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War Department First World War Narrow Gauge Layout O-16.5 WDLR

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Joffre Pt5 - Going even slower!

Not really that much to report I am afraid but thought I better let you all know that I am still going! Not only am I rather busy with proper work but this valve gear business really is fiddlly! Most of the parts need to be laminated and many of them forked as well. Went wrong a couple of times as well which has meant that the supply of pins has dwindled rather as I have had to re-make parts so am now having to use wire which is calling for delicate soldering skills I never knew I had. One side
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Joffre Pt4 - Predictably Slow!

Completly as predicted, things have slwed down rather on the Joffre build. This is not to say that I havn't been spending ages on it (which I have), but just that I am now dowm to the fiddly bits. A slight critisism of this kit is that others would probably have included lost wax brass castings for some of these bits but here we have lots of etched parts. Is certainly fun putting these together but is very time consumeing. So her is the reversing lever;   Some of these bits are seriously sma
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Joffre Pt3 - looking like a train.

Having had enough of the chassis I moved onto some bodywork for a bit of light relief. The tank sides went together pretty well with a rather unusual web arrangement for supporting the tops. Unfortunately, I managed to flatten the curves at the front so resorted to a bit of 'lead loading'. This involves filling the area that needs reshaping with little blobs of solder and then filling and sanding back to the correct profile - simple but effective;     Had a bit of a dilemma at this stage as
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Joffre Pt2 with lots of cocktail sticks!

A week into this project and I now have a chassis - I know there things can not be rushed but it does seem to have taken a long time. Much of this though was down to the compemsation and the rather fiddly gearbox. Anyway, on to cocktail sticks. Work was started on the gearbox, it being a High Level one. Now here, i have to admit that despite several attempts, I have never assembled one of this sucessfully and this one nearly joined that list as well. One thing it does have in it's favor though
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Joffre Pt1

What a lovely little kit this is turning out to be - certainly no walk in the park but not a climb up Everest with no Oxygen! You have the option of building a compensated or non version and I agonised long and hard over this. Would it be best to go for simplicity and a stay alive or the works that might not work? As I was veering towards non I realised that there were no plain bearings included in the kit and I was out of spares so the decision was made - full wobbly bits! Now, I may have been
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Exhibition Debrief

All in all a very successful outing (did I mention best in show!), and pretty much everything worked far better than before - obviously a result of my highly organised on going improvement program! The easy bit of this is to see what lessons were learned so they can be put into action before the next outing.   Biggest disappointment was that both the Dick Kerr and Westinghouse on their clever custom built chassis both failed pretty early on. One I think due to a simple electrical or DCC glitch
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Best in show again!

Starting to get a bit monotonous this! Yes, another show and another cup - David Taylor Cup for best layout at 7mm Narrow Gauge Association show at Burton. And not just a cup - there is a dinky 7mm figure mounted on a little plinth to keep and a special best in show badge for the layout. Very nice so thank you to everyone at Burton and also to Simon for helping very ably all day. Only the one quick pic as computer with PhotoShop on is playing up and due to being on the go since five this morning
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Going for a Burton!

All packed up and ready for a very early start tomorrow for the 7mm Narrow Gauge Asociation exhibition at Burton Town Hall. Am thinking that this will be most critical audiance yet! Have just spotted that the spell check has stopped working again so appologies for anything that is wrong, I don't have the energy to lift a dictionary right now!   Loco rosta is straight out of Noah's Ark! 2x Hunslets, 2x Baldwins, 2x 20hp Simplex, 2x 40hp Simplex and 2x Dick Kerr/ Westinghouse (they are pretty si
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A State of Flux

Let this post be a warning to you!   It all started a few days ago while I was flitting through the various projects on the go (warning #1), and put one of the Hunslets aside on the desk thinking 'I will come back to that later'. All it needed was a power extender fitting. So, on with something else that involved soldering, a pot of Carrs Red and a lid that didn't go back on (warning #2). Of course the inevitable happened and I was aware a little later of a puddle in the bottom of the tray I w
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Testing Times

Having just fitted a new decoder to one of the Baldwins, it was time to change the address and a couple of little tweaks to the chip. I find all this far easier to do using the Digitrax PR3 via the computer. Obviously having too much time on my hands (I wish - but it is strange - the busier I am the more I seem to get done!), I decided to do something I have been meaning to do for ages. My plan to mount the PR3 on a board with some track soon escalated into a complete test station for chips comp
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A Trip to Hornbyville

As a brief distraction to the serious business of the Western front I spent an awful lot of yesterday sorting out my neighbours 6x4 Hornbyville layout that he is building for his Grandson - Yeah, right! Anyway, his son (an electrical engineer!), has been going to do it for the last six months but he has now been given up on. Unfortunately, in the meantime, all the track has been stuck down and various buildings and scenery added without the provision of any holes for the point motors. So, what s
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Getting out the big guns!

This is last of my 'specials' for nowand almost finished. Lurking under all that plastic section is the last of the 3D printed F Class wagons and is providing transportation for a very big gun indeed. The gun is a Duncans models kit which I got, ready built (lazy!), very reasonably from Ebay. I have not done much with it yet but have an appointment booked for a dose of weathering.     And here is the inspiration;     The book is Roy Link's wonderful WDLR Album - a real must have if you
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Simplex's finished at last!

Or maybe I am speaking too soon as pretty sure I have said something similar before. Back story to this is that I started one of the Nigel Lawton kits about three years ago, went together very nicely and is a brilliantly designed kit but just couldn't get it to run properly. Not put off by this, I started another a year later and although it was better, it was still not good enough. I have played with them intermitantly since but finally had a Eureka moment when i realised I could do away the wi
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Fit for a King!

As I have got as far as I can with the ambulance I have turned my attention to another 'special' I have had in mind - the inspection car that was used for the Kings visit to the front;     Here again, just one grainy photo to go from but luckily it is pretty much straight on and as I know the dimensions of the basic wagon I was able to scale it in PhotoShop to 7mm, print it off and just take dimensions from that. At least as was able to use that spare D class body this time. Some simple sid
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More on the ambulance case

So the next day - when it eventually stopped raining - I got outside with the spray primer. After this I was still not happy with the roof as it still just looked like a piece of wood, which, of course itis! Out came some very fine wet and dry and an amazing transformation occured - and quite a lot of dust. It very quickly took on a beautiful smooth surface, the primer presumably having filled all the hollows of the grain. It didn't even need another spray. Next up were the canvas curtains court
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D Class Ambulance Conversion

One goal that I set myself after the last exhibition was to build a few sort of self contained items of rolling stock that could just be run up and down to a a bit of interest, You have already seen the 18 pounder gun and there is an 8 in howitzer on an F that you haven't seen yet but thought I would go for the conversion of a D class to an ambulance van. So I started off with this;     A Wrightlines D class that I picked up along with a load of bogie bits off Ebay recently. First thing to
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Read All About It!

The Mag is out now (even in Litchfield where magazines are only delivered on Tuesdays!), so if you haven't seen it there is a brief taster below. Really rather pleased with how it turned out - even the video (although the trains do seem to be running much faster than in reality). I was a bit worried about how it would all stand up to cruel close up but needn't have worried. A few mistakes did creep in though but nothing too serious, but just for the record;   The layout is set in 1918 not 1915
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Front Page News!

No, nothing to do with the election - something far more important! Something I have known about for some time but only now becoming reality but Up the Line is featured in the new issue of British Railway Modeling which is out tomorrow - and, what is more, it is on the front cover! There should also be a video feature on the cover disc including an interview with me that I am really not looking forward to watching!   About six months ago I fired off an Email to all the main mags to see if they
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Bristol Fashion

No modelling to report from this weekend due to going away for a few days but just because I didn't physically do anything didn't mean I didn't have mu modelling hat on! A couple of days in Bristol gave plenty of opportunity to photograph various details and buildings that will go into the 'put aside for future inspiration' folder. We were actually very impressed with the city, both with the amount of stuff going on (a lot of it free!), and the gems of architecture hidden away. What really did i
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Garage finished

So here it is, the garage finished and planted on the layout, surrounding dirt is still a bit dark as PVA still not quite dry yet. But how did we get to this state? I left off last time with all the walls in place but no floors or roof. These were made from balsa sheet cut into strips with my much used Master Airscrew balsa stripper - an invaluable tool. I didn't bother drawing up any plans for this building as everything was just done by eye. Here we have one of the floorsbeing made up by layin
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More Spaghetti

A job I hadn't been looking forward to today, but that of course, is no reason to put it off! It doesn't normally stop me though! Anyway, today I got down to installing the duplicate dontrol panel for the new fiddle yard points at the other end of the layout. Well I say other end, at the moment it is all set up in two halfs, one down one side of the room and the other down the other. This mant it was much easier to test the new panle setup. As alawys, never underestimate how long wiring takes -
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Another Trip to the Garage

Luckily not with my ailing FreeLanders again this time but to my sceanery extention. Not a huge amount of progress but I have been hampered by playing host to an old American friend with an unhealthy interest in British pubs! Not that I am complaining about this of course, but the corresponding dent in my wime collection......... So yesterday I clad the foam board walls with Slaters plasticard and did some dry brushing of brick coloured acrylics. Wanting to make sure that the interiours were all
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A bit more scenery

Well, what passes for scenery on my layout so it is some more ruined buildings. I became aware that since I extended the back scene to wrap all the way around the back of the fiddle yard, that it was making the transition to the bare boards rather to stark. Obvious answer was to extend the scenery a bit further onto the fiddle boards. what ti put immediately next to the big house was easy as the in one of the photos I was working from you can see the area to the left.     Then to make thing
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4 Fs, 2 Cs an A and a B

No not a Scrabble hand from hell but a response to the recent comment about having more locos than wagons! Am finally doing something with the 3D printed wagons I got via Shapeways about 6 months ago and, true to form with the other 3D prints they are taking far more work to sort out than you might think. I started work on the Fs about three weeks ago but soon hit a snag as I only had cheese head 8 BA bolts for the bogie pivots and really needed counter sunk ones. Managed to pick up some of the
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A prototype for anything

Firstly an apology for the poor quality of the pics today. I was not going to take my big camera but had intended to take the decent little one but...... so, this is the best my phone could manage. But what a day to forget the camera! Just couldn't resist the weather forecast and it being school hols got up horribly early and zoomed off to Snowdonia for the day. It was meant to be a walking up the mountain day (which little Iz and I did via the ranger path in really good time and beautiful weath
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