Well, it really has been a difficult and challenging couple of years; one of those miserable troughs that life sometimes puts in your path that just seem to go on and on and on…
As a result the layout spent a good 18 months dismantled and stacked at the back of a garage with everything railway modelling-related being boxed up and put on hold.
But, happily things are now back on the up again; new job, new home, getting married, and the layout has been retrieved, all the bits found, the d
Things have been coming on quite nicely of late;
The Baby Deltic bogies have had the white-metal sideframes grafted on to the nylon/plastic cradles with Araldite and are now ready to go back into the chassis.
The chassis frame has been fettled to fit snugly into the body, which has been receiving the first round of panel/vent/louvre details:
Unfortunately there have been a couple of “grrr” moments along the way. Going back and re-checking the reference materials proves that the cent
I have terrible affliction in that I am totally unable to resist the temptation to start fiddling with things before the glue has fully set, or before the paint has fully dried on them.
To try and keep myself distracted from inappropriate fiddlings with the Baby Deltic yet *again* (having just had to remedy as uncured paint has rubbed off on my fingers) I have resurrected another project out of the unfinished box to keep myself occupied whilst things dry or set.
A while back I had starte
Crikey, it’s been 5 months since I have done any serious railway modelling. Constructing and populating a granny annexe took every free moment over the Summer, but now with the dust settled and my workshop/mancave finally set up only 8 months after having moved in, I have the luxury of dark Winter modelling evenings ahead.
Looking through my boxes of half-finished projects, I have decided to take the half-built Class 23 “Baby Deltic” in hand.
I started this project quite a few years a
A chance purchase from the RMweb classifieds (cheers Damian!) means I am now able to show a comparison between the relative sizes of a class 73 ED in OO and TT scales:
Unfortunately it also shows that the cab castings could have done with a little more work to make them more prototypical, but at the time I was only working from photographs and “close enough” was good enough.
It also shows another comparison between the two scales;
With OO you send off a cheque, get a package in t
It’s great when the modelling Muse strikes when you least expect it and leads you down tracks you had forgotten, or were unaware of…
Very early on a rainy Bank Holiday morning, the weather having put paid to my carefully-crafted plans for the day, I sit down at the workbench with a strong coffee and start idly browsing through my project boxes. My hand falls on the box containing my “cripple siding” - failures and abandoned projects.
The Iron Ore tippler wagon catches my eye.
It’s one
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I had a very pleasant outing to the Salisbury MRC 50th Anniversary Show today. I was on a very definite mission to see two layouts in particular, first up Redford Junction in TT scale, built by fellow 3mm Society member Paul Hopkins:
A real inspiration and an excellent demonstration of just what can be acheived in "The Modellers Scale".
The man himself.
Second up was Mr Muz's most excellent Fisherton Sarum - back o
Being a hamfisted clot I have managed to push my fingers through the window frames when glazing the signalbox.
This means many more hours to be spent, again, with a magnifying glass, tweezers and little sections of minuscule platicard strip that stick to everything *but* the place you're trying to stick them, and which then "ping" off into the outer reaches never to be seen again just as at the 5th attempt you think you've finally managed to get the little swines in place.
Grrrrr.
Well, I thought my plan of spending the entire Easter weekend working on the layout sounded like an excellent idea, but for some reason it was not met with unanimous enthusiasm and was vetoed at the committee stage. (Well ok, fish n' chips on the promenade at Lyme Regis, a spot of gardening and a walk along the towpath taking in the 1812 beam engines in operation at Crofton locks on the Kennet & Avon canal - all in glorious sunshine - was an acceptable subsitute. )
But I have been getti
Well, I'm still feeling motivated but am starting to come down off that initial high of seeing the layout standing again, whatever I am doing just seems to take so much longer than it did when I was planning it through in my head! Plus having moved recently I'm frustratingly still spending a lot of time hunting through cardboard boxes for elusive but absolutely critical odds n' ends that without which work comes to a grinding halt, e.g scalpel blades. (I have a hospital-sized box of the dratted
1st of April - an auspicious date for getting my layout construction underway again. :-)
It's been a month since my housemove so the first challenge is to find all the layout components; they were all stacked together in the spare bedroom when the movers turned up, but are now all strewn across the garge, conservatory and who knows where else.
Having eventually found the ziplock bag with the wing nuts, bolts and washers, Jubilee Point is soon standing again:
Trackwork
