Mr. Bushnell's Whirligig

Mr. Bushnell, Cliddesden Station Master, had a hobby making whirligigs.

This picture is not as clear as the one in our reference books but look closely (no not the wind pump!) and you will see in front of the tower ladder a tall post with a blob of something on top. In the book we can just make out a four blade propeller attached to the 'blob' but, the animated scene atop the post cannot be identified for sure. The post, by the way, is the trunk from a small tree with the branches cut off.

I spent ages trying to find a whirligig design that bore some resemblance but to no avail. A search for 'antique whirligig' on Google did throw up some interesting designs and I choose one from the period that was a fairly simple arrangement of objects to scale down to 2mm scale - and here it is on our model railway.

Can you see what it is? Well, it's a woodman sawing a log with a bow saw. Simply printed on two sides of paper. No attempt to cut out the blanks around the detail as the bow saw in particular has very fine lines that would be nigh on impossible to preserve. The white blanks are visible but not here photographed against a white sky.

David