Dunalastair

Another early adopter of electric traction was the Croesor Quarry in North Wales. This was my simplified printed version of Moses Kellow's overhead electric locomotive, albeit running on another layout so without any overhead wires. Gauge was 16.5mm.

Thankyou for the kind words. I fear that OCD might be the best way to describe my interest in modelling obscure railways, especially electric, and preferably narrow gauge. I suspect that not many others take an interest in Mr Binko, or in the complicated, unclear and disputed provenance of the earliest electric railways. A better known pioneer (with a small 'p') was the Bessbrook & Newry - half tramway and half railway. This is my 3D printed version, posed against a photograph of the broad gauge railway viaduct it ran under.

That has a certain presence - looking good. We live in a converted three-storey maltings (one of seven properties) so I can attest to the length of such buildings, even small ones. Do we get a cupola?

Indeed, and I have modelled some of them, e.g. Percival Holroyd Rogier / Siemens Binko Among the 200+ models of locos which have come off my 3D printers (and Shapeways in the early days) I don't think there is much which is narrow gauge and electric from the UK which has not been tackled, albeit in simplified form.

Sounds good. I've not been to the Hythe Pier railway, but have modelled the rolling stock. Not a diorama - just a photograph behind the loco and tank car (used to fuel the ferry).

Yesterday's 'diorama a day' featured my model of Volks' shortlived 'Daddylonglegs' seagoing electric car. For today, it is back on land for the associated and historic narrow gauge Volks Electric Railway. Note the open topped bus in the background of this image. https://dewi.ca/trains/brighton/volks.html So the bus also features in my diorama, based on a similar preserved vehicle. I'm not a bus expert or a bus modeller, but this fine example rather appealed. https://www.showbus.co.uk/gallery/south/bh&d6.htm As I remember, it started off as one of these, before a repaint and detailing with railings and bespoke blinds. from ebay So after all that bus stuff, here is the 1:76 diorama, with a 3D printed art deco station building and rolling stock. The track is 9mm Peco, and the platform a proprietary moulding from the rummage box at a show. The grassy bank was hanging basket liner, and the sandy beach was sand from the local river (or was it? I think the base might have been Poundland sandpaper). The scene is rather compressed (no car park!) but hopefully captures the essentials. I have visited Brighton, but I got there by bicycle on the organised London to Brighton ride, so there was no chance to ride on or even visit the iconic first narrow gauge electric railway on the UK mainland.

I looked again for and found my copy of A W Brotchie's Lanarkshire's Trams. The account of the Carstairs Tramway runs from page 86 to 92. On page 86 there is a full page image of the car at its rustic shed, showing the side conductor gap where the line crossed the drive, and points for branches to the stables and boilerhouse. Page 88 shows the interior of the power house and page 89 an 1897 1:2500 OS map extract showing the track layout at the house. Page 90 has the image I linked in the original post, and page 91 the wiring diagram for the car. Finally page 92 has images of the track near the Mains farm, running through trees, and the transfer siding at the station, showing both SG and NG track. There is a detailed description of the electrical generation and transmission arrangements, confirming that the contact conductors were positive and negative, 12" outside the rails, on insulators 10" above the sleepers (so my depiction is rather too high). In places there was a double conductor on one side. There was a single car, tested to 35mph, running at 20mph, built locally. It was 6' 1" long by 3' 7" wide and weighed 2 tons. One account mentions two parcel vans. As coal was carried for the boiler, there may also have been open wagon(s) - some 'bogies' apparently survived to be scrapped in about 1932 with the rails. Now that I have confirmed the title, I can link the book here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lanarkshires-Trams-W-Brotchie/dp/0905069293

Today's 'diorama a day' represents 'Pioneer', the single sea-going electric car on the quirky Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway. Magnus Volk built the railway to extend the Volks Electric Railway (which features in another diorama for a future posting). The VER is still with us - 'Daddylonglegs' fared less well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_and_Rottingdean_Seashore_Electric_Railway The French had a 'pont roulant' which looked similar, but that was smaller and cable-hauled. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_roulant_de_Saint-Malo_à_Saint-Servan#/media/Fichier:Pont_Saint-Malo_1.jpg The car was 3D printed at 4mm scale and assembled from parts. Not many trains apart from those designed by Emmett had lifeboats ... The rather basic diorama experimented with using toilet tissue / PVA to produce the 'waves' which were then painted and varnished. This is as far as I got - budgets did not permit adding a crowd of happy Edwardian holidaymakers to the decks.

Googling again now, I find that the Narrow Gauge Railway Society has a special issue of TNG on the NG railways in Longdendale - I don't remember seeing this so I think this may have been published after I did my research. I must now try to resist temptation ... https://www.ngrs.org/book-sales-tng-special-issues/

Today's diorama in my 'diorama a day' series is a depiction of the unusual electric narrow gauge railway operated by Manchester to serve the reservoir works in the Longdendale Valley, near Glossop and the GCR Woodhead Tunnel. Narrow gauge steam railways were often used for reservoir construction (Harold Bowtell was the authority and his books make interesting reading) both for private contractors and for Corporation direct labour projects. https://www.marplelocalhistorysociety.org.uk/society-meetings/meetings-2014-2015/202-february-16th-a-history-of-longdendale-valley-2.html Some water boards retained NG rails for maintenance, many of which survived until comparatively recently. Manchester was different in that they used an overhead wire electric locomotive, apparently supported by their tramway department which used similar equipment. In later years IC traction was used, but the loco body survived as a lineside shelter. Several railway enthusiast visits recorded what then survived - in the 21st century the NG line is now a path and even the Woodhead line is a cycleway. My little diorama on an A4 sized base uses 16.5mm Tri-ang track suitably buried in the static grass, alongside one of the stone-lined water channels. The 3D printed steeplecab locomotive with its tramway trolley pole hauls a flat wagon loaded with a section of waterworks pipework. The overhead wire support poles are based on photographs of surviving structures. A rather American-looking worker watches from the other side, having used the footbridge to keep out of the way of the short train. A useful resource for projects such as this can be found in back issues of the Industrial Railway Society's 'Record'. Many of my models are based on scaling from photographs in articles from that useful journal.

More on the history of the railways at Thistleton can be found in The Ironstone Quarries of the Midlands volume eight, by Eric Tonks. There are more rolling stock photos, including one of the two Hudswell Clarke NG diesel locos. The Thistleton operation had been a development of a previous NG mine operation, with a separate tramway from the south. The 224hp electric loco was supplied by EE/Baguley, but the latter five of the planned six were never built. Sidney Lelux, another IRS stalwart, photographed the HC NG diesel, with SG ironstone tipplers in the background. Note the cramped driving position! https://www.irsociety.co.uk/Archives/60/Ironstone.htm I have not (yet) modelled the Thistleton diesel.

Today's 'diorama a day' represents Thistleton ironstone mine in Lincolnshire / Rutland, a short-lived narrow gauge mine railway where, unusually, electric traction came out to the surface via an adit. The gauge was 3' 6" though 28 days says 2' 8.5". As usual for East Midlands iron mines and quarries, Tonks provides the best resource, but 28days shows what is left today. For once, I will show a build sequence. https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/thistleton-ironstone-mine-sept-2010.53799/ First 3D print the rolling stock, running on 16.5mm track with a Kato pantograph. Next use 3D design to help visualise the geometry, somewhat foreshortened compared to the original. Print the tunnel portal (with date) and cut insulation foam for the contours Add static grass using my home-made fly-killer static sieve. Install and ballast the (Tri-ang) track and print and erect the poles and span wires, Finish with pickup wires and add the train. At this stage the PVA water in the stream had not yet set. Track maintenance figures add a sense of scale - these were very small locomotives. Actual scale is about 1:64. This colour image turned up after a built my model - it seems to have suffered some slippage during digitisation. Or is it colourised? https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=5317785651676281&id=523375437784017&m_entstream_source=permalink&paipv=0&eav=Afa_8ummsQJvWRKM0DcGAtxfBsWhe26nQc8wWNZP_IbCgdks0qST6HxDbx1XCe-VnUE&_rdr

Thankyou for those links. The early hydro scheme alone would make it an interesting piece of industrial history, even without the tramway. Apparently the power station went on to power a mill, even when the railway / tramway ceased electric operation. Accounts suggests that lasted until the 1960s, and the site has since been reused for a modern installation. Given the history, you might hope for images on the web, but the Canmore history pages seem to focus on the house with more than a hundred exterior and interior images. Though none I can see of the tramway. https://canmore.org.uk/site/181750/carstairs-house?display=collection&GROUPCATEGORY=5&per_page=103 I just dug out the Gillham book, but it only has a short paragraph on Carstairs (contents as per the previous RM thread) and no photographs. I must have a more thorough look for that Lanarkshire tramways book. Of course, these days Carstairs has a rather larger electric railway operation ...

Not many records it would seem, sadly. Legend has it that there was an electrocution, but other authorities reckon it was a heart attack. Yes, side conductor rails - I think. I seem to remember seeing image(s) with gap(s) - presumably the car coasted between conductors - and could have been (carefully) pushed if it stalled. Thankyou for the kind words about the model of a prototype which even for me must count as obscure.

On reflection, my backscene probably is Carstairs House - the map on the wiki page shows that the railway ran past the Kennels, the Mains (the home farm) and further outbuildings before reaching the ?back of the house proper. As I recall, I based my model on a short account in a book about Lanarkshire tramways, but I cannot put my hands on my copy right now. There is also a mention in 'The Age of the Electric Train', as mentioned in this thread https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/150425-carstairs-house-tramway/

So what to choose for today's contribution to my 'diorama a day'? One of the earliest electric railways in the UK was the 1888 Carstairs House Tramway, running from the station to the house. Pickup was from elevated rails at the side of the track. Accounts differ as to what survived and for how long - it might have been used as a horse tramway into the 1930s. https://www.facebook.com/226677430704972/posts/this-week-we-shall-be-looking-at-carstairs-house-and-the-nearby-roman-camp-of-ca/3249477018424983/ My 3D printed diorama, using 16.5mm track to represent 2' 6" gauge, featured the tram, the luggage van, the nicely rustic shed and the pickup rails, with an image of the house in the background. At least I thought it was the house - it looks rather different to that in the photograph above. Once again, an obscure (narrow gauge) line with little information available on which to base a model. This was a static model, but would have been easy enough to motorise with a motor bogie.

NIce images of the recovered stock, thankyou. The detailed wiki article on the railway describes several incidents after closure, including the 'Great Chicago Leak' in 1992 when the tunnels were flooded from the river - and many city building basements were inundated. I like this image of a more conventional railroad scene with a tunnel mailcar at Grand Central Station. A working version of the elevator would make an interesting model. I feel temptation beckoning - get thee behind me Satan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company I just put a micrometer on the model. The gauge is about 3.7mm (larger than I remembered) making the scale about 1:160, given the original is two foot gauge, if I have got my sums right. So about N gauge. The diorama is indeed 100x100mm.

Keeping up my 'micro a day' postings, today's contribution is a depiction of one of the narrow gauge overhead electric coke railways which were a feature of several medium size gasworks in the UK, this one being York. Information on these can be hard to come by, with the odd photograph and old OS mapping from NLS being as much as you can hope for - and some do not even have those. The railways were often as simple as an end-to-end line on a gantry, taking coke from the retorts to 'landsale' yards. Locos were very simple, sometimes appearing to be home-concocted, often with a wire for each polarity. In this case the rolling stock, gantry and wire standards are 3D printed, the York backscene is 2D printed and the lorry is a diecast toy bought cheaply from ebay, suitably weathered to cover up play damage. The wheelsets are 16.5mm and the scale is about 1:43. Looking through my Flickr and Imgur accounts, I have perhaps another dozen or more railway-themed dioramas which I could post here. Overall, I seem to have rather more of these than I had thought ...

I built this microlayout as a proof-of-principle for a later slightly larger layout based on a narrow gauge aluminium railway in the Scottish Highlands, loosely inspired by Kinlochleven. Track is Peco, but those VERY tight 180- degree curves are Rokuhan, both z gauge. Loco and wagon chassis are Rokuhan shorties (at the time very cheap) and the NG bodies are 3D printed. At the time I was using Shapeways for printing - my own printers came later when Shapeways rates (and especially shipping rates) became much more expensive. The first image (a video if you click the arrow) shows the bare bones of the layout. The loco is based on one of the NG Thamshavnbahn locos from Norway, since preserved despite wartime sabotage. The next photograph is probably my favourite view from the microlayout - I like to think that it mostly works considering that scale is 1:148 and gauge is 6.5mm. Here the steeplecab loco is printed, but the wagons are Rokuhan z gauge. A wider angle view of the layout on the mantlepiece, with 'clearances cottages' at the left and a ruined chapel on the right. And to show that it still runs with scenery, albeit before the chapel kirkyard was fully integrated into the scene. Following the lessons learned from this project, I went on to build my 'Uisge' layout, but that is another, slightly larger story.

Nice photos, thankyou. Yes, I realised too late that the early rolling stock should have been green. I now have 200+ 3D printed models of obscure mostly narrow gauge locos, and perhaps 60% are on 16.5mm gauge wheelsets, with scale adjusted to suit. Often around 7mm scale, but sometimes very different, e.g. when modelling 18" gauge. As to modelling further rolling stock, the issue is where to put it - these shelves represent less than half of the accumulated models, and of course the dioramas and microlayouts take up even more space.

My interest in narrow gauge electric railways extended to pier railways / tramways, of which there were many. Southport Pier in Merseyside has had several generations of trains, but I chose to model the version running at the start of the 20th century, as seen in this photograph, albeit with reduced width. https://piers.org.uk/piers/southport/#gallery The static diorama based on this photograph provided an interesting exercise in 3D design and printing. Those people (cheap Chinese figures from ebay) are perhaps a little too modern, and might be better replaced by 'Victorian' figures. There is an interesting BFI film from around 1900 which shows people on the pier taken from a tramway train (but not showing the rolling stock). https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-southport-pier-1899-1905-online

I have now posted my simple models and diorama. https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/179956-post-office-railway-diorama/ Must be an interesting challenge, cramming yourself into the POR loading gauge to drive. Here is an earlier WIP image of the Ramsgate model, before the 'grass' mat was applied. showing the art deco station building entrance and clock tower. And no, I did not put a watch mechanism behind the clockface, though it did cross my mind. The model was a little scaled down. For comparison, here is the original. https://ramsgate-pleasurama.weebly.com/the-tunnel-railway.html

Yes, I seem to remember seeing those on Shapeways, thankyou. I am trying to minimise the number of new railway books I buy - my shelves are already overloaded! For an obscure railway, it is good to see the modelling interest.

In the Ramsgate Tunnel Railway diorama thread, there was a comparison with the second generation Post Office Railway rolling stock, from the same supplier. As it happens, I have also modelled that interesting system, again with much simplified 3D printed models. This is the four wheel first generation car - in the tunnels these did not last long. This is the replacement stock, from English Electric, with a small articulated power unit as at Ramsgate And here is the simple diorama of a station scene, to justify this thread being in the diorama section. The wheeled containers are now in place on the carrier and on the platform. The track is old Tri-ang Series 3.

There is a certain amount on the web, but most of what I learned came from Peter Harding's book(let), which has some useful photographs, but (looking again just now) no drawings. I am indeed guilty much of the time when modelling obscure prototypes of scaling from photographs. Yes, the Post Office Railway rolling stock was similar - and indeed I have modelled that line in static form. I will perhaps post my (very simple) diorama of that sometime soon.