The Johnster

Glanrhyd was a slightly different situation; the train had not been running over flooded track but under normal conditions (just a rough morning) when it encountered a river bridge that had washed partly away and the driver couldn't stop in time having not seen it in the dark. The tragic loss of life occurred when passengers re-entered the leading coach, which had already been evacuated by the train crew, to retrieve luggage. I have seen, but can't recall where, a photo of a 56xx running slowly through flood water up to running plate level at Mountain Ash GW, in 1963 I think. The driver could have had no idea what he was running on, if it was there, or if it was obstructed, and the firebed must have been in the water, and I imagine the passengers had to put their feet on the seats to keep them dry!

As it was explained to me back in the 70s when I worked on the railway, vacuum brakes were generally used with steam locos because they were easy to 'blow off', release, with the large ejector on the loco. Westinghouse air pumps were less powerful, but more suited to electric stock and the 'chunka chunka chunka' sound of the electrically driven pumps would be familiar to anyone old enough to remember red London Underground or green Southern Electric trains. Diesel and electric traction is more suited to air brakes blown off by compressors. Train air and vacuum brakes are separate from locomotive steam or 'straight air' brakes. Train brakes are required to be 'fail safe', and are held off the wheel by vacuum or air pressure, applying by weight or spring when pressure is lost, but loco steam or straight air brakes are pressured on, and release if pressure is lost. A 'dual fitted' loco thus has 3 separate braking systems, the steam or straight air which works only on the loco's wheels and a vacuum and an air brake that works on the train's wheels. On a part fitted freight train there is of course a fourth, the guard's brake in the van, and on a loco there is also a handbrake; not uncommon in accident reports to read that all available brakes had been applied fully in desperation, or none if the situation had developed too quickly for the crew to react. When train air brakes were widely adopted on BR from the 1960s onwards, a 'dual pipe' system was used with a train brake pipe to operate the brake and a reservoir pipe to release it quickly when you needed to get on the move again, as the locos' compressors were rarely powerful enough to do this. So, a lot of pipework appeared on the buffer beams, and things got a bit crowded when steam heating bags, control, and electrical cables were included in the mix as well. Dmus had a dual pipe vacuum system that worked in much the same way, with a brake pipe and a release pipe; this was very effective and even on a 12 car train the brakes could be released instantaneously. All braking systems that rely on flexible hoses (bags) leak, and pressure must constantly be maintained.

I think it was, and to an extent still is, a class thing. The airphoto of Aylesbury sort of shows this, middle class or at least aspiring middle class development in Metroland. These people can afford to buy their vegetables in shops, and want to use their gardens as places for the kids to play safely and to sit and relax on nice days in; flowers and shrubs bound the lawns and there is a potting shed (or perhaps it's an outside loo) in most of them. Eating outside is a relatively modern development; nobody would have thought of barbies or garden furniture beyond a plain green canvas deck chair or two back then, and it was the same when I was brought up in the 50s and 60s in a not dissimilar sort of house. Yer landed gentry took tea on the terrace, but there was no plastic outdoor crockery in the 30s, and the china stuff was kept inside! Poorer homes would have smaller gardens and these would most likely be put to growing the family's vegetables, possibly with a chuck or two for the eggs, but the aspiration was to upgrade from that sort of life. Evidence of this is on the left of the photo, one of that nice Mr Balfour's schools to ejumacate the great unwashed. Nowadays the middle classes are reclaiming it, in gardens and allotments. Nobody, not even rich people, had tumble dryers and washing lines were an essential. Ours was a quite tall double deck affair. Houses like these in the photo with back lane entrances would have their coal delivered that way, and the 'coal shed' is probably at the rear of the house accessed from outside. Inside, next to it and accessed from the kitchen, is the pantry, and on the other side of the coal was the outside loo. A middle class house built in 1898 did not have an inside loo, and my grandfather had had this put in upstairs along with a bathroom in the 30s. The electric, as it was called, was put in at the same time.

Oh. Bu**er. Back to replacing my Fruit D with a Parkside, then...

Just had a squiz at Rails' advert for the Dapol made SECR van they've commissioned. Now this is more like it, and if Dapol could manufacture wagons to this standard more often I'd reconsider buying them. Or even upgrading the chassis; the old body toolings might not be up to the very best of modern standards but they are by no means bad. The Fruit D has all sorts of problems with the planking and width, though, and needs a complete renewal IMHO.

Perhaps because RTR chassis for A1/A3 and A4 pacifics are readily available and of pretty good quality. Gordon is probably a pretty good starting place for the overall appearance, and the RHDR locos may be worth looking at as well, but I would imagine that a loco built in 1915 would have a GN type without the side windows, rather like a K3, and possibly a 'normal', as opposed to Wooton, firebox; basically a stretched GN Atlantic. It might not even have outside Walschearts. Which begs the question of what RTR chassis might be used if the Gresley pacific is the wrong length.

The tanks were glass lined on the inside, and steam cleaned as soon as the milk was discharged, but as has been said the outsides were not cleaned and stank of stale milk, especially in warm weather. Hygiene was understandably considered vital in the production process, but as no milk could reach the consumers that had ever been in contact with the outside of the vehicles it was not considered necessary to clean them. Tanks with branding, St Ivel and so on, were scrubbed up more frequently in order to display the brand name, but the 'ordinary' silver painted ones were left to their own rather smelly devices. This is, trust me, not an aspect of the traffic that you want to recreate on a model...

I'd have to agree with Mike's comment, especially as we are talking about a WR depot where any loco that had not been built at Swindon attracted comment, mostly adverse. Locomen never overtly praised any loco they had to work on, and the best you could get were 'not bad', or 'strong', which suggested that the engine could pull the train but nothing else about it was any good. What else does it need to do, you not unreasonably ask, but ride, steaming, ease of firing, draughts, stiff or loose controls, view ahead, the quality of the coal and a load of other annoyances conspire to ruin a driver or a fireman's day, and they are more than capable of ruining each others' days as well! Having a loco you weren't familiar with was a sure way to make a job you'd done a thousand times before unpredictable and potentially problematic. Where is the best place to take water? Will I be able to see the shunter through the window or will the bunker get in the way, and if it does will he realise what's happening? Why are the cab steps different and I've nearly fallen off the loco because I forgot and the handrail isn't exactly where I need it to be? What's the best way to fire it? And so on, and on, and on. Locomen, well railwaymen in general but locomen in particular, are small c conservative and like everything to be the same as it always was because they know they can manage that, and resist improvements. A standard loco of any sort at Old Oak would be commented on. they were vociferous about the Brits and dumped Iron Duke on the Southern almost as soon as they saw it!

Splitting hairs, but these are not really pickup goods workings in the traditional sense, they are 'trip' workings to private concerns with railway sidings. A pickup is a train that services a number of goods yards at stations on branch lines or smaller stations on main lines, dropping traffic off and picking it up. It may function as a trip working as well, but is not that primarily. Pickups in this sense disappeared when small local goods yards went out of business post-Beeching and general merchandise goods were centred on larger depots in towns to be delivered by NCL to the local destination. I worked with 9E76 in the 70s, and we called it a pilot, which performed trip work to Ferry Road, Virgil Street, and Ely Paper Mill. At that time it was a Canton turn with Canton drivers, but was still booked a transfer trip to Radyr and return light engine at the end of the day; by the 70s this was very much 'as required' and would mostly be a Friday evening run to clear odds and ends that had fetched up at North Curve over the preceding week. Virgil street was not regarded as separate from the Penarth North Curve pilot work. The job was to marshall traffic for the trips that had been left in the yard by the various trains booked to call there, do the trips, and leave the collected traffic convenient for picking up. On a couple of occasions we took accumulated traffic to Long Dyke; ah, the glamour of waving at girls on the platform at Cardiff Central from the brake van... It was a brilliant place to learn basic railway work!

It is possible that in the period immediately following the final withdrawal of standard gauge steam in 1968 BR were concerned that steam loco running around in BR liveries might be mistaken for locos that they owned and were responsible for. They were very concerned in those days to promote the corporate image and rid themselves of the perception that they were failing to modernise. A few years later, the blue/grey livery and arrows of indecision had become very firmly embedded in the public consciousness, and steam had become part of the nation's noble engineering heritage, so the unfortunate connotations of steam being old fashioned, slow, dirty, expensive, polluting and symptomatic of an inefficient railway had gone, and those concerned with promoting BR's image were more tolerant of steam locos in BR livery. I'm not saying that I'd agree with any of this, but you can see why they might have thought in this way. Many of the earlier preserved locos could appropriately carry pre-BR liveries anyway. The early SVR never had any trouble with 43106, though, David Shepherd was able to keep Black Prince and Green Knight in their BR liveries, and AFAIK it was only the KWV and Lakeside and Haverthwaite that painted locos in these 'non BR' liveries. Perhaps it was a Northern thing; steam had lasted longer up there. Locos were painted for film work as well, which does not happen so much these days as suitable locos for a greater variety of periods or imagined locations are available.

The facing double junction is so redolent of WW2 that I cannot visualise it without one of those red brick flat roof signalboxes, and would be an essential for any layout post about 1943, and it's absence just as essential for periods prior to that. I'd leave it out because there is not a lot of operation to be done on this layout (it would be important to me, so pardon and ignore me if I'm projecting my own needs onto your layout), and a high point of whatever operation there is will be the reversing of the pickup across the station throat blocking the main lines and having to be done to timetable to avoid delaying the Cornish Riviera. I think this would be a Westbury turn. We are looking north for this diagram, and there needs to be high chalk downland behind the station perhaps a mile or so away, which begs the question of where the branch is going; there's not much in the way of towns or villages up there and it doesn't look like an MSWJ or DN&S through route. The canal, if you have it, will be the Kennet and Avon or a branch of it, capable of taking boats to those dimensions, and needs a K & A 'look' to structures and bridges.

I remember those days! A rake of Ratio 4 wheelers, fully lined out and with interiors fitted, proved that you had gone beyond the train set level, if only because they wouldn't run around train set curves. So you'd proved you could cope with Graham Farish Formway (now that really dates me!) or Streamline as well, hence you were necessarily competent to cut rail accurately and solder wire to it, in other words you had mastered the skills needed to build a whitemetal loco kit, usually a 14xx or a 57xx. I was a failure in this respect as I never managed the lining out, and my current 4 wheelers are to represent the coaches' final days on early 1950s miner's trains and in BR unlined crimson or GW unlined austerity brown, so I'm still fighting shy of lining them! A Keyser 57xx was in fact my first attempt at whitemetal kits, and while my current brace of Baccys runs rings around it for detail, it was a success with Romford 40:1 gears. But I cheated and Araldited it together as I am still nervous of soldering irons in the vicinity of whitemetal parts.

The bigger cousins, fitted 24½ tonners, were common enough at Tondu working circuit power station coal traffic to Aberthaw A station from the early 60s well into the 80s, but these impressive brutes are sadly a bit to modern for my layout. They worked on block trains, originally hauled by 42xx and later by D68xx Class 37 diesels.

The story of the naming of the D95xx class may or may not be apocryphal, and goes that a foreman at Swindon Works, seeing the drawing of what he was to oversee the making of, commented that ‘well, we made the Great Bear, now they want us to make a bl**dy teddy bear’. I have to say that I don’t see anything especially cuddly about either loco, but a frontal view of a D95xx does suggest big sticky out ears, or it does if you accept the Micky Mouse argument for Ivatt/BR Standard 2MTs.

These images are photo based and post edited to look like drawings, and Senkei has fallen down a little on his research, but we'll forgive him. I reckon the top one is Duke of Gloucester and the mk1 coaches with B4 bogies in different liveries are a dead giveaway to railtour photos! He's swapped commonwealth and B4 on the leading coach as well.

They were handsome machines and quite stylish with those tumblehomed tanks. Never heard of 'em being called Teddy Bears, which in my world applied to the D95xx hydraulics not introduced until 1965, which confused me a little in relation to Exeter!

Finished 1/044. Photo cruelly exposes a horrid joint on the nearest corner! Haven’t painted this except for the buffers and buffer beams, though I’ll be putting a dab of white on the ends of the handbrake levers next time I’ve got the white paint out. The moulded colour of the body parts isn’t far off BR bauxite, another shade that’s difficult to pin down exactly, and I just applied the transfers and sprayed matt varnish on it; I’m quite happy with the faded painted planks effect that resulted as the base for a little weathering. I don’t need any more wagons now, and haven’t really got room for any either. Wonder how long that’s going to last...

A gear train which does not rely on coupling rods to transfer power reduces wear at the coupling rod bushes, which are now no longer load bearing and play a merely cosmetic role, and means that play and slop can be reduced. It also reduces the risk of wheels going out of quarter as long as the drive is complete. DJ do not really intend you to take your loco apart and there are allegedly 'no user serviceable parts inside', the idea being that after an acceptable service life the model is replaced with a new one (yes, that's what I thought as well, but presumably with sealed motors and no need to lube anything in there it saves on production costs). A motor inside the body area can be more easily hidden and ballast weight can be better distributed. I've read some criticism of this type of drive on DJ's 14xx as well, but it seems to work well if you are lucky, suggesting a QC issue rather than a basic design fault to me.

That about sums it up for tension lock couplings as well, and with t/ls you also have several different hook and bar profiles to consider. The standard is the box height and position (distance of front face of box from buffer beam) only. Kaydees are originally designed for US stock where everything is mounted on bogies, and that they can be adapted for use on European or British 4 wheeled vehicles is a testament to their versatility, and NEMs were also not originally designed with British stock foremost in the specification. The answer is to set a standard box height for your layout (the most common existing one would be the obvious choice) take the mounts off models whose boxes do not comply where you can and replace them with Parkside mounts. These are plastic dovetail blocks that glue to the floor of the vehicle. If the coupling is going to be too high, a spacer between the block and the floor can pack it to the correct height, and if too low you can cut the top of the block down to specification. Don't make the mistake I did of assuming that the correct height is standard as measured from the vehicle floor, measure it from the rail head. This will be much harder for bogie vehicles; you mention mk1 coaches, but for any coupling system to work properly the height must be a specified standard for all vehicles on the layout. Ride height of vehicles may be affected by wheel changes as well. Your couplings should ideally be a standard projection from the buffer beam and have a standard lateral play as well, but on a layout where both bogie and rigid framed vehicles with a range of different sized and shaped buffers are used this cannot be done and a compromise must be achieved.

BR classified the 80xxx as 4MT, the same as the GW large prairies, so the most likely explanation is that the BR locos worked turn and about with 61xx and 5101, though like Pannier Tank I was never aware that 80xxxx were ever allocated to the London end of the WR. Landore inherited some from Paxton St in Swansea, but Old Oak is news to me! OTOH the locos were only there for a short period. ‘98 and ‘131 may well have only been ‘paper’ transfers that never actually spent anytime at the shed, and frankly I’m dubious about the others (cue avalanche of photos proving me wrong!).

CJ was very adept at squeezing quarts into pint pots, and many of his schemes involve complex track plans for short trains (this was normal in the 50s and 60s) and multi-level solutions that need a high degree of carpentry skill and very precise track laying to get away with; I suspect that some of them have never actually been built. But you can do no better than him for learning the basics of layout planning and for inspiration. My advice FWIW (probably what I'm charging for it) is to first spend some time thinking about what sort of trains you want to run. This would include the standards (RTR setrack, Peco Streamline, Code 75) and you've already got some Streamline code 100, so let's go with that for now. Code 100 flexi will join to Peco setrack and most British market proprietary (but don't buy second hand as you won't know if it's up to current spec), and the stock will run around it so long as you pay attention to the manufacturer's minimum curve recommendation, which also ensures that you will not have coupling or buffer locking issues either. Setrack turnouts will automatically give you track centres that will allow stock to clear on double track curves, again so long as you stay within the manufacturer's minimum curve. Isn't setrack wonderful? Well, yes and no. It is very useful if you want to lay track out temporarily to try out different plans, and better than flexi for very tight curvature; my usual recommendation for flexi is 2' minimum and 30" is better, because the track can pull out of gauge if manipulated to such tightness. Setrack will give you a 15" minimum. Flexi, which in the current UK market means Peco Streamline, enables you to lay larger radius curves which are more realistic in appearance; just look on any large scale map how gentle even speed restricted real railway curvature is! It will also enable you to incorporate transition curves, which will also improve the look and the high speed running. Isn't flexi track wonderful? Well, yes and no. You no longer have the advantage of the turnouts automatically setting a correct geometry for you and double tracks can have closer and more realistic centres but you need to be aware of the possibility of fouling on double track curves. And as soon as you flex the track the ends do not line up and have to be trimmed to fit, so track laying needs a bit more skill and care; precision cutting tools are needed. No proprietary electrical power connector can be used and you have to be able to solder the connection, skills that need to be mastered before you start. It is not difficult but may be outside your current comfort zone. While you are engaging in this though process, consider the length of trains and of locomotives, as this will determine the length of your sidings, passing/run around loops, and fiddle yard roads. A modern high speed passenger coach is about a foot long in 00, and a pacific with the tender not much short of this. This does not mean you need 6 feet long loops for a 6 coach train, you may need up to 8 feet if the turnouts to enter and exit is are to be suitable for high speed running. A run around needs a headshunt capable of taking the biggest loco you are going to use, and the turnouts must be suitable for it's recommended minimum radius, all of which will eat into what you thought was sufficient space like a plague of space eating locusts. So there are 3 vital dimensions to consider; track centres, minimum radius, and headshunt/loop clearances. Leave plenty of room for these and you should be able to build a reliable working layout. A model railway is still a railway, and must be constructed to specifications and standards to work properly. Next, before you start, you need to think about baseboards. Are they to be permanent, semi-permanent in case you need to move house, or portable to be put away or taken to exhibitions. Plenty of advice for all sorts, but they need to be level at the joins and remain rigid for the life of the layout or running will be compromised. Then, go to some exhibitions or look at videos for inspiration and advice about how things are done, and to give you an idea of what is possible and achievable at your level.

My eyesight is not perfect by a long chalk, but I am aware of the shortcomings of moulded handbrake levers and brake blocks out of alignment with the wheel treads from normal viewing distance; perhaps my side lighting of the layout is showing things up a bit more than it might if the lighting was overhead or behind the stock from the viewing/operating position. I cannot run 30 wagon 16tonner coal trains, there's no room on my little BLT, but of the 15 RTR Bachmanns that I have all have the correct wheelbase, which Hornby and Dapol cannot provide, all run perfectly and all have NEM couplers that operate properly; there are 4 different diagrams represented, and no duplicate numbers. A 30 wagon train of correct wheelbase RTR steel 16tonners is entirely feasible, as transfers are available to eliminate duplicate numbers. My 15 are part of a 23 wagon fleet which includes Hornby 21tonners, Baccy and Oxford xpos, and a 'French' cupboard door 16tonner. 3 Hornby LNER 21tonners with older couplings and moulded handbrake levers are high on the replacement with something decent, but if with Dapols they won't be on the Dapol chassis! My only Dapol vehicle remains the Fruit D, and it continues to derail and give coupling problems; it'll be binned as soon as Parkside replacement enters service. I use Peco code 100 with minimum 'medium' 30" radius, carefully laid and no other vehicle gives these sort of running problems, so it has been demoted to siding lurker, something I have no space or time for. To reiterate, I won't be buying any more Dapol wagons unless they up their game, which is a pity as I want a couple of the GW 21tonners. They are not, IMHO, worth the trouble. I may have a go at rewheeling the Fruit D and fitting Parkside coupling mounts, though, to see if that brings it in to line a bit.

So do I...

Stratford Bill says 'The Rain It Raineth Every Day'. He's right this summer!

I suspect this comes under the category of 'life's too short'.