Little Muddle

[Winslow Boy]

9 minutes ago, Ponthir28 said:

The question is how many days is it going to wait?

 

What do you mean days? This is LM we are talking about they don't measure time in such short intervals. We'll be lucky if the engineer and fireman don't get bored and walk back into town to get some grub and have walk around town.

[KNP]

This next two pictures are almost a repeat of yesterdays one but with the view changed.

With the trees moved from around the rear of the farm I was able to place the camera in a previously unreachable position.

 

 

 

[aardvark]

On 04/07/2022 at 18:00, Ponthir28 said:

The question is how many days is it going to wait?

 

3 hours ago, KNP said:

This next two pictures are almost a repeat of yesterdays one but with the view changed.

 

Well, that's one (so far).

 

[KNP]

Been updating a very old wagon that had been sitting in the open barn for years (real time) so I thought it was time to give it some tlc…

 

 

 

Overall view of Middle Farm as seen by the Squadron Leader.

 

 

[Donw]

Lovely job on the wagon not sure that counts as tlc but it looks the business

 

Don

[John Besley]

On 04/07/2022 at 09:12, Winslow Boy said:

 

What do you mean days? This is LM we are talking about they don't measure time in such short intervals. We'll be lucky if the engineer and fireman don't get bored and walk back into town to get some grub and have walk around town.

 

Engineer?

Oh do you mean Driver and Fireman 

[MrWolf]

34 minutes ago, John Besley said:

 

Engineer?

Oh do you mean Driver and Fireman 

 

Now I have Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode for an earworm.

 

Btw love what you've done with the wagon. Somewhere I have an old Slater's dray that's only slightly less disheveled,as in it hasn't lost its horse shafts yet.

Edited July 5, 2022 by MrWolf

[KNP]

13 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

 

Now I have Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode for an earworm.

 

Btw love what you've done with the wagon. Somewhere I have an old Slater's dray that's only slightly less disheveled,as in it hasn't lost its horse shafts yet.

Thanks

For years and years this very old wagon was put nose first into the barn as the shafts where broken and lost.

Painted in Old Wood it sort of just sat there forgotten about then last week I moved it and felt sorry for it so off to the work bench it.

Repainted and very heavily weathered.

Any old off cuts used, bits of spruce to form the load and an old napkin cut to be a sheet….and hey presto we had on old wagon renovated to make it look even older….!!!!!

So would this be be retro down grade?

Edited July 5, 2022 by KNP

[Martin S-C]

On 03/07/2022 at 14:30, KNP said:

 

Lot more planting been done around this area, obvious to me but many will will look and say where???

 

Kevin, just a quick question - do you use an airbrush? You have a nice border of brownish dead grasses/dirt between the gravelled hard area and the full-height grassy area and I'm wondering how you achieve that boundary. It seems to work well and takes away any hard edge between the man-made surface and the plants.

[Martin S-C]

On 03/07/2022 at 09:39, Nick C said:

Does anyone know of any good references for this kind of stuff? For everything inside the railway fence there's loads of books, websites and photos, but I can't find much on mid 20th century farming...

A visit to Pendon Museum with a camera will furnish you with more inspiration than you could possibly model. My own take on the 20s and 30s is that almost everything should be horse drawn or worked (or even sapiens muscle power), with a very occasional steam traction engine. Internal combustion in most rural areas was really a post-war advance.

The biography of Roye England (Pendon's founder) "In Search of a Dream" also has numerous photos and written asides about inter-war English farming practices.

Edited July 6, 2022 by Martin S-C

[KNP]

4 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Kevin, just a quick question - do you use an airbrush? You have a nice border of brownish dead grasses/dirt between the gravelled hard area and the full-height grassy area and I'm wondering how you achieve that boundary. It seems to work well and takes away any hard edge between the man-made surface and the plants.

No I don’t have or ever used an airbrush.

It is an earth coloured acrylic paint dry brushed to various intensities.

If you look all over this layout I have dry brushed places like this to represent areas of grim, or where sections are not used or to give variation.

Simple technique but rather effective to my eyes.

[Martin S-C]

On 03/07/2022 at 15:50, John Besley said:

One item that would fit into the era would be a agricultural traction engine as opposed to a road locomotive parked up and disused as the internal combustion tractor is now taking over.

 

This could be partly sheeted over and pushed into a corner of a field where it will stay untill either the WW2 scrap metal drive or preservation in the late 50's

I honestly cannot agree with this. Internal combustion farming certainly away from the big "modern/planned" estates was still very primitive in the 1920s and 1930s. There was recession and the horse and human muscle reigned supreme until after WW2. You would never see an abandoned ANYTHING in the 20s and 30s, let alone a "modern" cutting edge steam traction engine.

Our canals remained mostly horse drawn past WW2. Until the 1960s there were more horse drawn delivery vehicles in London than trucks and vans! The lorry began to be used more for long-distance freight usurping the train in the 1930s but local rural use remained the province of the horse.

I've said this countless times on RMWeb and elsewhere but railway modellers seem to model internal combustion power far too much and too early when horse drawn appliances of every kind should be more common on our layouts even up to the 1950s and 1960s.

[DaveF]

 

Dad lived in a village as a child, as he grew older he sometimes "helped out" on local farms in school holidays (before WW2).  He always said that horses still did most things, traction engines were used for very heavy work on bigger farms.  Tractors were quite rare.

 

When I lived in a village in the 1950s all the local farms had tractors (mainly grey Fergies) but our coal was delivered by horse and cart.  A number of local traders still used horses and carts but they became scarce by about 1960.  There was a local contractor who still used traction engines for some ploughing work and hauling timber.

 

Living in Nottingham in the 1960s our coal sometimes came by horse and cart, as did plants from the local nursery.  The local brewery also delivered using horse drawn drays - though that was partly for publicity.

 

I quite often saw steam lorries when I was cycling to and from school in Nottingham.

 

David

Edited July 5, 2022 by DaveF

[KNP]

My apologies.

I have just looked at the quality of the two pictures of the revitalised wagon on the main computer screen and thought how poor they looked.

So I have been back up the layout with the camera and taken these, now you can see it properly.....!

 

 

 

 

Edited July 5, 2022 by KNP

[Donw]

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

I honestly cannot agree with this. Internal combustion farming certainly away from the big "modern/planned" estates was still very primitive in the 1920s and 1930s. There was recession and the horse and human muscle reigned supreme until after WW2. You would never see an abandoned ANYTHING in the 20s and 30s, let alone a "modern" cutting edge steam traction engine.

Our canals remained mostly horse drawn past WW2. Until the 1960s there were more horse drawn delivery vehicles in London than trucks and vans! The lorry began to be used more for long-distance freight usurping the train in the 1930s but local rural use remained the province of the horse.

I've said this countless times on RMWeb and elsewhere but railway modellers seem to model internal combustion power far too much and too early when horse drawn appliances of every kind should be more common on our layouts even up to the 1950s and 1960s.

 

I would certainly agree with you when referring to smaller farms.  However larger farms especially arable farms may have been early adopters of tractors. I cannot see why anyone would leave a tractor to rust in those days surely even if you bought a better one  the old one would either have been sold or used for lesser duties on a large farm.

 

Don

[St Enodoc]

4 hours ago, MrWolf said:

 

Now I have Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode for an earworm.

 

Btw love what you've done with the wagon. Somewhere I have an old Slater's dray that's only slightly less disheveled,as in it hasn't lost its horse shafts yet.

You want an earworm?

 

"There's Casey Junior and old Red Rock too,

Fireman Wally and the rest of the crew.."

[MrWolf]

A lot of farms were struggling in the 1920s and items like traction engines were going out of fashion, often being too expensive to repair and of little resale value as being expensive to run, so they were simply mothballed. Also scrapping one would involve either expensive transport or oxy-acetylene cutting gear that was very uncommon outside industrial areas. It is documented that after the Abermule rail crash in 1921, cutting gear had to be borrowed from an engineering contractors some miles away to disentangle the wreckage.

There were a good number of abandoned or contracted farms in the period and big items such as steam engines and threshing drums were stripped of non ferrous metals and left where they stopped.

Such things that did survive were pressed back into service during WW2 which is why so much has survived.

[KNP]

Off they go, heading to the station.

 

 

[Ponthir28]

Busy day for the drovers at Little Muddle today. Not many cattle lorries around in 1938.

[Dragonboy]

14 hours ago, KNP said:

Thanks

For years and years this very old wagon was put nose first into the barn as the shafts where broken and lost.

Painted in Old Wood it sort of just sat there forgotten about then last week I moved it and felt sorry for it so off to the work bench it.

Repainted and very heavily weathered.

Any old off cuts used, bits of spruce to form the load and an old napkin cut to be a sheet….and hey presto we had on old wagon renovated to make it look even older….!!!!!

So would this be be retro down grade?

Renovated or Retro Down Grade maybe but I think more deserving of Masterpiece 

 

Brian

Edited July 6, 2022 by Dragonboy

[The Stationmaster]

20 hours ago, Donw said:

 

I would certainly agree with you when referring to smaller farms.  However larger farms especially arable farms may have been early adopters of tractors. I cannot see why anyone would leave a tractor to rust in those days surely even if you bought a better one  the old one would either have been sold or used for lesser duties on a large farm.

 

Don

Certain parts of the country had different types of spoil with some having quite heavy clay.  Thus changing over from horse drawn ploughs and harrows to i/c engined tractors would vary for very practical reasons.

 

I can't establish how many Fordson Ns were produced at Dagenhem between the transfer of production to there and the outbreak of WWII but during the war the factory turned out 136,000 Ns before changing over to the E27N in 1945.  Obviously wartime production would have been increased but to step up to =22,000 per annum would have required a fairly good level of production as a starting position, certainly more than a few hundred a  year (Cork had built more than that each year but most of those were exported).

 

And many of those 6,000 tractors that were around in 1919 were very complex pieces of kit which cneeded spare parts to be imported from a place where their designs were already outmoded.

 

(Steam powered) Portable engines were readily replaced for much of the work they did by small one or two cylinder i/c engines which were being mass produced by the inter-war years by numerous manufacturers serving the agricultural industry and they had been around since before the Great War.

[aardvark]

15 hours ago, KNP said:

Off they go, heading to the station.

 

 

 

That's a relief.

 

I thought it might be stuck there for ages waiting for the signal to change.

 

[Winslow Boy]

7 minutes ago, aardvark said:

 

That's a relief.

 

I thought it might be stuck there for ages waiting for the signal to change.

 

 

You mean we were supposed to stop at the signal. No one told me. I just thought it was part of the scenery. Like those trees that were planted the other week. There now thirty feet high. I wish someone would let me know when they make these sort of changes. Anyway we're past it now. No one 'll notice it's Little Muddle.

[aardvark]

38 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

 

You mean we were supposed to stop at the signal.

 

My mistake. 🥸

[KNP]

Lets have a general view of LM station.

All seems quiet and tranquil....