Yesterday I took delivery of a fat envelope full of C-Rail Intermodal goodies, including painted and unpainted containers, as well as some excellent decal sets. The quality of the mouldings and detailing parts was very good, shown to especially good effect with the pre-painted Freightliner boxes, which are of a style suitable for the late 70s.
It was time to see how the containers sat on the modified flats! I'd added the cast attachment points to the flats in accordance with the S-Kits diagr
As part of the reworking of the spring module, I wanted to take the opportunity to replace the original photographic backscene with a painted one, in keeping with the other two modules. There's nothing wrong with photographic backscenes, of course, and in many ways they'll be the most realistic, but I prefer the flexibility of a painted one, as well as finding them easier to alter as one's ideas change.
The original backscene consisted of card sheets with a photographic layer glued on. In an
This is one of those protracted modelling projects which kept being shoved into a shoe box under the workbench and forgotten about. Although it might be considered a bit outside my normal interests, I've always had a thing about container trains. I think it goes back to a school trip to France in 1979, which involved sailing from Southampton. With seemingly hours to wait before the ferry departed, I remember a view across the docks of a container terminal, and being amazed at the variety of colo
Over the last fortnight I've taken the plunge and done some fairly major reworking of the spring module. It used to be single track, but now it's double, which - given that there were already two running lines through the main summer module - means that there is now only a short stretch of single track anywhere on the layout. It's been a lot of messy work, and so the obvious question is - why? One answer is that I've always fancied seeing running of the bigger locomotive classes, such as Castles
A real bit of old-school railway modelling here - just an afternoon's work with some card, glue, sharp knives and Superquick stone paper:
It's a freelance bridge, but inspired by a number of photos of arched occupation bridges in which the road rises to a hump in the middle. It's meant to conceal an exit on a reworked portion of the Spring module - but more on that later. The bridge allows access across farmland which has been traversed by the railway, so it need only be wide enough for
While I carry on with the Collett coach, here's a bit of 2-D modelling that's been keeping me occupied since last summer. Those of you who've seen a copy of Neil Parkhouse's recent book "West Gloucester and Wye Valley Lines" will recognise the inspiration, in that there's a captivating colour image of Tintern station, taken somewhere between 1936 and 1939, and probably around 1937. It's one of the most amazing images I've ever seen in a railway book, a real glimpse back into the pre-nationalisat
Looking a bit better now - this spray job went more successfully, and this afternoon I applied the lining using Fox decals. I'll have
to have a good look at my HMRS transfer sheet to see if I've got enough "thirds" to do all 20 doors on this beast - might need
to order another set of transfers, but I suppose they'll come in handy sooner or later.
Next up I will tackle the door and commode handles. I'll feel a lot happier once they're all in place. All good fun, though!
One thing I tried to do on this blog is document the cock-ups as well as the triumphs, so in the spirit of honesty, here's what happened with the 70 footer this week. Rest assured, it's back on track now, but it's definitely been one of the more trying episodes...
As mentioned last time, I had primer on and over last weekend I went on to apply GWR cream, which went on very successfully. I then allowed the cream to harden over a couple of days before carefully and laboriously masking up the s
With the coach mostly finished except for door handles and so on, I decided to make a start on painting it. I separated the body from the chassis and gave the former a couple of coats of primer. As is often the case with my modelling, the priming stage revealed a lot of things that weren't quite right, but which hadn't been obvious in the bare brass. The main one was that the sides weren't tucked as neatly into the roof rebate as they could have been. So, some careful work saw the sides prised a
Here's a bit more progress on the Collett coach, with basic roof details now in place. The instructions give a full-size template for setting out the ventilators and roof ribs, which is very nice, and - although the instructions say that about half the ventilators were later removed - I decided to fit the lot for now, as I reckon it'll be easier to remove them than mark, drill and add more later, if I were to change my mind. I also added the roof ribs, using - following a helpful suggestion from
Over Christmas I finished the bogies, apart from a few extra castings which I just found at the bottom of the box, and also completed the basic detailing of the underframe. I say "basic" as, to be accurate, there should be four sets of trusses at the bottom of the coach, not just the two on either side. And perhaps I'll get around to adding the middle two at some point, as well as the brake linkages and dynamo belt, but for now I've used all the bits in the kit and it's certainly on a par with m
Here's a bit more progress on the Collett coach. The bogies didn't present any problems, being a simple fold-up design with white-metal cosmetic frames. I used Gibson bearings and Bachmann coach wheels which I've found to be reliable and free-running. If I was going to fit lights to this coach, I might have considered using the DCC Concepts pre-wired coach wheels, but since I didn't have any in stock I decided to go with the Bachmann ones rather than get involved with ordering stuff at this time
Between a couple of glasses of red last night I set about trimming and test-fitting the aluminium roof. The roof is slightly over-length so needs cutting with a hacksaw, which wasn't hard provided you measure accurately. The fit is really good; just a bit needs to be filed off at each corner, easily done. The instructions say to allow for an overhang of about .75mm at either end, which is what I've done.
I also added the steps on the coach ends, which are done as a set of very clever fo
Fancying a change, I decided to tackle this Comet kit for the Collett 70 foot corridor third. I acquired the kit as a complete set from an Rmwebber a few years ago (the same gentleman who sold me the parts for the Prairie I built earlier this year), but every time I opened the box I didn't quite feel in the mood to tackle it. The Comet kit is mostly brass, and all the coaches I've "built" in the past have been mixed media or RTR conversions using etched and white metal bits. This was going to ne
Both old projects, these, but they've been back on the workbench this week for various reasons.
The Castle is based around the Airfix/Dapol/Hornby body on a Comet chassis. I built the chassis in 2009, but didn't make a particularly good job of the cylinders and slidebars. There was too much slop and my soldering was a bit hit and miss, leading to some weak joints. At the recent Warley show, I decided to buy a new set of cylinder/slidebar parts and remake them. It turned out to be relatively
As part of a very long term plan to build a larger French layout as a follow-on to Cogirep, I've acquired a few of the card kits manufactured by Regions et Compagnies:
http://www.regionsetcompagnies.fr/
Earlier in the year I ordered three kits from the Loco Revue website, of which one was a Nord goods shed, and the two others were urban structures suitable for a town or city scene. I've since picked up a Nord signal box, but for the first one, I thought I'd tackle La Passerelle, a very e
I mentioned this Berlin Airlift Dakota back in February:
http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/257/entry-15562-and-now-for-something-completely-different/
but back then it was just in plain silver. Since then I've completed most of the painting and decal'ing, including the complicated colours around the engines, with only a few fragile bits left to do, followed by a light touch of weathering to bring out some of the details. Although it's an old kit, the decal sheet is huge wi
Other than a rear vacuum pipe, this one's about done, and I'm very satisfied with the way the model's come out.
After a lot of testing, I added an additional set of pickups to the rear truck, and this seems to have made the running pretty much 100% reliable, even over some less than fantastic track joints, so I'm well pleased with that aspect of the model. The SWD sound decoder is incredibly good fun, the only downside being that I'm so impressed by it that I've started considering addi
After quite a bit of testing, I decided to bite the bullet and add a South West Digital DCC sound decoder to the Prairie. I picked up their 2-cylinder GWR Group 3 decoder, which includes generic sounds which are suitable for a range of larger 2-cylinder engines. This was my first hardwired sound installation so I had to summon up a bit of courage to snip the 8-pin DCC plug from the wires, after testing it of course, but I reasoned that if for some reason it didn't work in the Prairie, I could al
Thanks to the good offices of Mr Peco, I realised that I could fit a loop of their O gauge set-track on the decking in my garden:
I soldered up some track feeds, plugged in a controller and within minutes my Tower Brass Prairie was trundling around...
At the moment it's only got two wagons to pull, but the satisfaction of having a cup of tea while it trundles merrily around can't be overstated! The model had barely run more than a few feet in five years, so it's been nice to gi
Test-running of the Prairie continues, it's been fairly painless so far, plodding around at very slow speed with a decent freight, although there's a dodgy track joint which is tending to throw the leading driving wheels off the rails every now and again. Since it's not just the Prairie it affects, the solution will be to fix the track, rather than blame the engine, although I might squeeze a bit more weight over the leading drivers. I filled the bunker with lead, and if anything it does need a
Just a minor update here on the perils of being too clever...
The Prairie chassis went together easily, and even though they had to be bent around the springs, the pickups were problem-free from the start. One of the good indicators of this is wheel cleanliness - if, after a few hours of test running, the wheels are still shiny, there's nothing wrong with the pickups. If pickup is intermittent, the wheel will begin to accumulate dirt which will only worsen things, leading to more dirt ... et
Nothing dramatic to report here, but for some reason I always enjoy seeing locomotives "in the raw", with detailing parts added and so on, prior to painting - is it because the end is in sight, but at the same time, there's still a pleasing array of different bits and pieces visible, not yet unified by paint?
I decided to strip the dodgy weathering, and with it came most of the underlying BR black applied by Airfix. However, the black proved quite stubborn in some areas despite two goes with
Apart from the wheel balance weights, the first Prairie chassis is now finished, and is now beginning running trials. I was expecting all sorts of bother with the pony trucks derailing, but so far - touch wood - they've been fairly well behaved, although perhaps a bit of extra weight in them wouldn't go amiss.
I didn't have a front wheel of exactly the correct diamete (3' 2" I think), or the right number of spokes, so it's running with a slightly too small 3' Gibson wheel for the time being.
A little bit of work over the weekend - ably assisted by Florence & The Machine's new album - saw the chassis essentially finished apart from the leading pony truck.
As reported in the last post, the basic 0-6-0 chassis ran very well, but as always, there is scope for things to go wrong as you start adding cylinders, connecting rods and so on. Although Comet kits are great, I've found that their outside cylinder parts need a lot of fettling before things work... whereas the two DJH kits
