A good day...despite the door!
Entry posted by IanLister
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So, you wait 3 months for a blog entry and then 2 come at once……..I seem to remember buses like that.
Yesterday was such a lovely day up here in North Northumberland; so calm it was almost windless and a clear blue sky. Just the day for a long dog walk on the beach or a walk up into the Cheviots? Actually it was perfect for going to the workshop, getting the workmate out into the yard and doing some baseboard woodworking without getting soaked and/or frozen and without the plywood flapping about. So I did, and took the stack of A4 track templates for the next section…..just in case.
And then when I got there I couldn’t get the door open………..
Something appears to have broken inside the mechanism; when you turn the handle the latch pulls back but not enough to allow the door to open no matter how much fiddling about I do with it. So a call to the door fixer and he’ll be here ‘sometime next week’……...oh good.
Fortunately we also have the unit next door and they’re connected internally, so Val’s hobby room became a sawdust-footprint-decorated corridor between the workmate (out in the sun) and the layout ( tucked up safe and warm in the workshop)…….and I covered several miles with various sizes and shapes of timber and ply, knocking the occasional supposedly precious ornament over now and again, but generally managing to behave myself. And it turned into one of those rare good days where everything you do just seems to work at the first attempt; so I got a lot done.
When I arrived there was a 2.1m x 1.5m baseboard frame sitting on trestles in the middle of the floor.
Legs for one end were already on the adjacent board so I made the ones for the other end, fitted the end profies and joined the baseboard to the next one with dowels and coachbolts. It all fitted together surprisingly painlessly, and was flat and level. The trackbed on this board is on the raised bit at the back, with a road, Carr Rock jetty and the river in front of it, which explains the width. A retaining wall runs along the back which will give me about 150mm of useable hidden space the full length of the board, so the 5 turnout motors on this board will all be surface mounted for ease of installation and maintenance; possibly Cobalt SS.
The track templates were carefully trimmed and tacked together with sellotape; easy enough to do but not so easy to move about safely at 2.1m long! This allowed me to cut the trackbase as a single piece from a sheet of 9mm plywood; it’s a tricky shape as the front edge curves pretty much the full length and there’s a cutout for the coal drops.
So far so good, except for the door, and it was only 2.30. I fitted 2 longitudinal trackbase supports along the full length, letting them into the cross profiles to a depth of 100mm, and glued the trackbase down with lots of heavy objects strategically placed; and then used the templates again to mark and cut the 3mm high density foam underlay. I get it from a company who make orthopaedic insoles and it comes from a 1m wide roll, so I can use it in big pieces. Stuck down with Evostik and with the templates added using Photomount, which was the trickiest bit as I stupidly decided to lay the whole length in one piece………..but it worked eventually, and is flat, correctly positioned and firmly attached. So, on to the tracklaying………..
My plain track sleepers are cut to length from 1m lengths of 3.5mm x 1mm walnut strip using a small guillotine with an end sto set at 34mm. It’s repetitive but strangely enjoyable as long as you keep your fingers out, and I can cut 600 or so in under an hour. The walnut looks good and is stable, easy to stain and weather, and seems to work with butanone and C and L sleepers better than ply; the grain is a little more open so I suppose the bond into the wood is more effective. I really like this product for sleepers.
By now I was way ahead of schedule for the day, which is highly unusual, but I decided to make the most of it. So after a chopping session with the guillotine I laid the first sections of sleepering for this board:
From the left, the first track is a siding leading from the end of the platform 1 runround loop; it’s used for storing coaches, mainly from the excursion trains coming down from the Borders mill towns or along the ECML from Newcastle or Edinburgh. It will hold 8 or so depending on type with any excess being taken up to stable at Berwick until needed. The next track leads into the station, coming down from the ECML at a junction just south of the Royal Border bridge. The third track from the left leads into the goods yard, while in the other direction it crosses a bridge next to the one in the photo and curves downhill to Tweed Dock. 3 or 4 short trip freights each day will use the dock branch; there’s a maltings, an oil depot, a Co-op distribution warehouse, a coal loader, a timber quay, a cement quay and a general merchandise quay, so it’ll be busy.
The track on the right is the goods yard headshunt with the coalyard siding leading off it. At the far end in the photo there’s a short section of track that appears to be offset to one side; it’s not bad alignment, I changed the plan slightly after laying the templates on the first board months ago…..honest!
So next, a few more sleepers and then the mysteries of EM turnout construction, which will be a first, though I think the fact that I built a few in 2mm FS should help a little.
In the evening a few local members of the EMGS came round for our usual Wednesday night get-together and a very useful discussion took place about control panels, turnout switching and other stuff which I’m learning about; and I finally got home at 11.30pm. But it was a good day, despite the door.
Ian
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