The Wrightscale Workshop

A beautiful new workshop stands in our garden. We are grateful to our customers whose purchases financed the project, the professionals who put up the building and to everyone’s patience as we modified, electrified, decorated and floored the interior.

The Notre Dame Workshop, newly built by Malcolm Wright and friends

We thought that a lot of railway-related art could come to this new workshop. In pride of place would be photos showing a family trip to Paris as we posed under the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral. I think we told you that the day that the workshop was scheduled to go up, Notre Dame was (not quite) burnt down. There would also be framed artwork from our books – Tarn Tramways  and Colonel Péchot: Tracks To The Trenches. In addition were all the models created over the years.

The original artwork from the book TRAMWAYS A VAPEUR DU TARN from Oakwood Press. Our thanks are to Alison Ewan who brought a black and white postcard to life

Before any display, we had to plan storage, without which many a job can be started but few finished. It had to come first because it has to be planned. No machine can be used without an array of tools and accessories, not to mention raw materials which be kept to hand.

Then the machines begin to be moved.

Also from TRAMWAYS A VAPEUR DU TARN, available from Oakwood.We hoped to have this painting by Alison Ewan hanging in the workshop

One of these machines is the Tom Senior Mill. The Tom Senior was the pride of its makers, the Atlas Works, Liversedge, Yorkshire. It was to perform tasks beyond a centre lathe. Sadly, it cost more to make than the selling price. This can mean only one thing for a business …

Malcolm originally bought his second-hand Tom Senior in the late Eighties. He explained to his sceptical wife that it would do ALL the jobs which a lathe couldn’t do … well perhaps not all, he admitted. His sceptical wife then asked where he would put it. At the time, we lived in a semi in Oxford.

 ‘Easy’ he said, ‘the shed at the bottom of the garden.’ To be accurate, the garden sloped upwards, and so the shed could be more fairly described as the one at the top of the garden.

He went ahead and nearly a tonne of awkward metal arrived at the front gate. His wife took one look, said that the children needed supervising and vanished. Malcolm and a friend took it piece by piece up the garden and reinstated it in a shed.

When we left Oxford, professional removers took care of our possessions and installed said Tom Senior in the existing workshop at Burnside. This all happened a long time ago and so he thought a move from the old shed to the new should not take the two of us very long.

Here are the adventures of its would-be removers. It is an iron law of nature that for every year that passes, the mass of an object increases! Our generation, as we never cease to remind the young, achieved marvels when we were their age. The young, quite correctly, look sceptical and remind us that we are no longer capable.

The Tom Senior milling machine, wearing an overall! Even though this is only a part of it, the machine is a good size as we were to find out

‘We just stood in the street and took a few parts off, then carried them one by one up the side entrance to the shed. Then we put it together. What could be more simple?’ said he.

Nothing was simple.

The motor, for example, merely needed to be disconnected from the electricity (run into the house, check what devices were running, throw the Mains switch, come back, check that the power REALLY was off) disconnect and then do Power-Up, that is, Power-Down in reverse. Then the retaining bolts could be withdrawn (search for correct spanners, loosen all round, complete the unloosening, lay all bolts, washers, spanners etc in a careful kit, ready for reassembly). Prime Mover and his assistant would then have to clear the site of all tools and aids which had crept in during the process. The motor could then be eased off its perch, weight swaying first to the assistant, then back to Prime Mover and so on as necessary. Then the motor joined a series of parts on the floor.

Quite rapidly, the spanner or Allan Key or whatever was needed for another job and so it left the kit of parts. There would be fun and games at the other end, but that is quite another story.

Some parts were so heavy that they required an engine crane to be moved. The trouble is, engine cranes require a large area so the assembly had to be moved to a spot convenient for the crane. Since Stonehenge, we Britons have moved things on rollers. As the object moves forward and off the roller, so the assistant runs from back to front to put the roller in position again.

The workshop interior, painted, lined and floored. It would have made such a lovely art gallery!

To introduce the roller required a lever to raise the load. We had just such a lever in the form of a jemmy. Again, the principle is simple. Archimedes said ‘Give me a long enough lever and I can move a Tom Senior’ Or perhaps he didn’t. We found using a lever rather complicated. The Atlas Works had designed a cabinet for Tom Senior which fitted snugly to the floor at all places. Introducing a jemmy required an elaborate dance It had to be rocked just enough to get a lever underneath, but not toooo much!.

Finally, the crane was in a position to do its job. There was some todo because the lifting gear expired on the job.A replacement was found which lifted Tom Senior on to a trolley. Prime Mover and Assistant were rewarded by the crunching sound of trolley breaking, the cue for further consternation.

We had wanted to display the original artwork for this book in the workshop. Original painting by James Albon, book from Birse Press

We do have another, more sturdy trolley. Unfortunately, it had spent the last five months as a handy parking place for an equally large load – piece of 7 ¼” gauge rolling stock since you ask. In order to liberatesaid trolley, we needed the crane. Tom Senior was lifted back on the ground, engine crane dismantled, taken to trolley . The crane was re-erected and sturdy trolley finally liberated. Before we could get back to Tom Senior, it was painfully clear that the tyres of the sturdy trolley were less than optimally inflated – something to do with the load it had been carrying for months. This had to be addressed before there was any question of new use.

Two days later, Tom Senior finally stood in his new quarters. He is indeed a magnificent beast, so magnificent that we realised that a workshop thirty square metres in area is actually quite small. Reality had bitten our plan.

The Wrightscale Wren, a model we had intended to display in the workshop

The well-lit, watertight and secure environment in which we were going to display our treasures will have to be used for other things, small essentials such as walk-round space, shelves, cupboards and so on.

As I write, we are working on a new display space.
As a footnote, we are concerned about the preserved railway, the Chemin de Fer Touristique de Tarn which runs on old TVT track. The spectacular bridge which linksthe station to the rest of the line is under threat of closure. It was built in the early 1920s and so it is showing its age.