Top Posts Tagged with #fowler 4f

Commission for @pikablob of Porterbrook No.4 Teapot Anne.

T’was half-past five on a ‘Rensday morn’ when driver, crew, and all, came hurtling out o’ the loco shed in a damn great Number 4… The inside-cylinder 0-6-0 is one of the most common layouts in the Below, being preferred by the conservative locomotive builders of the Margate school of design. The largest of these, Goulder, Bilston, & Co., offers the No. 4 Goods class as one of their standard types, and many operators in the Freehold rely on them for both shunting and local freight duties. Porterbrook, a freight-handling company based out of Volk Freehold, operate two such locomotives. Known to their crews as Kettle Jae (No. 3) and Teapot Anne (No. 4), these two have been overhauled several times by the giant Cortopassi Locomotive Works, which belongs to the Hamilton school of locomotive design, and now carry a mismatch of fittings as a result.

The brief was "Americanized Fowler 4F," combining it with details from a USRA 0-6-0.

A Fowler 4F, a fairly prolific 0-6-0 goods engine on British Railways.

0-6-0s were used in Britain as branchline and mainline goods engines, but in the US the poorer track quality needed to span an order of magnitude greater distances led to engines using pilot trucks and becoming 2-6-0s instead. The extra unpowered wheels in front would guide the loco through curves and keep the train stable. Thus, 0-6-0s in the US were confined to switching/shunting service. Everything's bigger in the States, so whereas British shunting 0-6-0s were usually tank engines, American switching 0-6-0s were usually tender engines.

This hybrid UK/US design is therefore a road switcher--suitable for trips on the mainline but also designed for switching in the yard due to the high-visibility slope-back tender.

This time the client, who commissions me to draw trains so often that perhaps "patron" is a better word, was extremely helpful in that she included in the references this schematic showing all the changes made to the loco. This did take away some of the freedom I might have had otherwise but it did make it much easier to know what I was going for.

it took a long time to get the sketch just right. It kept looking wrong.

After playing around with the proportions for a bit I decided to try something strange:

I attempted to fit the orthographic view onto the central plane of the drawing of the locomotive in 3D space, so try and troubleshoot what was wrong. That let me get a little closer in proportions.

And I ended up with this. This was one of these sketches were I feel like I'm absolutely torturing the poor thing with all the cutting up and moving around of various details I ended up doing.

One of the last details was to lower the roof, which helps balance the loco out a little more.

Then the line art was done, using a vanishing point snap tool to ensure decent perspective.

Then work on the livery began. The brief was essentially "USRA 0-6-0 in Baldwin Works Green but with a Darker Green"

This livery would become unrecognizable when the drawing is finished.

Shading was somewhat irrelevant since most of the highlights would, by design, be hidden by the weathering.

I took a sick twisted pleasure in absolutely ruining this engine. The description was that the locomotive should appear basically black, with her crew being completely uninterested in aesthetic maintenance, but i did leave some regions where the underlying livery could be seen. A friend of mine described her as "the lovely grimy color of once-green."

That brings us to the final image. Headlights and smoke, then steam were added. Here's a few variants of the final image: