The station building that fronted Freshwater Station from 1889 until it was demolished to make way for a Co-op supermarket, was the largest and grandest of the stations of the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway. It comprised the two storey Station Master's house, with single storey booking hall, waiting rooms and conveniences, and was extended at some time to add a parcels office. It was red brick, with tiled roof rather than slates. The brickwork was quite ornate around the eaves and arou
18 July 2010: Following the Expo, I can now get on with adding the uncoupling magnets. I had always intended using permanent magnets, following their successful use on Brunswick. I bought some small magnets from Merg, but they were nowhere near powerful enough to operate the DG couplers from below the baseboard. Now I have purchased 50 'rare earth' magnets via Ebay. These are really powerful for their size (about 5mm diameter and 3mm long) and come with all sorts of warnings. 'Rare earth' magnet
In my last blog entry, I showed my recently completed Merg CAN-CMD CBus controlled DCC Command Station. The Merg kit includes the PCB and all the components to populate the PCB. For future layouts I will probably just mount the PCB directly to a baseboard and hard wire it in. However, this first one I wanted to keep as a portable and flexible unit.This meant fitting it into a case with suitable sockets, switches and Led indicators.
I found a suitable case on Ebay made from black plas
Freshwater station only has one platform, but it was extended at various times over the years. The first section by the buffers where the locomotive would stand is very low with plain brick facing. It then ramps up to a more normal height. The next section is typical Southern Railway concrete panels from the Exmouth Junction concrete works, while the latest extension used the Southern Railway lightweight concrete trestles, more standard components from Exmouth Junction.
Modelling the
Well, I didn't give up. At the end of the last post, I had the chassis running nicely with the controller wired directly to the motor, but picking up from the rails was less impressive, despite the fitting of the 'Simpson spring pickups' rubbing on all the axles. The chassis was disassembled and re-assembled a few times, to no avail, and another crank pin came loose from a wheel and had to be re-soldered back in. Quartering the wheels was trickier as the motor was now solidly in place, but plent
Not much progress recently - I was diverted by a different project which was no 2mmFS.
Anyway, with a couple of exhibitions coming up in October (Fareham and Abingdon/Didcot) I have set up the layout ready for some more work to be carried out, and took the opportunity to take a few, up to date photos:
Following general scenic work completed in time for the Basingstoke exhibition, a start has been made on some detailing and buildings. One important detail item is the starting signal. Fortunately there is only the one proper signal on the layout, as it has taken 6 months to build it. The two ground signals required will be another story.
I wanted to build a typical SR rail-built upper quadrant signal, operational of course. I purchased some etched brass signal boards, counterweights
It has been some time since my last post. During that time there have been various improvements, design changes, failures, successes and experiments on the electrics underneath the layout. I have still not quite finished, but I do have a working system again.
The original plan was to use Merg Servo4 kits to drive micro servos controlling points and permanent magnet uncouplers. A temporary switch box connected to the 25-way connector on the layout operated the individual points and un
OK, I know they did not survive into the 1950's but a 4 car set was used on the Freshwater line, so that is good enough for me. The brass etch for the bodies is available from Etched Pixels. They suggest putting them on chopped up peco wagon chassis, but I thought they would look nicer on etched chassis. The GWR 4 wheeler chassis from David Eveleigh is almost perfect for length. I could not figure out how to fit the footsteps provided, and the Stroudley set only had a single footstep, except bel
I started chronicling progress on this layout on another blog, but have decided to move here, where people seem to actually read blogs. I will start by recycling what I wrote before, to catch up with the current situation.
24 Feb 2009: The 2mm Scale Association laid down their Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge to build a layout of 9.42 sq. ft. or less in time for their 2010 Expo. I then spent a year and a half thinking about it, leaving a year and a bit to actually build something.
The t
As anyone who has seen my layout at exhibitions can tell you, so far some very unlikely motive power has been operating the Freshwater line of the Isle of Wight. I do intend to rectify this, but getting the layout operating smoothly, and scenery added were higher priority. I have acquired some Dapol A1X Terriers (one at least with the correct extended bunker) ready to be converted to 2mm finescale. Many months ago I started work on modifying the original chassis, as per an article in the 2mm Sca
Obvious quote from "Oh, Mr Porter" describes this morning's activity. Using some plastic card and some printouts from Scalescenes, I started on the interior of the Station Master's house:
And what can you see once it is in place?
Well, I am really proud of my first attempt at producing artwork for etching. This arrived today from PPD, Special Delivery:
It all looks crisp and clear, and, more importantly, the correct size. Here are the window frames for Freshwater signal box (top) and the magazine stand (centre and bottom):
And the solebar overlays for the LBSCR 4 wheel carriages:
And finally, some fold-up buffer beams and the guard's lower steps:
I have actually 3D printed some buffer
I have now added rail wiper pickups, fabricated from 0.2mm phosphor-bronze sheet, as fitted to number 8 'Freshwater'. This has improved pickup no end. I still need to permanently fix the con-rods, add 'stay-alive' capacitors and couplings, as per 'Freshwater' before I can give it a proper test on the layout.
https://youtu.be/4ckGObsXMFc
Here is a view of the wipers that I added to number 8 'Freshwater':
Edited to add photo of wipers.
6th June 2010: This week saw the completion of the track wiring, and the successful test running of trains all over the layout. Copper tape bus bars run beneath the tracks, and small 'dropper' wires link the rails to the tape (two per length of rail). There was just one missing link wire found. Wiring up the point operating servos is still to be done. From the photos you can see one Merg Servo4 board mounted under the baseboard. Two more of these will be fitted to control the remainder of t
'Freshwater' will be on show again next Saturday, 14th April 2018. It will be the first 2mmFS layout to be invited to the East Surrey N Gauge Show at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School, Linkfield Lane, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 1EA. As usual, I wanted to get a bit more completed after its last exhibition, and next on the list was the Newsagents stand and the signal box. The main part of these buildings were 3D printed by Shapeways, as were most of the other structures on the layout. However, for the
Freshwater will have more trees than any previous layout I have built, so I wanted to get some planted in time for the Farnham show (and 2mm Scale Association AGM). Previously I have used plastic tree armatures from Heki and Woodland Scenics. These start off as 2D trees, the branches of which need to be bent to produce a not very realistic 3D tree before attaching bits of foliage.
This time, I wanted to try new techniques. I had purchased a tree-making kit from Ceynix many years ago,
It is over 12 months since my last posting on this blog. A quick recap of the project so far is in order.
Way back in July 2010, the 2mm Scale Association celebrated its Golden Jubilee with a special Expo in Oxford. Prior to this, a layout building challenge was issued for layouts up to 9.42 square feet to be exhibited at the Expo. I built Freshwater for this challenge. As a change from my normal use of relays to operate points, I decided to try servos for the new layout. I joined Merg to ge
With another exhibition looming (actually, tomorrow 9th May 2015 in Portsmouth) I felt I should do a bit more work on the layout. I had mostly been working on some more suitable motive power and rolling stock for the layout (none of which is finished yet). I had been making a few more trees in spare moments, including a large Elm tree that I am particularly proud of. These have now been planted, but lots more are still required, plus other ground cover.
When I moved to a new house, I purchased a shed to house all my model railway stuff. Initially all sorts of junk got stored in there, until I could not even get in the door. After 5 years, some of the junk was removed, and it was used to house some computer servers, poorly cats, spare furniture, etc. Finally, enough room was made to set up Freshwater to work on it (still no room for a chair though).
So, nine years later and the original paintwork was starting to look tired, so I fina
Still making progress, and still making mistakes. The etched chassis does not include any provision for mounting the motor, but I spoke with Jerry Clifford at the Didcot exhibition who said he fits a piece of plastic onto the centre frame spacer, files a curved saddle into it and glues the motor to that.
I always want to be a bit different, so I thought a blob of Milliput might form a saddle without the need for filing. My first attempt started well, but as the Milliput took a long t
With another deadline about to whoosh past (exhibiting at Andover this weekend) it is about time I added a bit more scenery to the layout. I picked up a couple of boxes of Noch laser etched bullrushes to add to the plumber's hemp rushes I had already planted along the river Yar and the brook that runs along the rear of the station. I found some more on eBay, and in the end, I have almost 150 bullrushes to plant. They do not go far, as you need to group them to look effective, and even then, they
At the Basingstoke show, the only building on the layout was a Ratio SR concrete PW hut. There are only four other major buildings required to complete the layout, but all will need to be scratch built. I started trying to create drawings for the station building, using a 3D drawing package, but the more I did, the more I thought about 3D printing the building instead of using plasticard and printed paper as I had orginally intended. The complex decorative brickwork would be really difficult to
1 March 2010: A milestone (or is that a millstone?) has been reached. All the track is now laid, except for the buffer stops which will be the eagerly awaited etched SR kits. I have made a start on installing the dropper wires, and one point mechanism and servo is in place, so I have some way to go before proper testing of the track can start.
As can be seen from the non-painted track, there was a lot of curved track required (half track created in the jig, then the second rail being a
Not that sort of of bus - a layout control bus. DCC is really good for controlling trains, but is less suited for controlling points and signals and the like. A separate bus for operating accessories means that a short circuit on the track does not cause points and signals to change at random. The separate bus can also use systems that are more suited to train detection and route selection.
I initially joined Merg (Model Electronic Railway Group) in order to access their servo contro
