Lacathedrale

I used to take the train from Lewisham into Charing Cross and London Bridge. I can remember the introduction of the Networkers, but when it comes to the slam door stock I’m mostly guessing at 4CEP. I think the last one I can recall seeing was a slam door unit at Waterloo East in the early 00’s which I got on by mistake!

Easiest preorder choice I've ever had.

“The long high summer of the Victorian Age is over and it is the Edwardian evening, a golden evening yet one in which many now realised that summer could not last forever.” - LTC Rolt, A Railway Adventure LSWR / LBSCR "Panter" Brake Van I have dug out my Kernow LSWR brake van. This South Western design by W. Panter was adopted by the LBSCR in 1915 with very few modifications as LBSCR Dia 1574. Though slightly outside of my time period, I couldn't resist an offering close in both design and era in RTR. I should clarify that there were three such Panter designs, the final goods brake van design of this type was the basis of the well known Hornby 'LBSC 20t Brake' but which is far too late for inclusion on my layout, being almost Grouping-era. I haven't dug through my Southern Wagons book to confirm, but I believe the only major modification required is the adaption of the diagonal outside framing into cross braces with some 1.5mm square rod. As it is out of my era anyway, I am not too concerned about absolute prototype fidelity- but it should suit my needs for a goods brake van for the sake of variety on my layout. Goods Train You might be thinking "But this is a Passenger Station!", and you would be right, but I want to show off all those wagons that I built at least periodically. A plausible justification is the need to very real need to reverse trains between the East and West Coastway lines. In reality I believe this would have been done in the Upper Goods yard (by Lovers Walk) for freight and in Brighton Central for passengers, but I think this would work by exception. If I ever build the 'corner extension' then I think a depiction of the Goods Tunnel from the Lower Yard, under Brighton Central to the Shoreham/West Coastway line would be an excellent design element.

I don't think I have it in me to double-line this but I'm fairly pleased how it's turned out so far. I understand that the black goods engines originally got an 'L B & S C R' in yellow with a red drop-shadow, transitioning to 'L B S C' in 1911 - and some recieved gold lettering rather than yellow. Whether this is wishful thinking or not, for now I'm going to let it lie.

Well yes, but 0-6-0T engines alone do not a Stroudley LBSCR layout make - there'd need to be lots of singles, 2-4-0's and 0-4-2T's!

I had a friend over today and had a surprising amount of fun twiddling those signals at the platform end...

Thanks @BlueLightning - my thought is that my layout could be reasonably backdated to the mid-Stroudley period - the only major differences would be about half of the stock. Given the scarcity of the Dapol Umber A1, or Bachmann Birch Grove - I've decided to pull the trigger.

Right, so IEG E1's would be suitable, in theory, for 1880-1890 @Compound2632 ? @Nick Holliday always to the rescue :)

Am I correct in assuming the IEG liveried E1's are fictional? They were introduced post-1874 when Goods Green was introduced, and would have been in umber in post-1920 when lined black was abolished? If not, when would they slot into the timeline?

As usual, Mike this is fantastic stuff! You have directly inspired me to investigate 3-D, modelling and printing for railways, and I’m part of my way through the journey of modelling the LBSCR terminus building at Brighton circa 1841, from the RIBA archive of plans. I wish I had the e stick to run a Mike Sharman style early era layout, but not yet!

Roof balustrades in place, although I didn't print with enough support so it'll need to be re-done properly in future, and another panel for the rear wall in place. I also printed out the tuscan columns and have rested a bit of ply in place to give an impression of the covered walkway - not half bad!

Yes I agree - I dearly love scratchbuilding stock and fettling kits - but I am primarily a railway modeller, not a scenic modeller - otherwise I'd be building dioramas - so I can pick and choose where I spend my time. The last major piece of the puzzle for the station building is the aforementioned covered way - the area between the station building and the trainshed roof is slightly deeper, with more widely spaced columns, This is the only profile plan available but looks like it should give us suitable information for fabrication: I absolutely would have modelled this flat, so image showing the slight cant is very useful, as well as the drainage gulley at the foot of the balustrade. The columns themselves seem to be simple tuscan types with a square pediment. There is no detail on the balustrade, but so I've made things easy for myself by using the engraving pictured earlier as reference: It looks a little unusual here, because the tuscan columns are bare (they are to recieve the roof trusses in due course), and I haven't repeated the balustrade objects across the trainshed, but this pretty much brings the station building 3D printing to a close. You can tell I'm a rookie at this because I haven't made any provision for positive alignment of the parts - pegs, ledges and slots would make assembly a good deal easier!

I am very much an amateur in this - I am fortunate that they are relatively simple shapes - the blueprints are overlaid onto the X/Y/Z axis as appropriate then it's a case of drawing various sized rectangles. If there's something which may end up being a parameter (such as the width of the central section) then I add that and use it in the dimensions. When you have part of the sketch done, the rest can be leveraged off it (for example, the height of the centre hall was determined by pinning it to the middle floor of the wings. Once the sketch is done in the flat, it's a matter of extruding into the third dimension (one click, drag and set the distance in that axis). These are all things you could learn within an hour or so of picking up Fusion360, and the very few complicated things I did were the result of a google - sweeping the profile of the corbelling around the rim of the building, or around the profile of the pillars in the trainshed wall. Difficulty only really arises when you either want to make things more efficiently (in which case you need to figure out the order of operations and then leverage some of the automation included such as 'pattern on path', 'mirror', etc.) rather than hand cranking those features. The big benefit of this kind of modelling is that you can go back and edit features 'in the past' and have that be reflected in the timeline - changing the shape of an extrusion, adding or omitting features, etc. Long story short - I think I probably spent about an hour on each component, i.e. the wall, the centre hall fascia, each floor of the building and the corbelling. I think the latter is probably the most worthwhile use of the printer - repetitive, detailed parts that would be a right pain to scratchbuild. I've still got some trainshed walls on the printer (which I think I've decided will only be temporary) but when that's done I'll be sorting out the balustrades around the central hall - something that would be a right pig to build from scratch, but which is very easy in CAD: Hopefully I haven't lost all of the people who followed this blog for 1960's Tri-ang kitbashing...

Top Yard being the one on the Shoreham side? Interesting times! Thank you for the kind words and provoking comments on those photos - certainly not your usual crop, eh?

It's almost as if I planned it.... A wider shot showing the station building in context. In the second photograph above, you'll notice the trainshed wall prototype has been printed and sat on the layout in the approximate position - that odd gap between will be filled be a covered walkway, as seen in an early engraving below: Though the early engravings show an Olympian classical building, it quickly grew barnacles and extensions - offices on the north side, a perimeter wall, and a wall around the train shed: On the north side of the station the wall was only partial, leaving a large gap as a cab road onto the departure platform in true Victorian style. That the cab road for Brighton Trafalgar would not be off the heady summit of Terminus Road, but instead the damp effluent and shaded crook of the Central Station is best left unsaid...

Thank you both - the articles those photographs are from are fabuluous - they were shared in private with me so not sure I should be re-posting them complete, but many more of the yard itself. I have modelled the rear wall of the trainshed: This is based on Brighton, but significantly lower. I'm still not entirely decided on how to model this area, but much like the station building - better than some white foamcore!

The north wing is in situ - I had to trim the corbelling and wraparound lintel but is otherwise a simple mirroring of the south wing. The north wing has the men's waiting room and conveniences downstairs, and the clerk's rooms upstairs - as opposed to the ladies' waiting room and the engineer's offices in the south. With these two wings in-situ I can now model measure the width of the central hall, so that it fills the space without causing the south wing corbelling to extend beyond the baseboard edge. I had estimated the hall to be 50' wide in my CAD drawing as a thumb-to-the-air guess, but it turned out to be 56'. Luckily, I am using Fusion360 which is a parametric modelling tool, so I created a variable for the width and then based my features off of dimensional constraints (i.e. 'place 5 of these equidistant', or 'put this in the middle') rather than explicit dimension (third window is 20' from the edge), so when I change a parameter the model adapts to fit the space. With that done, the central hall walls are now being printed - they will be mirror images for the front and back of the building. The ground floor of the central part of the building is wholly taken up by the booking office, while the upper floor hosts a board room and secretary's room. You can't actually see the doorways from the wings into these rooms in any of my photographs, but they are there too! It only occurs to me now that I probably should have specifically provisioned for the central door of the booking office to leads ou into the middle of the island platform, but I didn't. Hopefully it's not too jarring, and I could revisit in a further refinement of the models at a later date. There is a good deal of detailing to add in due course, if nothing else. Lastly, although not shown in this picture I have taken advice from @PMP and given the backscene boards a dusting of light blue and white aerosol spray. It didn't occur to me at the time that as ply the texture would show through - but it's better than plain wood and I'm all about 80/20 at the moment.

Incidentally, from the same group of pictures is the forecourt of the goods office which is roughly where my station building is going to sit:

Lovely :) It's definitely a traditionally suitable backscene as well. I have had other thoughts too, though. The following photographs are of the Brighton Goods yard, the ostensible location of the station, and there's a very well tailor-made backscene, as you can see: I'm not sure how well that would dovetail into the platforms - whether they would be blanked out doorways/etc. or something - but it's certainly quite compelling.

Another set of boring meetings today, and the centre section is modelled - this one in the flat, with slots for 5mm foamboard floors to be inserted for the floor and roof.. The front and back will be mirrored, so only one required: In the background you can see the projection of the trainshed pillars, and in the foreground (literally) you can see the spacing for columns of the covered walkway in-front of the building. I'm not sure if I'm going to do much with either of those at this point, but it's there for future inclusion.

And Part 2:

@St Enodoc that is very pedantic indeed ;) The building has been printed - it's quite solid and I'm very impressed with how it looks on the layout - the real epitome of Victorian monolith looming over the platforms. I've sprayed some khaki over it just to show the form a little better, it looks more suitable for 1950's Euston than Edwardian Brighton! The second picture attempts to show some of the interior detail - ladies in the corridor between their waiting room (on right) past the WC (behind them, sans doors), towards the platform entrance. If anyone can posit the layout of the middle area which is marked down on the ground floor as "booking office" I would be much obliged - there's nothing on the architectural plans except the outline of the exterior walls!

While between meetings I've been modelling the station building. RIBA want £15 each for high res versions of the plans that I need - which feels a bit steep for what is effectively going to have to be pinched and prodded into shape anyway, so I'm working off the low resolution scans. This is the first stab at the ground-floor wing of the Mocatta brighton station building, mirrored for the other side: The 'real' building is (as you can see from the underlying blueprint) 34' deep, but I only have 22' to clear the garage door. This works out somewhat in my favour, as the original building was mirrored left/right for Shoreham and London separately with individual parcels offices, waiting ladies and mens rooms, etc. and in my station there's no such need - so it simply has one waiting room, conveniences, stairs up and office in each wing. Unfortunately the clerks and engineers will have to share their offices with their underlings too, but there is space for a board room! All of the holes are voids in the masonry to recieve proper frames and decorative effects at a later date, and the first prototype is currently in the printer, and here's the middle floor and corbelling: I've got the roof and loft also modelled, but let's see how the print turns out before we get too far ahead of ourselves. Looking around for pictures around Brighton, I think this view from Dyke Road across the running lines works about right - chalk with a brick retaining section atop and railings with a road and some terraced houses behind:

@ColinK my (very tentative!) idea was a long thin view block down the middle of the layout, a loop on each side/etc. and then some kind of automation to run the trains. Anyway, I printed out some locos for size comparison: 16mm, 7mm, 4mm:

I used manual ground throws for my couple of US layouts - most successfully my modern image Miami layout here: https://interlocking.blog/previous-layouts/csx-miami/ I'm still quite bummed out by the coupler break on those LNWR coaches, as @Jol Wilkinson has pointed out, they are just an odd set - gloss black bogies, unpainted underframes and beige corridor connections. I've pinched a 14mm wheel from my Ratio 4-w First conversion for now, but with no bloody hook it's a bit pointless. Really I think they all need to be re-bushed and replaced with metal axles - but that's another fat wedge of cash :(