Well its Sunday, and I'm relaxing with a nice coffee, slowly getting over the exploits of Saturday, and Foster Street's exhibition debut at the Weston on Trent exhibition.
Despite having a many, many outstanding jobs left to do, the layout was packed into the car on Friday night, god knows what the neighbours think and it just about fit, so with my six foot seven frame scrunched up behind the wheel of the car the Domestic overlord and I set off into the early morning darkness.
Having arr
Well what can I say, another marathon weekend of work finally over, even resulting in me visiting the office twice on a Sunday, I mean work on a Sunday!!!!!!
However today I manage to fit in a little modelling time, and buy little I mean hardly any, just enough time in fact to take out my soldering iron and successfully set my fingers alight (I am beginning to hate re-wiring the layout).
Being your typical tough northerner pain means nothing to me, so as I type this with still smoulderi
Is it just me this happens to, or are there other modellers out there who suffer from the same condition?
how come whenever I set out to complete a task, just before I do and sit back all smug with my achievement I managed to start another project? It all started this weekend, Foster Street is due to make its exhibition debut at the Weston on Trent 2014 show and I have a list of things I need to complete.
Now Foster street is only 10 feet long and about 2.5 feet wide, so in the grand sch
Just a quick entry this time - Try not to all cheer at once
I need a quick break from re-inventing the laws of physics and more particularly the laws governing electrics.
I NEED HELP,
The bay platform, and the goods yard on Foster Street are accessed by electro frog points, the are isolated from the main lines by double insulated fishplates, everything went well, running was great.
After the track was ballasted and painted, second testing and everything went well, until now.
Well the weekend finally arrived well at least Saturday did, an I got my long waited for lie in, it was bliss instead of getting up for 4am to get ready for work, I got up at 5am so I could spend a few hours in the office, then I rushed home to escort the Domestic Overlord out on a shopping expedition.
Anyway eventually I managed to get everything completed so I could spend a little time on Foster Street, to try and get it ready before the rapidly approaching deadline.
I had intended to
Well with a deadline looming I should be spending more time getting the layout up to a reasonable standard. However like most things there in always something in the way, and I don't mean the Domestic Overlord
The problem is the major jobs I need to complete are those little jobs that just eat up modelling time, and in the case of me and a soldering iron, lead to lots of burnt fingers and industrial language.
Still I managed to get the surface of the canal ready, or at least nearly read
Well I managed to spend a couple of hours on the layout today, and I am beginning to realise I still have an awful lot still to do
At time like this a modeller should be completing jobs on the layout rather that creating new ones (all the point motors in the goods yard are fried).
I set out today to complete the storage yard for the layout and I must admit its nearly complete, all I have to do it finish the branch line yard and the job is a "gud un" and I have the cut and damaged finge
Today's big question Is where does all the time go? I managed to finish work relatively early today, all I had to do was beat the traffic on the motorway. Drive to the bank to get the money for the repairs to the Domestic Overlords Car, park mine close to the garage but not too far away from where we live (halfway).
Then walk (yes actually walk ) to the garage, pay for the repairs then drive the worlds smallest car home (more like wear the car home as its not easy to drive it when your six f
Well the Domestic Overlord and I have spent a brilliant few days away in North Yorkshire and returned home today feeling totally refreshed. Then it hit me, its nearly the end of September and the exhibition deadline is rapidly approaching.
So I decided to start to overhaul some of the locomotive fleet, four use on the layout, I must admit I thought I had more maroon locomotives but I was wrong, ad two of them are Duchess's not what you would expect to find on a secondary line?
The prob
Well I am typing this entry with poorly, burnt fingers, I had some time today to spend on the layout and so I tackled the re-working of the storage yard, and that meant I had to use the tool from hell, yes a soldering iron.
No matter how often I use the dammed things they always seem to get the better of me, all I needed one for today was to solder the track to brass pins acoss board joints for the storage yard. With a little jiggery pokery I managed to fit in a total of 9 tracks in the stor
Well despite a rapidly approaching Exhibition deadline, the amount of spare time I have had to spend on the layout has been virtually nill
I still have a few jobs I need to complete, and in some cases need to start, but I think I can still get them done or at least to a level where they may be acceptable?
Anyway I managed to sneak an hour today to spend on the layout, and I thought I would spend this splashing a little paint on the Canal boats, so that they at least look partially compl
I think I smell a plot, something is definitely going on, the Domestic Overlord has extended my parole I'm not stupid though I know something is a foot (well 12 inches actually) so being sneaky I have pretended to do some modelling, while really investigating the evil plot of the Domestic Overlord.
I'm sure like most of you, I have a huge list of jobs that need to be completed especially as the exhibition debut is rapidly approaching. The most urgent of the jobs is to rebuild and finish the
Before I go any further, what happened was not my fault, it was the fault of the Domestic Overlord
A few days ago the other half was going to spend the evening with friends, catching up, and I was lucky enough to have the shackles loosened, and was granted freedom for the evening to do what ever I wanted
So once I had gone through the almost endless list of things I was not allowed to do and looked at the three things I was allowed to do, I dutifully signed "good behaviour contract" an
Well today I was another year older, so in an anti-celebration mood the Domestic Overlord and I walked (yes actually walked), into our local town to partake of a meagre spot of breakfast, spot the healthy tomato
Once we managed to get on the outside of a weeks worth of calories, and still having the use of our legs we managed to walk home, this healthy living is easy. Anyway I set off to the railway room to work on a few of the outstanding jobs that never seem to get finished, and actually m
Well, rather like Topsy, Forster Street just sort of grew, my original plan was to build the layout from 3 equally sized boards to give a maximum length of 9 feet, however when I visited my friendly timbre merchants, I managed to get boards measuring a total of 10 feet.
Not a problem I thought, they will still fit in the spare room, as its 11.5 feet long, and it gives me a little more railway well what I have come to realise now, is that the 1.5 feet of space between the end of the layout an
Sometimes even the shortest amount of modelling time, can be far, far too much and lead to mistakes that take seconds to create but maybe hours to fix.
Yes in the short time I had today to do so modelling I decided that I test fit the backscene to board 3, the initial fit showed that I had to trim a little off the scenery, which I managed to achieve without any mishaps.
Filled with confidence I then decided to cut the holes where the track run off into the storage yard, and whoops I thin
As the Domestic Overlord has granted my parole, because I have been such a good boy recently I decided to ballast the track on Board 3.
This usually boring job, progressed far quicker than I thought and as a result I had some free time, so out came the paint brushes and I attempted to make the girder bridge look more realistic.
Feeling rather smug with myself I thought I would review some of my goods rolling stock, and work out how many wagons I needed to finish, a task I'm not looki
Well I have managed to spend a few hours working on Board 3 in an attempt to get it to some sort of reasonable level, the first job was to work on the deck of the bridge. To be honest this did not take much effort and it was soon under a coat of dark grey (once this is dry yet another area to weather).
I must admit the factory has grown on me, somebody suggested that it looked to neat, and that the buildings should have been more ramshackeled, but my excuse is that the original buildings blew
The Domestic Overlord is definitely plotting something as I seem to have been given a lot of freedom to "play with my trainset", only time will tell what evil, nasty machinations are planned for me but for now hay ho
As a result progress on Board 3 has cracked on at a pace, and I have not glued my fingers together once (nothing to do with the fact that I have not been using Superglue, the Domestic Overlord has confiscated my supplies and my hidden one as well).
Anyway using my new favou
As you know from previous blogs Foster Street is made up of 3 boards, the first contains Foster Street station and Goods yard, and the second covers the transition from the urban sprawl to the start of a more rural environment. In my mind at least board 3 was to be the easiest to complete, to my mind at least as it was just supposed to be a representation of your typical Northwest scrubland
So with Foster Streets exhibition debut rapidly approaching (November) I have been slowly working thr
Well I set off to the spare room to do some work on Foster Street and its Exhibition debut is looming (Its not until November, but that's not time at all). So with all the best intentions in the world I set off to the blast furnace that is currently our spare room.
I think it must have been the effect of the heat, but before I knew what I was doing the controller was fired up and I was as the Domestic Overlord puts it "Playing Trains".
Despite its age and its inaccuracies I must admit I
How lucky and I, don't ask how I have managed it, but I have managed to find a few modelling hours over the last few days, and rather that spend this valuable time on the more important jobs on Foster Street, I have used it on an engine.
As some of you may recall, before my blog disaster where I wrecked a load of entries by accidentally deleting photo's in my gallery (I can still hear people cheering ) I was working on producing a passable Stannier 3 cylinder 2-6-4T for the layout. I had got
Well with everything that has been going on lately here at "Trump Towers" (named due to a recent a prolonged outbreak of wind) modelling time has been in very short supply. I have been working on finishing my Stannier 2-6-4T and have managed with a very shaky hand to lined the loco, well at least sort of.
Anyway the project that has really been eating into my time is the populating of the area surrounding Foster street with some of the your average locals. Well at least my representation of
Just a very quick entry this time (Hurray I can hear you cheer ).
I have been working on various little projects on the layout, you know the ones that just drain modelling hours, anyway one of the quick projects I have managed to complete is to convert a "Luton" type van into a flat bed.
The need for this came about, because I was bored of making railings to keep the residents of the stepped terraces on the layout safe. Showing a "devil may care" attitude to Health and Safety I decided t
Well I have finally finished weathering the Milk tanks (all 15 of them) that will form one of the trains on Foster Street. My usual method was used of a limited pallet, dry brushed, and them topped off when dry with a coat of my favourite "dirty" thinners.
I tried to avoid the uniformed look, and after the research I have made, some of the tankers seem very, very clean, considering the real things carried fresh Moo Moo juice it certainly make you think.
There are a coupe of areas I think
