Compound2632

An interesting topic, as they say. Firstly, photographs of goods trains on the move are rare once one goes back to the early Edwardian period - even the wealthy gentleman photographers saved their expensive glass plates for Scotch expresses on the main lines. Most photos of goods engines are posed broadside or three-quarter views, as we've seen from your Dean Goods project. Goods traffic is mostly seen in photos of goods or marshalling yards. The next point to bear in mind is that this is the pre-pooling era: Midland traffic in Midland wagons, returned empty if consigned to a non-Midland destination. Question: what happened at locations where the Midland had a goods agent or traffic canvasser but no goods station, e.g. Southampton - once the agent had secured a consignment, did he request a Midland wagon be sent to collect it? Thirdly, covered goods wagons (vans) were thin on the ground - most merchandise would travel in open wagons, suitably sheeted to protect goods in transit. I have in mind a West Midland setting - taking inspiration from aspects of the North Warwickshire coalfield (Kingsbury branch) and Cannock Chase coalfield (Sutton Park line). I envisage a Midland line with running powers for the LNWR - at least for some exchange traffic. The Great Western presence is more tenuous, their lines not extending north of their main Birmingham - Wolverhampton line, but we can suppose Cannock Chase to be a sufficiently desirable target for some access arrangement to have been made. The Midland and Great Western rubbed shoulders well enough south of Birmingham, e.g. the Halesowen branch. This gives me four varieties of goods train: 1. Midland mineral trains (full and empty): PO wagons and D299 opens. The PO wagons I've built have been chosen to reflect a North Warwickshire - Worcestershire/Gloucestershire flow, which seems to be evidenced by Keith Montague's book on Gloucester C&W Co. wagons, although there's also some North Warwickshire - Reading traffic postulated. The latter would in reality be exchanged with the Great Western at Bordesley, though I will argue that in my adjusted geography it's going via the OWW route. I haven't given much thought to the Cannock Chase traffic. There's also block working of D342 coke wagons from Saltley gas works. 2. Midland goods trains: mostly Midland wagons, many D299 opens - after all they accounted for half of the Midland's stock - but with a smattering of other types, chiefly D305 dropside wagons and various vans. 3. LNWR goods train: mostly LNWR wagons - a mix of coal (including a few appropriate POs) and opens with a few vans. 4. Great Western goods train - transfer trip: Great Western wagons consigned to Midland destinations (and beyond) and returned Midland wagons from Great Western stations. Possibly the odd PO wagon of South Wales coal. That justifies the majority of my wagon building. Then there are the strangers: take that NER van for example. It appears that they were assigned home stations - in this case Hull. It's been dispatch to Birmingham laden with some imported high-value Danish goods - Lego or bacon maybe - passing onto Midland metals via the Swinton & Knottingley joint line. The North Eastern's dock agent must have been on his toes, getting to the shipper before the Hull & Barnsley's agent, who would have pointed out the merits of the route via Cudworth. Or maybe the Alexandra Dock was too far from the best pubs for the Danish skipper's liking. I have more trouble justifying the L&Y wagons. The Midland worked closely with the L&Y in respect of Lancashire - Scotland traffic whilst simultaneously poking its tentacles into the L&Y's West Riding territory but I suspect that traffic south and west would have been transferred to the LNWR route - so could end up in my LNWR train. But equally, the LNWR had a strong presence in Lancashire and the West Riding so would more likely have captured traffic for Birmingham at source. There are more exotic traffics to consider: cattle - a regional market could attract vans from at least the three local companies; racecourse traffic - ditto; but here we're venturing into NPCS. A favourite photo from Essery & Jenkinson's Midland Locomotives, Vol. 3, provides a counter-example: a short Midland goods train at Devynock on the Neath & Brecon Railway - part of the Midland route to Swansea - c. 1900. Headed by a 1102 class 0-6-0T running bunker first, the only identifiable Midland wagon in the train (apart from the brake van) is the second vehicle, a D353 van. The first wagon is a 2-plank wagon with fixed sides but centre door. The third vehicle is another outside-framed van, a bit bigger than the Midland one, possibly with some company initials high up on the side. It's got Scotch brake and a tie-bar linking the axleguards. Both these wagons might belong to local companies - Neath & Brecon or Brecon & Merthyr? After the vans, three dumb-buffered POs - I get the impression from marshalling yard photos that these were already rare on the Midland main line (fruit of the buy, scrap and build D299 policy of the 1880s - the many POs one does see would be to the 1887 RCH spec). The seventh wagon is a sheeted open, followed by the brake. It's a posed phot with engine crew looking out along with four station staff and a dog.

Where are the Swindon drawings for this period archived?

For the turntable, it's a bit hard to say what typical Midland practice was as the BLT really wasn't a Midland thing. However, nearby Nailsworth might give some inspiration. I think what's drawn as a diamond crossing is in fact a double slip, providing an engine stabling siding alongside the turntable and a trap to protect the running line, doubling up as an end loading or dock siding. Bear in mind that the turntable will be 42 feet diameter - the standard Midland size, big enough to turn a tender engine with 8'0" + 8'6" wheelbase - anything up to a 4F.

By no means. The Royal Scots were Southern engines painted red. (Actually the common feature leading to the success of these LMS engines was the three-cylinder layout which came in a straight line of descent from S. W. Johnson's compounds.)

I never cease to be surprised how little has been published about the Great Western in the last quarter of the 19th century compared with the wealth of information for the Midland and LNWR.

You know Sir Edward Watkin was a director of the Nord? Along with the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire, Metropolitan, and South Eastern Railways and the Channel Tunnel Company - you get the pattern? Oh, and the Great Eastern and Great Western (hence 'Sir Watkin' of the 'Sir Daniel' class of Armstrong 2-2-2s, I presume) among other minor lines... What was it we were saying about Barons?

What a scene of carnage! I take it the Gibson dome is the rear one (actually attached to the engine) and the forward one is the Finney dome? The Gibson dome looks a little slimmer. Scaling off three broadside photos of engines with S2 boilers in LI 157 (using the leading-coupled wheelbase 7'3" = 29 mm as reference) I estimate the S2 dome to be about 2'6" = 10 mm diameter. Possibly closer to the Finney dome? The S4/B4 dome is a great fat monster of a thing dwarfing the engine underneath it. But your 517 demonstrates that every Great Western engine should have two domes... EDIT: Is that a shortened smokebox in the background? Demonstrating an Oxford blunder - the chimney was on the centre-line of the short smokebox and didn't move when the smokebox was extended because it had to stay directly above the blastpipe, the position of which was determined by the cylinders/steam chest.

Oh yes! Pre-Swindon Armstrong! But very niche...

Ah yes, King Louis I & VIII - one of our more frequently overlooked monarchs. The barons were backing him against King John until the latter died, whereupon they decided the infant Henry III would suit their interests even better. Barons haven't changed... Louis was welcomed with great rejoicing by the City of London and was in control of most of England for around 18 months. He was acknowledged as King but never crowned - but the neither was Edward VIII and we count him in.

Yes, I've been trying to elicit authoritative guidance on whether the Alan Gibson '517' dome is a good enough match for that on the S2 boilers...

I have been digging deep in the garage and finally found the box containing the wagons I built in my late teens through to my mid-20s – quite a few with P4 wheelsets. This has added a further ten Ratio LNWR wagons to my stock; along with half-a-dozen Slaters Midland D299 wagons, four D305 dropside wagons, a coke wagon and three brake vans; assorted Coopercraft GWR wagons (too many O4s for my present purposes); a D&S NER van that I must have glued together but really looks rather nice, some Slaters 20 ton hoppers (why?) and a birdcage brake; some hand-lettered POs; and this: … which is what I was particularly looking for, given my rash of L&Y wagon building. I believe this is an Ian Kirk kit for a D5 12 ton (loco) coal wagon, which, you will note, I painted in my naïve idea of ‘unpainted wood’ livery. I don’t know how it works out dimensionally, not having the second volume of Noel Coates’ Lancashire & Yorkshire Wagons, but the bodywork certainly looks very like the photo in Vol 1 (Plate 50) – also in unpainted wood livery. The underframe is rather generic RCH 1923-ish and the end pillars don’t reach all the way down to the headstocks, which must be wrong, but I think that there’s scope for upgrading it to something a bit more like. I was going to hold it back but I can’t resist showing you the NER van too – from a D&S whitemetal kit, glued together about 30 years ago: I’m really rather proud of what I achieved then. I’ve only recently got back up to the same standard.

So schneidet Siegfrieds Schwert! Sorry, Nordic rather than Greek mythology. The true modeller will exercise his free will and not accept the law as handed down by the one-eyed manufacturers.

The really dangerous thing is that I may be lured into buying one now that I've got interested in correcting its defects, whereas I probably wouldn't have looked at it twice if it had been spot on. Potential sale to Oxford, so no harm done from their point of view!

A very great deal has changed in the world of 00 gauge RTR since the Hornby 2721 first saw the light of day in 1980. Oxford's Dean Goods should be compared with the Bachmann C or 3F/4F, or the Hornby 700 Class, all low-footplate 0-6-0s which present similar challenges to the designer.

How about trompe l'oeil - print from photos to scale?

This thread seems to me to have ceased to be primarily about Oxford's Dean Goods. For me, the action (and drastic it is), along with serious discussion of the relationship between the Oxford and Mainline models and the variants of the real thing, is to be found over at Mikkel's workbench...

Both from lot 99 - the first lot with wider footplate (to use the correct technical term) and S4 boiler. No. 2455 has gained an S2 boiler and both have gained the extended smokebox. Both have tenders with coal rails but I think in No. 2458's case not yet plated. No. 2455 provides a good view of the cab and a rare view of the RHS of an S2-boilered engine. Not much evidence of livery apart from No. 2458's tender!

Looking at photos (LI 157 again): I'm beginning to see that all engines had the valences set the same distance apart. On engines with the wider footplate, it visibly overhangs the valence more. Therefore, to give at least the impression of a narrow footplate, it needs to be shaved back so that it only just sticks out from the valence. (Query: at Derby, the term would be platform, are we using the correct Swindon terminology here?) Is the Oxford platform metal or plastic? The Finney kit doesn't provide for either the short smokebox or the S2 boiler - the earliest date possible is October 1898 when No. 2571 appeared from Swindon as the first engine with extended smokebox (S4 boiler, wide footplate, fluted rods). If you hear owners of the Finney kit laughing, it's at the insanity of attempting to model the Great Western in the pre-Churchward era. Ask them, if they've built the kit, if their 1935-condition Dean Goods has the right combination of footplate, valence and coupling rods for the number it's carrying.

But for example, No. 2441. The caption in Locomotives Illustrated 157 says, photo Weymouth c. 1906: S2 (dome forward) boiler, extended smokebox, plain rods, GREAT (crest) WESTERN on tender. Lot 92 (April 1893), therefore built with an S2 boiler, S4 (rear dome) boiler fitted September 1901; S2 boiler fitted June 1903. So was the smokebox extended when it received the S4 boiler or when it reverted to the S2 boiler?

The GNoSR had barely anything other than 4-4-0s - a handful of 0-4-4Ts for Aberdeen suburban work and some 0-6-0Ts for shunting, again chiefly at Aberdeen. Possibly unique among main line railways in the British Isles in never having possessed any 0-6-0 tender engines. I thought she looked a little small! (Still referring to this locomotive, not to any Edwardian undies that have since appeared.) Although Cowan's engines were built by Scottish firms, she does have something of a M&GN Beyer Peacock engine about her.

He was wearing a top hat at the time.

Burntisland 1883 was at the Warley show the other year. I commented that although all the North British engines were green, no two were the same shade. The gentleman with whom I was speaking admitted that this was because (a) this was how things had been and (b) no-one was really sure. But then he did admit to being primarily a Caledonian enthusiast...

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Very true. I've been increasingly intrigued by the early condition of the 2301 class in the last few days! Also, I don't think the modeller of the Great Western in its classic 1930s phase or even in the ever-popular 1950s can afford to ignore this, as some of the detail differences between the early batches (platform width, front footstep shape) remained with the engines throughout - a point that as several have noted, Oxford have failed to grasp. I have to admit it: NOT ALL GREAT WESTERN ENGINES ARE THE SAME! Now don't get me on the differences between, say, a Neilson Goods and a Class M (contemporaries of the Dean Goods but substantially larger machines), and how these were still apparent when the engines were rebuilt as 3Fs. Note that these engines were built in proper quantities: 100 of the former ordered from Neilsons in one go!

Although there's not symmetry in Warson Fothergill's design, there are some stong vertical relationships. Sorry, I got intrigued and spen some time looking at the photos available online. The niche divides the first floor windows 1 to 3. The group of 3 is symmetric in relation to the timber framed gable - as in your first sketch. The niche (which is actually quite narrow) is directly above the apex of the left of the two large ground floor arches. I'm taken by the panels below the first-floor windows. That below the single window to the left of the arch, in terracotta, is clearly intended to imply that WF does have a secure grounding in the principles of classical proportion. The group of three, in stone, depict (from left to right): the clients in uproar at the audacity of WF's design; the architect in dispute with the contractors who are attempting to substitute inferior materials; and finally, the architect being forced to compromise as the client runs out of funds and the project fails to reach completion according to his original high-minded conception.