mikemeg

And when the next section of the railway is built; the section shown in one of the first photos on this thread, then the centrepieces will be these signals which stood here. Now, of course, they are long gone, replaced by colour lights, but this is what they looked like, now more than half a century ago. Cheers Mike

Not a lot of progress on the railway itself while I build the signals which stood in this place. This photo has been posted to the signal building thread but, I guess, it really belongs on here for this, for me, is what this modelling is all about - re-creating those scenes of our boyhood and youth. I can never think of this place without remembering the final lines of A. E. Houseman's immortal poem 'A Shropshire Lad' :- It is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. Those happy highways where we went And cannot come again. Needless to say, the gantry is scratch built, as are all of the signals; there are no etches available for these things. Cheers Mike

Many years ago there was a bridge over the railway, at a place called Hessle Haven, just outside Hull on the mainline going to all points west. It was a railway kind of place with lots of intricate pointwork and three of those wonderful McKenzie and Holland gantries and signal bridges. As kids we would spend hours and days at this place, just watching the never ending procession of trains. So this was the view from Gasworks or Shipyard bridge looking west through the down gantry. This photo confounds all of the 4mm norms - too close, very dark, etc. but, hopefully it conveys just something of the atmosphere of the steam railway of the 1950's. Everything on here is scratch built. Cheers Mike

Can I add my endorsement to the comments above. This really is an excellent and very informative thread. This latest signal model really does look 'the business'. Well done and I look forward to the next thread(s)- did someone mention gantries? Cheers Mike

How to secure the pivots and lamps to the post. John, For securing the pivots to the post, especially as you are building in 7 mm, you could do worse than follow the prototype. The pivot was a single casting with a bearing housing and a flat base, which was bolted through the post. So a rectangular piece of .010" brass or nickel silver to which is soldered the pivot. Drill each corner of the baseplate (0.5 mm?) and use this to mark the post. Then drill four holes through the post, slightly more than .5 mm to allow the wires to pass through more easily. Solder a length of wire (.5 mm) into each corner of the baseplate, long enough to pass through the post and leaving a couple of mm protruding, and leave about .5 mm proud to simulate the bolt at the baseplate end. Pass the wires through the post and either glue them, or solder a small bolt at the back (14 BA) and trim off the wires to size. The whole lot shouldn't then move on the post. Just a thought. Cheers Mike

It's still June 1950 but on a glorious spring morning. A Peppercorn A1, then almost new, coasts under Hessle shipyard bridge into the early morning sun (and that really is the early morning sun - no-one could produce light like that) as it brings its train into Hull. I've posted this photo a few times and, as photos go, it isn't good; the depth of field has just gone. But for all that it does seem to work and convey something of the wondrous place which was the railway of our childhood and youth. The picture is simply called - Early Morning A1. Cheers Mike

It's June, 1950 in the early morning of a grey (well magnolia actually - I really must paint a sky backscene for these photos) day. A T1 4-8-0 tank slides along the down slow, passing the hawthorn blossoms, with its guards van as it returns to Hull and its days work. I do enjoy taking these lineside pictures; it seems to re-create that wonder which we knew as kids just watching the trains. Cheers Mike

It isn't steam but that is just lovely. Cheers Mike

Nice picture above, but what is it, where is it? Are those r-t-r models on r-t-r track or are they kit/scratch built or a mixture of the two? Cheers Mike

Or perhaps this one. This is the scene under the shipyard bridge at Hessle Haven - a real bridge which stood in a real place. Everything on here is hand built; the bridge - plasticard and various microstrips, the bridge abutments with hand made brick work - scribed card, painted with water colours and then sealed - the track (P4 track company chairs and rail, hand made and stained sleepers). The J72 started life as a Bachmann but has been heavily rebuilt with a new P4 chassis and many body modifications. So the picture is simply called 'Passing a century of grime'. Cheers Mike

These are just the models, as yet not located on the railway. I leave it to you to judge how realistic they are. These are not r-t-r models, weathered; they are not etched brass and nickel silver kits; they are scratch built. More fool me for doing it, but there are no etches for these prototypes, just photographs and memories. Cheers Mike

Certainly echo that; they are lovely and capture the 'essence' of those locos superbly well. Cheers Mike

Go for using the early picture to judge the track. The picture related to the ballasting technique has somehow deformed the straightness of all of the lines - honest guv! Mike

Almost all of the pointwork on the railway uses the P4 Track Company point kits - normally the B8 kits. However one of the turnouts on the prototype was an NER sleepered turnout which necessitated a scratch build. I could have used a P4 Track Co kit and modified it but I did want to experiment with scratch building pointwork, especially as on the third section of the railway, yet to be built, there are a number of formations which will need to be scratch built. I also intend, on the third section, to revert to using 'C' switches for the turnouts as opposed to the 'B' switches used thus far. I may also use 1 : 9 turnouts rather than the 1`: 8 which I have used so far. This will add a little to the turnout length but should make the running of locos and stock, into turnouts, much smoother. The photo, below, shows the single scratch built turnout on the down slow. Cheers Mike

The method I used for ballasting has been described many times so I won't elaborate on it other than to say :- 1) I always use 'N' gauge ballast for 4mm modelling. Somehow the 'OO' gauge ballast just seems too coarse. 2) I found that misting the ballast, to be glued, with water in a plant mister, after spreading it around the sleepers, allowed the diluted PVA mixture to flow freely without the 'blobbing' of the ballast through surface tension. I guess like everyone else who has used this method, the resulting colour of the ballast as it dried filled me with horror, for it went a very strange shade of green. So to the painting of the ballast and, again, this was done before a rail was laid. It should be mentioned that for pointwork, I normally write the timber numbers on the paper underlay beyond the extent of the ballasting. Where multiple turnouts are placed, effectively overlapping each other, then I use different coloured pens for the timber numbers. This 'notepad' area of the paper underlay is where the cess will be created, once all of the trackwork and ballast is done. For painting the ballast, I use white emulsion - the sample pots sold by those diy outlets who provide computer mixed colours. This is very heavily diluted with water and is coloured with water colour or gouache paints. Even though everything is water based, the resulting painted ballast is impervious to water, at least it is colour fast. So the first colour applied is an all over coat of a mid grey. As this forms the base colour for the ballast, then the actual shade chosen for this coat does determine the overall look of the ballast. Light grey for reasonably newly applied ballast (at least on what was the old North Eastern region); a darker, browner grey for well weathered ballast. By using a very watery paint mixture, the stones of the ballast don't become an amorphous painted mass but actually retain the texture of ballasted track bed, where individual stones are visible. Painting the ballast, in this way, does sound like a very time consuming job but I did a seven foot board with four tracks and seven turnouts in a day. It is a good idea to accompany this task with your favourite music just in case boredom does get the better of you. The highlights on the ballast are again done using the diluted emulsion but coloured with various different greys, blacks, browns and whites. I use the emulsion mixture almost as one would with dry brushing and just 'flick' the brush over the tops of the ballast. Again, the same seven foot board took less than four hours to colour in this way and the difference in the look of the ballasted track bed is amazing. The photo above shows the result of this painting process. It is worth pointing out that for the cess I used an entirely different material to reproduce the much finer texture of this area and a much darker grey, again using the emulsion as a base. Cheers Mike

So to the building of the railway; at least what has been built so far. Baseboards are built in a fairly standard way, though for the actual trackbed I used 12 mm mdf, braced every foot or so. To date I have had no problems with any distortion on the trackbed, through the mdf twisting or warping; hopefully this will continue. I normally use cork for the actual trackbed, 1/8th inch thickness, which is stuck down with evo-stick. Somehow evo-stick seems to provide more flexibility and noise suppression than using PVA for this. So far, I have only laid totally straight track, so have not had the challenges associated with marking out and laying curves, though I did make a number of curve templates of various radii, simply using mathematics and a flexible ruler. The shoulders of the ballasted area are made from strips of card, 5/16" which are PVA'd to the edge of the cork to give the required angle for the ballast shoulder. Again, these card shoulders are allowed to dry before any further processes are undertaken. Once the cork and the ballast shoulders are dry then the whole of the cork bed is covered with paper - normally I use lining paper as bought in decorating shops. I lay around 18" at a time pva'd to the cork base. Once this is dry then the positions of the tracks and sleepers can be drawn using a biro and a two foot steel rule. I developed this technique before the advent of templot, which is something I would probably use now. I did do quite a lot of experimenting with various methods for producing sleepers. I have never liked plastic sleepers so wanted to use wood but I wanted to improve, if I could, on the normal 1/32" or 1/16" thick ply sleepers. I did experiment with balsa which is easily workable but which is far too soft; the chairs sank into this in a very prototypical way. Eventually I discovered obechi, which is far harder than balsa, is close grained and can be stained using white spirit based dyes. My chosen colouring regime was a mixture of Colron (usual disclaimer) mahogany and colonial oak which, by adjustment of the relative constituents of this mixture, was capable of producing colours varying from the rich brown/black of new sleepering to that faded silvery grey of very old sleepers. So a batch of perhaps two hundred was soaked in the wood dye for around fifteen minutes and then left to dry. Prior to colouring the sleepers, each batch was loaded into a jig and lightly sanded, just to ensure absolute uniformity of thickness; these sheets of obechi can vary in thickness by a few thousandths of an inch. This sounds an involved process but it only takes a minute to do. Sleepers were then stuck down onto the paper template using pva and the edges lined up against the same two foot steel rule. Once dry, then the whole lot, including point sleepering was ballasted and the ballast painted. On the next posting I'll outline the process for ballasting and for painting the ballast, prior to laying any rails. Mike

One or two further pictures taken on the railway and then I will begin the description of how some of this was done and also bring the thread up to date. Off to the quarry A Bachmann J39 heavily modified with new chassis, inside motion (non working) and lots of detailing on the body - new boiler bands, handrails, glazing, etc. So on a warm summers' day, in 1950, 64914 trundles along the up main on its way to the quarry to collect the chalk train. Over the Fence The view from the bridge - shipyard bridge - looking over the fence. Hurrying Along the J39 gets a move on, further along the line, as it passes one of the newly built ex-NER brackets. Waiting to be turned Inside a T1 tank stands by the Hessle Station up main starter, waiting to be re-routed onto the up slow. Cheers Mike

So before I move on to describe how this lot was built and put together, let me post some of my favourite pictures. These are just some pictures which I took along the way and they serve to remind me of a time when the railway was truly a wondrous thing, when steam was still abundant and when we liked nothing better than just 'watching trains'. Early Morning A1 - still one of my favourite pictures. The depth of field simply went wrong and I was going to bin this picture but I kept it. Somehow it works, perhaps because that light is real sunlight. Anyway it's early morning on a glorious late spring day in 1950. A Peppercorn A1, almost new, coasts under shipyard bridge as it brings its train into Hull. Basking in the Sunshine - my first attempt at loco scratch building, as well as at some fairly ambitious scenery scratch building. I don't count rivets but if I did, then I would have got well beyond 3,000 when I made that bridge. The brickwork is also hand done a la the Pendon technique. But I'm out of therapy now! So an ex-LNER T1, waits for the road, in the late afternoon sunshine. An unusual and probably very unwelcome visitor to the main line. Half a Century of Soot - A Bachmann J72, heavily modified. Most people forget the sandboxes under the bunker, which were a BR modification and had to be scratch built. It's a dull, damp day as J72 69003 drifts along the up slow past the soot encrusted brdige abutments.

So having decided to model this locale the next decision was the period to be modelled. That decision was relatively easy for I have always liked that time when the transition from the liveries of the big four to the new liveries of BR was taking place. So some time around 1949/1950 was the chosen period. That choice does preclude running any of the BR standard classes, except the 2-8-0 Austerities, but the BR standards were not that common at Hessle even in the late 50's and early 60's (except for some running in turns from Doncaster for ex-works locomotives) so not a huge price to pay for the choice of period. Conversely in 1949, many of the relics which just scraped into BR ownership were still working so a much wider choice of locomotive types than even three years later. There still remained the problem of locating sources of information and data from which to build the model, and here fate or serendipity played their part. Browsing through one of those wonderful places which sell second hand books and magazines, I came across a copy of Steam Days for July 1995 and contained therein was an article Memories of Hessle Station, written by Dennis Robinson. This article contained a number of photos of the very place I was intending to model and formed an excellent start point for the gathering of information. Then I had a great stroke of luck. One of my mates when I was a teeneager and a keen though inexperienced modeller was Mick Nicholson. When I moved away from Hull in the mid 1970's I lost contact with Mick and only regained contact with him on reading one of his articles in a modelling magazine back in 2003. Anyway I contacted Mick, told him what I was intending to do and asked if he had any details of this locale. Mick was able to supply literally hundreds of documents - line diagrams showing the detailed layout and distances, signalling diagrams, ordnance survey maps and a host of photographs. From this I could very quickly work out what was what and where. It's fair to say that without Mick's archive of information, none of this would have been possible. Anyway that's how it came about and, over the ensuing posts I'll try and show what came about and how it was done. To date around fourteen feet of main line has been built with another seven feet 'on the stocks'. There is still a great deal to do to capture the atmosphere and essence of this place but, hopefully, a start has been made. Certainly there is enough of the railway done to provide a photographic backdrop for other models. So I'll finish this post with a photo of one of the first two sections of the railway. This part of the railway is the section shown on the photo with the two bracket signals, both of which models are now made. Cheers Mike

Rod, Oh absolutely. And it is not my intention to trot out the same photographs as are on the other threads concerning the railway, though perhaps with one or two exceptions. But I did think it might be useful to start the story at the point of inception of the railway, if only to provide continuity. Yes, the railway is a reality, though there is still much to build (I am fascinated by your FREMO ideas elsewhere on this site) and I'm still not sure how much of this locale I will model. There is probably one more section of around seven feet (175 yards scale) going east; if I go west and include the station, then there could be another thirty feet of it. It depends on whether I can find somewhere to accommodate that much model railway. As always, many thanks for your comments and bear with me if I repeat some of what you already know. Best regards Mike

Slightly more than fifty years ago - my God that's half a century or two thirds of a lifetime - I and my childhood mates discovered the railway. We were all ten or eleven and liked nothing better than cycling the one, two, three or four miles from our homes to congregate at a place called Hessle Haven. This place was just outside Hull on the four track main line to Doncaster and Selby and all points west and south. As railway locations go, this was a fairly unspectacular place, there was no real scenery and no prestigious trains but there was a profusion of trains. It was a railway kind of place with the various exits and entries to three of Hull's marshalling yards and an almost straight main line which made for some fairly high speed running. No-one who ever saw one of the fitted fish trains could ever forget the way those nine and ten feet wheelbase vans leapt around behind a K3 or a B1 at quite frightening speeds. Alongside the railway was Hessle Gasworks with its own siding; a piece of track which may once have been straight but which was now unbelieveably kinked and uneven. Alongside the gasworks was the Haven itself and Hessle shipyard, which built tugs trawlers and other small vessels. It built the two sail training schooners - Malcolm Miller and Sir Winston Churchill in the 1960's. Further along the line was Hessle Station - a typical country station though only five miles from the centre of Hull. This place still had a working and thriving goods yard, gas lighting on the platforms, an eighty lever signal box and a station staff whose 'accommodating and beneficient attitudes' to train spotters was almost legendary. Best described as irrascible and, at worst, bloody minded, they nonetheless tended to their station and kept it neat and tidy. It was a time warp, still oozing the atmosphere of the railway of Worsdell, Raven, Gresley and Thompson. In short, it was a delightful place, as so many of these country stations were back in the late 1950's and early 1960's. I came back to model making about seven years ago after retiring from the corporate rat race, this after a thirty year lay off. I started by making rolling stock - wagon kits from various suppliers and a few LNER coaches using MJT and ABS components, finally 'graduating' to r-t-r bashing and then scratch building of locos. Around five years ago and with the collection of models growing, I thought that it might be useful to build a short length of P4 track on which to test the running characteristics of the models. The decision to go P4 was simply based around the fact that I had no legacy of 'OO' or 'EM' models so the choice of gauge was a 'blank canvas' and P4 seemed the way to go. The original intention was to build a six foot section of single track; sufficient to run the models up and down. This idea was borne around eight o'clock one evening while sat in the armchair savouring and just starting a bottle of Shiraz. As the bottle emptied, so the plan became ever more ambitious until, with the final glassful, I decided that I would build a model of a piece of the real railway. With that thought firmly implanted and feeling ever more mellow and reflective then the choice was easy; there could be only one place which would fit the bill - Hessle Haven. I would try and re-create this place, in miniature, just as I remembered it fifty years ago. But did I really remember it? How could I locate enough information, enough photos, enough data to re-create this place? That'll have to wait for another posting. I'll leave this one with a few pictures - all black and white - of this place. Cheers Mike

Carl, I've been watching this thread for a little while now and all I can say is what others have already said - WOW. On my model of Hessle Haven, the prototype location had a small shipyard - built tugs, trawlers and the two sail training schooners Sir Winston Churchill and Malcolm Miller in the early 1960's. I'd never considered building a 4mm ship to go on the model but your thread has inspired me to have a go, sometime next year when I build the next section of the railway. This thread is just a sheer joy to behold and the photographs really do illustrate your work superbly. Many thanks for the inspiration and for a wonderful thread. Cheers Mike

That sun is the real thing, no-one could produce light like that artificially. This was just one of those 'happy accidents' in how the photo turned out. Here's another one in the sun, perhaps on that same June day in 1950. A Peppercorn A1, then almost brand new, coasts under shipyard bridge and into the early morning sun of a glorious day, as it brings its train into Hull. This photo just went wrong, losing its depth of field though, somehow, it seems to work. Mike

It is a glorious late spring day, perhaps early June of 1950 as an ex-LNER T1 waits in the sunshine, by the Hessle Station starters; 'waiting to be turned inside' to continue its journey on the up slow. Mike