Modeller and draughtsman?

Bazzmund

Active Member
One of the issues I am finding with free-lancing an entire pre grouping railway company is that it is not like a light railway which may have a handful of off the peg manufacturers locos and a few main line cast offs. There are whole generations of locos and rolling stock that need to be at least visualised if not modelled to provide a sense of historical progression, family lineage and tradition. I've got a few off the cuff projects which I have very much been making up as I go along, but ultimately I'll be pretty much drawing any of the finished designs which make the cut up into a "Diagram Book" made up of 1mm graph paper. I'm curious if anyone else has followed this particular route which keeps a standard set of dimensions to work from for any future models, or am I literally just going OTT? :))
 

Osgood

Western Thunderer
Given the influence of company locomotive engineers in the appearance of locomotives and stock, and given the regular migration of those engineers between railway companies, then the establishment of the lineage of locomotive engineers of your railway company would likely be necessary to determine what the family lineage looked like and how it might have developed.
Would you have any famous / notorious names in mind for a spell as servants of your company?

Many of the designs may not be very different (and some of it may be almost identical) to that run by the real companies of the era.

Interesting to note the early influence of the forerunners of the Leeds industrial locomotive manufacturers in the roots of locomotive development arising from the use of hired locomotives built by them (e.g. the Jenny Lind designs) by many of the fledgling mainline companies before they started building their own.
 

Bazzmund

Active Member
At the moment the plan doesn't involve any real engineers as it's a bit too difficult to find a method of shoehorning them into it without retconning some other company's history. I've tried to fit into a scheme of Art imitating Reality by using real life events to fuel what happens eg I've fitted a CME resignation in disgrace into 1899 at the height of the locomotive builder crisis, forcing the purchase of 0-8-4Ts from Baldwin while delayed 0-10-2Ts from Sharp Stewart are sat in limbo.

The Hornby James has been a basic pattern for later steam designs so as a consequence belpaire boilers are a fitting I am working with for both new builds and rebuilds. Likewise I have been chopping up Hornby 4 wheelers so I can experiment with a standard 1880 - 1900 carriage design that's good for 4 and 6 wheelers, using the chassis' from these carriages to scratch build brake vans, and, once COVID allows, raiding second hand open wagons and re-chassising with kit/scratchbuilt underframes to produce the wagon fleet. Baby steps yes, but as they say acorns and oaks etc etc
 
Top