Oh, dear! wherever is the train?

I first wrote about the Bullhouse Railway accident back in 2013 and have writen short updates a number of times since. I've now pulled all that research into a single article but rather than publish it here I wrote it as a guest post for the Railway Work, Life & Death project.

Even if you've read all my previous posts about this accident you should find something new in this longer version as I spent quite a bit of time finding more contemperaneous newspaper reports to try and give a more detailed first hand account of the accident and it's immediate aftermath; lots of graphic descriptions of death and mutilation!

Half a Sleeper

One of the comments on the previous post pointed out that the tool for adding the rail chair marks could also be useful to modellers of narrow gauge lines in 7mm scale as often these lines used standard gauge sleepers cut in half. Strangely I'd actually modelled this already when testing the tool but forgot to include the photo in the original post so for completeness... here is a newly creosoted, half sleeper, ready for use in laying some new narrow gauge track.

The Ghost In The Sleeper

Wooden railway sleepers don't last forever and often need replacing. The wood is of course still useable for other things. For example, it's not hard to find old sleepers used as fence posts. Such uses of old sleepers are easy to spot as, apart from their fairly standard size, you can usually see the impression left by the rail chair including holes where they were bolted down. Whilst you may see similar fences on model railways, how many modellers go to the trouble of modelling the ghost of the rail chair?

Whilst most people might not bother with such small details some people like to go the extra mile to make their models as lifelike as they can. One such person contacted me last year to ask if it would be possible to design a tool that would make it nice and easy to add these marks to 7mm to the foot scale sleepers.

The design work was relatively easy as I managed to track down a drawing for a rail chair (specifically a four bolt version used by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway) which I used to produce a 3D printed prototype on my resin printer. This was then tested using some of my son's Playdoh.

Of course the resin version is unlikely to hold up to repeated use being hammered into wooden sleepers, but having proved that the pattern it left seemed right, a little more work got me to a an easy to use tool that I could have 3D printed in brass.

Of course once the brass version arrived I couldn't resist giving it a go before posting it on to it's new home.

I think that looks pretty good, and as it takes just seconds to add the marks it's easy enough to quickly detail a large pile of sleepers ready to build a fence or maybe for an old siding where the rails have been removed. Given how many different ways old sleepers get used the possibilites are endless.

If you want to add rail chair details to your own 7mm scale model landscape then I've made the tool available to buy on Shapeways (see here).

While four bolt chairs were fairly common, I do have drawings for rail chairs from other companies which (given time) I'm intending to use to produce a set of tools, but in the meantime if you want a tool to produce the ghost of a specific comapnies rail chair let me know and I'll do my best to help.

An Orange Simplex

I've not had much time for modelling lately so the work on completing the 16mm scale Simplex locomotive seems to have taken forever, but as you can see I finally got there.

Now I know most Simplex locos are painted a shade of green, but my four year old son was insistent that it had to be orange. I wasn't convinced by the idea at first but I'm actually really happy with how it looks and it certainly won't ever get lost in the garden! Strangely there is a prototype for painting Simplex locomotives this colour (in fact this exact shade of orange) as Alan Keef Ltd. paint their locos, inlcuding their hire locos, orange and over the years that has included a few Simplex locomotives.

So given the lack of dirt (I've not yet had the heart to weather the model) my back story is that it's just been over hauled and repainted by Alan Keef Ltd. and is now ready for it's first hire contract.

And to finish with here is a short video to show that it does actually work. Sorry about the shaky camera work, but I was controlling the locomotive via an app on my phone while also holding the camera and trying to ensure it didn't run off the end of the track!