This should have been a posting about ballasting, that being the next logical step with Mercia Wagon Repair.

Ballasting began last autumn and quite a bit of work was done, even though it has proved a slow and painful process. There was also the little matter of swapping out four solenoid point motors and replacing them with MTB motor drives after I was warned that continued use of solenoids would ultimately lead to the breakup of the Peco switch blades. Given all the trouble caused by having to dig out one failed point from within the formation even at the unballasted stage, further failures would probably have doomed the layout, so the solenoids had to come out .

Unfortunately life and other things then got in the way. I had an operation on my right eye just before Christmas, they put an air bubble in the eye, and dire warnings were given about the implications of getting dust in the eye during recovery. Did that include plastic dust from model making, I asked? They thought it probably did, so anything involving shaping plastic was out.

(The operation was pretty successful – the sight in that eye has got rather better, not worse. It was this eye condition that panicked me into starting Mercia Wagon Repair since the initial mis-diagnosis by Vision Express was pretty bleak and not properly handled; I thought I'd better do something with the N gauge bits while I still could  since the eye might be gone in 5 years. Happily that is absolutely not a possible scenario.... I just need my new spectacles to arrive now)      

The result was that the only modelling done during a little over two weeks off work was this:

Two huts and a weighbridge hut built from freebee card kits given away with magazines over the years. Two of them are courtesy of BRM some years ago and one came with RM a couple of months before Christmas. I’ve accumulated a good few kits from magazine giveaways over the years but nearly all of them are 4mm scale. These three huts represent everything I could find in N from my stash that was usable. And you could fit the lot on the palm of my hand. It feels like quite a lot of effort for a very small reward.

The BRM models were printed on glossy card and the sheen was unacceptable. I have a big bottle of Winsor & Newton artists matt medium bought years ago because someone claimed that it could be used for ballasting in place of dilute pva and the ballast wouldn’t turn purple. It proved unsuitable for ballasting as the stuff is too viscous, but it’s useful for killing the sheen on art paper and card. The printed card roofs on the BRM kits were way too light to be acceptable as slate and since I’m new to N I’ve got virtually no brickpapers in stock. What I did have was a small pile of Model Rail giveaway booklets from about twenty years ago containing various brickpapers. These included a set of printed slate strips in a decent dark grey.

Now I’m pretty sceptical about relief on slate roofs even in 4mm and building up a slate roof strip by strip is pretty laborious, but needs must. I’m sure the rows should have been a little more even, but critically the colour is good. The printed sheet was brushed over with matt medium to kill the  glossy paper sheen : it swells a little but relaxes back into shape as it dries. The white edges were dealt using a green charcoal pastel pencil, with another coat of matt medium to seal it and stop it rubbing off. Similarly cut edges of the card elsewhere were treated with red/brown pastel pencils to remove any white line. Chimney pots were improvised from bits of kit sprue painted, then I remembered I have some whitemetal castings in stock…

It’s been some years since I’ve had the opportunity to do this kind of modelling, so it was a matter of easing myself back in and I’m reasonably pleased with the results. It’s just that a week’s worth of work sits in the palm of my hand. I feel like I‘ve achieved almost nothing.

It’s been way too long since I did any 4mm modelling in a scale I’m comfortable with and know what I’m doing.

This is the bits of an NNK courier van conversion from a Triang Mk1 BSK. The bits had been sitting on the bookshelf almost finished for nearly a year. This one needs its own workbench post, but I finally fitted the vertical door handrails and blackened them, rubbed down and repainted the ends through several coats of black to erase the vestiges of removed detail and assembled the bits. I’ve even started adding the cantrail lining from Fox transfers.

I’ve also been trying to finish off a clutch of N gauge wagon kits which have also been sitting on the bookshelf gathering dust. These too deserve a post of their own in ORBC, but there’s a Chivers SSA, painted with transfers applied, an NGS chemical tanker ex caustic soda in china clay traffic, and a BH Enterprises resin PNA body.

These now at least now are painted, have transfers and are weathered to my reasonable satisfaction. They just need couplings to go into traffic. But applying 11 tiny scraps of transfer to each side of a chemical tanker was a painful reminder of why N gauge and I don’t necessarily see eyer to eye (I left off a couple of the solebar markings, too).

While I was at it, I had a go at weathering a few of the RTR bogie wagons, since with N gauge you are always going to mix up way too much of a weathering mix for the job in hand. A useful technique has proved to be a tinted varnish – in other words the weathering wash mixed about 50:50 with matt varnish. This allows a much thinner weathering coat to be applied evenly to the model, since the varnish acts as a filler meaning you are applying rather more volume in a more viscous form. A china clay hopper, a Cargowaggon van, and a Tiphook hood acquired at Warley have all been treated and now look reasonable.

And at Ally Pally I finally succumbed to the Model Rail/Rapido J70 I’ve been resisting for some years. The unskirted versions with waggly bits were marked down to £99.99 on the Kernow and as this was the version that tempted me, I bit – having first put the model up against a SR diesel shunter on the stand to check it was a lot smaller. (I know an 08 is too big to look right on the Boxfile, and I wasn’t spending a tidy sum on a loco only to find it wasn’t suitable). The skirted BR versions have sold out – soon after release I think -  but all the unskirted versions were still available and discounted . Given that 500 each of 10 versions were originally ordered, it’s fairly clear that people want Toby in his classic skirted form and pre-nationalisation liveries are something of a drug in the market. It’s now nearing 4 years since this model was released - how long it will take finally to shift the LNER unskirted models is an interesting question. Rapido

I’m well aware of the reasons why the cost of new RTR has increased well above the rate of inflation and real wages in the last decade – and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It costs what it costs, there is not much to be done about it and nobody is making a packet in RTR. At the same time I notice that at a personal level I will buy a loco I don’t strictly need but like when it‘s priced in double figures. Once it’s into 3 figures I won’t. I have a Hornby Peckett and DS48 for the Boxfile – both were bought at shows for about £75 a time after I’d been resisting a while because I didn’t strictly need them – they run beautifully and are now front-line motive power. My last few loco purchases have been an N gauge Class 33 for £80 off the Dapol stand (I needed something earlier than a 66, shorter, and I wasn’t up for splashing the cash), an NGS Hunslet shunter (£81)  a Hattons Barclay (I finally succumbed when the 14” version was discounted to £84 in a decent livery) and Hardwicke (she’s do on railtour duty with 2 x blue/grey Mk1s). There’s a pattern here. I most emphatically do not expect manufacturers to aim at this price point, but I have more stuff than I actually need and at some point I’ll be out of the game – though hardly out of the hobby – at least as far as unnecessary impulse purchases are concerned. Someone’s 31 at 170 quid – er, maybe not. I’ve already got two 31s , and a pile of bodies, and a 37 as backup that sees little service, and a Rat project to do…      

I had the J70 up on the rolling road for almost an hour each way to run her in the following weekend, and here she is.

I‘m delighted to report it’s a diminutive loco, pukka Great Eastern, and runs beautifully. Ideal for the Boxfile . I also took the chance to commission the Barclay – that this has been sat in its box unused for 18 months was another reason to hold back on the J70. It now has buffer wires glued in place to take Sprat & Winkle couplings and I had an operating session for the first time in months to give it a run. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem quite as smooth or sweet as the two Hornby locos or indeed the new J70. Good but needs a prod too often. And then a feed wire to one of the points broke, and the session was truncated. (The wire has been soldered back: all’s well again)

How many locos does a boxfile need? I’ve got eight…

Meanwhile ballasting of Mercia Wagon Repair hasn’t made a scrap of progress in 4 months.