Ribble rubble masterpiece
When Allen Pearson’s ‘Ribblehead’ was destroyed by a falling tree, there was nothing else for it but to start a new project. And this miniature architectural masterpiece is the result!
A new layout – ‘Chirk’ – has risen from the ruins of Allen Pearson’s ‘Ribblehead’ layout.
Picture the scene: you’re on your way back from holiday and, as you near home, you muse ‘I hope the house is still standing’. Allen Pearson returned home to find that a 130ft tall, 7ft diameter horse chestnut tree had come crashing down on his garage during high winds. Thankfully, his house was fine, but his superb ‘N’ gauge take on the famous Ribblehead Viaduct that starred in the April 2015 issue of Model Rail was completely crushed under the timber and rubble. It certainly wasn’t the way most people would want to dispose of a layout… Allen then started the search for another classic piece of railway architecture to model.
“Two revelations happened when ‘Ribblehead’ was destroyed,” says Allen. “Number one: get insurance. Thankfully I was insured. The funny thing was, though, that while the insurance company paid out for every tree on the layout, it wouldn’t pay for damaged plants and trees in the garden as it doesn’t insure living things. When you’ve put hundreds of hours into a layout and spent a lot of your hard-earned money on it, to see it all crushed is heartbreaking.” “Revelation number two came later – in that I then had the opportunity to build another layout and try out some other techniques. “Once a layout is finished I get bored very quickly
“I knew I wanted a viaduct and, if possible, an aqueduct as well, as that’s something which ‘Ribblehead’ didn’t have”
and I had been thinking about a new layout anyway, but I didn’t want ‘Ribblehead’ to finish that way. I did sell what was left on ebay, so maybe one day we’ll see it again.” A product designer by trade, Allen is quite handy with computer-aided design (CAD) and wanted to use the facilities available to him. This led to the search for another stunning piece of railway architecture to bring to life in 1:148 scale. “I knew I wanted a viaduct and, if possible, an aqueduct as well, as that’s something which ‘Ribblehead’ didn’t have. Then Chirk [in Denbighshire] came to my attention. It was perfect! It’s a two-track line that’s straight and doesn’t have any pointwork to complicate the wiring. It would also fit with my Nelevator [see MR246].”
ENGINEERING MASTERPIECES
There’s only one place to start with ‘Chirk’ – those magnificent feats of engineering that are the viaduct and aqueduct. Standing 100ft and 70ft respectively above the river in the valley, and over 700ft long, the aqueduct is Grade Ii-listed and was built between 1796 and 1801. The viaduct came later in 1846 for the
Chester-shrewsbury line and locals believe it was intentionally built higher and longer than the aqueduct to emphasise the railway’s superiority over the waterways. Allen visited the town on six or seven occasions to take photographs, ensuring that he had as much information as possible to work with when he returned to the computer screen. “Both structures were designed on a piece of computer software called Solidworks, right down to the individual stones. The majority of the arches are identical, with only a couple of pieces of decoration on the viaduct that make two of the arches unique. With the design done I could use the 3D printer at work to print them using polyurethane. It does take a long time as there are a lot of layers, so I started the printing process before I left one evening and came back in the morning to a completed arch. I had to repeat the process about 20 times!” With the arches completed all that was left for Allen to do was to paint them and connect them together, with the joins hidden by the water and the ballast. Once the two structures were in place he could deal with the most difficult part of the build – getting the valley correct. “The need for compression made this the most
challenging part of the whole construction because it was difficult to make it look right. Naturally, I wanted it to be as accurate to the prototype as possible but, as with many things in model railways, a perfectly scaled interpretation doesn’t necessarily give you a goodlooking result. It was the slope that needed to be compressed the most and it was tough to make it not look as though it was a cliff.”
CREATING REALISTIC WATERWAYS At the foot of the valley is the River Ceiriog, a tributary of the River Dee which begins on the slopes of Moel Fferna in the Berwyn mountains and forms the England-wales border between Chirk and the Dee. In model form, Allen wanted to use Woodland Scenics Realistic Water to create the fast-flowing current, but having never used it before he enlisted the help of his friend and Model Rail contributor Ben Ando. “Water is one of those areas that’s so easy to get wrong and can take weeks or even months to correct. So, as it was my first time and I didn’t know if it would affect the 3D printing in any way if it went wrong, I asked Ben to come and help. We applied a thin layer and allowed it to dry, and then kept building layers until we were happy with the result. It isn’t a very deep river at Chirk so we didn’t need to use a lot of the product.” Complete with winding hole at the tunnel end, the Llangollen Canal through Chirk was vital in the
19th century for transporting limestone around the country. It runs from the Horseshoe Falls to the west of Llangollen to Nantwich, where four locks drop the water level down to the Shropshire Union Canal. In Allen’s garden cabin, the canal is made from clear acrylic above an earth-painted base to give the illusion of depth and add a murky look to the water.
TOWN PLANNING Not only are the viaduct and aqueduct accurate – so is the town, except for one or two minor discrepancies. “The road layout and buildings are all in the right place with just a couple of changes. Firstly, on the prototype, there is a roundabout at the junction near the station, but that is fairly new and is one of those roundabouts that don’t appear to serve much of a purpose, so I’ve left it as a T-junction. “Secondly, the pub on that junction isn’t actually a pub, but I can’t build a model railway without having a watering hole on it!” ‘Chirk’ may have been born from disaster but the need to replace ‘Ribblehead’ has led Allen to hone his skills and technology that may well, in time, become the norm. We look forward to it!
I can’t build a model railway without having a watering hole on it!”