HOW TO BUILD A GASWORKS
PART ONE
Richard Simpson converts a lineside warehouse into a gasworks retort house.
The complete gasworks with the retort house at the right-hand side of the complex. From there, the coal gas goes through the condenser, the scrubber and the washer before final cleaning in the purifier beds and collection in the gas holder (left). Also shown is the weathered Bachmann water tower and a fan room to supply the furnace air to the retort house via a duct.
PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD SIMPSON
Ithink most of us must have come to the situation in our layouts where something outside our control has driven things in a particular direction.
Such was the case with my own layout where, slap bang in the middle of the backscene, was a structural newel post for a staircase. It could be cut down a little but basically it had to remain, so my thoughts were then driven towards how to conceal it.
Various industrial buildings were considered, all with their advantages and disadvantages, but then one day I came across a Bachmann low‐relief resin gas holder. The dimensions looked very promising, and the price was reasonable enough to accommodate failure, so I went ahead and bought it.
With a lump hacked out of the base it proved to be the perfect size to hide the newel post, so the idea of creating a gasworks to supply the gas holder was born. A lot of research was undertaken into the construction of coal-fired gasworks, including plans and supporting articles from a 1936 issue of Model Railway magazine and the mine of information supplied by various museum websites from around the country, before I came up with a very basic plan for the layout. Most importantly, I wanted the gasworks to be credible, by which I mean I wanted the various components to be as you would expect to find them in a real coal gas plant from around the 1940s.