Latest vehicle to join the Grime Street bus fleet is this Leeds City Transport AEC Regent III with Roe body.
Built from the Little Bus Company kit 'Roe 4', which in itself is a very nice, very easy to build kit.
It's powered by my usual 1.5v AAA battery this is mounted in the upper deck seats and from normally viewing distances pretty un obtrusive, it's connected to the chassis by Faller charging pins.
The motor/gearbox is by KKPMO in Poland, costing around £17.50 delivered, as usual
Well no, it's Rochdale Town Hall about 3pm this afternoon, as sort of requested here's a short video clip that was kindly sent to me by a visitor to the Heywood MRG show this afternoon.
Road vehicles, trams and that bloody cyclist again! I now need eyes in the back of my head but fortunately no serious crashes!
What's that thing they have on the back of trucks now, 'do not pass on the nearside' ? Well more by luck than good management I've managed not to mangle a cyclist with a sideswipe. smile emoticon
I've re done quite a bit of the Faller circuits using magnetic strip so was having a bit of a test before scribing the new plaster bits....
Sorry about video quality but trying to get it all together at the same time was fun....
Having a few Faller car system spares to hand I thought I'd have a bash at building rather than converting a chassis, this was based round a AAA 1.5v battery holder as I tend to use these rather than the 3v Faller ones as it slows them down to a more reasonable speed.
So add in a switch and a reed switch and bar onboard charging you have one that'll do the same thing as a Faller, the batteries are easy to swap over and you just pop a freshly recharged battery in rather than having to charge
There are quite a few ongoing projects at the moment mainly FUD prints but a few other bits and pieces.
First up is Leeds post war car 276, this was to be the prototype for a batch of 50 , unfortunately it never progressed beyond this one, this proved to be the last complete tram built at Kirkstall Rd works, (601 and 602 were built by Roe at Crossgates and 600 was nominally a rebuild)
Shown in the second of it's three liveries (light blue, dark blue then red). FUD print body, scratch bui
Very few of the trucksides used for the Leeds tram fleet have had to been produced as there are plenty of resin or white metal cast parts about. However there wasn't anything for the EMB pivotal trucksides used on the Chamberlain cars that became known as Pivotals obviously due to their trucks, which in theory were meant to combine the best of the 4 wheel and bogie designs, in practice they weren't a success as the linkages needed plenty of maintenance to work well, the majority of the time in u
.....or as they're more correctly known a pair of Blackpool Coronation tram bodies in 7mm scale.
One upshot of the recent WSF price changes was that I decided to try the Blackpool Coronation tram in 7mm scale, overall it's come out very nicely, Mark Hughes is going to re scale his etch and I believe Terry Russell is beavering away at 7mm PCC style trucks (one of these is for Terry....)
At just sub £100 they're not exactly cheap, but for a print of this size (approx 14 inches) I don't thi
A cryptic heading....however I was fairly amazed recently when the Grime Street Blog ticked over to 100,000 plus views, I can only put it down to a stuck F5 button on my various laptops!
To be honest I'm always gobsmacked that anyone is interested in what I'm doing, the subject matter is hardly mainstream add that to my ramblings, well 'nuff said! So thank you to all who have looked in and taken an interest, whilst I doubt it's inspired many I do hope it's shown that modelling trams doesn't
Well that was rather an eventful month or two, having missed RMWeb live through illness, next outing was Leeds MRC show this last weekend, as the layout doesn't often get put up in its full form now (it's getting too big!) opportunity was taken to get a few pics of the current state of play. It's as complete as it has ever been, but you know the old mantra....'it's never......' well that remains the case.
Several things are planned before its next outing in February (Rochdale) but as per nor
Well the next couple of weeks will see a concerted effort to get a load of things done and finished in time for a rather well publicised show in the Coventry area.....yes that one!
One thing to get sorted recently is the Faller road vehicles, a recent project has seen a Base Toys Bristol BRS wagon married to a Faller truck chassis, fairly easy to do by fitting the cab and altering the box van body to a Luton type with an over cab bit, with a bit of careful sawing this was done without having
A brief interlude from layout and Leeds trams.
I had a new version FUD print of a Blackpool Coronation handy and decided to do something with it.
This was an original form with roof windows and I decided I wanted a 60s version with roof advert boxes etc....
So fill roof windows paint in appropriate colours after adding Mark Hughes etched detail to make it into car 659 (The first one converted to conventional control with Z4 controllers)
Add roof boxes and Mark Hughes etched tower
As per the recent entry Grime Street board 3 made its public debut at the Festival of Model Tramways last weekend.....
The whole event wasn't without stress and drawbacks as I didn't quite manage to get quite a few things finished in time (ie stringing the overhead at 11.30, painting the road surface at 12.30 the night before and the weathering the road surface at 5 am before loading and heading for the show is not good for your stress levels)
However the one thing that did perform faul
After much feverish activity Grime Street board 3 made its public debut yesterday at the Festival of Tramway Modelling in Manchester, despite all the recent activity it's not quite finished but nearly there had to be good enough.
The Magnorail cyclist performed faultlessly all day, even though I've still not got round to painting the figure yet, seemingly more interesting than the rest of the layout put together!
Faller car system needs a little work yet but in general will be ok.
An
Is it that long since I added anything to the blog?
Work has been progressing on board 3 and as they used to say in a certain advert 'we're getting there'
however I just hope it's quick enough....2 weeks to go till next outing and work is still not finished.....
Anyway a taster to board 3, most railway modellers get to add a bus on an overbridge, will as a tram modeller I get to use the cliche of a train on an embankment....
So a quick taster, K3 on a Leeds to Wakefield stopper pas
Seeing as the latest extension board to Grime St is 'embargoed' (it's going to be a surprise at it's first exhibition outing) I thought I'd stick a pic up of the latest tram being built...
This is Leeds Pivotal car 127 (Pivotal after their 10ft wheelbase EMB pivoting trucks, that didn't really work and were locked solid most of the time)
Body is a FUD print, sprayed Rover Monza red and Land Rover ivory which are decent matches to the Leeds red liveries, adverts by Andy Burrows aka Purple
After much messing with boards, plaster, rail, pcb, magnorail tracks and Faller guide wires the whole lot is now up and working.....
There's the 2 tram lines, 2 Faller guide wires and the Magnorail cyclist in about 5 inches.
Pavements and road surfaces are all done and now just the setts to scribe.
A good number of the buildings are well underway so hopefully it's well on track for it's first exhibition target.
Quick video of the cyclist in action passing Leeds 600
A bit more done to the Supertram CAD, there's a couple of little bits to sort on the body (front rubber bumper is one) but the bodf is nearly there now.
Chassis and articulation is next to be sorted, but that's more 'modelling' than copying the prototype.
Few more pics
I'd seen various articles and mentions on here about the Redutex self adhesive textures and thought they might be worth a play with to see what they were like, each to their own but I just can't get on with brickpapers so I thought these might be a bit of a half way house having the relief of plastic/plasticard and the self coloured nature of printed papers.
So a sample was ordered from modeltextures.co.uk (usual disclaimer) I went for the Flemish bond brick with dark mortar in the coloured
More work on the Supertram project, roof detail now done, some of this is a bit OTT and probably won't print, but I want to see what we can actually get away with before deleting anything.
Anyway pics
Couple of minor mods to do to the body and that'll be then done, running gear for chassis and fitment pretty much sorted using Halling bogie that'll clip in, so coming together nicely, Vinyl graphics are pretty much likely too.
One of the things progressing has been a model of Leeds Snowblade7 as mentioned earlier in the blog here
http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/172/entry-8616-leeds-snowblade-7/
It's now 99% finished, body from a Prime Grey 3d print other bits scratchbuilt in plastic/metal wire etc and a few w/m castings
Fortunately a few more prototype pictures surfaced showing front end detail etc.
Fairly heavy weathering as other pictures show it rather dirty when in use.
The co
Grime Street made the long journey south to Croydon Friday evening (ah the joys of the M25 at teatime....) to attend the Festival of Tramway Modelling this year held in the air conditioned comfort of Fairfield Halls, Kew bridge is a nice venue, but sometimes the heat can be a bit oppressive.
Usual story of PPP (you know what I mean) but in my defense I've managed 4 days of since early April, all exhibiting at shows.....anyway we were up and running before the punters arrived, we being me, Mr
Finally got round to getting the Magnorail cyclist up and working properly..........
Shown with a couple of the buildings likely to be used, all I need to do now is build the rest of the board round it......
Few photos of the test print of Sheffield Supertram project, done in WSF as I knew there was a few things to sort in the CAD but wanted something physical to show at the Sheffield Bus, Tram and Train Show next weekend.
Not the finished article by a long stretch, one error from the drawings had been picked up before and another one since so hopefully the final version should be spot on...
Anyway some pics
Sorry couldn't resist that title....
Anyway something modern image......I don't do post 1950s, so what's all this then....
No I'm not doing Sheffield post 2000, nor will I be trying to run one on Grime Street......
Just a few shots of works car 6 in a heavily weathered state, many don't like weathered trams, but most of mine have it in some form, the works cars in Leeds in the 1950s were certainly not pristine and the model reflects it.
Built from an ABS kit with a Halling drive with a plasticard cradle for the drive, bow collector bis .45mm nickel silver wire pivoting in a .5mm brass tube. Weathering done with powders. washes and dry brushing.
