clarify please
by sink line do you mean as in dip and dunk - the processor moves racks/hangers/baskets of reels from one tank to the next?
For me sink line implies a sink with a number of tanks of chemistry that you move the film holding mechanism from tank to tank, while standing in the dark watching the timer. They can get fancy - automated or manual nitrogen burst agitation, water jacket with pump and heater with controller.
For me on my early exposure to a darkroom at the age of 14 some almost 30 years ago with a ww2 vet - a photo recon guy's set up. His colour chem sink line entailed a collection of a few small thermos coolers filled with water and fish tank heaters that sat in a low epoxy painted plywood 'sink'.
Stainless steel tanks with the right chemisty bobbed in them. You pulled the covers of the 'eskies' as the Aussies would say, then removed the floating lids from the stainless tanks. 4x5 film on hangers rode in a stainless steel basket of some sort that had a handle on the top - you lifted it from one basket to the next, and agitated along the way using it as well. There was a very dim green light in one corner of the room that you could start to see a bit by after 5 minutes in the dark. I saw him do colour processing this way but once.
Most of the few other times I was over to Mr. Noakes house I helped sponge develop photo murals that he specialized in creating and hand colouring. I wish I had been more tuned in to appreciate what he must have known. I called in after college, and both he and his wife were dead and the house sold to someone else.
The other end of the spectrum for sink line gear is the machines that I see written up in Jacobsen's 'Developing', and a series of photo encyclopedias from the sixies that I have.
