Dead Meat

Halwill Slaughter House

Railway modellers often add industrial buildings to their layouts, in order to justify some extra freight traffic.  I've seen oil depots, gas works, cattle feed merchants, china clay linhays, milk factories and a paper mill, but never a slaughter house.  Perhaps the subject is too grusome for your average modeller, though I somehow doubt that our ranks include more vegetarians than the rest of society.

With their keen eye for business, the London & South Western Railway built slaughter houses at Halwill, Holsworthy and Bude stations, and I was determined that St Petrock should have one too. As well as the obvious traffic in dead meat for Smithfield, they used to generate traffic in sheepskins, wool and animal fat (for candles), though I don't know how much of this 'extra' traffic survivied into the late 1950's.



I built my model using my favourite method – card, faced with Scalescenes brick paper.   I experimented with printing the window frames on inkjet-friendly acetate, but it didn't really work.  Cream coloured printing came out far too faint, so I reluctantly settled for dark brown.  That'll do for now, but I'll eventually replace them with etched frames from GT Buildings.  That's when I'll also add some drain pipes... and handles on the doors might be useful too!

Progress at St Petrock Station

Please be assured, dear reader that, during my long absence from this blog, my modelling activities have not entirely ceased.  Progress has, however, been moderated by other priorities, such as decorating the lounge, refurbishing the bathroom and erecting a new fence in the garden.  I wouldn't wish you to think that I've been idle!

Anyway, despite all this, there has been some progress at St Petrock Station, though, as you'll see from the photos, there's still much to do.

The main platform is almost complete, and is edged with Southern Railway 'harps & slabs" (from Peco), in-filled with Polyfilla and painted to look like tarmac. I now realize that the edging should have had at least one extra row of paving slaps behind it, but I don't feel inclined to correct this omission. Perhaps the contractor didn't know what he was doing.  Yes, that's a good excuse.

The running-in board is a Dart Casting with lettering on plain paper, printed using my computer. In the background you can see the goods shed beginning to take shape.

If you look at earlier photos of the station building, you'll see that the platform there has brick edging and a paved surface, giving the impression that the platform had been extended (doubtless in the 1930s) to cope with the growing holiday traffic.

The following photos show the station and station yard.  Station Master Hubert Penrose's greenhouse has appeared, but vegetables have yet to grow in his garden.  Thankfully, when they do, the Southern Railway are in the process of giving him a stout fence, so passengers with nothing better to do won't be pinching his beans.

The last photo shows the harbour branch passing behind the station yard and descending at about 1:36, beneath Station Road.  The pots of green and yellow poster paint in the background are not part of the intended scene!  A model of my dad's old shop is planned for that spot.

Station Building Reflections

Most of the station buildings on the North Cornwall line have a distinctive common design and I was keen that St Petrock should have it too.  The old station building in Padstow still survives, so a few years ago I measured it.  "We do this every few years to see if it's shrunk," I explained to a group of bemused emmets.

I made a good start at building a model in plastic card, but the project was put on hold while we moved house (twice in 2012).  When peace finally returned and work started on St Petrock, I decided that a brick built version would be better, as it would match my Bachmann model of Bude signal box.  It was then that I spotted a review of the ABM Railcraft card kit in Railway Modeller so, keen to speed things along, I ordered the brick BR(S) version.

A clip from the ABM Railcraft website

Immediately I hit a problem.  The ABM kit has the station master's house on the left (viewed from the station yard side) and the booking office on the right, but I wanted them the other way round - as at Padstow, Delabole, Otterham, Tresmeer and Egloskerry.  I had almost decided to abandon the ABM kit and continue with my old model of Padstow when it occurred to me that I could scan the ABM cards into my computer, create mirror images, then print them out on good quality thin card.  Whilst doing this, I took the opportunity to give the brickwork a slightly pinker tint that more closely matched the Bachmann signal box, then, to give the model some much needed strength, I mounted the printed parts on 2mm card (1mm for the roof).

If you're tempted to do the same thing, it might be worth contacting ABM first.*  I see from their website that they are happy to reduce the kit to 3mm scale at no extra cost, so they may be equally happy to produce a mirror image version.

By now the urge to adapt had well and truly taken over.  Surely, I reasoned, an important holiday resort like St Petrock would have more station facilities than a country station such as Egloskerry - something more akin to Bude, perhaps.  So I duplicated part of the booking office and set it at 90 degrees to the main building, somewhat in the style of Bodmin General.

Peter Denny once advised me (there's name-dropping for you!) to scribe the horizontal lines of card roof tiles with a blunt screwdriver.  The result is a great improvement on flat card, though I'm less pleased with the ridge tiles, which I produced from plasticard.  One day, I tell myself, I'll replace them with tiles made from thin paper.

By the way, for this photo I simply plonked the building on St Petrock's unfinished platforms. There's lots of work to do here, including building a canopy to protect the passengers.  It has been known to rain in Cornwall, even in the summer!
 
Finally, I thought it only right that Station Master Hubert Penrose and his wife should be able to relax in front of a television when their day's work was done.  In 1960 the only channel available in these parts was BBC from the North Hessary Tor transmitter, so there's a Band 1 H-aerial on the roof.  How the memory fades... I'd quite forgotten that those old aerial rods were almost 10 feet long.  No wonder Cornish gales toppled them so often.

* ABM do indeed now offer a mirror image of their station bulding, and also a suitably modified version of the canopy.