Putting it back together...

When people talk about going on a drawing hunt...

This is from a post on Fbook from Didcot Railway Centre about drawing conservation. Tracings are particularly problematic apparently. I wonder if someone holds a central registry of surviving drawings? Then maybe incomplete ones could be matched up.

 

Ha, when I worked for London Underground (not all that long ago) sticking drawings back together like this was a fairly regular occurrence. And those were for things still in commission!

(PS: And no we did not use sellotape, although in my experience mainly because when the glue dries out it goes brittle and yellow and falls off. 3M Magic Tape is the stuff to use.)

 

Surprised you were still using the originals - we had them microfiche in Tube Lines and that was back in 2009.

Regards,

Dan

 

I have a similar problem. As Archivist to the 8F Society, I hold quite a few original shop drawings, both Crewe and North British. Many of these bear W.A. Stanier's signature. I'd like to have them scanned but many are so brittle I would hate to endanger historic documents.

I'm working on it!

 

Unless you want an accurate reproduction why not just photograph them? I’ve done quite a few simply so I can conveniently look at them on the PC

 

I've done that for small parts of them, Steve, but bigger sections are difficult. These things are bigger than A0, and my arms aren't long enough! They are also creased and rolled from previous times, so the results aren't always very promising. Below is the blast pipe and a bigger section of the main frame.

 

I put them on the kitchen table and hold the corners down with suitable weights. Then stand on a chair or stepladder to get height. If necessary, I put something under the table legs to tilt it slightly. The hardest problem is avoiding glare from lights.
(When I clicked on your photos I got a warning'Do you want to report this adult content? )

 

Cataloguing archives of railway-related drawings etc (and creating an index that is descriptive) is a huge problem, as often there is no money to employ someone, and I imagine a shortage of competent volunteers, assuming (and that can be a big assumption) the archive is so-minded to do something about it. Does Didcot have an accessible index of what it has? The NRM drawing indexes for instance, as you probably know, are distributed over a number of separate lists, some of which seem to be the old OPC lists which are poor at describing what the drawing is, so to match something up would probably require some consistency of standards as to how to describe drawings.

Digressing slightly, I did discover recently that the NRM holds general arrangements for a lot of Dübs locos, although working your way around their online catalogue requires time. These are very large drawings, impossible to photograph casually other than in sections (even small drawings are difficult to photograph casually because of problems holding flat as they are often folded or rolled, plus lighting issues), and the NRM and elsewhere discourages standing on chairs or putting the drawing on the floor, although the NRM does offer a copying service (which is quite expensive), and subject to the drawing not being too frail.

If you have the luxury of being able to do it in your own home or more formally, you can get overhead scanners which will do larger sizes than the usual desktop A4 scanner but they would not be much use for the larger drawings, and it may be better to try fixing them to a large flat board outside and putting the camera on a tripod.

 

You must have taller ceilings than me, and higher chairs!

To be fair, I don't think the kids would be that interested anyway!

 

The NRM does have a step ladder in the reading room at Search Engine.

 

When looking for detail on the Weltrol we are currently working on, we did not bother trying to get the full drawing in shot.
We just concentrated on the smaller detail areas of the drawing as we were not really changing or replacing anything in the main body of the wagon.
Even then trying to decipher the rolled, creased or smeared areas was difficult in places.

 

The GWS have been preparing and making available for many years (3o+) lists of locomotive drawings held and slowly working through transfering them to Microfilm. Ocasionally i see a print or photo of a GWR drawing with EDOS along the bottom ..... Thats a GWS drawing copied to microfilm and made available on request to a loco owner or railway... ( EDOS are in Bourne End and can still handle the transfer of historic drawings to either Microfilm or Digital.

 

The problem with Microfiche is that the critical dimension you need is usually the one which is most pixelated...

I'm a bit out of the loop, but I believe there is currently some cooperation between the GWS and Tyseley regarding the cataloguing of drawings.

 

Thanks. Is there an online link where one can find those lists?

 

I think that's the very limited capability of the earlier equipment. I imagine its much better now. Some of the copies the NRM makes available are scanned in monochrome and at limited resolution so quite desperate in places.

 

I have a large microfiche viewer, ex John Browns of Clydebank. When viewing microfiches, the quality is quite good, but the scan or print from the microfiche can be poor because of the number of pixels about in the 1970s/80s, when a lot of the microfiches were done, was a lot less than what is available nowadays. You scan an old drawing now, what you see is what you get.

 

Depends on the drawing Dan. They tended to microfiche things which weren’t required to be updated so often. Then when they did need updating that brought its own problems as the prints were often of pretty dubious quality. There are 1950s originals still in use to this very day, as far as I know.


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That makes more sense - all the older drawings I had to work on were 72 and 67TS structures for conversion into the engineering fleet. We tended to either re-draw with the modifications or go for a raster version in Microstation and edit it in there.

I presume if steam locomotive drawings need modifying a similar process is followed (CAD software availability permitting).

Regards,

Dan

 

The National Railway Museum drawings are expensive to have scanned - I understood they went to a specialist who did work for the county record office etc -
but if they are already scanned further prints after the first are much cheaper.