Plasser & Theurer
Entry posted by legomanbiffo
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I can't believe it's so long since my last update, an unfortunate reflection of how busy I've been of late. My missus has been labouring under the misapprehension that DIY and household chores somehow have priority over serious model railway business. She was helping me clean out the loft the other day. All dusty and covered in cobwebs, but she's good to the kids. Actually, she's not been very well lately, she's even had to give up her coal round...
The new Deltic videos, filmed at a friend's 7mm garden railway seem to have gone down well, clocking up nearly 1500 hits in a month. Thanks very much Dave for the help. We had so much fun on the day that I forgot to record the various departure sequences and only two of the four were captured. The Heljan model is on the back-burner for a while now but I will get around to putting another big speaker in the free space inside the body. The loco was supposed to have made a public appearance at Newark until a certain Yorkshireman managed to corrupt all the CV's and disable the sound before the show even opened! It seemed to go down well at Peterborough though. I always know from the smiles when I've got it right.
Out in the field, just two recording sessions to speak of. The first was undertaken in the 'Garden of England' at the excellent Spa valley Railway (Tunbridge Wells, Kent; sadly on the other side of the M25 hell-hole from me). The session was supposed to have included the Thumper but its turbo expired the week before so in the end it was just 31206. The Thumper is likely to be in the spring now.
It was a real pleasure to spend the day on the 31. As a youth living on the Birmingham-Norwich route, 31's featured heavily in my haulage book (just had a quick count-up, over 60 different locos, happy days). This one sounded excellent and pretty much everything was in full working order including both sets of horns. The crew were great and gave me everything I needed. I had plenty of time to set up and tied a boom-mounted mic about a metre from the exhaust (see the photo), which yielded some very clean engine sounds. I also managed to capture various sounds that I missed in my first 31 session when I was just starting out (exhausters, brake applications, BIS etc). The sound project has had an intermediate upgrade (various new auxiliary sounds and enhancements but still with the original engine sounds). The new engine sounds will be incorporated asap so I suppose I'd better start looking for a Hornby loco to ready for a video. Public thanks go to the loco owner, the crew and the railway. As well as the Thumper and 31 the Spa Valley have also got a couple of 33's and the 37 which I recorded in 2011 (37153, now looking superb in Inter-City livery). Well worth a visit if you're down that way. Oh, and they have some of those old-fashioned trains too :-)
On the way down to Kent I dropped in to see Richard Armstrong of 'The Armstrong Powerhouse' and have a play on his Rail Simulator set-up (big screen, simulated loco control panel that sits on your lap, sub-woofer, the full monty). Great fun and very interesting to compare and contrast his railway sound editing environment and business with mine.
The final amusing anecdote in Kent came after the recording session when we were all starving hungry and ready to eat. I went back to my hotel room (right next door to the railway) to drop my gear off. Walking back down the corridor I was horrified to find a long trail of dirty black footprints leading all the way to my room. Oops! Cue big tip and apology to the cleaner next morning.
The most recent recording session was with a Plasser 08-16 tamper which came about as an indirect result of Jonathan Buckie's superb kit. My helper on the day was exemplary, a real authority on the subject and I suspect this won't be the last time we work together. Recording and editing this has been really enjoyable as it's so different to everything that's gone before. They are incredible pieces of kit and very interesting technically. I doubt whether I could have made the project work so well with a v3.5 chip but the v4 is so flexible it has been quite straightforward to make the necessary adaptations from normal loco operation. The project is almost finished, just final testing really now. Jonathan is trying to get a model ready with fitted sound for Warley. I suspect he may shift many more kits than he anticipated, and good luck to him.
My 03, 33 & 60 are now in the very capable hands of Lord & Butler for weathering. When I get them back I'll try and get a video done of the 60, and the 33 to demonstrate the all-new engine sounds (recorded from 33109 at the ELR). The 03 will be a while longer as the project is in need of major work to bring it up to current standards.
The (very) slow boat from China has finally docked with Charlie's 144's on board. Part of last month was spent recording new beepers, brake applications and a handful of other sounds to enhance things. I also managed to capture a generic Northern Rail on-board announcement which has been included. Now I have had a production model to play with the project has been tweaked to suit the mechanism and the finishing touches have been applied. Many locos and units have distinctive sound features that immediately identify them and you just have to get right. For the 14X units it's the ear-splitting flange squeal that results from the long wheelbase, two-axle design. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. As with the original version, you can squeal, creak and groan to a standstill and the sound will pick up again (slowly at first) when you set off.
Finally, the next recording session is shaping up nicely so perhaps more on that next time...
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