Model Railway Forum

Before 1939 there were between 4,000 and 5,000 different traders owning between 1 and 1,000 wagons each. There were nearly 700,000 privately owned wagons. 11,500 were owned by traders who owned less than ten vehicles each. Even most of the larger traders would not have had sufficient rolling stock t...

Thank you Nick for enhancing the reply. The subject of use and detention of wagons has been a complicated topic, not only for private owner wagons, but railway owned wagons too. The matter of free days, placement and such like keeping many clerks in goods offices fully employed trying to sort out cu...

On the real railway the interval between adjacent tracks was referred to as the "Six Foot" which was approximately 1830 mm between the rails of adjacent lines (3360mm centre to centre). This has to be regarded as an absolute minimum, and in practice was often greater. In OO the distances will be 24m...

Remember that wagons in service got dirty, and bashed about, so within days of being turned out new they gathered a film of dust and grime, which stayed on them and gradually got worse and worse until the wagon went in for a major overhaul. It was rare for anyone to wash a goods wagon. Because of th...

I won't say it never happened but I believe the individual companies tried to keep their own locomotives, brake vans, and non-pool wagons under their own control and on their own territory. Many brake vans were painted with routing restrictions, especially on the GWR which not only kept them on the ...

The 'official' colours for buffer stops on the Southern Region were as follows- The legs and supporting structure was to be green if adjacent to a station platform, otherwise they were to be treated with black tar. The buffer beam / buffer plank on the front side should be white, with a horizontal r...

When I worked at Tinsley Yard in the early 1980s on a Friday night / Saturday morning we would watch anxiously for a a overnight Speedlink service from Dover via Willesdan to Leeds which frequently which often brought us one Ferry Van from Spain or Italy full of fruit destined for Parkway Market She...

Many years ago I made some in gauge O from code 124 rail bent to shape and soldered, I still have them somewhere. I used plans published in that fine old publication "Model Railway Constructor" sadly no longer published. Because they are a solid metal structure I had to join them to the layout using...

In my experience the usual type of buffer stops in goods yards tended to be of the 'rail built' type. These were fabricated from bull head rail and were bolted to the track. The buffer plank (the bit that goes across which is at the same height as the wagon buffers) is often made from three lengths ...

Rigsby's cat?