Following on from my post of a month or so back about accepting yesterday's standards as being "good enough", here's the sort of finished 93XX, now with the Comet cylinders as promised. They make a big difference I reckon.
I say "sort of" finished because the livery and tender transfers are just to get something into BR service without doing a full repaint from the original GWR green. I removed the latter's lettering with T-cut, then added HMRS transfers for the late cre
Following the theme of the last entry, here are two more cheap and cheerful vehicular restorations.
The 3.4 litre Jag is a Lesney model that was in a very tatty state. I flush-glazed it from the outside using Glue-n-glaze as I didn't want to faff around getting into the rivetted interior. It worked surprisingly well although I've not always had success with glazing big gaps like the windscreen. The model was repainted. The Lesney wheels were retained, but I swapped the o
After a trip to the dentist last week I treated myself by popping into the toys & collectables shop on our high street. They sometimes have some railway stuff and I had my eye on a Superquick church kit that I'd spotted in the window a week or two earlier. Alas, the aforementioned ecclesiastical structure had gone but a rummage in one of the bins turned up a nice little white metal car kit in the John Day range. Although I didn't realise it at the time, it's a prewar/war Hillman Minx.
Pushing on with the theme of digging out old kits, a good rummage in my boxes unearthed a nice little Scale Link kit for a1928 Morgan:
I don't remember buying this, but the "GM&S" price label is a giveaway as to its age. Godfather Models & Supply was a very good Dutch model railway specialist with a finescale bias. I don't think I ever visited the shop, but they went to the two large Dutch exhibitions that I used to attend from time to time, and were a good sourc
At RailWells last summer I did the usual thing of buying various detailing bits which then languished in a brown paper bag until rediscovery last week. One of these was a nice pair of Shire Scenes etched brass kits for a K1 and K6 telephone kiosk. i decided to have a go at them over the last few evenings.
The K1 (as I've since learned) was an early 1920s design and the first real mass produced public telephone box. Although most have now gone, there are still one or two dotted around
Recent developments in the hobby have thrown several factors into relief, including the relative cost of new models versus spending power, and the general demographic of modellers as we all age. I've certainly been spending less on my UK outline in the last year or so, although it took a conversation in a model shop - talking about the relative merits and price points of the Accurascale and Bachmann Class 37s - to finally pin-point, to me, the reason why I'm spending less, at least on engines.
I enjoyed taking Paynestown to the Barry show organised in support of Alzheimer's UK. It was a very nice day out with plenty of friends involved with other layouts and just helping out, with much thanks due to Brian and Paul Rolley for instigating the event and making the whole day relaxed and convivial. By happy coincidence I was also collecting for a separate Alzheimer's event so my bucket was plonked on the same table as the layout!
I brought along a rubber mallet, not
Paynestown's public outing is coming up fast, and inevitably there's a rush to get a lot of jobs done, compounded by the fact that I'm travelling on the two days prior to the exhibition! I think it's nearly there, though, provided I get a good weekend of tasks done.
Other than adding additional wagons to the stock box, by way of converting their couplings, the other main job has been further tidying up of the fascia, ready for its final coat of paint. I've opted for a satin warm grey
With Paynestown's appearance at the Barry show just over a month away, I've been pushing on with some of the outstanding tasks. Most of the work has been on the right hand end, including the building of this pub from a Metcalf kit:
I toned down/adjusted the colouring with washes, added a proper roof and some gutters and drainpipes, but other than that it's as Metcalf intended. I've named it the Railway Inn and made it a Rhymney & Crosswells pub. I spent a happy few h
I'm the worst for leaving the boring jobs until the last minute, but for this layout I was determined not to be caught out and to try and get ahead on the less exciting tasks, including sorting out the fascia and the lighting rig. It'll still be a mad rush at the end I know, but at least the presentational aspects should be reasonably finished.
This view shows most of the layout, with a start made on the fascia, and also with the LED lighting in place for the first time. The latter d
Nothing very dramatic here, just a bit more progress in the general direction of scenery. I've begun adding some additional fencing along the road, and developed it more greenery on the right side of the layout. It all helps with the feeling that the layout is slowly knitting together.
These rustic wooden fences were made using Peco plastic sheets, cut into short lengths with scissors, then suitably abused along the top to suggest a degree of creeping dereliction. As with
The last couple of weekends provided the welcome opportunity for a big push with the scenery on Paynestown, although appearances can be deceptive!
Back at the Bristol show at the start of the month, I was able to find some very cheap sheets of plastic card which were a bit discoloured, but otherwise perfectly fine for modelling. This allowed me to push on with the curved backscene:
Once that was done, there was
Following a hugely enjoyable SWAG 23, for which many thanks to Rob, Grahame, Stu, Phil, Andy Y and all involved, I returned to sunny South Wales with renewed modelling mojo and a strong desire to push on with the layout.
Recent work has been focused on further tweaking of the trackwork, painting sleepers and rail sides and so on, and generally trying to get it looking semi-finished ( at least on this half of the module) before I move on to other matters.
The first loco bought with the intention of an eventual South Wales-themed layout in N was the then-new Dapol 57XX pannier. At the time I could only test it easily under DCC, so I put in a small decoder and tried it on the American layout. It was rubbish. but I (naively) assumed it would improve with some running-in and so on. Not a chance! After I got it out of its box again for Paynestown, I was reminded how hopeless it had been to begin with. It would only do very jerky starts, couldn't run
A spot of dry weather was the spur for taking an overall view of the layout:
This is the whole thing now, with the backscene permanently mounted. Just to be on the safe side, I did see if it fitted in the car! It did, and while there was plenty of margin of error on the height and width, I was surprised at how close to the limit it was in terms of length. That's with the back seats folded down, but the front passenger seat still fully upright, allowing for a spare operato
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been building some of the Ratio kits which form the main railway buildings of the layout. As my first venture into scenery in UK N, I quite enjoyed getting to grips with these.
First up is the goods shed, which is where the engine shed used to be on the old layout:
In keeping with the other buildings, and the original layout, I've opted for GWR colours of light and dark stone, rather than WR brown and crea
A bit of daylight in the conservatory was the prompt to get on with the slightly fiddly work of making a few more DG couplings!
The Sonic Models 56XX is a lovely model but greatly benefits from losing the chunky couplers, and having the somewhat less
obtrusive DGs fitted. I made up another two pairs which enabled two 12T vans to be added to the goods fleet, in addtion
to a short rake of 16 tonners (and a Toad!) already one. It's not much but it does allow for s
Over the last few weeks, I've dug my Paynestown project out of the attic and made quite a bit pleasing progress.
To recap - and unfortunately my earlier pics were lost in the image crash - I built a 4mm layout with the same name in 2010, then sold that a few years later. I'd always said to myself that might have another go, this time in N, provided there was an easy route to getting a 56XX, vital for a layout set in former GWR territory in the South Wales valleys. Thanks to Sonic Mo
Back in October I reported on a revamped Hornby Princess, using a Comet chassis under the body of an old tender drive model. Keeping on the same theme, toward the end of the year I also embarked on a similar upgrade to a Princess Coronation - aka Duchess - from the same source.
Here's the loco nearing completion:
The basis of this model was an even older specimen than the Princess, which was a relatively recent 1990s release. This one goes back to 1979! The or
You couldn't get further apart than these two locos! They've both been on and off the workbench in recent months,
though, so I thought a brief write-up was in order.
Let's start with Queen Maud, a Princess Royal. This one started life as a 1980s-1990s era Hornby Princess with tender
drive, in LMS Black - I think possibly Princess Marie Louise. She was repainted into BR green about 20 years ago but
hasn't seen much service since I went over to DCC. She did run pretty ni
Over on my S&D blog, Colin (@BWsTrains) kindly asked if I had any close-up shots of the station building when the layout is in GWR mode. I promised to dig some out but was surprised at how few I had that offered a clear view of the model. I can't take any fresh ones of the building in-situ right now, because the layout is still in S&D mode, but I did grab a few snaps of the model on its own.
It's no great shakes as a piece of architectural modelling, but it does h
I've pushed on with the Nu-Cast 2021 class to the point where it's nearly ready for painting, although it might be a case of putting it back in the box until I've got another GWR loco to do at the same time (there are some candidates in the stash!). However, it has now begun to settle in when running under load:
Not much more to add other than to say I'm always quite relieved when a loco gets to this stage without any major gremlins, as I can then start thinking abou
Most of my blog posts, few that there were in recent months, have been over on the S&D blog I started, but this one really seemed to belong back in the old "mostly GWR" bit. So here we are!
Way back when, in 67, ... no, that's a Steely Dan song. Way back when, around five or six years ago, I came back from Railwells with a complete Nu-Cast kit for the rather petite 2021 class pannier, including motor, gearbox and a full set of Markits wheels.
Nice, as Louis Balfour wo
As mentioned in the Paynestown topic, I was a bit underwhelmed with the slow speed running of the Dapol N pannier. So, determined to give it a proper run-in, I temporarily back-converted the Gulf, Atlanta & Eastern to DC and let the pannier do many laps (nearly 3 scale miles each time). The running did improve, but that's another story. While I had the layout connected up to a DC controller, I remembered a little 009 loco that had been in my possession for 18 years, but which had barely turn
