John Minter

The obscurities of locomotive history have fascinated me for many years. We live in the age of information technology and have hitherto unknown opportunities for pursuit of historical research, and although it seems that a detailed historical analysis of even the most minor railway has been researched and written up, there are still, even now, little surprises to be found. In the pursuit of the unusual, I’ve found myself drawn to the unlikely appearances of locomotives on lines for which they were not intended. Some of the lovely juxtapositions are well known – the pair of delightful little moguls that found their way to the Midland and South Western Junction Railway are a far cry from their Antipodean cousins. Also, for example, the Highland Railway’s ‘Yankee Tanks’ and the splendid Barry Railway 0-8-0 with its rather Nordic round cab side windows. Others are more obscure and really do take some digging out. The sometime Ledsham and Hereford Railway falls into this category and the company’s catholic taste in railway engines has attracted scant attention from the world of railway journalism over the years.

A brief reference in the remnants of a copy of The Locomotive Magazine of around 1910 that I found in the Ashford Library railway collection, (sadly this wonderful asset was scandalously frittered away by the Powers that Be and the town is now a lesser place for its loss), led me to the discovery that a pair of dainty 4-4-0s of very obvious Scots provenance could once be seen making their way through the orchards, hop yards and sunny pastures of Herefordshire. This, then, is my attempt to depict one of them in O gauge.

The loco is, I hope, a reasonably accurate model of one of the 4-4-0s designed by William Cowan for the Great North of Scotland Railway. It is well documented that six of these were supplied by Neilson of Glasgow in 1866, ostensibly as a goods locomotives. Less well recorded are a further two engines that Neilson found on their hands in an advanced stage of construction, and beyond the means of the impecunious GN of SR. It seems that the Ledsham and Hereford were able to secure both of these engines for a very favourable price. Thus the locos found themselves in very different surroundings to their brethren – in a part of the country where the Spartan weather protection was less of a discomfort for their drivers and firemen. In their later years I understand they were given Derby boilers and fittings similar to those of the Avonside 0-4-4 tank engines described in my last article. As such, they must have been pretty things and with their pierced splashers and Johnson cab and boiler mountings, they would have borne more than a passing resemblance to Johnson’s rebuilt Great Eastern Sinclair 4-2-2s. I know nothing of their eventual demise and they do not seem to have made it to Swindon in 1923 for the great cull of non-standard engines.

The model is largely scratch-built and is made up of brass parts produced from my own Plastikard patterns using a pantograph miller, mainly by John Taylor of Sowerby Bridge (a very friendly service and thoroughly recommended- he has all my patterns should anyone else fancy one of these engines). Some parts were cut out by Alan Gibson, a long time ago, but he no longer undertakes this work. John Taylor made all of the plate work, with the exception of the frames. These were cut out using a piercing saw, including the delicate pierced splashers and beading. John also made the nickel-silver coupling and connecting rods, to which I added the cotters and security bolts. Many minor fittings came from Laurie Griffin, who kindly compared the parts that I suggested from his catalogue with photos and drawings and either endorsed my choices or recommended alternatives. They are, invariably, superb little castings. The boiler is acrylic tube – I couldn’t find any metal tube of the correct diameter and doubted my ability to roll one well enough. This slides telescopically into available tubing forming the brass boiler-smokebox jointing ring and smokebox wrapper, which fortunately has flush rivets.

I’m not going to go over every stage of the construction blow-by-blow as everything is fairly conventional. The construction is mainly soft-soldered by my usual application of an excess of solder and lengthy removal of the surplus with a Minicraft drill and grinding/cutting tools. Major components are bolted together with nuts and setscrews of various BA sizes, all intended to enable easy reduction into subassemblies to assist painting. The loco does not lend itself readily to this, however, as many components bridge or pass through the various sub-assemblies and these are either sprung into place afterwards, in the case of much of the pipe-work, or glued in using an adhesive that can be fairly easily broken away if required.

The tender wheels are Slaters, but I’ve used some 10-spoke carriage wheels as they were far closer in profile to the rather delicate wheels of the prototype. Also, the slender outside frames would have made the usual massive 3/16 in axles and horrible inside bearings and frames very obvious, so the wheelsets have proper bearings in the axleboxes, which are arranged to drop out of the frame cut-outs should the need arise. Axles are made up of telescopic sections of K&S tubing and rod. Pick-ups are phosphorbronze strip rubbing on the tops of the tender wheels and power is transferred to the loco by means of the water pipes. These are fixed rigidly to the tender and rub against some sprung wires projecting back from beneath the ash-pan and virtually invisible from any normal viewing angle.

The bogie splashers were taxing things to get to work properly and I’m afraid the cylinders are about 1/16 inch too far apart but this does enable a tiny bit of swing in the bogie. The bogie pivots with no side play and the frames behind the motion plate are slightly narrowed, enabling the driving wheelset to have some degree of sideplay. The driving wheels are sprung. The coupled wheels are driven by a small Mashima mounted vertically in the firebox, in an attempt to hide the worm and worm wheel. Pick-ups are, again, phosphor-bronze strips rubbing on the tops of the driving and coupled wheels and the motor and pick-ups can be removed as a self-contained power egg by undoing two screws. Six foot radius curves can just be traversed without shorting at the bogie. Having no lathe at the time, the cylinders were turned up from some brass billet for me at a local industrial estate and I soldered on brass rings at each end, drilled for 0.6mm brass pins with heads turned down in the mini drill to represent the bolts. These are also present in the hardwood buffer beams, where they secure the guard irons and coupling plates.

In the future, should a boatload of time arrive, I might experiment with putting a motor in the tender and a flexible drive to the coupled wheels. At the very least, I’ll address the weight distribution which isn’t as it should be, and try to get more of the tender’s weight onto the coupled axle.

The decision to build this wee beastie was encouraged by finding a simple (although not very accurate) 4mm scale drawing in a book. Contact was made with the Great North of Scotland Railway Society, who were very helpful and provided me with an abstract of the later Cowan class C, which had many shared design features. A general arrangement drawing was later procured which showed the intimate parts in more detail, including the rather unusual Clark firebox design. The pursuit of clean combustion led this engineer to do away with the brick arch and to direct steam through a series of small jets at front and rear to create draught. The manifold for these has been modelled, as has the rather strange firebox door with bottom pivot and long vertical handles. This feature is shown in broad brush on the drawing, but with no clear indication of how the levers were actually released. The search for a Scots engine driver of some 180 years of age being fruitless, and the time machine being only capable of forward motion, the mystery remains. Also noticeable is the way the spectacle plate is completely flush with the face of the firebox back-plate; the familiar brass rim around the back-head is completely absent.

Cab spectacle rims are thin slices of .303 spent cartridge cases found locally whilst walking the White Cliffs and the tender tank filler is another slice of brassy ordnance.

The livery is the green of the fictitious Ledsham & Hereford Railway, to match my 0-4-4 tank. The name The Lawley, is one of the northerly hills in the Shropshire border country, after which all the engines are named. Narrow Planet produced the Fairlie-styled nameplates and, also adapted some of their other artwork to make some appropriate works plates, showing sequential number and based on that of the Neilson 0-6-0 preserved in Finland.

The painting and lining is by the inestimable Bob Fridd, whose patience I have severely taxed on this project, and to whom I am very indebted indeed.

Especial thanks also goes to the East Kent O Gauge Group who have provided so much support, friendship and camaraderie.