Today I spent an enjoyable afternoon progressing with the winter module. After applying plaster I gave the whole lot a coat of white acrylic in the hope that this would look sufficiently snow-like in its own right, but it's clear that there's more to be done; the texture of the plaster still shows through so I guess I will have to apply another layer of polyfilla or something similar. In time there will be some hedges and undergrowth, suitably snow-covered, and a few wintery trees. No shortage o
Just a couple more shots of the cottage, now that is has lighting and a few details to place it in the surroundings.
Like many of the buildings on my layouts, this one is absolutely ancient but has been tarted up a bit to keep it in use.
Anyone watching this blog could be forgiven for thinking that I've given up on Shillingstone as a project, but in truth it's just been relegated to second fiddle while I spent half of this year cracking on with other projects. Along the way I've continued to add some details to the first module and think about where I'm going with the other elements of the layout.
My original plan had been to tackle the large station module next, but I've put that on hold for now, for a couple of reasons. Fi
I've spent a few evenings beginning to add the road overbridge at the northern end of the summer module. The pictures in Iain Rice's book on using the Wills materials proved very useful, as did a trawl of the internet - I had my doubts about a structure of this type spanning more than two tracks but soon found that it wasn't unheard of.
The construction is nothing fancy. I had some girder bridges salvaged from my old layout Wyvant, but these were all unfortunately slightly too short for the
I've finished the two tracks that run through the Shillingstone module. They're lightly tacked down since I want to tweak the alignment a bit but the wiring is done and tested. Since I don't envisage ever wanting to operate two locomotives at once, I've only used on-off switches, so a train can be parked in the station while another passes. I do want to run DCC-equipped locos on the layout occasionally, though, so there's a DPDT switch to select between analog and digital. Screwed to the undersi
I love hanging basket liner - it's the best thing ever. While I accept that it is best viewed as a basis for further texturing, rather than an end in its own right, its sufficiently grassy looking, in its natural state, to fool my eye into thinking that some definite progress is being made. Rather than endless hours faffing around with glue, paint and Kermit-coloured scatter materials, you can cover dozens of square inches of model landscape in seconds, giving that instant gratification of seein
One of the models that's survived with me down through numerous upheavals and house moves is this Hornby Battle of Britain class "Spitfire". It was a Christmas present in 1981 so will soon have been in my possession for forty years.
The model was much anticipated as the original Triang-Hornby Spamcan had been out of the catalogue for some years and I had high hopes that Hornby would have used the gap to improve the product a bit. After all, this was the time when Airfix
I've added some Springside swans and cygnets to the brook, and some water for them to swim around in. I've also got around to putting in the 5 foot fluorescent lighting fixture, which is attached to an L-shaped beam running across the entire 7 foot module frontage. I'm generally pleased with the way it's brightened the scene, but I haven't eliminated shadows on the backscene from the big tree. They're softer than before, as you'd expect, but I still need to do a bit of work to make them less obt
Following a suggestion by Wenlock of this parish, I've added a road sign to the junction at the top of the bridge - it's a Dart Castings "Somerset" sign but I guess Dorset is close enough? I also extended the road into the backscene, and took the opportunity to add a bit more detail and variations in tone.
And look who's arrived in his midnight blue Bentley? If Ivo's expecting some S&D trains, he's in for a bit of a wait. But perhaps he'll be able to make do with the Western Region traff
A few days off work saw some enjoyable progress on the summer module. Currently it's in "GWR" guise although as mentioned earlier in this blog, all the region-specific fittings are designed to be easily swappable so that I can switch to S&D operations with relatively little bother, as well as having some scenic areas that can be changed purely for variety.
Here's the current state of play in the station/goods yard area, before I ran out of Wills sheets to do the setts between the sidings
With the glorious weather we've been having, it seems only fitting that progress on my S&D layout finally reaches the "summer" module. And now that I'm finally forced to make certain critical decisions, it's become clear that I'm no longer even pretending that this is Shillingstone, or even an attempt at "essence" thereof. I'd already made major compromises with the track layout, but the clincher has been the need to disguise the entry and exit points of the track through the backscene. I've
Things have moved quite quickly in the last couple of weeks. This tends to be the way it goes, I find - slow progress from baseboards, track laying, wiring, backscene construction, and so on, then basic landforms go in and everything speeds up (before slowing down again with the slow process of fine detailing, which can take months or years as required). Maybe it's because scenic work is very much my comfort zone as a modeller, but I tend to just dive in and get on with it, coupled with having a
I kicked off the ballasting on the summer module with this short stretch over the culvert, which will be difficult to access once the road bridge is in place. As mentioned elsewhere, I now use Copydex rather than PVA, which retains a degree of resilience once it has dried, so that the ballasted roadbed still has some give in it. Other than that the process is the same; sprinkle down the ballast, mist over with water, then add the dilute Copydex solution through a pipette or eye-dropper. The resu
The summer module is getting on for four feet deep in one corner, so I need to have completed any fiddly work at the back before working forward to the front. In fact, part of the layout is still be bolted into place and once that's in, it will be hard to get to the back right corner at all. With that in mind, now has been the time to take care of the backscene.
I used a photographic backscene on the spring module, but the two I've done since then have both been painted directly onto a rigid
It was good to have a close look behind the scenes at Chris Nevard's marvellous Brewhouse Quay during Railex, one of the benefits being that I saw the use of bendy MDF for the first time. I'd not knowingly seen this stuff in the flesh, but now that I had an idea what to look for, I quickly found a big pile of sheets in my local B&Q. They must have been staring me in the face every time I'd been in before, of course.
All the scenic modules on the S&D layout employ curved backscenes, w
Incredibly, it's 12 months to the day since I posted the first pictures of Stourpayne Marshall on rmweb. As elaborated on at the time, this isn't a new layout, but an identity-swap for my existing GWR-based layout King's Hintock. Using various dodges, King's Hintock can be swapped over to an S&D station (and back again if needed) in about twenty minutes. In the course of the transformation, the station building moves from one side of the tracks to the other, the goods shed is relocated, and
I decided to crack on and get the DJH 7F back into correct right hand drive condition!
As mentioned in the previous post, the model as acquired by me was a bit of a dog's dinner in that it
had been incorrectly numbered in the 1925, left-hand drive series, whereas the DJH castings are only
good for the first batch of locos, with small boilers and right--hand drive. However, the model had somehow
ended up with the reversing lever on the "wrong" side for the boiler, so it
This week has seen a wee bit of progress on the new scenic extension to the layout. Recapping from July, I showed how I'd decided to push the scenery onto one of the previously non-scenic connecting bits, by reworking the end of the summer module:
Into this revised format, where the sky board is now "unwrapped" so that it continues out over the former connecting bit.
I've now begun landscaping the new bit:
The gist of it is
A minor digression into drawbars, here.
Hornby's Rebuilt West Country/Battle of Britain models are nice products, with a couple of annoying quirks. The first and worst of these is that
they're prone to gear failures, at least the ones produced in the early batches. I ended up with three, and after a few years two of them were
both non-runners due to various issues. Hornby's repair department was no help at all, which I found very disappointing as they are by no means
o
Following the debacle mentioned in the previous blog entry, 5MT 73049 has now been paired with the correct type of tender. The route I went down was to buy a second hand Bachmann model of 73049 itself, what I should have done in the first place, but since I'd already gone to the trouble of weathering and renumbering the original loco, I decided to swap the tender from the new model and use the old tender and new model (do keep up at the back there) for a future repaint and relining job into BR b
Some examples of 4MT and 5MT motive power on the layout, including an exciting blooper!
First off, a Bachmann 4MT 4-6-0 which has been renumbered (using HMRS and Modelmaster transfers) to an S&D example:
Light weathering is applied by brushing on liquid acrylics, then almost immediately swiping it off or buffing it around using cotton buds. I must admit I rarely use the airbrush for weathering these days, preferring to use brush
A couple more locos, one with an association with the S&D, the other more dubious!
2P 40601 was an S&D regular, here represented by another Hornby loco with tender drive, and again a more than adequate runner. Again, not much has been done to this one - tender gap shortened, renumbered, lamp irons and lamps, crew, coal and a bit of weathering. In immediate post-nationalisation BR condition, there;s a nice picture in this state in one of the Ivo Peters volumes.
In between working on the scenic features, I've been enjoying giving some of my older S&D-related models a run.
44422 was an S&D 4F and this model was renumbered about a decade ago, It's an old Hornby 4F with the Airfix-style tender drive. Although beyond the pale in certain quarters, my experience with these particular mechanisms is that they respond incredibly well to DCC. There's a bog-standard Hornby chip in this one and the running is quite superb, with impe
Some recent low-stress modelling on Stourpayne Marshall:
This Bachmann Jinty was renumbered to a Bath example and then weathered. It came with "British Railways" lettering which I was reluctant to remove, even though I don't have any evidence that this particular loco carried that scheme. A number of S&D locos did, though, right through until 1953 or so, so it's not obviously out of place.
It runs smoothly, and incredibly quietly, but I can''t get it to s
As seen below, there's an area of raised platform to the left of the station building that was notionally going to be a loading dock:
After living with it for a while, I decided that I wanted something else occupying this space, in line with the parcels store at the real Shillingstone. Unfortunately I missed the boat with the Bachmann nodel of this structure (and they seem to be very scarce on ebay) so I decided to build something of my own.
The basis for thi
