BUILD A GASWORKS

Richard Simpson converts a lineside warehouse into a gasworks retort house.

Ithink most of us must have come to the situation in our layouts where something outside our control has driven things in a particular direction. Such was the case with my own layout where, slap bang in the middle of the backscene, was a structural newel post for a staircase. It could be cut down a little but basically it had to remain, so my thoughts were then driven towards how to conceal it. Various industrial buildings were considered, all with their advantages and disadvantages, but then one day I came across a Bachmann low‑relief resin gas holder. The dimensions looked very promising, and the price was reasonable enough to accommodate failure, so I went ahead and bought it.

With a lump hacked out of the base it proved to be the perfect size to hide the newel post, so the idea of creating a gasworks to supply the gas holder was born. A lot of research was undertaken into the construction of coal‑fired gasworks, including plans and supporting articles from a 1936 issue of Model Railway magazine and the mine of information supplied by various museum websites from around the country, before I came up with a very basic plan for the layout. Most importantly, I wanted the gasworks to be credible, by which I mean I wanted the various components to be as you would expect to find them in a real coal gas plant from around the 1940s.

MAKING A START

The first structure to be tackled was going to represent the start of the gas making process, the retort house – where coal was baked to release gas. While most retort houses shared many similar features with generic industrial buildings of their time, it became obvious to me that they all shared one thing in common, and that was a large set of ventilation louvres in the roof to allow the escape of the huge amounts of heat generated within the furnace. This feature must therefore be incorporated into the layout somehow.

It would almost certainly have a loading platform for the delivery of coal and the departure of coke, and may well be on two levels to allow top feeding of the coal. And it would definitely have a large chimney built in for the retort furnace exhaust. After a lot of consideration of scratchbuilding and hacking around various resin structures and plastic kits, I decided that the closest starting point to what I wanted would be the L Cut Creative (LCC) Large Lineside Warehouse kit. With my mind made up, it was time to start the build…

The basic L Cut Creative Lineside Warehouse kit as it arrived. The big advantage of these kits is that all the parts can be purchased separately, making for a very flexible building system and relatively easy modifications just by adding additional parts.

The complete gasworks with the retort house at the right-hand side of the complex. From there, the coal gas goes through the condenser, the scrubber and the washer before final cleaning in the purifier beds and collection in the gas holder (left). Also shown is the weathered Bachmann water tower and a fan room to supply the furnace air to the retort house via a duct.