Saturday 11 May 2013

Cliddesden 1925 - Passenger Coach

To increase operational interest on this small, sleepy branch line with only one engine in steam we can move the period forward from 1916 to 1925 and run Southern Railway liveried  rolling stock.

Summer 1925 is a year after the track was relaid and the line reopened. 1925 also saw a change to the timetable that increased the number of passenger and mixed trains from 3 to 6 in each direction plus the daily goods.

We already had a Southern liveried M7 tank engine and some SR freight wagons. These have now been supplemented with a scratch built passenger coach in Maunsell olive/green livery. The coach is the same design as our existing LSWR coach but the opportunity was taken to change the style of bogies to that used in the second and subsequent manufactured batches of the prototype. They have leaf springs instead of coil springs.

The construction of the model followed the same process as for our LSWR coach. The bogies are Graham Farish but the wheelbase is a couple of mil. longer than should be for this coach.

I'll elaborate on the livery detail. First thing was to identify the correct colour. I obtained colour samples from 3 different photos of rolling stock purporting to be Maunsell olive green of the 1920s. They were all wildly different from each other, which goes to show you can't trust a colour photograph. A bit more research and I discovered that the generally accepted colour specification is BS223 Middle Bronze Green and a colour swatch was found on the web for this, which incidentally closely matched this photo of an LBSCR coach on the Bluebell railway. For the model I lightened it a little to take into account normal viewing distances. (The Photoshop colour is #4D5731).

In this photo the colour interpreted by the camera is a little more bronze than the actual model.
Interior detail  - now hidden by a permanent roof.

David

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