Just came across an old photo (well from 2016) of a posed shot on my yet to be dismantled (before house move) partly complete weston super mare S&D of a very GWR scene with my rather lovely Bachmann City 'City of Bath' renamed and numbered as 3440 City of Truro just before I disposed of it as being surplus to my requirements on Ebay (sob sob) ... well it will get resurrected as a monstrous hybrid of Airfix kit with a Bachmann mogul Swindon No.4 boiler on to make amends for the rather undersi
Turning the clock back (or forward)
This explains what I'm trying to do and why ...
OK you can accuse me of being a pedant. But I would like a loco, coach or back scene look like it really did at the time period claimed. I can't claim perfection but there is now a lot of information out there in dated photographs to allow a fairly accurate depiction of a time frame. Of course there are catches due to inaccurate dating of photographs, failing memories etc. But at least I will try, and enj
I kid you not, I attempted to convert a Triang Hymek to P4. Why? because the body is actually close to scale and didn't take too much work to look half decent with wire handrails and SE Finecast flush glazing. The chassis was an entirely different matter. The biggest problem is that the Triang bogies are only a scale 8' 6" long - the prototype had 10' bogies. My solution? Bodge in the power and trailing bogie from a Lima 'Warship' and stretch the cosmetic bogie side frames. Not using the origina
So my last entry found me trying to debug the point work in the station throat and the curved approach track. I had replaced the first 10cm of the approach curve as most stock fell off without fail at the point marked with an arrow:
sadly, all that happened is that the stock ran on the replaced track and then fell off at the next original section -dash it. Here the obvious occurred to me. Even though I thought I had laid this curve very carefully, I had not taken suf
Following on my last entry, replacing dodgy curved like a Thrupenny under gauge and too tight radius track, the new straight track board makes progress. Two photos, one in each direction show what it looks like now and my Pannier (Bachmann conversion) has successfully ventured on to it ...
Here with the track temporarily lightly pinned down, a third track for the empty carriage road will be added once the section on the main station throat board is slewed to be parallel with the othe
Since the last report I've wired up all six new Dingham electromagnets, and tested them with a couple of Dingham equipped coaches, and even got loco - coach uncoupling working! So some photos of the top view of the 'control panels' distributed along the baseboard sides. The push buttons are for the uncouplers, the switches variously are linked to signals, points (the switches linking the electrical sections controlled by said signals / points), or are isolating switches e.g. at the loco run-rou
So my lockdown experience: staying at home mostly for self protection has not resulted in a huge acceleration in layout development as a few 'little' main house projects have taken precedence. But in my time off from that I've switched from rolling stock projects to trying to advance the state of those old baseboards that came from my previous house (all of three years ago) to have a more realistic environment for that rolling stock when it does really roll so I can, wonder of wonders, do some r
After 2 1/2 years in store, my 'Weston Super Mare S&D' baseboards were unpacked yesterday. Looking a bit sorry for their time in storage, with some damage from the house move, but very re-usable in their new location. So some photos for you of my 'scrap yard challenge' baseboard support frame - two single bed frames, 6'6" (2m) by 2'6" (76cm) supported about 3' (90cm) above the floor. Being made of 6" / 150mm deep timber edge boards they only need supporting at the ends, giving very handy cle
Reality Warning - this locational is fictional and so is almost every thing that follows, but it interests me!
I've mentioned early on in the blog the chosen 'real' location for my layout, that is an imagined Somerset & Dorset Railway terminus at Weston Super Mare (henceforth abbreviated as WSM). To me it has several attractions, as firstly, historically it was something that really did almost happen, and secondly a very attractive variety of services both local and long distanc
A trial of the new look RMWeb - my first new entry since the update so see goes
So I've been silent a long long time while other jobs on our newish house take precedent. And there has been the agonising over how much of the old layout construction I can recycle into its new environment - a space much longer (at 7.1 metres / 23 feet and a bit) but a little narrower at 3.05 metres / 10 feet) the its old home. The bit narrower is a bit of problem as modelling in P4 a complete double t
Reality Warning: My location is fictional and much license has been taken. There are categorical statements about train formations of services that could have run in my chosen (imaginary) location. I have researched in detail what might have run, correlating with photographs where possible - reader beware and please don't take offence! It is also written while I'm away from home and away from the modelling bench ....
This is a draft of my thoughts that have been being in my head fo
In a previous post called 'modelling again' I described the trials of detailing a pair of Airfix Inter District LMS non corridors (now made in kit form by Dapol), tackled just before a house move. Now having moved, some modeling has resumed in the midst of the necessary work after moving in. So first in the queue was the local train.....
Almost finished, I discovered that the underframes were the wrong way round on both coaches. This I found by looking at prototype photos in 'Mode
After a long break getting ready to move house, I've been able to get at the work bench again. The target - a couple of old Airfix non corridors, modelled on the LMS Inter district stock, to make my 'scratch' S&D local train. My excuse is - there was a pair of Period 2 Inter-district coaches running Bath Green Park to Bristol, they appear in a photo taken at BGP in 1954. From looking at photographs, some of the S&D local formations running from Highbridge to Evercreech had one of these w
Apologies - this seems very disjointed as it was written across a house move and as a result my plans had to adjust as the space the layout will go in is different, again. In the process I had to pack the layout to move it, and I decided to renew the boards as the old ones, with 40 year old chip board had distorted with time so that none of the joints were flat .... so this is a June 2022 edit / correction of what I wrote nearly a year ago before the move, forced by the rmweb catastrophe that w
Having a couple of years with bits and pieces from my previous house assembled as a 'testing plank' pretending to be a layout I have decided at long last to attempt to bridge the gap from one side of my converted garage to the other to make something approaching a real layout - one where you go from one bit to another (!) in this case from the station on one side to the storage sidings on the other. Having bought a quantity of 12mm ply as tops for some new baseboards, and 18x44mm timber for the
Well not much has happened on the modelling front since my last entry on the Dapol LMS lavatory non corridors, with good reason. My new house came with a massive garage which is in the midst of conversion into a workshop and a new model railway room, with a partition in between. The result will be a railway room approximately 8m by 3m (25 ft by almost 10 ft). The garage is substantial, being brick with a pitched tiled roof, but as such was very cold and damp inside. So it is being upgraded with
Here is my simple upgrade to a Mainline (now Bachmann?) Period III (Stanier) 50ft Full Brake in BR lined Maroon. P4 conversion running on MJT compensation units, sprung buffers and Dingham couplers (I will have an overall roof so need some kind of auto-coupler). All handrails carved off and replaced with brass wire - question: should they be painted? If so how to get the paint to stick to shiny brass wire? (thinking - metal primers not kind to plastic, don't want to damage the really good paintw
Here is progress quite a while later. I've flush glazed the windows, made frames to hold the window bars and representations of the 'things' behind the bars that look like either the back of shelves or the bars that CCTs had to lock down vehicles. Anyone know which these are? The roof is now retained by the top set of handrails, (Like many Lima model coaches, the roof and glazing are one piece, the roof painted. To accommodate the flush glazing, all the glazing material was removed apart from ta
Dear All - and in the middle of a house move, decided that some stock needed working on before the move to keep me sane! So I found an old Lima LMS 42 ft CCT I had in a box, partly converted to P4. looking at the other entries here on rmweb it gave me some ideas for a little more work to do - so I added extra strips to the side (as most in the photos on the web have them), replaced the roof vents and am flush glazing the windows, not complete yet - and of course, replaced those little hand brake
A small project thats been sitting unfinished for years is my retro mod to the Lima Inside framed Siphon G. Of a kind built from 1930, modelled with wrong bogies (just their version of the BR Mk.1) I thought I'd try to see how it looked with Airfix 7' bogies and a repaint. So here it is with the handrails carved off and painted brown. Waiting replacement handrails ...
Question to viewers ... does anyone 'do' pre-blackened brass or steel wire? just that the handrails should be black, and b
This is my station area under construction - a fictional S&DR terminus at Weston Super Mare built on the site of the 1866 Terminus, which was superseded in 1884 by the opening of the Weston super Mare loop line. In reality it became a goods depot, and remained intact until the 1950s when it lost its overall roof, but then survived into the 60s. Now there is a supermarket on the site.
So in my fictional scenario of the S&D building the B&E (Bristol & Exeter) proposed line f
A bit chicken and egg, to test a layout track work is properly built you need stock and to test that stock is properly built you need some track with pointwork (!). In a bid to reduce the frustration of having built stock and finding it falls off the rails, won't go around bends, strikes platform edges I decided to resurrect the layout boards I had moved house with to have something to run the stock in progress on ('never end a sentence using a preposition with'). In the process I found out jus
Hello RM Web community - I'm new to blogging so here is a brief intro to my interests and what I plan to do
Now in my early 60s I've had a life long interest in railways - it started when my parents lifted me out of the pram to look over the parapet of the bridge at the end of our street at the Exmouth branch trains chugging beneath, near to Polsloe bridge halt. The fascination of trains, full size and model has not diminished since then.
However, over the years I've left a trail of u
Having got to the happy situation that I could actually run stock without something falling off the rails all the time, I can turn my attention to building or rebuilding items of stock to run, knowing if they stay on the rails with the current set up, they should (!) run nicely on any successor set of baseboards (!!)
So I turned my attention to my trusty (very) old Triang-Hornby Hymek, subject of a much earlier blog entry. The prototype I remember with much affection having travelled
The last entry on this project to make a frankencoach from a Hachette coach chassis and roof combined with heavily modded sides and interior from an old Triang-Hornby Mk 1 CK was in October. Every so often I would pick up on this project and do a little more .... then a few weeks back I got the bit between the teeth and attempt the finish stretch. This covered: painting the sides (maroon), roof (grey). Painting the glazing bars a proper shade of maroon (Precision), lining with HMRS Presfix trans
