I've tried several types of coupler on my N gauge stock to avoid the hand in the sky approach, Cruikglen will feature two stations where shunting is required, as well as the engine shed.
To date the most reliable have been D&G type, although I've found them very prone to damage. I've recently been experimenting with the new Dapol magnetic couplers and have found them to be excellent. With care in setting up the magnets and couplings themseleves reliable results have been achieved even wi
My friend Alan Powell bought an N guage layout which included a shed with a turntable.
When he first demonstrated that turntable I was gob smacked at the low speed and rock steady rotation it was capable of. Even in bigger scales the turntables I'd seen on various club/exhibition layouts rotated at unrealistic speeds or were very juddery or both. Here in N gauge was a turntable which had neither of these problems ... I wanted one.
The previous owner had kept all of the invoices and warr
Sometimes, forward progress on the layout is almost exactly counterbalanced by backward steps. Last week I made headway on the scenic (gradual) slope from the mainline to the retaining wall around the shed. Multiple cycles around the fill, sand, check for smoothness cycle and we have the gentle slope I was hoping for.
I’d achieved a nice smooth joint between the retaining wall mount, and the slope into the shed. And then as I sanded one more time, and trimmed hold-melt glue overspil
Slow progress but I’m eating the elephant one bite at a time.
The branch
The first track work I’ve tackled is the section of the branch which dives down on board 4. In the last post I described how this was laid, on Woodland Scenics track bed. I’ve since bought an airbrush, so after practising on scrap lengths of track I sprayed the sleepers and rails with Lifecolour acrylic sleeper grime. After a couple of light coats I achieved the look I wanted, a dirty grey. I prefer this
Since the conversion of the garage has been delayed whilst I get planning permission I've decided to begin the construction of Cruikglen with a single board to keep me occupied until the real building begins.
I chose board 4 which contains the shed and lies just beyond Cruikglen junction. It contains the most variations in height of the track bed with the Waverley line climbing to the right (as seen in the picture below), the branch falling away to the right, and the slope descending to the she
I've finally finished the design of Cruikglen and have posted drawings in my 'Cruikglen trackplans' gallery. Each image has brief notes attached outlining the various sections. More details will follow soon.
Twenty years ago my layout was built on three boards each constructed with a four by three foot sheet of chipboard on two by one softwood frames. They were noisy, even with cork under the track, were incredibly heavy and warped out of true so much that I could never get reliable running over the baseboard joints.
Returning to modelling twenty years on, I’m older and wiser, and realise that joinery is not one of my skills. So I began to look into the use of alternative baseboard materials.
I’m fortunate (or not) enough to be involved with two new layouts. Farnham and District Model Railway club’s N gauge group are busy planning for a new layout, as Basingstoke is showing it’s age, and my garage has been cleared of junk and is available as a railway room.
The club layout will be a prototype, and after new members were consulted it was not going to necessarily be a Southern prototype, as the new members all have interests which lay elsewhere. The predominantly Southern lo
Armed with a copy of 'The Art of Weathering' by Martyn Welch and 'British Railway Goods Wagons in Colour' by Robert Hendry I've had my fist stab at weathering. Please let me have some feedback on these efforts, they look OK (if incomplete) to me but then I'm biased
In general I want wagons to have a run down, well beaten look, as I'm modelling the end of steam BR era, so lots of equipment is just around the corner from the scrapyard.
First up a unfitted Bogie Bolster C with load,
One of the ‘new’ ideas I discovered, on returning to railway modelling after a twenty year break, is DCC. This is attractive to me for two reasons; firstly I can drive locomotives not blocks of track, and secondly because it holds out the hope of controlling points, signals etc. from a computer.
I have a Dapol 9f which is entirely inappropriate for the branch to Belsey, but comes with a DCC socket and an opportunity to try DCC out. In order to help decide which system to buy I used my go
