JimC

When you consider the extreme sophistication of the complex shaped GWR rockers in order to make for as accurate as possible valve events it seems unlikely they would have been happy with the compromises forced by 3 cylinder implementations. Cook says in his book "GW locomotives had extreme regularity in their exhaust beats and we certainly could not permit of anything like two beats and a wooffle which was noticeable on some rival lines"

That red/white check sign looks to be BR though judging by the text font and general style. The OP needs something GWR era. There were surely a good number of such restricted structures, albeit more height than width: someone must be able to dig up an example. And if no-one can find an example - then no-one is in a position to show the current setup is incorrect! I just had a browse through a railwayana site, and while they had a number of those BR limited clearance squares, I didn't succeed in finding anything that was any earlier. And its not as if having to add an additional sign will be a great disaster should evidence ever turn up. There were a few "railway company locomotives must not pass this point" which presumably are also private sidings. But for my money that sign looks neat.

The smoke box arrangements on the Dean Goods had been upgraded several times over the years, so they were probably as current Swindon state of the art as any other. I note from GAs I have that blastpipe to bell dimension on 1940 Dean Goods GA and 1930 57xx GA is identical, as you'd expect it to be. My knowledge of the complexities of front end design is minimal, but I note that the total volume of a set of Dean Goods cylinders is 46% of the total volume of the Duke cylinders, so maybe the Dean Goods casting was simply the right size?

Drawing accuracy... Here's an example of how things can go wrong... This drawing of a 94 is from CJ Freezer's "Locomotives in Outline", and presumably the 'Railway Modeler' before that. In fact I recall it from RM as being the first thing I ever attempted to scratchbuild. (got stuck on the boiler). anyway, nice enough drawing. But lets look at my 94 drawing I did for my book: Spot the difference? What seems to have happened is that CJF somehow got muddled between the 94xx and the 57xx, and his 94xx drawing has the same rear overhang as the 57xx, not the extra length of the 94. The bunker is the right size, but he shortened the cab to make it all fit. I imagine he worked from the front back to the front of the cab, and from the rear to the back of the cab and the doorway. Its all a lot easier when you can just electronically lay one over the other... Incidentally, don't go thinking I believe my drawing to be perfect: Its based mainly on the GWR weight diagram, which is far from a reliable source, so I'm not claiming full accuracy. I'm not quite sure about the height of the firebox, and I think I had better revisit the brake pull rods. Like models, electronic drawings are never finished...

A great resource is https://maps.nls.uk/ which has historic OS maps. The highest resolution maps will give you individual tracks, so you can check what was there in the 1930s.

The Henley on Thames branch might be a suitable location: double tracked, Castle class on direct London trains etc.

If your desire is London area, twin tracks and 4 coach trains wouldn't you be looking at suburban traffic, and probably 61xx power? And hence for inspiration look at the secondary lines in the London area?

Yes, I was struck a while back by these odd looking 19thC GWR rebuilds which started life as 0-4-2T. They had a lot of weight on the rear drivers, enough in fact to reduce their route availability. But now I consider the valve gear/ashpan clearance then the configuration starts to make sense.

Sudden enlightenment... I have in the past vaguely wondered why many of the micro locomotives used for rail motors at the turn of the century used outside Walschaerts valve gear, but those creations have given me a clue - how much their ash pans must be reduced in size to allow for the eccentrics between the frames and the difficulties that must be experienced keeping the abrasive ash from where it will do great harm.

Would fruit vans also have been used for more general merchandise outside the fruit seasons?

Well, I've covered all the main Barry classes in varying levels of detail as my fancy and my sources permit. The other absorbed lines won't be nearly as simple - the Barry Railway was founded late and had a particularly organised and disciplined locomotive policy. There are some obvious books on the Barry Railway locomotives for those who wish to learn more. My main references have been "The Barry Railway Diagrams and photographs of Locomotives Coaches and Wagons" by Eric R Mountford, Oakwood Press 1987, ISBN 0 83561 355 9, Russell's "A Pictorial Record of Great Western Absorbed Engines", Oxford Publishing Co, 1978, and RCTS Part 10 - Absorbed Engines 1922-1947, 1966. I haven't been able to justify to my self purchasing the Welsh Railway Circle's Barry Railway Drawings, but its companion volume Rhymney Railway Drawings is an excellent publication, and I imagine this one is just as good and much more readily available than the older volumes. The drawings are to a larger scale too which is always a good thing. There are also on line sources for photographs, almost too many to mention, search engines being your friend, but this flickr collection by Nick Baxter and the 813 fund's collections deserve a plug. For those who haven't tried the exercise of interpreting drawings and photographs, this page covers how I go about it. The sketches are strictly representative. Unless you have a full works general arrangement drawing its difficult to have much confidence about a inch or sometimes three here and there - weights diagrams aren't nearly as accurate as one might hope - and the minefield of locomotive condition against date, not to mention the problems of understanding what you are looking at, means nothing is truly set in stone. In general when I haven't understood something I've omitted it. Pipework and inside valve gear especially. In answer to the always vexed question of liveries, drawing out lining is a royal pain in the neck and doesn't in my opinion add very much to the legibility of the sketches, so I don't do it! I've given rudimentary colours to the sketches because it looks prettier than grayscale, and the contrast between the pre group and GWR green helps make it obvious which is which.

A class of five small lightweight 0-6-0T, numbered 781-5 by the GWR. Two survived to join British Railways but were gone by 1950, whilst three went to industrial use in the 1930s and lasted to 1958/60. Only one received a really major GWR rebuild, which included a non standard Swindon designed boiler as well as GWR style cab and bunker. There are complexities around the E class bunkers! 781, 783 and 785 had an upward extension of the bunker with coal plates in Barry days, but 782 and 784 did not - or at least had lost it in their GWR time. I've drawn it in the Barry sketch. There are various problems with the GWR weight diagrams. Diagram A82, which was purportedly the locomotives as received shows the wrong shape cab entrance and the bunker too low. Diagram B5 ,which only applied to 782, shows a GWR shaped bunker that was never fitted. The locomotive appears to have had a new bunker at that rebuild, but it was a plain rectangle, taller than the Barry bunkers and about the same height as the extensions. 783 had a more major rebuild for Diagram B21 and did have a GWR style bunker. Another feature is balance weights on the wheels. I often leave these off as being tricky to manage accurately, but in the case of the E class only 782 appears to have had them. The generous supply of handrails seen on the Barry sketch may not have been present on every locomotive. They had quite an array of pipework behind the safety valve cover which I haven't managed to understand well enough to reproduce.

And do it with better kit and better tech ability than me too. Agreed, little point in taking photos unless you have a particular reason.

Built by Sharp Stewart, the C class originally comprised four small 2-4-0T, without the standard boiler used by most Barry Railway classes. In 1898 two were converted to 2-4-2T, and the other two, one also converted to 2-4-2T, were sold to the Port Talbot Railway. Both the Barry locomotives were gone by 1928, even though one received a major rebuild with a Metro boiler.

Not to mention spectacularly expensive!

The smaller wheeled classes tended to be a tad lower on the whole, unsurprising I suppose. I've just been through Russell starting to compile a table of cab heights, but by the time I got half way through looking at the drawings of locomotives against loading gauge it became evident that more often the cab roof eaves are closer to the limits of the GWR gauge than the centre of the roof, so the centre value was of dubious usefulness and I stopped. No doubt 56s and 42s also had to take into consideration the various loading gauges on the absorbed lines.

I'm not sure. The story seems complicated. I've got an 1899 gauge diagram which is 13'3, and a mention of a new gauge in 1908 in the GWR magazine. There's also a drawing in the NRM archive of a proposed gauge made a few years later which I haven't seen. It needs more detailed research than I've been able to do from my desk I suspect.

These ten locos, built in 1914, discarded the old Barry standards and were a bigger loco overall with a much bigger boiler and a very large bunker. They were generally considered successful with the exception of a serious and strange flaw. When running forwards the rear coupled wheels had a tendency to switch points as they passed through them, sending the trailing bogie down the other branch. In reverse, they were fine. Naturally this resulted in an immediate derailment, and this was usually coupled with a fracture of a main water distribution pipe. This lost all the water, meaning the fire had to be immediately thrown out. On absorption, they were numbered 1347-1355 and 1357 and given diagram B. Four were rebuilt in 1922 with Standard 4 boilers, the first Welsh class to receive such a major change. This was allocated diagram C. In 1926, with the loss in traffic resulting from the General Strike, it appears the GWR lost patience with their reluctance to stay on the track and all were scrapped in short order. 1356, by the way, was allocated to an 0-6-0T locomotive that had been built for the Severn and Wye Railway, had been taken over by the GWR in 1895, rebuilt by the GWR in 1896, sold to the Alexandra Docks and Railway Co in 1912, and then resumed its 1895 number when it came back to the GWR at the grouping.

The GWR standard loading gauge changed from 13'2" to 13'6" height in the centre about 1908. I imagine it took some time for that to be universal round the majority of routes, and some branch lines never even made the 13'2 figure. By and large the extra height was only made use of for 4-6-0s, 2-8-0s and the like, with most other classes staying pretty much within the old limit. However going through Russell I see cab roofs on 2221 and 31/5111 in their original form were fractions of an inch over 13'2, as is diagram A13 for the new 3100s. The 5101s, 6100s and 8100s OTOH were a good deal lower, under 12'8 as were the 5111s in their final diagram. Below 13' is within reach of the vast majority of the pre group gauges, whilst the Met widened lines were 12'8".

This first sketch is aimed at being post war, but pre grouping. In 1899, the Barry railway desperately needed some new locomotives, but all British builders were at full capacity. To resolve this, the five locomotives of the K class was ordered from Cooke Loco and Machine Co in the USA. It seems the Barry railway really wanted something as close as possible to the B1 class and the Americans wanted to build something as close as possible to their standard product. The result was a decidedly odd hybrid, with the top and rear halves largely complying with Barry standards, and the front and bottom halves - the cylinders and the frames - pure US with bar frames, outside cylinders and all. The combination does not appear to have been a happy one, and yet when the GWR got their hands on them they elected to rebuild two in the best GWR style with Standard 3 taper boiler and full GWR side tanks, cab and bunkers. They were numbered 193-197. The rebuilds do not seem to have been significantly more satisfactory and all were scrapped between 1927 and 1932, no industrial user having elected to purchase one. This sketch represents the two rebuilt with Std 3 boilers. The sketch owes as much to an excellent photo in Russell as to the weight diagram. I had some trouble with this one. Its the muddy shadows under the footplate, and the fact that aspects of the design are so alien. The original Barry weight diagram contains a dimensional error, which complicates my method of tracing weight diagrams as the starting point for my sketches. The odd mix of US and British practice also complicates things, because I sometimes had trouble establishing in my mind what a line represented. I hope there aren't too many errors. I was having so much trouble getting a feel for what was happening under the footplate that I even reluctantly looked at photographs of a model, which is of course a desperate and highly dangerous step indeed. In the event all I really achieved with that is spot a number of things which obviously the modeller had failed to work out either and omitted. Sensible man! Under the footplate is really troublesome, and particularly against the firebox between the second and third drivers. I also can't work out where the front sand pipe and sand box is, and the brake rigging looks odd too. I think the brake cylinder might be horizontal between the cylinders, which is quite unlike anything else I've sketched! The weights diagrams from the Barry (in Mountford) and GWR (in Russell) have been major sources, although as above there's a dimensional error in the Barry diagram which the GWR apparently caught in the first drawing in Russell. Interesting, BTW, that like Churchward's US inspired locomotives, the cylinders are horizontal with their centre line above that of the wheels.

They are simply Dean Singles converted to 2-6-0. In real life some of the Sir Daniel 2-2-2s were converted to 0-6-0s. It was less complicated than you might imagine because by this stage the Sir Daniels were using the same boiler and motion as the Armstrong Standard Goods, so the biggest part of the job was realigning the cylinders. So what I did was the same process with a late variant Dean Single. Holcroft tells us that Churchward considered a 4-4-0 conversion for the Dean singles, but when they looked at it in detail it came out too expensive. I decided money wasn't a problem (!!) and given new cylinders to the same basic design I reckoned that it was just possible to fit in the existing motion with the cylinders moderately steeply inclined round a carefully positioned leading axle, whilst the trailing wheels are where they were on the single. One has the "original" boiler, while the other has a standard 4. As well as the Sir Daniels, this also riffs on the conversions of 3521 class 0-4-4T (ex 0-4-2T) to 4-4-0s, which ended up with a mix of parallel and taper boilers. In practice the more I look at it the more needs changing. In particular the amount of work needed on the frames. Holcroft tells us that Churchward didn't want to alter the cylinders, but the job proved to be impossible without making changes there. This would have been around 1908, so creating a class of sort of half baked Armstrong 4-4-0s or Aberdares when the new outside cylinder classes were so much better cannot have looked like a smart move. The Sir Daniel and 3521 conversions had been started around 1899/1900 when the future locomotive policy must have looked rather different.

If you mean the green structure, its meant to be a sandbox. I appear to have left the smokebox saddle off the parallel boiler version completely! Oops!

Null Pointe! Look again, and remember this is the fictional locomotives thread! Although to be fair there are a few bits of modified Aberdare in it. Right era.

There are sort of precedents for these two variations on a theme so not quite as unlikely as one might think... Lets see who gets internet points for both what it is and what precedents there were...

Churchward had done much the same thing when he introduced his outside cylinder standards. A Dean single with a set of dummy wooden outside cylinders was sent all round the system. The lead fingers were a neat touch though.