In my previous post, I described a little about the location of North Leigh station on the branch line to Witney, originally planned in 1849. For some reason, this line was omitted from Bartholomew's 1/2inch map of 1903 but I have restored it to its rightful position, in order to show the location of the station and its proximity to the tunnel through the ridge of high ground between North Leigh and New Yatt.
The later, cut-off, which allowed trains to run directly from the Worcester
Photographs can be very cruel! Looking at the photo of the handbrake ratchet in my previous entry, all I see is the huge tab, which I have not filed smoothly. It's invisible in practice but not on the photo! It's a real test, to subject modelling to this type of scrutiny.
My favourite weapons for removing those pips, as well as flash on white metal, are emery nail boards from the pharmacy. They're cheap and disposable, and don't get ruined by white metal, so saving my precious needle
Most of my entries in this blog, so far, have related to locomotives and rolling stock. For most of us , these are the key elements of a model railway and involve a lot of scratch or kit building, since very few pre-grouping (and especially pre-WW1) models are available as RTR.
Now, I am starting to think about scenery aspects and have realised that there is something of a paradox when 'turning back the clock'. We tend to think of 'older' as meaning 'quainter' and more 'weathered' wh
In my previous post in this blog, I described my chance discovery of the former narrow-gauge system that linked the farms on the Buscot Park estate to a distillery and other works, located at a wharf on the upper River Thames.
This was especially interesting to me because I had introduced an imaginary narrow-gauge (NG) line on my ‘North Leigh’ layout, to serve the local quarries for Cotswold stone and the sawmills around Wychwood Forest, by connecting them to a railhead at North Leig
Time flies! Back in August, I wrote about the 'DCC Concepts' oil lamps that I had installed on the platform at North Leigh. Various events have conspired to limit my modelling activities of late, but I have finally got around to wiring up these lamps.
The enamelled copper wires attached to the lamps are extremely fine, so I mounted small printed circuit boards carrying block connectors, onto which I soldered these wires. This proved a rather cruel test of my eyesight since, although
My photo alongside might look similar to the final one in my previous post but is, in fact, the result of a complete re-build, in an attempt to correct at least some of the mistakes I'd made!
I'd already found some of the problems in trying to adapt real drawings to an 00 gauge model, in that the wheels fouled the diagonal members of the chassis. Then, when my grease axle boxes arrived from 'MJT' (after 15 days and well within the 21 days maximum), I found that there was insufficient
I had intended to wait until my carriage truck was complete, before writing another post, but various events have introduced delays, so here is a 'work in progress' report. . Some of my readers seem to like my 'off-beat' approach to modelling and this one also has some unusual features!
It all began when I saw a box of 'extra long' safety matches on the supermarket shelves. I had been looking at a drawing of an early wooden-framed carriage truck (1866) in Janet Russell's book on 'Gre
Finding things to do in lock-down is something of an ‘art-form’. A friend recently introduced me to some software called 'Pixbim ColorSurprise AI'. He showed me some remarkable results, where it had automatically coloured some of his old monochrome photos.
So I thought I’d try it out on some of my collection of 19th-century railway photos. There’s a ‘free trial’ version but, as is so often the case, it is hobbled by printing multiple watermarks all over any saved results. To show t
I am grateful for the patience shown by my followers, while I have been wrestling to make progress on 3D modelling, against a background of many distractions!
In my previous post on this subject, I described my progress in understanding how ‘slicer’ software turns a 3D computer model into a file suitable for 3D printing. This enabled me to make a few test prints by downloading 3D models from the web.
3D printed carriage from downloaded STL file on the web
I find it interesting to observe how, having broken the ice, the waters of enthusiasm start to flow!
I’ve been experimenting with some of the tools in 'Fusion 360' and while it’s still very early days, I can now produce carriage sides with ‘tumble home’ curves and I can also add curved tops to the ends, for fitting to roofs.
So far, this has just been an experiment, as I explore some of the possibilities for future designs.
The 'Fusion 36
Five years ago, I came across JCL's splendid thread about the Silhouette cutters at an appropriate time for dropping heavy hints before Christmas. This resulted in my acquiring a 'Silhouette Portrait' machine and loads of ideas for making my own coaches and buildings.
It proved very fortuitous since, only a few months before, I had decided to return to railway modelling by re-furbishing my old small layout and turning back the clock to the 19th century period. The cutter was a great
One of the things to remember when 'turning back the clock' is the former widespread use of horses, which continued up until WW2 and lingered even into the 1950s. I felt I needed to learn a bit more about how they were used, so that I could replace some of my more modern traffic with appropriate period vehicles. I found the book 'Great Western Horse Power' by Janet Russell, which proved to be a mine of information but seemed to concentrate on large depots and cities, whereas I was interested to
In my very first post in this Blog , I referred to the need for plenty of horses and the facilities to support them. As part of "Turning Back the Clock", I decided that an essential railway vehicle would be a Horse Box, so I chose to build the Wizard Models/51L etched brass kit of the GWR diagram N6 box.
Inspired by @magmouse description of his 7mm scale model, I decided to restore my own early post about my 4mm scale model.
Although at that time (2013), I had not started
A comment on my recent post about modelling Rocket reminded me that my first scratch-built locomotive was an Armstrong 2-2-2 that I constructed 10 years ago and described in ‘Railway Modeller’, July 2014 , as ‘Simply Victorian’. I explained in that article that I was encouraged by a drawing of one of these engines in Russell’s ‘A Pictorial Record of Great Western Engines’ with the caption comment that: "The utter simplicity of these early engines can be seen." The idea of ‘simplicity’ appealed t
I've been starting to get my 'painting eye' in, by working on some of my 19th-century vehicles, before I attempt any people.
For the Victoria carriage, described in previous posts, I first spayed the entire vehicle with red car primer. After that I painted the undergear, footboards, and folding hood with black acrylic. I chose Crimson Lake as the main body colour and painted all the relevant panels with Humbrol enamel (now RC403, though I used an ancient tinlet of HR116 - these paint
Last Saturday I visited my local model railway exhibition - AbRail 2015. I was looking for ideas on scenery and there was a good number of interesting layouts. Several featured canals and water and, of these, I particularly enjoyed the 'Aldford Brewery' (Wimbledon MRC) and the canal-side inn at 'Mulldale' (Letchworth MRC).
I also thought that there were some impressive trees alongside 'The Abingdon Branch'. Initially I thought 'Highclere' (Julia Adams) looked rat
When I decided to base my layout around the never-built line to Witney through North Leigh, it was simply a whim, derived from a map shown on Martin Loader's website about the Fairford branch.
As I have got 'drawn in' to the scenario, I have begun to learn more about the area and have found, to my surprise, that some of my 'fiction' is closer to the truth than I thought. My layout incorporates several 'features', including a quarry, saw-mill, and.lime kilns.
From s
I wrote a Forum post about some of these ‘absorbed’ engines back in 2014 but it has now been archived and has lost its illustrations, so I thought it was worth restoring these in this blog post, which is partly based on my original text.
Some time ago, I acquired a bound set of the RCTS "Locomotives of the Great Western Railway", mainly to learn more about the various pre-grouping designs by William Dean. I had tended to skip over the volumes on 'Absorbed Engines' but later found my
It's now over two years since I built my first locomotive from scratch, using brass sheet. It's still looking quite good and helped to inspire me to continue with building lots more scratch-built stock. For more information about my model, see 'Railway Modeller', July 2014, "Simply Victorian".
My model of the GWR 'Queen' class
It really was simple to build - basically a brass tube over a brass plate, with a very simple 'chassis' to hold a set of wheels at the right
With the holiday period now upon us, many of North Leigh’s locomotives are now ‘on shed’. In the following photo can be seen my first ‘scratch build’ - a GWR ‘Queen’ class, with a ‘Stella’ 2-4-0 next in line. Disappearing out of view, the back of ‘Lord of the Isles’ can just be glimpsed, while on the front track is a Dean Goods, together with an early PBV. (The 'back scene' is by Photoshop)
Locomotives ‘On Shed’
Looking back into Broad Gauge days, I remember a comme
I visited the Swindon Railway Festival yesterday (15th Sep). It's always good to study prototype fittings, such as the sand boxes on the Dean Goods. In model form, these often show a 'draw' from the casting process, so it was useful to be reminded of the shape and details of the original.
Dean Goods no.2516 - Sand Box
There was also a sizeable model railway exhibition and I got talking on the Broad Gauge Society stand. I mentioned that I had recently photogra
One aspect of modelling, which interests me, is the ability to compare the proportions of locomotives that are rarely photographed together.
Many years ago, I built a K's Milestones kit of the GWR Broad Gauge 'Rover' class locomotive, so I decided to photograph this model alongside my Tri-ang Dean single, to illustrate the profound differences between these types:
The Broad Gauge locomotive takes advantage of the width between the wheels to use a much
The recent fine weather has kept me away from the modelling for a while, while I have been pursuing my outdoor photographic interests. I am also procrastinating a little, as my coaches are at the stage of needing a lot of fiddly detail work to be completed!
Because of my small radius curves, 'fine' flanged wheels are a bit unreliable, so I prefer to use 'Hornby' or 'Bachmann' wheels, which hold on pretty well round the corners! For my 6-wheel coaches, I decided to try 'MJT' Mansell w
I am very grateful for the appreciative comments on my recent posts and very pleased to know that some of my earlier posts are still considered to be a useful resource. I confess that I am still finding it hard to adapt to the ‘new’ (well, fairly new) RMWeb format and don’t seem to dip into here as much as I used to do – it’s an age thing I suppose.
Progress with the 3D printer continues to be slow – two small grand-children do take up a fair bit of my energy resources and I have ma
In my very first post in this blog, I mentioned converting an old K's 14xx to a fair representation of a 517 class. Since the 517 was a very variable class, it's impossible to select a 'typical' version - they vary from the earliest tiny saddle tanks, with a short wheelbase, to the final re-builds, which were very similar to Collett's 14xx series. Nevertheless, there were significant differences between even the latest of these engines and the 14xx - most obviously in the cab but also the 14xx h
