Works Locos and Industrial Narrow Gauge Railways
In a larger works, particularly those handling heavy materials, an internal railway was often useful and many industries found it worthwhile to own their own locomotives for moving wagons around the works. There have been some excellent model layouts based entirely on works railways, generally of the larger industries such as steel works or docks. The 0-4-0 tank engine, often with a small, sometimes non existent coal bunker was probably the most popular type, although 0-6-0 tanks were also used. The examples shown below are (left) a small saddle tank engine owned by a brewery and (right) the popular if diminutive Sentinel shunting engine.
Fig ___ Works steam locos
An engine shed would normally be provided, which served as a workshop for general maintenance of the engine(s), but as the engines were small the shed was correspondingly small compared to a main line loco shed. These engines did not venture onto the railway proper but could access shared 'exchange sidings' associated with the works.
Where there was a risk of fire they generally either used engines fitted with spark arrestors on the chimney, or they used a 'fireless' locomotive, which was charged with superheated steam at a central boiler away from the dangerous area of the works.
Fig ___ Standard gaunge 'fireless' steam loco & narrow gauge loco with spark arrestor
By the 1920s there were quite a few petrol engined locomotives in use, building on designs dating to before World War One, and from the late 1930s these became increasingly common. There were some surprisingly small engines built to run on standard gauge lines, intended for pulling wagons and other loads about inside a works area, not for use on the railway proper. The example shown below is a 1920 McEwan, Pratt & Co standard gauge petrol or paraffin engined factory loco. I feel the cab is rather high, making it appear smaller than it actually is, the illustration is taken from an advert in The Locomotive magazine.
Britain was a major supplier of railway engines to other countries (in many cases the railway itself was owned by firms based in the UK) so small engines of this type, as well as larger main line engines, were a regular export. This makes an interesting wagon load for a drop-centre wagon heading for the docks, although the light cab would be removed from the above example. They would (presumably) have rail laid on the bed of the wagon to protect the flanges of the wheels.
In the post war era there were still plenty of British industries with internal rail networks and engine builders to supply them with works locomotives. The example shown below left is a small Ruston 0-4-0 (the prototype on which the sketch is based worked in a post-war house coal depot), the larger machine on the right is a post war Sentinel type favoured by heavier industries and docks.
Fig ___ Works petrol and diesel locos
You can often get away with continental models for standard gauge 'works locomotives', I bought a couple of Tomix 0-6-0 diesel shunters to work a dock area, these are slightly over-size (Japanese N is to a scale of 1:150) but looked acceptable and ran beautifully.
Narrow Gauge Systems
Narrow gauge wagons with tipper bodies, hauled by small petrol engined locomotives (and occasionally steam engines) were very common in a number of industries, gas works, electrical cable works, glass works, brick works and medium and heavy engineering works all made use of the narrow gauge railway, which could negotiate very tight curves but carry a useful load of several tons.
Narrow gauge rail systems were common in quarries, both to support the cranes and also to transport the recovered material. The photo below left is low resolution cropped image I found on the Wikimedia Commons (it has been released into the public domain by G-MAN). It shows a typical scene in a sand quarry recreated at the Amberley working museum. The older steam locomotive shown below right runs on similar track, by the 1930s the norm was a small petrol engined loco but some of these small steam locomotives lasted in use until after the Second World War.
Fig ___ Light quarry railway and stock with sketch of a steam loco
The side tipping wagons shown are a very common type called a Jubilee, although this actually refers to the oval chassis and the track they run on. The Jubilee wagons and track were built to 2 foot gauge but the chassis was sometimes modified for use on other gauges (in one case the axles were extended through the chassis to run on nearly standard gauge line, the wheels were outside the chassis leaving the bearings on the inside). The basic oval chassis could be adapted in various ways, at one sand pit they used pairs of these chassis to make bogie flat wagons to carry bagged dried sand from the works to the railway siding for loading onto standard gauge wagons.
The petrol engined loco was probably the most common, these were built to run on tracks down to about 15 inch gauge, although the two foot gauge was (I believe) the most common industrial narrow gauge in the UK). Narrow gauge light railway systems, often based on redundant military narrow gauge track, were widely used in various mining and quarrying industries, the ex military track was designed to be lifted and relaid so it was well suited to this work. To run on these tracks various companies produced diminutive petrol engined locos, the example shown is a Lister, running on 15 inch gauge track and in use in the 1930s at a road building job.
Fig ___ Lister petrol loco for a small brick works, quarry or building site
The standard driving position was as shown above, with a seat on one side, so the operator could see in either direction just by turning his head. Some later versions had a simple metal cab but small open engines of this type remained in use at least into the 1970s at smaller works. The example shown below runs on 2 foot gauge track.
Fig ___ Typical small petrol engined loco and side tippers as used in smaller brick and tile works
There were many designs of small wagons used on these lines, including fixed-bodies with the lower part of the sides hinged to empty sideways, various designs of more or less rectangular body on various chassis used for tippling, so basically you can knock out what ever you like and it will probably resemble one or other prototype. The examples shown below are the side tipper type (top row) and a coal tub (bottom left), the open wagon with raised ends (bottom right) was used at brick works and lime quarries to take the materials to the kilns.
Fig ___ Typical narrow gauge wagons
Some works used small-wheeled trolleys pulled using a rigid tow-bar by small locos running on narrow gauge lines to transport things from place to place. An example would be an electrical cable works which used special wheeled cradles to move the heavy drums about. This offers the possibility of including movement (a small works engine or tractor towing the drum on its cradle), but reversing would be tricky for continuous operation.
Fig ___ Lifting and transporting cable drums
For an OO gauge layout there is 9mm gauge track and points with narrow gauge sleepers available from Peco, the engines can be represented using an N Gauge loco with the cab sawn off and a new cab made up from thin metal and fitted in its place. Fleichmann offer a pair of N Gauge side tipping wagons which would pass muster for such an 009 line.
There are no commercial models of industrial stock available in British N scale at the time of writing. however Peco offer some narrow gauge wagons designed to run on Z Gauge track and people have made some lovely narrow gauge layouts using Z Gauge track and mechanisms. Z Gauge uses a scale of 1:220, so the track is 6mm gauge, which corresponds to just under three feet in N, which is slightly wide for the more common 2 foot gauge systems common in Britain. More recently T Gauge, which has a scale of 1:450 and runs on 3mm gauge track has appeared, at the time of writing this is very new and I understand rather expensive, but if anyone produces cheap flexi-track this would serve for a 15 inch gauge line (of which there were quite a few).
The alternative is to make your own track up, although (in my case at least) this has to be a non-working representation. For Jubilee all-metal track (which came as ready made 'set track' units) Slaters 20x30 thou plastic strip sleepers with rails of 10x20 thou strip (glued on edge) looks acceptable, especially if you half bury it in dirt and scrub. To get the spacing I used an odd length of strip wood that happened to be near enough 4mm square, this had been bought to make some packing crates for yard clutter. I cut blocks from the strip, glued down the sleepers, glued one rail onto these then used the blocks to position the second rail. Note the sleepers and the rail are 'rust' colour so paint them before adding the ballast.
To make the oval Jubilee wagon chassis one option is to use 1mm slices cut from a tube of about 7mm diameter (external) squeezed until it will slip over a bit of 4mm square wood or metal. The wheels can be represented by slices cut from small diameter tube or rod (about 1mm diameter) glued to the inside of the chassis (if the body does not cover the base you can add axles from thin rod or wire, but you can get away with not having them in N).
Tipper bodies are not easy, especially the empty ones, loaded tippers can be easily made by making a 'load' from wood and adding a paper strip around the base and paper ends with scraps of postcard glued on for the end supports. I did once make a couple of empty tippers with thick metal foil (cut from a pie dish) formed over a carved wooden former with ends of the same foil glued on with Evostick and trimmed when dry, but they were not a great success. I used a block cut from the corner of some planed wood, so the sides end up at 90 degrees to each other. I cut the base square so it was stable on the desk and rounded off the top edge a bit to get the curved base of the tipper body. A better option would be to make them from plastic card, you need a male former and a female 'pusher' (this can be just a hole the right size). Place some plastic card under the grill (on a low light) until it goes all floppy, drop this onto the former and push down with the female part of the mold. Many years ago I could make aircraft canopies in this way that came out ok, but I haven't tried this technique for over thirty years now and cannot remember all the lessons I had to learn at the time.
You can of course take another approach, the example sketched below is a simple rolling wagon tipler from a post war Scottish line. The wagon is rolled into the cage, which is then pulled by the electric motor on the gantry so it rolls over the pit, empytying the wagon. The girders on which the cage rolls are at a slight angle so when the motor is released the cage rolls back in line with the track. Simple and rather elegant, and it gets round the problem of making tipper wagons.
Fig ___ Simple wagon tippler for a narrow gauge line
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