BR Blue around Hunwick and Rough Lea

As promised on the Auran forums I've now done a little tuning on the trackwork (and some tweaks to the scenery while I was in there) on the area around Hunwick and Rough Lea, so here's another update.

For this one I've bent history a little and gone BR Blue (in reality the Durham-Bishop Auckland line closed in 1968) but it's certainly a very interesting "might have been".



The same location as the last shot in the previous set, but showing off a rake of the TC3 team's excellent Mk1s which just happened to be passing by...



The realigned trackwork at Hunwick looking north (I'm still not sure about that crossover, though) with shunting discs now in place. The line to the right is the one in the foreground of the first picture.

There's also now an InvisiCAB floating in front of the signal box for those "screenshot moments".



Looking south this time, a Gateshead based class 46 heads north with an ore train. I always did like the look of this style of headcode on these locos.

From memory the 46's were a little maligned in the North East around 1980 because as so many of them were based at Gateshead they appeared very regularly in the area. I did like them, though.



A very unusual visitor: the unique Tinsley based 47901 sits in one of the sidings at Hunwick with an MGR train.



A class 20 "Whistling Wardrobe" leads a short train of HTV hoppers towards Rough Lea Colliery as a Metro-Cammell DMU heads south with a local service. I saw one of these locos at the Swanage diesel gala in May; it brought back some great memories. :)

Incidentally there's an InvisiCAB in front of this signal box (Rough Lea Junction), too.



58001 heads north past the brickworks and colliery.




A couple more views of Perchpole's 46 north of Rough Lea. It's such a great looking model that it really does deserve a closer look! :)

A bit of prehistory: The NER Todhills and Newfield branch

As promised, here are a few pictures of the long closed Clarence Railway/NER Todhills branch:



Burnhouse Junction, where the newer Spennymoor-Bishop Auckland line (left) diverged away from the Todhills branch (right) to Newfield and Willington. The trackbed here is now part of the Auckland Way.



The branch was notable for its extreme inclines - the worst of which was a 1 in 16 (!!) from just outside Todhills station down to the River Wear. The section between Burnhouse Junction and Todhills (shown here) had far less extreme gradients.




Todhills station closed in 1867, but the engine shed remained open until 1922, and goods traffic continued into the 1930s. The station buildings themselves were still intact in the early 1950s at least.



A spur leading to the colliery and brickworks at Newfield diverged from the branch before it reached the Wear. By 1900 the inclines and colliery were gone and the track from the brickworks to the incline - shown here - had been cut back to a spur at the bottom of the hill.



Newfield brickworks. There's an industry enabled coal drop-off and goods pick-up amongst the sidings.



If you walk along the line from the brickworks this is where you'll end up after crossing the river.



The Newfield branch rejoins the Bishop Auckland-Durham line at Hunwick. Incidentally, the blue 31 is a hint as to the era I'll be showing in the next set of screenshots. ;)

Hunwick/Rough Lea Update

It's been a little while since I posted anything (been planting trees and cultivating the shrubbery...) but telegraph poles aside I'm getting to the end of the landscaping at the north end of the Durham line now.

Here's a few from that area:


An English Electric type 4 heads south past Rough Lea Colliery.



A Black 5 heads south past the farmer's crossing between Rough Lea and Hunwick. The line to Rough Lea Brickworks can just be seen on the left near the signals.



Looking the other way from the crossing in the picture above. Hunwick goods yard is just visible in the distance.



An English Electric Type 3 on a Carlisle-Eastgate cement waits for the road at Hunwick while a DMU heads north with a Durham service.



Looking the other way from the signal box, a Deltic passes through with a diverted ECML express (a reasonably regular Sunday occurance on the line until it finally closed to freight in 1968) while a Brush Type 2 waits in the sidings.



Another Eastgate bound cement, this time seen south of Hunwick.



Beware of the flowers!

The line on the left of the picture is the branch from Hunwick goods yard to Newfield brickworks, which originally went on to link with the NER Todhills branch (notable for its 1-in-16 rope worked incline from the banks of the river Weir to the summit at Toddhills itself).

Next up: Burnhouse Junction and the Toddhills branch. :)

An unusual visitor to Pink Panther Country

Looking at the last one (and mindfull of recent advice in the Auran forums) I think I need to change the grass to one that blends in a bit more (it's just a bit too green) Other than that, I'm rather happy with this part of the route (Rough Lea, between Hunwick and Willington). :)

A Peak in south west Durham

I've just acquired one of Perchpole's Class 46 Peaks (native to Gateshead, so definitely right for the area) and thought I'd take her for a spin...



An ex-works D177 leaves Bishop Auckland heading north




A lineside short just north of Hunwick. I rather like this one!




Passing Rough Lea Colliery (between Hunwick and Willington)




North of Rough Lea, heading for the portal which terminates this part of the route (and avoids me having to build Willington for now...)


I've done quite a bit on the Spennymoor line recently (in particular Byers Green and Coundon) as well as adding Rough Lea Colliery (which you can see a hint of in the third picture) and a whole pile of scenery so I'll post some more pics shortly. :)

A quick fly around Bishop Auckland

Although I sketched out the basic outline of the routes in TransDEM (which it dutifully exported to Trainz) the real work of trackbuilding is done in Surveyor itself. The first thing to do was lay the main routes into the town (from Shildon, West Auckland, Spennymoor, Hunwick and Etherley) and get the trackwork in the station area roughly into the right form.

Once that was done, I started trying to make the basic routes drivable - which meant getting the gradients roughly right. That's a very iterative process, but once you get the hang of it isn't too difficult (maps often show where cuttings and embankments lie along the route, which gives a pretty useful clue) it . I actually started with the area north of town, as I figured it would be easier to work out the height of the trackwork from published data on the Newton Cap viaduct which carried the line north towards Durham (it is something like 32m high from ground level).

I have to admit it was quite fun to dump a 31 or 37 at one end of the model and drive around for the first time!

I have actually been working on this for a couple of months now, so it's actually beginning to look fairly good in places. Here's a few pictures showing the area around Bishop Auckland itself:

Bishop Auckland station, viewed from the East. Bare platforms for now, but that will be sorted out in due course!

Platform 4 at Bishop Auckland, looking towards the Weardale/Crook line

Bishop Auckland goods yard

Bondgate looking north towards Newton Cap viaduct and Toronto

Bishop Auckland east junction. The lines to the right lead to West Auckland and Barnard Castle

I've obviously not included all of the screenshots I've taken (there are way too many to do that!), but these and any others I upload can be viewed directly at http://picasaweb.google.com/nosleeptilspennymoor/NoSleepTilSpennymoor#.

Hills and Stuff

Durham is anything but flat, and Bishop Auckland - being on the foothills of the Pennines - is definitely no exception. With that in mind, it was pretty obvious that building a model on a flat board then trying to put the hills in afterwards is really not going to work.

Enter Digital Elevation Mapping (DEM) - a technique for geographically mapping spot heights of terrain - and a tool called TransDEM. When I learnt about this it was obvious that this was the way to go. Although georeferencing of maps etc. is somewhat tedious TransDEM takes much of the gruntwork out of it can (even better!) can export the basemap to Trainz itself as a starting point.

I used modern Ordnance Survey maps as my reference, together with freely available DEM data provided by the Space Shuttle Programme. It's not hugely accurate (30m if I remember correctly), but it's a good start. The first step, however, is to georeference suitable maps to provide an overview of the route:


When the Trainz baseboards are generated, this map will actually be imprinted onto them, which acts as a useful guide while building the route. Here's how it looks with the DEM data overlaid on the map:


Once the export to Trainz is completed, the map will be overlaid on the terrain. Here’s a (very early) version of the area around Newton Cap viaduct in Surveyor, with the underlying map clearly visible:


It is quite hard to get your bearings at first, but helpfully the georeferenced map data is easily visible in the Surveyor map view:


TransDEM can not only create the baseboard terrain, but also the basic trackwork. For detailed mapping, it also allows “UTM Tiles” carrying street maps etc. to be created and positioned in place within the model.

Just to wet your appetite, here’s an early version of the area of Bishop Auckland station itself, with most of the trackwork in place:


Overall, a very useful and interesting tool. :)