The Hidden Landscape

Focalplane

Western Thunderer
I am starting this thread for a number of reasons, but first an explanation of its title. In 1993 a geologist at the Natural History Museum published a book titled "The Hidden Landscape". Its author, Richard Fortey, wrote this on the inside book cover:

Twenty years ago I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western locomotive took me westward from London, further and further back into geological time, from the age of the mammals to the age of trilobites. The train soon left the flat Thames Valley beyond Reading, and with it the soft sands and hard cobbles of the Reading Beds, laid down when there were mammals and birds on land and crabs in the sea. Then I was speeding over the chalk and back in time to the company of dinosaurs. The train travelled on toward Bath, where Jurassic limestones and shales take turns across the countryside, the former proud with ancient corals, the latter dark and low, with ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs that grasped Jurassic fish and ammonites. Under the River Severn and into Wales, and I was back before the time of the dinosaurs, to a time when Wales steamed and sweated, not with the fires of smelting, but with the humid heat of moss-laden and boggy forests in coal swamps, where dragonflies the size of hawks flitted in the mist. And then on, back further in time, so far back that life had not yet slithered or crawled upon the land from its aqueous nursery.

It seems appropriate that the description was viewed from a train. For those of us who enjoy the scenery and in my case see the view as a geological laboratory to be studied and explained, the land can give up its secrets quite easily. This being the case, our models should always try to reflect the hidden landscape.

My own model of Moor Street Station may not seem to have much to draw upon in revealing the reasons for the lie of the land or the use of building materials, but in fact there are good reasons for why the station is where it is and what it was built of, or more precisely, what it was not built of!

It is easy to take ready to plonk structures and mix them up to fit a space (which we know is always limited!) but should we have different bricks used for different buildings, or should our village scene have a stone church but red brick cottages? Generally there is almost always a case for anything, otherwise known as Rulke 1, but, sad to say a flint faced cottage from Cambridgeshire really cannot be expected to have been built in mid-Wales!

Well, enough of a preamble. I'll kick things off in a few minutes with a discussion of why a relatively young railway, the North Warwickshire Line from Tyseley to Stratford upon Avon, has one accommodation bridge that is not built of of the ubiquitous Staffordshire Blue Bricks!

And an open invitation - please contribute freely, always with the aim of adding to our WT knowledge base!

Paul

IMG_0966.jpg
 
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Focalplane

Western Thunderer
How to explain a stone accommodation crossing!

When the Great Western Railway connected Tyseley to Bearley Junction, this forming a new main line from Birmingham to Cheltenham and Bristol, the railway map of the Midlands was just about complete. In 1908 the line opened to reveal a winding double track that crested at Earlswood on the Birmingham Plateau before descending down to the River Avon. This part of Warwickshire was basically undeveloped at the time and was distant from existing main roads for much of its length. However the sprawl of industrial Birmingham needed housing and commuter trains dominated the timetable with a few expresses and a lot of freight.

Why did the railway line twist and wind through the country side? The first and obvious reason was the need to descend from the Birmingham Plateau without the need for a Lickey Incline. But prominent landowners also had a say in the alignment and one such person was the owner of Umberslade Hall. The Hall was owned by the Muntz family (with important political connections to Birmingham and Warwickshire) who also insisted that an accommodation crossing not be built of the ubiquitous industrial Staffordshire blue bricks but of local stone to match the Hall itself. Why?, well it was on the main “drive” into the estate!

The closest you can get to this private crossing today is here:

Google Earth

Which is rather poor evidence that there is always an exception to every rule!
 

Focalplane

Western Thunderer
Wanted - Local source of building material

One of the great features of the Settle and Carlisle route built at great expense by the Midland Railway was the use of local stone to build the many valley crossings in the Dales. Ribblehead is probably the most famous but other viaducts add to the spectacular journey as well. The use of local stone was logical and in keeping with the majesty of the area. Though the Pennines are hardly a mountain chain to be called majestic when compared with other parts of the World!

Good supplies of local building stone made life a lot easier - transportation using contractors' temporary railways was possible while the practice of tailoring the removal in cuttings to the addition of embankments was at an early stage of reaching economic equilibrium. Also, if you had stone then you didn't need brick and local masons were already available to cut and fashion the stone.

The London & Birmingham Railway ran into the opposite problem - how to cross the River Ouse without decent hard rock materials. The Grand Junction Railway became the first route into Birmingham (from Liverpool) because the land they crossed was easier to work with - no Chilterns, no Watford Gap, no River Ouse. They did have problems but they were easier to overcome, so although the L&BR had a fine terminal on Curzon Street, the wooden station next door received the first trains (from Liverpool).

If you have lived in the Cotswolds, as we did for 20 years, you get used to all the buildings being made with the Cotswold (lime)stone which varies in colour from grey to a rich dark brown at Edge Hill. As you move away from the outcrops of Jurassic Limestone, the villages start to change in character. Stratford-upon-Avon is located in a lowland area, the Felden, which has poor building stones, notably at Wilmcote. These limestones are not as robust as good Cotswold Stone but were used for many larger houses and in combination with cornerstones made of Cotswold stone. This combination was capable of producing fine churches such as Holy Trinity where Shakespeare is buried. Cost of moving stone from quarries was a considerable problem when roads were poor and horse and cart was the mode of transport. Come the canals and then the railways and transport became easier and cheaper.

So the age of a building will explain a lot of where the materials might have come from. Also the wealth of the owner will also be a factor.

So, Stratford has all sort of buildings reflecting these variables. Today, red brick dominates but some structures display signs of their owners' wealth with either Wilmcote or Cotswold Stone or both. And there is the other building material, occasionally used by the early British railways - timber.
 

LarryG

Western Thunderer
Interesting to read this thread. I think it has come at a good time. Building materials and the way railway companies tackled obstacles became of interest when I started building model railway layouts, the first being Greenfield (West Riding of Yorkshire). Just as important was the way things weathered although some aspects of 'colouring' went right back to my art school days of 60-odd years ago. Railways blended well into the British landscape, most likely because they used natural materials such as wood, stone metal that went rusty very quickly. Even the paint colours adopted were usually sympathetic and dulled down.
 
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SimonT

Western Thunderer
I'll quietly go and join the boys at the back with my plan for a collery feeding into Holme Lacy in Herefordshire.
 

Overseer

Western Thunderer
The Pattern of English Building by Alec Clifton-Taylor is a very good place to start researching why buildings look like they do in different parts of the country. Lots of well researched and considered information, pictures and easy to read. I recommend buying the 1987 4th edition. The paperback should be available for £10 or less.
 

Focalplane

Western Thunderer
I remember commenting favourably on Tony Wright’s Little Bytham scenery over on RMWeb, particularly the appearance of the shallow cuttings along the main line. It turns out that Tony used fragments of the real thing to create the outcrops!
 

Yorkshire Dave

Western Thunderer
Railways blended well into the British landscape, most likely because they used natural materials such as wood, stone metal that went rusty very quickly. Even the paint colours adopted were usually sympathetic and dulled down.

And of course when built the railways and thier associated buildings had the same impact on the 19th and early 20th century landscapes as a new road or motorway and large buildings do today.
 

LarryG

Western Thunderer
That
And of course when built the railways and thier associated buildings had the same impact on the 19th and early 20th century landscapes as a new road or motorway and large buildings do today.
Even the large brick-built viaducts that span country areas are considered constructions of beauty. Sixty years on and the M1 that I travelled along in 1960 has not blended into the landscape. Concrete and tar never will. :)
 

simond

Western Thunderer
mmm, I agree about the concrete, mostly, there are a few wartime-era bits and pieces around here that colour-wise have blended in, but they always have corners. Landscapes are notably short of corners, I find.

But tarmac - it blends in fine, given time, and no white lines.

atb
Simon
 

Focalplane

Western Thunderer
We had railway modelling books around the house when I was around 10 years old by Edward Beal. All his railway architecture drawings reflected the modernist era that is only rarely seen in the prototype and then mostly on the London Underground.

Concrete is an interesting landscape addition and as noted above it is only rare that it ever blends in. The French do a reasonable job with their LGVs. There is no doubt that the French autoroutes create much more of a scar (though some of the terrain is truly spectacular). Concrete also lends itself to graffiti which to many of us is most unfortunate. However, I suppose those with modern era layouts would be wrong to ignore such trackside artistry.

Ian mentions the M6/WCML in what used to be known as Westmorland. My research area included Shap in the late 1960s when the M6 was being built. I mapped a "section" through the Carboniferous sequence shown on this map (from my thesis):

IMG_0968.jpg

The M6 now runs through what was section 6 on the map, as shown in the BGS map from their iGeology app:

IMG_0969.jpg

Further south the M6 is divided into north and south carriageways, usually seen on many Scout Green videos.

There is no doubt that railways have a very small footprint by comparison.
 

Lyndhurstman

Western Thunderer
For me, time, landscape, geology, and human endeavour are best expressed in a handmade brick of London Clay. A simple, portable, sentence, of special colour, that imparts history into our hands. To hold one is a wonderful thing.

I used to have one, once.

Cheers

Jan
 

Yorkshire Dave

Western Thunderer
I am starting this thread for a number of reasons, but first an explanation of its title. In 1993 a geologist at the Natural History Museum published a book titled "The Hidden Landscape". Its author, Richard Fortey, wrote this on the inside book cover:

Twenty years ago I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western locomotive took me westward from London, further and further back into geological time, from the age of the mammals to the age of trilobites. The train soon left the flat Thames Valley beyond Reading, and with it the soft sands and hard cobbles of the Reading Beds, laid down when there were mammals and birds on land and crabs in the sea. Then I was speeding over the chalk and back in time to the company of dinosaurs. The train travelled on toward Bath, where Jurassic limestones and shales take turns across the countryside, the former proud with ancient corals, the latter dark and low, with ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs that grasped Jurassic fish and ammonites. Under the River Severn and into Wales, and I was back before the time of the dinosaurs, to a time when Wales steamed and sweated, not with the fires of smelting, but with the humid heat of moss-laden and boggy forests in coal swamps, where dragonflies the size of hawks flitted in the mist. And then on, back further in time, so far back that life had not yet slithered or crawled upon the land from its aqueous nursery.

On the other hand if the author had travelled north to the Outer Hebrides (or Cape Wrath on the mainland) he would have gone back even further in time to the Pre-Cambrian era.
 

Lyndhurstman

Western Thunderer
An utterly impenetrable colour I would say, or am I completely missing the point Jan?!

Pete.
I wouldn’t say it was impenetrable, Pete. Although maybe my post was.. Sorry... . :)

London bricks (their compaction of history, geology, and industry) maybe aren’t an expression of the landscape upon the railway, but it’s certainly the hidden landscape brought into view.. and the special glow of London Clay is one of the reasons why I narrowed down onto the London & Blackwall for my muddled modelling moments...
The Secret History Of The London Brick

Cheers

Jan
 

Tim Watson

Western Thunderer
Getting the colour right of London stock bricks is very challenging. As we are modelling an older scene they should of course be heavily weathered with all the London soot. However, it is easy to end up with them much too black. On CF we have the buildings weathered to various extents and there are different paint formulae we use for variety in the base colours. Our colours certainly err on the lighter side so giving some sense of distance. The geology of the area is apparent from the shallow angle of repose of the cutting sides: a necessity with London clay.

Tim
 
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Osgood

Western Thunderer
I’ve always associated London brickwork with “yellow stocks”.

For the last 30 years or so, chalk quarried from Suffolk’s hidden landscape has played a part in London’s ‘man made landscape’, being hauled around the M25 to the brickworks south west of the city and blended with the local clay to create the classic colour of ‘yellow stocks’.
 
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Lyndhurstman

Western Thunderer
Getting the colour right of London stock bricks is very challenging. As we are modelling an older scene they should of course be heavily weathered with all the London soot. However, it is easy to end up with them much too black. On CF we have the buildings weathered to various extents and there are different paint formulae we use for variety in the base colours. Our colours certainly err on the lighter side so giving some sense of distance. The geology of the area is apparent from the shallow angle of repose of the cutting sides: a necessity with London clay.

Tim
Hello Tim
I’ve always felt that CF got it right for colour. I have 8ft of Wills viaduct on Watkins Wharf to render into something approaching similar. I must swot up... Of course, mine will be a matter of a few feet away, rather than the distant gaze CF requires...

Cheers

Jan
 
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