(click pictures for big versions)
I spent time on Whitemarsh last week so that I could enter in the NZAMRC 2012 Convention competition. I opted to just take the bridge end - nothing's been done to the other module which is definitely lagging behind now
My main aim was to try and fill in various unfinished or messy-looking areas. The worst offenders were the last-minute patches of grass I added before Railex in 2010 which were applied straight over the ballast, and didn't have any "reinforc
Relay boxes by Will Vale, on Flickr
...have been greatly exaggerated. I have been modelling in my spare time, just not railway modelling, so I'm doing better than last year at least...
But I have done something train-related today - I dug Whitemarsh out of the cupboard and finished painting all the cable trunking which had only had a base coat of cream paint until now. I'm trying to get the bridge end of the layout ready to take to the NZAMRC convention at the end of the week, so of cour
We had a good show at the weekend, although operating Whitemarsh meant I didn't have much time to do anything else - quite a shock after showing roundy-roundy layouts the last couple of years.
First of all, let me offer thanks to my dad for operating Igelfeld and Tanis, and Micky for bringing us lunch on both days, and giving me a quick break from Whitemarsh to eat it. Also thanks to Kev and Rich for making trips to the coffee room on my behalf!Â
I was pretty panicky the week befor
Whitemarsh goes to war in about half an hour, then I need to come back, tidy up and curry favour with Mrs. V. - who to her eternal credit didn't bat an eyelid when I started building a fiddle yard on the living room carpet.
This post brought to you by coffee and paracetamol.
I shouldn't really be doing these, I should be doing more important things like weathering more track - but these were fun:
This is supposed to be cow parsley, made from twisted wire, green paint and white scatter. Below is rosebay willowherb from brush bristles, static grass, lilac scatter and more paint.
I *nearly* didn't post the pics, because I was a bit let down when I saw the close ups - I was quite excited about the individual plants before planting them. In the en
I've been looking forward to this for ages - the little yellow blobs have been sitting on one board or another for quite some time awaiting my largesse. Today they got it:
Having got the left end of the layout to the right kind of state at the weekend, involving lots of sensible risk-addressing (doing the most sucky and/or risky things first) I thought this would make a suitable treat I stripped some fine wire and pushed/pulled the conductors out of it so that the insulation would f
I've been working on the assumption that I'd be able to use static grass with my electric tea-strainer and get through the scenery on Whitemarsh quite quickly. So I did some tests and ended up doing something almost completely different with the same materials.
Possibly because this is 4mm scale using 6mm Noch grass fibres, the electric tea-strainer didn't do too well - see the right-hand patch here:
I needed to use neat PVA to get the fibres to stick, and they weren't al
Just a quick entry since an experiment came out well and I wanted to share the results.
I wasn't sure how to do the road markings - certainly I was pretty sure I couldn't brush-paint them. Given that the road surface is styrene and has a decent coat of primer I thought masking might be a good option - with acrylics I can always clean them off if it goes badly wrong. I laid the stripes out freehand with Tamiya tape, using existing rows of tape, the pavement edge, etc. as guides. Then
The deadline is looking very very loomy at the moment. I hope that the (accidentally?) revised date sticks, since I have a week off before that, but I'm making progress nonetheless.
I finally got the bridge installed - well mostly, I haven't stuck the girder down yet since I want to paint the pavement first, and I'm a bit worried about damage too since it's the first bit not protected by the profile boards. This involved lots of layers - there are balsa blocks atop the abutments to rais
I made a start on this on holiday, making the walls and adding all the framing, but didn't get as far as the windows. Remedied that this afternoon, via some experiments.
The windows here have a smaller section on the left which (probably?) slides or opens, certainly it's in a frame which sits proud of the main pane of glass. I had a go at making glazing bars with strips of sticky label, but gave up since I didn't get them to adhere well enough. More interestingly, I tried masking off th
James Hilton suggested a while ago that I'd not really be able to avoid scratchbuilding the bridge if I wanted it to look like Whitemoor - and he's right. Given that I'd done the abutments I thought I'd have a go at the girder.
The above picture is just a quick test - I need to remove some material from the deck so it can sit further back, and there's a fair bit of cleaning up to do as well. Unfortunately I didn't take many work-in-progress pictures this time, although here's one of att
Not much happening for the last three weeks since we've been away, but the jet-lag had receded sufficient by Sunday that it was possible to do some modelling without falling asleep.
These are the abutments and central pillar for my attenuated Norwood Road bridge. It's been kind of a pain, since the only reference pics I found are about 400 pixels wide, but I've been able to find a few details captured in other pictures taken by heroic folk leaning over the bridge to spot some choice
Whitemoor has an awful lot of quite distinctive modern lamps - any picture shows them quite well. I need at least three, probably more.
I was thinking initially about using this N-scale Viessmann lamp since they should only about 50mm tall in 4mm, but I wanted to try and build one first since the shape looked relatively straightforward, and the Viessmann lamp doesn't have the wider section (cable cabinet?) at the base of the post. I bought some 3.2mm square brass tube (since the insi
Whitemoor is handy in that it's a fen prototype with a bridge as a view block. The new incarnation of the yard is even better in this respect since significant earthworks have been done to build a cycle path on the west side of the bridge which runs parallel to the yard throat.
I tried to rough in the embankment with Styrofoam initially, but it wasn't a good fit - the real thing is very artificial in form (it's not just an earth bank) and I took it out and used straight-cut 10mm foam bo
There isn't going to be much in the way of elevation on this layout, and what there is is nearly all at the road bridge and embankment.
This has been quite tricky to research, since everyone seems to stand *on* the bridge and take pictures of locos for some reason The roadway and path are nicely visible on Google street view, and there are a couple of small pictures of the bridge itself on Flickr, taken on the open day I think. Unfortunately the photographer doesn't have larger version
Bolstered by a cup of coffee, I thought it was better to attack the single slip before I chickened out. Inspecting Man was less than impressed:
I should point out the rationale for doing this - the single slip really doesn't make much sense for the layout as it is, and if I'm going to be operating it on my own for a two day show I think it's worth some pain and delay now to make the operation as simple and sensible as possible. With a double slip, I can bring trains in on the correct li
More scrap etch and superglued fingers have resulted in the following progress:
The grease blades are pieces 4x1mm (ish) scrap brass glued to the inside of the rail below the railhead, with some finer scraps folded into L shapes and slotted in under the rail to make the brackets that hold them in place. I had to make a tool (well, a piece of plastic filed to a wedge) to hold them in place against the bottom of the rail while applying glue, then carefully withdraw it before it too got
As a change from ballasting and installing cable troughs, I went and raided some plastic kits to make this:
Not that exciting in concept, but exciting for me because I
1) Saw it in a prototype photo
2) Guessed what it might be
3) Confirmed my guess (thanks helpful RMWebbers!) and got some more information
4) Figured out some rough dimensions
5) ...
6) Made it!
As someone who's relatively clueless about the real railway this was obviously quite satisfying. The system wor
Having posted a lot of pictures of bits and bobs as I work on them, I thought I'd share an overview, to better show the warts. Click for big:
Note: Includes a loco for James, albeit an out-of-the-box RTR specimen! Blue Lightning has been helping me test the uncoupling magnets again now that they're ballasted. So far so good.
I'm afraid the layout plan evolved before the adoption of Whitemoor as a prototype, hence the "inspired by" name. I'm pretty sure I've made all kinds of gaffes
Martin prompted me to weather the concrete - good advice - hopefully this looks used but not too old:
I added a wash of Devlan Mud, sponged off in places, and then stippled/drybrushed on some dark grey (Adeptus Battlegrey) and finally some white to bring the corners out again. You can see some brush-tip tidemarks from the wash on the square pad, but unless you know to mentally join them up I think they just read as scratches. The mark in the middle of the pad is a drilling pip for wh
He's no pointing man, but inspecting man came out this afternoon to check out the path for size.
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This was really to test a couple of things - how does the fine grit on the path photograph, and how the concrete looks. I'm fairly happy on both counts - in the flesh I think the path is a bit too heavily drybrushed, but in the picture it's not *too* bad and the grain size looks very believable. The concrete colours are working well - this is a drybrush of Tamiya Buff and then white (very g
Sounds a bit more glamorous than "I made a path" doesn't it?
Rest assured, it isn't.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I decided to stick with the 3mm high path edges, since they match the height of the fittings such as the lamp bases, and the idea is to infill with ballast leaving just 0.5mm-1mm showing at the top. I have some very fine ballast somewhere which will do for the gravel of the path itself - the colour isn't an exact match, but it's in the right sort of area.
Havin
I finally put some ballast down! Not very much, since we were just off out, but enough to get a feel for it.
I'm after the look of (what looks to me like) pale grey ballast as used at Whitemoor, still fairly fresh. At the moment it's much much too stark, especially since I washed the track with a fairly heavy concoction of burnt umber and black to add a bit of variation to the sleepers yesterday. The hope is that everything will tone in when some brake dust and other colouring is ble
The right hand end of Whitemarsh has a couple of little sidings. Just space for some TMD-esque stuff.
I picked Ipswich Freightliner stabling/fuelling point as the inspiration for this - it's the right area of the country and a neat little depot in a tiny space. Not as tiny as the space on the model though! I also think it'll add some personality missing from Whitemoor, which is really clean and tidy and new-looking. There's a useful picture by Colin Brooks which gives a reasonable vi
At long last I've found the ballast I wanted and have started preparing the track surrounds - sorting out levels, etc.
I've also started doing the around-track detailing - orange pipes and cable troughs are this year's GWR branchline if you like modern image stuff, but they look so good
The orange pipe is leftover from my layout wire, with the conductors (mostly) stripped out and the end opened out slightly with a knife-point. It seems to be the right size, I think the Peco sleeper
