Nearholmer

Onward toward the FY/sand hopper. This is only a tiny step forward, but I’m using this thread to record the entire process. Observant readers may notice that EST&T now have a loco, but close inspection will reveal that it isn’t really a very appropriate one. I went to the shop to look at both 48DS and 88DS, and when I encountered the famous (to railway enthusiasts of a certain age) ‘Shunter 20’, it sort of leapt off the shelf into my hand. There really is no credible excuse for it being in Sussex, since it spent all its time at Reading, and as someone wrote in another thread “….. went nowhere, and lived under a bridge.”, but it was a loco I saw several times. All the 48DS they had in stock were in overly flamboyant liveries, so no temptation there, but I have remembered one that I saw in still in service late in the day, being used on the construction of the DLR by a track contractor, and apparently Hornsby have issued a model of that, so there is a danger that this could drift into becoming “all the shunting engines I’ve ever known”.

If you want real bus bodies used as NG coaches, delve into the history of the Bord na Mona 3ft gauge lines in Ireland, because they had several old buses mounted on bogies for staff transport, as well as the passenger saloons from ex-West Clare railcars, which were themselves very much bus technology.

Fascinating. Have you ever seen pictures of the old Southend Pier Railwsy railcars? I think you might have re-invented them.

Google ‘Filcris’. They supply very good boards and sections made from recycled plastic, mostly for parks and gardens, but they have a specific range of bits for outdoor railway modelling.

Yep.

Looking the other way. There’ll be some sort of shrubbery between the main line and siding at the entrance to the FY. Does anyone have one of the Horny 48DS? If so, I’d be interested in how it runs without the conflat attached. I’m actually slightly more tempted by the 88DS, which seems a bit more likely for these loads, by this date, so knowledge of that would be useful too.

I’m a huge fan of your diagram; just my kind of thing! Well, this lot is all nailed down now, and the main baseboard joint fidliness dealt with (the EST&T line into the scenic bit of FY still to go). 00 is definitely proving expensive/disruptive though. I got so annoyed by not being able to see what I was doing that I booked an eye test, which resulted not only in the need to order a new set of specs (annoying, because the current ones are only just two years old), but a swift referral to hospital for further investigation of the ongoing deterioration of the retina in my right eye (not a new thing), and the beginnings of a cataract in that eye as well! This, I know, will result in the ophthalmologist stroking here chin, and saying “Hmmm …… we need to keep an eye on that; see me again in a years time.”.

What you might call an acquired taste!

Bombed them back into the Stone Age in Phase 1 of the war plan, I guess. If you think about Europe towards the end of WW2, the railways had been severely damaged, and huge numbers of US locos, steam and diesel, were used by the liberating forces to get things going again.

Well, if anyone knows, it’s Mr Lamming. I’m really surprised though, because everything about the ride felt so like being in something really heavy - the soty of feeling I imagine one gets in an old-style Rolls Royce. The thing that impressed me most was the fold-out tables in the compartments, which were very substantial stainless steel things that pulled up from sockets below the windows.

EST&T had a grading plant and sold “beach”, “gravel” (the small pebbles), and coarse sand. In my alternative universe they found a specialist market for the sand in the abrasives industry. I think it was sea-dredged gravel, combined with worries about coastal erosion, which killed-off the various Sussex coastal sand and gravel works, this one, Hall & Co at the Crumbles and Rye Harbour, and the various concrete works there too. Marine aggregates, the fancy name for the graded sea-dredged shingle, started to go by rail in large quantities c1970, notably from Cliffe, in Kent. The sand from Holmethorpe was much posher stuff, used for glassmaking.

I think it might be a civilianised version of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALCO_MRS-1#:~:text=The ALCO MRS-1 is,in the event of war.

Yep, that’s as I remember it, but not all the wagons were the same, there were many variations on a theme, and they leaked sand wherever they went!

The French Inox coaches of that type, which I think might have been a licensed US design, were very smooth indeed, and had really neat interior detailing, everything made from stainless steel. I wasn’t sure whether the ride was down to clever bogie design or the fact that they were immensely heavy, a bit of both I think, but they certainly made BR Mk1 look and feel very Shakespearean, hand-crafted, and rough-riding. When they were scrapped, it must have released enough stainless steel back into circulation to equip Europe with cutlery for the next millennium.

If you look at the Holmethorpe thread on here, there are a couple of shots of two women with a child in a pushchair looking at wagon labels on some (pre-TV-era Sunday afternoon stroll?); they appear in the background of various photis of ‘Dom’ and ‘Gervase’, and on Derek Hayward’s site in his Redhill set there are wagons that may be for sand, or possibly CE spoil. That Redhill set is crammed with nostalgia for me, because I used to trek all the way over there during school holidays to watch shunting with a pal (not that I was a dull child, you understand) and to see the WR freight train come in and do its thing.

It would, and I’ve allowed for that in the track-plan, so it is an option. I’m trying to work out the history of wagon types and brakes for the Holmethorpe sand trains, which I will use for inspiration. But, if it’s a shunting engine up front, the train needs a van for the guard, and I think probably a travelling shutter, to ride in. I actually bought a sand wagon when I went to get some track-pins. It’s not exactly the right type, but it’s so close that I might see if I can find some more secondhand ones of these to use. I think it’s the Mainline model from the 1970s, still made by Dapol. First job on this one is obviously to replace “iron ore”, which is what they were all built for, with “sand”. Paul Bartlett has collated oodles of info about the Holmethorpe wagons, but even that doesn’t seem to cover the wagons used pre-hoppers, some of which look suspiciously like coal wagons to me.

See my latest layout under construction, second link below my signature.

‘Because I don’t want to demolish any of the buildings, even in my imagination. Anyway, we needn’t face the question head-on, because that bit is “off scene”, unless I decide to expand the layout, which I doubt I will, since this has always been about getting the “highly portable layout” bug out of my system.

There was a whole breed of mechanisms designed specifically to do just that, called “economical FPLs”, first used I think on colonial railways, then adopted widely by light railway - I think they even get a particular mention in the BoT guidance about LRs. But, I think what you are talking about might be “home brew” versions created by railway S&T departments. I think I’m heading for the loop point and loop trap being operated by one lever, and the two switches on the double-slip by another, with the FPL having its own lever. I still think that other point can be operated by a ground level, without risk of mashing the trap, because no shunt can approach it without the point and therefore the trap being reversed, but I think I will give it a place in the ground-frame, so that the shunter can control everything from there, while the guard looks after coupling. The other end of the double-slip definitely has to be worked directly by a hand level, because EST&T need to use that when there are no BR bids present.

A recent self-spread, rather than import. Their range has increased massively in the past few decades, and I see them almost daily where I live now, fifty miles north of London now, whereas they seemed super-rare in Dussex when I was a kid.

I’m trying to recall when BR started using catchy names for routes, and so far as I can remember, things just went by simple descriptives in the 1970s. I’m not even sure “coastway” was called that, until after a limited stop bus service called “coastliner” (iirc) was introduced. Can anyone else remember when lines got branded? You've identified the bike place; Windover operate out of the same building as the bike hire, so the final building on the right, the one I’m going round the back of, must simply be a house.

Phil Your first photo is particularly helpful, because you are looking down right onto the site of the station. It’s remarkable how nature has reclaimed things, leaving barely a trace that is visible from this distance. Neither box, nor LC. The line went under the road in a bridge, between where those two buses are, round the back of that building (which if I’ve got my bearings right is now the premises of a very upmarket hand-built bike frame maker called Windhover) in a very tight cutting. SG in red, NG in yellow. And in topo form: TBH, the ideal route would be ever so slightly lower down, by LC, and then straight through what is now the visitor centre, but I don’t want to demolish any of that, even in my imagination! When I’m next down, I’ll conduct further detailed survey to see whether there’s a good level that involves absolutely minimal demolition. Nobody would want to tear down this sort of thing, would they?

The SR relaying of the site was complete, because the initial LR flat bottom track on rubbishy sleepers was clapped-out after 30+ years of use. More to the point though, this is a tiny model railway, built using off-the shelf track, to fit particular size baseboard modules, and all the points are fixed down now, so it is what it is. The double-slip used like this was also something of an LSWR speciality, so I reckon when the SR altered the erstwhile CVLR facilities, the chap in the DO was an ex-LSWR man. I’m still favouring a “lock in” arrangement over a SB, to avoid paying that tiny bit more for a signalman-porter.

Yes, the Central Section had 04, and if ever this gets finished and operated in multiple time zones one of those would be ideal to take over from Terrier and P in an early/mid 1960s setting.

Further thoughts: On arrival at Berwick after booking-on, the crew need time to start the loco up (how many times in the winter will it prove to have flat batteries??), and to form-up the train of empties before departure. Likewise, when they get back with the loaded train they need time to detach the brake van and shunt the wagons ready for collection by the main-line goods train (presumably the one that serves Lewis Cement Works). We also need to trip the loco to St Leonard’s and back for fuel overnight periodically (weekly/fortnightly?). I remember the loco from Horsham having to go to Three Bridges for this, and even that took all night and sent the drivers ‘up the wall’ because it was so slow! Can we get an 09 allocated to the branch? Dare we try an 07? Probably best not, because it couldn’t be trusted not to get hot axle boxes and expire across the junction at Hampden Park. An 03? Now, that might be worth a try.