After being hoiked out of a skip some 30 years ago by my Dad and being stored in his garage, I have some 65m of 8 core cable to strip for use on our model railway electrics. Once stripped the cable will provide me with 8 nicely coloured wires, red, black, orange, yellow, purple, green, brown and white, some cotton twine and some braided wire sheathing.
Originally there was 100m of this cable which had be wrongly bought for a building job and was skipped brand new! Me and my dad stripped 30m
Just seen some freshly chipped roads that look like model roads, with no weathering. Something just does not look right with them all being clean and uniform in colour. Now where my airbrush and weathering powders....
After attending the York Model Railway Show, came back with a Hornby Railroad Class 37 (in Yellow) and a NEC Powercad (PCab) DCC controller. I got it from the Digitrains stand and am very happy with it. I had previously visited their shop in Lincoln to try out the various controllers and to ask beginners questions and the guys from the shop were very helpful and impartial whilst I was doing my research.
I really like the Powercab and find it very intuitive to use. The speed control buttons &
Well long time since last post, but hands are pretty full having two boys; 4 year and a 18 month. But we now have a basic 8x4 layout slowly growing in the attic conversion, so at least I get to play trains more now;-)
So I have had a go with the pipe insulation method again and crated some more wagon loads; lumpy (real) coal, ballast and gravel. Just like the MGR ones is did sometime back. Very happy with the result and they are so easy to pick out of a wagon and very robust in kids hands
After a post Christmas trip to the NRM at Shildon end of year toy fair with my 3 year old son, I came away, with among other things, two boxes of the triple Railroad MGR wagons. Even though these are Railroad versions, I was impressed with the level of detail, ok they are missing the fine level detail some wagons now have and the chassis lacks and painted details, but I think with a bit of a paint touch up and some weathering they will be great addition to my railway (once built).
The key bi
Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2011.
Well our due date came and went. This gave us a bit more time to finish the building works; the kitchen units went in on Monday, then carpet in the nursery whet down on Wednesday night and our son arrived the following day (16th Dec) all safe and sound.
So, apart from slowly getting my head round all things baby including some serious toxic waste I am now starting to realise that I now have perfect excuse to play trains, model and 12" to the fo
As I intend to carry on with North Marsh Road outside of the 2010 Competition, I though I had better get my blog up-to-date. So there we go my blog is now fully updated with all my posts from the 2010 forum area.
If you have been following NMR then there is nothing new in any of the posts, but if you have not seen my layout before, then please start with post 1 and work your way backwards so to speak. Please do leave any comments as I would love to hear what people think of the layout and
It looks like my 2010 competition layout is going to have take a back seat for a while, which is really disappointing, the reason, well our baby is due in December!! So not really that disappointing As we are still trying to renovate our house, I suddenly have a lot of DIY projects to complete before Dec arghh!!!
OK, so I might not have got anything ready for the 2010 competition, but with out it running I would never have even have started. So to Andy and RMWeb, I say a big thank you.
As mentioned in may last post a some major work and home projects have been completed which meant that a much needed holiday was due. This was supposed to be spent up in Scotland, but a two week forecast of rain and gales put paid to that. So we ventured South West to Cornwall instead and found much better hot sunny weather.
As I also said in the last post not much has happened on NMR, so I managed to sneak some wagon kits into the campervan to make while on holiday; well I think building
My word how time flies and unfortunately modelling progress has not been made during this time.
I have spent a large part of my recent spare time working on home restoration work and my job has also taken up a lot more than just my basic hours, so with these two things added up, railway modelling has taken a very big back seat.
However, the repair work, plastering, woodwork, painting, wallpapering is now complete, the carpets are laid, the furniture back in place and one bedroom and ne
Well I have finally plucked up the courage and have made two out of the three turnouts. I say courage as these were C&L B6 tunrout kits and I have never scratch built any track before, so I did feel a little trepidation before I started.
The first one was a real challenge and there are a few minor glitches with gauge I think but it was a good learning experience. The second was much better and I found quicker ways of doing things like threading chairs on to rails before cutting them o
One of the wagons I remember see round Kings Lynn during my childhood was the red curtain sided Campbell soups pallet wagon.
As these do not exist as RTR and so as a bit of a sideline I am looking into a wagon scratch building project, to this end I have just bought 8 blank wagon body shells.
I have created a new topic in the Kit building & Scratchbuilding modelling Zone to record the build progress, it can be found here - Campbell Soups wagon - A scratch build project.
In the me
Having now got North Marsh Road under way I though I would post where the fictitious map came from. I used a copy of the 1946 OS map of Kings Lynn and after quite a bit of 'photoshopping', well Paint.neting I came up with the map for North Marsh Road.
Here are the two maps - First the original Kings Lynn one (flipped) and then the edited North Marsh Road.
I have to say I quite enjoyed trying to create a map that firstly matched the track layout of Wymondham and then one that was
I've decided to beef up the scenic baseboard construction as I was not very happy with the flexibility of the 3mm MDF one. So I bought a 1200x600 sheet of 9mm exterior ply. This provided enough wood for 2 long sides, 2 ends and 2 stretchers bracings. Each 'girder' still measures 100m deep was built following the same method detailed for the MDF girder.
The build time was about 3 hours, which was a bit slow but it was after a full day of DIY on the house The result though is far better
Well I have made a start on some baseboard construction trials. As the scenic board will require an underbridge, I need to be able to create some vertical depth to the scenery. I could achieve this either by having a raised track bed or by splitting the baseboard level.
My initial thoughts are towards using the open framed baseboard with a raised track bed method. I feel this allows for a more natural landscape to be created which the track runs through rather than on.
I have
After much procrastination and umming and ahhing I have decided to take a late plunge and enter the RMWeb 2010 challenge. Not sure how far I will actually get, but the challenge has really inspired me to get on do at least something. However, my modelling efforts will have to be shared with a rather long running and fairly extensive house renovation project.
But for now here are the basic layout stats I am thinking of:
Layout Name - North Marsh Road
What Type - OO 4mm/ft - DCC
