I did a lot more planning and tweaking and deciding, and was finally able to get some MDF cut for the sides of the board, and the track bed.
After more tests I went with keeping things simple and not having any elevation changes on the track. I think the deciding factor was listening to the Z locos struggle on a 2% gradient - the Märklin Doppelstockwagen driving trailers have power pickups which add quite a lot of drag, and the hard-working motors are amplified by the lightweight board
I went and dug a sheet and a bit of 10mm foam card out of the garage last night, so I could mark up and cut out the main bits of the Höllentalbahn board.
I added 5cm in each direction to the width and height of the plan in the previous entry - I may regret this, but it seemed like it wouldn't make that much difference to getting it though doorways, and it relaxes some tight areas on the plan. That gives a board size of 1900x500mm, or 6'2" by a bit over 19".
Cutting the thick board
I spent some time pasting together Google Maps images and watching cab rides to see better how the line behaves between Falkensteig and Hirschsprung. Then I laid out potential track plans in SCARM (which is brilliant) and tried to put the two together. It looks like I'll need to compress reality about 2:1 to fit the stretch I want in the space I can manage. For a "railway in the countryside" layout that doesn't seem too bad to me.
I ended up truncating the fiddle yards to two roads eac
So having solicited some opinions a little while ago (thanks to everyone who responded!) I seem to be about to ignore them... Unfortuntely, while I've been doing a little plastic-kit-making for Tanis (Do335A Pfeil) I'm still drawn to the Höllentalbahn. It seems like something to do that I could get to a good state for Railex at the start of October. I'd only want to model a bit of it as a tail-chaser, and the bit that appeals most is Hirschsprung and associated tunnels.
[image by Joachim
I really didn't mean to vanish for several months - it just sort of happened. I had a big burst of activity to get Whitemarsh ready for the challenge and then the show at the end of November, then a short break from modelling. Unfortunately this ran into Christmas, which ran into a new work contract, which was happening at the same time as writing a conference paper and a hobby game project. Yikes.
Anyway, the culmination of all this madness was a two week trip to the 'States involving a lot
Had a fun time today applying powder and paint to 60014's roof:
Had a less fun time trying to make good after botching truncating the printed nameplate so it doesn't stick out from behind the etched ones. I did both sides the same way (enamel thinners, cotton bud) but the first one I was too rough and removed some of the base paint. I had a go at matching the base paint colour but it wasn't too hot, so I decided to try and make it look patch painted. I think the real loco may have be
I've been messing about with a new (to me) product - MIG enamel washes. This is also the first time I've used enamels of any kind (except pigments, I suppose) since I was a nipper. The aim was to get some streaks on 60014's flanks and ends.
I took some pictures to have a look in close-up before the second set of washes harden, so I thought I might as well post them and get some feedback I based what I was doing on a series of prototype pictures of the loco at Peak Forest around
I finished off the other two MOAs last night, and went back to give them all interiors - better to finish things straight off giving the impending deadline.
The splotches and marks are photo-based for these two, at least on the 'A' sides. I also added some graffiti to one - it's a simplified version of a tag which was on every other panel of one MOA I saw, but I ran out of steam after two The other new one has a yellow X in the corner, again from a picture. I realised too late that I'v
I went back to the MOA for another hour or so and hopefully fixed some things. It's getting closer to the prototype pictures.
It makes a bit of a change compared to yesterday, I think:
The wheels have been touched up and the backs painted. I also applied some powders to the bogies to correct the colours, add detail, and dull them down a little. It's odd, they still look glossy here, whereas they look very matt in real life - possibly the location of the layout at the moment means th
I haven't posted anything that wasn't Whitemarsh for a while, but I had a play around with some stock yesterday, fitted Sprat + Winkle couplings to the outer ends of my 3-MOA rake, and then set about applying some weathering.
Fitting the couplings took a couple of attempts to figure out a good solution, but it turned out to be pretty easy. The coupling bar is a wide "staple" shape fitted into 0.4mm holes drilled up into the buffer shanks from below. The coupling itself hangs from a smal
I made a start on the underframe today. The more I look at detail pictures, the more I marvel at Hornby's tooling - there's really nothing missing.
The first step, as seen above, was to paint the entire underframe with Tamiya Nato Black, which is a useful not-quite black and has a very flat finish which should help the powders stick. It also means that because my finish is based on an out of the bottle colour, it's easy to paint out mistakes.
Then I went looking for pictures - I fou
I was unhappy with what I'd managed last time, so I thought I'd have another go.
The H&S poster is from a photo, printed on the computer - the paper is a bit thick, but the real thing appears to be a metal or plastic plate rather than a sticker, so some relief is OK. I should have used a low pass filter to remove the ambient light before resizing though! I've also painted the armrests and the knobs on the handles black as well as a couple of other details, and dusted some grot aroun
I thought I should take the plunge and get a test item of motive power finished up ready for Rail-ex in November. I like 60s, so it's going to be 60014, which I bought locally a year or so ago but hasn't been out of the box much in the meantime apart from the occasional ogling session
First step was to fit a sound chip and speaker - this is using the Howes class 60 chip with a DCC supplies bass reflex speaker fitted above the twin grilles in place of the "doughnuts". Since my chassis is an
I finished painting the last two limpets (the ones with the finer springs) today. First, here's another Dutch one:
based on this picture of 390317 by Andy Jupe: http://gingespotting.../p32727072.html
I really liked the detail of the TOPS panel covering an entire bodyside panel, and done recently enough that the black paint and axleboxes were relatively clean. Unfortunately I assumed that because I could paint out the dashed outline successfully, I could also join up the dots neat
I finally got hold of a Bachmann SSA locally, which I've wanted for ages in order to try Nigel Burkin's underframe conversion from the Modern Wagons book.
I followed the book's recipe fairly closely, although I cleaned up the original SSA buffer mouldings (which had a fair bit of flash) and used brake details recovered from the PNA's underframe. Not strictly correct, and I suspect there should be more stuff under there but I can't figure it out from the pictures in the book. To fit the
The first set of springs I made was a bit too heavy, so I picked up some finer strip. Using 0.75x0.25mm allows the correct four leaves, and looks reasonably close to scale:
They are less wonky than they look in the picture, honest - I think it's because the picture is much too wide-angle!
These are really easy to make - if you cut one length of Evergreen strip (as above) into four, you can stack the pieces and build four complete springs flat on the workbench. The end brackets are
I made an unpleasant mistake on this one at 2am, which took quite a bit of fixing. Came out pretty well in the end, I think.
I wanted to make something along the lines of these pictures of 390181 by Martyn Read:
http://ukrailrolling.../p36338863.html and http://ukrailrolling.../p24117355.html (large image!)
The disaster was deciding to fade the paint too late - I applied a wash-like layer of MIG white pigment with their fixer, and of course with the fixer you can't really see ho
I thought I should man up and have a go at paring the Bachmann leaf springs off the TTA underframe and replacing them.
So armed with a new scalpel blade I set to. It's really fiddly work and quite tedious, I would guess it took me about an hour to get rid of all the mouldings and clean up, and of course I managed to make a few small gouges in the chassis which oughtn't be there really. Then another hour to make new springs from styrene and curve and fit them. That was a lot more fun Th
As requested, here are some pictures of the dents in my limpet and a spiel on how I did it.
(Please forgive the image quality - I can't find the charger for my SLR battery so these are taken with a Sony digicam. It's a nice camera for a lot of purposes (fast, accurate colour, decent metering) but it seems to have a lot of problems with macro focus and general softness, especially at the telephoto end. Oh well.)
I wanted to try some denting since lots of real MKA/ZKA wagons have dent
I did some more work on the limpet I started the other day. I applied the modern warning flashes (very nice Fox transfers) and blacked out the DC prefix on the data panel which I forgot to do last time. The body has had a little bit more work with washes and powders to try and tone down the contrast a bit, otherwise it's much as before. The white filler on the inside is to cover a soldering iron mark from the denting process, it'll get sanded down and painted over tonight hopefully.
The o
I've been sitting on some limpets for a while (ouch!) and thought I should make a start on dirtying them up:
The real things seem to be utterly filthy - I think other spoil wagons hang out with them since it makes even the muckiest PNA look classy by comparison. After a false start searching for ZKA images and not really finding any, I discovered that Limpets ended up coded MKA, which was a lot more fruitful. I started with this picture of 390327 by Richard Jones as a reference.
I'v
I spent the afternoon fiddling with couplings and have a bit more to report then last time. See here for the basic idea and where it came from. I wanted to try the delayed action couplings at both ends of vehicles, i.e. the normal tension lock setup with a hook at both ends, as opposed to Christopher Payne's version which only mounts the hook at one end. Apart from flexiblity, this would mean locos wouldn't have to mount hooks at all, and could just have a neat wire loop and full buffer beam fit
Part of the reason for slow progress on Whitemarsh Yard is that I've been held up by needing to get reliable working couplings and install uncouplers before ballasting can go ahead.
I did some experiments with Brian Kirby's magnetic tension locks and came away quite happy, but when I started thinking about siting magnets I was less happy - even for a small layout like Whitemarsh you need quite a few. Plus because I didn't install them before laying the track, each uncoupler requires cut
So back at the tail end of last year I built this A3 layout in three weeks. I was quite pleased with it, and thought I could take it to the 2010 Convention in NZ and enter it in the A3 competition at Easter. I had a long list of things to finish/fix/improve and plenty of time to get them done in the interim.
Fast forward a few months and we're flying down to Christchurch for the convention next Thursday, and Tanis hasn't had any of the attention I wanted to give it until last Friday night. O
Nice to see RMWeb up and running in its new home - thanks to Andy and the team
I spent some more time last week working on my crane, there's still a lot to do but progress is being made. I built new hydraulic cylinders for the boom to support the geometry I wanted - the kit cylinders and rams are all plastic, so they aren't too robust, and the LAV-R crane is stowed horizontally on the roof so the geometry is a bit funny. The new ones have styrene tube with paper clip or music wire for the r
