Compound2632

I agree - the junction between the old and new lines to which I was referring is a few hundred yards to the east.

It's simply a trailing connection into the up (?) line, just that that immediately converges with the down for the single section to the junction - see http://maps.nls.uk/view/104192289. The layout at Braintree presumably grew like that at Rowsley - the original terminus became a goods-only station when the extension was built, with a new passenger station on the new line - but in this case resulting in a single-line junction that is a single point - not something the BOT liked - preferring junctions to be laid as double, which in this case would have meant extending the station loop beyond the junction.

That looks very like one of the wagons I've been given by my GW friends which I plan to refurbish - Graham456 and Brassey identified it as an old Ian Kirk kit. Brassy suggested it should have grease axleboxes, certainly I'd go that way for my 1903-ish period. I'll be painting mine red of course. Thanks wagonman for the additional data posted here.

Just arrived, as compensation for not having time to get to the Warley show this year, a wagon kit so simple I might even get it built in between lesson planning! The Mousa resin kit for the LNW D1 one-plank open wagon, with choice of primitive or even more primitive brake block (singular…): Note the MJT waisted bearings - hoping for a better fit this time. I see Bill has just got his D2 and D3 out as 3D printed resin – so there will be many about before I get my Ratio kit-bashed D2 finished! My Ratio-based LNW wagon-building bout is really being overtaken by technological developments what with these, London Road Models w-irons and Coast Line Models 3D printed and etched parts. Though I think I did mention splashing out on some Coast Line grease axleboxes – here they are fitted to my D53 conversion: The 3D printed parts are rather brittle – I snapped one spring so had to graft on part of a spare oil axlebox spring from the Ratio kits – this bodge is tucked away out of sight under the brake lever. Note the profound lack of interior detail – waiting for a load of coal. (There is a hole in the floor to avoid warping.)

Yes, but not also at the sea-side - the beach at Borth being the other big draw. So somehow we never did the W&L.

Ah yes, Bridgnorth - when I was little we lived first in Shrewsbury and then Birmingham, so the SVR was our nearest steam railway; the next nearest (or so it seemed) bring the Talyllyn and Vale of Rheidol - the latter being a 'proper' railway with engines and carriages in BR blue. While on the theme of blue remembered hills... Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? ... but no, the Midland was a coal railway. Any other traffic was incidental.

The high class station building seems to be a model of Haworth on the K&WVR - with this early Midland influence, I do wonder how Edwardian got distracted onto 1935 GWR alongside his pre-group interests! I see that (following mullie's hint) this was a Builder Plus kit of the mid-to-late 70s.

I like the coal mine - evidently you already knew what railways were really about! That's a very high-class station building... Very early 80s judging by the rolling stock and your collar?

At age 7, I asked for the Nellie goods set as my first train set (per the 1971 catalogue with Terence Cuneo's painting of Evening Star on the cover) but she was out of stock at the shop (bicycles and model railways?) on Wyle Cop in Shrewsbury so I had to settle for a set with 47606 - and I've never looked back...

Thanks Andy - sounds a promising technique; hope you can post some photos! My conversion to D53 is just waiting for the paintshop - or rather waiting for the final touches to my D2 so both can go in together - but my coursework comes first at the moment...

... and indeed there is a heap of discarded blue clothing.

Hmm. I didn't find Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe that helpful as a guide to mid-19th century female fashions.

At first I read it as "mangles swedes". Does that help?

The two wagons on the main line* below look rather Dalby-esque. *i.e. the LNWR - note the coach behind the wagons.

I've not had a problem applying Pressfix transfers to a matt surface. There isn't a carrier film. Do follow the instructions carefully. The tricky things are 1: lifting the transfer off the thick backing sheet - gently easing out with a sharp knife and then handling with tweezers - and 2: getting them to sit in position without moving before finally pressing home - especially small things such as individual digits. Looking around other discussions around here you'll find they are marmite - but personally I get on reasonably well with them.

Is it definitely a guano tank? somehow fish oil seems more likely - more liquid. I hope it wasn't used for both...

Once you're hooked on Mek-Pak you'll never look back... The Dapol wagon looks like nothing - 10' wheelbase for starters. The only thing putting your wagons either side of it tells you is just how horrible it is. The Bachmann 7-plank wagon is a good representation of the RCH 1923 wagon, though not as good as the Parkside kits, which are a joy to build. Aren't the Hornby wagons an amazing mixed bag though? There are some like that 3-plank (also 4-plank and 6-plank) that at are perfectly proportioned for the pre-grouper and others such as the coke wagon that are still straight out of the Triang catalogue - I've got one in a box somewhere that I was given as a cast-off from my cousins c. 1973. (Though there are some rather odd goings-on below the solebar on the 3/4/6-plank wagons - that V-iron for instance...)

Had they been at Darlington, that is...

I mentioned about a month ago that I am doing something similar with the "Hull & Barnsley" van bodies using the Cambrian Gloucester 9' underframe. I've not made any progress but, Nile, I hope you won't mind my posting a couple of pictures here. First, the trial version, which has been sitting in white primer for several months: This has single-side brakes as befits my 1903-is time-frame. One refinement to the Cambrian solebars is to scrawk off the two pieces of diagonal strapping either side of the v-hanger - I believe these are only appropriate for a Gloucester 5/6/7 plank open wagon, being the end of the diagonal strapping that runs inside the side sheeting. I have another three bodies to do: Precision Superstrip doesn't remove all the Hornby printing. The middle body is from the Thomas range - you can see the whites of its eyes! Also, there's been a change to the mould with an extra lump on the underneath. On the H&B body, unlike the bodies used by Nile, the end pillars extend down over the headstocks, which I think is rather more how the real thing would have been built. I'm not quite sure what the bit of pipework on the end is supposed to represent but I might make these vans through piped so they can run in passenger trains. There have been previous discussions on here about this body though I've yet to see a photo of a genuine H&B van resembling it - though what I gleaned was that the originals had side sheeting flush with the framing rather than recessed and also that they were possibly fully fitted, maybe even 3'6" wheels? Anyway, this isn't supposed to be a model of a H&B van - it is, as I said in my original post, an entirely accurate model of a Derbyshire & Staffordshire Junction Railway biscuit van, one of a batch built by the Gloucester Carriage & Wagon Co. in 1897 - see Plate 666 in the OPC book by Keith Montague. Bother! I've just noticed I've left the PO registration plate on - inside the left-hand crownplate. Also, in this "cruel enlargement" the total failure of the inner and outer V-irons and the piece that drives the push rods (what's that called?) to line up is painfully obvious.

The short section crammed in between two road bridges is very Black Country-ish but can you give it any other distinctive features? A canal for instance - with the railway bridges abutting older canal bridges? Rather than a passenger station, how about a private siding serving some typical industry? Or is that too much like an American switching layout? Isn't Spon End in Coventry?

Quite so - the Midland does not need the sympathy one has to have for the benighted Western companies with their archaic engineering practices and dowdy liveries... If after that I'm allowed a less partisan comment: by the Great War the Midland and LNWR were co-operating in many areas - traffic pooling etc. - the Wolverhampton/Walsall district being one such - so there is no escaping the tentacles of the mighty Midland octopus.

Indeed - the truth is in the carrying capacity (with due allowance for variations in the density of the coal from different regions or even, I would guess, different pits and seams). See my comparison of Slater's Gloucester 8T and Parkside RCH 1923 12T wagons - ignore the "10T" branding on the smaller wagon, that's just PowSides fitting a known livery onto an available kit. A 12T wagon will have 50% greater volume than an 8T wagon. That said, I must have 40-odd Bachmann PO wagons being pulled around my layout by engines in early BR livery...

Mike and Mikkel, thank you both for your comments. With regards to my experiment with the LNW wagons, right now with artificial light only, what the naked eye sees is closest to my middle photo but in strong sunlight the difference is more pronounced - closer to my flash photo. I don't think there is that much difference in the flash-light flux incident on the two wagons - the camera is set to x4 digital zoom and is about 40 cm from the wagons. (It's just a cheap and cheerful family snap camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS62.) Mike's experiment with my red O4 photo is interesting. As I described in the original post #15, the body colour is "Humbrol 100 with a light wash of the grey slop in the bottom of my brush-cleaning jam-jar", while "for the plates, I scanned a photo in Atkins (Vol. 1 p. 70, wagon no. 73697), imported into CorelDraw, traced and printed onto photo paper at the best resolution of my HP Deskjet printer. The base colour was adjusted to hex code #BD6038 (R: 189; G: 96 B:56) but some highlight and shading was added to try for a tromp l’oeil effect for the raised numbers and edge of the plate". So that's not far out from Mike's analysis - certainly there is a significant blue component. The colour match of the plates to the body colour was by eye and "close enough". What I didn't do and perhaps should have, was to give the finished wagon a spray coat of matt varnish to unify the surface finish – so the plate is probably both shinier and bluer than the body. The point about reflected light from the surroundings is interesting too. I’d understood that the famous “blackberry black” of LNW engines had a blue component due to the reflection of the blue of the sky, the actual paint being “drop black” but with a high standard of finish including several coats of varnish (see Talbot et al., “LNWR Liveries”, HMRS, 1985). Of course those who have described this colour were choosing to remember what they’d seen on glorious June days out at Rugby or Tamworth, not on overcast, smog-laden February days in the bowels of New Street Station.

I should finish my home-made D2 based on the Ratio underframe - not as crisp-looking as the 3D print I'll admit, and with a different pattern of rivets (apparently not bolts) on the corner plates. I've ordered some Coast Line Models 3D-printed LNW grease axleboxes to substitute for the oil axleboxes in the Ratio kits - thereby squeezing more nineteenth-century wagons out of my stock of kits; the postage being nearly as much as the axleboxes, I thought to get more for my postage by adding the Furness Railway 6 ton 1 plank wagon to my order but Shapeways couldn't print it: 'Given the nature of 3D printing, every now and then we catch designs that are too fragile to create in certain materials. Though we do our best to identify these issues as early as possible, some are only found during the manufacturing process.' - this was FUD. Anyway the axleboxes will be my first experience of 3D printed components. I could of course have got the same number of grease axleboxes by buying another couple of Ratio underframe kits for about the same price but then I'd have had even more unused solebars tempting me on...

This is for MikeOxon! Back in September there was a further round of discussion of GWR wagon red, spread over several threads and blogs, including Mike’s own which included photos taken at Cinderford sometime around 1890. These showed a mixture of GWR wagons that look either ‘light’ or ‘dark’. One interpretation is that the ‘light’ wagons are painted grey and the ‘dark’ wagons red, suggesting both liveries coexisted at this period. There was some very interesting discussion of the spectral response function of early photographic film and attempts at modelling this by digital post-processing photos of model wagons in the two liveries. There was also discussion of paint chemistry and weathering processes, in the course of which I made the suggestion that the surface finish of the paint may be a factor in the apparent colour – with the paints then in use new paint would be gloss, weathering to matt. I’ve had my latest part-finished LNW wagons sitting next to some completed ones in my cabinet for a while and have noticed a difference in apparent colour. The wagons I’m comparing have all been painted in Precision NBR wagon grey over Halfords grey primer. The completed wagons are sprayed with Humbrol matt varnish. The latest ones have a gloss finish (again Humbrol) to improve the appearance of the waterslide transfers. Of course the intention is that these will eventually be sprayed matt, once I’ve got round to adding the tare weights using Pressfix transfers. This first photo was taken indoors on an overcast day with the room light on – a ‘natural light’ 14 W (75 W equivalent) bulb. D54 coal wagon in matt on the left, D4 open in gloss on the right: Next, with the addition of some ‘floodlighting’ from my modelling lamp, the angle highlighting the planking grooves: Finally and for me the clincher, with camera flash (note shadows on the background paper): (There seems to have been a sudden fall of snow – or drifting of the flipchart-paper!) I admit that this is somewhat unscientific – these are colour photos taken with a modern digital camera. However, I think they do demonstrate that surface finish does have an effect. Nineteenth-century photographs will of necessity have been taken in strong sunlight, so I think the last photo taken with flash is particularly telling.