Ffarquhar by Rev. W. Awdry

[Clearwater]

It was really excellent to see this out and operating.  I think I enjoyed it more than my 6yo and cast my memory back to the descriptions of the layout and rolling stock in early 1980s Thomas the tank annuals.

[PaulRhB]

2 hours ago, Edge said:

A lot of the stories used Ffarquahar Mark 1 as their model for illustrations etc. The current touring layout is Ffarquahar Mark 2. The original was far larger and non-portable.

Mk 1 was also portable and there’s a picture of it at the March Rotary Club Exhibition in Sept 1958 in the December 59 RM. 
Pics from the article here

https://trlottte.com/rm-1959-12.htm

 

In his article in the Jan 68 RM on the proposed rebuild for mk2 he mentions he had to retire it as the “Bedford which took it to many exhibitions has been sold”

 

Edited December 1, 2022 by PaulRhB

[Pacific231G]

12 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

  13 hours ago, Edge said:

A lot of the stories used Ffarquahar Mark 1 as their model for illustrations etc. The current touring layout is Ffarquahar Mark 2. The original was far larger and non-portable

Mk 1 was also portable and there’s a picture of it at the March Rotary Club Exhibition in Sept 1958 in the December 59 RM. 
Pics from the article here

https://trlottte.com/rm-1959-12.htm

 

In his article in the Jan 68 RM on the proposed rebuild for mk2 he mentions he had to retire it as the “Bedford which took it to many exhibitions has been sold”

 

It was indeed and though, for a 00 layout, one might perhaps nowadays think of a 6ft x 2ft baseboard as transportable rather than portable, Awdry is very clear in his 1959 article that it was built for exhibtion. All the controls and wiring were on the station/fiddle yard board*. Mk 2 looks to actually be slightly  larger in total size than than Mk 1 though in a far more easily moved format. 

It does occur to me that in TT:120 you could, with a little adjustment of the front curve,  probably fit this layout onto a 4ft x 2ft 3in board and an equivalent layout onto a 4ft by 2ft board (In the first few months of TT-3 Mike Bryant did build a somewhat more complex layout- known as "Pint-Pot"  on a 4ft x 2ft board)

 

* The first person to use the format of a terminus with the fiddle yard behind and a link to give a continuous run was Maurice Deane with his Portreath layout (Railway Modeller no. 6 Aug-Sept 1950) which was a hollow 6ft 6ins by 6ft affair (with a tramway extension to the long side) Several people, including Awdry, used that format for slightly smaller layouts.  Portreath itself was though quickly replaced (on the same baseboards) by the Culm  Valley- a pretty faithfull reproduction of the real branch-  where there was no continuous run and the fiddle yard was modelled as a visible yard.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Pacific231G

[PaulRhB]

I took some aerial photos of the layout and from the plans in the RM for mk2 I’m guessing the two station boards are about 6ft x 1 ½ft and the whole layout around 12x 7ft?

If anyone knows I’d be interested to know the actual dimensions so I can add a scale to the plan when I stitch them together. 
The plan in BRM suggests 10 by 8 ½ ft but it’s proportions don’t match the photos I took so I’m a bit wary of it’s accuracy!

 

[harris0169]

On 02/12/2022 at 15:18, PaulRhB said:

I took some aerial photos of the layout and from the plans in the RM for mk2 I’m guessing the two station boards are about 6ft x 1 ½ft and the whole layout around 12x 7ft?

If anyone knows I’d be interested to know the actual dimensions so I can add a scale to the plan when I stitch them together. 
The plan in BRM suggests 10 by 8 ½ ft but it’s proportions don’t match the photos I took so I’m a bit wary of it’s accuracy!

 

I kinda bumbled into this thread and haven't read it all so apologies if these links have already been mentioned...

 

This one has a plan of MkII 

https://trlottte.com/ffarquharII.htm

And this one mentions the board sizes..

https://trlottte.com/rm-1968-01.htm

...scroll down to the words "First, Ffarquhar Rebuilt"

 

These pages seem to be resurrected because the site they came from went offline...might be worth saving the content. There are also links to MkI and also building Toby article. 

 

I think this helps 😃

 

Andy

[PaulRhB]

28 minutes ago, harris0169 said:

And this one mentions the board sizes..

https://trlottte.com/rm-1968-01.htm

...scroll down to the words "First, Ffarquhar Rebuilt"

Ta, hadn’t read that bit 😀

[DLT]

On 01/12/2022 at 11:10, Pacific231G said:

* The first person to use the format of a terminus with the fiddle yard behind and a link to give a continuous run was Maurice Deane with his Portreath layout (Railway Modeller no. 6 Aug-Sept 1950) which was a hollow 6ft 6ins by 6ft affair (with a tramway extension to the long side) Several people, including Awdry, used that format for slightly smaller layouts.

And Cyril Freezer based countless designs on that format for many years afterwards.  He referred to it as The Deane Pattern fiddle Yard.

[PaulRhB]

The aerial view

 

[Pacific231G]

1 hour ago, DLT said:

And Cyril Freezer based countless designs on that format for many years afterwards.  He referred to it as The Deane Pattern fiddle Yard.

He did indeed though Maurice Deane himself didn't AFAIK ever use it in exatly that form again. He did though produce a number of compact layouts, including The Rye terminus of the Rye and Camber tramway and  the Wantage tramway (in 4ft x 2ft in 00!) where the terminus was an inside branch from a continuous oval. Portreath itself, the layout that led to that description, was very short lived because, as soon as Deane discovered the Culm Valley, he dismantled it and used the same boards to build a model of the whole branch (apart from the junction) but that was  a coiled end to end (shunting yard to terminus with two other through stations) layout with no continuous run. The plan for the Culm Valley appeared in the first edition of 60 plans for Small Railways but not in subsequent editions.

[PaulRhB]

7 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

The plan for the Culm Valley appeared in the first edition of 60 plans for Small Railways but not in subsequent editions.

In the RM archive Jan & Feb 1952 for the two articles, Feb for the layout, although the plan is reproduced in the letters section on p688 August 2018. 

[Pacific231G]

2 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

In the RM archive Jan & Feb 1952 for the two articles, Feb for the layout, although the plan is reproduced in the letters section on p688 August 2018. 

Both articles are still well worth reading and I think Maurice Deane was probably the first person to study an actual line in depth and then model it to a fair degree of accuracy. He did the same, though on a far smaller scale, with Rye, Wantage Town,  St. Aubin (Jersey)  and Welshpool (W&L)

 

What was particularly interesting about Culm Valley was that it was a relatively small layout but with all three stations (not the junction) modelled with their actual track plans- albeit compressed. Given that most post-war rural branch line layouts have been terminus to fiddle yard affairs - reproducing the progress of a train-especially the daily goods train- along the entire branch was an interesting alternative. It's an idea that Cyril Freezer tried to promote a few times as well as suggesting modelling the junction station with a dummy main line as an alternative to hidden sidings/fiddle yard.