Having been temporarily chucked back together for AbRail, the Hall is just back from an extended spell in the paint shop having its paint job generally finished off and some weathering applied... just in time for St Ruth to go to Macclesfield this weekend.
My plan for the 'paint job' was to wash over the Dapol GWR green (or it it US Army WW2 geep green?) with thinned Precision BR Green, doing my best to avoid the lining. It's kind of worked, but it took a few more coats than I had hoped
After being on the back burner for a while to make way for the completion of D604 and work on the next signal for St Ruth, I finally got round to doing some more on the Ultima Hawksworth BCK that I started in October.
The coach is now ready for the paint shop (I just corrected a typo there - 'pain shop' - quite appropriate really). Although the coach is ready, I don't think it will be going near any paint for a little while - it's too flippin' cold and dark out there.
For the most part,
In a scandalous misuse of the limited time remaining before Railex, Jackie and I took the Cheltenham Flyer from Tyseley to Paddington and Back with 'Castle' class 'Earl of Mount Edgcumbe'.
The run was superb - a storming ascent of Sapperton and some fast running in both directions on the main line. 40 minutes early into Paddington and then an hour early back to Gloucester. A shame that NR couldn't find us an earlier path back to Brum so we all had to sit in Gloucester for an extra hour forlo
Spent a pleasant day today at the DEMU Showcase in Burton helping out on Jim Allwood's Welton Down along with fellow Midland Group member John Russell and lapsed member Richard Lake. Thanks to Jim for inviting us and the show organisers for putting on a good do.
I thought I'd take a few trains to play with but having precisely zero appropriate items to fit in with the 1990s Network South East theme, I just had to take along some inappropriate ones.
First up, I thought I'd hijack Jim's co
A former member of the Midland area group recently donated his box of unfinished projects and other bits and bobs so that the group members could make use of them. I picked out a part built Gresley BG which looked like a nice model which was crying out for someone to finish it. I have a bit of a soft spot for parcels stock.
Some photos and words about progress to date...
The coach as retrieved - basically two sides, two ends and a floor
I don't know much about its origin - this is
I thought it was about time we had another Hydraulic on this blog, so here goes...
St Ruth is set in 1965 so by rights it should be overwhelmingly populated with Warships. No problem there, we have Cockade, Hermes, Druid and Zest of various ages, plus Cossack too of course. The snag is that in 1965 they should really be green. Maroon is a bit of a stretch - the first maroon repaints appearing in September 65 so we really need some green ones.
The first Farish Warship I acquired was a blu
More steamy goings on from my workbench. Now that I'm not frantically trying to make South Yard look less unfinished I've got back to some of the other items that have been in progress for a while. The main build effort amongst these is the David Eveleigh chassis for the Dapol 45xx. The various bits of this have been liberated from their paint shop boxes and put together in hopefully something resembling the right order.
Under the hood is a Nigel Lawton motor coupled to the worm via a U
After a somewhat late night yesterday evening getting them finally assembled, the two chlorine tanks are now finished.
Here are a couple of photos.
Overall I am really pleased with the way these have turned out. They have taken a lot of effort to build, mainly in the initial etch design and the painting and final assembly stages because they are such complex vehicles. I have also discovered a few tolerance adjustments that will be included in any future builds.
As Association
I thought I would introduce South Yard by concentrating on what it is for so here is a picture of South Yard set up in the holiday cottage that we rented last week for our half-term holiday on the North York Moors.
I don't claim any originality in any of South Yard's ideas (or the title of this posting) - the main inspiration came from David Mallott's 'Chapel Wharf', particularly his idea of having a layout that could easily be taken on holiday to provide entertainment in case of inclem
There hasn’t been a huge amount recently that has really justified a blog posting on its own but there has been plenty going on so here is a potted summary of recent developments and the covoluted paths by which they progressed through the works.
Another Stephen Harris tank is now ready for the paint shop. This one is a class ‘A’ tank. I went for one of the early ones with the shoe suspension and without bottom discharge because that’s what the transfer sheet covers. On the whole though I’m
The class 22 is in the paint shop (scary) so something new has taken its place on the workbench - an Ultima kit for a Hawksworth full brake.
These coaches survived well into the 1970s in rail blue, so this will fit neatly into my chosen period. I also happen to think that the Hawksworth coaches are some of the finest looking coaches ever built, so I don't need much of an excuse to build one. I'm planning to make life difficult for myself by painting it maroon and using my new Bob Moore linin
D6309 is pretty much finished now and is ready to earn its keep on South Yard and St Ruth. It even went on holiday (with South Yard) to its native Cornwall a couple of weeks ago.
The trip through the paint shop was fairly long and painful, the lowest point being when I sprayed it with Humbrol matt varnish to protect the transfers only to find that this left a horrid translucent effect over the whole loco. I rescued this with an wash of thinned Precison green applied by brush. Thankfully
There have been one or two models that have had an extended stay in the paint shop over the winter. Since we have the Epsom and Ewell show coming up later this month, I have knuckled down and managed to get everything out of their various paint boxes and back together into something resembling models. There are still a few finishing touches to do here and there, but here is the latest crop.
Just back together today is the second of the Stephen Harris 35T tank kits. A class A version this tim
A few photos from South Yard's day out at Nottingham. A good day out was had by all and it was nice to catch up with some 2mm friends for the day.
The layout worked well all day and I got lots of nice comments.
The new backscene being cut out from its surrounding card. In the end I went back to watercolour because I'm too new to Acrylic and things just weren't going in the right direction.
All packed up and ready to go. Very neat (not!).
The layout on show complete with pai
Hmm.. July 2015... apparently that's when I started on this particular project
http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/100931-riveted-oil-tanks-in-2mm-scale
I've not said anything more about it on here since then... mainly because until a few days back I had no idea whether or not it was going to succeed or fail.
Rather than theorising further about whether this would or would not work as a 3d print I decided to take a punt and had it printed when Shapeways had a free posta
There hasn't been a great deal to report here recently. It's not that I haven't been doing anything, just that a good deal of it has been kit assembly or repeat builds.
There is one job that I did started shortly after the 2mm Expo that I thought would benefit from a few words here. We were a bit more relaxed at the Expo with mixing and matching locos to different trains. At one point this ad libbing caused us to come unstuck. My Hymek was moved from its usual local passenger turn and put on
This is a catch up installment on D604... and quite a long one. I was quite keen to get it into a presentable state so that I could use it at TINGS, so that meant no mucking about on RMWeb for a little while.
In the last installment the basic shape of the bodyshell was completed but the detail was yet to go on. There is a lot less to add to the class 41 than the class 22, but there was still some work to do.
The roof has most of the right things in the right places. Unlike the 22 there i
A little project that I've been working on for the past few weeks...
This is an Ixion manor bought on Ebay and now sporting a partly completed Nigel Ashton milled brass 2FS chassis.
This evening was its first proper test run. South Yard is a bit too short for this sort of activity so after a few initial runs there to make sure the thing could actually move it was up to the loft to try it on the rehomed (and not very scenic) Taw Bridge where there is at least 6 feet or so of clear ru
Thought it might be time to say a few word on here about the thing that's been taking up most of my modelling time since last June.
The Esso depot at Hayle North Quay was laid with a kicked back siding. As the quay had no run-round, it could only be worked using a shunting tractor... so my layout needs one of those.
It might have been nice to just get on with building the layout and worry about this later but that's really not going to work - the tractor is too small to have an on-board
One of my jobs for St Ruth is the preparation of the operating sequence so that we don't get stuck in a rut of just running the same trains up and down. I've done this by referring to the WR working timetables for Cornwall for the late 1960s and the excellent carriage working information available on the BRCS Yahoo group. This material has provided plenty of ideas for introducing variety into our train services without the need to depart from reality. One of these ideas was the working of a slee
A couple of items that have been stuck in the paint shop for a while.
First up is a BD container. This is from a Parkwood kit that was sat in the gloat box for ages. It's sat in a steel bodied high - also from a Parkwood kit. The chassis is a 2mm Association etch.
I've hankered after a container in the later BR 'door to door' livery for a long time and have now finally got round to doing one. It may be possible to get commercial container transfers but I was doing some custom decals for
... but he hasn't done anything at all!
Well looks can be deceiving. Actually quite a lot of work has happened on the 45xx over the past week or so but the overall appearance is not hugely changed. Let me put it another way... here is how it looked a couple of days ago...
When I stopped work on this project I really wasn't happy with the way it was running. The worst issues had been solved but it still had pretty poor slow running and a nasty tendency to stall. All in all not a
As we all know, the Earth is anything but flat but a flat earth is quite a common sight on our models. Now it's pretty obvious that Hayle North Quay has some high ground at the back and a quay edge at the front, but is that the whole story? Well, no...
A couple of examples from my visit in 2010 (the place has been completely rebuilt since then to provide flood defences).
I'm not sure what this building used to be, possibly stables for the Steam Packet hotel or possibly so
The painfully slow progress of the 45xx build continues. The loco had a test run at AbRail where it showed a tendency to derail. After readjustment of the pony truck springs it had another run at Macclesfield and was much better behaved. Over the past few months I've been gradually making progress with putting the cylinders together and tonight the second one was finally fitted to the loco.
I've got to say that they weren't the easiest of things to put together - annoying issues like th
The full brake is ready for the paint shop, all bar a few bits of fettling.
I don't intend to write a blow by blow account here - after all the kit comes with instructions, so I'll stick to the main places where I have gone 'off piste'.
Unlike David 71's build, I opted for using solder for all of the brass to brass joints. I stuck to cored electrical solder plus Carrs Green Label flux because I find this stronger and less messy than using lower melting point solder pastes.
Footboards
