Cliddesden 1925 - Staton Building

Stationcolours.info is a great resource for finding out about colour schemes of the British railway companies. I learned there that the early Southern Railway building colour was Middle Chrome Green BS381C shade 226. A colour swatch was found elsewhere on the web and our existing design file for the LSWR station building was modified from LSWR cream and brown to SR green.
The website suggested that the building colours did not change from the pre-grouping schemes until 1926. I have no evidence as to what/when Cliddesden was painted but at the re-opening ceremony in 1924 the new Southern Railway poster boards were present on the building and it is reasonable to assume these and the building were green.

These poster boards were not present on the earlier LSWR building so it has been interesting to do the research into poster styles of the 1920s. From left to right we have Brighton then Hayling Island, the B&ALR 1925 timetable and finally Isle of Wight.

The LSWR version.

David

Show Time - Part 1

We are planning to show Cliddesden at the Farham MRC expo. in October. In preparation we needed a stand for the layout and after much deliberation decided to adapt a traditional market stall. Reason being that it would be the quickest solution and probably not much more expensive than fabricating a structure ourselves.

We found this market stall, which has some good attributes:

• It is the same length and width as our 6' x 3' layout
• It is designed to be portable
• It has an overhead frame that can be used for the layout nameboard and lighting rig
• Multi-purpose - when not supporting the layout it can be used as either a work bench or market stall

The standard stall has a table height of 30 inches, which is too low for an exhibition layout so the supplier kindly added extra fixings so we could set the table height to 38 inches.

It came as a kit of poles without instructions but to be honest it was obvious how to put it together and it was up within a few minutes. The layout was temorarily placed so we could plan how to dress the stand.

It is a sturdy piece of kit but without A frames built into it does tend to wobble a bit.  We could live with this at home but at exhibition if someone leant against it or worse fell against it then the movement would be most disconcerting and might result in damage to the layout.

There are a number of tasks involved to prepare the stand:

1. Fit a table top
2. Add A frame strapping
3. Make a lighting rig
4. Make a nameboard
5. Make a pelmet
6. Make a skirt
7. Make a backscene
8. Fit an LCD panel for a slide show

To Part 2.

David

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

LSWR 12-Ton Open Wagon - Part 4

The tarpaulin was designed in graphic editing software and printed on ink jet paper. The canvas texture graphic has come out quite well.

It is not easy to re-create cloth wrap around folds using paper and I don't think this method would be suitable for the larger scales.

Ed suggested I use FIMO clay. This might be worth a try but the serif font of the lettering would I think be a problem to replicate, unless there are suitable transfers available*. Interesting that the font used on tarpaulins is different to the sans serif style used on the trucks.

After all the work gone into making the wagon body to represent the prototype it is a shame the tarpaulin covers the detail. Any r-t-r wagon could have been used with hindsight. However, the tarpaulin is removable and if I tidy up the inside it could be run as an empty showing the correct bodywork for this 8 plank LSWR truck.

Below is a photo of the midday goods train comprising all wagons recently made. The bodyworks are scratchbuilt on Peco chassis kits, except the Lowmac which uses butchered Graham Farish bogie parts.

* Just found this.

To Part 1.

David