wagonman

A couple of things... Alan Buttler of Modelu has added some 'Ragged Victorians' to his collection. As they are based on 3D scans of real people they can be scaled to any size and printed out. https://www.modelu3d.co.uk/product-category/finescale-figures/ragged-victorians/ Mortimer was a GWR station – between Reading and Basingstoke (so strictly speaking Berks & Hants Railway). Are you going to include Pictor's stone siding (on the left facing the tunnel entrance)? Slicing coaches down the middle and inserting extra bits was what Holden did for the GER six a side stock – the exact opposite of what he had done at Swindon converting BG stock to the 'narrow' gauge after 1892.

If it is a statutory right of navigation then it is quite a complex procedure to extinguish it. When they built a new flood bank round Cley a sluice would have cut off access to the quay, historically important but now rarely used, so they built a canal-style gate instead. Every time there is a very high tide forecast the gate is closed. It's saved us from a soaking at least twice in the last 15 years.

It hasn't opened since 1987 – and won't do again as they've laid continuous rail across the swing section.

A swift and dirty copy out of a book (PO Wagons of the Ice Waggon & Ironworks Co by J A Watts) of Potts wagon 531, a 12-ton wagon built in 1910 to dimensions slightly smaller than the 19213 standard. Livery was dark red with white lettering shaded black. I don't know of any RCH 1923 wagons owned or operated by the company. Wagons merely hired were painted in a similar livery but with the body in grey, according to Watts.

The standard length for GWR stock was 15' 6" until sometime in the '80s (I should look it up but not really relevant to this discussion) after which it became 16' 0". Later still – 1920s – they adopted the RCH standard underframe length of 17' 6". The 3-plank wagons were all to the old length, the four plankers all to the new 16' length as were most of the Iron Minks. The 3 plank wagons would have all gone from main line use by your time period I would think.

An example comes to mind: Maurice Jones of Weston super Mare whose only (so far as I know) wagon was numbered 40, which just happened to be his age the year he bought it. Perhaps it was a birthday present to himself? Phipps of Devizes had five wagons numbered 111, 222, 333, 444, and 555. And so on...

A rather better view of the real thing at Didcot. Note that the transom is notched into the main baulk. Also the wood packing under the rail to stop it digging into the baulk over time, and of course the (non-imaginary) fang bolts!

Before you go too far I'd better point out that the cross timbers (transoms) were set between rather than underneath the longitudinal baulks. They were there to keep the rails apart – the opposing function of pulling the rails/baulks together was done with metal tie bars. The Broad Gauge Society http://www.broadgauge.org.uk/index.html will have drawings etc though you may have to join! They say "never model a model" but here is a snap of a bit of baulk track as reduced to standard gauge and still i use in 1905 – at least in my model universe. If you peer closely enough, almost lost in the ballast is a tie rod just in front of the transom. Rail is bridge section from the BGS held down by imaginary fang bolts...

Consulting Leleux's Index – which doesn't go later than 1974 – there was something about Norton-in-Hales (probably a drawing of the station building) in a 1964 edition of Railway Modeller. Don't know what month but it was page 277.

I've only got the 1904 edition though I believe there was a facsimile of the 1923 edition. It wouldn't list coal merchants unless they had their own private siding – which Keay didn't. There was an article in the Model Railways magazine (exMRN) back in the '70s/'80s which gave a detailed analysis of the traffic at Norton-in-Hales, including its use for stabling race day trains from Market Drayton. Might be useful for operating your layout.

The Manors were 'blue' engines of course. What was the weight restriction for the Teign Valley line?

Mostly it would be because of its age of course. I don't think they were building new 8-tonners in 1923.

Indeed. Small coal merchants were among the last users of 8-ton wagons as they much preferred them; 12-tons was too much to deal with. Granted his wagon would likely have been hired, or bought on deferred payments, but it would still have been cheaper which was one of my points.

The 1913 Kelly's Directory is the latest one I can find – this has a William Henry Keay recorded as a farmer and James Meakin & Sons Ltd as coal merchants. Keay had a son Edwin George, born April 1896 who would seem a likely candidate. The 1911 census merely records him as a 'Farmers son working on farm' but then he was only 14 at the time. William died in 1921 but there were older sons to inherit Brook Farm, assuming they survived the war. None of which helps you with your wagon livery of course... James Meakin & Sons Ltd are still in business – they're based in Market Drayton – and may well have had wagons though they're not in the PO Wagons index. I don't know if Keay set up in opposition to Meakin, or they had withdrawn as there wasn't sufficient business – the population was under 400 – but either way Keay is unlikely to have bought a new 1923-spec wagon when there were plenty of smaller, older, cheaper wagons around. That he later became the Postmaster rather suggests his venture was not a success? You can have plenty of fun building Stoke area wagons...

That's being naughty. In this case it was making up a jolly threesome. You know the saying: two's company, three's a derailment.

Without wasting hours delving through my library... I think 101 was referred to as the 'Holden' tank because it used James Holden's patent design of oil burner (as applied to Petrolea et al). I doubt he had snuck back to Swindon for a bit of moonlightling.

The GWR had one of their Python CCTs specially strengthened to take elephants...

But surely historians have always judged the past by the standards of their own times – what else could they do? When I was studying history one of the texts I had to read was Pieter Geyl's analysis of the changing attitudes to Napoleon Bonaparte during the 130 or so years since Waterloo (he was writing 'Napoleon For and Against' in the mid 1940s).

There's a lot of cocaine swilling about in the District of Columbia ... or did you mean Colombia?

As some wag sprayed on a wall of the Odéon in Paris in May 1968, "Je suis Marxiste – tendence Groucho".

When Network Rail was created out of the ashes of Failtrack they promised they would take the bulk of their work in-house with the twin aims of improving control and reducing costs. It doesn't seem to have happened though... A rolling programme of electrification using their own labour would be better than the ludicrous situation we have had recently with schemes cancelled half way through and operators forced to use inefficient and expensive bi-mode trains instead.

Most DLOs were attached to Housing or Refuse departments and were usually kept busy. They were abolished under 'Thatcherism' from the '80s on, not because they were inefficient (some were, some weren't) but because they failed to provide profit opportunities for the Tory Party's sponsors.

You just have to worry about the man-eating pike...

I'm afraid to say the brake push rods on your 3 plank are the wrong way round as those wagons had normal lever brakes.

The various divisions seemed to have used different designations for the various coach rakes. For instance, what Ian Smith describes as a B-set in Bristol (c1918 and presumably earlier too) was a K-set. Their B-sets were made up of a close coupled trio B/3rd+Compo+3rd (usually T47, U4 and S9 as modelled by Ratio) with a loose B/3rd to round it off. The basic set could have strengtheners added, and the odd swinger too.