Michael Crofts

Thanks so much for posting that wonderful evocative picture which does not appear in any of the books or magazine articles I have seen. Yes, that must be the crane that is on the map, because it's in the right place and it's unlikely there was ever more than one or that the crane was ever modernised. Not much detail but enough to place it as a standard item from one of the manufacturers of the time. The vessel is a barge, not a wherry. Raybel is well documented - Official No. 145058, 80 tons. Built at Sittingbourne 1920 by Wills & Packham for G.F.Sully, launched in 1920. Isn't she just beautiful? I am always astonished how lovely the artefacts of previous eras were, especially in contrast with the stuff we produce now. Yes, Snape was always goods only, but it had a Station Master, who was caught out one hot summer's day when a train was offered from the junction while he was bathing in the river. I confess apart from the railway this place holds a special interest for me because I grew up at Theberton, and in 2015 my wife and I sailed to Snape and moored on the wharf - it's one of the last remaining harbours in the UK where there is no mooring fee (or, for that matter, harbourmaster, the Rope family being long gone). We passed sailing barge Cygnet on our way upstream, she was being sailed sea-wards single handed, and her skipper was making the passage through Troublesome Reach look easy. My jaw dropped in awe at the seamanship. I was so mesmerised that I lost my concentration and grounded. It was a rising tide and soft mud so no harm done. Thanks again for that picture. Lovely.

The first loco on the 15" gauge Perrygrove Railway (see my avatar) was built by the Stirland Family (Exmoor Steam Railway) and they are from a road engine background where, as explained above, most braking is done with the reverser, at least on slide valve engines. The Stirlands couldn't see anything wrong with using the reverser to retard their slide valve loco on our 1 in 30ish gradients, and it was going to save a lot of brake block replacements, so I did this (always with the drain cocks open) for 18 years until I retired. One of the first operational changes the new management made was to abolish the practice, and I don't disagree with this. I was always told that the reasons real railways don't retard with the reverser is that it can suck in abrasive grit from the smokebox, cause overheating and excessive motion wear, and run the risk of blowing a cylinder cover off. I never had any of those problems but I do accept it was a very un-railwaylike thing to do. I never did it with piston valve locos.

Just a thought, does anyone know what sort of crane was on the wharf at Snape? It's shown on the map extract. No sign of it now.

I may have already mentioned this on the Little Muddle thread but there was another regular Puffer in the Bristol Channel:- 'BLACK DWARF was an ex-Clyde puffer, which was bought by William Jones of Lydney in the 1890s and traded out of Lydney docks for the next fifty years. She was most aptly named after the Sir Walter Scott novel and is still remembered with great affection by older Lydney folk.' https://lightmoor.co.uk/about.php And the mention of the sailing barges at Ipswich brings back happy memories. When I was at Ipswich Civic College around 1971 or 1972 I did an analysis of the business of R & W Paul Ltd. for my Geography course, made friends with the blacksmith, and made with my own grubby hands a new rolled and rivetted stove pipe chimney for the Thames barge Thalatta. Having indulged myself with a personal memory I owe it to the panel to include a photo of a dockside crane. Not a very good photo but hopefully the subject is worthwhile, the hand-propelled, hand-operated, wagon-mounted crane on the island of Herm.

I like the improvised coal "staithe" on the left of this extract. Are there more permanent "staithes", of the kind people often put in models, on the right? (Yes I know the word staithe is wrong) Acknowledgement to Tom Burnham, the photographer and owner of the image. https://www.flickr.com/photos/21602076@N05/with/6231933062/

Plymouth, Sutton Harbour. Recent pictures but the NLS maps suggest this is just right for your era if you want setts/cobbles. (my photos) NLS map extract: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5db4shjdh32ajtt/NLS map 1912.jpg?dl=0

Speaking as a hat wearer (flat caps for site work and a Tilley for walking and boating) I wouldn't mind a browse to see if Harry Hall has anything for me. Perhaps a straw boater? But you'd struggle to get me out of Juckes if I ever got in. Just think of all those English-made tools, best Sheffield steel saws, ash or hickory handles, made to last a lifetime and beyond. I still have two of my father's saws, a cross-cut and a rip. 90 years old now. You wouldn't know it. Files that will cut and cut and cut and seemingly never go blunt. Hammers balanced so you hardly feel the weight. Lovely tools. But a big chunk of the week's wages to buy a good saw in those days, so mustn't get dewy-eyed. Beautiful model-making. How on earth do you find the time to fill a shop with stock like that? Hours and hours of fiddly work. The fine-art miniaturists typically only produce 3 or 4 pieces a year. Amazing.

Please forgive the intrusion of the modern world to Little Muddle but I am an evangelist for creosote. The genuine article is 100% coal tar creosote. In the days of little Muddle it was a by-product of the gasworks, one of the left-overs from producing town gas and coke by heating coal. Much harder to source now but not impossible (here for example) and it's not illegal to use. I was using it only last week. It is available only in pack sizes of 20 litres or more and must not be used where it will be handled frequently or where children might have access. Several attempts have been made to ban it but so far BT, the electrical utilities, and a few other large-scale users have been able to withstand the pressure. By definition any timber preservative must be nasty. If it isn't nasty it won't work. Tanalised timber used to be the CCA process - Copper, Chrome, Arsenic. First they took the arsenic out, then the chrome, then the copper. Now all that's left is water and dye and wishful thinking. I do like my weekly visit to Little Muddle where the railway fence posts and telegraph poles are creosoted!

Since this thread has been revived I'll add my little bit because there is something I've forgotten and would like to be reminded of. My first job after school in 1969 was guard at Cambridge, a good place to be because of the variety of routes and traffic. Most of my memories of 'vans are of summer days pottering about the countryside on pick-up and trip workings, coloured by the fact that I did the job for two summers but only one winter. As the second winter approached I single-mindedly set out to find something else to do. Looking back on it there were lots of good bits but winter nights at Whitemoor when the wind was in the north or east were no fun at all. Anyway, the thing I can't remember and would like to know about is how the paperwork for the up trains out of Whitemoor was prepared. My memory is that after the rest period I would walk along the train calling the loco back to bring the wagons together for coupling. I was never shown how to use a coupling pole, I had to just watch other people and try to work out the right swing for myself - and I always struggled with the vacuum hose couplings on the fitted stock, hoping that neither the loco nor the hump controller would move anything when I wasn't expecting it. After coupling the whole train up I would send it forward until it was clear of the points leading to the Brake hump, then go to the Brake which was next off the hump, and release the brake to let it run down on to the back of the train, and couple it. There was then a frantic search for coal. I don't remember preparing the lamps so they must have been trimmed & filled for me but I definitely remember always having to collect my own coal. And I have absolutely no memory of handing the driver any form of paperwork, neither do I remember noting the wagon numbers, weights and brake force of any coupled fitted stock myself. Was all that done by the hump controller when he assembled the train? As others have said, you could get the stoves red hot if you wanted to. And the way to stop a train was to turn a tail lamp round and then set the Bardic to red and wave it at a 'box. I had to do that one night somewhere east of Royston when a chain came off the top of an empty bolster wagon and flailed along the cess, kicking up sparks and doing goodness knows how much damage. Fortunately the next 'box wasn't long coming, a quick wave of the Bardic got the next signal back to red, and the driver wasn't asleep. I needed help to get the chain back on board, it was so heavy.

Here is my very rare colour slide of the Wells-next-the-Sea Harbour Quay taken in 1939. Sadly the photographer is not known to me. Taken looking west. https://www.dropbox.com/s/gt2l92qj9lyid9y/WellsNextSea 1939.jpg?raw=1

I think I may have been the one to mention fenders and if so I wish I hadn't because I have been right through my collection of photos of working boats and working harbours and haven't found a single photo of a fender pre WWII.

If still available and the standard LGB section (330 thou high from memory) I'll have them and pay parcel post. Michael

Glad you didn't get churned up in the Portland Race! We left our boat in Portland for weeks once, waiting for a weather window to go west across Lyme Bay in comfort. In the Little Muddle harbour there's a clear high water mark and the water is only a foot or so below, so we're either at or very close to high water on a spring tide. If it hasn't got a gate it will be a drying harbour but it just doesn't look the sort of place to have 35ft of wall. So my guess is that Little Muddle is some way up a river or creek and Snowflake will gently fall about 10ft or 15ft to sit (probably) on mud. I know she's only a puffer, but her skipper will want to fend her off those boltheads on the quayside baulks so they don't catch on her rubbing strakes. What did they use for fenders in the late thirties? When did old tyres start being used? Did they use fenders at all? I have a colour photo of a tramp steamer at Wells-next-the-Sea in 1939 lying against a (smooth) stone wall with not a fender in sight. Most of my photos of harbours are earlier so I really don't know what was being done in your time period.

A really great boating scene. Lovely to see it develop. I have done a bit of motor yacht cruising in the Brizzle Channel and I have huge respect for the men who traded there in the days of sail and steam. It's always summer in Little Muddle but imagine her skipper bringing Snowflake across from Swansea on a dark night in November, low in the water with a load of coal, on the first leg with the tide coming in, a nor-easterly blowing, wind-over-tide kicking up a swell almost enough to broach her, no weather forecast, no autopilot, no radio, no radar, no GPS..... Imagine being the stoker, below decks with the ship pitching and rolling and cork-screwing, not much light (were paraffin Tilley lamps used on ships?), trying not to fall against hot pipework and valves.... And all the crew on meagre pay from an employer who might go bust at any time, no health service, probably no pension (and not much life expectancy after retirement). Nobody has mentioned the other prototype for a puffer in the channel, Black Dwarf: '...an ex-Clyde puffer, which was bought by William Jones of Lydney in the 1890s and traded out of Lydney docks for the next fifty years.' (Lightmoor Press website). I took some photos of an old Puffer in Plymouth in 2016 - might just possibly be of some interest. A good colourised view of a Thames tramp steamer here. Not greatly different to a Clyde Puffer except that a lot of the tramps didn't have the "luxury" of an enclosed wheelhouse. At least Snowflake has some shelter at the wheel.

I have been working on some notes about railway traffic to and from breweries for some time. Notes here if you are interested: http://perrygrovefarm.co.uk/Brewery_traffic.pdf I've learned from this thread that grain and malt traffic in sacks wasn't often carried by the Midland in vans (because they didn't have many) but was that true of all railways? Presumably if sacks were carried in open wagons they were sheeted. One source of confusion is that many old maps refer to "Malthouses" without making it clear whether they were Maltings (where grain was germinated to become malt) or simply stores for malt which had been produced elsewhere. The leading authority on brewery buildings, "Built to Brew" is silent about that, and so is Peaty IIRC. The modelling on these threads is amazing.

This page marks the end of my first acquaintance with Little Muddle. I've read the whole thread and I can't recall a layout which has made such a strong impression on me since Buckingham, the Craig & Mertonford, and a couple of articles by John Ahern in Model Railway Constructor when I was a bit younger. I've learned such a lot. Possibly the most important lesson for me is to create the basic scenery as quickly as possible and then fill in details bit by bit rather than feeling under pressure to build the entire thing all in one go. Thanks Kevin. For more information about Clyde Puffers in the Bristol Channel there is this post which hasn't been mentioned here. We had our motor boat in those muddy waters during 2017/18 - I'm just astonished that the Puffers were able to cope with the tidal streams. I have a small collection of scanned colour slides taken in East Anglia in the summer of 1939 - would they be of any help? PM me if so. Michael

Did anyone get any pictures of Roy Link's Crows Nest layout showing the whole thing as it was set-up for the show? I have seen close-up pictures but I would love to see how the whole thing looks. I didn't hear about this show until too late! But that's just me. I have only just started to think about going to shows again and haven't been monitoring lists.

Hi Giles, thanks for the details. Instead of drifting the thread I've sent you a PM. Geraint - thanks for the tip.

May I ask how your backscene is mounted, and does it touch the rear of the baseboard or is there a gap?

I sent a message to Turbocad (using the message tool on their site) asking if any of their versions can be purchased instead of rented. The site suggests there may be some versions which one can buy but isn't crystal clear about that. They didn't bother to reply.

Thanks for further help. I have bought QCAD and the ebook and will experiment with that to begin with. Can't remember if I already said this, but I never use subscription software, only programmes which I can buy and own, which reside on my machine, and which I can transfer when my machine dies. Getting harder all the time but still a good policy for the private individual paying out of taxed income with no way of recouping costs. Also I hope to transition to a Linux Operating System either this year or next so whatever I use must run on Linux, and that was part of my decision to try QCAD.

Great help, thanks. You'll have to stop me if my questions get dumb or this thread drifts too far from the title. I'm trying not to turn it into "Beginners Guide to Etching"! I've attached a sketch of a very simple lineside plate - not to scale or anything. I've used Michael Edge's protocol of black = etch rather than the traditional red for front etch and blue for rear. In QCAD, if I create the text as text, then "explode" it to polylines, are you saying I can fill each letter as white, albeit manually? If the answer to that is yes, I'll risk the 33 Euros and buy QCAD. I must stop faffing around and actually DO something! Etching example 001 v01.pdf

Duplicated post

@D869 I see you have QCAD. Please would you look at it and see if it will do the equivalent of "explode text" which Mike Edge mentioned: 'Turbocad has a command to "explode text" which turns it into a series of polylines (fills) which are then reliably reproduced. It can no longer be edited as text but all the characters can be scaled, copied etc. ' I suppose this feature might be called something different - "Convert Text" perhaps? have prevaricated long enough, I need to choose a CAD system for etching today. I wanted to use Turbocad because it is what a colleague in a forthcoming joint project uses but all the "permanent" copies/versions of Turbocad I have found are dubious and I'm not willing to pay annual licence fees for any software because there is always a risk that if you let the subscription lapse you lose all your work. I am therefore hoping QCAD will be OK, the Pro version states clearly it is a one-off payment. In the near future I need to etch builders' plates, cast iron lineside signs, fire insurance wall plaques, road junction figerposts, , etc. - all things with lots of text on them - which is why I am asking this question.

Is that what Phillips get for making the photo tool, two separate parts (front etch and back etch), both in black & white? The Grainge & Hodder 'Beginners Guide' says this, which seems much more complicated and risky: 'The next stage is to submit the artwork for plotting to a photo tool. The artwork should be submitted preferably as a dxf file with the instruction 'Turn off layer 1, combine layers 2 & 3 in black and reverse for front tool, combine layers 3 & 4 in black for rear tool.'