Three-D Modelling for Railways

Corfe Castle is a small village in Dorset. The station is on the line from Wareham to Swanage, which closed in 1972, but was preserved along the Swanage end. Corfe Castle was the only intermediate station when part of the national network. It is an attractive station, with interesting rooves. I recalled that there was a plan and elevations in Railway Modeller in 1976, and managed to find it. I took a photo, used GIMP to remove distortions, then imported that into Blender. After sizing, I could them use that to get the proportions right. I visited the village in 2019, but did not make it to the station as I had the family in tow. I could just about see it from the castle though.

Blender's "Sculpt" mode is something I am slowly learning about, and so I thought worth a blog post. I will probably add to it as I learn more. It allows you to modify a mesh by, well, sculpting it. You can go into Sculpt mode using the drop down at top left where Object and Edit mode can be selected, but I think a better way is to go to the Sculpt tab. Either way, whilst in Sculpt mode, you can press tab to go into Edit mode. I recommend applying scale before sculpting, otherwise it can be skewed along one axis. Vertices If you start with the basic cube, go into Sculp mode, and try to edit it, not much will happen. By default, Blender will try to apply the tool to the existing vertices, and you only have six. There are three ways around this. Lots of Vertices - If you subdivide the cube a lot, then when you sculpt it, Blender will have plenty to work with, and you will see something happening. Density - You can use the density tool (fifth down on the left) to increase ...

 A small project I did in Blender on Christmas Eve, and printed on Boxing Day, painted today. The prototype is where Old Manchester Road meets Manchester Road, and was built to commemorate Queen Victoria's Jubilee - like so many municipal drinking fountains. I created one corner, which was then replicated using Geometry Nodes, though mirroring would have worked just as well! There is a gargoyle on each corner, which I did using the "Sculpt" mode, and is fine in small scale, but will look a bit rubbish if you look too closely! This is the print, unpainted. This is the first time using a light box for photos (thanks to middle child for the present!). And printed. The STL file is available on Thingiverse . The above is a slightly different version as the prototype is missing a ball in one corner and has a sizeable chunk out of it

I visited Settle with the specific intention to get photos of the footbridge, but ended up doing most of the station structures. The Settle and Carlisle Line is a popular one to model. The Midland Rail had a standard design for buildings, so the main station building at Settle is essentially the same as that At Appleby, Kirby Stephen and other locations. The waiting room is even more ubiquitous. Here is that main building. This is the platform side. The door did not quite print properly, and the bits in the windows either side failed to and had to be redone - and are rather fatter than they should be but that is a limitation of the technology. But if you ignore that area, otherwise it looks pretty good. This is from the road side. No doors on this side, which is unusual. Was that to prevent draughts? The waiting room is very much in the same style. The water tower. I did a second version that is rather smaller. The Settle water tower is noted as the biggest on the line. The footbridge....

The prototype is discussed here . It is a complex model, but for the most part not technically challenging. The worst part was aligning the pivot with the centre of the arc, and I am not quite sure I got it right. In hindsight I should have done the pivot first... There was also the cog and rack. The cog on the back of the curve is the rack aligned to a curve. There does not seem to be a cog and rack on the prototype, but I felt I would need one to make up for the lack of weight. I printed it in four parts, the two big being the main stationary infrastructure and the lifting the span. The roof and top of the counterweight being the other two. The lifting span was printed upside down. The road deck is card. I designed it hoping it could be motorised, but the lifting span was too wide, and catches on the stationary part. With a bit of effort it could be modified, but that is a job for another day.

Built by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, but I cannot determine when, besides the second half of the nineteenth century. This is a nice building to model because it is so thin; the model is only 65 mm deep. The model was fiddly to do, but not that complex technically. The tower was done aligned to the grid, and then I took a copy, joined it into a single object, and rotated it 45deg. I printed the roof and tower separately.