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Tweedale - Ballasting Tweemoor Yard


awoodford

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Tweemoor Yard is Tweedale's rather pathetic answer to Whitemoor. When it comes to keeping up with the Joneses, the Tweedalers have a lot to learn. Small though the yard is, it nevertheless forms the hub of the new extended system, where wagons are blocked together for shunting trips out to other parts. Here's a simplified operating schematic showing how the yard relates to the rest of the system...

 

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There are three sidings if you include the line that continues through to the port. I think more would have been better, but the locals are optimistic that three will be enough. As they remind me, they're not made of money and what with the ruinous cost of track parts and the shortage of suitable land, we should count our blessings.

 

These are the proposed shunting jobs...
1. Docks branch and industrial estate (may be split into 2 trips if needed)
2. Slaghill and The Pits
3. Poshington and Grimley branch
4. Dale End (run as a seperate trip because the sidings face a different way from elsewhere)

 

In view of the strategic importance of the yard to the region's prosperity, I was urged to get the track ballasted and fit for traffic as soon as possible.

 

Ballasting with paste

 

In the layout's early days I experimented with ballasting the track using a paste made from tea leaves, brown ground foam and dilute PVA glue - they happened to be ingredients I had to hand at the time. What can I say - it has a rough texture, it lies between the sleepers, therefore it must be ballast. The colour is a bit weird, sort of gingery, as can be seen in some of the photos in previous blogs. The method did have some good points however. The ballast has an inherent flexiblity which gives much quieter running than the conventional stone chip ballasting that I've used on my other layout, and it is less weighty. It's one of those techniques that seems to show promise but has yet to fully deliver. I decided to give the method just one more try on the extension.

 

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The track was first painted with a couple of coats of Humbrol Dark Earth matt enamel. As the Peco sleepers are quite deep, card was added around the edges of the track to build up the ground and save on the amount of ballast required. The card was later sealed with grey undercoat paint.

 

An exhibition visit supplied two shades of grey dyed sawdust and some Woodland Scenics Fine Turf. The latter was labelled Soil but was actually more like soot. Equal parts of the 3 powders were mixed together with dilute PVA glue (1 part glue to 2 parts water). A dash of talcum powder was added to lighten the colour slightly as I knew it would get darker on drying.

 

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The ballasting was done in small areas at a time, the paste being pushed and poked around the sleepers and tamped down. I found that the ground foam component seems to help bind everything together and gives the paste a preference for sticking to the ground rather than the spatula.

 

Alas the result didn't look anything like the cinder ballast I was hoping to represent. It was too light and the texture was too obviously sawdust. I also made the mistake of sprinkling some of the WS Soil on the surface of the wet paste, which made it look patchy. After musing on the problem for a few days, I finally went over the whole area with dark grey poster paint, flicked from the end of a stiff brush by dragging a finger across the bristles. That did the trick. The tiny dots of paint broke up the surface texture to make it look finer and gave it a darker more even colour.

 

Although there are without doubt easier methods, I'm happy enough with the final result. It's a definate improvement on the earlier tea leaf concoction. Next time (just the one last go) I might try without the sawdust though, only use the Woodland Scenics and talc, to see how that looks.

 

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While we're here I might as well introduce Mr Yardley the Yardmaster. That's him there, sitting on the camp stool looking fed up at having to work from temporary accomodation in the middle of a building site. He'd be even less happy if he knew how far down the to-do list his new office has slipped. With him is his young nephew Angus on a visit from the north. He's a Boy Scout and likes to do good deeds around the yard, the little creep. Give him a hammer and he'll tap wheels for hours. Thankfully the layout hasn't yet got around to an ambient-sounds system.

 

Cheers, Alan.

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  • RMweb Premium

Besides helping old ladies round the wet ballast patches, he best start collecting sticks for a fire. Wrong time of the year to be doing the crossword in a tent.

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  • RMweb Gold

Have some sympathy for Mr Yardley, I bet he really wanted to be a tightrope walker - but with a name like that what can you do.

 

This is good stuff. I like the operating schematic, it's an interersting way of adding operational scope and context to the layout. 

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Northroader, Mikkel, thanks for your comments.

 

If its sticks that he needs, I had better get the forestry people in pretty smartish. They need to hide those strange hills left behind by the land reclamation lot anyway... I knew it was a mistake going for the cheapest quote.

 

The operating schematic is handy, particularly for operators unfamiliar with the layout. The numbers and letters refer to sidings and shunting spots used in conjunction with the card and waybill system. A waybill might give a wagon destination as, say, Grey's Paint Works 1c. If the operator doesn't know where the paint works is (an anonymous building on the backscene and a couple of tanks) he can refer to the diagram, which at least tells him that siding 1 is at Grimley and spot c is at the far end of the siding.

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