Traffic and trains (still at the armchair modelling stage...)

There is a part of me that finds planning a model railway more interesting than actually building it.  I read History at university, which may help explain this.  Anyway, having got together a fictitious history for my fictitious railway to a fictitious town, it is time to think about the sort of traffic the railway might generate, and what locomotives and rolling stock I will need.

Passenger traffic - I reckon three trains per day at most.  By the late 1950s the typical Border Country branch line train, where they still existed, would be made up of a single brake third (most often a Gresley corridor coach, or sometimes one of the newfangled BR Mk.1s), and a motley assortment of vanfits and four wheeled parcels vans.  That shouldn't blow the budget.

Goods traffic - stone trains would probably be made up of short wheelbase 24 ton hoppers.  Maximum train length I can accommodate is 10 wagons plus a brake van.  I plan to build two rakes of wagons, one empty and one loaded with the distinctive red stone produced by Harden Quarry.  A train of empties arrives at the station, reverses and is propelled into the quarry sidings (i.e. the fiddle yard).  The locomotive then draws loaded wagons back into the station, runs round and departs.  Not exactly the most exciting operation, but at least it gives viewers something else to watch if I ever take Belstone to an exhibition.  I may be getting ahead of myself here...

Daily pick-up goods - 16 ton minerals for the local coal merchant, Vanfits with animal feed and other agricultural essentials, and the odd open wagon.  In one of my boxes of bits I found a Ratio kit for a small oil terminal, so perhaps my coal merchant might have diversified into fuel oil.  This would give me the chance to run the two very nice Peco tank wagons that I found in another box of stuff.

Livestock?  In rapid decline by 1962: in that year British Railways reduced the number of stations handling livestock from two and a half thousand to two hundred.  But there was (and still is) a large cattle market at Wooler, and I can imagine some farmers continuing to use the railway to move cattle to market for as long as they were able. So a couple of cattle vans, and the facilities to handle them, would not be totally out of place. The Farish BR standard cattle van is a particularly fine model. Being XP rated, cattle vans would most likely have been attached to the regular passenger service and shunted off at Wooler.  There might have also been the odd horsebox turn up: perhaps containing hunters, for the purpose of hunting the Belstone Fox.

So that's the trains and traffic patterns sorted. What about locomotives?  This being an entirely fictitious railway, I can run whatever I like. However, I am trying to recreate the feel of the long-lost Northumbrian branches, and having the 'right' motive power is I think an important part of that.  So who would provide motive power for a branch line from Berwick-on-Tweed?  Almost certainly Tweedmouth (52D), closed in June 1966. What would Tweedmouth have been able to turn out for the Belstone branch in the summer of 1962? Ignoring the 'big' engines (A2s and V2s, which would have spread the track underneath them long before reaching Wooler), we are left with two types:  half a dozen Gresley J39s (all long-time Tweedmouth residents), and five Ivatt 2MT 2-6-0s, displaced from various other sheds in early 1962.  Hence my choice of date.  A few months earlier and J39s would have had a monopoly.

Isn't the Internet a wonderful thing?  No need to dig about in old Ian Allan ABCs any more.  I just went to the excellent BR Database, and in a few seconds I had the entire 52D loco allocation for June 1962 in front of me.

As previously mentioned, I already have a J39.  It is an older Union Mills model, not especially detailed and to my mind the proportions are not quite right.  It looks a little narrow from the front.  But it runs well, can apparently be converted to DCC without too much hassle, and a bit of detailing should see it looking more like a scale model locomotive and less like a pre-war Hornby Dublo model that has shrunk in the wash.  Ivatt 2MT is on the list of forthcoming releases by Graham Farish, along with a J39 (in case the Union Mills project doesn't work out)... and a 24 ton stone hopper.  Bless them.

I suppose that by 1962 the passenger service might have been dieselised, almost certainly with a 2-car Metro-Cammell DMU (Farish again), but I can't see a lot of operational interest in that.  Perhaps one for exhibitions, to be brought out towards the end of the day when everything else has stopped running properly.  I can't imagine diesels being used on the branch freight services at that date, though I like the look of the new Dapol BRCW Type 2s.  But as things stand, a J39 and a 2MT should handle pretty much all Belstone's needs.  Dear Santa....