Garden Railway Forum

The middle of August tends to be the time for the second steamup of the year at the Scorton Bank Railway. Having missed the first, I made a bit of effort for this one, and bought a nice big train, including my new carriage making its first run. Here are some pics

First out is the newest SBR loco, the William purchased about 20 mins after my Superior from IMP models at Elsecar last year

Resident Silver Lady and a goods train

PTLRcecil bought along King Arthur, the mighty Superior that seems to vanquish all other locos in its wake. Its train got steadily longer as the afternoon went on

Didn't get any pics of my Superior running solo (including on a 13 car train), but it do a bit of double heading with King Arthur

Superior and King Arthur

LMSjools bought his Merlin, bought about 30 mins before my Superior from IMP models at Elsecar last year...

Rolling into Scorton Bank off the new-ish bridge

Resident Roundhouse Katie looks nice with my carriages

Katie leads my train round the curve, with my new carriage on the front of the rake


Meanwhile, its once again time for Mr Bond to look away as I show everyone else an absurdly long NWAG train!!


I said King Arthurs train kept getting bigger....By this time it had reached 16 carriages, 60 axles in total!

SLRmidge couldn't make it today, but he was there in spirit

Meanwhile LMSjools was having fun with the On30 layout
Many thanks to SBRArthur for letting the NWAG invade once again. I took quite a bit of video, so I'll be having a youtube video of the event up soonish, first time I have done one for the SBR

love the green William

Great afternoon, many thanks to A for hosting.
and to Ratty for posting
the nice pics, I can hardly wait to see the video.

 :D

Glad you had a good time , wish I could have been there.....

We wished you woz there too

Dont worry midge, the coffee pot got in the way of everything so bluebottle wasent needed.

-shudder- uegh, there arn't enough people on a narrow gauge railway to go in such a long train like that!!

Mr. Bond of the DVLR:57597 wrote:-shudder- uegh, there arn't enough people on a narrow gauge railway to go in such a long train like that!!

11 "carrs" instead of 16 I know, but not all of the 16mm ones are full length bogie coaches.

Then again you wouldn't think there was that many special wizards going to your school but no. The Hogwarts Express is HUGE!

EDIT: That's a fail, that's the Funky diesel on the back not a coach!

The expert on big passenger trains on the narrow gauge used to be the Isle of Man. 30 years ago I saw Isle of Man No.11 Maitland being banked out of Douglas during TT week by No.13 with 14 bogies on the hook - probably 200-210 tons all up. I would guestimate the passenger load at between 500 and 600. It was rather a neat demonstration of what those long platforms at Douglas were built to do, and how much a Beyer 2-4-0T can handle. One nasty feature of Douglas is that you start climbing at 1 in 65 as soon as you cross Nunnery bridge (the half mile post) - not much time to get the fire thoroughly burnt through!

Of course, my dad's generation would talk about the IMR in the mid-1950s sending off the 10:10am Port Erin would go off with 9 carriages on behind 'Mannin' in high season to be followed at 10.40am by one of the medium boiler locomotives with 7 carriages on. Mannin would have been banked as far as Keristal, and probably the 10.40 would get a shove as well. If there was no banker available it was not unknown for 'Mannin' to take 9 up Keristal bank unassisted. However, I would not fancy that on wet rails. Meanwhile, on the other side of Douglas station a joint Peel and Ramsey train would go out double headed. The three trains between them would probably clear 1000 folks out of Douglas in half an hour - and this was when the system was in decline!

I suspect that another twenty years before that the place would have been heaving with humanity at 10.10am on an August weekday morning. I have seen several pics from the 1930s of double headers with probably 14 on as the locos are out by the starting signals on both departure roads!

Peter in AZ

Garratts and Irish railways accepted I still don't feel easy with those NWAG trains... Suppose I'll just have to visit some times and experience them first hand to make up my mind...

Oh and Pete...

Mr. Bond of the DVLR:57597 wrote:-shudder- uegh, there arn't enough people on a narrow gauge railway to go in such a long train like that!!

Every now and again there will be a 13 carr train on the Ffestiniog, 12 more often & two 11 carr trains every day at the moment. There are plenty of people on narrow gauge railways.

Nowadays...

Lovely pics I must say.

Oh & large trains, bring them on. I like to see a loco working rather than idling along. HELLFIRE!!!

The Isle of Man, the Wee Donegal, the Muskerry, and the Cork, Blackrock and Passage were all a bit unusual. The first and last were always predominantly passenger lines, and the Donegal had heavy excursion traffic from 'Derry/Strabane/Stranorlar to the Donegal coast. The Muskerry Tram had heavier than usual local traffic thanks to Blarney Castle and the proximity of the towns it served to Cork City.

The IMR was the biggest passenger carrier of that lot in that from the Edwardian era through to as late as the mid-50s it carried over 1,000,000 passengers a year - the bulk between Whitsun and the middle of September. On a busy day they would have nine or ten locomotives and 65 carriages in service. Then of course, all hell would break loose on Tynwald Fair Day. The Wee Donegal shifted far more goods though, and some of the Ballyshannon excursions were monsters.

On the Welsh side of things, the Ffestiniog ran some monster mixed trains in the 19th century, but until recent times things were relatively restrained on the passenger side. Big passenger trains only became a feature of the Welsh narrow gauge in the mid-to-late 1960s.

Peter in AZ

Strange to think that the Isle of Man is possibly the only British NG line where train lengths have decreased in the preservation era. When I visited in 2002, the train length was only 4 coaches, which is what I usually run with when running trains on my own at home (absolute maximum is 5, then run time starts to be seriously depeated). The Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway ran some pretty hefty passenger trains in its heyday in the 1920's, and also during peak periods right through to the present era, although 10 is the max nowadays because of the platform lengths. I have been on an 11 car train before though.

Part of the reason trains are shorter than they used to be is that except for the Manx Grand Prix and the TT, the season is not as intensive as it used to be. It is also somewhat longer than it was as recently as the 1980s. Up to the 1970s the bulk of passenger landings at Douglas were concentrated into the Easter period, then Whitsun week through to the first week of September. In 1972/3 I seem to think the railway opened for Easter, then again at the beginning of May, and the season ended late September. By 1978 "the season" was going from Easter to late September with a distinct peak in July and August, which say six car sets and a timetabled relief to the 10.10am ex-Douglas and the 4.14pm ex-Port Erin.. Today it seems to run from March to October with an extra tea time (1730) train in high season. This means the whole scheduled service now requires two locos and two sets to run it rather than 3 and 3.

When I was a regular in the Isle of Man in the 1970s three cars was the norm in low season increasing to six at peak periods.  The coaching stock was marshalled into what looked like 'A' and 'B' sets

The 'A' sets were a brake-third (BT), a compo, and a luggage-brake-third (LBT)

The B sets were a BT, a compo, and another BT

In 1977 and immediately after nationalisation there was a tendancy towards five car sets - BT, third, saloon, third, and LBT.  There were usually a couple of spare carriages stored in Birkenhead siding at Port Erin - it seemed to be F10 and 11 a lot of the time - and in road 6 at Douglas..  Also at Douglas a spare set was stored either in road 6, behind the spares or in road 7.  After the station was van - er - rationalised, the spare stock was usually kept in road 5, and it was also easier to access the carriage shed from the main station once the headshunt had a connection facing the station from the mainline.  

Currently it seems to be two or three cars low season, then four or five in high season.  The demise of all but one of the LBTs means the railway has problems handling cycles, and they really do need to get another of the LBTs useable so the railway can offer bike transport.  F39's small, windowed, luggage compartment would be ideal for a wheelchair position or two, but I am loathe to suggest that too loudly or too often as it is the last serviceable MNR passenger vehicle.  The last wheelchair conversion was botched due to the use of softwood to the point that the vehicle (F41) got serious rot problems and had to be scrapped.  

However, I do not see any extention of the current overhaul programme mainly due to the Manx Government being very short of cash right now.  They are dealing with not just with the recession, but also with the Lord of Mann's other Government clawing back more of the Island's VAT revenue to cover "shared" expenses such as defense.  I was very surprised that the railway's season runs from mid-March to early-November this year.  I was expecting it to be cut to back to late-March to early-October as it was in the last cash crunch in the 1990s.

Peter in AZ