The weekend gave me the opportunity to remake the ends of the bridge corner boards which I had to shorten to make space for the extra 10cm of fiddle yard. A short length at the end of the baseboard is built up with MDF and ply to a height which allows for a solid length of copper-clad PCB to go underneath the rails. This gives something solid to solder the rail onto and hopefully keeps everything from moving. I had to put an additional bit of bracing onto one of the main baseboards to stop it fr
With the hiatus caused by test building of a new MERG DCC Booster and the preparation for Ally Pally out of the way, (thanks everyone for the nice comments on the London Festival of Model Railways thread) I got back to the main matter in hand, finishing the engineers' possession on Empire Basin and getting back to being able to run trains around again.
Having made the fiddleyard move up and down the next step is making it stay in one place. Until I have a way of accurately holding it at a pa
Set up on Friday went smoothly, despite missing the right turning from the North Circular for Ally Pally. My Son did an excellent job at map reading (no new fangled Sat Nav for us!). The unloading was greatly eased through a helpful trader who had just finished using his rather excellent 4 wheel trolley which he kindly let us borrow, reducing the number of trips between vehicle and site considerably!
Everything worked well on set up and we celebrated by visiting IKEA for Swedish meatbal
That's Alexandra Palace and the London Festival of Model Railways next weekend.
So, time to take Fen End Pit out of the cupboard under the stairs where it resides and do a few 'pre-fight checks'. Fortunately the whole layout goes up in our back room with the kind permission of the domestic authorities.
A quick bit of scenic work with a hoover, removing the spiders, was followed up with a new coat of paint on the backscene and on the facia panel. The work then turned to the stock, fi
Well a couple of days off and a weekend's worth of construction and the frame of the vertical fiddleyard is now mounted on the wall. First up went the rack-mount server runners and then I hit the first problem, trying to fasten things accurately to masonary is a complete pain! Despite measuring accurately it is just impossible to actually drill a hole and get a rawl plug into exactly the right place particularly when you are trying to fix something to the resulting holes and have no margin for e
The re-construction of the fiddleyard started in earnest with a couple of days off. The original Mk-1 version was based on a lump of MDF as a back with some shelves of 6mm MDF fastened on the front. The unit had been built up one at shelf at a time at it had proved difficult to make each shelf align properly with the exit roads, basically as layers were added the previously alignment would get pushed out with the extra weight. I also had the problem that in retrospect I had mounted the rack-moun
Now this locomotive has been very long in the making. Originally constructed from an Alan Gibson kit while I was at university 25 years ago this has always been a bit of a 'problem child'. The 2-4-2 wheel arrangement makes it virtually impossible to get around any kind of curve without resorting to some way of getting the leading and trailing axles to turn into the curve. Obviously the prototypical way of dealing with this would have been radial axle boxes but these are fiendishly difficult to m
The original Wills kit was designed to fit around a Hornby Jinty or such like with a massive X04 motor protruding into the cab. Having built the chassis with something a little less 'old school' it was pretty clear that the absence of a floor, or backhead or crew was going to be a bit noticable. It isn't as if you can see much in the cab through the windows, it is just that you can really seen the absence of anything through the windows, if that even vaguely makes sense.
So I decided to put
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I built a Wills N7 kit. The chassis was built using the etches for the kit, now sold by South East Finecast. The original chassis had the 'posh' hornblocks from Gibson (I think) which were the lost wax casting with a tiny springs pushing down on the bearing with a bolt through the top of the hornblock to locate the spring and set the ride height.
All of this worked fine until you took into account the sheer weight of the white metal body. The body c
I spent a few hours today fitting the TOUs and servos which I built yesterday. I'm hoping a step by step guide might be useful to some people.
The first step is to drill the holes which the TOU will go through to connect to the switch blades. If you are sensible and have planned ahead you will of course have drilled these before you stuck the point down or at least before you fitted the rails! However all is not lost as you can carefully drill a couple of pilot holes in the right place about
Great to have RMweb back after the Christmas downtime - thanks to Andy for seeing it through.
I decided that I needed to redo the control for the lower section of Empire Basin to use servos. This is partly because I was unhappy with my attempts at wire-in-tube and the rather lashed up linkages I'd made which didn't work very well and partly because I wanted to have a test bed to demonstrate the use of servos for point control.
I needed to make a proper drive mechanism for the point blade
An evening with Scalescene's paper and card on Friday has resulted in the road bridge being basically complete. A mistake on my part mean that I had to do quite a bit of re-work as I'd not left quite enough room for the bridge to fit against the viaduct wall. Not quite sure how I screwed that up but there you go. The gab between the buttress and the wall which is very noticeable in the photograph will close up when I get the bits stuck in their final positions.
To the right of the road going
A bit of tidying up of the wiring today and I managed to get to a point where I could think about turning to the scenery on the next section of viaduct. This consists of a road bridge under the railway which will also have the station building at street level. The road itself will be wider that the arches of the main viaduct section so I have drawn out an elliptical arch which matches the height of the other arches but gives the right distance between the piers.
Given this is a bridge o
I thought folks might be interested in a couple of photographs of the new MERG CBUS based DCC system. This uses a CANBUS (originally developed for the automotive industry) to transmit the signals from the handset to the command station which then generates the completely standard DCC signals on the track. The advantage is that this is the same wiring bus as I using for controlling the rest of the layout using other MERG CBUS boards. Ultimately I should be able to run the whole layout with 6 to 8
The banner signal has now been positioned on the layout. It is tight against the wall of the viaduct and I actually have to do a little bit of work as the wall of the parapet would actually be a bit too close. The driver's eye view shows the On and Off position. The Off is not quite a steep enough angle but I'm afraid it will have to do as getting a stepper angle would mean having to adjust the rather delicate push rod.
The curve probably demonstrates why the repeater was necessary,
Do you refer to the colour of a signal as a livery? I suppose in these days we should consider ourselves lucky that they don't get repainted with each change of franchise. Fancy a signal in 'Barbie Rail' pink and purple?
Anyway, following advice from folks here and more photographs from 'Adrian the Rock'
http://www.roscalen....ratfordUponAvon I decided to repaint the post white, ladders black and also take the actual banner head a darker grey.
I think the result looks a bit more s
Much burning of fingers later and the repeater head is mounted on a pole. The photographs showed ladders up the front, presumably for cleaning the glass, and the rear, for access to the bulb. The signal will be operated by a servo so the operating wire terminates in a little sprung plunger which is a bit of 3/4 inch long tube beneath the base.
I've got to admit I'm quite pleased with the result and it will be nice to have a feature 'on scene' to demonstrate the aspect of the 'off scene'
The internet is a great tool for research for this hobby of ours. Following inquiries on the Scalefour forum I was pointed at some drawings of banner repeater signals. I found few pictures on 'Adrian the Rocks' signalling web page http://www.roscalen....gnals/index.htm and following a quick email Adrian sent me a couple of pictures showing the rear of the banner signal without having to resort to Eileen's extreme products.
At just under 11mm in diameter the result isn't big and has caus
I've managed to build the platform starter for the Up line following the description of making a tubular post signal in Mick Nicholson's Constructing and Operating Semaphore Signals (Booklaw publications 1999) I'm pretty pleased with it, particularly the coloured 'Crystal Klear' for the lenses. It still needs the lamp fitting which is why you can see the colours from the rear. Operation is via a servo controlled using a MERG servo4 card (which also gives me bounce).
Having positioned t
One of the joys of this hobby is when you realize that you have done something which with hindsight was probably wrong! I had originally planned to make the fronts of the viaduct part of a jigsaw board which would contain the lower level yard. However this would have made if difficult to deal with the bridge section and was also causing problems with the way in which the baseboard sections of the main line were going together.
The viaduct sections were also not quite a multiple of the lengt
Yesterday I visited ExpoNG and came away with quite a lot of inspiration and enthusiasm. I bought a motor to go into my P4 Barclay fireless.
I particularly liked some of the 'single baseboard' layouts like 'The Loop' and drew up a plan to give an opportunity to run some of my 7mm stock which doesn't get a trip out anymore since I sold 'The Works'. This is based on a fictitious exchange between the Wissington Railway and a narrow gauge agricultural line. I'm imagining a river along the back
A bit more progress over the last couple of evenings. I've added some coal into the tender (I've got to clean off a bit of dilute PVA that leaked down the tender foot steps). I've also made up a couple of brass splashers that fit just behind the pony trunk wheels. At the moment there are just attached to the chassis with some bits of sticky-fixer just to see if the loco would still go around the corners!
Also I fitted some Alex Jackson couplings to the tender so I can now enjoy the sight of
I've put a spray of gloss over the cab side and tender side so that the transfers would slide. I had the usual fun and games trying to get 5 numbers to line up and sit square. The spraying has also just 'lifted' the colour slightly so it doesn't look quite so matt and uniform. I also got around to fitting the balance weights on the driving wheels and painting the rims which greatly improves the overall look.
I've got a couple of pictures from Colour Rail to help with the weathering.
I think the colour is best described as 'Stratford unloved black'. I still need to sort of the driving wheels and then get some transfers on it. I did wonder about the colour of the guard irons, would they have been black below buffer beam level?
Paint was Precision paints etch primer followed by matt 33 followed by satin 85.
I'm quite pleased with the way it looks...
(and no I'm not going to line it out!)
David Barham
This will probably appaul the continuous springy beam folks but when you have individual springs on a chassis it is important to be able to adjust them so that the effective weight on each wheel is similar. I had some problems with my J39 which would hold the track then 'turning right' but not 'turning left'. It was suggested that perhaps the springing on the front axle was uneven so I decided to build a rig to try and check this out.
An £7 set of electronic scales was purchased off ebay (I'
