Ready for the Paint shop - the first item of stock built specifically for Litlington.
This is a Cambrian (C98) kit of an SECR Van, purchased on something of a whim earlier in the week. I intend to use mostly LBSCR stock, however a fascinating discussion in the Pre-Grouping section on 'Foreign Wagons' - http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/92231-foreign-wagons/ - has given me a few ideas, so when I saw this I couldn't resist.
It went together in around an hour, and I'm reall
Now that the baseboard is built, things are moving on, and tonight I have been able to get the track out and see if it all fits together as planned.
This is always a worry, especially when you are converting an electronic plan to a full-size one, but on this occasion all seems to have gone has planned.
As mentioned last night, I'd like to include a gradient, and with a 3/4 inch rise decided on, I was quite pleased to find a CD box (Driving Rock, inevitably! ) which matches the correct he
I mentioned a few days ago altering the track plan to include a run round, whilst hopefully maintaining a sweeping curve (well, as 'sweeping' as you can get in a 6' Scenic section!) into the station platform.
That track plan is, again, below.
One thing I've never tried before, but have always wanted to, is to incorporate a gradient into the plan. I tend to plan my layouts and schemes on XtrkCad to avoid the 'optimistic pencil' that I know would result if I tried to draw the plan out
So after posting last nights update I was feeling pretty pleased with myself - I had a nice, flat and solid baseboard which looked good.
Impatience, however, then took over - I was keen to fix the end pieces to the boards, so took out a couple of the screws as the sides seemed to be secure. Of course, allowing a couple of hours rather than the 24 recommended on the tube of Gripfill was too soon, and I quickly found I had to put them back. Luckily, no damage occurred and this morning I was ab
After the diversions caused by the slight alterations to the plan, the weekend landed today and with it the chance for me to properly begin Litlington (again!)
As mentioned I have decided to go along the foam board route, and this afternoon purchased the required parts. The foam board itself is Knauf Space Board Eco - which I recently found out is now discontinued in the UK, however fortunately our local Wickes still had some in stock. They now have two less!
General consensus is to add
Is of course, not money, not beer, but Google.
In my last post, I mentioned the runaround.
All was well and good. I then had an idle moment at work (we have had some IT issues over the past couple of days where our system has stopped working at times!) on Thursday and googled 'run round in goods yard' to see if any inspirational, real-life examples came up. The eighth link was to these virtual hallowed halls, where member jamest of this parish asked for a critique of a layout plan.
You c
As promised, I've been playing with various plans for a week or so now.
This is the latest and, hopefully, final iteration of the smaller 6' Plan.
This is the basic version - I've printed out the plan a few times and have been drawing the structures etc on to get the best fit.
Starting from the right hand side, the branch curves in, crossing to the left hand side of the board and then heading offstage over a level crossing. The track below this is the headshunt for the goods
It's been many a moon since I did any modelling - aside from a half-finished Tamiya Ford Capri which is still awaiting painting of the bodyshell (unless cross-stitching several Christmas cards counts!)
However, times they are a changing. I last updated in August 2013. Since then we have moved, I started a new job and have subsequently obtained promotion. Leah is now a cheeky little miss of 20 months and we celebrate our third wedding anniversary in July. I'm not really sure where the time ha
The Baseboards have been on the back burner since the last update, because the weather has not tended to be at the best when I have had the time (and it isn't late enough to annoy the neighbours) . It's not a problem - I'm in no mood to rush things for the sake of it, and anyway, I have been reconsidering my reasons for going with the jigsaw method.
Originally, I wanted to do this because I felt it would be an easy way of making the layout portable - which still applies. However, three 4' lo
Over the last week I've been mostly working on some rolling stock, but today have been able to put together the first of the baseboards.
As has been explained previously, I intend to use the 'Jigsaw' method of construction. This has been giving me headaches over the past few days, but today I bit the bullet and got on with it.
The first board is below;
Click image to enlarge
The result? - Not half bad, especially the slabs underneath (photo taken in the garden for natural ligh
The usual Sunday morning trip round one of the local Car Boot Sales revealed some interesting bits. Firstly – an old Hornby Sheep Wagon. I believe this is nothing like the prototype, but at a solitary pound, with no broken bits (I have a spare wheelset!) , it will do as a placeholder and something in the right livery to shunt around whilst I am building kits.
The books both caught my eye on the same stall (£2 the pair). The H.P White ‘Regional History of the Railways’ book has already thrown up
Tonight has seen the first real tangible progress on the layout - although there isn't a lot to show for it.
What I have done is to print out the XtrkCad plan in 1.1 scale, and tape it on the board. Now that I've worked out that the gap in the middle was down to the printer rather than any fault of mine, I'm pretty pleased with it - the layout flows nicely, with something that I had previously only seen on screen now taking physical shape.
This though is the easy part - what comes next is some
OK, so first things first (at risk of boring my regular readers and contributors to tears!) - another plan.
Combining the best bits from previous ones - reintroducing the river which guides the eye, a bridge over said river - and keeping the shed and station building as a view block. I've also 'flipped' the layout - whilst I liked the idea of passenger trains traversing the length of the layout before pulling into the station, it would have produced an issue with operation, in that the loco
As mentioned in the last post, I'm still fiddling with the trackplan. '3' was definatley my favourite - until I considered changing the orientation of the bottom set of points;
That resulted in this - 'Version 3B'
Whilst fiddling with that one, however, and having a re-read of the A.C Elliott 'Cuckoo Line' book, I noticed from the plan of Hailsham that the Cattle Dock was behind the platform. I still liked the idea of the Engine Shed as a view block though, so after much moving arou
So after the last two plans I've been continuing to play around, and re-reading the excellent 'An Approach to Model Railway Layout Design - Finescale in Small Spaces' book which has given me so much inspiration for this project.
With that in mind, and a nagging 'is it the best use of space' thought in the back of my head regarding 'V2', see Version 3 below.
This borrows shamelessly from Iain Rice's 'Witheridge' plan in the aforementioned tome (Page 44, and sadly I can say that witho
Now that I've written the history and dreamt up the rationale, it's now time to think about the layout.
Attached is the first draft of Litlington, my chosen station. I am hoping to draw up a nice 'pen and ink' plan, but wanted to make sure everything 'fits' properly.
It is pretty much as per the 'Route Guide' published recently, except I've decided that the brewery entrance would be better 'offstage' - it just seems to suit the open feel of the place a little more. There is room for
Isfield
The Cuckmere Valley Line began at Isfield, with services departing from Platform 3. Facilities at Isfield were shared with the Wealden (Lewes-Uckfield) Line Station, with A.E Lavender the local coal merchant, also involved with sand, granite and the shingle extracted from Cuckmere Haven. Whilst most passenger trains terminated at Isfield, a few ran onto the Wealden Line, pausing at Platform 1 before continuing towards Uckfield, Eridge (for connections to Hailsham and Polegate via th
British Railways was formed from the Big Four in 1948, with, again, little except signage and numbers on rolling stock changing for the Cuckmere Valley Railway. During the 1950's, the tourists began to drift away - tempted by other parts of the network, with the era of the Holiday Camp in full swing.
Still the little railway soldiered on - but in 1963 came a double whammy which the railway would not recover from - firstly the famous and feared report of Dr Richard Beeching recommended the l
'The Grouping' as it came to be known saw The LBSCR merge with the South Eastern & Chatham Railway and the London & South Western Railway, as well as several smaller companies, to form the Southern Railway, one of the Big Four. For a while, little changed, although gradually LBSC fixtures and fittings began to disapear to be replaced by the roundel of the Southern. At Litlington, a new 'White Horse' was cut in 1924 to replace the original which had become overgrown (1), whilst the Brickw
Following the somewhat fractious planning and construction of the line, the route settled down quickly to return a modest profit over the first few years of operation, with the shingle and brickworks especially profitable traffic. For a short time, there were two 'Berwick' stations - before the one serving the main line was renamed Berwick & Selmeston. Services were operated by the LBSCR, who had regained their financial stability by the middle of the 1870's (1), with Stroudley's A1 Terrier,
The Cuckmere Valley Railway had a curious history - born from the aspirations of Victorian entrepreneurs in the trying circumstances of the 1860's and the battles between two companies, and ended, like so many rural routes, by the ex-Technical Director of ICI.
The story begins some 20 years earlier. The Brighton Lewes and Hastings Railway built a line from Brighton to Lewes which opened in June 1846. Three years later, this was extended to serve Eastbourne, with the line opening on the 14th
Firstly, an explanation.
Since I bought the Iain Rice Book - 'Layout Design' (from the Haynes 'Realistic Railway Modelling' series) a few years ago, I've been keen on some of the ideas included - principally that of the holistic approach to design, rather than my current/previous method of blundering in with an XtrkCad plan and often making avoidable mistakes along the way (ref the Shed layout, where the curves are too tight to run things properly...)
What will follow and will develop in
