An old trackside conveyer belt

I have been going through some old negatives and found a shot I took as a kid, sometime between 1960 and 1963 of a long conveyer belt along a CN rail line in northern British Columbia.


I had a model railroad then and was snapping interesting rail line shots whenever I could. I am not sure if it was near my home in Kitimat or taken somewhere else during a vacation.

I remember wandering what the conveyer was used for then and I am even more curious now.

I am going to post this picture on one of the forums to find out what the answer may be.

Wampo Nieke and Sonkrai Progress report

May to October- Railway salvage?

It was after I finished The Sonkrai Tribunal, that I decided to build a model railway based on my research, to model the real bridges on the River Kwai.

But at that time there was trouble brewing. Management at CBC had applied for conciliation and that had started the clock ticking towards the lockout that began in August.

Money was tight, but my basement was full of material left by the one the previous owners of my house, that could potentially be used for a layout. A large pile of wood, probably structural wood, taken down when the wall was taken down between the living and dining rooms. There were also two doors in the basement, not the standard hollow doors available at your local hardware store. There was a solid door, same pattern as the rest of the doors in my house and a hollow cupboard door.

So that became my planned bench work.
The plans were put on hold as it became clear that there would be a lockout and I was working on the first round of revisions of the manuscript.

In August, the model railway gods favoured me while I my income was reduced by the lockout. I was able to get more salvage material from construction sites on my block. The first was some old-fashioned wire mesh, three different types, which I picked out of a pile of construction waste.
Then a couple of weeks later, another house on my block was being renovated. The exterior walls were covered in lovely blue extruded Styrofoam. And a colleague and lockout picket captain owns the house next door, so I was occasionally a visitor and one day I was there when the contractor’s crew was outside and I asked and received all their scraps.


October to November. Layout planning.

The lockout ended (see the Garret Tree for my blog on the lockout) and once my pay cheque resumed, I dropped by my local Home Depot and bought one large piece of 4 x 8 one inch pink Styrofoam and a couple of pieces of two inch 2 x 8 foam.

I knew the rough layout and I what was essential, the great Sonkrai trestle bridge in the centre of the layout and the spectacular Wampo viaduct on one side. As well, by watching the forums and e-mail, I concluded that for viable freelance operation, the railway needed an economic reason to operate, over and above the long-standing idea that it should be a short cut from Southeast Asia and China to India. When I visited the region in 1997 I saw the devastation of clear cut logging, similar to the cut, clear and leave the slash that so familiar to me when I was growing up in British Columbia in the 1960s. The Imperial Japanese Army had created small sawmills along the route of the railway to produce ties and material for bridges, so my economic assumption is that there was a small post-war logging and lumber industry that provided some support for local trains.

So that meant a branch line going to the sawmill.

The layout is designed as point to point as the original railway was. But since the Burma Thailand Railway had what were called “air raid spurs” – spur lines with little clearance from the jungle that were designed for trains to hide during Allied air raids, the return loop of an oval is partly the air raid spur.

Christmas holidays

I built the bench work during the Christmas holidays.

January and February

Going slower than I thought it would, but then by monitoring the forums, it seems it goes slowly with everyone.

I glue down the base extruded Styrofoam.

Then I layout the basic track plan, using Kato Unitrack for the lines. I planned to use Atlas Snaptrack for the many bridges (there were 688 bridges on the Burma Thailand Railway). My plans at this point call for four trestle bridges based on the photographs and drawings of the real bridges on the Kwai. (The movie bridge had trusses, the real ones did not) plus a plate deck bridge (Kato model) based one of the railway’s steel bridges in Burma.

The problem is for this mountain layout is to figure out the maximum inclination that can be modeled. The Burma Thailand Railway steep inclines and in that location two locomotives were used in a push-pull configuration.

I didn’t know about bridge track until I saw a mention in a forum. So I’ve ordered the bridge track from my local hobby shop.

But I will keep using the Atlas track for test purposes as I build the inclines.

More on why and what I am doing

A post in the Model Railroader magazine forum

Original question on Ever re-created a movie or t.v. scene on your layout?

My answer:

My entire model railway (I am currently working on the track layout on the foam) is based somewhat on The Bridge on the River Kwai.

My late father was a POW on the River Kwai.

I have just finished a book on a war crimes trial of River Kwai prison guards, called The Sonkrai Tribunal, that will be published in Australia this fall (I still haven't found a North American publisher)



During the research for the book I obtained original WWII intelligence reports which listed such things as rolling stock, locomotives, number of wooden trestle bridges (680) and steel (8) and how stations and yards were configured. Reading and rereading the reports rekindled my long dormant interest in model railroading.

The period I am modelling is after the war, when the rail line was run by the British military, with cooperation from Thai Railways. This period ended in 1947, but the freelance element is that the railway continued to operate throughout the 1940s, as intended by pre-war planners in UK and Thailand as a short cut between Southeast Asia and India.

(During the research I came across a United Nations report that proposed that idea was still viable today. I blogged that last spring )

It allows for an interesting mix of locos and rolling stock. As well as Japanese engines brought in and used by the Japanese Army, there were locos appropriated by Japan from the Federated Malay States Railway, a number of British made for export locos and U.S. built Baldwins. Those Japanese locos were handed over to Burma and Thailand after the war and continued to operate for many years in both countries.

It's in N Scale called the Wampo, Nieke and Sonkrai.

I plan to unveil a blog on how my progress on the WNS in a couple of weeks.

Robin