The Heybridge Railway, 1889 to 1913

[Richard Gawler]

I have assembled a water column for Heybridge Basin from a Duncan Models kit. This column is described as GER pattern but the design is so plain it ought to pass as generic.


The plywood base is something solid to fix the column onto. I can build up the surrounding ground level with foam board or similar.


The kit provides a base with detail of what I think is stone setts. The grating is a cab grill made for 4mm scale.


The idea of the card underneath is to let me prise the model off the baseboard if I ever want to re-use it somewhere else.


The model will have to stand quite close to the railway if the hose is to reach a water filler in the middle of a loco.

I’ll put off making the hose until after painting. The stash of unbuilt kits is diminishing but I am gaining a collection of almost-but-not-quite-finished models in its place.

 

[Lancastrian]

I can see two ways to continue this workbench thread. I can either try to paint the buffer stop (and each successive model) or just carry on with the building. I’m not very good at painting (might improve!) and I am waiting for warmer weather to spray primer outdoors, so I will carry on with the building . . .

Rewind to last January:



The yard crane for Heybridge Basin is from the Peco kit. I have shortened the jib a bit so the model looks better in the scene, not for any prototypical reason.

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I have based the jib on a crane preserved at Ellesmere Wharf on the Shropshire Union Canal. The steel girders provided for the jib in the kit are wrapped up inside the white styrene to represent a timber beam.

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I have added a brass spindle to attach the two stays. This arrangement seems to be more common than fixing the stays to the frame holding the pulley, as portrayed in the kit.

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The rollers for the chain are brass wire, tube and 14 BA washers.

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This all comes apart for painting.

I have picked up a particularly stupid habit of dipping the brush for Plastic Weld into the bottle of phosphoric acid flux, this being followed by pondering why the plastic joint has fallen apart. Also the brush carries contamination onto the model, hence the stains on the jib. Hopefully the primer will still stick

Richard,

Don't paint the buffer stop, stain it with diluted Indian ink. 1 to 1 with water should suffice, and you can build up layers until you get a nice old and worn look to it.

 

[Richard Gawler]

Aggregates were extracted near Heybridge Basin but I still don't know what they were. I am guessing sand and gravel as found throughout the middle of Essex.

Would almost certainly have been sand and gravel, either from the buried river channels which criss-crossed the area or from estuarial / ancient beach deposits.
This material generally drains very well, unless it contains too much fine sand / silt / clay (which might be the case with material coming from further east where the rivers slowed and lighter particles dropped out.

As-dug, often rounded, aggregate was maybe not the best ballasting material compared to angular 4" down rock or slag due to insufficient large (+ 4") stone to help resist lateral movement but it certainly drained well, and was the staple ballasting material on light railways wherever deposits were found.

In the case of the Middy the (main?) source was just a short distance east of where construction started at Haughley station. where a ballast pit was dug.
The Heybridge Rly would have had to pay more for imported material if local aggregate was not used.

I doubt I will ever discover what came out of the aggregate workings near Heybridge, but I did take a couple of photos in the Gipping Valley (Suffolk) last week.




These deposits are beside some excavations now full of water, near Pipps Ford Lock.

I wonder, is this the sort of stuff we are talking about for ballast?