Duchal Moor Railway

When I originally started work on a bridge for the Dave Brewer challenge I wasn't sure if I was going to copy an existing bridge or just use one for inspiration. That is why, until now, I've specifically not mentioned the bridge I'd been looking at. Of course, as comments on recent posts have shown, it's difficult for any of you to make comments on how accurate something I've modelled is if you have no real idea of what it should look like, so......

The Duchal Moor Railway, known locally as the Grouse Moor Line, was built by the shipbuilder James Lithgow to help transport people and equipment out to the shooting butts on the moor. When completed in 1922 there was approximately 7 miles of 2ft gauge track. The railway closed in the late 1970s and most of the line has disappeared back into the peat bogs it was built over. One of the remaining sections of the line includes a bridge over Blacketty Water which I'm using as the basis for my model.

Clearly it's not a particularly big or complex bridge but I was looking for something that I had a could model with a chance of finishing in time, and which would also let me experiment with a bunch of new techniques. To follow up on the question of sleeper size here is a comparison of the test piece of track and the real track.

Having measured from the photo, I think the majority of the sleepers are around 2' 9" wide but I've modelled them as 3' (so 12mm) to give a little more width. Even with the extra width they look very narrow due to the over sized spikes and heavier rail. Given there is not much I can do about the rail or the spikes (I really couldn't handle smaller spikes) I think the track looks like a reasonable representation, especially as when viewed from a normal distance the spikes blend in more than they do in the close up photo. I suppose the other option would be to just glue the rail down and not bother with the spikes given how small they are in real life but somehow that seems like cheating.

Anyway, now you all know what bridge I'm basing my model on hopefully you'll keep making helpful comments as I continue experimenting and then building the final model.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Having really enjoyed my trip to the 009 Society AGM back in April I've made the decision to attend the other big narrow gauge modelling show of the year, ExpoNG, at the end of October. As well as going to enjoy the modelling on show and to socialise I'm also hoping to have the kit for the Hudson-Hunslet ready by then as well which if it's a success will help with the expense of getting to Kent for the show.

ExpoNG presents a number of awards each year for layouts but they also have an open modelling competition, the Dave Brewer Memorial Challenge. Unlike the 009 Society competition this isn't just about locomotives or rolling stock and in fact the rules change every year. This year the competition is all about building a bridge. Specifically the rules are:

1. The model bridge may use any scale and gauge combination, as long as it represents a narrow (ie less than 4 ft 8.5 ins) gauge, with a maximum gauge of 45 mm.
2. The model can be any type of over or under-bridge and should be complete with abutments and track.
3. The model may be wholly scratch-built, or use parts from kits or commercial models, but no unaltered kits or commercial models can be entered.
4. To ensure we can fit entries into the available space please use these maximum sizes:
1. 50 cm by 25 cm by 35 cm high for gauges 32 mm and above, to a maximum of 45 mm.
2. 40 cm by 20 cm by 25 cm high for gauges 14 mm and above, but less than 32 mm.
3. 30 cm by 15 cm by 20 cm high for gauges 9 mm and above, but less than 14 mm.
4. 20 cm by 10 cm by 15 cm high for all gauges below 9 mm.
5. The model should not have been entered in any previous competition.
6. To be eligible, completed entry forms must be received by 31st August 2015.
7. To be eligible, models must be presented for judging at Expo Narrow Gauge 2015.
8. A prize, including one year’s subscription to Narrow Gauge World, will be awarded to the winner.
9. The judges’ decision is final.

Given that I still find producing effective scenery a lot more challenging that building wagons etc. I thought building a small diorama (with a bridge) to a deadline would be a good idea. I had originally thought about building something in O14 so I would have somewhere to display the Clayton battery locomotive, but as I'll be travelling down on the train I'm thinking a small diorama would be better especially as it's going to need a sturdy box to transport it.

I have decided what I'm modelling but for now I'm planning on keeping it as a surprise for the day. I will, however, blog about the build as I go along as there will be a number of experiments that I'll need to make before committing to the final version. Without describing the bridge in detail I can say it's fairly decrepit looking and crosses peat coloured water. This means that I need to be able to model (among other things) peaty water and sleepers that have been weathered almost to a silver colour.

Having never tried to model water before I decided that this was likely to be the main problem I'd have to overcome. There are a number of products available for modelling water but they all seem to produce crystal clear water which isn't what I wanted. Asking around on the forums and most people suggested that I'd be best using a number of layers of yacht varnish to create the effect I wanted but I've never had much luck varnishing furniture so I didn't really fancy this route. The other option was to add colour between layers or into the water products, but again I couldn't find many people who had done this to model what I was after; the one exception being the stream on Tom Dauben's Dunbracken layout (a good photo of the stream can be found here). Tom told me that he'd used the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water and Water Effects products to create the stream with colouring applied to the stream bed and between a few layers. Armed with this information I set out to do an experiment or two.

My original intention had been to paint the stream bed (in this experiment a bit of white card) and then pour the water to see how it worked, but while browsing in WH Smiths I discovered that Winsor & Newton do a peat brown ink. So armed with the ink, some paints, and the Realistic Water I did an experiment. I first painted patches of the ink and burnt umber acrylic paint on the cardboard. I then coloured the water using a few drops of ink before pouring it onto the cardboard (the weird chunk at the top I'll come back to). The colour looks better in real life and what I've found is that the ink works well not just for colouring the water but helping simulate depth where I used it to paint the cardboard. the burnt umber patch seems too dark and different from the water to be believable, although that could just be because you can see the edges so clearly. The weird chunk is because I had a little bit of the mixture left so added a bit more ink to make it darker and then left it to dry in the pot. Once dried I removed it from the pot and decided it was way too dark. Unfortunately I then put it down on top of the experimental pour and left it there overnight. The following morning it was stuck. Anyway I'm really happy with this first experiment. Obviously I'll need to repeat it using some proper scenic materials (i.e. plaster) for the stream bed, and probably multiple layers of water to get more depth but it certainly appears to have promise.

As some of you may remember it took me quite a few attempts to get a well worn wood effect sorted when painting wagons and they are a very different colour than exposed sleepers would turn (or at least I think so looking at photos etc.), so I wasn't looking forward to coming up with a new approach, but I think I've found something that works reasonably well.

The sleepers aren't the right size as I just chopped up and distressed some coffee stirrers but hopefully the painting will work regardless of the size. I started by soaking them for a minute or so in a 10:1 mixture of isopropanol and Indian ink. This doesn't turn them jet black but allows the ink to settle into distressed bits of wood quite well. I then painted the sleeper using the peat brown ink used for the water. The black sections show through giving a nice variation and depth to the cracks etc. I then followed this by dry brushing with dark sand, ivory, and finally gun metal. This approach seems to work nicely as close to you can see lots of the grain and colour variation, yet when viewed from a distance, especially with the light falling on them, they look very light in colour which matches what I was hoping for.

So I might not have actually modelled anything but hopefully I now have a good idea of most of the techniques (although not all) that I'll need to complete the bridge for the challenge.

Clayton Battery Electric Locomotive No. 5843

While work is still ongoing to turn the Hudson-Hunslet into a kit I've already started work on designing another model. As with the Hudson-Hunslet I've picked something with local interest; this time to where I live now rather than where I grew up.

As I've mentioned a number of times before the Penistone line from Hudersfield to Sheffield runs along the bottom of our garden. Until 1981 the line also formed part of the Woodhead route between Sheffield and Manchester. The line to Manchester branched from the current line at Penistone and climbed into the Peak District where it entered a tunnel at Dunford Bridge before reappearing at Woodhead and continuing to Glossop and on to Manchester. Since the line originally opened in 1845 there have been three parallel tunnels built. The original tunnel was joined by a second one in 1853 and a new tunnel replaced both of these in 1953 when the line was electrified. When the new tunnel opened in 1954 the two Victorian tunnels were closed and the track lifted and they remained unused until 1966.

In 1963 the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), now known as the National Grid, announced that they wanted to construct an overhead power line linking Thorpe Marsh power station in Yorkshire with Staylbridge in Cheshire. There was significant public objections, however, to allowing pylons to be built within the Peak District and eventually the CEGB decided to route the cables through the old Victorian railway tunnels. As part of this work a 2 foot gauge railway was installed within the northern of the two tunnels to ease access. A number of locomotives have worked this line but my interest has been caught by Clayton battery electric locomotive works number 5843 which was a one off variant of a standard Clayton design using larger wheels to give a higher top speed.

The locomotive was delivered new in 1971 and withdrawn, I believe, sometime during the 1990's. It's now owned by the Moseley Railway Trust who purchased it in 2000. Amazingly these two photos are the only colour images I've been able to find of it in use prior to preservation (there is a black and white photo in issue 77 of the Industrial Railway Society journal). It's not just photos of the locomotive that are hard to find though. Given how much interest there is in the standard gauge Woodhead route I can find almost no published accounts of the 2 foot gauge railway that replaced it. I'm guessing this is mostly due to only short sections at either end of the tunnel being visible to the public and both of these are in fairly out of the way places. If you happen to know of any more details on the line, the locos or the rolling stock I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment.

Fortunately, while details of it in active use might be scarce I already had a set of drawings done by Jeremy Tilston in 2005 and these have allowed me to make a start on a model. Currently progress is only virtual as I'm again intending to 3D print the majority of the model.

There are still a few details to add before I order a print but the render on the left seems to be a good representation. My plan is to print it in two halves; a chassis (in orange) to which all the mechanical parts will be fitted and then an upper body (in yellow) which will slide over the motor and be secured by two screws. What you can't tell from the images is that this model is in a new scale for me.

I really wanted to produce a model of this locomotive in OO9, the same scale as the Hudson-Hunslet, unfortunately it just wasn't possible. On the Hudson-Hunslet the motor just fitted within the bodywork, unfortunately on this locomotive there isn't enough space in OO9 to fit even a 6mm x 10mm motor horizontally within the body and if fitted vertically the driveshaft would be almost touching the rail and two low to drive the layshaft. This means I've had to move up a scale and this model is designed for O14. For those not familiar with this scale it models narrow gauge in O scale (7mm to the foot) using 14mm gauge track. This has the advantage of being an accurate representation of 2 foot gauge railways. Even in this larger scale the model is very small and in fact won't be much bigger than the OO9 Hudson-Hunslet!

Of course having never modelled in O14, or any scale larger than 4mm to the foot, I'm going to have to see what modelling skills work in a larger scale and which need some more thought. I'm also going to need to build some 14mm gauge track to test it on. I can see months of fun ahead!

Canopus

In 1901 Manning Wardle of Leeds built an 0-6-2ST locomotive for the Pentewan Railway in Cornwall. The locomotive, named "Canopus" arrived in December of 1901 and was immediately put to work hauling china clay along the railway. The railway didn't usually carry passengers although during the summer it was noted for the annual Sunday School Tea Treat Trains when the churches and chapels around the area hired the railway for the afternoon and conveyed their scholars, family and teachers to the coast at Pentewan. Canopus continued to work the line until it was abandoned in 1918. Canopus was eventually sold for scrap in 1924, but not before working as RAF loco No.7 at RAF Manston apparently on the construction of two underground hangers.

After a bit of searching I've managed to find just two photos of Canopus; one clearly showing her in use by the RAF and the earlier photo which I'm guessing was taken on a Sunday showing one of the church outings.

By this point you might be wondering why I'm suddenly blogging about a locomotive built for a small Cornish railway which no longer exists. Well, Canopus will be the second OO9 steam locomotive kit I'm going to attempt to build. The kit is from Backwoods Minatures, and from a brief look at the parts it seems as if it is a really well thought out kit that even I should be able to assemble. It will certainly be more difficult than the Brian Madge Quarry Hunslet kit I recently built as I have to build the full chassis rather than building a model around a pre-assembled motor bogie.

In a similar way to the naming of the Quarry Hunslet, I'm not intending to build a replica of Canopus rather, another loco to the same design, with a sensible backstory explaining how it ended up in the bottom left hand corner of Yorkshire. Even though I 'm not building a replica of Canopus, I'd be interested in any other photos, drawings, or livery details that people might have as they can only aid in construction of the kit, which will of course be the topic of quite a few future blog posts.

British Pathé

Last Thursday British Pathé released their entire archive of 85,000 newsreel films spanning the period 1896 to 1976, and uploaded them to YouTube. I'm sure this will be an interesting historical resource for many reasons, but from a quick look lere is plenty of interesting railway related footage.

For example, a quick search led me to two interesting films from 1926 and 1927 about the construction of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, a 1930 film showing the LNER Hush-Hush loco, and a 1962 film from Dinorwic Quarry.

Given where I grew up though, one of my favourites so far shows the early days of preservation on the Middleton Railway:

Local Wildlife

As I mentioned in the last post, with family visiting for the weekend there was no chance of any modelling, but I did manage a sneaky railway visit. We'd originally intended a bit of a walk, but the weather on Saturday wasn't great, so we switched to going to our local garden centre for brunch as well as plant shopping, and then a short walk, weather permitting. The weather permitted, so we drove five minutes down the road from the garden centre and parked at the side of the road. Literally 30 seconds after getting out of the car we heard the unmistakable sound of a steam whistle.

The railway, which at this point we could hear but not see, was the Kirkless Light Railway. This is a 15" gauge railway which was built along the track bed of the old Clayton West branch of the Penistone Line. The original branch line closed in 1983 and the first section of the narrow gauge railway opened in 1991. Now it runs for almost the entire length of the old branch line, around 3.5 miles and includes a 500 yard tunnel. Interestingly for a steam railway, every locomotive permanently at the railway was built specifically for it and so there is an rather odd mix.

We headed south-west from where we had parked and picked up the railway as it appears out of the tunnel heading towards the terminus at Shelley. We'd been walking by the railway for only 10 minutes or so before we again heard the distinctive sound of a steam engine. Unfortunately we weren't in the best place for taking photographs.

Fortunately all the engines are different colours so I can tell you that the train was being pulled by Badger an 0-6-4ST built at the railway in 1991. On the way back to the car we were treated to another train passing us, this time being pulled by the diesel engine Jay.

Given how close the line is to where we live I need to go back and have a proper look around, maybe on their gala weekend when there will be lots of trains running.

And We're Off

Work, albeit minor, has now started on the new layout, although as yet there isn't exactly much to see. Now as well as a box to store the layout in (the trays have now arrived as well), I have the baseboard on which everything else will be built. As with Jerusalem I've gone for a simple piece of MDF as the baseboard; this time 9mm MDF rather than 12mm based solely on what the local DIY store had in stock. To ensure that I can get the layout out of the box, the final baseboard size measures 110cm by 22cm giving a maximum model, at 4mm to the foot, of 275 foot by 55 foot. Also, given the depth of the box, minus the MDF and storage trays I have 22cm I can build above the baseboard (so 55 foot of model space), which should be enough, although it certainly means that any point control etc. will have to be on top of the baseboard as I won't be mounting anything under it.

I've also had my order for the Dorothea kit from Brian Madge confirmed so that is at least one piece of rolling stock confirmed for the layout (assuming I manage to put it together correctly). Given that there isn't much to show I thought I'd illustrate this post with one of the slides my Dad took while I was growing up, which shows a Quarry Hunslet locomotive which isn't that different from Dorothea. The photo shows Elidir, built in 1899 for the Dinorwic Quarry and original named Enid, at the Llanberis Lake Railway on the 6th of August 1985.

Jack-In-The-Box

In my previous post I gave you some idea of the theme of my next layout; a 4mm to the foot model (OO9 gauge) of a narrow gauge industrial railway. I also showed you two kits I'd like to build to provide locomotives for the layout and given that one of these was for a Quarry Hunslet you could be forgiven for assuming I was going to go for the classic Welsh slate industry layout. You would, however, have been wrong.

The Quarry Hunslet classes of locomotives got their name because they were built by the Hunslet Engine Company and could usually be found working in a quarry, often a Welsh slate quarry. While there is nothing wrong with modelling a Welsh slate quarry I decided I'd go for something closer to home and look for some form of Yorkshire industrial setting given that the engines were all built in Leeds.

I'm not sure if there is a sensible prototype from the late 19th century, but there is a modern prototype I'm going to use for inspiration. The Leeds Industrial Museum at Armley Mills, which is only 2.5 miles from where the Hunslet Engine Company used to be, includes a narrow gauge railway on which a Quarry Hunslet called Jack runs. It's been a long time since I've been to the museum but fortunately Reinhold Behringer has been more recently and posted this excellent photo on Flickr.

Unfortunately the narrow gauge line was only ever built to exhibit the museums locomotives and wasn't present when the mill was a working woollen mill. As such the track plan isn't particularly interesting, as you can see from this plan I've put together from some 1990 Ordinance Survey maps and a satellite image from Google Maps.

I've had a look at other works where I know there used to be old railway tracks but so far the lines don't seem to show up on the old OS maps so I'm struggling to find a nice example track plan. Mind you given the space constraints (remember the complete layout can be no larger than 1135mm by 232mm) a single line through some mill buildings may be enough. Given the problems I had deciding on the track plan for Jerusalem I know it's worth taking my time to get it right, and that sometimes less is more, so I'll keep thinking about the track plan while I start building the rolling stock.

I mentioned in the previous post that the layout could support different time periods based on the locomotives and other detailing items; I'm currently thinking that there are at least three obvious periods I can model; two with the mill in use (one steam and one diesel) and then a modern day museum setting (just like Armley Mills) where I can run anything I want. I think this should give me lots of flexibility and allow me to build almost anything I want to.

One other thing I need though is a name for the layout, and here I'm hoping for some help. My current thoughts are around doing something related to the fact that it is being built to fit a specific box. So my ideas so far revolve around things like like "77 Box Lane" or "Box Street Mill". Any ideas are more than welcome.

A New Scale for a New Layout

Before I go any further let me clear up a possible confusion from my last post. Jerusalem is "gathering dust" as it is uncovered, not because it isn't being used or enjoyed. I was just making the point that I should probably have thought about how I was going to look after the layout long term, before I started building it rather than afterwards, and that I wasn't going to make that mistake again. So having cleared that up let's move on to a bit of planning for my next layout.

If you've followed this blog for a while then you will know that Jerusalem was an N gauge (2mm to the foot) model of a standard gauge railway running through a mostly rural scene. For my next layout I'm intending to go for the exact opposite; an OO9 gauge (4mm to the foot) model of a narrow gauge industrial railway. Firstly while N gauge gives me more railway in a small space, I do find the 2mm to the foot scale very small compared to the modelling I did in OO gauge at 4mm to the foot (for example the 3D printed wagons I designed). Having now built a continuous run model, where I can sit and watch the trains go by, I'm happier with the idea of a more interactive railway, and so the end-to-end nature that going up a scale will necessitate doesn't worry me as much as it did before. Having said that the dimensions of the layout, dictated by its storage box, are just 1135mm by 232mm (or a little less to make sure it fits). At 4mm to the foot this allows me to model, at the most, 283 feet by 58 feet which isn't actually very much. Given the space constraints narrow gauge seems a good idea as the track will still be just 9mm wide (the same as in N gauge) and will require less clearance and allow tighter curves than modelling a standard gauge line. The choice to model an industrial railway is simply that I fancy doing more building construction rather than focusing on the landscape as I did with Jerusalem. Of course describing the layout as being a narrow gauge industrial railway still doesn't give you any idea of what I'm planning.

One thing about modelling in OO9 is that I'll need to build most of the rolling stock, including the locomotives, as there is currently very little available ready-to-run and there are been a couple of locomotives I really fancy building.

Firstly we have a Quarry Hunslet locomotive from a kit by Brian Madge (although I'm having problems contacting Brian to order one). I've always liked the look of these narrow gauge locomotives and the kit looks like something I should be able to handle; the chassis comes part assembled and the whole kit can apparently be assembled with super-glue if I don't feel up to soldering it together.

As most of you know I definitely prefer my locomotives to be steam powered, but I've been fascinated by the Narrow Planet kit for this small Baguley-Drewry locomotive since it was still in the design stage. The main body shell is 3D printed and then augmented with etched metal parts and was being designed at the same time as I was designing my first 3D printed wagons. Again it uses a pre-built chassis so should be within my capabilities to build. My thinking is that with these two locomotives I could run the layout in a number of guises covering a number of time periods, which would extend the interest both for me building it and for anyone who gets to see or operate it.

So that's the locomotive power sorted (when I actually manage to order the kits), in the next post I'll give you more details on the setting for the railway and some possible track plans.

Scales And Gauges

So far all the 3D modelling I've been doing has been at the same scale as the models I already own which are OO gauge. It should, of course, be fairly easy to scale the computer model up or down to match other common scales. The image on the left shows my not so successful first attempt at this. In this case I scaled down to N scale, only to find that at this smaller scale the axle is wider than in OO gauge, which would result in the wheels (Graham Farish Wagon Wheels) not fitting into a printed version. The problem is that there is a difference between scale and gauge yet, just like in the first sentence of this post, they are often used interchangeably.

The scale of the model is simply the ratio between the size of the model and the real life item. In my case I've been modelling at 4mm to 1 foot or as a ratio 1/76 scale. The gauge, on the other hand, is the distance between the inside surface of the rails, and in the case of OO gauge this is set to 16.5mm. Unfortunately as the real railways use a gauge of 4 foot 8 1/2 inches, a scale width of 16.5mm is at a scale of 1/87 or 3.5mm to the foot, i.e. the rails aren't at the same scale as the locomotives and rolling stock. Apparently (or at least according to Wikipedia) this combination came about as early clockwork mechanisms and electric motors were difficult to fit within HO scale models of British prototypes which are smaller than equivalent European and US locomotives. A quick and cheap solution was to enlarge the scale of the model to 4mm to the foot but keep the 3.5mm to the foot gauge track. What this means is that 16.5mm track at 4mm to the foot scale represents a gauge of 4 feet 1.5 inches which is 7 inches too small, and so the track should be approximately 2.33mm wider. What this means is that if you accurately model the width of a wagon at 1/76 scale then you have to narrow the underframe slightly so that the wheels will fit. Having to alter the underframe in this way means that you can't simply scale the model to fit a different scale unless the gauge is similarly modelled wrongly.

N scale (at least in the UK) is 1/148 scale with a 9mm track gauge. While the track gauge isn't completely accurate it's a lot closer than in OO gauge which explains why the wheels wouldn't fit on my naively scaled down wagon model. I think it should be easy to adjust the model so I might give it a whirl at some point.

Interestingly some people do model at 4mm to 1 foot scale with a more correct track gauge (these are EM and P4 scales). The problem with these scales is that they aren't supported by the main manufacturers and so nearly everything has to be built from scratch, and while I'm happy building wagons I don't (yet) have the skills to build a locomotive or track.

Of course there is another good reason to change the gauge of the track yet keep the same scale; to model narrow gauge lines. If you don't know what I mean by narrow gauge, or just want a laugh, then I'd recommend letting Thomas and Friends explain things to you.

In the UK at least most narrow gauge lines have a gauge between 2 foot and 2 foot 6 inches, and the common way of modelling these is called OO9. That is OO scale (i.e. 4mm to 1 foot) running on 9mm gauge track. At 4mm to 1 foot scale 9mm actually represents a gauge of 2 foot 3 inches, but the difference is small enough that 9mm gauge is used for most narrow gauge 4mm scale modelling. This of course means that N scale parts (track, wheels etc.) can often be re-used or at least used as a starting point for scratch building as there are very few ready-to-run OO9 items available.