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Baseboards

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2015 9:59 am
by jon price
Well, with several items of rolling stock part completed (ie not completed) it was obviously time to address the issue of baseboards. My first attempt (DEMU challenge, failed to run) was much too large scale, depicting a fictional mainline junction, and the baseboards I built were not brilliant. A site visit, and re-assement of maps, convinced me that I could, and should, attempt an actual location. In addition there was the last birthday for which a (relatively) expensive present was likely. So I drew up the plans and ordered baseboards from Grainge and Hodder Ltd.

The transition from basic sketched plan with dimensions to design of components was very smooth, with just an emailed jpeg, and a couple of telephone conversations. From that point the manufacture took a matter of days./ The boards are laser cut from good quality ply and arrived like a big jigsaw to assemble. The basic rectangular boards are straightforward, but the main board was quite complex. Despite this the pieces fit together perfectly and produce a square end product which would otherwise be beyond my capability, and would have taken up far too much modelling (or prevaricating) time.

The layout will aim to look like the terminus of the Buckley Railway/Wrexham, Mold and Connah's Quay Railway at Connah's Quay c1906. At this point the WMCVQR had just been absorbed by the Great Central, and there was also a link direct from the docks to the LNWR. The Buckley Railway had a ruling gradient of 1 in 28, but this was climbing away from the docks, so the track will be all level, which should make the building process easier. The back of the layout will be the embankment of the main Chester to Holyhead line of the LNWR. The Buckley railway, after careering down the steep incline from Buckley Mountain dives under a very low bridge and then splits, one side going into sidings on the old quay, and the other going round a 2 1/2 chain curve onto the main docks.

The photo shows the baseboards for the old quay. The rest of the docks are off to the left of the picture. The boards have been dry assembled and the track is just for scale.
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http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/b/bu ... ndex.shtml
http://www.graingeandhodder.co.uk/store ... ducts.html

Re: Baseboards

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2015 12:09 pm
by John Bateson
Do you have "The Buckley Railway Album"?
John

Re: Baseboards

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2015 12:45 pm
by jon price
Yes. There are some good images in it. As far as published sources go there is very little. The Album, Boyd's recent book on the WMCQR; plus for details of industry and hence traffic, Pritchard The Making of Buckley and District (2006), and Conolly's Life in the Victorian brickyards of Flintshire and Denbighshire (2003) are all I've been able to find.

I'm intending to visit the Flintshire Record Office soon to look at more material. I also spent some time photographing the Old Quay Inn, only to find that it was completely rebuilt some time after the 20s! I now have several photos of its earlier appearance thanks to the Archive. A lot of detail can be gleaned from the Buckley Album images, but I'm hoping there is more, or a couple of buildings will have to be highly speculative. The hand cranes were quite hard to interpret until I saw an article on Deganwy Quay along the coast at Conwy in the LNWR Journal. There appears to be an identical crane still extant there despite the quayside redevelopment, which I'm hoping to get a look at after my archive visit.

Archive Horror Baseboard Massacre

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 11:16 am
by jon price
Well it had to happen. Working from a GCR survey I had a pretty good fix on the track layout and relationship to buildings. Then I visited the Flintshire County Archive. Amongst the excellent additional stuff I turned up was an LNWR survey of the main line from Queensferry to Connah's Quay. The embankment for this forms the back of my layout. The new map was much more detailed, larger scale, and by the look of things much more accurate. The result was that my finely engineered laser cut baseboard for the quay area had to be attacked with a tenon saw.
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Re: Baseboards

Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2017 1:09 pm
by jon price
Finally got all the boards done for the first phase (possibly). Difficulty of assembling them in the limited headroom had not occurred to me, but it all proved just about possible.
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Almost ready to lay track.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 3:04 pm
by jon price
After a number of false starts, plan modifications, lacunae and general failure to focus the Connah's Quay baseboards are almost ready for tracklaying. The backstop for the layout is the LNWR Chester to Holyhead mainline, and this will probably be the first track laid. An amount of scenery will feature on the other side of the embankment in addition to the casette fiddleyard. The embankment substructure is finished, but obviously the sides require scenic add-ons.

If you think the rail bridge is a bit low, well that is because it is: The headway is shown on the 1906 plan as 11' 9". The extra width is to accomodate the road which ran alongside the track. This had a 7' headway. I will probably ease the track headway a bit so that I can run some non-prototypical locos under Rule 1, but eventually I should be able to run to prototype if I manage to complete the scratchbuilds of the especially flat WM&CQR locos such as No8 that ran on this line

Re: Baseboards

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:30 pm
by nberrington
Great start - for me overcoming the inertia of baseboard construction and all the head scratching that goes into conceiving the layout is the biggest hurdle.

Looks like the heavy lifting is done and you can start construction of a railway!