Johnson 1P

 #FEF aka Front End Friday….

Yesterday evening after finishing my commercial photography work I completely reworked this 13 year old RAW file from the bottom up, or top down, depending on which way you look at it…..

The fiction..

Here we have the mid morning mixed train from Bridgwater arriving behind 58086 sometime in the mid-1950s. This particular engine had the honour of being the last Johnson 1P 0-4-4 engine running on British Railways. But sadly suffered its ultimate demise in 1959 after many years pottering about from nowhere to almost nowhere in this most remote and almost forgotten part of Somerset. I think it’s a real shame that none lasted into preservation, they’d be so useful, so much so, that if I was Elon Musk I’d commission a new build, but sadly I’m just a cynical photographer and model maker who is getting on a bit living in an unfashionable part of outer suburbia.

The reality…

I built the loco as a teenager in 1982 from a Craftsman etched brass kit. It was all assembled with superglue, despite at the time being told that it wouldn’t last 5 minutes. Of course they were right, soldering would be so much better, but it’s still in one piece to this day and runs beautifully. But I have to confess to having the chassis fully rebuilt by a professional in recent years. 

I’m not really a loco builder, despite being able to create miniature wonderlands to what I hope is to a reasonable standard. However I’m mechanically inept when it comes to things that have to move. But luckily these days I can buy stuff that needs to move off the shelf. That said, I’m very good at building track from individual components, just not engines. The carriage is from a Ratio kit depicting a Midland Railway suburban coach. I’m not sure they lasted in to BR days. But it looks the part, and I won’t tell if you won’t. And for the nasal finger pointers, it’s a milk tank wagon behind the coach, not fuel. Though it has been known to transport moonshine occasionally. 

The Photo…

It was taken on a Canon G9 using a long exposure - the exif data telling me that it was 5 seconds long at 80 ISO with an f8 aperture - the smallest on this particular camera model. I do wish they’d go down smaller, but I imagine the designers don’t really have model railway photography in mind, and of course diffraction might be an issue with such a tiny sensor. So to gain greater depth of field I focus stack - you can Google that if interested. 

I recall the lighting was a single domestic bulb in the ceiling, the single point light source giving a single crisp shadow rather like sunlight. I admit the sky is a cheat, for the backscene finishes just a few inches above the distant tree line, so the brick garage wall is covered by a genuine summer storm sky taken above the Somerset Levels near Glastonbury last summer. With this in mind my more recent layouts have far taller backscenes, but when I started building Combwich in 1980, I didn’t think I’d be pointing a camera at it years later. 

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