GWR water tanks & footbridge

Before painting.

This layout keeps putting up challenges. You know that saying – if you want it done, do it yourself. Not available as kits, these tanks had to be scratch built. This was the case where the water tanks were concerned. Commonly known as Brunel style tanks, I had a go at building them with a little trickery thrown in! The models mostly consisted of styrene, with the cast iron parts of the columns dressed with copper wire.  Research showed that there were many size tanks made but all had a similar styling with regard to the cast iron work. I needed one for Penwith Junction, and being  a main line station needed to be larger rather than smaller.

Applying the printed cast iron looped frames.

The difficult area was the cast iron looped frame directly under the tank. My solution was to draw up a colour image design on my PC and print it out on matte photo paper. Trimmed and glued on with a degree of weathering, it looks convincing.

While I was on the tank thing, I made up an all steel type to present to a friend who has helped me out with reference books, videos and photocopies of relevant material that I needed for the Porthminster project. He now has a nice matching set for his GWR main line station.

The tank was of the same style but with the all steel "I" beams. The two cranes are from the Ratio range, shortened slightly to sit on top of the passenger platforms, complete with fire devils. These combustion fires were used to help prevent water freezing the pipes when not in use between visiting engines during inclement weather.

Another item of purely Great Western style was the footbridge. I procured a kit from Scalelink, but I was somewhat confused by the instruction sheets and construction methods. I assembled it my way with a few modifications along the way. One being that it was to be wider than the kit instructed. Fortunately there was enough length in the etched brass lattice sheet supplied to account for this.

Also I added guttering and downpipes, plain ends to the canopy at the bottom of the steps and a few tweaks to the flimsy canopy frames to make them stronger.

Acombination  of styrene and brass works for me. Supaglue is the answer here. whatever it takes to achieve the result.

It worked out well and sits proudly across the platforms matching in with buildings as they were at Radley Station, which the buildings were modelled from.

The completed footbridge.

The layout is now starting to look more like a railway with curtains made and clipped on with press studs. A must for top presentation at Exhibitions. There is still another coat of Carriage Green to be applied around the fascia areas above the curtains.

Looking from junction end of Penwith Station.

Looking from the goods yard end of Penwith. The four doll signal gantry
sit proudly on the platform ramp. Another Scenecraft Signal box is
place opposite with accompanying point rodding and ground signals.

Till next time - good modelling!!!