I realise that I left matters hanging with the tender for No.184, in my post of almost two years ago!
The awful truth is that I rather lost interest, when I found that I had made the frames of the locomotive too wide, so that the outside cranks tended to bind. I simply couldn’t face starting again from scratch until, quite recently, I hit on the idea of simply cutting off the folded edges of the plate which supported these frames and fitting new support members, made from short lengt
I've now built my second GWR 3-planker from a David Geen kit. This time, I made a floor from 10 thou brass sheet, which acted as a template to keep the body panels square. It certainly solved the problem of trying to align several lumps of white metal in my far-from-steady hands!
My method, when working with brass sheet, is to print a scale drawing of the part onto paper and then stick the paper to the brass using a glue-stick. For the wagon floor, I simply used a guillotine to cut o
It was only when I looked at the photograph of "City of Truro", which I took yesterday, that I noticed that the nameplate was missing! About half of my track is in tunnel, so there was an evens chance that it had dropped off in the tunnel. Fortunately, I have a 'search and rescue' procedure.
Some time ago, I became interested in the idea of shooting video from the footplates of my model locomotive. I found that there was a miniature video camera, popular with aircraft RC enthusisats,
At the end of my last post, I felt that I had solved all the main problems associated with building my Armstrong Goods engine, although a lot of detailing remains to be done.
To complete the model, I needed to add a tender, which I intended to contain the drive unit. I have made several powered tenders based on 'Hornby' ring-field mechanisms, around which I used components from either plastic or white metal kits. I have used two different 'Hornby' mechanisms: type X9105 with 7' 6" +
After reading some recent posts about horse drawn wagons and the like, I started to wonder if it would be possible to 3D-print my own horses.
A look at the 'Cults' website yielded a 3D-printable horse by David Mussaffi, described as ‘FDM printer ready’, so I thought that this would be a good place to start. I looked at the file after loading it into my ‘Cura’ slicing software and found that the model was cleverly split into three parts, such that there were flat surfaces to lie on
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
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
As I mentioned in the previous post, I have been trying to track down a photo of the prototype of Sir John's special train.
Today, I have found one but unfortunately, the morning of April 1st 1892 was notable for the famous London 'pea-soup' fog.
Despite the photographer's best efforts he has been unable to capture much detail of the train. He has, however, used sepia toning very effectively to enhance the subject 🙂
Train in London Smog - 1st April '92
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
I find it hard to believe that more than six years have passed since I started to build a model of one of the early standard gauge engines, transferred to the GWR when they acquired the Oxford, Worcester, & Wolverhampton Railway (The Old Worse & Worse, as it was colloquially known)
I have been reminding myself of what is in this, my older ‘Pre-Grouping’ blog, before I changed over to (became obsessed with) the Broad Gauge! My model of No.184, shown below, was the last model
Introduction
The last few months have been busy ones for my household, with little time to think about model-making. The spells of hot weather have not been conducive to spending time in my workroom either and, on top of all those things, I have had another failure of the feeder mechanism in my 'Geeetech' printer.
Broken Filament Feeder
I think the root cause of the problem was a faulty temperature sensor in the print head, which caused the feed tube to j
I have not forgotten about my plans to create a diorama, as described in my Broad Gauge blog.
While I was researching the early days of the GWR, however, I found myself thinking about what had gone before – back to the ultimate pre-grouping period! This led me to Trevithick’s engines, of which I photographed a replica at Blists Hill Museum near Telford:
Trevithick replica at Blists Hill Museum
Trevithick was a remarkable inventor but, sadly, not a good
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
In my previous post, I showed the brass components that will form the ‘hard’ skeleton of my planned model of an Armstrong Standard Goods engine. The fireman’s side of No.661 is shown below to complement my previous illustrations of the driver’s side of No.31:
Armstrong Standard Goods No.661
Now, I shall describe my procedures for producing 3D-printed parts to form the ‘flesh’ of the model, which will carry the details of the outside frames, footplate, boiler cladding, smok
North Leigh Station, with Goods Yard and Narrow Gauge System Beyond
When I first decided to attribute the location of my small layout to North Leigh in Oxfordshire, the only basis I had was a map dated 1849, which shows a branch line from the OW&WR main line running south from near Stonesfield to Witney. Of course, this line was never built and Witney was eventually served by the now closed Fairford Branch described at http://www.fairfordbranch.co.uk/ , from which website the fol
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
It’s some time since I’ve scratch-built a standard gauge locomotive, having been spending my time recently on Broad Gauge models. I learned several lessons, however, during the construction of my previous 00-gauge models, the most important of which was to remember that 00-gauge is actually a narrow gauge – closer to 4’ than 4’ 8 ½”, when scaled.
My first scratch-build, described in 'Railway Modeller', July 2014, was of a 2-2-2 ‘Queen’ class engine, which was a simple choice because
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
Most of my train-running recently has been for the enjoyment of my young grand-children. For this, I tend to use my reliable ‘1854’ saddle tank, with its heavy ‘Wills’ cast body and ‘Hornby’ chassis that make it fairly ‘bomb-proof’
Trains at North Leigh
Suddenly, after what has been many months (if not years) of reliable running, the engine de-railed on the three-way point at the West end of North Leigh station. Following application of the ‘big hand in the s
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
Background
Several years ago – 2006 in fact – I was driving away from a visit to Blaenau Ffestiniog slate quarries and noticed that the last train of the day was due to arrive at the railway station.
It turned out to be quite a long wait, as the train on the Festiniog Railway was in trouble and eventually arrived with a broken flexible steam pipe to one of the power bogies. With a sense of ‘make do and mend’, the trailing end of the pipe was lashed up and the train then m
There is one problem that has been lurking in the background throughout my design of this outside-framed locomotive – how to fit the wheels? The wheels need to be pressed onto their axles and set to gauge, before fitting them to the locomotive.
I had already decided that this engine will be tender driven, so I do not have to make provision for a gear train. After considering various options, I decided to adopt the method used in the tender-drive ‘Mainline’ Dean Goods model. Since I h
At the end of the previous part, I had printed the main body components but was experiencing difficulty in printing small boiler fittings. The difficulty was that, on their own, these had no flat surface to lay on the printer bed. My next idea was to ‘slice’ these components just above the curved flanges that fit around the boiler and print the upper and lower parts separately, so that they could subsequently be glued together across their flat faces.
To my surprise, the tiny compone
Never become complacent! After a long spell of trouble-free printing, I started to encounter problems a couple of weeks ago. First off, the old problem of lack of adhesion to the printer bed returned. I had become lazy about replacing the blue masking tape and the surface had become worn. After replacement and re-levelling, all seemed well again ... until the heat wave struck. The next problem was uneven printing. It was too hot for me in my work room, so I left it alone while I got on with des
Despite what I wrote in my previous post , I decide to add a ‘rolling’ chassis to my model of ‘Edith’, to help me assess the overall appearance of this little engine. Printing and assembling some of the very small parts created some new challenges.
Our heating system failed last week, just as the weather turned colder. I had not noticed before how sensitive my 3d printer is to the temperature in my work room. For the first time, I experienced a fractured filament as it wound off the
