• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Recent content by Vann

  1. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Lighting - pt.4 - Electrical Supply. Electricity for the lights was sourced from a battery in the guards van. The batteries were charged from a dynamo at Wellington station and had to last the 84 mile journey to Longburn and return. To quote again from the Wellington-Manawatu Railway, Working...
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    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Lighting - pt.3 - Electric Lamps. As with the oil lamps, we have not found any photographs or drawings of the electric lamps. We have 1901 proposal drawings indicating the intention to use fittings consisting of a single lamp of “12 CP (candlepower) 50volt” in second class carriages. We can...
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    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Lighting - pt.2 - Oil Lamps. Wellington & Manawatu Railway carriages were initially lit with oil (kerosine) lamps. We have not found any photographs or drawings of the lamps - with the exception of a drawing of the lampshades. There is one photograph on the end of a carriage that vaguely...
  4. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Hi Alex. We found three different designs of these, all within the first carriage. The Yanks call them "Deck Sash Openers" though we prefer "Top Light Openers" or simply "Clerestory Window Openers". I don't have a photo, though I can try to remember to get one on Thursday. In the meanwhile...
  5. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    I have to say I feel proud whenever I show someone new through the shed. We walk past the "wreck" and past the dismantled second carriage, and can show the first carriage looking nice. Without that the project might feel hopeless. Thanks all, for the kind words and the "likes". Cheers, Vann.
  6. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Lighting - pt.1. Wellington & Manawatu Railway carriages were initially lit with oil (kerosine) lamps. However, from 1896 the company began experimenting with electric lighting - equipping one train with electric lights that year. The results weren't quite to expectations. In March 1897 the...
  7. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Interiors. I don't have pictures of the interior of the first carriage (#48 of 1906) when we got it, but these photographs are of the current interior of the third carriage (#42 of 1904). The ceiling of #48 was in better condition, but otherwise both interiors were in a similar state of...
  8. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Several years back I bought some square nuts from a guy in the UK, who had had them specially made (in Germany I think he said). They have metric threads. He had them made because hex nuts just didn't look right on the sort of historic looking projects he worked on. Some of the preliminary work...
  9. V

    Development of the Wadkin RB Surface Planer.

    Hi Guineafowl. Sorry, I've just not found the time to rework my sketch of the actual guard. So as I'm going away for a week from tonight, here is the "back-of-an-offcut" sketch: Kindly excuse the mix of imperial and metric dimensions (working on restoring an old, pre-metric, railway carriage...
  10. V

    Development of the Wadkin RB Surface Planer.

    Sorry about the delay. My friend has had a medical "procedure" (stents), so my visits have been interrupted. Nonetheless I called in for a short visit on Friday and took these photos for you. I'll turn the "back of an envelope" sketch (actually back of a piece of wood) into something more...
  11. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Here's a picture showing the fours bolts for mounting the new dead buffers, once completed. And just for fun, here's one of the old headstocks... Cheers, Vann.
  12. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    This photo might help a little. You can see the two pairs of holes for the coupling pin, the drop tail of the coupling pin, and the bridle (right of the pin holes). Two vehicles butt together. The hook has it's pin through the rear holes, while the pin on the other vehicle is in the front...
  13. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Those are "dead buffers". They don't actually make contact except in a heavy shunt (we think). They are American practice, adopted by the WMR for bogie vehicles - passenger and goods. We don't think they were ever fitted to their locomotives, nor their 4-wheel wagons. I believe they were...
  14. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Yes. Air brakes - Westinghouse brakes - were introduced in New Zealand in 1901, following a serious crash in Canterbury (South Island) a few years earlier. Cheers, Vann.
  15. V

    Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

    Normally there's a hook that pivots from a horizontal pin in one coupler and drops over the same pin (in the second hole) in the other buffer. Then there's a "bridle" that goes over the hook end to stop it bouncing out. But there's also the option of a "kidney link" which has a hole at both...
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