Yesterday was that great annual treat of a trip to Scaleforum, the journey to Aylesbury almost made me miss the delights of queuing around the M25! The list of bits was rapidly procured (with the exception of those from High Level kits where the focus was on talking to customers rather than rapidly serving (this is not intended as a complaint, that is a large part of the point of Scaleforum) - note to self: next time buy online!)
I purchased a 12x24 motor to replace the 14x24 which I had pu
I was keen to try and find a way to make a slate roof that would give some texture better than just printed paper. The Scalescenes paper I used before looked very good, but I couldn't face the idea of trying to cut all the lines between the slates.
What I've tried here is to laser cut strips of slates onto large A4 size postage labels. The slates are about 3.5mm across and the strips are 10mm deep.
Laying these strips is a little fiddly and I found with the hipped roof that you
After an excellent weekend with 'Fen End Pit' at the Southwold exhibition I came back and spent a few more hours on the PC producing the drawings for the roofs and chimneys of the test station building. No matter how hard I try to sort out the angles of hipped roofs by being mathematical I'm always surprised when they fit, more often than not after a bit of 'adjustment'.
The chimneys are cut from 1mm MDF and fitted together quite well. I'm less convinced about making 'interlocking' brickwork
Taking on-board the advice from KH1 and Middlepeak I had some further goes at the brickwork on the building. Running in some very dilute acrylic white into the mortar joints worked well and then I tried just lifting the colour of the bricks using some Derwent graphic pencils. Using a couple of different colours on the brick red gets quite a nice subtle variation in my view and I hope I've toned down the quions to slightly better grey-yellow of the Cambridge white bricks.
On Friday
I had a go at cutting the building again, this time in the more conventional 3mm MDF, using .7mm ply for the quions. The result fitted together quite nicely, though I probably shouldn't have turned the 'corner power' down so far on the ply as I had to resort to a scalpel to get some of the parts free.
Before discussing painting here is a picture of Clare station to give you some idea of the colouring. I'm not convinced that four decades of no trains and possible cleaning haven't chang
Fen End Pit had a very enjoyable day out at the Leighton Buzzard narrow gauge railway, making an exhibition of ourselves in the locomotive shed at Page's Park. The stand next to us from the Darjeeling railway society probably felt at home with the morning monsoon but the roof on the shed didn't leak and we had an appreciative crowd who enjoyed playing 'spot the Leighton Buzzard locomotive' on Fen End Pit. (It isn't difficult as the answer is 'most of them!')
Additional sound effects wer
A few weeks work and progress can definitely be seen on the E4. I'd been concentrating on the body but today was the day to try and get some wheels in place. The loan of a GW wheel quartering jig from Middlepeak Tool Hire made this so much smoother. Being original Alan Gibson wheels these had the hole already drilled for the crank pins, another help when putting things together. You'll see from the photograph of the underside that the chassis is built using 'continuous springy beams' with High L
Over the last few weeks I've been drawing up a laser cutting drawing for a Great Eastern Railway '1865' style building. These were built on several lines including the Stour valley line, conveniently these came in three sizes, small, medium and large. The Great Eastern Railway society publish some plans of the small version Takeley and an ancient April 1986 copy of Practical Model Railways has drawings of the Medium taken from Lavenham.
I've decided to try this as an experiment on cutting us
No blog entries since February, too much going on and now so much to catch up on. Get a cup of tea, this could be a long one.
First up I've been working on rebuilding the lever frame from Empire Basin to fit Empire Mills. The revised track plan calls from more levers and so an extra Shropshire and Herefordshire Area Group frame was ordered from the Scalefour stores. This takes the frame up to 25 levers. The frame was built as per the instructions except for the addition of a locking 'tab' wh
Today I rewheeled and chipped my Heljan Railbus which was given to me at Christmas. It was a bit of a fiddle, why manufacturers make it so difficult to dismantle their stock to put chips in I'll never know. Having to remove the horns to get at the bolts and then prise the top off with a scalpel isn't my idea of fun. At least I'd purchased a 21-pin chip that just slotted in (once I got it the right way up). Rewheeling was fun too. The masak casting that forms the chassis (actually it is so heavy
Pleasure...
I spent most of Saturday playing trains. I intended to 'do some work' on the layout, but having built the sidings and got the double-slip working I just seemed to let the afternoon slip by shunting trains in and out. I can see I'm going to have fun trying to 'think like the real railway staff'. Things like trying to work out how the pick-up goods would have been marshalled to make shunting at each station more straightforward or see how you would swap empty and full wagons out of
The small yard on Empire mill is entered by a trailing point from the down-line. This had been built while I was building the continuous run around the room. However the yard itself needed a asymmetric double slip to give access to the two sidings and the cattle-dock. the crossings are all 1:8 but one of the curved sides is quite a bit tighter that the other. As with the rest of the track Templot was used to draw it out. The crossings, both standard and obtuse were made as separate units solder
Progress since Christmas has been good with the final section of track laying over the bridge completed allowing trains to once more go all around the room. The vertical fiddle yard is still functioning having been dismantled off the wall and then 're-hung' and the old portable sections over the door and the 'crew lounge' (spare bed!) could be re-used with only minor adaption to fit the new position of the rails coming off the main scenic section.
A view from the door gives a reasonable impr
I made some more progress on the bridge this weekend. I need to get at least a base to the structure (and some transparent acrylic cut for the water service) before I can lay track over it and with a desire to be able to run trains around the room again it has worked its way onto the 'critical path'. I've drawn out the base in TurboCAD and worked out a representation of the underside to give some transverse girders between the main side girders. I've also put some girders following where the rai
This weekend I had a good few hours to do some concentrated work on the layout. The track on the main boards is coming on well and the two points at the right hand end of the loop got finished off. There was nearly a disaster here which took a bit of working around. I had made a small mistake early on with the very first board I built. I had carefully laser cut all the pieces of framing and then assembled them and stuck them to the bottom of the baseboard. Unfortunately I put one piece on the wr
An excellent day out to day at 'Steam in Beds' organised by the Bedfordshire area group of the 16mm association. Our surroundings in the church at Eaton Bray were rather impressive and it seemed only right given the Church of England clergies long history of interest in railways! Many thanks to Rad and 2BIL for their help.
Despite the obvious temptations to things 16mm I managed to resist buying any new toys, probably a good idea given the orders received from the MERG and Rapid electro
Being a private siding the line to the mill needs protecting by a catch point. At least this didn't need another 'V' making! However as you can see from the picture getting the sleepers of the crossing space so as not to foul the line for the loop exit was a pain and more glue was smeared around on the underlay than should have been. The intention is to have a gate across the siding just beyond the catch point.
This leaves me with one last turnout to build and then lots of plain track -
Most railway companies would recycle components from use on a main line down into sidings and track of lesser importance. Following this practice (and because at £20 for 500 chairs they aren't cheap) I decided to try and remove some of the components off the old Empire Basin for reuse. Fortunately the chairs were willing to separate from the sleepers with a little persuasion and with not too much cleaning up some lengths of rail were made available to the track gang for reuse in the goods yard.
As requested by Phil, a few notes on how I make tie-bars. I'll try and cover the current TOUs later, my previous version made from plastruct was described here http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/186/entry-8263-making-tous-turnout-operating-units/
The visible tie-bars are made from a couple of pieces of scrap etc roughly .75mm tall and a tiny piece of thin paxolin. Mine originally came from Eileen and judging by the price label which says 70p I suspect it is quite old! I have
Inspired by an excellent day out at the Peterborough Festival of Model Railways I launched into more track building. The turnout from the down mainline into the yard got finished as well as the rest of the down line on this first baseboard. Much pushing of wagons and coaches around has followed. I'm generally quite please with the way it looks.
The mirror is not because i have suddenly got particularly vain about my appearance but because it is an excellent tool to look along the t
Not quite sure how to link to a Youtube clip, but here is the first train to run on the new layout.
shunting vans over the slip without anything falling off - most satisfying.
David
Time to finally start laying track and I decided that I needed to start with probably the most critical bit of the formation, the single slip and turnout into the loop. The template from Templot showed these a 1:8 crossings, which is actually the shallowest diamond that you can have apparently. Anyone who has ever made a diamond crossing will tell you the most difficult bit is making the obtuse crossings - they are a pig to get right. That said after spending the whole of Friday evening turning
Since the last blog entry I've been pretty busy. The entire layout was dismantled, all the shelves and even the shelving track removed from the room and the whole place redecorated. The result means that the plethora of holes drilled in the wall previously got filled up and everything looks much cleaner!
When everything went back into the room and fitted together again I was well pleased. The backscene is held up by industrial strength Velcro and is sitting about 5mm above the top of the bas
The last few weeks have shown a good deal of progress on the layout. The remaining framework for the baseboards have been completed and the infrastructure is coming together. It is good to see a nice smooth and level surface covered with the templot drawing. Today I trimmed the old MDF backscene from Empire Basin, reducing the height slightly as the baseboard is now higher than it was. I've also purchased some timber to frame the backscene so that it can be held firmly against the wall. The inte
Progress on the baseboards continues at a pace with the ply framing now constructed for two boards and mostly complete for the third. So far I'm rather pleased with how it looks.
from the railway room door things begin to take shape. The templot plan is laid down and the two large mill buildings fit nicely.
Underneath the layout the ply frame is nice and stiff and fitted with lots of useful holes to feed wires through.
Looking across the workbench and you see the area
