Focalplane

Earlier photos show a carefully constructed Ratio coal stage placed where coaling will be done (eventually). The prototype for this is, apparently, in Scotland, a long way from the English Midlands, so it really will look out of place. Volumes I and II of LMS Sheds have plenty of illustrations of LNWR style coal holes, basically consisting of two roads under a water tank, one road slightly elevated. The example at Birmingham Monument Lane was one such design but in fact there were quite a few variations. Today I downloaded the scalescenes.com print-your-own card kit. I did this more to get ideas rather than build the kit "as is" as it appears to closely follow the GWR design as at Didcot. The basic LMS coal holes include: 1. Two roads under the tank, coal shoveled or thrown from slightly elevated wagon into tender or bunker, the tank providing some shelter during inclement weather. 2. One road under the tank, possibly elevated, with coal transferred to 10 cwt tubs, elevated and tipped in tenders and bunkers in a track next to the structure through a chute. The tubs were elevated hydraulically in some sheds (including Crewe at one time). This design could be easily modeled within the existing layout. Parts of the scalescenes.com kit could be used for both tank and chute. The hydraulic lift could be scratch built into the design. 3. Larger systems included two roads under the tank and one road each side of the tank structure. I don't have room for this. 4. Water supply from the tank was, in some cases delivered to the tender while coaling. This particularly applied to the original LNWR 'standard' design. There is a relationship between size of coaling plant and the number of shed roads. Typical 4 road sheds (as in Legge Lane) had a coal hole and any upgrading would probably only include a powered conveyor belt. The big concrete coaling stages were reserved for sheds with at least 6 roads, usually 8 or more. Information sources other than the Wild Swan Publications also include warwickshirerailways.com, an excellent site with plenty of photos and descriptions through time. Even if you are not interested in Warwickshire, there is plenty to look at on this site.

The smokebox door is so close to the buffer beam! Those lamp irons stick out in front. Shame the tender is separated, they've done the same with 46235 City of Birmingham at the "StinkTank". In the interests of education maybe but the profile of a tender locomotive should be aesthetically correct, the way the designers intended! Lovely photos, by the way.

More thoughts on the loco lamps. The first thing to do would be to dirty the white lamp casing - the only time they were ever white was probably on the Royal Train! The second thing would be to remove the over scale handle from the Springside Models lamp and possibly fix some very fine wire as a better scale handle (though this may not be necessary as it would have to be very fine indeed and therefore may not even be visible!) I have looked at DCC Concepts lamps and wish they would make one without the light! These lamps were prototypically being moved from bracket to bracket to store and the wiring would preclude that option. Does anyone have suggestions?

When I did my fire and drive with City of Truro I arrived early to help prepare the locomotive and was given a large rag and a can of WD40. I was very proud of my hard work before breakfast and I do appreciate all the hard work that volunteers put in, but my memory of the real thing was very different and that is what I am trying to model. Please take no offense at my earlier comment.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out. I feel sure that in my time frame (late 1950s) the loco may have been transferred to the LMR, but I am still thinking about a different number. 75022 had been photographed in ?Saltley so I might use that number. Trouble is, the individual locos can be quite different in detail. Edit. the Bluebell Railway website gives the information that 75027 started out on the WR then the S&D, then in 1962 moved to the Cambrian before finally joining in the LMR in 1965. I may change numbers!

Comet has a detailing fret but Bachmann has done such a good job the fret isn't needed. The rectangular pocket on the front of the bogie will be easy to remove, the difficult part was grinding out the space for the screw link coupler. This really does cause major modification to the model, rendering its value questionable. However, toy train couplers never existed in real life. . . . .

The Western moguls were (and are) fine locomotives and had a very good reputation when working the Cambrian. I seem to remember two moguls often double headed the Cambrian Coast Express from Shrewsbury to Dovey Junction. Visits to heritage railways are always interesting but I sometimes think that everything looks a little bit too clean! In the late 1950s the only clean locomotives you would see were those coming straight out of the Works. Some sheds did a better job at cleaning, particularly for the crack expresses, but workhorses got very little attention.

Cold showery weather - what am I doing in England?! Well, Sunday is a good day to take a loco out of its box and do some detailing and I had forgotten about my Bachmann 75027 in "out of the box" weathered state. It is a very nice looking model and really does justice to the real thing. I am about half way through the list of work on this model and much remains to be done once I take it back to France where I will apply some really heavy weathering, etc. The most difficult part was fitting scale screw couplings, particularly to the front of the loco as it is solid metal behind the buffer beam. Fortunately my Dremel made the job relatively easy, particularly now that I have a Dremel Work Station. I used a Smiths set of couplers which are not as heavy as the ones made by Romford but do look good. I will eventually remove the Bachmann coupler pocket from the front bogie and then the front end will look as it should look. All the supplied add ons were applied to the front of the loco. Real coal will be added when I get back to France. The coal was collected from a disused open cast mine north of Béziers a couple of years ago. There is nothing that compares to the real thing! The tender will also be close coupled to suit 3 ft radii and a crew added to the cab. The lamps are from Springside Models and I am not entirely happy with them. The jewels fell out of both front and rear lamps as I was drilling out the base of the lamps. One I found, one is gone for ever.

As I remember those Tyseley 56xx's were used for most suburban trains out of Moor Street, including 'my' line, the North Warwickshire to Stratford and beyond. They were a fascinating sight on the Moor Street traverser, parts of which are still there as a reminder. The parts as such are the spaces under the platforms. I like your attention to detail and visits to the prototypes. More difficult for me a lot of the time!

More on the turntable saga later, as mentioned in my last post. Here is a sketch of the track plan. The diorama is 186cm by 40cm. Note that the ash plant wagons run straight across the turntable, an important consideration I think. In fact it would probably be only one wagon at a time. The coaling stage is as shown in a recently posted photo but I am considering a typical wagon-to-tender affair with water tank over as seen at Monument Lane. The wagon siding would be slightly elevated to allow hand shoveling of coal across into tenders/bunkers. A nice compact arrangement though hard on the shed staff.

The second generation of Legge Lane's turntable moves to the new apartment and a smaller diorama footprint. A new base was needed and the Dremel Trio tool began to pay for itself in cutting the well for the second Peco kit. I had cut up an old hardwood framed futon base and this came in useful for the new baseboard. The first idea I came up with was to tap three holes in the base of the turntable well and pin down the flexible base for the motor. three tapped holes in the base took appropriate bolts locked to brass bars screwed to the baseboard frame. The turntable shaft was then threaded through a rigid U shaped brass channel and the rig tested. This seemed to work quite well but I was not satisfied as the setting that worked best seemed to cause binding between the turntable and the well. So, yet another solution was sought but this will have to wait until I can take some photos on my return to France. To be continued. . . .

My first attempt at motorizing the Peco turntable kit was a good learning experience. First, the motor kit featured in the photo is inexpensive, but this brings with it a number of setbacks, the main one of which is noise. The photo shows that the motor and gears are fitted directly to the underside of the plastic "dish". The glued strips of wood give the dish strength but I cannot say the result is good (and it looks dreadful!) The slack within the gears also means poor registration but surprisingly the DCC control turned out to be good and with some experience the tracks could be lined up using a very slow control on the motor. Subsequent improvements included smothering the internal gearbox with lithium grease but the noise was still too much. The worm drive is useful in that the entire mechanism sits within a reasonable thickness of under-baseboard. There is a commercial solution that suspends the motor vertically below the spindle. I am sure this is a great solution, but not for my table top diorama as I simply don't have the space. This installation was subsequently abandoned as I moved into a new apartment and had even less space to work with. More on that later.

I am far from the layout at the moment and much of my material is also not with me, so it is difficult to maintain entries in a consistent manner. However I can relate an ongoing saga with motorizing the Peco turntable kit. I am now reasonably satisfied after buying two kits, two inexpensive motor kits and then replacing the latter with a more robust design using Meccano spares. The motor is DCC controlled and the last time I was in France I was able to test it and it is almost ready to consider a working accessory! But for this post, an introduction to the kit itself and some minor criticisms of the design and robustness of the kit. The plastic tray on which the turntable sits is too flexible. I have tried all sorts of strengthening tactics and have abandoned them all in favor of a separate plywood base for the motor, gears etc. this works well but requires a lot of preparation or modification to the underlying baseboard and frame. The plastic bush attached to the turntable is prone to breakage. The pickups need to be installed very carefully, the sprung plungers click during operation. And if course the dead zone rule must be obeyed. Peco do not supply enough plates for fixing around the rim for track connections. I use code 75 and had to adapt some of the code 100s to fit. The handrails should not be fitted until last. I plan to fit scratch built rails using brass wire, etc. And most modern LMS turntables were vacuum operated so the turntable needs modifying anyway, at least in my case. But to be fair, the kit is the best option out there for British modellers. Next up, some motor options.

I hope this isn't too far off topic, but like you I found the old Museum of Science & Industry a great inspiration for life in general. I've never visited the replacement ThinkTank and will only do so under extreme duress when I start my DJH model of 46235. I agree with a crazy idea of getting 46235 out of the museum on the pretext of removing its asbestos and then restoring it to running condition but my plan would include an oil fired system. This could effectively achieve maximum power output, outdoing what firemen were unable to do over a four hour run. But after all the hoopla with 7 A4s, three Semis together would be wonderful!

Yes, this is interesting news indeed! Whether an auto tank will be available is another story. They will always be one of my favorite Swindon products.

My first experience with the diorama concept was when visiting the old Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry in the 1950s. I have been fascinated with them ever since. The ability to focus on detail is perfect for those of us who lack space. Building interiors are now more doable than ever due to the options for lighting, etc. I am planning to build a more detailed prototype engine shed for my next project which will have all the details you are putting into Oswestry. These are exciting times. More thoughts on my early years in Oswestry. The line to Withchurch was not a Cambrian line, if I remember rightly and had LMS steam including the new Ivatt 2MT moguls. We also saw LMS locos pulling the Birkenhead-Wolverhampton trains through Gobowen, in fact my first "cop" on Gobowen station was a Jubilee. That would have been around 1957. In Oswestry the main classes of motive power were the Manors, 43XX, 464XX and 2251. The Manors were always maintained in good condition. The Gobowen Rattler auto train typically had 1432 on one end rather than in the middle. It stopped at Park Hall Halt, the site of the RA camp.

Sundays were lax at the time, we just asked at the shed superintendent's office and were usually allowed in. I do remember the large gates but all else is rather vague. I have read that the four stored locos inside the Works were kept off the Western Region's books so that they would not be scrapped.

Hi Alan, just been through your entire thread and what an Interesting project! I lived in Oswestry in the late 1950s and used to do the sheds many a Sunday. The Works were visited often, with the dukedogs and the two W&L stored. I don't think there was much else going on in 1960 but I may be wrong. Lots of steam on shed, mainly Manors, light standards, etc. And, of course the 14XX for the old Gobowen Rattler auto train. Your 3D modeling fascinates me. I think I may be old school now!

The LMS cafeteria system went something like this: Loco enters depot, goes to ash pit, drops fire, cleans smoke box, etc. Loco moves to coaling tower/staithe, fills tender with coal Loco takes on water, moves to shed road for inspection, boiler cleaning, general check, then returns to service when required. Sheds were designed to facilitate this as much as possible, though in many sheds the track layout made things difficult to be as efficient as planned. One of the important facts of life is that ash pits and inspection pits were not one and the same. Hot ash and lubrication do not go together!

Here are two photos taken during track laying. The turntable well and inspection pits were installed first, the ash pit was cut out ready for a scratch built ash plant. Various locos and scenery were placed for the photos. View from above the shed location toward the turntable and various facilities. Coaling on the left, ash plant on the right Close up of the facilities area

This is my current project, set up on a cabinet top in my apartment in France which I use for R&R when not working in West Africa. Lack of space precludes any other type of layout except a small branch line and as I like large (and small) steam locos then a detailed fictional late 1950s LMR shed in the Birmingham area seemed a good idea. There is no prototype, rather a set of ideas translated from numerous sheds in the West Midlands. Monument Lane might have been a good prototype but its layout simply would not fit the space. So I adopted a nearby lane in the Jewellry Quarter for the fictional model. Legge Lane is mostly derelict these days but I remember growing up there when a lad. The track layout is unusual, relying on the turntable for almost all switching. There is only one other switch in the yard. This was forced by the lack of space. This is actually prototypical as most Midland sheds were constrained by their surroundings (Monument Lane, Coventry being but two examples). In designing the layout, thought was given to the LMS cafeteria method of servicing a steam locomotive, so the turntable is actually used in a specific progression from arrival to storage to departure of each locomotive. The shed roster is being accumulated and will number many more than the eight which will actually fit in the four road shed. So far all are LMR but a few foreigners may visit from time to time. The roster currently includes many Bachmann RTRs, an old Wills Finecast 4F, and several metal kits waiting completion. Some of the RTRs will be upgraded with Comet chassis. Some key design parameters: Size - 186cm x 40cm Track - Peco OO code 75 Finescale Wiring - DCC Turntable - Peco turntable kit, motorized with Meccano motor, etc. Structures - Scalescenes shed, various kits and scratch built items Backdrop - Scalescenes brick arches, tunnel to rest of the system fiddle yard The next post will add a few photos.