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About this blog

  • This blog aims to follow the conversion of my existing layout to an earlier time-frame. I hope that others will find it of interest and helpful,

 

Entries in this blog

GWR N6 Horse Box - 2

In my very first post in this Blog , I referred to the need for plenty of horses and the facilities to support them. As part of "Turning Back the Clock", I decided that an essential railway vehicle would be a Horse Box, so I chose to build the Wizard Models/51L etched brass kit of the GWR diagram N6 box.   Inspired by @magmouse description of his 7mm scale model, I decided to restore my own early post about my 4mm scale model.   Although at that time (2013), I had not started

MikeOxon

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Early GWR 'Absorbed' Engines

I wrote a Forum post about some of these ‘absorbed’ engines back in 2014 but it has now been archived and has lost its illustrations, so I thought it was worth restoring these in this blog post, which is partly based on my original text.   Some time ago, I acquired a bound set of the RCTS "Locomotives of the Great Western Railway", mainly to learn more about the various pre-grouping designs by William Dean.  I had tended to skip over the volumes on 'Absorbed Engines' but later found my

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GWR ‘Sir Daniel’

A comment on my recent post about modelling Rocket reminded me that my first scratch-built locomotive was an Armstrong 2-2-2 that I constructed 10 years ago and described in ‘Railway Modeller’, July 2014 , as ‘Simply Victorian’. I explained in that article that I was encouraged by a drawing of one of these engines in Russell’s ‘A Pictorial Record of Great Western Engines’ with the caption comment that: "The utter simplicity of these early engines can be seen." The idea of ‘simplicity’ appealed t

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25 years later - ‘Rocket’

Having gone right back to 1804 with Trevithick’s locomotives, I decided to start moving forward again - to Stephenson’s famous ‘Rocket’, which was to put passenger-carrying railways firmly on the map.   When I built my Trevithick model, I wanted to put it alongside a model of ‘Rocket’ to illustrate the progress made over 25 years but, although I know I have a 4 mm scale model built from an Airfix kit, ‘somewhere’, I couldn’t find it!   I did find however that there is a 3D pr

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Ultimate Pre-Grouping - Trevithick - Pt.2

I’ve now managed to produce a set of ‘printable’ parts from the original download from the ‘Printables’ website described in my previous post.   I’m still puzzled by the theories on exactly which of Trevithick’s locomotive engines was actually used for the Penydarren trial, which was the moment in history that put the steam locomotive on the map.   There is a print in the Science Museum collection, said to be the Penydarren engine but it has been discredited because, accord

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Ultimate Pre-Grouping - Trevithick

I have not forgotten about my plans to create a diorama, as described in my Broad Gauge blog.    While I was researching the early days of the GWR, however, I found myself thinking about what had gone before – back to the ultimate pre-grouping period!  This led me to Trevithick’s engines, of which I photographed a replica at Blists Hill Museum near Telford:   Trevithick replica at Blists Hill Museum   Trevithick was a remarkable inventor but, sadly, not a good

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3D-printed Double Fairlie

Background   Several years ago – 2006 in fact – I was driving away from a visit to Blaenau Ffestiniog slate quarries and noticed that the last train of the day was due to arrive at the railway station.   It turned out to be quite a long wait, as the train on the Festiniog Railway was in trouble and eventually arrived with a broken flexible steam pipe to one of the power bogies. With a sense of ‘make do and mend’, the trailing end of the pipe was lashed up and the train then m

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Old Model Updated

Introduction   The last few months have been busy ones for my household, with little time to think about model-making. The spells of hot weather have not been conducive to spending time in my workroom either and, on top of all those things, I have had another failure of the feeder mechanism in my 'Geeetech' printer.   Broken Filament Feeder   I think the root cause of the problem was a faulty temperature sensor in the print head, which caused the feed tube to j

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Printing 'Edith'

Despite what I wrote in my previous post , I decide to add a ‘rolling’ chassis to my model of ‘Edith’, to help me assess the overall appearance of this little engine. Printing and assembling some of the very small parts created some new challenges.   Our heating system failed last week, just as the weather turned colder. I had not noticed before how sensitive my 3d printer is to the temperature in my work room. For the first time, I experienced a fractured filament as it wound off the

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Modelling 'Edith' from Buscot

In my previous post in this blog, I described my chance discovery of the former narrow-gauge system that linked the farms on the Buscot Park estate to a distillery and other works, located at a wharf on the upper River Thames.   This was especially interesting to me because I had introduced an imaginary narrow-gauge (NG) line on my ‘North Leigh’ layout, to serve the local quarries for Cotswold stone and the sawmills around Wychwood Forest, by connecting them to a railhead at North Leig

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Oxfordshire Narrow Gauge

North Leigh Station, with Goods Yard and Narrow Gauge System Beyond   When I first decided to attribute the location of my small layout to North Leigh in Oxfordshire, the only basis I had was a map dated 1849, which shows a branch line from the OW&WR main line running south from near Stonesfield to Witney. Of course, this line was never built and Witney was eventually served by the now closed Fairford Branch described at http://www.fairfordbranch.co.uk/ , from which website the fol

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3D-Printed Horses

After reading some recent posts about horse drawn wagons and the like, I started to wonder if it would be possible to 3D-print my own horses.   A look at the 'Cults' website yielded a 3D-printable horse  by David Mussaffi, described as ‘FDM printer ready’, so I thought that this would be a good place to start.  I looked at the file after loading it into my ‘Cura’ slicing software and found that the model was cleverly split into three parts, such that there were flat surfaces to lie on

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A new ‘Old Engine’- Re-visited

I find it hard to believe that more than six years have passed since I started to build a model of one of the early standard gauge engines, transferred to the GWR when they acquired the Oxford, Worcester, & Wolverhampton Railway (The Old Worse & Worse, as it was colloquially known)   I have been reminding myself of what is in this, my older ‘Pre-Grouping’ blog, before I changed over to (became obsessed with) the Broad Gauge!   My model of No.184, shown below, was the last model

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Lock-Down 'Pastime'

Finding things to do in lock-down is something of an ‘art-form’. A friend recently introduced me to some software called 'Pixbim ColorSurprise AI'.  He showed me some remarkable results, where it had automatically coloured some of his old monochrome photos.   So I thought I’d try it out on some of my collection of 19th-century railway photos.  There’s a ‘free trial’ version but, as is so often the case, it is hobbled by printing multiple watermarks all over any saved results. To show t

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Christmas Break

With the holiday period now upon us, many of North Leigh’s locomotives are now ‘on shed’. In the following photo can be seen my first ‘scratch build’ - a GWR ‘Queen’ class, with a ‘Stella’ 2-4-0 next in line. Disappearing out of view, the back of ‘Lord of the Isles’ can just be glimpsed, while on the front track is a Dean Goods, together with an early PBV.  (The 'back scene' is by Photoshop)   Locomotives ‘On Shed’   Looking back into Broad Gauge days, I remember a comme

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Track Maintenance

Most of my train-running recently has been for the enjoyment of my young grand-children. For this, I tend to use my reliable ‘1854’ saddle tank, with its heavy ‘Wills’ cast body and ‘Hornby’ chassis that make it fairly ‘bomb-proof’     Trains at North Leigh   Suddenly, after what has been many months (if not years) of reliable running, the engine de-railed on the three-way point at the West end of North Leigh station. Following application of the ‘big hand in the s

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Armstrong Goods - Adding a Tender

At the end of my last post, I felt that I had solved all the main problems associated with building my Armstrong Goods engine, although a lot of detailing remains to be done.   To complete the model, I needed to add a tender, which I intended to contain the drive unit. I have made several powered tenders based on 'Hornby' ring-field mechanisms, around which I used components from either plastic or white metal kits. I have used two different 'Hornby' mechanisms: type X9105 with 7' 6" +

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh - part 6

There is one problem that has been lurking in the background throughout my design of this outside-framed locomotive – how to fit the wheels? The wheels need to be pressed onto their axles and set to gauge, before fitting them to the locomotive.   I had already decided that this engine will be tender driven, so I do not have to make provision for a gear train. After considering various options, I decided to adopt the method used in the tender-drive ‘Mainline’ Dean Goods model. Since I h

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh - part 5

At the end of the previous part, I had printed the main body components but was experiencing difficulty in printing small boiler fittings. The difficulty was that, on their own, these had no flat surface to lay on the printer bed. My next idea was to ‘slice’ these components just above the curved flanges that fit around the boiler and print the upper and lower parts separately, so that they could subsequently be glued together across their flat faces.   To my surprise, the tiny compone

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh - part 4

Never become complacent! After a long spell of trouble-free printing, I started to encounter problems a couple of weeks ago. First off, the old problem of lack of adhesion to the printer bed returned. I had become lazy about replacing the blue masking tape and the surface had become worn. After replacement and re-levelling, all seemed well again ... until the heat wave struck. The next problem was uneven printing.  It was too hot for me in my work room, so I left it alone while I got on with des

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh – part 3

In my previous post, I showed the brass components that will form the ‘hard’ skeleton of my planned model of an Armstrong Standard Goods engine. The fireman’s side of No.661 is shown below to complement my previous illustrations of the driver’s side of No.31: Armstrong Standard Goods No.661   Now, I shall describe my procedures for producing 3D-printed parts to form the ‘flesh’ of the model, which will carry the details of the outside frames, footplate, boiler cladding, smok

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh - Part 2

It’s some time since I’ve scratch-built a standard gauge locomotive, having been spending my time recently on Broad Gauge models.  I learned several lessons, however, during the construction of my previous 00-gauge models, the most important of which was to remember that 00-gauge is actually a narrow gauge – closer to 4’ than 4’ 8 ½”, when scaled.   My first scratch-build, described in 'Railway Modeller', July 2014, was of a 2-2-2 ‘Queen’ class engine, which was a simple choice because

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A Standard Goods for North Leigh – part 1

On a number of occasions over the years, I have posted comments indicating my dis-satisfaction with the ‘Mainline’ Dean Goods that is currently serving on my North Leigh layout. It’s really too late for my period, with Belpaire firebox and other details that place it long after the turn of the century.   My model Dean Goods at North Leigh   I have recently been following Mikkel’s conversion of a ‘Belpaire’ Dean Goods into an earlier ‘round-top’ version and have thought o

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There's Nothing New ...

More than three years ago, I wrote about some experiments I did to add to the debate about GWR red wagon livery. I showed photos of wagons at Cinderford Iron Works, taken around 1890, which had marked differences in (monochrome) image tone.     I thought, at the time, that I was doing some ‘original’ research but recently I have been looking through back issues of the 'Broad Gauge Society' magazine ‘Broadsheet’.  There I found that this ‘well known’ photograph was discussed

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MikeOxon

Family Saloon - Hybrid Construction Method

I thought it would be easy to modify my U29 model, to represent the body of a diagram G13 Family Saloon but various gremlins struck with a vengeance!   Omit reading the ‘Gremlins’ sections, if you just want to follow the progress of the model itself.   Gremlins   I have now learned the necessity for taking great care when selecting entities to modify in Fusion 360.   For example, when selecting parts of a drawing in, say, the X-Z plane, it is easy to inclu

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