It's been a long time since there has been any real movement now, but I think I've had some good excuses!
Back in March work went absolutely mental, and most of my waking hours were spent working, or keeping the essentials going. I had also adopted a homeless cat and was trying to get her living inside. She loved it inside, but did not get with the other female cat in the house, so eventually I gave her up for adoption via a local rescue centre (and just this week I had news that she has fou
My dad sent over a link from some New Zealand snow ploughing on the Athur's Pass route from Chistchurch to the West Coast.
Go and have a look on youtube... No snow plough required. Maybe Network Rail needs to go downunder for some training?
Search for "New Zealand snow plough".....
Well that was a very productive week: I've managed to lay all the track in the main station and the fiddle yard. All the remaining track will be up in the air so this is a major milestone.
Most points have a dropper for frog polarity switching and each of the loops in both "stations" has droppers connected to the DCC bus. I'll post some photos once image upload issues here have been resolved.
Next will be the fitting of the point motors (11 in all) Hopefully it will go better than last t
Last week I finally bit the bullet and started putting down some track for the main station: Gerlos. I had glued down the cork using PVA after cutting, so so far so good!
As I'm using Roco sectional track, this should be a piece of cake! How wrong can you be.....
Lesson 1: Even though I measured out the distance between the edge of the board and the track before nailing each piece down, I should have looked along the line of the track. It's not quite straight.
Lesson 2: If you need t
Having spent all summer in the garden, nothing much has happened on Gerlos for a while...
However with both Dapol and Graham Farish having released some wonderful models, my stock collection in N is slowly growing.
It had a major boost over last weekend with me acquiring Leighton Hall, and 4 Collet coaches in late 20's early 30's livery.
I had thoughts towards doing Paddock Wood in the modern day with the Hawkhurst branch as a preserved railway, but that is waiting on loft conversion
Back to the train shop this morning to see what had happened to the steering coach! It turns out Andy had accidentally mixed it up.
So now the shuttle train is complete. Here it is going round the test track:
Back to the real work, building something for it to run on!
Sticking with the theme of the last two days, the new Gmeinder got a bit of workout this afternoon!
The coaching stock is:
AB 1 - Ramsau/Hippach
AB 2 - Uderns
B 28 - Zell am Ziller (Buffet Coach)
B 13 - Mayrhofen
B 20 - Asschau
B 12 - Ried
B 29 - Fasslwagen (Barrel Wagon)
F 52 - Generator Van
B4ip 30 - Bogie coach
Cism 480 - DR 3rd
BCism 259 - DR 2nd/3rd
Pwism 811- DR Luggage van
Bi/s 3641-3 - OBB Pinzgauerbahn "mit Herz"
Gwk/s - ZB Zillertaler Bier van
All this is no
It really goes to show that I shouldn't work in any scale smaller than HOe as either yesterday or today, I managed to dislodge one of handgrips from the D15 and only noticed once I looked at a photo!
So here from the top, the front of the D15:
Next a side view, the switches for the headlights are under the square ventilator in the roof:
Next we have the intermediate coach side view:
The old coaches are about 14 cm long, this one comes in at 20 cm, an increase of be
Of course not long after getting back from Skiing I get sick! Proper, unable to move type, sick... So again not a lot got done. I did manage to build a kit I bought before getting sick, so now I have a PECO great little trains 4 Wheel Coach. A bit crooked because I didn't quite get the underframe right, but on the whole pretty good.
For the rest the garden has taken a lot of my time, and I mean a lot! It's been back breaking work to clear the mess and get it ready for turning the back third
OK, so some might think Switzerland isn't quite toy town, but having spent over a week in Lauterbrunnen it certainly seems like it!
I now have some 300+ photo's to sort out, a bunch of videos (no sound as I didn't bring my video camera) and this will take me a while....
Some modelling ideas:
A ski carrier: The WAB has these on its old trains, essentially a low side wagon with a rack on it for skis
The BLM: All trains are made up of one railcar plus a wagon
The turning triangle b
Any gardener will tell you they have a constant battle with slugs, this is not nearly as bad, it's lug elimination on the ROCO points, check out the difference:
Gone are the horrible sticky out bits where the (hugely expensive) point motors attach, leaving a near perfect looking point. I've also had to enlarge the whole in the middle of the tie bar a little so the arm of the Seep can make it through.
The two I've done as an experiment look nigh on perfect, just a touch of fine sa
I've been raking my brain to find out how to eliminate the ROCO point motors, and I now have the solution for all but one.
The problem places are the point at the top of the spiral, the place where the track enters the fiddle yard on the right, and where the front track joins the main through line in the station (Gerlos) at the front.
The one at the top of the spiral I've solved simply by shifting the point to the right by reducing the length of the straight to the right of the upper sta
I knew there was something I forgot earlier! This is the track fully layed out out on the board:
The gap is where the ROCO geometry has let me down, and will need filling in with some flextrack. Luckily I have some PECO crazy track that I can disguise by overfilling with ballast so you can't see the sleepers. It seems to have the same profile as ROCO track, so there should be no jumping of trains.
OK so something went wrong the first time around.. Here is the container again!
This photo was taken in August 2008 at far end of Mayrhofen station. It would make an interesting and fairly easy modelling excercise...
Around Christmas time I finally got around to ordering the track. Well it arrived a couple of weeks ago (unexpectedly early), but work has been so busy, I didn't have the lay out the track and check everything was going to work.
Today I have (the car's broken so I can't go anywhere!), and the compositions do fit. But I did find I didn't order enough track! I need another pack of 12 curves to complete the spiral... Never mind!
There is one small issue with the spacing: If you have a right
Right I finally decided to get on and do it...
Called Winco to order a pile ROCO HOe set-track, as this layout is too twisty and windy for Flex (at least for me).... It's going to be expensive, but I've been saving up for it (and have stopped gratuitously being things that take my fancy).
Meanwhile my garden layout (an eventual project) rolling stock has increased remarkably. In addition to the Deadwood Central Consolidation, I now have a log car, two box cars and a caboose (which says S
Happened to go past my local train shop today, and popped in for bit to have a look for interesting bits and bobs.
Andy soon grabbed me to say the Lilliput D11 has arrived (even though the Bachmann web-site still lists it as "Aug/Sep"), so rushed home, gave it a run on the test track, and it's now fully chipped!
Beautiful! Great runner, very good running slowly. The only downside is that sometimes it gets a bit unstuck when changing direction. A gentle nudge gets it on its way though...
Well it's better than no progress!
The main area of activity is the two and a half turn spiral. I've been batting around in my head the best way of doing this and on Friday whilst sitting on the train home (a couple beers after work included), I realised I hadn't been looking at the problem from the right angle. So now I've worked it out and the spiral is taking shape down-stairs (no dining table for a while, but hopefully that will be over by the middle of the week).
On Saturday it was
The trackplan for a 2.10m (7 metric feet), is this attached. At the bottom is the main station Gerlos, at the top is the fiddle yard, quite small but then there's not much room!
In red is the top station Koenigsleiten. The two longer consists cannot pass here, but that should be fixable.... The circle on the left is in fact a two and a half turn spiral....
As I have now added an extra 4" to the table, it will have to change, bit not very much.
The test track from a few posts back, now sports a radius 3 PECO set-track loop as well. It was quite a squash as the radius is not much less than the HOm loop!
I added it only because the Dapol Voyager was having severe difficulties on the radius 1 curves.
At the same time it means the ROCO HOe Mh.6 can now go for a decent spin, it was also not liking the radius 1 curves very much.
OK, so I've been working in N gauge, but it hurts so much!
When assembling the little sheds from the Peco platform kit starts to take a number of evenings, you have to begin to wonder if you're doing the right thing!
I have been building out my HOe stock collection, so now I have most of the ZB steam special (except for the generator van and the Kristall Wagen, too bling for words). That together with the fact that Lilliput are going to bring out the Zillertalbahn Gmeinder diesel with ma
Actually finished the track laying on Saturday, but the wiring was still a mess. Finished that off tonight and for the first time in a very long time got out some of my RhB HOm rolling stock. So out with the railcar and the rebuilt Ge 4/4 I, 605 Silvretta. Here seen with two Saloons and a restaurant car.
All the curves are minimum radius, so if a loco can get around that, it should cope with whatever layout it's ever run on.
Not much has changed on Knucklesford, some more track has gone down, mainly the goods spur, that's still in progress... I've worked out a pretty good method of soldering drop wires for power feeds.
Put the soldering iron on full.
Liberally tin the drop wire
Use minimal solder on the track bottom
Put the soldering iron to the drop wire and touch both of them onto the track to fix
Speed and accuracy is of the essence here to stop the sleepers from melting.
As for the Oxted and
Well, so the paint shop was closed today, so it's become a train day, and repainting the windowsills will have to wait. Appearance wise, not much has changed, but there is much more nailed down than before.
In fact everything but the two spurs on the left and the right. The goods spur is for tomorrow, the bay platform spur might get done too.
Lessons learnt:
Don't nail down track too readily, I nailed down the left hand point in the crossover before nailing down the facing track!
Some good news... Fiddling about with the point last night, I noticed that if I made the point motor move the point then it does work! So it should just be a case of taking that off the board and drilling the hole out a bit to make it work both ways.
