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4mm Wagon, The Part 1 Opens, Minerals and Hoppers By Geoff Kent
The 4mm Wagon Part 1 Opens, Minerals and Hoppers By Geoff Kent
Soft Cover
86 pages
Copyright 1991
CONTENTS
Introduction1
Chapter 1-First Principles7
Chapter 2-Open Wagons17
Chapter 3-Mineral Wagons45
Chapter 4-Hopper Wagons71
INTRODUCTION:
Despite the valiant efforts over the years of a number of extremely knowledgeable and talented people, goods wagons have tended to remain the poor relation of the model railway world. While endless skill is lavished upon coaches, track, buildings and especially engines, the rich, but often subtle variety of goods wagon types and designs gets surprisingly little attention. I say surprisingly because freight was and is, after all, the bread and butter traffic of the railways in most areas, and the number and variety of goods vehicles has always vastly outweighed the number of passenger-carrying ones.
It is surprising too, because information on both the prototype and the techniques of reproducing it in miniature is not lacking. Perhaps the clue lies in the apparent sameness of the more common goods wagons: 90% of the average steam-age goods train consisted of minerals, opens and vans, and it may be significant that to inject a little variety people seem to concentrate on private-owner wagons (which admittedly were very numerous until the fifties), and private-owner vans (which were anything but), together with more than the usual sprinkling of special-purpose types like glass carriers and weltrols. In this they have been aided and abetted by manufacturers ofready-to-run equipment and, in some cases, kits as well, who, understandably perhaps, have favoured the colourful and the arcane against the drab and the commonplace, which no doubt boosted sales but did little to encourage the accurate representation of typical goods trains, which, curiously enough, did not generally consist of odd, picturesquely-liveried vehicles belonging to a dozen different owners from all points of the compass.
But it isn't my intention to enlarge upon the subject of private-owner vehicles, at least not in the period of their heyday. Anyone who wishes to study that subject can do no better than to read Chris Crofts' scholarly treatise in past numbers of the Model Railway Journal, coupled with Bill Hudson's albums of photographs. Nor am I qualified to discourse at length on early goods vehicles, although, having said that, the basic four-wheeled wagon did not change much in essence throughout the steam era; the vehicles built by British Railways in the first ten years of its existence are quite recognisably descended from those built a hundred years before. By contrast, the changes that have taken place in the last quarter of a century have been far more dramatic, with wagons of advanced design, a return to colourful private-owner liveries, and the virtual elimination of the traditional short-wheelbased, low-capacity vehicles of yesteryear.
Regrettably, perhaps, the period of my closest acquaintance with the original, and of my experience of reproducing it in miniature, coincides with the time when wagon liveries were for the most part at their least inspiring. From 1948 the bulk of the wagon fleet was either bauxite brown for vacuum-fitted and piped stock or pale grey for unfitted vehicles. In service these stimulating colours quickly degenerated to cheerless shades of rust, muck and unpainted wood, thus becoming incidentally far more difficult to reproduce successfully - further reasons, perhaps, fox many modellers' preference for the Golden Age of railways. Even so, the apparently common assumption that the efforts that went into maintaining the gleaming brass and spotless paintwork of locomotives and carriages ever extended to the humble goods wagon is rather misplaced; goods vehicles were usually dirty, never cleaned externally, and frequently scarred by misuse.
It is something of a paradox, however, that the years which saw wagon liveries at their least colourful were also those of just about the greatest variety of wagon types. Remaining pre-and early post-grouping vehicles (in many cases all-wooden) rubbed shoulders with the standard designs of the Big Four, who had gradually diversified into steel and plywood as alternative construction materials. These in turn ran check-by-jowl with British Railways' developments of these traditional designs and the early forerunners of today's hi-tech vehicles, as the railways fought by greater specialisation to attract new traffics that demanded faster and more efficient handling, and to retain old ones for which road transport was an ever more competitive option. The results were all-too-often a short-lived compromise, but served to increase still further the range of vehicles to be seen. Piecemeal modifications to existing vehicles, and design changes in newer batches of established types generated even more variety. And if you take into account the hundred-and-one minor variations in such things as brakes, axleboxes and lettering, it is rather to be wondered at that any mixed goods train could ever have contained two identical vehicles.
The problem remains that for all these differences, a train of, say, 13-ton high-sided open wagons is still a train of virtually indistinguishable vehicles, especially if they arc all nominally the same colour. You need to look pretty closely to tell a Southern Railway open from a Great Western one, or an early BR Lowfit from an LNER one, or for that matter an LMS cattle van from its Midland predecessor, and at first glance you may not be able to tell them apart. For this reason it's quite understandable that many modellers are going to be less than totally fascinated by the minutiae of wagon design, and will content themselves with putting kits together straight out of the box, rather than spending valuable time studying ways in which they can be adapted to produce a wider range of related, and often, frankly, not very dissimilar types.
My intention, therefore, in the following pages is threefold: first, to outline the construction of a selection of kits more or less as the manufacturers intended, covering as wide a field of materials as possible. Second, to assist those who are looking to broaden the scope of their wagon fleet by suggesting ways in which some of those same kits can be modified by judicious butchery and modest scratchbuilding. And third, by more extensive scratchbuilding, to produce types of vehicle which are so far poorly represented in either kit or ready-to-run form.
Wagons to be considered will all have been built in the period I900-i960, and mostly post-1923, since this fits in with my own chosen modelling period of the mid-to-late fifties. This, I'm afraid, automatically tends to reduce, or even eliminate the representation of some manufacturers' production, namely those whose kits are largely confined to pre-grouping types: Model Wagon Co., Slaters, D&S and Coopercraft all fit into this category, and I apologise now to anyone who feels slighted as a result. But many of the techniques used will apply to earlier and later vehicles, just as the technology of wagon-building itself made only gradual advances until quite recently.
I should also make the point that some of the models described have been built over a period of some years, and the kits and proprietary items involved may not in all cases still be available, or may be marketed under another name. The history of Airfix kits and ready-to-run products, together with Mainline, and their various inheritors, becomes quite involved, as does the saga of the dynasty that began with Ian Kirk's 'basic kits' in the 1970s. The same applies to small parts manufacturers, and if at times the reader becomes confused, I can only plead that, as a consumer outside the trade, I do too. And although I think I have a fair grasp of the overall picture of 4m scale kits and bits, I can't claim to know every manufacturer's range backwards, and there are sure to be things available of which I'm blissfully unaware. In any case, it's a constantly changing picture, so anything I say today might well not be true tomorrow.
With these provisos, my aim will be to produce a representative range of wagon types, such as might be seen in the average pick-up goods of the period. As far as possible I shall try to avoid regional variations, but you may find odd references to the railways around Wrexham, since some of the wagons have been built to suit the long-term objective of a layout somewhere on the Shrewsbury & Chester line in Western Region days. I shall also steer clear of vehicles which would only, or mainly, be seen in full trainloads (steel coil wagons and iron ore tipplers, for instance), together with one-offs or types with very limited working patterns. But when it comes to variety, a mixed goods might include almost anything, and some of the less usual, but still quite numerous types are fair game: pallet brick wagons, for example (over 1400 built), steel-bodied bulk grain vans (827 built in all by the GWR, the LMS and BR) or Conflat L's (2,242).
But whether you're building kits straight out of the box or seeking to introduce a bit of individuality by constructing variations on a theme, background information is indispensable. There are few kits indeed which answer in their instructions all the queries the builder is likely to have, whether he is an apprentice or a time-served craftsman. Livery details are often sketchy, and you will search in vain as a rule for guidance as to possible variations in detail, let alone in other batches of similar wagons. Occasionally the information is downright misleading.
Unfortunately, the days are gone when you could pop down to the local goods yard and observe at first hand details of the wagon stock, which might range from the latest vacuum-filled pallet van (state-of-the-art in 196o) to a pre-group, or even Victorian survivor put out to grass as a stationary stores van against the blocks in the furthest corner of the depot. Even as recently as the early eighties, there was still a tremendous variety of wagons of traditional design in departmental use, while internal-user fleets on privately-owned works sidings offered numerous gems of former revenue-earning types pensioned off decades previously. The lucky few have been saved for posterity on preserved lines, but even these organisations have tended to look askance at anything built in the last fifty years or so that can't be adorned with a private-owner livery or two-foot-high letters proclaiming the identity of one of the Big Four railways or their constituents.
Nowadays, the chances of finding more than an odd one or two vehicles of traditional style on their wheels are slim indeed, and even these are likely to be of BR build. Even the familiar grounded van body is nearly a thing of the past, at least on railway property, though a safari round the farmyards in almost any part of the country can still produce something of interest. My own small village can boast vans of NB, GE and GC (actually MS&L!) origin, all in quite reasonable repair - certainly good enough for detailed measurements to be taken, given the (sometimes rather bemused) agreement of the owner. While all such grounded stores are vans of one sort or another, the range is really enormous, the only common denominator being the possession of a roof. So while ordinary box vans predominate, you can see horse boxes, cattle vans, brake vans, fish vans, meat vans, containers- you name it, there's one somewhere.
All the same, the most readily accessible sources of information are in published form. I shall include a selective bibliography at the end of Volume 2, selective because it will list only the books that I have personally found useful in pursuing my own interests. Even so, some gaps remain: the definitive book on Southern Railway wagons is still waiting to be published, for example. If you have access to past numbers of the various model railway magazines you will find a huge range of drawings and articles available to you, though you may have to go back to the fifties to get anything like a complete picture. Unfortunately, the BR/OPC service of copies of original works drawings seems to have fallen by the wayside; a great pity, since the scope was truly monumental and the service first class. You were hard to please if you couldn't find what you were looking for here, the only problem being the difficulty of pinpointing it from the often sparse description in the catalogues.
Finally in this introduction, I think I ought to make a few points about some aspects of my style of wagon construction. I try to model the body as faithfully as possible in most respects, but I have to admit to a few short-cuts here and there in the underframe department. Working on the premise that if you can't see it on a photograph of the original you're unlikely to miss it if it's not on a model, I'm inclined to simplify the brake rigging on a fitted wagon for instance. Not to the extent of omitting the cross-shaft, or some semblance of the yokes between the shoes on clasp-braked wagons, but I stop short of tying them all together. I also try to make sure that dropping the lever would actually apply the brakes rather than lift them off, something which has not always been appreciated by all kit manufacturers, it seems. But if handbuilt brake gear complete with every bolt, pin, link and lever is to your taste, I fear you may be disappointed.
For couplings I always fit scale three-link or screw ones, using mainly Roxey, Maygib or PC etchings; say what you like, they look better than the automatic variety, although they can be mightily frustrating, especially at arm's length in poor light. Scale couplings really deserve sprung buffers, I suppose, but I don't use these for goods stock as a rule, at least not with short wheelbase vehicles. Buffers are a slightly difficult area, in fact: over the years some of those included in kits have been pretty dire, and although most of the common ones are available as separate white metal castings, they aren't all. So sometimes it's a case of make do or adapt.
If buffers are sometimes a compromise, however, compensation is almost a closed book to me. I have always worked in EM and compensation is frankly unnecessary in anything other than P4/S4/18.83 : if you can't make them stay on the track with overscale flanges, compensation is unlikely to help. Some people don't even compensate goods stock in S4, preferring a bit of slop in the axleboxes. Smoothly-laid pointwork, parallel, free-running axles, and a bit of added ballast in the lightest vehicles are far more important in achieving the illusion of weight and momentum. However, it would be a serious omission in a book of this kind to ignore the subject of compensation entirely in view of the growing number of modellers for whom it is indispensable. It might be thought presumptuous of someone with no real experience of the subject to try to tell others how to do it, for while I can put together a 30-wagon train of uncompensated vehicles and be reasonably assured of propelling it successfully first time through EM point and crossing work, I can't say the same for compensated stock simply because I've never done it. But I have conducted some experiments with compensation on a few of the vehicles built while this book has been in preparation, and have reached a few empirical conclusions. I can't make any claim to authority on the subject, but the ones I've built in this form do run, so I must have done something right.
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