When our small salt kiln finally deteriorated to a state in which it became difficult to fire we decided to build a kiln smaller and easier to fire than our anagama  but which could reproduce some of the natural ash patterns achievable in the anagama. We wanted the option of relatively short firings of glazed ware or longer firings for natural ash effects. Although the kiln replaced a salt kiln we did not intend to use salt in it.  Steve Harrison's awkwardly named Long Throat Bourry Box Kiln, which is similar in principle to John Neely's Train Kiln, seemed an appropriate choice for us. We called it  the Oztrain Kiln for convenience.                            

The kiln is rectilinear and not at all elegant, unless you count the elegance of simplicity. It has a Bourry box at one end, a single narrow chamber which is horizontal,  and a chimney at the other end.It is loaded from the top, and finding suitable material to span and insulate the top of the chamber is the only skill required in construction.  Across the top of the chamber we used silicon carbide kiln shelves, which  had seen action in two previous salt kilns: five 2x2 ft shelves plus one 2x1 ft shelf, spanning a chamber 11 ft long and 22 ins wide at the top. A six inch thick layer of ceramic fibre on top of the kiln shelves provides insulation.
Because the design is so simple and the dimensions so arbitrary this is the sort  of kiln which depends a lot on what materials are available. The only point of these pages is to illustrate  solutions to a number of trivial problems.

At left: the kiln shelves spanning the chamber are in position, waiting for the fibre insulation to be placed on top. The fibre insulation sections are shown at the top left of the image.