BWsTrains

If only you had the space, it'd be a wonderful terminus to model in full, so much activity. Must surely capture an iconic BLT at the very peak of its illustrious lifetime.

One interesting issue arising from this conversation is that in a 1921 Kingsbridge photo, a detail which I'd missed previously, holds crucial new information. The station in its original form (up to 1910 at least) was in the 56' +21' flat roof outbuilding form. By 1936 I've many photos showing the full final format, 90' building after the outbuilding was incorporated into the main structure and a canopy, now curved to match the platform, along the entire length. What I'd missed in the 1921 photos (*2) was that the station building extension but not the canopy was already in place. This excellent aerial photo - source Britain from above Kingsbridge Station 1928 It is a delightful timestamp of life at a busy BLT around my era and shows that the extension retained the inset rear wall of the orginal design. A candidate for the lamp hut can be seen to the right of the station. I'm thinking that as the "true" William Clarke testing ground for his later Kingsbridge, my Upper Hembury design should also move forward, and have the improved Parcels handling extension rather than the flat roofed design as built in 1882. This Close up from a 1921 photo shows the extension before addition of the canopy.

Agreed but as @melmoth noted.... and I've not seen one in my photo collection of several Clarke stations with the outbuilding / chimney design. Then at Kingsbridge with no third chimney (as built) there is a most promising looking hut standing near to the Engine Shed. It even makes it to the 1906 OS 25" map. There seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence in support of "Stores and Lamps" use. Perhaps when the Regs. came into force, the fireplace use was banned? They were after all mostly tiny, minor along-the-line stations, perhaps rarely needing to tend lamps. I'll make provision for a suitable hut at UH, there's a very fine Engine Shed waiting (H/T @john dew) to de deployed. Thx again everyone for adding to the discussion. Colin

My two Melbourne granddaughters are just the same regarding their likes and interests on UH. That's a great photo.

Thx again, this makes excellent sense. The room appears to have stayed as such, given you mention there's no record of a separate lamp hut at either of the two small stations at any stage. In contrast, Kingsbridge never had the telltale third chimney between main and out buildings leading to my conclusion that the larger available 21' space in the latter was designed for a different purpose. Circumstantial evidence points to this being "Parcels". It certainly was the case after the extension there. Consequently so it shall be for Upper Hembury. John, what you see in the early design are wind deflectors not chimneys. There were at least two for a 1 flue chimney and three for 2 flues. Sometimes additional deflectors were present to protect all sides. These were sometimes later replaced by pots. All the photos I have of Kingsbridge, from 1900 to 1960s show neither deflectors or pots. Thanks to everyone for all the constructive input. As @john dew says "Trivia research, one of the optional charms of our hobby". Scratch the "optional" for me! Colin

Thx, most helpful and it confirms what I've deduced from my source, the BRJ 1985 article "The Standard Buildings of William Clarke" where the Portesham plans are shown in detail. Most tantalising in your extract is what comes next.... "the Cast iron supports of the canopy had small cast shields bolted to them.......?" I'd be very interested to see the continuation if you could please.

Thanks Mike, Disused Stations - Portesham has a number of photos, the ones from 1950 and after closure in 1955 show the same overall structure for the outbuilding as seen in the plans. The left hand door at the side seems to have a sign on it "Gentlemen". Notable in earlier photos is absence of any room signs perpendicular to the station frontage or side. This partial front view from the station drawings shows the door and window of the room seen in my earlier post marked "Store and Lamps". The ratio of chimney to room size must be some sort of record!

And to the the weekend's progress in one picture. Ends glued on, quoins cut and installed, chimneys completed, and the main beams for the building and canopy, each one a 30' length as in the original design. A few interesting issues arose but those will have to wait until tomorrow.

Moving back to the station at Upper Hembury, the question of the third chimney has some relevance to the floor plan for my outbuilding. We can draw on one 1906 image of Kingsbridge showing the original design, with a 56' long main station building and 21' outbuilding but no end chimney. The entire rear side of the latter space was toilets, simply a longer version of what can be seen at Portesham. My speculation is that the lack of chimney at the end of the main building (or in the outbuilding) means the lamps were stored elsewhere and that the platform side of the area was used for parcels handling. After the extension to 90' there was a large parcels area which can be seen at that end of the station. One useful thing I've found from working thru the various William Clarke station photos in my collection is that as at Portesham (see plan in previous post) the Gentlemens toilets were not platform side access. The entrance to the gents typically was reached beyond the far end of the station building, past the outbuilding and turning down the side along a fenced path. Quite some hike on a cold day.

William Clarke Stations - The Mysterious Third Chimney It has been pointed out to me by @john dew that in the standard small format stations (length 38' + 15' outbuilding) the third chimney serves only a small room in the outbuilding (8' * 5'9") designated "Stores and Lamps". It is shown in the end elevation as a rectangular opening in one corner of that room. The adjoining space on the opposite side of the outbuildings was the single ladies toilet cubicle. No heating there! Suggestions please on why the room needed this facility. As John noted, it could hardly have been to heat an unoccupied room.

Right now I'm unable to, reasons unknown. Attempts to checkout were greeted with "no available shipping option" when I attempted to ship to Australia. Today it was just a trial run to discover their shipping rate, not a great start though.

I found theirs, but only in "O" gauge. Were yours custom made? Well last night anyway, I looked via a different search and found them thx. Colin

Hi Graham, where abouts did you get these canopy supports? https://content-eu.invisioncic.com/y320084/monthly_2022_12/IMG20221223174626.jpeg.f68c8ebb89db3df8198c1991318c3e0d.jpeg Colin

All the Doors and windows have been fitted and the station body painted. Some young helpers (C&S; 12 and 9 now) were enlisted during their stay. C charged with finding a good colour match for the lintels and future quions, S worked with me to extract some dimensions from the plans for the chimneys and these then were advanced to the preparation of the first half of one of them as seen here. Some remaining rough edges under the harsh gaze of the camera but looking good in real life now.

The sides have been cut and Slaters sheet fitted, seen here after priming. Meanwhile the derived plan view has been tidied up to show the overall format of the extended Clarke design. Useful for planning the build as the two chimneys are internal rather than at the ends and I need to build to accommodate these in the construction. It seemed logical to incorporate suitable internal walls first, rather than completing "the box". This is seen here along with all the completed doors and windows fully painted and glazed. in the real the #3 shade has more pink than is evident here. More on that later.

The Station Build There's background on the origins of the station design here https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/173620-upper-hembury-east-devon-a-gwr-sr-branch-line/?do=findComment&comment=5158415 It was a very early William Clarke build, longer than the well known basic line-side halts and a precursor to the later Kingsbridge with its original 56' design. The desire of the Earl of Southampton to have an impressive Clarke station ran headlong into the parsimony of the GWR in those tough times of the early 1880s. Hence, Upper Hembury is a far more subdued design than the better known buildings often popular to model. Fortunately the excellent design drawings for Portesham give me dimensions and formats for Doors and windows and originially I'd considered getting these laser cut as per @Graham T for Chuffnell Regis. That did not happen due to the company's other commitments so out came the pens and scalpels to prepare much the same 4 layer designs DIY mode. Seen above this was very much work in progress before tidying up and minor repairs. My attention is turning next to cutting out all the sides, the Slaters sheet to cover them and suitable paints for GWR Light Stone #1 and Dark Stone #3

With uncouplers laid and working, and disrupted track reinstated, it was time to clean some residual paint and grime off the rails and achieve a minor milestone. With no fanfare or town band attending, at 5.52pm Sunday a small mixed train from Cullompton pulled into Upper Hembury. 9728 headed up a Siphon O1(2), a Beetle prize cattle wagon and a pair of Collett non-corridor 57’ coaches. So, modestly, did operations commence! Attention is now being turned to building a proper station building, the old one from Westown-Heathfield being overdue for retirement.

I have some recently purchased Dapol spoked wheel sets and aside from being loose as measured by the BtB gauge, they were excellent in operation after adjustment.

The final step - installation The magnet / plate assembly is typically 3.4mm thick and removing 2 ply layers from my baseboard provides a suitable slot for the uncoupler. By making the plate the same width as my sleepers it's easy to mark up the cavity and later ensure accurate alignment. These steps are shown below.

KADEE Uncoupling - continued.. The single most important thing I discovered was the importance of using a steel "intensifier plate". This is simply a thin piece of mild steel (0.5mm will do) which holds the magnets and intensifies the "Up" directing field". Repulsion between adjacent magnets is greatly reduced while the focused field above the magnets is increased. This is often found in Cup or Pot magnets. Simply aligning all same poles up becomes easy as magnets lose their propensity to jump one on top of another. The end result is shown here on a 30mm * 50mm steel holder. The black PS strip marks the mid point of the track and magnets have been aligned manually to get the best uncoupling in this location (all approach here is from right). Magnets when fully tested are held in final location with some drops of CA and then primed. While not shown, the rails would run directly above the centre of each line of magnets R -> L # The original uncoupling video in Feburary was recorded using this particular uncoupler plate. These magnets are hi-intensity Neos extracted from an old Hard Disk Drive. I find this to be a very reliable source of material; on-line you need to be careful as there is much rubbish being sold and it's hard to identify good from other. # bottom left magnet excepted, that looks to have moved and avoided detection. Oh! and drill the mounting holes first up before magnets come anywhere near!

KADEE Uncoupling - I'm well overdue to get back to this, so my apologies. Previously I showed the well known problem encountered with standard Kadee uncouplers, viz. axle drag. There is a much watched Youtube on the topic (something about "the inconvenient truth"...) where the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field was rightly identified as the source of the problem. This is best illustrated by a few pics for the less familiar. Uncoupling depends on a soft iron hanging pin (a bit like a mini elephant trunk) seen in 2 uncoupled wagons here. The default position being slightly right in direction of travel. When coupled, the engaged pair looks like this and uncoupling requires the hangers to be pulled to their respective sides, opening the jaws. (Red arrows). From this is shouid be clear why a perpendicular field is appealing, both hangers lie in the field and will be drawn towards the nearer pole. It's just the unwanted side effect of the strong cross field which drags axles as per section 1 of the short video. https://youtu.be/MgCePqwWfCs My solution requires all upward facing poles to be the same. The magnets are thin flat ones polarised across their thinnest dimension. Axle drag is mostly eliminated by the lack of the cross field. However achieving a functioning solution requires a little work and this will be covered in a following post.

I see this year marks 180 since IKB was appointed engineer and set in motion the design and building of the South Devon Railway. As a reminder, this link relates some of that early history http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_events/atmospheric_railway.php I think ANT -IKB will be in order while you're down there. Colin

John raises an important point here and it might be worth doing a "retake" on impacts for your potential designs. Have you a real life location for the CR II situation which might better define the layout? Viz. which operating line, (presumably GWR) between X and Y and then from that decision, when the stations took on their Era 3 configurations? Next, deciding on any tradeoffs between being prototypical wrt to configuration and getting all the functionality you desire and the ability to model them in the available space. All this "motherhood" I know but can be helpful to do a check-back during the planning process. Colin

Re Phil's: "Templot is a Marmite program so be sure you can get on with before you shell out on Parallels" It might be simpler if you could find someone with a laptop they could spare for a while while you try it out. Pity I'm 10000km away as I have just the thing.

Andy, I was attracted by the appearance of general yard surfaces at Stoke Courtney and John told me he'd used Chinchilla dust. https://content-eu.invisioncic.com/y320084/monthly_2022_05/y1.jpg.831733e2cde6ae49d20bb0dc4494377e.jpg As that's not available here I did some searching around and found that finely sieved gypsum seemed promising. Haven't don't much more since but initial post is here. It's a very fine texture and could be poured in between tracks, tamped down and glued with dilute PVA. My gypsum has a pink/ orange tinge but when I followed by applied a dilute cream acrylic paint / PVA I got the result shown. More grey would be easy. Colin