Page 9 - November December 2011

MOTIVE POWER MUSEUM
W. A. Corkill
Pictures of roundhouse construction and details may be left to explain themselves, but instead of cutting out four separate inspection pits between the rails I decided to fit one large sub­baseboard under the whole area and then to build up pit walls above it. Rail ends usually had no track stops or bumpers but I decided to fit substantial bumpers to connect with Kadee coupler knuckles and thus prevent runaway engines colliding with the roundhouse wall. Curled up rail ends would foul pilots and cowcatchers. The result may not be prototypically correct but I defend it on grounds of making a practical working job.
Top left: #1681 Vaughan’s M4 class 2-8-0 (superheated) from 1904. #548 (at right) – typical Preston SR 4-6-0 of 1891 (one of 76 rebuilt with world’s first superheater, outside Prussia, in 1901
Below: Motive Power Museum Roundhouse under construction
Photos: W A Corkill
Any decent roundhouse with wooden interior parts that lasted from around the end of the 19th century (or the early years of the 20th) would by 1954 be able to class itself as a museum. As for the engines it housed, some could have been around for some 50 years and have seen huge developments in size and power.
It was always tempting to take time off from modern trains to examine those of the past in more detail, and this I set out to do for the next article to follow one in the August 2011 issue. What I didn’t realise was that a bumper crop of apples would attract the attention of all the bigger birds and make extra work for me which wasn’t in the plans.
Nevertheless two historical steam locos have just managed to hit the paint shop in time and I hope they will convince a few readers that historical modelling has some very real advantages when it comes to interesting research, decision­making and the satisfaction of creating something that very few modellers seem to find time for these days.
One is that famous “world first” superheated 4­6­0 which started the CPR looking seriously at superheating in 1901, and that one got a D4g class chassis with a scratchbuilt boiler and the cab off an old Ken Kidder model from the earliest days of brass imports, around the mid to late 1950s. The tender off a Pocher woodburner 4­4­0 was about the right size.
The other one is an M4 class 2­8­0, no less than 40 of which were built in 1904 when the CPR made up its mind about superheating decisively and abandoned compounding except for some special cases in 1909–11 and 1931. They took over the Kicking Horse Pass in 1904 and helped convince the rest of the world’s railways soon after. The chassis came from a United 2­8­0 fitted with a can motor and a boiler off a spare CPR D10 4­6­0 picked up when it was a worn­out 1958 brass import. In the 1980s I got many old wrecks and parts at meets in case I might find them useful at a time like the present. A D10 tender was a perfect fit. But for both these examples there was a lack of pictures and scale plans, and detail information concerning painting schemes and how they matched the dates when numbering schemes were changed. Just because Head Office says things have to be changed, that doesn’t mean it will happen at once, or within the next five years. So I tossed a coin and I hope the results are convincing enough to make historical modelling as interesting as the latest ditch­light position on secondhand remotored switchers in remote areas of what used to be called the Wild West!
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