As I said in my previous piece, my intention with this layout was to create a bit of nostalgia through recreating a number of cameos from my visits to Bangkok. Additionally I wanted to include some signature pieces that would firmly place the layout in Thailand, since I have met very few railway modellers who know the slightest thing about Thai railways. That meant that the layout would have to be based on Thonburi rather than be a representation of Thonburi. An example of one of these personal
One perennial problem for layout builders is how to fill the foreground of layouts. It's not always a good idea to lay tracks right by the baseboard edge but if not then something has to fill the space. Obviously that something has to be low in height so as not to obscure the view of the trains, which limits the possibilities. For layouts set out in the countryside it's not difficult to get out the grass machine and scale cows and create a meadow or two but you can't do that in an urban environm
It's been a while since my last entry. I had to take time out to do something about lighting the layout since the absence of it was causing me problems assessing whether the colours I was mixing when painting buildings were right or not. Something that looked good on the workbench by the window was way too dark in the unlit corner of the room. However I now have two strips of daylight white LEDs mounted over the layout and that problem is solved.
That done, attention could be turned back to
Another short progress report.
I have determined that 15thou Plastikard gives the best results, 10 thou thickness is too prone to blowing through before the full shape is taken up. I have also learned not to panic while using the hot air gun. What happens is that the Plastikard first bubbles and deforms, then it flattens out again. If you keep applying heat then it starts to sag and its when you can see the highpoints of the underlying mould appearing on the surface that you hit the power on
Many, many, years ago when the only colour on the covers of model railway magazines - or indeed inside them - was the title bar, and when the price was still in shillings, there was a series of articles describing an author's layout under the title "Fact and Fiction in Cheshire". It was a big layout covering LMS, GWR and LNER and the reason for the title was that the layout was both prototypical in operation and had freelance aspects in the form of connections and services that might have reason
Right, the baseboards were built, track is laid, wired up and tested. Now is the time to consider what is going around the tracks - i.e. the scenic treatment. Some might say that the time was actually earlier than that, that the scenic treatment should have been considered before a rail was laid. Well in broad terms it was, but in detail certainly not. I knew I wanted an urban setting, my station would be placed somewhere within the Bangkok city limits, but my thinking has been evolving over the
It's been a few months since my last blog entry, partly because I been distracted and partly because it's summer and things like the garden need more attention. However some progress has been made on Maenamburi, in particular on doing the artwork for an etched brass sheet. I use etched brass to save time making fiddly things, to achieve consistent results and to work to greater accuracy than I can manage myself using file and fretsaw. It may be useful for readers for me to give a shout out to PP
How time flies. I last added to this blog over two years ago, so it's probably time to pick things up again. I have worked on the layout, though progress is probably not as spectacular as might be expected after two years. My involvement in the Great Model Railway Challenge did mean it gathered dust for a year, but since the end of 2019 some steady progress has been made.
In earlier blog pieces I described individual features that I had created, now I think might be the time to descr
I could say that this all started from a cancelled meeting, I don't really remember. What I do recall is being in a room in the J W Marriott with a free day thinking "what shall I do today, I know, I'll go and look at some trains". The MRT Subway had been opened a year or two earlier so getting down to Hualamphong station couldn't be easier. Skytrain to Asok, down the steps to Sukhumwit on the MRT and then the subway to Hualamphong. Heck of a trek from the MRT at Hualamphong to the mainline stat
I accepted at the start of this project that commercial support in the form of ready to run locomotives and rolling stock would be non-existent. That's not a new experience, some forty odd years ago I started serious railway modelling by choosing to represent the South Eastern Railway in the 1890s and there was no commercial support for that either. The difference between now and then however is the range of technology that can be brought in to assist. I have a personal computer with drawing pac
Further to my earlier blog, I thought it might be of interest to post picture of the beast.
This is just a quick pic taken with my mobile phone but it shows the layout. I had just heated and sucked a piece of 15thou sheet round a pair of canopy formers.
I can get six goes out of one standard sheet of Plastikard
I won't say I have mastered the technique of home vacuum forming, but once I was getting consistently acceptable results for my market stall canopies my thoughts turned to other uses for this technique. And I didn't have to look far. Across the tracks from where the market was starting to take shape is the large corrugated iron shed that in reality belonged to the SRT Permanent Way division. A photo of this appears in an earlier blog entry.
Now, when I built this I was quite pleased with it.
