Buckjumper

...except when it come to verbose verbiage...

Thank you! I've added another shot showing the top of the tank which I missed when uploading images earlier on.

It's a very characterful little shed. Are you adding some brickwork to the interior, or will it be too murky to see in there? I like the parsnip store on the end...

Over the weekend I was hunting down some photos on my computer and found a few of the tar tub tank wagon that I decorated about 18 months or so ago, but which haven't been posted on here. If memory recalls correctly, this was one of the last models I completed before having to drop model making for a while. The model was built by Graham and Peter Beare and briefly described by Graham in a thread at the time, and I gave a rather full description of my process of decorating it with a couple of photos posted alongside to illustrate. Having found the other photos I thought it would be of interest to post the whole set here for completeness, and as a lead-in for a future tar tank article that will appear on Basilica Fields which Graham has kindly offered to build. Don't hold your breath for the next tub though as Graham is very busy working though vast swathes of of track construction at the moment, but in the future I will be referencing back to this post. In a nutshell the wagon is a Slater's kit married to Exactoscale sprung axleboxes units and has replacement brake gear from both Ambis and Exactoscale plus a lot of extra detail. Graham is making a detailed photo-journal of the construction of the next tank as he builds it, showing all the areas he modifies. It will be a terrific read and should raise the bar of modelled tar-tubbery! In the meantime, here is a précis of the weathering process. The top coat is Precision enamel Red Oxide airbrushed over Games Workshop white acrylic primer which is perfect for translucent colours such as reds and blues as the primer adds depth to the finish which is emphasised when T-Cut is applied. Rather than go for a perfectly smooth finish which is the usual goal of painters, I increased the air-to-paint ratio and sprayed from an extra couple of inches away causing the paint to land in a semi-dry state and giving the finish a slightly gritty texture. After a couple of days I knocked this back with some 2000 grit wet & dry, working in between the rows of rivets on the tank sides and ends, but I wasn't too fastidious about it. I then applied T-cut using a cotton bud, polishing these areas to a shine. The remaining gritty texture around the rivets helps facilitate the appearance of erupting rust, but the sides need to represent sheet metal, and an underlying sheen with plenty of depth helps to trick the brain into thinking it's looking at just that, not injection moulded plastic. This surface also helps to bed transfers in, so it's a two-birds-with-one-stone process. Later on the shine can be knocked back by weathering - not matt varnish which is a sure-fire way of obliterating all of the nuances I've worked hard at creating. The tank top was left alone with the rough texture in place. The transfers supplied are for No.9 in the fleet, which is a slightly longer wagon than No.2 (Graham wanted a red tank, not a black one, hence the change), so I had an interesting morning chopping the numbers and letters up and re-spacing them until they matched the photograph. All the ironwork was then brush painted with Humbrol satin black. The model was then weathered with my base palette - a 70/30 mix of Humbrol 33 and 133 with the tiniest drop of 62 for brake dust accumulation on underframes and ends. This is applied very thinly with the merest of hazes wafted gently on and the patina slowly built up. Subtlety is the key to all weathering, even for those dirty great filthy WDs clanking around the country in the 60s; build up the weathering textures and colours slowly, just like the real thing. The tank sides and ends received a gentle dust of muck which was wiped away in a vertical motion with a moistened cotton bud, the grime remaining trapped in the textured patches around the rivets accentuating the texture of erupting rust, gunk and spillages. The tank top was given a waft of the sooty mixture and left alone. Graham didn't want too much tar spillage represented as he supposed that in the Edwardian period there might have been a little more care taken over getting the stuff into the tank compared to the laissez-faire state attitude apparent in later periods. The limited spillage was represented by a Metalcote gunmetal and grey 64 mix drybrushed on. The tank top was then scrubbed with a stiff brush to simulate scuffing and rubbing from boots, sleeves, hands and trouser knees from the men who scrambled all over it to fill 'er up. I used the same mix to simulate spills and seepage from the oil axleboxes. At this stage the amount of grime looks fine, and I see so many models weathered to this stage, but to my eye it's all a little flat, so time for some sleight of hand. I mixed 33, 62 and 64 in a ratio of about 4-1-1 and with a flat bush, and almost all of the mix wiped off, I brushed in an upward direction across all the rivets, along every edge on the tank, the frames, the ironwork, the running gear to give the impression of shadows. This takes some time and requires a lot of patience. I then mixed the same colours in a 4-1-1 mix in favour of the light grey, drybrushing all the same areas but in a downward motion which simulates light bouncing off these raised areas. it has to be done with extreme subtly or you get a caricature seen so often in some areas of military and fantasy painting - it sometimes works in those arenas, but not in ours. If you bodge it up, simply wipe away with thinners or knock it back with a mist of the general weathering mix. The highlights and shadows lift the murky running gear, the grittier areas and especially the tank rivets and the ownership plate which was one I had etched specially for the wagon. To finish it all off I added oily water runs on the tyre faces where the tank had been standing, and pushed tiny grains of rust weathering powders into the springs and axle guards. That's about it, except for the frippery, so here's an early colour photograph... ...and how we're used to seeing them in the old orthochromatic emulsions. Well, sort of...

Graham - Agreed. Chances are that I will make a start on the GER viaduct lines before The Yard is completed - in fact they will determine the exact course of the viaduct itself, so it's something I'm bearing in mind. Paul - I didn't realise Albion Yard stemmed from the same source. I'm not usually an advocate of models from models but IR has quite a knack for condensing prototype practice into modellogenic plans - but then he understands the prototype in a way I think other layout planners perhaps don't. However, track is one thing, but nailing the composition of the whole scene is the tricky bit and that's going to take a little time to get right.

Thanks for the positive comments. I was in two minds as to whether to write this piece, but once I started it kind of took on a life of its own, latching on to all sorts of references along the way (as well as the obvious which is a bit of mischief!), and I was fairly pleased with the end result, but as it was so different to the rest of everything I've written in respect of Basilica Fields I nearly didn't post it. Positive remarks from here and elsewhere have confirmed I was right to do so, and so there may be further 'Tales from...' as future blog instalments.

A quick, and very rough sketch to show the levels. That it looks like part of Ricey's Cornfield Street is no accident - it fits the bill perfectly, so there's no need to reinvent the wheel. We're looking south. In the foreground I've added the an impression of the far side of the brick lined cutting for the Metropolitan Lines (stage 3 of this segment) and the position of the future road bridge over it on the right hand side. On the viaduct at the back will be the quadruple tracks of the Great Eastern Main and Through lines with the beginnings of some sidings on the left (stage 2). These three stages will only encompass one half of The Rookery with about half as much again either side bringing it to about 20' in length in total. However, what you see here shows the extent of the visible Met. lines for this whole section as they disappear into cut & cover tunnels either side. Over the top on the right (west, towards The City) will be a network of grimy East End streets and courtyards with the main lines on the GER viaduct forming the backdrop. Beyond that is a goods depot and then Artillery Lane where the Met. lines reappear. To the left the sidings eventually lead to a large coal depot. But that's all some way off... In the space in the left foreground are some dilapidated buildings of a small courtyard (builder/decorator/merchant/whatever) accessed through the viaduct. It all looks to be a tight squeeze and that's intentional; I want to impart a cramped, claustrophobic feel. I think a mock up will be essential so I can move things around if necessary to make the best of it.

Apparently one on this page near the bottom, and another here but the link will only last a few months.

Great shot, though that's at Standon, not Buntingford which is four stations down the line. I used to live behind the pub on the left, now a Chinese restaurant which served me a meal this evening! The mill on the right has been converted into apartments, and the station has sprouted housing.

Hallelujah.

Yes, the van is a Holden design to diagram 15 (b.1888 - 1903) and was numbered 6102. it was withdrawn in the 30s.

Yep, more clangers than the little blue planet. As ever, once it's in print, people start to believe it...

Modern Locomotives Illustrated has a photo of D8408 with the small square panel on the short bonnet and states it was delivered with it in 1958. There is a photo of D8406 in The Buntingford Branch of D8406 at Standon with the small panel on the short bonnet in June 1965, yet in Green Diesel Days there is a photo of the same loco in 1959 with an all-green short bonnet. Yer takes yer pick...

Mad houses, poor houses, work houses, whore houses, slums, hospitals, feculent rivers, churches and cemeteries have all succumbed to the steady onslaught of the coming of the railways to East London from the late 1830s to the present day. As the Eastern Counties Railways and its successor the Great Eastern Railway marched inexorably onwards towards the City, they cut a huge gash through the densely populated streets where pickpockets, housebreakers and prostitutes live in great numbers alongside destitute street sellers and home-based artisans in Sweater’s Hell, each struggling to survive through every waking minute of every day on meagre pay and little food of the poorest quality. Rookeries abound; compacted courtyards and wretched streets of ancient, rotting housing stock are linked by a network of dilapidated low-roofed subterranean corridors and passageways vastly overcrowded by second and third generation Londoners and more recent migrants. Newer housing invariably contravenes building regulations and are almost always without foundations, often with windowless cellars or wooden flooring laid directly onto bare earth where entire extended families live in a single low-roofed room sharing one damp bed. Exteriors of cheap timber and ash-adulterated clay brick are held together with billysweet (a by-product of soap making from local factories) instead of mortar which never dries out, resulting in sagging, unstable walls sometimes faced with blooming plaster upon which badly pitched leaking roofs sit, supported by mouldering rafters. Damp and mildew seeps through the very fabric of the buildings, disease and sickness abounds. Mortality is high and never more so than during times of contagion, the death toll is often twice that of other poor areas outside of the Rookeries. Fifty years ago viaducts constructed from millions of handmade bricks rose up and bisected foetid communities; the resultant archways were quickly leased out as housing, workshops, warehouses and even public houses. Goods depots, factories and granaries, each several stories high, have erupted from cleared slums and link with the railways at viaduct level. An array of hydraulic hoists delivers wagons of merchandise into the deep Stygian gloom beneath via a viper’s nest of street-level inset tracks, each one dragged, shoved or otherwise coerced by horse, rope, capstan and pinch-bars over of ranks of wagon turntables into small dark unloading bays. Every two hours dozens of fresh wagons of steam and domestic coals are lined up on rows of tracks with hatches astride and between, their contents hurled into the depths below to be weighed and bagged. Six hundred and twenty five thousand souls live within a few furlongs of the railway, between them burning some 937,000 tons annually; every day ten 300-ton trains of coal from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire are brought into the capital via the GN&GE Joint Line satiating their household needs. As time passes, new depots arise and older sidings are ripped up, altered or allotted a new use. Here in the Angel Rookery, the old ECR Burial Street goods depot of 1840, built on the site of a disused cemetery, was largely swept away by the Great Eastern during widening of the viaduct and quadrupling of the line in 1891. The remaining few sidings at street level on the north side have been converted into a small locomotive servicing yard for engines shunting the nearby warehouses. The yard is accessed by way of a severe gradient from the main line, local crews bestowing upon it the grand epithet The Pipe to Hell. Some ancient squalid housing remains in Burial Street, a dirty, amputated stump of a road, no more than a shadow of its former self, their small rooms seething with damp, disease, death and worse… Less than a decade ago the streets of the Angel Rookery were within the stalking grounds of Jack the Ripper. Some residents worry that one day he will return, and in quiet, unguarded moments, one can see uncertainty mixed with the suspicion of strangers in their eyes, sometimes a flicker of fear traces across their careworn features. Fables abound, mostly generational folklore handed down from the Irish, Jewish, Romany and Huguenot migrants to frighten the children at bedtime, but adults confide to me that at least the relatives of Jack’s victims had remains to bury, whereas the victims of other psychotic murderers or phantasms have no such remains to mourn over. From various sources I have collected the names of dozens of local souls who have vanished in recent years, and at first I greeted such tales with no small degree of scepticism – stories of children and adults, sometimes one walking alone, sometimes one in a group, simply disappearing into thin air, never to be seen again. One of the strangest and most recent of these events concerned an old man, a lunatic in his seventh decade who turned up on the doorstep of a house in Burial Street and claimed he was the child of the occupant and his wife in their thirties whose eldest son, a boy of seven, had disappeared last year. The old man’s disclosure obviously upset the couple, they angrily refuted his claims which grew louder and more passionate until chased away by a clearly unnerved crowd of locals who had gathered around. Later that evening the old man stole onto railway property and threw himself into the path of an oncoming train. One might easily consider such stories to be fuelled by alcohol, or inventions woven to cover infanticide, fratricide, or even an accidental death as five sixths of all infant deaths in these Rookeries are by suffocation from overlaying due to overcrowding in family-shared beds. However, so consistent are the stories, and so earnestly are they told, that even a man grounded in scientific principles might begin to wonder if something dark and sinister is indeed abroad. Standing sentinel over the junction of Burial Street and Angel Lane is a lone remnant of the old cemetery rudely crushed beneath industrial progress. Myths surrounding it are legion; older children put the fear of God into their younger siblings who tremble at the stories, giving wide berth to the statue they are told moves and drags you silently into the ground to consume you alive. I am quietly amused yet nevertheless interested by these pagan fables, but sometimes a little less of the statue’s mournful face appears to be covered by raised hands. It is, of course, a trick of light and shadow created by the flickering of a spluttering gas lamp or from patterns swirling in the dense, greasy yellow-green fog of another pea-souper settling over the dismal East End. In the blink of an eye one can see that of course no such movement has taken place, but if the mind of a methodical scientist can be tricked, how much more so these poor, ignorant, uneducated souls? Tonight I heard the tanks of a locomotive being filled with water and the clanging of mineral upon metal plate as the bunker was filled from wicker baskets of coal stored on the timber staging. I stood by the wall adjoining the public house near the sub-surface lines and saw a small black engine standing in a siding. One of the crewmen exited the grounded carriage, trudging towards it through the accumulated slush and climbed into the cab. Words were exchanged, conversation drowned out by a short blast on the steam whistle and followed by a staccato bark from the chimney. The exhaust gave way to near silence, just the quiet clanking of rods and the thud of wheels passing over rail joints echoing down Burial Street, before disappearing under the iron bridge leading to the rest of the world. In the distance and high above, the muted, heavy labouring of a heavy mineral train punctuated the air, brakes squealing in protest as it slowed towards the coal depot located a quarter of a mile away. In the brick-lined cutting below, an aspirating train filled with passengers burst from the gloom of a long tunnel, a cloud of sulphurous exhaust roaring into the moonlit sky caught me unaware, causing my heart to suddenly race. I looked at my pocket watch; the hour was late, and before returning to the warmth of civilisation and society there was a long walk across London ahead of me. Laughter and song spilled out from the Weeping Angel public house, light from the front window bathing the flagstones in a soft yellow glow. I stood and watched through the etched glass before crossing the muddy street towards the sorrowful angel, and for the first time in all my visits here, as I glanced up, the gas lamps in the street flickered and for a moment I thought saw the horror of blank eyes staring back. Extract from the Journal of Doctor J. Smith, army surgeon (retired), entry dated 12th December 1901. Less than two months later the doctor himself disappeared, the last entry in his journal indicating that he believed he had solved the mystery of the vanishing residents of the Rookery.

Although there are some similarities, it's not one of the old Worsdell cross-braced GE vans; the doors were cupboard style and internally braced, the roof profile isn't shallow enough, there are too many planks, it shouldn't have T ironwork on the ends, it should have iron bracing rods through the centre of the cross-timbering...ad nausium... Nice van though!

Pointstaken: An ancient kipper would indeed bring that je ne sais quoi to the model. However I'd appreciate no more of these sort of suggestions when I get to fill my GE wagons with 3cwt barrels of dog poop for the tannery... Graham: Yes, no Atlantic fishies to Billingsgate via Basilica and the GW, but North Sea herrings, sprats and winkles will come in from the GE lines. Mark: Thanks for that - yes logic indicates they would have been sheeted, turf or no turf, and thanks for confirming barrels were used - some now on order. I'm keeping an eye on your thread. Mikkel: A desktop printer will easily cope with thinner paper, but a printshop should have lots of different gsm papers to hand with different finishes so I can chop and change until happy - then I can get a couple of sheets filled with these printed off, which for this railway company will last me a lifetime. It'll also give me a head start when I come to get some GE, GN, LBSC and various other company sheets printed for which I'll need a vast number. I can just squeeze four 7mm wagon sheets onto A4, but printing on A3 would be even better, especially when the numbers of wagon sheets required for Basilica is well in three figure range - so I'm looking at the printshop route as being a recce for future wagon sheet printing en masse.

One of the wagons in the works is a lovely Highland Railway open fish truck from Lochgorm. It's one of those wagons you could find an excuse to build a layout around due to the volume of character it exudes, no doubt exacerbated by the sultry curves on the ends. Once I finally get my camera lens sorted I'll put a photo up, in the meantime for those of you completely in the dark, Pete Armstrong has built one for his Highland project (one of my favourite external blogs that). Anyway, I digress... An email dropped into my inbox over the weekend from my client; "...oh I think there was a folded HR tarp to go in the fish truck..." Now, it's not that I'd forgotten about the wagon sheet, it's just that I'd not been able to find out any information on the dratted things. Great Eastern, Great Northern, North Western, Midland, even Cambrian and Taff Vale I know about, but Highland... I wasn't even sure if the fish trucks were sheeted - in fact, I don't think anybody is. According to Andy Copp at Lochgorm and the HR Soc. it's not known for certain how they were loaded; were the fish in boxes or barrels? Were they sheeted or covered with turf or both? Blimey, they're not even 100% certain the colour the wagons were painted, and the running numbers don't really correlate with the build dates, and... The email continued, "...I am attaching a scan of the pattern I got sent by a Highland expert. I assume white lettering on black tarps. Hopefully it is of some use...." A crack in the lowering clouds at last, and indeed looking at another post by Pete I'm pretty certain the info came from the same place! On the computer I set up a typical wagon sheet-sized rectangle - yeah I know there was no definitive sheet size, but for my sins I used a Great Western one as a template, so slap me with a kipper...OK, don't do that really...I then set the sheet colour to a charcoal grey rather than black over which I will later weather, the charcoal giving a faded rather than as-new look for me to work with. I then started to push the lettering and numbers into place. When I was happy with the relative positions I fired one out of the printer on some standard 80gsm paper and bingo, it looked good. Tomorrow I'm going to get some professionally printed on some much thinner paper For this sheet I've not marked the five overlapping strips which go to make up one sheet, but I will score them in before folding it up inside the wagon. On the subject of folding sheets, this was done fairly soon after unloading, and there was a special way of folding them down to a very small stacking size to minimise the possibility of pin holes forming and rendering the sheet useless. Unfortunately once folded there's little so show the provenance of the sheet, so for this model we've decided to have it loosely folded in the wagon as if unloading has just taken place so at least some of the lettering and numbering remains visible. It will also give an excuse to model a couple of broken fish boxes and general detritus.

+1 what Jan said. It's so refreshing to see what could be such a mundane concept turned on it's head by thinking outside of the box - and almost literally at that - and then you get all that lovely atmospheric lighting in the 'after' shots...just fab. The Farthing Layouts - one of my favourite concepts and definitely my favourite blog.

Me neither, but after your post last night I dug it out and had a watch. Not brilliant quality, but nice and atmospheric as there's a very orangey winter's sun.

There's some colour footage and a cab ride in one on the Buntingford Branch on that line society's DVD.

Spot on. For a short time about a decade ago I worked alongside someone who worked both the BTH and NBL type 1s on the Buntingford line. Occasionally we got to chat about the NBLs, stories about which invariably included flames, during which he always exhibited an astonishing grasp of Anglo-Saxon vernacular.

Perhaps the year 2047 to mark the centenary...

It has been suggested that I'm on my own little planet. I prefer ;-)

OK, I've eased you into Basilica Fields nice and gently, now here comes the hardcore stuff. This is the latest post from the external blog, and is the first on here to be truncated with an external link. As I mentioned in a previous post there are genuine reasons for the linked content, and I hope the teaser is enough to make you want to follow it through. With this entry the Basilica Fields journal is one hundred posts old. Not only that, but in the last week it passed the 30,000 views mark. I am all astonishment; twenty one months of waffle, a little progress and lots of fantastic feedback. All in what is, to be honest, a very niche subject. I wanted to mark this milestone with something a little bit special so I looked up all the possible prototype locos of the various companies which might have worked the Basilica Fields lines with a running number of 100. Two locos presented themselves, both Great Eastern tanks, and they ran consecutively – although there was, strictly speaking, a few months of overlap. The earliest of the two, an E10 class 0-4-4T, worked throughout the whole period covered by this project, whereas the latter, an M15 2-4-2T, appeared right at the end of the timeframe, therefore I’ve no expectation of it appearing on the layout. Shortly after Massey Bromley took the post of Locomotive Superintendent at Stratford the E10 0-4-4T class appeared. The design was obviously that of his predecessor William Adams, essentially being an elongated version of his K9 class and very closely related to his 61 class. Sixty of the new locos were built between 1878 and 1883, the final twenty being fitted with the Westinghouse brake from new and the rest of the class fitted retrospectively shortly after. Number 100 was the eighty-third locomotive to be built at Stratford Works, and was constructed under Order R10. The loco was ex-works on the 18th June 1879 and released to traffic two days later in the then standard Great Eastern livery of black, lined red – the class being the first to benefit from Bromley’s widened lining style compared to that applied by Adams. It had 8″ yellow numerals hand-painted on the buffer beams, and was fitted with a pair of Bromley’s new-style cast iron elliptical number plates on the side tanks. In November 1894 No.100 was rebuilt with a new boiler pressed to 140psi, fitted with larger diameter cylinders and standard Holden-pattern boiler fittings. A new round-spectacle front weatherboard replaced the Adams-style square window type, and for the first time a matching rear weatherboard was fitted, finally enclosing the cab. It was painted in the then standard ultramarine blue livery (probably for the second time) with Holden’s enlarged ‘GER’ transfers on the side tanks, and fitted with Worsdell-style brass number plates cast with the legend ‘Rebuilt 1894′ on the bunker sides... This is an extract of the latest entry on my Basilica Field journal. Click here to read the full entry. Click here to access the full journal

@Mikkel: My way of dealing with it is the former, though I am trying to ensure that the composition of a given train is historically viable - you just might not have seen that Great Western brake 3rd on the Middle Circle Service at the same time as the LNWR Outer Circle train it's just passed going in the opposite direction through the cut & cover section - there could be a chronological (and/or temporal!) discrepancy of a few months or more. And that Midland shunter in the goods depot was built a year after that Great Eastern horsebox on the viaduct above was renumbered into a different series, and that particular Brighton Terrier on the ELR service had been rusticated two years before that anyway. All the stock is correct for the timeframe, it's just that there will be (because on such a project it's impossible to be otherwise) anachronistic moments. It's almost like each train is in its own universe and we're seeing a collapsed multiverse of movement. OK, that's a bit deep... @Mighty Chris. Thanks, glad you're enjoying it. @ Ian: Jim's New Street is superb, and knowing his build is expected to be 20 years or so means I feel much less out on a limb with this. At one point I did toy with building a strictly prototypical part of the Great Eastern based in the Cable Street coal depot area on the Fenchurch Street line. However, so much of the East End was wept away by both slum clearance in the early 20th Century and later German bombs, and although the photographic record of the East end of the period is comprehensive, there's simply not enough information for me to be able to truthfully say that such a model was built with minimal compromise. Once I began to accept that compromises both large and small were necessary, I moved from the desire to recreate a portion of history to a might-have been based on plausibility and the twisting of both the historical record and the lie of the land for my own wants. I'm probably going to satisfy the desire to model a real location in a narrow window of time by building a small rustic layout as a side project. That could be in any one of four scales 00, S, 7mm or 1:32...