cope with gradients, whereas Gladstone was designed primarily for express duties on a relatively straight and level system. If you want to keep the family likeness of the cab, you could go for Gladstone's little brother, the mixed traffic D2 or Lyons class, (see some of Burgundy's entries or the Kemilway web site) which is similar in size to the later LSW Jubilee class. The earlier batch, with Craven type tenders, avoids the too distinctive Brighton inside framed tender design. However, the 0-4-2 tender arrangement was rather rare in Britain, with odd examples on a few lines, with only the southern lines, the GNR and the CR and GSWR in Scotland having reasonable fleets of them. The alternative might be a 2-4-0, which, as either inside or outside framed, ran on almost every railway in Britain, and the LBSC had several examples, including Stroudley's Belgravia class, which again had his cab design to maintain the thread.

I would tend to disagree. Most branch lines were constructed with optimistic views of potential passenger traffic, at least to get the original finance, and constructing the platforms themselves was one of the cheapest elements of the costs. This wasn't true in the very early days, 1830s, when passengers were almost ignored in the planning, but once the amount of traffic that was generated was seen, promoters tended to feel the sky was the limit. It was only really around the turn of the century when Light Railways became fashionable, that minimalist provision was made - by that time there was a more realistic, usually, view of how much traffic would be generated, although there were still some grandiose schemes.Looking at a selection of archetypal southern branchlines, they commonly were provided with platforms between 250 and 400 feet long, and so could accommodate 7-10 coach trains of six wheeled stock, or, later 5-8 bogie coaches. In 4mm this would equate to platforms around 3' 6" to 5' long, but the trains would generally not be that long, just two or three coaches in length. However, you have to consider special occasions, such as market days or excursions, when it wasn't unknown for the trains to exceed the length of the platforms, in some locations. When this occurred regularly, it was, often, fairly easy to extend the platforms to suit - this happened at Hayling Island and, I believe, Swanage. As for goods yards, these can be as big or small as you like. In some instances the yard might be remote from the passenger station, as at Belmont on the Epsom Downs branch, or, occasionally, the next station's yard was sufficiently close to make a separate one uneconomic, such as Bramber on the line between Shoreham and Horsham.

There is a complete run of precast concrete fencing along the Brighton Road south of Belmont Station https://mapstreetview.com/#ukfrr_-49y2_3q.9_-ne46 As Nearholmer says, the panels remain horizontal, stepping down to match the gradient.

You don't mention which scale you are working in, so it is difficult to resolve your problem. However I would point out that there is going to be little or no space inside a continuous layout, making exhibition operation very difficult, as would be getting access to anything in the centre of the layout. Also, with a round layout with reasonably generous curves, there will be only a short "straight" section between the two ends, although I am not sure how your L-shaped layout was going to work if you are modelling in 4mm, either.

I seem to recall that the platform canopies at Horsted Keynes were roofed with zinc sheeting, probably galvanised steel rather than pure zinc sheets, and they were erected circa 1881.

Zinc sheeting would be a cheaper and lighter alternative.