Ridge: Purbeck part 3…

“Suddenly, my attention was caught by a thin plume of steam rising from the valley not a mile away. Hurriedly I focused my binoculars on it, the steam was coming from a small locomotive which even as I studied it began to move and was soon lost to sight behind some trees.

I pulled out the map and had a look, there sure enough was a ‘tramway’, and showed the road I was on crossed the line near Creech Bottom so without any more thought I set off. To attempt to drive with any haste would have been dangerous for the road was narrow and twisty and descended very steeply down the thickly wooded hillside. Just as well I proceeded cautiously as rounding a bend I came face to face with a set of peacocks, presumably out for their morning constitutional from Creech Grange. Half a mile further on the road skirted an oak wood but according to the map the railway ran right through it, a rough track led off the road and as I approached the turn, slowing to a walking pace emerged the green tank engine I had first seen from the hill top, wheezing past with a short rake of loaded ramshackle clay wagons…”

That evocative passage by Ivo Peters along with a photo of Quintus simmering in the woods kicked off my interest and love of the Purbeck ball clay narrow gauge and it’s the sort of subject that gets right under your skin. In fact from my first 009 layout Creech Bottom to the last, East Works it’s a subject that I still feel I have not fully explored. Creech Bottom depicted a mine, East Works the mill… part three of the trilogy? Ridge… the wharf on the River Frome seemed an interesting and model-able subject.

Crossing the flat heath the line dropped gradually from Furzebrook to Ridge allowing early trains to be gravity worked and returning empties by horse. The contrast to the rolling fields at Creech Bottom is attractive and the scheme almost completes the set, allowing me to use my existing stock and almost providing an encore to East Works. That layout was scenically successful but just to big to keep at home. Ridge needs to be a little smaller and built for home yet be exhibit-able rather than primarily an exhibition layout.

Imagine stumbling upon the works alongside the river, after a pleasant ramble across the heath in the late summer of 1954, a shrill whistle and a plume of white smoke in the distance catch your attention as the aging and wheezing ex Ashover Baldwin slowly makes it way down to the waiting barge on the River Frome. Insects buzz as you sit in the long grass, lying back, watching the clouds, listening to hypnotic clickety clack as under light steam the loaded skips get closer and closer… watching them arrive and be quickly unloaded in the barge it is time to go and grab some dinner at one of the pubs along the river at Wareham, perhaps enjoying an ale or two before retiring for the night full of sunshine, steam and the memories of a wonderful day out…

There will be more on this as I take this basic scheme forwards, fuelled by these passages, the photos in Chris Legg’s books and the idea of the industrial narrow gauge doing what it has alway done, in a beautiful part of the country. Until then, more soon…

References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furzebrook_Railway