billbedford wrote:If I've read the drawing I have correctly, the original Midland bogies were not exactly robust. The drawing shows a channel solebar instead of the angle on the original builds.
The is a photo of a carriage fitted with these bogies on page 273 of Lacey and Dow. It's interesting because all the underframe details are picked out in a pale colour.
That must be in Volume 2 (which I don't have, yet). But it is noteable that on, say pages 114 and 115 in Volume 1 there are some 6, 8 and 12 wheel carriages (the 8 wheelers having the earlier 8' not 10' Clayton bogie) with the underframe painted in a pale colour possibly a light grey. What is interesting is that all are posed on the same section of track in front of clearly the same two trees, and with the track inlaid in some sort of hard surface, and exactly the same location appears in many previous photos; this was clearly the spot for photography of carriages presumably just outside the works at Derby.
However, looking at the final chapter (the one pertinent to the originals of the Ratio carriages) a markedly different location is used for the posed carriage portraits. The rails are now exposed not inlaid, and the two trees, with or without leaves, are no longer in the background. Plus - frustratingly for this thread, the carriages are now painted ready for the road, as it were, not in some sort of "photographic grey" or equivalent for the underframe.
I wonder why the change, and then from what you say Bill, the change back?! Bit off topic but I have checked three times through Vol 1 and the more you look the more apparent this anomaly becomes!
Those earlier photos with the light underframes had been my only pointer to V hanger arrangements etc that I was looking at when earlier posts were made in this thread. I am now thinking a copy of Volume 2 needs to be added to the collection...!
All the best
Neil