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- Herausgeber: Crowood
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
The Welsh narrow gauge railways, with their colourful histories and vital role in local industry, are an extremely popular subject for both railway enthusiasts and modellers. This book is for anyone interested in modelling the Welsh narrow gauge railways and includes the historical background to the railways; useful reference photographs to help achieve accurate and realistic models; full listings of all the tools, equipment and material required, and, finally, step-by-step modelling guides with helpful tips and suggestions. A graduated series of projects, starting with a simple plastic wagon kit and progressing to a complete layout is also included.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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MODELLING
The Welsh NarrowGauge Railways
First published in 2021 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2021
© Chris Ford 2021
All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78500 801 6
DedicationFor Archie
AcknowledgementsThe author wishes to thank the following: Martin Collins, Nigel Hill, Simon Hargraves, Steve Mann, Matthew Kean and Richard Holder.Also the Bala Lake Railway, The Vale of Rheidol Railway, the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway and the Talyllyn Railway.
CONTENTS
INDEX
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Modelling the Welsh Narrow Gauge Railways. You may well have picked this book up after visiting one of the preserved Welsh narrow gauge lines. You may be an existing modeller who fancies something a little different, or you may already be a modeller of narrow gauge railways who has bought this book to add to your collection. Modelling the Welsh Narrow Gauge Railways contains a graduated set of numbered projects, starting with a simple plastic wagon kit through to a series of thoughts and suggestions on how you may wish to build a complete (but quite compact) layout.
There are some historical background notes on each individual item along the way, followed by a set of instructions on how you may wish to build it. These are by no means hard-and-fast rules, and in most cases it would be possible to deviate from the instructions by at least a small amount and to use other techniques that you may be more comfortable with. Those that are included here are very much personal techniques which have been built up over a number of years and are presented only as suggestions. You may well find different ways that suit you better. Allied to this there are ‘Tip boxes’ scattered throughout the text of each section, adding an idea or two to the fundamental build structure.
Probably most people’s mental image of the Welsh narrow gauge: slate wagons, small trains and beautiful scenery.
The overall aim of this book is to inspire those who are just beginning, those who are ‘stalled’ in their modelling, or these looking for something different. It’s often recognized that one of the hardest things in modelling is to decide what to do and then actually to begin. Coupled with this is the fear of messing up during the building process. Hopefully this volume will help to nudge you into breaking through that barrier and making a start.
WHY CHOOSE THE WELSH NARROW GAUGE RAILWAY?
Why narrow gauge and why Wales? Fairly high on the list of reasons for building any model railway layout will come the line’s surroundings and atmosphere and the way that this attracts the modeller at a personal and somewhat emotional level. The scenery and landscape around the Welsh narrow gauge lines is generally accepted to be some of the most beautiful and spectacular in the British Isles. Add to that the cute’ element of the comparatively tiny locomotives with compact rolling stock and this makes the area and its lines highly attractive to everyone – not just the ardent rail enthusiast.
The big advantage of narrow gauge is the ability to run in challenging geological surroundings.
The attractive nature of Welsh narrow gauge demonstrated by this view on the Tal-y-llyn Railway.
There is of course a little ‘kidology’ at work here: most people stumble across the Welsh narrow gauge lines as part of the modern tourist trail of the area when they are already in relaxed holiday mood and this ‘pretty’ and ‘cute’ element can easily mask the often harsh climate and arduous industry that make up the history of the area and its railways. It may look pretty at first glance, but there was – and to a certain extent still is – a gritty postindustrial undercurrent. The lush green mountains may not resemble black satanic mills, but this is a hard-working environment, still inhabited by the sons and daughters of the men and families that worked the hill farms, the unforgiving slate quarries and the railways and shipping that took the grey rock of Wales to all points of the globe. Yes, the little railways are very attractive, but the only reason that they, and many of the old families, are there is because of a heavy industrial base that is all but gone. Where once the railways mainly carried the valuable slivers of cleanly split rock, they now carry children, parents, dogs, buggies and the detritus of the British holiday trade.
A SMALLER DOMESTIC REQUIREMENT
Despite the visually vast surrounding scenery of the Welsh narrow gauge railway, it will soon become apparent that it is possible in model and domestic terms to be able to think somewhat smaller. For the railway modeller, domestic space is always the elephant in the room – no matter how big the layout in your mind’s eye, there is always the lack of domestic space to bring your dreams down to earth with a bump. However, Wales, with its rolling hills, its mountains and its deep quarries and mines, is a railway landscape that will surprisingly fit this space in a much more forgiving way. It does this successfully in model form simply because it does it so well in real life. These are railways that fit into their environment, rather than cutting straight across it, bending and weaving among the green hillsides and through small holes in the rock, challenging nature to stop them. The modeller of the main-line standard gauge railway is always limited in terms of space; possibly to a single station arrangement. The Welsh narrow gauge gives an overwhelming advantage – you can often take the same sort of household space and with a little careful planning and selective compression, model the whole line. So where do you start?
WHAT SCALE AND GAUGE?
This book is designed to take a notional novice or armchair modeller from an almost zero baseline to a point where a Welsh narrow gauge layout is completed. It also aims to offer the more experienced modeller a few different ways of looking at what he or she already does. The text and projects all feature the most popular 4mm scale (OO9) – the same scale as the models mass-produced by Hornby, Bachmann and so on. This means that any of the included projects could be run or placed alongside these OO gauge items if you so wish. This is not to say that the techniques included here and some of the materials could not be used for other modelling scales such as 7mm scale (Gauge O), or one of the slightly more specialist in-between scales such as 5.5mm scale or S scale. In fact, S scale would be a highly recommended upward jump, giving you something which would be very different. In crude terms with S, you would just need to increase any of the building sizes from a scale of 4mm to 1ft to 4.74mm to 1ft. However, the rolling stock would be another matter and would require some very canny thinking and scratch-building (making items from mostly raw materials such as plastic sheet or metal), but it would not be impossible and would create a very individual model railway.
The Baldwin, one of the new high-quality RTR products from Bachmann.
Much of what determines the choice of scale and gauge will often come down to two factors: firstly, a personal desire to model in the scale; and, secondly, the availability of kits/parts/figures produced in that scale. Unless you are a keen scratch- or kit-builder, you may first look to the availability of ready-to-run (RTR) locomotives and rolling stock. The situation in 4mm scale narrow gauge (usually referred to as OO9) has always been good with regard to locomotive and rolling-stock kits and is now seeing a boom time with various RTR items from PECO, HELJAN and Bachmann. The choices in 7mm scale are much more swayed towards kit building, as RTR items for British lines are virtually non-existent. Working outside these two modelling scales does put you very much out on your own. There are societies such as the S Gauge Society and the 5.5 Association which support other scales and help to supply certain parts and kits, but once outside the 4 and 7mm camps, it is frequently the case of having to make your own parts and adapt kits from other scales. For many modellers this is part of the attraction – working on the scale periphery keeps them from spending too much on commercial models and forces them into old-fashioned model making, rather than model buying. As a breed, modellers – especially narrow gauge modellers – tend to be notoriously careful with their money, opting to make as much as they can in the home workshop for the lowest financial outlay.
THE TRACK GAUGE
Modellers of 4mm-scale narrow gauge lines usually run their trains on 9mm gauge model track. This is usually referred to as OO9, that is, OO scale on 9mm track. It represents an exact prototype gauge of 2ft 3in (686mm), making it perfect for both the Tal-y-llyn and the Corris Railways, a shade under-scale for the Glyn Valley Tramway (2ft 4in [711mm]), a little too wide for the Festiniog Railway’s 1ft 11.5in (597mm) gauge and a scale 3in (76mm) too small for the Welshpool and Llanfair’s 2ft 6in (762mm). A few pedantic modellers work on 8mm gauge and there is at least one Dutch modeller working on 7.9mm gauge for close to exact scale 1ft 11.5in. Overall, though, most people are happy to accept the compromise between these close, but different, prototype gauges and mix them all on the 9mm gauge OO9 track made by the British track manufacturer PECO.
The situation is very similar with 7mm scale. An exact 2ft (51mm) gauge is represented by 14mm gauge track for an increasing number of modellers, but the vast majority will accept the compromise and use 16.5mm gauge track – the same as the standard OO systems and which is roughly equivalent to the Glyn Valley Tramway’s 2ft 4in gauge in 7mm scale. Here again a dedicated track range is also available from PECO with the 0-16.5 labelling.
For those unfamiliar with the terms scale and gauge, the confusion can easily be explained by saying that they are different measurements. Gauge is the fixed distance between the two rails, either real or model. Scale is the downward measurement from the real thing – for example, in 4mm scale, every foot (305mm) length in the real world is measured as 4mm length on the model, therefore a man who stands 6ft (1,829mm) tall would be 24mm tall in 4mm scale.
WHY A NARROW GAUGE MODEL RAILWAY?
What sort of narrow gauge line do you want? Some of the answers to this will be expanded on later in the book, but here are a few initial ideas. The Welsh narrow gauge was, and still is, surprisingly diverse. The modeller’s usual way of representing this is to build a branch terminus station with a platform, a goods shed, an engine shed and possibly a signal box (though this last item was relatively rare on the real thing in pre-preservation days). However, it should be borne in mind that this was far from being a common set-up on the Welsh narrow gauge – the majority of termini did not have engine sheds, some had only rudimentary goods facilities and only a few managed to include a proper raised passenger platform. Most, in fact, didn’t have terminal stations as we know them, but started in quarries and ended at a wharf. It is easy to fall into the trap of simply ‘scaling down’ a standard gauge branch station plan and applying the same set of ideas to a narrow gauge station – historically this has been a much repeated instruction, but in most cases will unfortunately not give a result with the correct narrow gauge atmosphere. Although one or two Welsh narrow gauge stations did exist in a similar way, this is far from representative of the real thing in its working form.
Interchanges were usually with the standard gauge main line or shipping. Here is the wharf at Towyn, where slate was transferred to standard gauge wagons.
The reason for this is that most of the lines which concern us were effectively just industrial conveyor belts either from quarry to port (for example, the Festiniog Railway), or quarry to main-line railway interchange (for example, the Tal-y-llyn Railway). So an alternative idea for a station model is to ditch the terminus station plan altogether and model a ‘through’ or ‘passing’ station on the line. This creates an entirely different set of operational requirements, as nearly all of the traffic is travelling on to somewhere else. Many lines were also originally mineral traffic only, requiring little or no passenger stock aside from a workman’s train running at the end of each shift. The locomotives would be small and the accent would be on moving multiple wagons, possibly still with a large degree of horse-worked running – at the very least for some of the yard shunting at each end.
Modelling the Welsh narrow gauge can produce a compact, yet visually pleasing layout with many scenic features.
It’s not to say that branch termini did not exist in the accepted way of thinking, but that there are only a few which resemble the modeller’s usual stylized idea of what a small terminus station should look like (for instance, Llanfair on the Welshpool and Llanfair line). In deciding what sort of narrow gauge model layout you want, you have to step outside the usual modeller’s track plan clichés and into the shoes of a company that was running a narrow gauge railway carrying a mineral load from a quarry to a transhipment point.
PLANNING YOUR LAYOUT AND YOUR TIME
All of this can involve quite a large degree of planning and careful study for the modeller. You may, of course, just lift a printed plan out of a book or a magazine and run with it exactly as presented. This approach will often work well, but bear in mind that some paper plans do not allow quite enough space, so do check that it will work full size before you start building. Many a layout has been speedily abandoned through not taking the time to build a simple mock-up with a few points and crude card buildings to prove that the plan will actually do what it suggests. The other thing to consider is that most published plans are already physically compressed in some way for the modeller and are often composites of prototype layouts, therefore will probably not take any further reduction in size.
Unless you are very confident, do not overreach at the beginning. A small, fully worked-out layout plan that is able to be finished in a reasonable time is better than a room-filling multi-station epic idea that will never have a chance of getting done. However, thinking in sectional terms and building one small part of your line first with allowances to expand around a room is a well-worn and tested method. The key point is often to work out how much time you realistically have available for modelling during your week, as this is probably more important than the layout plan itself. This nugget of information usually comes as a surprise to many modellers, but is often the pivotal point of the planning process. It doesn’t matter how many plans you dream up in your head during your working or commuting hours, if you only have twenty minutes of spare time a day outside of work and family commitments, then a big layout simply won’t get done and you will be staring at a vast area of bare baseboards for years to come. These baseboards will not only collect dust, but will quickly become a repository for all sorts of household and modelling junk. It is a far better policy to start small, pace yourself, and build something that can be regarded as finished within a sensible period of time. A project that is likely to take longer than a year to complete will quickly lose inertia and will become an irritating millstone, rather than a pleasure.
TIP
Give yourself as much time as possible to decide what it is that you want to achieve in terms of scale, period and size of the overall project before you buy too much or start work on a layout. The old maxim ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ is appropriate here. Having said that, there is a handful of well-known narrow gauge models that have grown organically over a long period and absolutely ooze atmosphere, so take this tip with as much of a pinch of salt as you dare.
HISTORICAL PROTOTYPE RESEARCH
Unless you are desperate to get started straight away, doing a little prototype research is time very well spent. This could be nothing more than a little casual browsing through some of the mainstream model magazines such as Railway Modeller, or you might choose to study something more academic. A very brief general history follows in the next chapter, but as a gentle preamble there are a couple of points to consider. Firstly, the layouts in magazines have a habit of replicating themselves and relying on modelling clichés. It’s unhelpful to criticize other people’s modelling work, but it is sometimes hard not to wonder if the builder has looked outside the modelling catalogues and magazines at all, such is the repetition of ideas. The defence for this is that in many ways the Welsh slate industry and the Welsh narrow gauge in general are very much an historical event, so other people’s models become the accepted pattern, as the original prototype working is no longer there in real life to view and study.
There are now very few who can remember the pre-World War II era, after which many of the lines closed, so we are reliant on books, historical film footage and photographs to form the bulk of any research and that is where most of the problem lies. We readily accept that everyone carries some sort of camera nowadays, but although relatively low-cost cameras were available in the 1920s they were still very much a luxury item. Add to that the high cost of film compared to the contemporary throw-away digital format and the subject matter chosen by the photographer becomes much more prone to natural selection. The photographing of industrial and narrow gauge railways was right at the bottom of the pile and we have only a few dedicated souls such as Ivo Peters and Henry Casserley to thank for recording these Welsh industrial lines during their height and decline periods.
A modern take on a period scene on the Festiniog Railway.
The suggestion for the novice is to start collecting some of the photo album-type books that refer to either narrow gauge as a whole, or specifically to the line that is being modelled. The second-hand market often turns up narrow gauge albums from the publisher Bradford Barton or The Oakwood Press. The former are very useful as they are comparatively contemporary with the end of narrow gauge working in the UK. However, this does offer up some traps, as the working had often been reduced and possibly dieselized, or in some cases the line was still working but using road vehicles or other types of mechanical handling. The newer versions of the Bradford Bartons are the books from Middleton Press and these deal with the railways almost line by line. They occasionally feature pre-war images, but a lot are very up to date and therefore useless unless you are modelling the post-preservation era. The whole process is one of sifting through material and discarding that which has no relevance. In essence, it is pure historical research.
TIP
Try to study the prototype first, keep your research balanced and do not base your layout purely on other people’s models, however tempting a shortcut this may be.
CREATING THE RIGHT ATMOSPHERE
What we want to create in our modelling is atmosphere. This is a slippery beast and often hard to get hold of, but it can be done with a little thought. Again, there are questions to ask. Is the railway/ station site rural or urban? Passenger-driven or freight-heavy? Steam or internal-combustion powered? Not all Welsh narrow gauge ran though glorious green mountainsides and historically much of it was pretty grotty. Is there traffic that needs a specific set of buildings, such as a transhipment shed or possibly a gunpowder store? Are there any passenger platforms and are they long or short, ground-level or raised? Many of the lines had only small flat areas surfaced with slate waste and no proper platforms at all.
These questions need to be asked quite early as they may affect how you approach your model. If you already have a picture in your mind’s eye of a tiny tank engine pulling a couple of four-wheel coaches, then something like the Tal-y-llyn Railway or the Corris Railway may be your ideal prototype, but if you want a more sizable feel with longer trains and larger engines, that is going to look ridiculous in the same setting – that would need a much more passenger-driven situation such as the Welshpool and Llanfair Railway or the Welsh Highland Railway. However, it should be carefully noted that the raised platforms that exist on many of these lines today are a product of the modern post-preservation development and more a result of modern health and safety matters than historical preservation. Generally, though, the railway’s traffic and the track layouts and station layout shapes tend to go hand in hand.
Prince at Porthmadog in 1963.
Taking all these factors into account should give you and the casual viewer an instant grab on the railway’s function. The oft quoted rule of thumb is always to be able to recognize the place and styling before the trains arrive. Don’t just look at the engines and guess the rest; look at the surrounding countryside and building styles and think of the model as a whole.
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM PRESERVED NARROW GAUGE LINES
As indicated earlier, the twenty-first-century narrow gauge modeller is lucky in the respect that there are several well-organized preserved lines in our chosen area. All of them are very welcoming and have a good range of locomotives and rolling stock to study and photograph. That said, these preservation lines, however well run, can only hint at the sort of operation that would have taken place when the lines were run in an industrial form. There are now no waterborne shipping connections, no sheep being herded across the station sites and no long, slow-moving slate trains clanking through the station. Nevertheless, preservation lines are all fine places for not only an entertaining day out, but also somewhere to do a little research and to gain an insight into line working. The other thing to consider is that this modern preserved line atmosphere may actually give an alternative base for a model rather than the usual pre-World War II historical approach; one that is still a Welsh narrow gauge railway, but set in the present day, using clean and polished preserved and/ or modern rolling stock serving the tourist industry.
The rebuilt Russell on the Welsh Highland Heritage line.
Today’s preservation scene features some heavyweight diesel power.Here, Vale of Ffestiniog shunts Porthmadog sidings.
TIP
Always take some sort of camera with you on these trips and record as many small details as you can. Not just the locomotives, but lamps, platform seats, stop blocks and other miscellaneous details. These are rarely recorded by the casual and family holiday visitor, but will help you to generate more reality for the atmosphere of your layout. The understanding and research around such items will all add to the pleasure of building a layout.
WELSH NARROW GAUGE – THE INDEFINABLE GENRE
Trying to explain what narrow gauge is can be quite tricky, especially to the non-railway enthusiast. The basic problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules to use to illustrate it and no fixed set of measurements. Narrow gauge is often glibly explained as ‘being less than standard gauge’. Though precisely what is standard? The British standard gauge, using its historical imperial measurement, is 4ft 8½in. However, there are other ‘standard’ gauges in use over huge areas, such as the Russian, Irish and Indian systems, which are wider and in relative terms make the British/ European/American standard gauge appear narrow. And that’s without getting into the question of the short-lived nineteenth-century British Brunel broad gauge of 7¼ft. It quickly becomes apparent that the catch-all phrase ‘narrower than standard’ is after all possibly the best way to describe it.
If the term ‘narrow gauge’ is tricky, then Wales is somewhat easier to define as the Principality’s borders are generally fixed, at least during the period that concerns us. The title of this book therefore refers to a fairly tight geographical base and you would assume a similarly tight subject to match. Unfortunately, this is where it can all start to unravel. The narrow gauge railways of Wales are by no means uniform, having been designed for a number of purposes and to fulfil several job descriptions: one or two were designed as agriculture carriers; some were pure mineral lines; and at least one in the area (the Fairbourne Railway) was, and in fact still is, a line designed just for tourist pleasure trips along the beach. But the overwhelming reason for building the narrow gauge lines, particularly in the northern part of the country, was mineral transport and in particular the carriage of raw and finished slate from the quarries in the north-west. Many of these lines were simply upgraded extensions of the low-quality tracks of iron, stone or wood that ran within the quarries.
Inclines were used to transport wagons down steep sections where a traditional railway would be impossible.
The history of these internal lines is one of crude development, the requirement being a hard surface on which to run wagons, carts or drams around the quarry either pulled by horse or pony, or pushed by manpower. This is a very important point, as it was this simple man- or horsepower that defined the size and shape of vehicles and therefore the lines that extended from them. They had to be small enough to fit physically into the confined spaces of the quarry and also light enough to be pulled by the maximum of one horsepower. The wagons also had to be small enough to be lowered and raised up and down some fearsome vertical drops. This was facilitated by various types of inclines, which were usually worked in a balanced fashion by the full wagons pulling the empties back up. All this necessitated a track gauge of usually less than 1m and vehicles that were fairly short in stature. In most cases, the end result was a track gauge of around 2ft (610mm) and a wagon size of less than 5ft in length and 3ft in height (1,524 × 914mm).
At the other end of the spectrum was the agricultural line, which was shaped for passengers and carrying produce, cattle and sheep. Agricultural lines were visually much closer to the usual standard gauge branch in general appearance, and yet still Welsh and still narrow gauge. This wide definition can cause some confusion and result in models which somehow do not look quite right if mixed together on the same layout. The geology of the types is different and the rolling-stock styling has variation between the types. Mixing the two together rarely works well on a model and creates an unresearched look that a model of a standard gauge railway would naturally avoid.
If these visual and traffic line differences are the beginning of the story, then the end (or at least the present) is twenty-first-century tourism.
HOLIDAY LINES
It’s very likely that most modellers of British narrow gauge prototypes are first introduced to these narrow gauge railways by the group of preserved lines known as the ‘Great Little Trains of Wales’ a title that was coined by the Welsh tourist organization in 1970. All the members of this group bar one are situated in Mid- and North Wales, and most have at least a tenuous link to the slate-mining industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those lines whose tracks were not originally built to carry slate often now rely on locomotives that were originally designed for the industry.
These preserved lines are far from being a homogenized group in style or technical characteristics. In fact, in nearly every respect they are all highly individual both now in their preserved state and when they were originally conceived. The only things that they have in common, apart from their geographical placement, is that they are now all largely powered by steam locomotives and they all have a track gauge of less than the British standard gauge of 4ft 8½in. The odd ones out in the group are the Brecon Mountain Railway, which is in the south of the Principality and has been built on a redundant standard gauge trackbed, and which mostly uses imported European rolling stock. It is included simply because it has been built to a narrow gauge of 1ft 11½in, purely as a tourist line. The other is the Fairbourne Railway, which was built as a tourist line at its inception and though it has changed dramatically, still retains its original character and usage.
Small vertical-boilered 0-4-0 locomotives, built by De Winton, often worked the quarries. A few of these were saved and still exist on preservation lines.
Except for the occasional demonstration freight train, all of these current preserved lines are geared towards carrying passenger traffic and are aimed firmly at the lucrative tourist industry, but that was not how most were conceived after their industrial lives had ended. Most began the second era of their existence as a way of preserving the line and the rolling stock as it was left in the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, the growth of the leisure industry and travelling on railways as a pleasurable means unto itself, rather than a method of getting from A to B, could not have been thought of. It was the introduction of passenger timetables by these rescued lines as a way to raise revenue that started this trend, with the result that nowadays some of these lines (though not all) are multimillion-pound operations, run with the level of professionalism and efficiency that this requires. Some people may suggest that these lines have become shadows of their former industrial selves and are nothing more than glorified railway theme parks. To some extent this is true, but with the huge rise in visitors and the increase in various governmental safety standards during the last six decades, the Welsh narrow gauge railways have had to adapt to circumstances in order to stay relevant to today’s visitor and passenger. No longer would tourists be keen to ride inside dirty slate wagons, even if they were allowed to do so.
The Brecon Mountain Railway operates over a section of defunct standard gauge line.
Most preservation lines run special events which are extremely popular and include a larger than usual stud of locomotives to be seen and studied.
Foreign locomotives feature on many lines – though this South African Garratt running on the Welsh Highland line is of course foreign in that it was built in Manchester, England!
