The Burnbake and Woodyhyde Railway

[MickT]

Nice one David!

Another reason why we would like to have a "like" button on the newly refurbished forum!

"LIKE"  ;D

[clayliner]

These three 5-plank opens are useful general purpose wagons:


3f by clayliner, on Flickr


Here they are loaded with gorse and heather from the heath, which, when dried, makes cheap fuel for the workers at home.

I like the subtle colour variations, although they have not been repainted since arrival on the B&W. They had rather nice fine chopper couplings which I have left between them, so they operate as another fixed rake. Keeps life simple!

David.

[clayliner]

Not long ago I happened across this Snailbeach wagon on the NP/Meridian website:

SBR by clayliner, on Flickr


which looked strangely similar to the one I showed towards the bottom of page 9 of this thread, despite the tank looking rather different (it looks square in the drawing but that may just be a round tank in profile, of course). If it is the same wagon it's a (minor) mystery how and why the tank was switched at some time or other, but of course n-g lines were very good at adapting things to suit local requirements.

The tank it arrived with was long ago incorporated into the water tower outside the shed at Mill Lane here on the B&W, as shown in various previous photos (and just out if sight on the right in this photo), leaving the railway with a handy general purpose flat wagon:


P1030394a by clayliner, on Flickr

David.

[clayliner]

A local farmer picked up a second-hand (at least) tractor in a distant farm sale recently and decided to ship it down by rail (which probably cost more than the tractor). He even persuaded the B&W to bring it the last few miles, though it does look pretty old and maybe he thought he didn't want to add to its road mileage absolutely more than necessary?

Either way, it fits nicely on this wagon:

tr by clayliner, on Flickr

- though it's probably a bit underscale.

I spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on the fixings for the chains - sometimes one gets into something which is more demanding than one anticipated, but is then determined to beat it, whatever it takes...

David.

(Lots of wildlife hereabouts of late!)

[Hugh Norwood]

Nice (and mucky)!

[clayliner]

Rummaging around on Flickr the other day I found this photo which I'd thought I'd already posted, but appear not to have* (but it might possibly have got 'lost' in the recent upgrade, as another picture in this thread certainly has).





Both clay extraction and quarrying are users of quite a bit of timber, for pit props, mine structures and the like, but the railway also carries some timber felled in the nearby forests for other users.

More interestingly (perhaps) is a small New Year project in the pipeline (and now I'm committed to getting it finished... which is no bad thing). Watch this space.

David.

* Looking back, I think it had indeed been in post 222, but like the one in post 220 had not survived the recent improvements. Here it is again anyway.

[clayliner]

A new year begins on the Burnbake and Woodyhyde - but what will it bring for the little railway? Clay extraction last year was again at near record levels and demand remains high, so the railway has plenty of work to do for now (and no sign of cheap foreign imported clay). But with rising costs the Directors are naturally looking for possible savings, and wondering whether lorries might not shift the clay more cost-effectively. Time will tell...


For some time I've been wondering about a small but useful accessory for the railway. Here's the story:-

First, we need an I-beam, which we will  make out of strips of plastic sheet glued together:


g1 


and which looks like this after a lick of paint:


g2 

A ruler would have been helpful - it's about 6cm long, but the length isn't critical.


Now things start to get serious, and for once I decided to Do Things Properly. This involved making a jig out of a small length of wood, marked out like so:


g4 


The diagonal lines are then cut out with a saw, a couple of mm deep. Next a length of brass rail, picked up cheap from 009 Sales (where all the best bargains come from):


g3 


I could have used ordinary track rail but as that is generally flat-bottom in profile this is better, as it's symmetrical, like bull-head rail, and easier to work with and will look marginally better. It is now chopped into four equal lengths of about 7cm each, and inserted into the groves in the jig with one end protruding:


g5 


so that one end of each piece can be filed parallel with the edge of the wood like so:


g6


Now for the tricky bit, which involves soldering(!) Cameras were not allowed to be present for this dark art, but two strips were placed in the jig protruding at the top so that the angled ends come together and then hot liquid metal applied... Hey presto! - after two joins and some cleaning up we end up with two sections like this:


g7 


So - we have two pairs of legs and a beam.

Can you see what it is yet?

David.

[clayliner]

For some time I'd been trying to track down a photo or drawing of what I was after, and part of the problem was knowing what it was actually called. I had had no luck until I came upon a website with the unlikely title of International Good Guys - igg.org.uk. This is well worth a visit; check out their raison d'etre on the home page, and for railway stuff type igg.org.uk/rail where there is lots of general interest info about railways and freight, with drawings and photos and even a whole section on kit-bashing!

Anyway, this drawing was just what I was after:


gantry crane 


and, yes, they call it a gantry crane (although my searches for that yielded lots of modern ones but nothing historical). (Not sure about their spelling of derreck, though, and the forum spell-checker doesn't seem to like it either!). Some extra detail would have been even more helpful but at least it reassured me I was on the right lines.

The next step was to assemble the three main items. Not too difficult, but now I had two relatively heavy legs joined by quite a flimsy cross-beam, giving a structure which need handling with some care. After glueing on some end plates and two length of stiff wire to brace the legs it looked like this:


g8 


As you can see, I've splayed the legs more than in the drawing for greater stability (visually, anyway).

From now on it starts to get tricky...

David.

[MickT]

Coming along nicely David! If you have a visit to John Wooden's (Isle of Stoner) blog or his postings on NGRM, he has a similar gantry that has the chassis of a Minitrains or similar skip on the top horizonatal girder to carry the hoisting gear. Looks good, in case you are following similar construction lines?

Mick

[clayliner]

Thanks, Mick. I was wondering whether anyone else had modelled something of this sort. I think I've found the Isle of Stoner one on John's blog but it looks a much more substantial structure (made out of a girder bridge / signal gantry?) - and, as you also say, there is a complete chassis on the top!

I'm afraid the B&W could never afford (or warrant) such a solid device and this one was run up in the workshop using 'pre-loved' (as they euphemistically say these days) materials already lying around.

Whether it will be man enough for the job we may never actually get to find out!

David.

[clayliner]

So - no wagon chassis here, instead a much smaller arrangement with rollers which run along the beam:


g10 

On the outside is a plate of thin plastic card, on the inner surface a piece of Funky Foam; not very tidy but it will not be seen and is just a spacing piece (in fact it needed another one to span the width of the beam comfortably). Then two slices about 1mm wide off the plastic stick of a cotton bud, glued to protrude just above the level of the plate, so that they can just be seen. These will represent the rollers. It will need two of these items, one for each side of the overhead beam, and glued together facing each other.

I foresee that, with the plastic panic which is (justifiably) upon us all - plastic cotton buds will soon be near-impossible to source, and may come to fetch silly prices on eBay, so I am stockpiling them now. Lots of uses.

David.

[MickT]

Excellent innovative modelling David - Accolades and Congrats!

I've just checked our own household stocks of cotton buds and discovered that our tub has a sort of compressed paper or card shaft on the buds. Quelle horreur! A panic induced search for cotton buds with plastic tube shafts has now begun! Back in my military modelling days these were an essential item for 1/76 NATO 105mm gun barrels and could also pass for 100mm barrels as found on Russian T54 tanks. Also used them with a diagonal cut and little nick along the centre line to make rudimentary quill type pen nibs for getting filler and paint into tight corners!

Mick

[clayliner]

Thanks for that, Mick - one could probably start a complete thread on uses for cotton bud sticks (like 35mm film canisters, but that's another story and probably another generation).


With the truck in place on the beam it now looks something like this:

 


I can't promise the other side looks exactly the same, but one of the mercies of modelling like ours is that both sides of most things can never be seen at the same time.

The next step is another order of magnitude trickier... All we need now is the dangly bits.

David.

[MickT]

Well done David, it looks very convincing.

Andrew - we really could do with a "Like" button on this forum!

Mick

[clayliner]

It would certainly save Mick a lot of time!

David.