Castle Aching

[Nearholmer]

The smallest BS radius in 2ft gauge portable track was c13ft, but i’ll check the Decauville catalogues later for the smaller gauges ....... probably six or ten times gauge, but locos are unlikely to get round that, they’d probably need 15x or even 20x. I’ll also check smallest radius for their smallest steam locos.

[brack]

Decauville 40cm track and equipment was not designed for use with locos (though I once heard a rumour of there having been a trial, but haven't seen anything of substance to back that up, most records show 40cm was hand or horse powered.

 

There was of course a lovely minimum gauge line to Claxton, specifically the brickworks there. It just happened to be the one in Yorkshire.

 

Regarding the possibility of a the model t being a Crewe tractor, Ravenglass had one running on 15" gauge in the 20s so it should've been relatively easy to adapt for 50cm gauge.

[Northroader]

Its very enjoyable, the first bit of proper railwaying I did was with a pal when we were about ten. One of our roams took us to a derelict area which had been a sort of clay digging/ tile making place, and they had some decauville serving that, mainly a long straight bit of track which sloped. Digging about in the bushes we found the chassis of a trolley, the sort of tipper truck frame, in a ditch, and we managed to get it back on the track, and runs up and down, gravity worked the one way. Then some old misery who lived there chased us off and shoved the trolley back into a pit. Drat!

[Donw]

They supplied 40, 50, and 60cm as standard, each in several weights/formats, plus all the complicated bits to make pointwork to any gauge in a variety of rail weights, plus rail, fixings, sleepers, tools, locos, carriages, wagons in multiple types, cranes, turntables, inclines ........ in fact, imagine the best model railway catalogue ever printed, and you’ll get some concept.

 

And, they were only one supplier of this stuff, there were several other big suppliers (Koppel, Fowler, Hudson etc) plus multiple slightly more niche suppliers.

 

All you needed was a good balance in the bank, and a telegraph connection, and you could get what you wanted, delivered, almost tomorrow ....... internet shopping big time!

 

To get a flavour for the variety of uses of NG railways, have a look at this, which I compiled a long time ago (so the postal address is wrong!) http://deangoods.co.uk/eastsxng.html

 

Very comprehansive Kevin. These sort of lines could appear anywhere. We lived at one time in a small hamlet between the Wenlock Egde and the Corvdale hills only about a dozen houses. My neighbour had lived their most of his life working as a woodsman. He said there had been a small industrial line to bring the timber down to a barn where there was a bench saw. The line had a small IC engine. All trace of it had disappeared as had the trees.

 

Don

[Argos]

Fascinating.

 

I assume post Grouping and quite short-lived. The page you linked to says it closed in 1936, yet beet growing did not take off on any scale until the 1920s, with the aid of government subsidies.

 

While Napoleonic Europe had to pioneer this alternative to cane, I imagine cheap and plentiful imported cane sugar from the British West Indies rendered domestic beet production otiose in earlier years.

 

EDIT: indeed, one is tempted to suppose that military surplus equipment made such a scheme viable, but I note that the gauge appears to have been 1'6" - 1'7", which puts it pretty much in the minimum gauge camp. Some military railways adopted minimum gauge, but I don't think the majority.

 

Something not so far from the Lincolnshire potato railways, I wonder if the line was horse/man worked or had motive power? One could adopt the Noch Feldbahn system for what here is literally also a field railway system.

I was under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that sugar beet was first grown as cattle fodder rather than for sugar manufacturing?

 

If so that would make it a viable commodity for WNR to transport.

[Nearholmer]

Catalogue checked: smallest standard radius in all three standard gauges was 4m, and the smallest loco (4 Tonnes en marche) had a recommended minimum radius of 10m (I think at both 50cm and 60cm gauges, there were no off-the-shelf locos at 40cm gauge).

 

And, I don’t know what beet was first grown for, but the big market in the 1870s was using it to make alcohol from. I dont think this was for drinking, but for other uses.

Edited November 13, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

I was under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that sugar beet was first grown as cattle fodder rather than for sugar manufacturing?

 

If so that would make it a viable commodity for WNR to transport.

 

It is certainly so used these days, but I do not know how far back the practice goes.

 

One source says the first UK sugar beet production was in 1860.  The following extract is from an article in the Farmers Weekly website (https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/the-history-of-the-sugar-beet-generation), and suggests a later date and that Norfolk was the place it began.

 

It seems to me that the reference to processing means that the cultivation was for the purposes of sugar production from the start:

 

The crop had first come to this country in the early 20th century after a group of Dutch investors began offering contracts to Norfolk farmers to grow it to be shipped to Holland for processing. By 1912, they were satisfied the crop could be grown in this country and built the factory at Cantley.

 

Terrible floods in Norfolk in 1912 and the disruption of the First World War meant that it wasn’t until the early 1920s that the Dutch-built factory got back into full production. By that time, encouraged by the high price of sugar, further processing factories were built (although some of them failed almost immediately). By 1928 there were a total of 18 operating across the arable areas of the country including one in Fife, Scotland.

 

Back in Norfolk, the Cantley factory – under the control of Dutchman, Joanness Van Rossum, who had moved to live in Norfolk to supervise the operation – remained the flagship plant. To secure supplies of roots, as well as to demonstrate the opportunities to reluctant Norfolk farmers, he bought several thousand acres of ideal sugar beet land around Cantley. He brought in Dutch farmers to manage these farms and built huge barns in the Dutch style to cover the crops they grew and to stable the many horses used on the land.

 

But sugar beet did not become a staple crop in Britain’s agricultural economy (and a must-grow crop for most Norfolk farmers) until 1936 when the Sugar Industry Act was passed by Parliament. It provided for the amalgamation of all existing factories into a single corporation in which the government held shares and appointed farmers representatives (among others) to the board with the brief to ensure fair pricing between growers and processors. The company was called the British Sugar Corporation.

 

A Dutch-sponsored Edwardian narrow gauge sugar beet railway interchange with the WNR?

Edited November 13, 2018 by Edwardian

[Nearholmer]

Read all about it, with 2’8” gauge steam locos. http://www.buscot-park.com/history/an-industrialised-agricultural-estate-in-berkshire

 

Although the website says there’s nothing left to see, there is actually plenty to make a good walk very interesting, if one takes extracts of 1870s 25” maps along.

 

A lot earlier than 1912, and this wasn’t the only place it was tried.

Edited November 13, 2018 by Nearholmer

[sem34090]

This talk of small narrow gauge tramways has reminded me of something found in the school grounds at my old school a few years back.

Alongside the main school site there was a large area of woodland which, somehow, the school also owned. The land sloped down to a small stream, then there was a fence. At the time, 'Forest Schools' were all the rage, so the school somehow managed to purchase the land on the other side of the fence. Now, in the stream, upside down, underneath the fence, lay a wheeled object of some kind. Some clever so and so worked out that, given it had flanged wheels, it must have been a railway vehicle. Upon hearing this, I immediately got a tape measure and sought permission to go and measure the thing to work out what it actually was. The first thing that I measured was the gauge - 2ft.

 

By doing this I caused quite a stir! The story had always gone that the thing had been nicked from the sidings at Rudgwick (The woodland had a boundary on one side with the LBSCR's Guildford to Horsham line, just outside the former station at Rudgwick) by some pupils in 1965 upon the closure of the line, and that they had used it as a go-cart... given the LBSCR line was standard gauge, I had immediately upset the old theory!

 

I identified the wagon as the chassis of one of the earlier pattern Hudson skips, sans skip and had this confirmed by the folks at Amberley. Now, the school myth was further disproven when it came to lifting the chassis out of the stream and putting it upright on the bank - it took several blokes to lift it!

 

After it's recovery, and having completed my final exams, I set about with various wire brushes and other bits to get it into reasonable condition. Then, I left and haven't been back since to see what they did with it! It was probably scrapped.

 

Now, it remains to me a puzzle as to how it got where it did. The woodland wasn't reclaimed industrial land, and the nearest known narrow gauge railway was up at Baynards Brickworks, at least a mile away! My eventual theory was that it came from a small, unrecorded, hand/horse powered tramway at Rudgwick Brickworks, 1/2 a mile or so away. But I never did have any thoughts as to how it ended up upside down in the bottom of a ditch. The only other piece of railway I found was a bullhead rail key, a metal one, that will have come from the LBSCR line.

 

So, I put it to RMweb to suggest a possible idea! Mr Nearholmer, if you please...

[Edwardian]

Read all about it, with 2’8” gauge steam locos. http://www.buscot-park.com/history/an-industrialised-agricultural-estate-in-berkshire

 

Although the website says there’s nothing left to see, there is actually plenty to make a good walk very interesting, if one takes extracts of 1870s 25” maps along.

 

A lot earlier than 1912, and this wasn’t the only place it was tried.

 

Gosh, that is interesting. And I quote ....

 

... the first moves in what must have seemed a fantastic scheme to make sugar and to distil spirit alcohol from sugar beet.  This was a practically unknown science in England at the time, despite an unsuccessful attempt around 1860 to make spirit on a commercial scale from mangolds at Minety, in Wiltshire.  On the continent, it had reached a commercial level, having been encouraged by the Napoleonic Wars and the failure of the grape crops due to disease.  Campbell's spirit was exported to France at 2s 6d per gallon.

 

The distillery, built at a reputed cost of £100,000 on the island adjacent to Buscot lock, was opened in 1869.  The island is still known as 'Brandy Island' (the legend persisting that it was brandy produced there).  The stills, by Savalle & Co., produced excellent quality spirit from juice collected by Collett presses.  In 1871 the Collett presses were discarded and Campbell adopted the Le Play system, in which fermentation takes place in the sliced beet.

 

To collect the 10,000 to 12,000 tons of sugar beet per year and other produce from the farms, and for general farm haulage, Campbell built a narrow-gauge railway round the estate.  The railway, of 2ft. 8in. gauge had over six miles of track.  Three 0-4-0 tank engines were used, built by Appleby Brothers of Southwark, and named after Campbell's daughters, Edith, Emily and Alice.  The engine Edith was illustrated and described in Engineering on 20th January 1871. 

 

Could this be Edith, Emily or Alice?

[TheQ]

I seem to remember the Dutch barns were painted red. At the beginning of ww2 which wasn't long after they were erected , a rumour started they were designed as some dastardly nazi plot.

[runs as required]

Following on from last Sunday's 'War to End Wars' centennial Remembrance events, I was interested to find that the Decauville system's underground electric railway can be visited and ridden on during Day 3 of this Tour of the Maginot Line

dh

 

PS

I think we've been before to Sand Hutton and local Aristo Sir Robert Walker's pet estate railway that was 15" gauge pre WW1 and after the war was rebuilt and extended to 7³⁄₄ miles to a railhead with the NER after Walker bought the 18" gauge Deptford Meat Depot railway.

It was extensively written up in Railway Magazine vols of the pre WW1 period because of its links with Basset-Lowke and Ravenglass.

Edited November 13, 2018 by runs as required

[brack]

Should anyone be curious, I'd suggest a browse of: https://issuu.com/tombell17/docs/decauville_1897_catalogue

 

Re. Sand Hutton, thats the line I hinted at to Claxton brickworks. But the SHLR didn't buy all the stock from deptford - most of it stayed there and was in use until the late 30s, with stock going in wartime scrap drives. There is ample potential for another line to have bought a few Waril class locos and some wagons. One of those hunslets is on my list for building in the future.

Edited November 13, 2018 by brack

[Nearholmer]

Brilliant find Brack.

 

SEM

 

The trouble with skips is that they were as common as chips. Any job that would now be done with a backhoe excavator and an all-terrain dumper might have been done using a dozen labourers, a couple of skips, and a couple of hundred yards of jubilee track, so it might be hard to pin yours down.

 

Any obvious earthworks nearby? Could be as simple as levelling the school playing field. Is the wood one that might have been 'logged' at any point? A skip chassis, even with those thingumajigs that support the bin, is a pretty good timber carrier. Were the military active nearby? Has the stream obviously been realigned at some stage?

 

And, when brickyards and the like closed, their kit often got sold-off to local farmers etc. 

 

And, and, proto-preservationists created stashes at various places, then left the odd bit behind when they moved on. Christ's Hospital station yard was used to store some 2ft locos and stock in the 1970s, for instance.

 

And, and, and, a firm called Tunnequip had several store yards for tunnelling equipment, including locos and stock, in the Horsham area. There has been a bit of a discussion about their activities on the IRS forum, the conclusion being that not every one of their sites was 'logged' by IRS members.

 

Not much help, I guess, but maybe contains a clue .......

 

Kevin

[Nearholmer]

Edwardian

 

I don't think so.

 

I've got a copy of the "Engineering" drawing of one of them somewhere, and it doesn't look like that, its a side tank of rather conservative design.

 

Buscot also had a Chaplin vertical-boiler loco, according to the IRS handbook.

 

Yours looks very Bagnall to me, and probably c25 years later in design. Notice that it appears to have a marine-type firebox, allowing the rear axle to come below it?

 

Where did you find it? The drawing is odd, because it looks to me to omit the exhaust pipes from the cylinders.

Edited November 13, 2018 by Nearholmer

[brack]

Could this be Edith, Emily or Alice?

I'm afraid it is bagnall works no. 1416 of 1893, the first marine firebox design EE Baguley produced when he became chief draughtsman at bagnall (at the age of 29, pretty good going!).

The loco was built for stock and used in lots of publicity materials, photos and catalogues. The wagons behind it are also bagnall products. On the photo the engraving is based on you can see it has bar frames and walschaerts valve gear, whereas subsequent production of small tank locos had plate Frames and Baguley or bagnall price gear. The engine was 2' gauge. Eventually sold to W Barrington believed to be for use on the Fergus reclamation syndicate in Ireland (lettered FRS No. 2). In some catalogue photos she is named Triumpho with wooden nameplates, presumably the catalogue reference, but they didn't build another one quite like it.

Edited November 13, 2018 by brack

[Regularity]

Anyone falling in love with such a beauty might want to consider changing to the 5” gauge ‘Sweet Pea’.

http://www.modelengineeringworkshop.co.uk/sweetpea-loco.php

Edit: That one seems to have Hackworth valvegear.

Edited November 13, 2018 by Regularity

[Edwardian]

Edwardian

 

I don't think so.

 

I've got a copy of the "Engineering" drawing of one of them somewhere, and it doesn't look like that, its a side tank of rather conservative design.

 

Buscot also had a Chaplin vertical-boiler loco, according to the IRS handbook.

 

Yours looks very Bagnall to me, and probably c25 years later in design. Notice that it appears to have a marine-type firebox, allowing the rear axle to come below it?

 

Where did you find it? The drawing is odd, because it looks to me to omit the exhaust pipes from the cylinders.

 

Happy to be corrected.  The picture title claims that it is an Appleby locomotive, but I see that its familiarity is due to its Bagnall looks.

[Nearholmer]

I haven’t found my Buscot File yet, but look what I did come across. 1897, and it seems to be the real thing, not a repro.

 

Should any dyed in the wool midland fan who is a member of CA-PC want it, PM me a postal address.

I haven’t found my Buscot File yet, but look what I did come across. 1897, and it seems to be the real thing, not a repro.

 

Should any dyed in the wool midland fan who is a member of CA-PC want it, PM me a postal address.

[sem34090]

Brilliant find Brack.

 

SEM

 

The trouble with skips is that they were as common as chips. Any job that would now be done with a backhoe excavator and an all-terrain dumper might have been done using a dozen labourers, a couple of skips, and a couple of hundred yards of jubilee track, so it might be hard to pin yours down.

 

Any obvious earthworks nearby? Could be as simple as levelling the school playing field. Is the wood one that might have been 'logged' at any point? A skip chassis, even with those thingumajigs that support the bin, is a pretty good timber carrier. Were the military active nearby? Has the stream obviously been realigned at some stage?

 

And, when brickyards and the like closed, their kit often got sold-off to local farmers etc. 

 

And, and, proto-preservationists created stashes at various places, then left the odd bit behind when they moved on. Christ's Hospital station yard was used to store some 2ft locos and stock in the 1970s, for instance.

 

And, and, and, a firm called Tunnequip had several store yards for tunnelling equipment, including locos and stock, in the Horsham area. There has been a bit of a discussion about their activities on the IRS forum, the conclusion being that not every one of their sites was 'logged' by IRS members.

 

Not much help, I guess, but maybe contains a clue .......

 

Kevin

I did think that, but as always - Mr Nearholmer - you have provided more of a valid suggestion than I ever did! Your knowledge of the obscure continues to amaze... If it's perhaps of interest in relation to the wagon, here are two maps from (I reckon) between 1890 and 1923 (the Std Gauge railway is referred to as LBSCR on both). The 'hand drawn' ring shows roughly where the wagon was found, the 'clean' ring a potential reason for its being there.

Maps taken from National Library of Scotland online resource.

Edited November 13, 2018 by sem34090

[Nearholmer]

I'd say the filtration location is a very likely source for it. I read the old map to show a rudimentary filter bed, possibly just a swamp filled with reeds, but that was probably superseded by a bed filled with aggregate of some sort. Such beds have to be emptied periodically, and refilled, and the standard kit consisted of a skip or two, and some jubilee track.

 

A similar, but not identical, task is going-on in the photos here http://www.ingr.co.uk/minworth.html This is a weathering bed, rather than a filter bed, but you can see track being laid in order to empty it.

 

Actually, this set is even better, because this is a filter bed http://www.ingr.co.uk/llanforda.html

Edited November 13, 2018 by Nearholmer

[sem34090]

So that also answers the other mysteries - why the ground was so strange round there and what those strange concrete foundations were! Thank you Sah!

[Martin S-C]

Wonderful conversations. I am learning so much. Please continue!

[Talltim]

The only such line I’ve seen was at Whitwell, Hertfordshire about 25 years ago to serve the watercress beds. I get the impression it’s still in use. It seems it just has one hand pushed trolley

More here http://gn15.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4210

[TheQ]

I haven’t found my Buscot File yet, but look what I did come across. 1897, and it seems to be the real thing, not a repro.

 

Should any dyed in the wool midland fan who is a member of CA-PC want it, PM me a postal address.

I haven’t found my Buscot File yet, but look what I did come across. 1897, and it seems to be the real thing, not a repro.

 

Should any dyed in the wool midland fan who is a member of CA-PC want it, PM me a postal address.

Interesting to see the MSWJR and Andover and Redbridge being shown as an important Midland route, I know there were through carriages..