Last week I finally managed to get back on to doing some scenic work on the main layout, I was waiting until I had both platforms cut and assembled and that was waiting on getting the platform 2 building built. I managed to get the track through the platforms painted and ballasted and then the basic ground works cut in polystyrene, scupltamolded and painted.
This evening I drove a few trains around to celebrate. The Brush Type 2 arrives with the pickup goods while the Cravens DMU wa
Just a quick line to remind folks that we are taking Fen End Pit out to the Uckfield show this weekend. There are going to be some fine layouts there and it would be great to see you there.
David
For a bit of silliness this evening I thought I'd try to recreate an original photograph. DisusedStations.org has this rather nice picture from 1965.
I know it is the wrong sort of DMU but I think you can get an idea of what I'm going for.
Now I've got the other platform built I'm not long of being able to ballast this section.
David
I've managed to get the platform for platform 2 made and cut in the position of the platform building and platform walls. The building now has a roof, with slates cut from sticky labels and ridge tiles and guttering 3D printed on the Anycubic Photon. This shot along the platform gives a pretty nice view to compare against prototype photographs. The main station building is still the '1865 small' based on Takeley (but with the colours reversed) which I built a few years back, the platform cutout
This weekend is the annual Ploughing festival near Ely. The farmer behind the drainage engine museum lets lots of vintage tractors plough his field for him. There was a good crowd on Saturday morning, unfortunately I'm not sure the weather is going to be as kind tomorrow. I hope you'll forgive some shameless photographs of vintage vehicles.
First up are Archie and Arthur, a beautiful pair of shire horses who seemed to really know what they were doing. I was amazed when the drive jus
More drawing and laser cutting and the Platform 2 building is coming along nicely.
I've now cut the complete building in 3mm MDF and painted it the base brick colours. The best approach to keep the quoins clean and crisp seems to be to 'grout' the main shell with the fine filler I use in the mortar before applying them. The cream coloured quoins don't show the white mortar much anyway and the Vallejo grey wash I add afterwards seems to blend things together nicely.
The station waiting shelter on platform at Clare is an attractive '1865 style' medium building. The building currently has a sign in the window which says 'coming soon - model railway' but I don't know what is planned or who is building it. Platform 1 by the way is a now a very pleasant little cafe which does a damn good bacon roll.
I've been trying to refine my technique for making these because I felt that the quions (the raised brickwork) on the previous attempt was a little too m
The second test etch for the Easichas for the Hornby J15 arrived via Brassmasters. Once again a superb etching job by PPD. Most of the mistakes from the first etch were corrected, though there are a couple of minor changes to be made based on actually putting this together. I've also been putting together the instructions and one of the other Brassmasters has been attempting to follow them! I'm really happy with the way the basic chassis goes together and very pleased with the fold-up brake gear
Just a note to say that Fen End Pit is out and about at the Mid-Essex Model Railway show in Shenfield on Saturday
Show Details
Look forward to seeing some of you there.
David
A day trip out in Norfolk culminated in sitting by the River Yare at Reedham with a beverage of choice. The swing bridge was open to river traffic and it was a quiet and peaceful evening with nothing to disturb of peace except bird song, the clink of boats in their moorings and a rather unremarkable band setting up for their gig in the pub. The bridge started to close and maybe ten minutes later an even more unremarkable 158 or such unit trundled over heading to Norwich from Lowestoft.
The prototype J15 had 15 spoke 4'11" wheels. Unfortunately the nearest available from Alan Gibson in a 4'11" 16 spoke wheel or a 4'7" 15 spoke. Gibson sells a pack of the 4'11" 16 spoke wheels with 2mm axles as a conversion set for the Hornby J15 (which has 2mm axles) and on reflection the 4'7" really does look noticeably too small to me. The Brassmasters' sprung hornblocks come available as 1/8" or 3mm bore so my decision to use the conversion pack wheels meant I also had to use Gibson's 1/8 t
Well over a couple of years ago I asked my friends at Brassmasters about the possibility of them producing one of their EasiChas range of kits to fit the Hornby J15. These chassis utilize the original motor and chassis block put provide a method to fit EM or P4 wheels with some springing. The design has now covered a range of prototypes including various LMS, GWR and LNER locomotives. I have produced artwork for some of the Brassmasters range in the past (point rodding components and the origina
Ok, so I have made some signals before, but these have always been 'modern' ones with tubular posts. Clare has lots of upper quadrant signals but most of these were just replacement of the old GER lower quadrant signals and reused the existing tapered timber posts. These posts are available from various suppliers in white metal but I've always had a nightmare reliably sticking on the various fittings and soldering white metal is for those more skilled than me.
I decided to see if I c
One of the photographs I have of Clare shows a row of bee hives on the bank next to the line. I modeled a bee hive up and printed them out on my Anycubic photon. Bear in mind that these are 6mm x 8mm, so pretty damn tiny.
I need to paint them but the row looks the part I think.
No I am NOT going to produce 4mm scales bees!
David
This is one for those of you who fancy building potato or sugar beet railways, or maybe a drainage board line taking clay to strengthen a bank. I took these pictures a good few years back during an afternoon driving around the fen. Some of these magnificent buildings are still standing though most of the engines inside them have long since gone.
First up is Hundred foot bank, near Welney.
Like several of the engine houses you have a tall central section which
More soldering of tiny little cranks, lengths of .45mm wire, given last week's heat a fair amount of sweat and the occasional tear. As I've said in a few posting the rodding routes were rather interesting and changed during the station's life, so they jump backwards and forwards across the tracks in quite an interesting way.
At the end of the platform the route jumps from the platform face to in between the lines of the loop. This involves four rodding runs turning through 90 degree
I've made a start on the point rodding for Clare. Before anyone asks this is NOT functional! It has been great fun trying to work out the rodding runs from photographs as they changed over time at the Cavendish end when the coal siding was realigned. The prototype was built using round rod rather than the more modern square section - typically I had bought a load of .5mm square brass wire from Eileen!
I've used cranks from Brassmasters and rodding stools from DCC concepts. These rodd
I designed and printed a servo operated uncoupling magnet for the Alex Jackson couplings I'm using on my P4 layout. Many people just use an electromagnet to do this but I don't really like the current these draw and get worried about them burning themselves out if left on for too long while you shunt wagons over them. One solution is to use a permanent magnet and move it up and down so it that it attracts the coupling (or doesn't).
As usual there were a few iterations in the design to get t
Not much happened on the Stour Valley over the past couple of weeks as I slowly prepared for the East Anglia Model Railway show in Kettering. I was invited at comparatively short notice to fill in for another layout. Several of my usual crew weren't available but I was luckily able to persuade (press-gang) KH1 and Nawty Quay to come and help out to bolster the team. Thanks also due to John and Michael for their help too.
Over the period of a couple of weeks I was able to work through
I managed to get the lever frame I'd printed painted (as per posting on the Anycubic photon thread) but additional furniture was required.
I found a website which had photographs of the tokens for the sections either side of Clare. These showed that the token apparatus was of two different types. A Tyer number 6 and a Tyer number 9, the web also furnished pictures of each type which I tried to model up in CAD. The results came out rather well, even the details of the pil
At the end of the last blog I said I was going to try and 3D print a lever frame. I knew that this was probably going to be at the extreme end of what the printer could handle. The results were promising with a few issues.
There seem to be a couple of issue, firstly the levers appear to have been attracted to each other by the surface tension of the resin. In most cases the bulk of the lever was actually printed correctly but as they came out of the printer the levers we
I sprayed the box with cream (Humbrol Matt 103) and then picked out selected timbers in green (Matt 105). Meanwhile I realized that I'd made a complete mess of the station platform. I'd tried to paint it with Greenscene's textured 'tarmac' paint, I don't know if the issue was age of the paint (I'd had it for years) but the resulting mess needed to be covered with thinners and scraped off. Fortunately this process didn't completely mess up the work I'd done so far. The resulting texture, with a f
I've made some more progress on converting the Wills signalbox to match the one at Clare. This little section of a photograph of the box shows the rather nice cast iron brackets which supported the gangway. I didn't think the flat piece of plastic supplied in kit quite cut it so had a go at drawing up a model and 3D printing it. I also made up some nameboards to be attached after the box is painted.
I made a couple extra just in case some didn't come out or broken as I t
A major milestone has been the starting of buildings for my layout. The first major structure is obviously the platform which has the station building and the signalbox sitting on (or more accurately in) it.
The prototype platform has had a lot of work on it since closure and there is quite a lot of subsidence along the length now. Over the length of the platform the brickwork is no longer consistent in terms of the construction, I'm working on what I think is a logical design - hop
I followed up making the first side for my reversed Wills kit signalbox by drawing up and printing the opposite end. I printed this at a different orientation to the first side which meant I was able to clean off the uncured resin from both sides of the part much more easily.
I took this picture of the part just after the printer had finished the job, you can see the orientation and the support structure.
The part was removed from the build platform and wash
