Dunalastair

Barclay was not the only industrial loco builder in Kilmarnock, never mind Scotland. The Industrial Railway Society handbook N is the essential reference, though it is itself now nearly a half century old.

Elevated railways provide one example of railways and (sometimes) stations built above and parallel to roads. More common in the US (and beloved of Hollywood - think about the car chase in the French Connection), the 'Docker's Umbrella' is the obvious example, often with dock railway lines inset into the roadways. https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/remembering-dockers-umbrella-used-stretch-21635783 Might we still have it if the structural steelwork had bene patched up back in the fifties - or would it have bene swept away in the 'modernism' of the sixties?

A couple of weeks since the last post, during which there has been progress but for various reasons not always to plan. Imgur seem to have been b*****ing about with their user interface again and making it harder to generate a 'direct link' but I seem to have got there. The canal bank has now been surfaced and 'grassed' using hanging basket liner - perhaps a little coarse, but vegetation grows well in the wet West Highland climate in season. Though photographs do not show lamps on the canalside, possibly because the steamers ran mainly in the long bright days of summer, simple printed lamps have been provided to avoid any accidents between trains and boats. I got into some height calibration issues with my 3D printer when trying to make some fencing, and need to resolve that issue - I have been rather putting it off. The archway surround has come adrift and needs to be re-attached, along with the lifebuoys on the steamer. This diorama was intended as a way to photograph the pre-grouping WHR stock which I described earlier in this thread in more of an original context than my 1960s layout can provided. It may have ended up more compressed than I had envisaged and necessarily rather crude, given the build approach, but will hopefully be ready for those photographs in the not-too distant future, at which point I ought to post a 'diorama' thread to complement this hijacked theme.

The sea on the West Coast and between the islands famously can look tropical in the right light - something to do with the white sand, perhaps.

Or indeed the CR's Alloa Swing Bridge - damaged more than once. https://www.facebook.com/groups/oldstirling/posts/4814687251929377/

When you consider the girder count at Central Station, both in the roof and between High Level and Low Level, then Irn Bru seems somehow appropriate. Though Central is still there - perhaps it was the erstwhile St Enoch roof which was used by Barr's? https://showmethejourney.com/train-travel-info/countries/great-britain/cities/glasgow/rail-stations/glasgow-central/ The 1878 Queen Street roof somehow appears less brash, though I have not seen the latest redevelopment.

I decided to use the masking tape approach to bridge between the 'ribs', and this has now been done, not without a few tangles on the way. The hanging basket liner material was then trimmed to size and fixed after pasting the masking tape surface with PVA white glue. This mostly worked as intended, needing only one patching piece at the bottom of the ramp, but placing the station building afterwards showed that it was now too close to the platform edge. So it was out with the knife to trim back the slope to allow the building to sit more snugly into the slope. The resulting gap is still less than I might have preferred, but this is a much compressed arrangement, and with the platform edging now glued in place and setting, I hope that I can live with the result. I have now printed and painted a set of lifebuoys in white, so the next task will be to trim those off the 'sprue' and fit them to the paddle-steamer railings. I wonder if it might have been simpler to print them as integral features - hopefully this way they will be more circular.

Looks good, and I appreciate the constraints of compression, but has the signal cabin ended up just too close to the platform edges? I am possibly sensitised to this issue by my current Banavie PIer station diorama project. Shuffling the cabin just a little back towards the station building, if that is still possible, might help the credibility. https://westhighlandline.org.uk/arrochar-and-tarbet/ Of course, it might simply have been 'plonked' for the image and since been moved up the platform.

If the rails are not welded, then does the rail bonding not make a significant contribution to the overall resistance?

Yes, that was my thought - very close. It was all very different in the 1850s : https://maps.nls.uk/view/74416226 And even in 1864 : https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/1864-birds-eye-view-of-glasgow-railway-stations/ It must have been interesting shunting using all those four wheel carriage turntables.

That is the stage my bike used to get to before I invested in disc brakes when riding in Trailquest events on clay Midland field bridleways. Hub brakes did make a difference, but I tired of the time it took to clean up after an event. Swapping to a smaller car also did not help - I could wrap a muddy bike and throw it into the back of the Vectra without taking wheels off. South Coast chalk sounds like an easier option, but I never got that far unless you count a London-to-Brighton charity ride on the roads over the Beacon. The bike has not been touched since before COVID and the shed it lives in is now buried in ivy.

When the West Highland Railway was built, machines such as that in the previous post were undreamt of. Though the steam shovel had been developed, it was better suited to softer soils than the rocky hillsides of Lochaber. In the UK the contemporary Manchester Ship Canal was a notable early user in of mechanical excavation, but when the Corpach end of the Caledonian Canal was built in the 1810s, construction was by brawn not steam - though a Boulton and Watt steam pump was used to drain the coffer dam at Loch Linnhe. My diorama of the Canal embankment has now reached the stage in the photograph below, with the diagonal walkway cut into notches in the foamboard ribs. The glue is setting on this assembly while I work out how I am going to 'cover' this framework without leaving any gaps. Ideally it might be as simple as cutting some hanging basket liner oversize then trimming it down to fit. We will see ... This arrangement is necessarily very compressed, and the station building is closer to the platform edge than I would like, though the depth of the platform edging will hopefully help with how it looks. In reality, the walkway started from the other side of the building, and as shown on the map the layout was much more stretched out.

Indeed - the West Highland was late on the scene compared to most of the network. Early enough images of the terminus at The Fort also show what seem to be concrete platform edges. https://westhighlandline.org.uk/fort-william/2/ However, looking at photographs of the iconic island platforms further south (or indeed the likes of Spean Bridge or Roy Bridge) from later eras seems to show a patchwork of changes over the years on some of them. The process continues to this day - "Rannoch Station Platforms 1 and 2 required their heights to be re-gauged to a lower level in order to accommodate new Class 153 rolling stock; a Caledonian sleeper that brings increased capacity to the West Highland Line." A statement which does not altogether make sense to me, but was apparently the justification for the works and the hi-vis brigade shown below. https://www.cpr-resurfacing.co.uk/value-engineering-at-rannoch-station/

Looking good. What are your thoughts on subtly 'flattening' tyres to make models 'sit' on the road more credibly?

When it comes to supposedly historic images, there is a postcard series which comes up on WHR image searches which are supposedly vintage but which have a modern look about them - for example the 'Fish train at Mallaig' scene below. Even the fonts look modern. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/274859931852 Does anybody know the provenance of the artwork? I'm not sure whether it is deliberately kitsch, but it will not win any prizes for great art. The phrase 'tourist tat' comes to mind, but I may be being unfair.

This is a crop of that one early photograph of Banavie / Banavie Pier station, taken from the pdf I referenced earlier, with thanks. Note the platform edge profile. The chimney pots in the distance probably belong to the station master's house. That must have been an easy job by the standards of the day, and even compared to other WHR outposts. Not exactly thronged with waiting passengers ...

A little more progress with the pre-grouping diorama of the pier at Banavie on the West Highland Railway, as it might have been before the Mallaig Extension stole its thunder and forced a renaming. My shortened version of SS Gondolier has now been painted and mostly assembled. White paint is currently drying on a batch of lifebuoys for the railings. Photographs suggest that these were white in the early days, only later changing to red and white. I have not been able to find out when the regulations of lifebuoy colours might have changed. There is now a pier for the paddle-steamer to moor to and track for the upper and lower levels, with a crossing for passengers arriving from the inclined walkway. It appears from the one photograph I have that the platform edges were concrete, so that has also been represented. Oh, and the rest of the station building windows have now been silvered. Parts have been rougly blocked to the appropriate heights while I work out how to arrange the contours. Slopes would have been more straightforward if it had not been for that angled walkway. As it is, I have cut some formers from foamboard (just visible to the right), but I'm not sure how well that might work. The grass will probably be hanging basket liner, which should cover up most sins if I can cut it to size. I'd like to think that this little scene is beginning to come together, but there is still scope for me to make a pig's ear of the landform. Gondolier ran between Inverness and Banavie for the last time in 1939, before being towed up to Scapa Flow, so this is the first time in 85 years that anything like this scene could be visited at 1:1 scale. Just as with Fort Augustus, one cannot help thinking that the station building was overkill, especially as most passengers would have transferred directly between train and boat, probably with through tickets.

I'm surprised there was enough space. I'm guessing it might be on the right in this somewhat murky image? http://www.eastbank.org.uk/images/Glasgow/BW01.jpg

Looking good. How did the signalmen get up there? A ladder up from track level or a ladder down from street level? Or even a stair?

My family on my mother's side worked for the railway in NE England. I think that my grandfather worked in the back office rather than on the operations side, but he was moved from York to Hull. My Great Uncle Tom, a true Dalesman who I could barely understand, finished his career as stationmaster at Bedale and bought the stationhouse for his retirement. So, yes, being moved was part of working for the LNER, though I thought it was generally part of career progression unless you were employed in a relief role. There are stories of relief men having to look after the livestock as well as train operation in some of the more remote outposts. Looking forward to seeing how the elusive signal box comes together. I seem to remember the gantry, but the cabin was before my time.

Given a choice between a posting there and e.g. Corrour, I think I know which I'd choose. Even if the wages were better in Glasgow, there would be nothing to spend money on living on the Moor.

Must have been a challenging posting for the signallers' lungs, even allowing that everybody smoked in those days. Diesel fumes were perhaps not necessarily an improvement. But considering how late the low-level platforms were steam-worked before the blue trains settled down, probably nobody thought anything of it at the time (except for the signallers' wives, working overtime on washday).

I am enjoying the vertical relief, and it is good to see an appropriate fence appearing around the flask gantry. It was not altogether flat around Wylfa when that facility was operating, although perhaps not as rocky as around Trawsfynydd. Cooling water was the must-have for reactors, whether salt or fresh - who knows what might be over that hill?

The arrangement at Banavie Pier as it was in 1899 can be seen at https://maps.nls.uk/view/82887594. I have not been able to find a reference to a previous model of this unusual station, which is perhaps surprising considering that there are relatively few branch termini in the West Highlands - and hence a good few fictional and might-have-been versions on this forum. Killin / Loch Tay, Ballachulish and Fort Augustus spring to mind - it is not a long list compared to, say, the GWR. But even compared to those quiet backwaters, Banavie Pier did not see much traffic - such as there was linked to the steamer, arriving one day and leaving the next. Latterly the service was essentially a summer operation for the tourists. Search images for 'Banavie pier station' and you should find a series on Getty showing boy scouts on the LNER Northern Belle tour train at the station in the 1930s, where they stayed for two days on successive tours while climbing The Ben. The story of those Scout tour trains is told at http://scoutguidehistoricalsociety.com/traincruises.htm, but sadly the image links are broken. There is more on the Northern Belle at https://www.steve-banks.org/prototype-and-traffic/357-the-northern-belle#close. Railway Wonders of the World also had a feature on the cruise train, when not carrying Scouts, including this nice image of the train stopped on Glenfinnan viaduct. But this is deviating a long way from 'pre-grouping', locomotives apart. https://www.railwaywondersoftheworld.com/cruising-by-train.html The station building survives as a private house, but the Scout images are as good as I have found of Banavie - there do not seem to be many photographs of the station, though the steamer was well recorded.

In the last post, the new West Highland saloon brake compo was out of focus. Here it is again, with red ends, in a rather clearer view together with the Holmes 'C' class 0-6-0 on a boat train in a mockup of a new diorama. Banavie station was in the 'extension' style, but the original Banavie, later Banavie Pier was in the original West Highland style. Here my printed version is part-painted, using silver paint to represent the glazing. The paddle steamer print is a much-shortened version of 'Gondolier', a vessel which plied the Caledonian Canal from Banavie to Inverness until 1939, whereupon it was commandeered as a blockship for Scapa Flow, where the hull apparently still sits on the seabed. The branch terminus by a harbour pier is a popular subject, with boats bobbing below the trains. Banavie was a little different in that the canal was significantly above the station, with an inclined path to link the two. An inclined kickback siding provided access to the quayside for goods traffic and perhaps passenger baggage. There is an image (not immediately embeddable) of what looks like a West Highland bogie with what might be a baggage van alongside SS Gondolier at Banavie at http://disused-stations.org.uk/b/banavie_pier/index.shtml, while the clearer image below (follow the link to enlarge / zoom in) has what might be a coal wagon alongside, possibly to bunker the steamer. https://collections.st-andrews.ac.uk/item/gondolier-at-banavie-pier/86127