Andrew and the Chocolate Factory
Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:14 pm
Hello all,
As promised (well, a little later than promised really...), here's a thread about the indoor line I'm currently building very loosely based on the old Fry's chocolate factory at Keynsham. The factory was connected to the GWR London-Bristol mainline, and had its own Sentinel loco for shunting, now preserved at the nearby Avon Valley Railway. I've been doing some volunteering for the AVR (fundraising and writing articles for the magazine rather than more traditional "hands on" stuff) and developed an interest in both the loco and the story of the factory, and so this plan was conceived...
As I mention on my (WH)WHR thread, the idea is that this will be a small portable layout built on a plastic patio table, so that parts of it can live outside when I'm not using it. It will utilise Faller track and be to a "sort of G" scale, to suit the Playmobil figures who will run the factory - those should appeal to children, but the real "crowd pleaser" should be the factory's production of chocolate balls, to be delivered to punters' hands by train...
That's the theory... Having made a rough sketch I tried it out on the kitchen floor with the plastic version of Faller track to see if it would actually work:
So far, so good... The Dawson box represents the factory itself, and the other one is the factory's on-site power plant. The two will be connected by an overhead pipeline. Where the lorry is standing a road will bisect the layout, crossing the railway at the bottom of the picture, with the idea of recreating the point where the real factory branch crossed the Bitton Road and entered Keynsham station. I'll post some historical photos at some point to give an idea of which bits are based on some sort of reality and which are pure fabrication!
I thought I ought to start with the main factory building - apart from anything else it needs to be able to churn out the chocolate balls (via a sort of home-made marble run) so I needed to make sure that would work. Here's the partially constructed back (or is it front?!) of the factory under construction, with my RH Little John posing for the camera:
The train's obscuring the loading bay, but you can see the bottom of the ball chute, which will be surrounded by goods awaiting dispatch to make it a little less obvious. The Big Big hopper is sporting the crude modifications with which I tested the chocolate delivery mechanism...
And here's the inside, showing just how much is still to be done on this building alone:
The white thing in the foreground is the loading bay canopy. Those photos were taken (in very poor light!) a few weeks ago, and things have moved on a bit since then, but progress is still slower than it needs to be - I've offered to exhibit the thing at the end of April! More photos to follow soon...
All the best,
Andrew.
As promised (well, a little later than promised really...), here's a thread about the indoor line I'm currently building very loosely based on the old Fry's chocolate factory at Keynsham. The factory was connected to the GWR London-Bristol mainline, and had its own Sentinel loco for shunting, now preserved at the nearby Avon Valley Railway. I've been doing some volunteering for the AVR (fundraising and writing articles for the magazine rather than more traditional "hands on" stuff) and developed an interest in both the loco and the story of the factory, and so this plan was conceived...
As I mention on my (WH)WHR thread, the idea is that this will be a small portable layout built on a plastic patio table, so that parts of it can live outside when I'm not using it. It will utilise Faller track and be to a "sort of G" scale, to suit the Playmobil figures who will run the factory - those should appeal to children, but the real "crowd pleaser" should be the factory's production of chocolate balls, to be delivered to punters' hands by train...
That's the theory... Having made a rough sketch I tried it out on the kitchen floor with the plastic version of Faller track to see if it would actually work:
So far, so good... The Dawson box represents the factory itself, and the other one is the factory's on-site power plant. The two will be connected by an overhead pipeline. Where the lorry is standing a road will bisect the layout, crossing the railway at the bottom of the picture, with the idea of recreating the point where the real factory branch crossed the Bitton Road and entered Keynsham station. I'll post some historical photos at some point to give an idea of which bits are based on some sort of reality and which are pure fabrication!
I thought I ought to start with the main factory building - apart from anything else it needs to be able to churn out the chocolate balls (via a sort of home-made marble run) so I needed to make sure that would work. Here's the partially constructed back (or is it front?!) of the factory under construction, with my RH Little John posing for the camera:
The train's obscuring the loading bay, but you can see the bottom of the ball chute, which will be surrounded by goods awaiting dispatch to make it a little less obvious. The Big Big hopper is sporting the crude modifications with which I tested the chocolate delivery mechanism...
And here's the inside, showing just how much is still to be done on this building alone:
The white thing in the foreground is the loading bay canopy. Those photos were taken (in very poor light!) a few weeks ago, and things have moved on a bit since then, but progress is still slower than it needs to be - I've offered to exhibit the thing at the end of April! More photos to follow soon...
All the best,
Andrew.