NOV 20 Tackeroo

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Andy Banks and Andy York

Factfile

Layout Name: Tackeroo
Scale/Gauge: EM
Size (to include any fiddle yards): 15’ x 2’3”
Era/Region:  1915-18
Location: Cannock Chase
Layout Type: End to end

 

 

Some years ago, the then director of the National Railway Museum said to me that modellers can have a part to play in recording the history of railways in a way which museums or books cannot realistically do. It is hoped that as modellers we have an interest in the real railway, current or historical and can research subject matter to produce the best interpretation possible of the subject matter, often this is limited in the mind of the modeller to what trains ran in that place and hopefully the relevant structures but it’s commendable when modellers replicate the traffic and operate the model based on evidence. Of course, it is possible to have a wonderful layout which ignores all of these things but then it is just a model railway and not a model of a railway.

We were aware of and knew a reasonable amount of information about the short-lived Cannock Chase Military Railway, which was on our doorstep but it was evident how little we knew when we looked at the then available primary source information, any map representations were vague to say the least and the imagery confined to picture postcards that the recruits sent home to their loved ones before they headed to the Western Front. Our journey of research took us out to the field, to personal insights of the environment, to long-forgotten historical documents in record offices and to contractors’ drawings and specifications.

At the outbreak of war, the call to arms was taken up by the eager pals of villages, towns and cities around the nation to support the standing army; as the scale of the war grew Kitchener’s recruitment campaign also escalated. Keen and patriotic the recruits may have been but these were young men, factory workers, agricultural hands and academics who were not ready for war – this was not yet a technological war, it was about men by the hundreds of thousands. They all needed to be trained to hold the front at least and so the pre-organised plans to build and manage the throughput of training camps around Britain were speedily implemented. I found it quite sobering that these plans were so far advanced at the outbreak of war, this was a war which was anticipated on high; they knew what the triple entente and the triple alliance ultimately meant.

The War Office gained permission from the Earl of Lichfield to use the high heathland of Cannock Chase which formed part of the state for the purpose of establishing two training camps, Brocton Camp and Rugeley Camp. To assist in the construction and supply of the camps, which could accommodate 40,000 troops at a time, a greater number than any of the surrounding towns of Stafford, Cannock and Rugeley, a railway was constructed by the West Cannock Colliery Company to a specification from the War Office in line with other camps around the country. The line was started from the colliery sidings on the Walsall to Rugeley L&NWR line climbing steeply onto the Chase at Brindley Heath and wending its way across the barren plateau before descending from Coppice Hill to reach the sidings at the L&NWR station at Milford & Brocton. Gradients to reach the top of the Chase and traverse the occasional interrupting valley were as harsh as 1 in 20. This railway was not for the movement of troops, they would be marched from the stations at either end of the line but for the supply of construction materials, coal, food supplies, fodder and munitions and an extensive network of offshoots and sidings grew to supply the functions of the camps. The locomotives were a collection of mainly small-wheeled 0-6-0 tank engines from a variety of manufacturers commandeered from surrounding collieries, there are very few photographs of any of the engines working on the line but through acquiring copies of detailed maps showing the points and loops on the 10-mile single-line railway we can surmise how the line would have been worked and from which direction traffic would have originated. In style, it would have been similar to light railway operations, both in terms of the track used and the operation of workings for there is no evidence of any signalling beyond occasional huts for flagmen. The operation of the line moved from the Colliery to the Railway Operating Division after 1915.

So, what is 'Tackeroo'? No-one seems to know the origin of the name or when it was first used but is referenced in a postcard from one of the many tradesmen who were transported in open wagons to their work sites in a poem entitled ‘Tackeroo Express’; hence our name for the model. The model is a compressed representation of some key features on Brocton Camp namely the large ordnance store building and the water tower which is identifiable in many postcard pictures of the camp and smaller buildings such as the flour store, shower and toilet blocks, guard room, a WH Smith’s store and accommodation huts.

Forming the landscape

Andy Banks produced some beautifully finished boards in 9mm ply, which I then took the saw to the top surface to cut out the trackbeds before extruded Styrofoam sheets were glued to the ply base. Proxxon make one of the best hot wire cutters for polystyrene with a span wide enough to shape the cutting wire to cut a profile to include the trackbed, cess and embankments either side. Take it slowly so the cutter does its work without dragging the wire too much and it’s an immensely satisfying approach for carving a trackbed into the scenery!

Trackwork

Through reference to images from other camps and on-site research, Andy Banks determined that flat-bottomed 55lb rail spiked to 9-foot sleepers was used with interlaced sleepers under pointwork so there was no alternative for him other than to build from scratch with Code 55 steel rail on copperclad sleepers. The trackwork was built on the ply trackbeds and then secured to the XPS terrain, except that wasn’t very good some suspect undulations so Andy took the sensible step of removing the foam from beneath the trackbed and supporting it properly with timber uprights and support at the board ends.

Buildings

The building of the munitions store and water tower is covered a little further on. Andy Banks is a dab hand at resin casting and so made moulds for key modular wall components to produce the accommodation huts of which several were needed with measurements taken from official contractors’ drawings whilst individual structures were scratch-built from plastic card.

Postcards from the camp often included groups of people and even activities. One soldier drew his own cards to send home illustrating and describing camp activities from spud bashing, training for the trenches and band practices of which he was a member; mundane detail which would have been lost. Cameo scenes appear around the layout from a doctor and nurse talking to wounded troops, bread being taken from the bakery back to the store for distribution around the camp and the potato peeling session is there too down to the bucket of peeled spuds. Andy Banks scoured suppliers for suitable figures and poses, during the time of our portrayal of the scene in 1917/8 the New Zealand Rifle Brigade had returned from the front and the ‘dinks’, as they were known, had a distinctive pinched hat style, which necessitated a few head transplants along the way.

Scenery and Presentation

Cannock Chase was one of the first places in Britain to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty despite the troops postcards home referring to it as a cold and barren area. Today, the open heathland mixes with forestry but the old postcards show barely a tree on the areas we have modelled which gave us several challenges with the trains appearing on scene through holes in the sky, how to capture the subtlety of vegetation and to produce a plausible but identifiable backscene. We’ve had to live with the first with use of some structures at one end, the second by use of materials from different suppliers and a variety of techniques including hanging basket liner, static fibres and very fine scatter materials to portray flowering and decaying heathland plants. For the backscene, we couldn’t use contemporary photographs due to afforestation so, using Photoshop, the topography was recreated digitally without the coniferous areas and toned to match the physical scenic areas of the scene fading out into the distance including a distant view down to the Trent Valley. Head for the spot known as the Glacial Boulder on Cannock Chase and you can see the view from the model’s location.

While numerous good exhibition layouts include reference material, we thought we would go a little further to give some of the atmosphere of life in the camp with end display boards and fasciae representing weathered timberwork from the huts. The artwork was produced from high resolution texture files for the woodwork overlaid with images and maps from the camp to assist with interpretation and information. The files were sent to a local printer who produces graphics for commercial exhibition stands to be printed onto Foamex board so we have a lightweight and portable set of panels used to ‘dress’ the layout. The frontage of the layout is dressed with hessian; one day we may get around to stenciling some appropriate markings on it.

100 years

The Great War gave rise many significant memorials and a different landmark to the Chase when the New Zealand Rifle Brigade were posted there to train more troops and guard the prisoner of war camp which housed 6,000 Germans. The NZRB had a momentous campaign in the Battle of Messines in Flanders where the German Lines were undermined and massive underground explosions, which could be heard in Whitehall, were detonated and advances made preceding the horrors of Passchendaele. The Kiwis, with the POWs made a topographical model of Messines at Brocton Camp, which had gradually become overgrown and was literally unearthed in 2014 by archaeologists. There are many saddening tales from the war and so the latter days of Brocton Camp were touched by mounting deaths in the autumn of 2018 at the time of the Armistice, not from guns or Mills’ bombs but from Spanish Flu. Today, ANZAC day is commemorated at the Commonwealth Cemetery on Cannock Chase alongside the path of the military railway where British, New Zealand and German soldiers (from the POW camp) rest alongside each other with headstones recording the dates either side of Armistice Day.

Summary

We know we haven’t told you much about locomotives and trains and many of the images don’t show you anything of them; that’s deliberate as the model is more about a moment in time, the people that were there and the railway just happens to be there. We know it’s not an exhibition layout to entertain with processional train movements, although the shunting can be very enjoyable but we’re happier to talk to people who have an interest in the era and area than be just another invented model scenario.

 

Follow the layout on RMweb

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'Tackeroo' – The Ordnance Store

A central feature of 'Tackeroo' is the large ordnance store building portraying one of the largest buildings on the training camp high on Cannock Chase. The role of the building would have been to store ammunition for the guns and rifles used in training and Mills Bombs (grenades) plus, we feel, incoming rail supplies of uniforms, equipment and materials used in the course of training tens of thousands of troops for the Western Front. Andy York shows us some of the detail in this one-off building.

The parts for the building were designed in Adobe Illustrator and prepared for laser cutting, I am very grateful to Geoff Taylor for his support and advice on materials and design and for agreeing to cut the parts for me on the large laser cutter he uses in his business. Without that advice, I would have made several expensive mistakes; I did still make some slip-ups in not considering the thicknesses of combined materials when designing components which joined onto these but the problems were easily worked around using scrap and offcut material.

I had always envisaged being able to get down to baseboard level, as the layout is displayed at a very high viewpoint to force natural viewpoints, and look through the building with open doors to watch the trains use the loading platform on the rear side of the building. To do this it was necessary to model some of the interior, once I started designing that I got a little carried away and decided to model the whole of the interior.

We have a copy of a large scale plan of the site, which gave us approximate dimensions of the structure and the concrete pad on which it sat still restricts tree growth 100 years on so we could gauge the size and feel of the building, despite there being no photographs showing the building other than in the far distance. We have a thumbnail picture of the inside of an army store building which, as many such buildings were to standard designs, gave us key details such as roof and floor construction and the type of doors used on such buildings.

The structure was designed to produce layers, an external skin of 1mm MDF with outside planking detail half-cut into the material, an internal liner of 300g/m2 car with planking detail cut into it and an internal framing layer cut from 1mm MDF to mimic the construction of the wooden-framed building finished with external planking. The three layers are glued together using Deluxe Materials Roket card glue to form a very stable wall section.

Once assembled each wall section was painted up with a base layer of general mid-brown/grey tones using a simple palette mixed from three acrylic paints.

After the base layer was painted, each individual plank was picked out is slight variations in the mix of paints to give variety to the tones.

From our thumbnail picture, we determined that the floor planking was diagonal, a feature which probably enabled consistent movement of the goods on hand trucks over the planking as most movements would then be made at an angle over adjoining planks. Once again, a variety of tones were created and used on the two parts, which form the floor due to the size of the model and the size that could be accommodated on the cutting bed.

I had looked at making nail holes in the planking at the design stage as the laser cutter would have made these small marks but they looked a little too uniform, so I decided to emboss these individually to give a little variety, possibly the most ridiculous and irrelevant task ever carried out in the pursuit of my hobby.

Each door was made with using the same three-layer principle and ‘hung’ on a metal runner made from 1mm square plastic strip painted in a gunmetal finish, hangers made from masking tape and handles from staple wire. The doors are positioned in a variety of positions hinting at the building being used.

Personnel doors, windows and vents were made using the same techniques, the windows being two framing layers sandwiching a thin layer of acetate.

Roof trusses from 1mm MDF were added sitting up to the side walls and a central upright support as a building of such a span (60’) would have had.

Loading platforms on such buildings seen in photographs of similar buildings on other WW1 camps had a roofed verandah to help keep goods dry during unloading, again there seems to have been a standard approach to such canopies and the support of posts and diagonal bracing timbers. The long length of posts and their main beam were produced in two sections, probably the most fragile part of all the pieces cut for the project but once assembled is a little more robust.

Internal racking for storage was created by cutting horizontal shelf parts and vertical support frames, hopefully, we can get around to stocking the shelves but we are looking at some more bespoke creations as the number of suitable products, even in the military modelling market, is limited and not necessarily of high enough quality.

The roof is made from Slaters’ corrugated roofing, a laminate of two layers of the sheeting to enable a slight step to be formed between the horizontal strips to give a slight definition using a strip of 5tho plastic sheeting between the layers where the strips join. The vertical join marks are made with a pen as there would be little surface relief in reality after the roof was sprayed with grey primer and a mist of Modelmates’ slate grey weathering spray.

As the roof covers all that interior detail many would ask what the point of such an exercise is. It’s a perverse enjoyment I have in modelling the unnecessary and inconsequential on occasion but I have created the roof in such a way that it can be lifted off to look at the detail inside. It’s a bit like a watch, all the beauty and interest is on the inside whilst the outside just performs a simple function, much like many buildings.

Painting (and building) by numbers:
358 parts to assemble
6130 individually painted planks
4612 embossed nail holes in planks
12 hours in assembly
48 hours in painting and detailing
4 tubes of acrylic paint
2 tins of spray colour

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Laser-cut water tower

For one of the central dominant features, we took the decision to explore designing it for laser-cutting to give a speedier result than traditional and complex styrene or brass construction.

Although primary research material is available, we found that some scaling down of the model tower was necessary in order to not overpower the rest of the model and make something which looks right in place.

Research and reference material

Local postcards were produced for the troops to send home and these have been an invaluable reference source for the project. This panoramic view of the heathland camp shows the water tower standing high above any surrounding buildings.

The concrete pads onto which the water tower legs were bolted still exist which gave us a measurement of 12’ centres for the legs.

After the war and the clearance of the camp, the tower was re-configured and erected on Sedgley Beacon between Wolverhampton and Dudley. This useful picture gave us the size and style of panels used along with vital information on the bracing and girder supports for the tank.

Braithwaites have been producing steel water tanks since the 1920s and are still manufacturing tank panels in Newport, South Wales. They kindly supplied reference diagrams showing the functional parts of a water tower.

1 – Rising main inlet pipe
2 – Ballcock
3 – Outlet pipe
4 – Overflow with coned top
5 – Washout pipe
6 – Valves and stopcocks

I used Adobe Illustrator to create the two-dimensional drawings of the individual components. It’s not as daunting as it may first appear as this model includes a lot of simple geometry, combining shapes plus copy and pasting. Don’t feel compelled to use this expensive software as there are free, downloadable programmes such as Inkscape and there is a great support area on RMweb for 3D printing and laser-cutting where you can find out a lot more.

Laser-cutting

The drawings were sent to Intentio, the owner of the business is also on RMweb under the username BrushType4 and has a topic showing many projects he has undertaken. I specified 1.5mm MDF as the material for this; in hindsight 1.00mm MDF would have given more finesse but you don’t know until you try these things.

I was really pleased with the quality of the cutting and the speed of turn-around on the order. If you have designed the parts yourself you shouldn’t need instructions of course but it is worth trying some dry runs with parts before getting too far ahead as it was at that stage I found some design errors I had made. Schoolboy errors but I’m still learning!

Assembly

Assembly starts by joining a long side and an end of the supporting ironwork. PVA glue would take too long to set, other adhesives were tried on test pieces but I settled on thick grade Expo superglue, which holds in 10-15 seconds, but is allowed to rest for a couple of minutes before attaching the next piece. Clothes pegs are a useful tool to hold the pieces in position at this stage.

The remaining long sections are glued to the end piece with the thicker upright sections butted up to each other.

Mistake No. 1 – at the design stage I had not given consideration to the width of the intermediate ironwork pieces and it was necessary to cut off the upright sections leaving the horizontal and diagonal trusses.

Each intermediate section on the ironwork is attached to a neighbouring upright section, one side at a time to guarantee precise positioning.

Once all of the single intermediate sections are glued in the other end can be glued in which brings everything back nice and square.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to test the structural integrity of the ironwork once dried. 22g of MDF happily supports 1.6kg of tins!

2.00 x 1.00mm U-section plastic strip is glued to the horizontal truss halfway up the sides.

3.00 x 2.00mm H-section plastic strips are glued to the long sides of the ironwork to form longitudinal beams. 2.50 x 2.00mm H-section strips are then glued across the beams to form lateral supports.

Mistake no.2 – I had designed the tank panels one panel too short in each direction so each side and end was lengthened by one panel using waste material. These panel frets were glued onto 30 thou plastic sheeting cut to size and a suitable bottom for the tank cut accordingly.

The water tank is test-mounted onto the supporting ironwork to ensure everything is square and level.

 

Inlet and outlet pipes with valves and junctions were created from Knightwing’s UN3 set of piping; ladders from Plastruct 1:100 ladders and 0.5mm brass wire and a platform from plastic section and Slaters treadplate sheet.

The assembled tank and fittings were sprayed with grey primer, Halfords satin black spray and a finish of Testors’ Dullcote spray before assembly and fitting of the pipes and ladders.

Overall, I am pleased with the near-finished model. I made some mistakes in the design stages but these were easily rectified in the building and it proved an interesting exercise in my first time having bespoke laser-cut parts made. I am sure the cost is comparable to styrene or brass sections but it was assembled much, much quicker with consistent and tidy results.

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