Related questions periodically crop up on sleeper spacing, rail and sleeper painting in addition to ballasting. At a couple of recent demos I was playing with a short plank and talking folk through some of the materials used. I thought it may be a useful reference point for future questions.
Peco track is the staple diet of modellers moving on from train set track. A basic limitation of the prototypical accuracy of the track is obviously the fact that it is OO gauge and any acceptanc
Remembers those Solvite ads decades ago where they papered a bloke to a plane and flew around and the one where they pasted him to a board and swung him from a helicopter? I never believed them for one minute but I now reckon they used this stuff:
It's 1mm thick, 38mm wide, double sided and self-adhesive on a thin core of foam. I thought it would be worth a go for laying the track on the train turntable onto expecting something that would allow secure fixing without the use of pins (
Another day shower dodging.
Baseboards connected, train turntable cut out, front scenic boards knocked together and the boards corked.
I've not decided yet whether the water (front middle board) will be done as before with paint/PVA/varnish layers on the flat ply top or to invert the board and create some depth to the water within the well. I'll try a couple of ideas and see where it heads.
When it's all locked together it's reasonably stable; I did manage to disassemble
"Ooh, I didn't expect it to be that big", long time since I've heard that one.
Whilst showers just about managed to hold off I was able to get the main baseboards and legs knocked together. I hadn't properly considered the leg issue when I made the previous board so that's also been replaced which now means the legs are interchangeable between boards with an easy slot in. No more bulky steel trestles!
A little more time would have enabled me to fit the internal an
Got the crayons out and had a scribble.
And then tried to put it into a 'real world' context.
That's definitely not to scale, that ferry would be huge!
For anyone who hasn't been to Keyhaven (which is probably in excess of 99% of the population) this snap shows where the car ferry ramp would be.
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/19508
Source: K2yhaven
After months years of chewing over the next phase of Keyhaven everywhere I turned there were self-created compatability issues and also the legacy of bits that could have been better so I'd decided some time back that its offspring would recreate some of the old but improve upon it, especially from an operation viewpoint, and take the idea a stage further.
If I keep deliberating and looking for problems it'll never happen so now is the time of year to make a start, a time when you can traips
Every now and again I suppose many of us go beyond what we'd normally expect as our own "it'll do for me" criteria and get carried away with something.
Keyhaven wouldn't have been right without a late 60s Crompton rattling away on idle and so the saga of the 33/0 began with much hacking to get a 33/0 with decent roof profile and one thing just led to another. To follow on from the blog link above the Archer's rivet transfers never did surface so I got round to ordering some more. Once you st
Whilst grazing over a cuppa  carrying out vital research for the Keyhaven extension I came across the following Pathe clip that fills in a few gaps for me on one of the components of the extension.
Ain't the 'net great?
 I took the opportunity yesterday to take my last ride on these venerable and extremely comfortable machines on a route that I have a soft spot for. Years of memories of watching them trundle over the bridge at Lymington made it too hard to resist. The Lymington branch racks up another last to follow on from the last steam branch; I wonder if 2050 will be seeing the last Desiro service on the branch with as much interest?
Anyway, I gather there will be a more professional vide
I wouldn't call it one of my quickest projects, after 18 months it's still not actually finished but I thought it would be appropriate to round up the bits that have been around before.
Keyhaven won't feel right to me until there's a filthy old Crompton burbling away in early guise (probably GSYPWL - work that one out) and so a 33/1 and a 33/0 shell have been sitting for ages idly waiting for me to grab some time to attack them. I know I could probably just about live with the incorrect roof
In finishing off the Mermaid modded here I thought I'd try the household cleaning aisle's wonder-stuff Klear for it's ballasting properties. A dry mix of ballast was placed in the weighted load area of the Mermaid, the Klear was given isopropyl alcohol and a blob of washing up liquid as additives and sprayed straight onto the dry mix. It soaked in like a dream with virtually no disturbance of the dry ballast. A few hours later it's rock hard. Any slight sheen is taken off with subsequent matt s
In turning around a Parkside Pallet Van I took the usual course of referencing Paul Bartlett's site and found that the Palvan's seemed to have a fairly distinct way of weathering after lounging around in backwaters following a fairly premature absence from action - http://gallery6801.fotopic.net/p24203000.html . In all likelihood they were probably as drab and mucky as any other van whilst still in service but I fancied a go at something a different shade of brown.
Starting from a base
Follow up to http://www.rmweb.co....n-silo-presflo/
I'd set off on a desire to be different more than anything else in trashing a previously perfect Bachy Presflo into a twin silo variant. I set off knowing that I'd got no reference material other assumption and guesswork and even the resources to complete the model in its supposed form.
Looking back Hornby Dublo produced a Presflo in a slightly bluish green with ICI logos and bulk salt and Dapol some years later in an even more garish s
Dear Number 57, whoever you are or more probably were, today I really appreciate what you and your colleagues did all those years ago!
I'd had a Dapol Prestwin in the to-do drawer for a year or two and decided a few weeks back to put into the works. What an utter disaster it was and virtually put me off buying any of Dapol's current production of these time-served moulds. The chassis was so distorted that at rest only two wheels would touch the rails, three if a digit was placed on a corner;
Jumping ahead to other bits of Keyhaven that may or may not get built at some point this year I picked up some Presflos with a view to altering them to reflect the twin silo variety that were initially used for ICI salt traffic and latterly for Slate Powder.
Paul Bartlett's site again provides useful reference content with various angles of these wagons - http://gallery6801.f...et/c121408.html
The starting point was the Crown Cement liveried Presflo with the correct buffer types sho
I picked up a Flangeway Mermaid at the weekend and although it has a lot of positives the big negative for me was the solid panel on top of the chassis - see cnw6847's post which detracted from the fineness of the rest of the model. Given the price at GBP15.95 I'd have expected something a little more but having looked at it I felt comfortable that something could be done to improve it.
Step 1 - Separate the wagon body from the supporting frame, maybe it should unclip but I could see glue re
So what's an L&Y pug doing down at the seaside?
This was an innocent bystander sat in the bottom of the drawer that I'd picked up for less than a tenner moons ago, no I didn't need it, want it or foresee any need for it but there you go. It'd be boring if everything was done to a plan wouldn't it?
After a strip down and clean it was the quickest DCC hard-wire job I've ever done, hiding the decoder's another matter hence the use of 'Big Hands' on the footplate. A quick blast from the
As part of the drive to get something useful done whilst the site's off in the evenings some layabouts in the to-do drawer have resurfaced. Keyhaven's always needed an 07 to help give it some geographical recognition and a lemon of a runner (and build) Craftsman 07 has lain dormant next to a Silver Fox resin body. The Silver Fox body needs a Bachmann 04 split chassis and having fried one chip with a chassis short when DCCing it too sat in the 'one day' pile. The detail on the Craftsman brass bod
It's high time I got round to putting together some of the more appropriate stock to run on Keyhaven.
First off the ramp is this M.A.R.C. Models reach wagon, some enterprising soul down Dorzet way seems to have purloined one of the matching pair that fell out of use at Dover in the 1950s. The originals were paired together for loading train ferries offering the bare basics of accommodation for riders.
Although the kit has been sat around the workbench for the last 7 months it w
The low relief buildings at the back of Keyhaven also serve to conceal a hidden storage road, one of which I've never been particularly happy with as it was a hasty gap filler at the time of the layout challenge. So, the 75% of the building in the centre is now a landfill contribution.? ?
? ?
I'd picked up a couple of Ten Commandments stone-cast low-relief buildings to hack about.? ?
And re-assembled as below, PVA giving a good bond between the sections.
The buildin
I'm frequently asked about how the concrete effect was achieved on keyhaven and also crops up periodically in reference to "How do I do inlaid track work?" questions.
The inset track on Keyhaven Quay was achieved by use of cork floor tiles abutted to the side of the sleepers, these basic floor tiles, obtained from a DIY chain, near enough match the rail height of Peco Code 75 track. The inset section between the rails uses Fabfoam obtained from a craft shop chain and cut into 14mm wide strip
I always enjoy any trip down to Hampshire or Dorset, the tinkle of yachts in harbours, the thrum of perpetual ferries, a chance to sample once more some of my favourite pubs; it lifts the spirits don't you know. I must be getting old when thoughts turn to "I could happily retire here, just there, that house with the balcony there", only another 20 years to save up for what I can't afford today!
This time whilst mooching around I was somewhat surprised to find in a bookshop one of the rare N
