Blog- kyle of lochalsh - Kyle goes to TOWIE...

RSS Fetcher · April 22, 2018

Evening all - smashing weather the last few days :sungum:

Last year I accepted an invite to the Billericay Model Railway Group one day show on 5th May 2018, so Kyle is Essex bound.

It’s a small one day show which is my preference at the moment juggling the hobby with work and family commitments as many of us do.

I wanted to try and do some work on the rolling stock for the show, having now got two class 24’s sound fitted. My priority was to try and get 37025 (purchased from TMC as 37035) also sound chipped to go alongside 37414...so I could run the layout with 24’s in the late 70’s period and the 37’s as the early 80’s period - all with sound - thanks again to Nic Bastable for sending me in this direction - not green Nic, more red in terms of my credit card

I purchased the same sound chip and sugar cube speaker from Digitrains for the 37/0 with Paul Chetter sound - which is impressive. As before, they kindly pre soldered the chip wires to the speaker. To get it to fit I repeated as per 37414 by removing the lid of the speaker, cutting off the top by a few millimetres and then made a new top from 5 thou plasticard coloured with a permanent black marker pen. This then sits better inside the loco which has less room as I lowered it as with my previous 37...note I prefer this approach than the raising the bogies method.

The other thing was to hard wire the lights. The wires are so thin and temperamental so getting rid of the PCB at each end made for some more room but the thin wire I purchased kept snagging so I ended up using normal layout wire as I call it. I know some peeps think the lights are a bit bright compared to the reality...but the high intensity light is pretty cool...and it does help see which way the loco is about to move off as the Daisy II has a continuous knob for the throttle.

The 37 has been renumbered with Precision Decals, detail added one end and a DG coupling the other end. Final touch was to weather it with some powders.

Next up was some corridor connections which Andy Stroud (Blueball Summit) kindly told me about for the MK II rake. These are MBM and good value for money and close the gap left by use of the Dapol knuckle couplings. I was going to also add them to the MK I rake then realised that the BG was always centred in the three coach trains to be close to the ramp. So I kind of guessed you wouldn’t let people walk through the train...unless someone can show me evidence to the contrary.

Finally (thanks for the tip off Steve Nicholls) some work on the new Bachfar Kyle line coaches which although only available as the digital train set pack, were seen as split out from a pack on E-bay. A must have purchase having asked them at Alley Pally if they would release the coaches separately and been told possibly next year. Would be great if they could replicate the Met Cam observation coach too as per the 00 version.

The coaches were joined with the corridor connections and lightly weathered. They always look pretty clean in the pics I have however the rooves were a bit shiny and so I toned these down and brushed some powders into the bogies and underframe too.

Am looking forward to run the layout at the show in two weeks time and see how the new stock is received. I will ask the exhibition manager if he can set up a thread on here for the show, failing that, perhaps I will.

Here’s a few photos of progress off the workbench...the next update after the show will perhaps have them on the layout itself.

Please do come and say hello if you are coming to the show :yes: