O Gauge Live Steam: Crewchester Autum 2015

Video of live steam in O Gauge taken at Graham Shepperds garden railway in early October 2015. It contains some features from the famous Crewchester railway.Good mixture of freight and passenger including Rafe's model of a very early LNWR express locomotive.

[@jtd5530]

Dave, a very nice video! I am into vintage 0 gauge live steam - the performance of the locos in your video makes me jealous! Being a Crewchester fan myself (and owning one of Jack Ray's locos) I am happy to discover part of his layout has survived and is put into good use!

[@locowerke]

All stunning models, very impressive level of model engineering. Thanks for posting your efforts.

[@grahamsheppard5590]

As owner of the railway, might I gchip in with a few words ! The railway has been down for 27 years, the fruition of a lifetime intention inspired by Jack Ray's Crewchester in a mag article in 1955! I was eleven and lived in Brighton. In 1982 I settled in Colchester, just twelve miles from Jack!s Crewchester - we became close friends. In 2002 he decided that he had to call time on his railway so I helped him dismantle it, hence the Crewchester buildings came to Colchester. l did them up a little but the signal boxes, station signs etc are exactly as I got them. Sadly Jack died in 2011, aged 95, but his memory lives on very strongly in my garden, he often visited. Abbottsdene is my own invention but is strongly influenced by Jack, using the sort of 1950's materials that he used. I went live steam in 2000 and have two steam days a year - May and September - when over twenty engines can be on shed. They are nearly all scratch built but there are vintage models of some eminent engineers now departed represented - Eddie Cook, Tom Parker and Clarrie Edwards in particular. The other models in the videos are by the current visitors to the steam days. It is a privilege to see them running on my tracks, but an awesome responsibility, especially with a tunnel ! My thanks to David Robinson who does a brilliant job with the camera and editing button, he somehow manages to run his engine AND film it ! Look out for more, our last outing was two weeks ago, it was cool so steam effects were good. Apart from John's coal fired Atlantic, the rest are spirit fired, no gas. The layout was featured in August 2003 Railway Modeller.

[@flippop101]

The Horwich Crab is a beauty!

[@allanegleston4931]

i loved the speeds which the locos and the trains travelled . they look more realistic than the scale mile stuff prevelent these days.

[@DrDave_63395]

Allan, Thanks for your comments. Yes scale speeds adds to the realism. Of course as the locos are mainly manually controlled, keeping the speed down to walking pace is also necessary :-)

[@Porschedude8]

Beautiful!

[@TheMendipman]

Brilliant Dave. Is there much of a live steam following in 0 Gauge? Noel

[@AB-xc7qh]

awesome railway

[@dierkschurack2425]

Echt super diese dampfer

[@RaneSachin]

Nice.

[@Night_Ferry]

I take it these are scratch built locomotives? Would you say this is harder than gauge 1? And could you recommend a good place for blueprints and fundamentals?

[@DrDave_63395]

Yes most of these are scratch built. They are slightly harder than Gauge 1 to make but the principles are exactly the same. Two starting points - The Gauge O Guild Live Steam book (cover is at the end of my recent videos) is an excellent description by Eddie Cooke (think LBSC Words and Music but for scale O gauge live steam). Another source is the G1MRA designs and a calculator. I have made an LNER N10 (0-6-2T) using the ARMIG design for the cylinder block but with the dimensions scaled by 0.7 (10mm -> 7mm / ft). This works well. Of course the LBSC designs are also a good starting point. The cylinders of my Netta (Q6) is basically the 1 1/4 version described by LBSC with the width reduced slightly. The boiler is a single fire tube with 11 cross tubes as described by Eddie Cooke. One advantage is the reduced size means you can do it on a small hobby lathe / mill. My Netta was built on a Toyo 210 (so called because the distance between centers is only 210mm. There are two advantages for O Gauge - they can go round tighter corners so you do not need so much space for the layout and the rolling stock (wagons and carriages) are cheaper and cover a wider range of prototypes.

[@DrDave_63395]

You can also start from existing live steam R-T-R models. For example the Tilbury Tank in this video started life as a HB Models example. I believe John Shawe re profiled the wheels to 29mm back to back and replaced the boiler with an internal fired version. The latter makes it much less susceptible to winds when running out of doors.

[@DrDave_63395]

Mike Swain is a master at converting commercial locos. There are several in my video of Chris Lovell's ope day this year (kzbin.info/www/bejne/nGWqZIuYi9CFnqM). In the main his are pot boilered. But as you see they run well.

[@Night_Ferry]

+dave Robinson Thank you, that's very helpful.