Blog postings have been a bit lacking over the last months as the house becomes a building site. We have now got walls, a roof and windows and things start to progress on 'first fit'. I can see the size of the railway room, as well as the other bits like new master bedroom and study for my wife. It is all quite exciting but taking a long time! Still we are making progress and at least have use of some of the house even if the kitchen has no ceiling and the kids have nowhere to sleep if they come
A bit of standard gauge for a change. I took delivery of a couple of the new Bachmann grain wagons which have been on order with Hattons for what seems like years. I've got a P4 wheel set in it now and replaced the coupling with Alex Jacksons. I can (just) remember seeing these being loaded at Sandy on the occasions when I used to cycle over there to watch some proper main-line trains in the later '70s. By then they were in a 'rust based livery' but I think they had been going that way for some
Over the last couple of weeks I got to pretty much finish off the LBT, the most noticeable change being to clean off the etched builders plates. I then went on to make some changes to the drawings based on what I'd learnt putting it together and then laser cut the body work for the LAT. There are a few subtle changes to the frames (the LBT has a hole near the front which the LAT doesn't have) and the bonnet (which has a different shaped grill for the radiator and the sandbox fillers). The LAT ha
As I mentioned in my previous entry, one of the issues with a stepper motor is that you can only tell it to step! You can't get it to go to a certain position unless you have some mechanism to set a 'datum' point first. This often means that you have some kind of limit switch which you can run the motor against so you 'know' you have reached the limit of travel, and therefore, know that if you move a certain number of steps you will also be at a known position.
The practical issue with my fi
Our modelling day in Sawston today gave the Ruston LBT its first outing on Fen End Pit. I was really pleased with how it looked and performed. We had an excellent day meeting up with old friends and making new ones, everything this hobby should be about!
Now I still to remember who does a decent 16mm scale driver to put in it.
and finally one of the dragline.
David
Please forgive the shameless plug and cross-posting from Middlepeak's blog.
Our regular group of 'Friday Nighters' here in darkest Cambridgeshire are putting together one of their 'mini-exhibitions', this time to give some financial support to the activities of St Mary's Church in Sawston. This will be a very informal affair - just a collection of layouts and modelling displays from our group across a range of scales from 2mmFS to Gauge 3! Among the exhibits will be -
Alex Duckworth, a f
I realized that I needed to get some better photographs of the engine of the Ruston LAT that I'm trying to build and, as the one which was at the Threlkeld quarry museum had moved, I decided a trip to the North Ings Farm Museum http://www.northingsfarmmuseum.co.uk/museum/ was required. My family refer to this particular organization, very unfairly, as 'The chicken sh*t farm' because the line was originally installed to move 'waste product' from poultry sheds. Don't be put off by the sound of it,
The 1.5mm MDF I ordered arrived today, the 1mm was out of stock. 1.5mm is the same thickness as the width of a header in 4mm so this allows me to interlock the walls on the header joint. I deliberately drew the 'tab' of the header .2mm over length to get around the problem I had previously that the 'tab' was not quite long enough to lie flush with the 'slot' when the wall was put together.
I also cut a piece of the MDF to be a sanding jig. By putting the wall through the jig I could lig
I've spent this afternoon trying to draw up a plan for the new layout. I'm waiting for PPD to come back with an etch for the narrow gauge Ruston and felt like an afternoon in front of the PC. Having received the structural engineers report which means that hopefully we should soon get a quote from the builder I hope this isn't tempting fate.
I started off taking a scan of the OS map into Templot and then trying to draw track over it. This is an interesting task as I'm sure that what you thi
So we've now had three major purchases for my Ruston project.
As usual the final drive to the axles will be delrin chain and the actual gearbox is being positioned in the same place as the prototype, central between the two axles and driving to one from the left and the other from the right hand side. I need a gear box with enclosed gears (owing the large amount of sand moved around on Fen End Pit) which ruled out my usual options from High Level. I remembered using on enclosed box on my J39
As the scalefour layout takes a rest while waiting for major house redevelopment I've been working on stock. Given that the E4 and various other coaches are complete I thought it was time for 'something different'.
Until this point Fen End Pit has been an all Simplex affair (ok, apart from the Lister) but given the Ruston and Bucyrus dragline it seemed only a matter of time before the Ruston locomotive salesman came calling for business.
I've always liked the LAT and LBT ever since I bui
I finally got around to fitting the buffers, crew and coal to my E4. I also converted the bogies on my second Hornby Gresley to make a nice short branch passenger train.
I'd be tempted by the 3rd coach, possibly seeing if there is something suitable in the Ian Kirk/Cooper craft range may be an LNER 51' Non-Corridor Full Third ?
I'm not sure what the typical make up of train down the Stour Valley might have been.
I'm rather pleased with the way this kit went together, I've n
After several evenings of fun, and I guess something about 20 hours work in total I have now got to the point of getting the replacement Penbits bogies under my Class 24. The initial 'rolling test' where you leave out the gears so you can just roll the locomotive along was great fun! I had used Black Beetle wheels in the original conversion and these went back into the bogies with no problems. Being insulated on one side only they made opting for what some people call 'the American System' of pi
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
One of the things about keeping a blog is that it makes you photograph your models and one of the things about photographing your models is that every time you do you just can't avoid seeing the faults in the results - things that somehow the eye only picks up when blown up on the screen when you look at the photograph.
So, here is the current state of the E4. I had to go back once and clean off around the dome which I didn't really pick up until I took some pictures last night. Tonight I ca
A few months back I was tempted by a pair of Hornby coaches while in Model Junction in Bury St. Edmunds. I had a rake of 3 old Bachmann suburban coaches in BR Blue but these weren't really suitable for my period and move to a less urban setting.
I was prepared to re-use the Bill Bedford sprung bogies from the Bachmann set to go under the Gresleys. The shape isn't quite right but you can't really tell. While wandering around Scaleforum I had looked to see if anyone had any Gresley bogie sidef
I had assembled the tender chassis originally using the Alan Gibson hornblocks supplied in the kit. This were the units with a tiny spring which provides some downward force but where the hornblock itself is designed to sit on the end of a bolt which passes through the top of the horn guide. The theory is that you can adjust the bolts to get the ride height for each axle correct. From my experience I find this very difficult and the resulting ride is very 'hard' and it is too easy to have one ax
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
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
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
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
