MikeOxon

I.K. Brunel wrote the following, in a letter to T. E. Harrison on 5th March 1838: “... let me call your attention to the appearance - we have a splendid engine of Stephenson's, it would be a beautiful ornament in the most elegant drawing room and we have another of Quaker-like simplicity carried even to shabbyness but very possibly as good as engine, but the difference in the care bestowed by the engine man, the favour in which it is held by others and even oneself, not to mention the public, is striking.” My own models of early GWR engines are no more than ‘ornaments’ but, as such, have given me a great deal of pleasure. They have led me to take a greater interest in those very early days of the railway and its hesitant progress through the many set-backs experienced at the time. Members of the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) may have read my brief accounts in that society’s recent Newsletters. Four ‘early’ GWR Engine Models The GWR was conceived initially as primarily a passenger-carrying enterprise so, after the engines, the first vehicles needed were carriages for first and second class passengers. At that time, there was no concept that ‘ordinary’ people had any need to travel any distance from their own towns or villages. The model for these early carriages was the road-coaches of the time and, indeed, one of Brunel’s justifications for his ‘broad gauge’ was that it would allow large wheels to be placed outside the main body of the coach, as in the case of contemporary stage coaches. This was quickly found to be impractical, since large wheels blocked the entrances to the compartments, but the overall construction methods initially followed road vehicle principles. I decided to make a model of one of the earliest types of 2nd-class carriage, to help me appreciate the differences between it and later designs. The most obvious distinction is, of course, size but it is clear that the dynamics of railway vehicles was not understood at the time and the choice of a 6 foot wheel base for a vehicle intended to run at speed on 7 foot gauge track seems unfortunate, to say the least! It is hardly surprising that the rough riding of these carriages caused sufficient concern for them to be ‘ordered off the line’ following a Board Meeting on 12th July 1838. In creating my model, I followed my usual practice of extruding the various components from a reference drawing – in this case, Data Sheet 102 from the BGS. Creating my 3D model in ‘Fusion 360’ I have often advocated breaking a model down into smaller parts, to reduce the time needed to print each part so that any necessary corrections can be applied quickly. As in most things, it is best not to be dogmatic about this, especially in the case of a small model like this carriage, where the overall printing time is quite short anyway. In fact, I discovered with this model that printing the body in one piece produced a better surface finish than was obtained by printing the sides and ends separately. This may be down to the settings I use with my printer but the sides that I printed flat on the printer bed showed much more surface grain than those printed upright, as shown in the examples below: Sides and Ends printed flat on Printer Bed The time taken to print the above set of parts was 56min. For comparison, the time taken to print the complete body was only 1h 32min, including internal partitions between the compartments, which resulted in a rigid structure with a fine surface finish. I printed the chassis separately as shown below: Body Printed in One Piece above Separate Chassis In this case, printing the sides separately would be a poor decision, as the time saved is insignificant and the surface finish is poorer – and there is the additional need to align and assemble the various components after printing. Early Carriages in Context Another member of the BGS brought to my attention the historical engineering collection held in the National NetworkRail Archives Amongst them, I found a rather perplexing set of drawings of Maidenhead Depot. When the first section of line opened to the public from Paddington, the original terminus was on the East bank of the River Thames near Taplow, where the bridge across to Maidenhead had not yet been completed. According to James Wyld’s ‘Great Western Railway Guide’ of 1839: “The Great Western Railway Company have a considerable station here, 42 feet above the level of the London depot, with engine-house, police station, and the usual offices. There is a jail for debtors and felons. The principal trade is in malt, meal, and timber, and the passing traffic derived from the Great Western road and the railway” All this seems to have disappeared, once the bridge across the Thames was completed, but the Archive drawings include one of foundations for what appears to be a carriage shed, with a central traverser to serve several bays. There is also a base for a small turntable, with a note on the drawing stating “This Turnplate to be carried as far West as the Solid Ground will allow”. I assume that this refers to the embankment leading to the yet-to-be-built bridge across the River Thames. Out of interest, I took this drawing (Ref.NRCA161489) and used ‘Fusion 360’ to create a 3D rendering, as shown below. I added some of my 1837 carriage models, to show how well they would have fitted within the planned structure. 3D Model of Carriage Shed Foundations with 3 Carriages Whether this shed was ever built is open to conjecture since these early carriages did not last very long. Rapid Carriage Development One of the reasons why I like to build these early vehicles is so that I can use them to demonstrate how rapidly the designs evolved as they began to move away from their road-coach origins. Sometimes, there seem to have been backward steps before ideas moved on towards our modern concepts. For example, according to Whishaw ‘The Railways of Great Britain and Ireland’, 1842, the GWR rapidly abandoned the use of closed 2nd-class carriages, in favour of open sides, because they were thought to detract from the numbers paying for 1st class! Here are my models of the 1837 carriage next to the slightly later ‘open’ 2nd, showing the overall increase in dimensions, together with the use of six wheels. My models of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ 2nd class carriages The difference in scale, when compared with more ‘modern’ practice (in my context, the late 19th century!), was really brought home when I placed my model 1837 carriage alongside one of the well-known Tri-ang GWR clerestory models! My 1837 model against a ‘00’ Tri-ang Clerestory coach. Mike

I like the way they carefully avoid looking at each other at the same time!

2nd hand book pricing is a nightmare. I usually scan ABE books to get a feel for prices but descriptions of condition can be very variable too. On the plus side, I recently bought a facsimile edition of Measom's 1851 guide to the GWR for £3.04 including postage and it looks like new!!! It' remarkable for its illustrations of many early stations. Don't forget the Internet archive for free downloads of many out-of-copyright old books. Mike

A very early example of a railway engine being used to tow river boats occurred in 1822 at Newcastle. At that time, William Hedley's engines were being used to bring coal to the Tyne. When there was a keelmen's strike, Hedley suggested that the engine 'Wylam Dilly' could be mounted on a keel and used as a tug boat. Apparently, this broke the strike. For more information, see https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/science-and-technology/wylam-dilly/ Mike

As others have said, the condensing mode is only for use in tunnels. When 'condensing', there is no draw on the fire so any smoke is what might be seen when the engine is stationary. The water in the tanks rapidly reached boiling point, so 'condensing' was used sparingly.

Thank you, Mikkel. Whenever, during my historical research, I come across am unusual vehicle, I cannot resist the temptation to create a model and, so far, my 3D printer has risen to every challenge presented to it! I am a terrible 'finisher' though and it is all too obvious that my models are missing many small features - buffers, brakes, pipes, and so on. I agree that 'people' would also be a great help when presenting my 'scenes' I bought some Andre Stadden figures several years ago and think they are very impressive but they are languishing in a drawer somewhere, waiting for me to get out my paint brushes. But then, I get distracted by some intriguing new discovery from the archives 🙂

link not working for me but I'd use red primer. The White areas have a reddish brown tinge to them anyway.

I frequently look in your wagon thread but somehow missed that post! How curious that we should have been considering the same thing at almost the same time. Your descriptions are very helpful, although I'm still not sure how the sliding parts worked on the GWR version. Did the roof hatch slide sideways coupled to the sliding door? I was expecting to see some evidence of runners on the roof but there is nothing obvious on the drawings I have seen. On the broad gauge, it becomes a surprisingly large vehicle. Mike

Thank you for looking in, AYMod - I think injecting a little fantasy into the subject is an important part of railway modelling!

I see that we’re now in the 10th year since I started writing my pre-grouping blog. Looking back, I realise how much my approach to railway modelling has changed over that period. There have been two major technical innovations and one significant change of emphasis in my interests. The first technical innovation, which occurred soon after I started exploring the earlier period, was the Silhouette Cutter, which opened up the possibility of creating complex panelled carriage sides. Since this cutter could also register cutting patterns with colour printing, it also made it possible for me to reproduced the complex liveries especially popular in the 19th century. My late 19th-century train using Silhouette cut and printed carriage sides A few years later, I made my next technical step into 3D printing, which allowed me to move away from ‘decorating’ essentially flat surface and to create all sorts of raised details onto components such as boiler cladding and riveted frames, as well as more complex vehicle shapes. My 3D-printed Broad Gauge train from the 1840s My interest in railway history received a major ‘nudge’, when I discovered that members of my wife’s family had starting working for the GWR almost from the beginning, progressing from general labourers in 1840 and working up the long career-road, through cleaners, firemen, and eventually succeeding as 1st class enginemen. Their employment records provided me with many interesting details about where they were employed and which engines they drove. Since that discovery, my interest in the early history of the GWR and, especially the broad gauge era, has continued to grow, which led to the creation of several models to help me appreciate more completely the ‘look and feel’ of those early railways. It has also meant that I somewhat lost track of parts of the ‘world’ I initially created around my fictional station of ‘North Leigh’ , on the planned but never built branch from the OW&WR ‘Cotswold’ line to Witney. Looking back over some of the comments on my posts, I realise that I did create some links between the Wilcote family in North Leigh and my later interests in the area around Bullo Pill in Gloucestershire, where members of my wife’s family once lived. In a reply to a comment by @Mikkel, I ‘discovered’ that Lady Wilcote*, before her marriage had lived at Flaxley Hall, a little to the West of Gloucester. The remark was made in the context of a ‘luggage truck’ and it set me thinking about how the move from Gloucestershire to Wilcote might have been achieved. Flaxley Hall, Gloucestershire, (DAP ‘aquarelle’ painting) I thought about my model of a ‘pantechnicon’, which could have been used for the job, but then realised that I never completed a model of the ‘road van truck’, needed to transport the pantechnicon over the GWR. It was a quick and easy lengthening of the ‘carriage truck' that I’d already built for Brunel’s Britzka’. 3D-printed components of Road Van Truck Once I had printed the new version, I had everything needed to create a train to transport all the newly-wed Lady Wilcote’s goods and chattels to North Leigh station. The key vehicle was ‘Knee’s Furniture Van’. This vehicle, when loaded on to the GWR road van truck, took full advantage of the generous BG loading gauge. My model ‘Pantechnicon’ on GWR road van truck I like to set up my models as a ‘diorama’, by photographing them against a plain background and then superimposing a suitable back-scene by means of ‘Photoshop’. As shown below, I assembled a complete ‘house removal’ train, comprising a luggage truck, then the pantechnicon on its truck, followed by my recently-constructed closed van , all brought up at the rear with a horse box and carriage on its truck. The whole train is in the charge of the Gooch bogie-class 4-4-0T ‘Aurora’. My diorama of a ‘removals’ train headed by 4-4-0ST ‘Aurora’ As a slightly more ambitious ‘montage’, I have also superimposed a photo of my ‘removals’ train onto an engraving of Ealing Station, derived from Measom’s Guide to the GWR, of 1851. I’m not sure what route the train must have taken but it seems that it first travelled to Paddington Depot and then made a separate journey out to North Leigh, via Oxford. My ‘removal van’ train passing through Ealing Station Mike *footnote: I know a little about Amy Wilcote's mother - she was born in 1849 at Flaxley Abbey, into the family of the Crawley-Boevey Baronetcy, and married Lord Wilcote in about 1870. Flaxley Abbey is not very far from Bullo Pill and she once commented on the accident there, saying "all those poor cows".

You are making good use of your Silhouette cutter, Mikkel. Don't forget that you could also make use of Slaters Plasticard Microstrip, which comes in sizes down to 0.01"x 0.02" (0.25 x 0.5 mm), which can be useful for very fine beading. If you scribe a groove with the cutter, then it can be used to help keep the strip aligned correctly. Alternatively, you can also use fine wire, again set into grooves made with the cutter. Once painted over, the mix of materials becomes irrelevant.

try Wizard Models - all sorts of stuff and canopy brackets too.

I think you should be ready to point out to him that it is a great improvement on other station along the line, where the eaves of the porch are out of line with the rest of the building. Mr Price's station is so much more harmonious.

Wrong for where? We're talking about Traeth Mawr, not some other station, and architects didn't do the same thing every time, you know. I think he decided that a lower profile roof was a better choice for that location. It's like the carriages on the North Leigh branch - everyone except Tri-ang seemed to forget the diagram to which the coaches on that branch were built. :)

My printer is a Geeetech E180 FDM mini-printer that cost just under £200 when I bought it in Dec.2018. I bought it simply to explore what I could do with a new modelling method and struggled at first with the 'learning curve'. It's taken me to places I never expected to go! A lot of my early progress (?) is documented in my other blog. Regarding roofs> This one is tending to curve up a bit at the ends. Perhaps I should add a longeron or two underneath.

I thought the same, so was pleased to identify it through the OPC collection. Looking at photos of the Swindon dump there were lots of variations that probably remain undocumented.

Because of various distractions, I’ve not had much time for model-building recently. I have however been spending quite a lot of time thinking about those very early days of the GWR when those first engines, which I modelled last year, were being delivered. Some of these engines were delivered by canal to West Drayton, where it seems that the first depot of the GWR was established. At that time, the way ahead was far from certain and concerns about the desirability of adopting Brunel’s proposals for the ‘broad gauge’. were still being hotly debated. Illustration from Measom’s Guide to the GWR 1851 Whereas we have quite a lot of information about the early locomotives, the other vehicles – carriages and wagons – have received much less attention but, fortunately, the late Eddy Brown of the Broad Gauge Society (BGS) collected a lot of information about these, which was produced as a series of Data Sheets, available to BGS members. I have already made models of several vehicles, which I based on the information from these Data Sheets but I also became aware that there are gaps that were either omitted altogether or received scant attention in these documents. For example, when I built my ‘Coal Wagon for Bullo Pill’, I couldn’t find anything about 12-ton coal wagons in the BGS Data Sheets. Fortunately, however, I found an article in the BGS Journal ‘Broadsheet’ No.9 (April 1983), which described such a wagon and included a sketch. That same article included the comment that “The basic coal wagon shown featured many detail differences such as door types, number of doors, number of planks etc. In one case the addition of roof and sliding door produced a lime truck.”. That set me thinking about other variants and recently I discovered a list of OPC/BR drawings in ‘Broadsheet’ No.8 (Jan.1983). These drawings cover the short period from 1852 to 1854/5 and include a group of wagons sharing a standard design of underframe with various types of body. One that caught my attention is described as “Covered Goods Wagon, Henson's Patent Slide: Sliding side doors, patent sliding roof door, no breaks shewn. Body of wood with outside framing of wood and iron to accommodate sliding doors. Body side planking extending beyond the corner posts.” Covered vans seem to have been rare in early BG days, since most goods (and third-class passengers) were carried in open wagons, often fitted with hoops to carry a canvas tilt cover. I was intrigued by the reference to ‘Henson’s Patent Slide’. Henson is better known in connection with the LNWR and, according to the ‘Steam index’: “In 1841 Henry Henson was a civil engineer in charge of the Camden workshops of the London and Birmingham Railway. When the L&BR became part of the L&NWR Henson continued to hold that position and in 1847 he was appointed head of the wagon department of the Southern Division.” Possibly, members of this community with more expertise about LNWR matters may be able to shed more light on the nature of Henson’s Patent. Henson’s Covered Wagon – Proc.Inst.Mech.Eng.,1851 I also realised that, just as in the case of the coal wagon I modelled, this van was the subject of dimensioned drawings in Alan Prior’s book ‘19th Century Railway Drawings’. Thus, I had the basis for constructing a model by following my usual method of copying over a printed drawing using ‘Fusion 360’ software. To re-cap, I imported the drawing as a ‘canvas’ into ‘Fusion 360’ and then drew a series of rectangles to represent the outlines of various body features. Next, I extruded the areas enclosed between the rectangles by appropriate distances, to create solid bodies of the depths needed to represent framing components, as shown below: For the roof, I extruded the arc cross-section from one end and then added braces underneath to maintain the shape. I also added surface details to represent the roof hatches. I use the ‘pattern on path’ commands in ‘Fusion 360’ to create regular structures, such as the cross braces and the planked sides of the van, automatically. The underframe was of the same design and wheelbase as that I made before, for my model coal wagon, so I only needed to increase the length of my existing model to match the new body. So, that’s the hard part done and the next thing is to transfer the design files to the ‘Cura’ slicing software, which prepares the ‘gcode’ files for my Geeetech E180 printer. I printed the various components in four separate print jobs. For the record, the printing times were: Roof 70 mins. Sides X2 73 mins Ends X2 31 mins Chassis 65 mins As I have mentioned before, I prefer to break the printing into several parts, so that I can check each part separately for any problems, without having to wait for the entire job to be completed. 3D-printed Components I was very pleased to find that the roof printed well, despite having no ‘honeycomb’ helpers to support the hollow underside. My basic FDP printer successfully bridged the 10mm gaps between the cross bracing, saving both time and material. 3D-printed Van Roof All that remained was to fuse the components together by running a 200°C soldering tip along the seams between the parts: 3D-prnted Covered Van – assembled As usual with my models, there are various details to be added but I feel it has captured the appearance of an unusual prototype from the early 1850s. Mike

I get the red screen when viewing on my iPhone but not on my PC. It's the same with some of my own posts too.

But what shade of Black is 'blackberry black'? 😕

Looking at my own models, I prefer a darker appearance for frames, especially under sky light. Of course, if I spot-lit these, they would look brighter but, to my eyes, less natural. Mike

Just Google 'Newcastle girls in snow' to get the picture 🙂

Please let us know if you find the source - it sounds fascinating!

I often enjoy putting together models of engines from different periods - it brings out the differences in proportions very clearly, I wonder how 'realistic' your engine controls are - can you for example feel the difference between the 4-cyl and 2-cyl Stars and Saints or between Stephenson and Walschaerts motion, with their different 'lead' characteristics? The thing I missed most with the flight simulator was the lack of any sense of physical movement and I guess the same is true of train sims, which cannot provide a real footplate experience. Great fun to watch though 🙂 Mike

Another reminder of how 'bare' early railways looked, compared with the overgrown line-sides that we are familiar with today - sapling trees and open country all around.

AKA a 'Lautrec' [colloquial English joke]