Back again after a pause

The weather warming up each spring tends always to a change in hobby activity at the Booth household. First, the garden starts to call for attention, and as the outside temperature rises it also becomes more comfortable to work on the layouts.

These; ‘Birch Vale’, ‘Bowton’s Yard’ and ‘Wheegram Sidings’, all live in what is actually our garage which, while certainly being some-what up-market and much larger than the run of the mill garage, has only back-ground central heating and needs a few kWhs of electricity if it is to be heated to a comfy working/operating temperature in the colder months. The workshop section, (Honley Tank) is temperature controlled & never falls below 55F but rises to 70F if I’m in there. However none of my layouts will fit in there; - its barely big enough to accept me! (See pictures a few episodes ago).

This year a halt was called on all current modelling projects so that when I needed a rest from garden work, I could carry out some much needed maintenance work on locos, stock and layouts. Particularly the layouts - they get a bit neglected in the colder part of the year!

‘Wheegram Sidings’ is the newest. Its also in EM but while the other two can be left fully in their running state, Wheegram needs the car out of the garage, its support brackets assembled, the baseboards unfolded, the electrics out of storage and plugged in, and, if it is to be viewed fully, a couple of items of removable ‘scenery’ need to come out of storage and be located correctly. Doesn’t take long but it’s a bit of a faff.

‘Birch Vale is the oldest of the three; it was first exhibited in the early/mid 80’s but it rarely needs any work beyond track cleaning and full dusting/vacking.

‘Bowton’s Yard’ is much newer and much more complex and when I was building it I was very experimental. Most rail is steel but with an odd piece of nickel-silver here and there (nobody has ever commented on the differing colour!).

Some plain track is plastic sleepered flexitrack, the type where you thread on short sections of sleepering, but in between each sleeper section I interposed two or three ply sleeper/rivets because past experience of plastic track gauge-narrowing over time, does not allow me to trust it. In other sections I used ply-wood sleepers with C&L plastic chairs, using MEK to fix plastic to wood. Also, I used up a stock of white-metal working chairs stuck to ply sleepers with cyano.

All pointwork was ‘ply & rivet’ bar one, which is an all-plastic Exactoscale. That one has given me more trouble than any other point but I can’t say why that is so. Certainly, I don’t like the permanence of plastic chairs welded to plastic sleepers; tweaking once the solvent has cured is virtually impossible!

Tweaking is much easier with ‘wood and rivet’, but I have found that after several years it seems very easy to cause a rivet to become a sloppy fit in the

timber due to the heat of the soldering iron when used for a minor tweak, causing slight burn of the plywood. Tweaking of plastic chairs on ply sleepers is fairly easy using a scalpel with a fairly blunt blade, this used more as a lever than a cutter!

At the time of building, my plan was to use diverse methods of track making in an attempt to find that which I considered to be “ the best”. But what does “best” mean? Are we talking only about appearance? In that case surely it must be grey stained wooden sleepers with working chairs of correct bolting and chocking appearance. All with steel rail because it then looks like steel rail. But is it dimensionally stable? Will the steel corrode? What about soldering to steel? What about point-work? (At that time only plain track chairs & slide-chairs were available). And, how many viewers are astute enough to take on board this truth to reality, assuming that’s what it is!?

Before I started building ‘Bowton’s Yard, I had virtually re-built ‘Birch Vale’; at least, the original track bed had been cut away and replaced with birch ply with a sleep mat foam underlay for the track. The track was as described in the last paragraph but with brass shim chairs and solder at strategic parts of the crossings, all the rail being steel. As stated at paragraph four it needs very little maintenance. However there are only two turn-outs!

At the heart of ‘Bowton’s Yard’ is a 1:6 double slip and this was built with ply and rivet. From the beginning it was little better than “just about acceptable”, but I reckon that it worked as well as most home made point-work. Certain it is that probably 70 to 80 % of derailments on Bowton’s have occurred there. Having said that, derailment due to poor track has never been extraordinarily high. Considering that my track-building experience falls well behind my loco building experience, I’m fairly pleased with running on this layout.

In the 1960/70s I was very much into copper laminate track and for me this is by far the easiest system and above all others it is very reliable and very tweakable! However it’s not perhaps as realistic in appearance as the more modern systems; but how many viewers actually notice?

Can I ask that question again please? “How many viewers actually notice?”. Few of we finescale modellers have a depth of knowledge that can spot that missing rivet on a loco, and that wagon that has got brakes on one side only when the real one had double brakes, and that point has no slide chairs, and the rail chocks in that section of track are on the wrong side, and any way that particular rail company only used four bolt chairs. I’m sure that you can add to this list of silliness! None of us have that sort of total knowledge.

One of my scratch-built locos has the correct number of impressed rivets on one of its lamp brackets. I made about twenty model brackets before I got one I accepted as correct and fitted it. The model needed another seven lamp brackets but my ability to impress rivets on these tiny items led me to decide that the rest would be rivet less! This model has won cups in competitions but not one judge has remarked on the lack of rivets! Nor has any other: -

loco-man, keen modeller, casual viewer or close friend ever remarked on this failure of the model to be correct.- so much for the ability of viewers to see all.

Where has all this babble been leading?

Well, my best track system is still undecided. Without doubt the easiest for tweaking is copper-laminate, but plastic chairs stuck to ply sleepers with MEK are probably better to look at and still fairly easy to tweak, however I’m not sure that I could trust plastic-MEK-ply to give the needed robustness and easy tweakability at point crossings; for me those areas need to be soldered because my experience has shown that even though all has been held with reputedly accurate gauges an odd tweak of a couple of thou’s or so is nearly always needed for smooth running, as too is the close matching of back-to-back of all wheel sets.

So, my faithful followers, that’s why I have not visited this blog for a few weeks; I’ve been busy philosophising and tweaking and feeling that I’d not much to say.

Bowton’s Yard double slip seems now to be causing less de-railing, at least of that stock, which has had all its wheelsets, backed with my go/no go pair of gauges. However there are now sections of copper ‘timbers’ at the crossings, so the keen eyed and knowledgeable can point out to me that my blobs of solder are a poor imitation of real chairs! And I can say “***!!!****<>!!!<>***” or words to that effect.

Have I set you thinking?

Enjoy your hobby,

Dave