During earlier ramblings the subject of signalling got raised, and with progress at the point such things need deciding it's time to be decisive. The heart wants colour light signalling, because it's pretty really. Though there are some excellent brass kits for light signals at a pretty nice price (plus a few detailing accessories), working dummies (ground signals) working are .... £45 each! The head says that it's pretty unlikely such a location would actually be re-signalled, the head also reminding me I have a GW/WR junction bracket 90% complete, which just happens to be what I need to protect the arrivals side of things, and an as-yet unbuilt stop signal for the platform starter. I am struggling a bit with finding nice dummies, but they do exist. To honest, semaphore signals suit the theme of the layout better really, so all-in-all semaphores it is.

So should they be working? Definitely. But.... Well, it is possible to make one of the available dummy kits work by all accounts, but the only details I found suggested that a lot were ordered in a modified form as a one-off to do this. With the layout only really viewable from the side the time/effort doesn't seem worth it. The stop signals I'll have a look at - if I can make them work I will, but adding illumination I'll only do if I can find some LEDS with very small leads. Time will tell on this I guess. Anyhow, I now have a plausible signalling plan. Tick box.

Soooo.... point rodding. I've never considered this before, it just wasn't a thing until quite recently, say 10 years ago it was rarely modelled. It's one of those scenics (like no signals, or random signals) that when you spot it you can't un-see its absence. I think it looks cool anyway. So I spend an awful lot of time researching it, including how it works. Pretty quickly it became clear that, like most railway stuff, apart from a few basics you have a fairly free range as long as you stick to the laws of physics. And that there's a lot of bad advice out there. One thing is for sure, you do have to plan it. Making it up as you go along will get messy. So I sat down and marked it all out on the layout, one rod to each set of points and two to those that passengers might pass over for the facing point locks. I'm going to ignore remote signal interlocks and use the 'it all happens in the locking room' line if questioned. This sounds simple enough, but routing is almost up there with track layout design to avoid errors building up to impossibilities.

With that done I could calculate what I needed (it's way more than you think!) and start looking for suppliers. I'm using square (actually U channel I believe) rodding and stools to match the period, though round ex GWR doubtless hung on somewhere until the layout's time frame. A lot of googling and reading came up with two sources; ModelU for the 'concrete' roller supports and Wizzard Models/MSE whitemetal rollers, etched brass cranks, square rod etc. ModelU also do amazing 3d printed rollers, but at the price point losing a roller every time you cut the length makes it hard to justify. There's also C&L's cast brass components - but there again the bill soon mounts up - and to me they look a bit 'chunky' too.

So, step one. Use some old sleepers to create a 'platform' for the cranks and signal wire pulleys to go outside the signal box, as this seems a logical place to start. If you haven't planned what you are doing it will all fall apart right about now with things getting in the way of other things. Gluing the sleepers together, with a couple underneath to match the 3mm cork is dead easy right? For whatever reason nothing would stick, the ever so small but still there twists in the sleepers just kept undoing everything, plastic weld, Araldite and Evo-stick. In the end I got annoyed and drowned the dammed things in Airfix glue. That worked!

Next I got the sheet of etched cranks, pullies and compensators and pondered quite where to start. A far as I can tell compensators are required every 210mm in 7mm scale, so it was rather disappointing to find only two on the etch - a full sheet of compensators would be very useful - if you were building a decent size layout you'll need a hell of of lot of them. I've not really been able to confirm he 210m figure, photos seem to show some. e.g. on the SVR, at five coach lengths spacing. After my head exploded I decided to stick with 210mm so if I'm wrong a lot of other people are too! Not having soldered brass for a number of years I decided to build the two compensators first to get back in the groove.

Well, it still works. Before cleaning up. I think there's intended to be semi-spherical 'domes' on the two pivots but I couldn't get the soldering iron to play ball - turning the temperature down to plonk on a blob of low temp solder just resulted in wobbly blobs that look rubbish, so I filed them off. If I find something later I'll add them. Maybe.

The aforementioned sleeper 'pad' at about the point it just fell apart and adventures in glueland commenced. On the right is one of the plates that hold the crank shafts with some rod (not supplied) for the, er, roddy thing. The etches have push-throughs to represent the fixing bolts. Didn't get the solder temperature right there, I'd forgotten to turn it back up again. You can see the size of the components - it's a 10mm grid.

I've no idea what size rod I'm using, it was just a left over from something or other, but matched this drill bit. Some of the holes in the etch needed a bit of a ream. Without the drill bit and small hand drill thing I can't remember the name of you'd be stuck here - some mildly exotic tools are needed.

Each crank comes with a washer. I've no idea whether the washer should go underneath or in top so I put it under to space the crank from the base. Cleaning up the parts before taking them out of the etch saves hours of hunting on the floor for them. That's a glass fibre stick if you are unfamiliar, great for cleaning up brass.

Could be better focus, ho hum. The first one made, using card (or anything else) to keep the crank at the right height and square. Fiddly is an understatement - this took about 30 mins and god knows how many attempts to get right. The shaft sticking out was cut off and filed flush when cleaning up. The thing is actually quite robust, which is nice. I'm using a bit of mahogany to save melting the cutting mat.

Having made all for for one side, there's four rods left and four right, with two straight on, coming out of the front of the box, I though it a good idea to look at how this works with the stools. The Great S&T Plan Of Old '20 requires four rods to go alongside the track for a bit after leaving the box, so with the stools being supplied in banks of six, the fifth slot was cut through with a small tenon saw, ditto the 'concrete' stands. After cleaning the saw was used to square the slots, without this the square rod was determined to sit at 45'. None of my needle files would fit in the slots, good job the saw did. The rod was also cleaned in case any gluing, soldering or painting should happen to it.

The left-over bits go to make singles, for the longest run. The plastic the stands are made from is easy to work, and is a bit flexible which is nice. You can see the flashing in the stools that stop the rods sitting square. These will be tidied up before use.

The bendy bits on the end of square rods are in fact rods, presumably because they are easier to bend, so I hunted round and fund some rod of the approved dimension. Using pure blind luck I put the kinks in with pliers and almost for a laugh soldered then to the (square) rod. To my surprise it worked and gives a pretty robust joint, the other ends will be Araldited - even with pliers as a heat-sink soldering the other end melts the solder at both. I could have used high and low melt solder - only just thought of that. Ah well. Since I have no idea what I'm doing here this 'proof of concept' was something of a relief.

And how does it all work with the cranks and heights and things. The sketch on the notes (definitely not, or intended to be, instructions) show the cranks at a 45' angle in a nice neat row. But if you do that the spacing between the rods will be way out. This is kind of where theory kind of gives way to practicality. There are supposed to be curved cranks interleaving the square ones, but with only a few in the etch I decided to save them for other locations. So having spent even more time looking at photos I concluded the way forward was to think in terms of how the forces work and things move and lay it out from that. First off, the crank end should never be exactly in line with the rod giving an exact 90' bend, since on pushing it it could go either side so to speak which could be embarrassing, and the cranks don't actually move all that far. As long as they are not going to hit anything placement depends on the size of the base plate as much as anything.

So, this is the layout. The signal box wall is bottom right and the cranks are lined up to get the correct rod spacing by laying four rods, supported b stools, over the top and eyeing it up, the cranks being pushed round in a sea of Araldite with a screwdriver to position them whilst also trying to keep the symmetry. Precision engineering at it's worst.

And all the way back to signals. Signal wires are a scale 0.011" - top E on a set of light guitar stings. That's apropos nothing, just an observation - with all the coatings guitar strings have these days you're never going to glue/solder them very easily. The etch comes with two different sizes of pulley, but they are only etch thickness and look awfully unconvincing. So I soldered them together in pairs, with the last of the spacer washers in between each pair (or, on the last one, the hubs cut out of the surplus pullies) and using spare bases with rod piled them up as required. Some scrap etch from a wagon kit provided some strip to form the 'hoops' that go over the tops. Five signal wires are required in one direction, four in the other, so they got diving up accordingly.

And here it is. It's easier building a brass wagon kit, but worth it. Now I've got to figure out how I'm going to go about fitting the rodding to the layout itself. Do it in sections and transfer them over, or assemble it all in place? See the next exciting episode.

View the full article