Leaderboard

Hello. Well my focus has been on the point rodding and the stuff seems endless! I dread to think how long I have spent on the stuff but I can report that its nearly comming to an end (I cant believe it!). There is a little bit left to do which I want to replace and then painting and sticking in place but I will be VERY glad when its all done. Anyway, here are a few pictures of the recent work... I hope I didnt scare anyone off at the recent High Wycombe show when I was beavering away on this with a magnifying glass?!? Missy

Being a private siding the line to the mill needs protecting by a catch point. At least this didn't need another 'V' making! However as you can see from the picture getting the sleepers of the crossing space so as not to foul the line for the loop exit was a pain and more glue was smeared around on the underlay than should have been. The intention is to have a gate across the siding just beyond the catch point. This leaves me with one last turnout to build and then lots of plain track - oh and the double-slip in the yard - gulp! David

Right finally finished or so I thought. Transfered all the photos to the pen drive looked at them before writing this post, and see that I had not fitted the front number plate well thats tomorrows job now. I have built the tiniest test track you can imagine, and this runs lovely. Not much to write here as it was just pputting it back together. Adding buffers, safety valves etc. I will just let the photos show the last of the story. Here it is finished in it's first BR livery. With the LMS on the left hand side now moved. And the moody low level shot.

No not that sort of fun - actually not fun at all! I am , of course, referring to the 3 way point in the small fiddle yard and the fact that I had never actually got it to work properly - something which i had quite forgotten when I decided to make the first foot of the board scenic. Am sure it would still not have been easy but it would have been a bit easier. Anyway, only one road would work so I turned my attention to the wiring. What I found first was that one of the Peco PL-13s was faulty and not doing anything (this makes me nervous - has anyone else had problems with these?). Got a new one and realised that I had actually put them on upside down - stupid! Well that was sorted out but still no luck. I then disconnected the wires and started adding them back in one by one and testing the individual sections. For this a small bleeping continuity tester is ideal. tried all permutations but still nothing. Then brainwave time - I hadn't altered the small factory fitted link wire position. Quickly swapped over and away we go! Having got that sorted I thought I would try wiring them up only to find that the Capacitor Discharge Unit I bought in the summer is completely dead. So, gave up on this plan and tested them with a small Simplex loco that was handy only to find that it constantly derailed on the point. Dug out another loco and that was fine. Turns out that because it is so small and low bits of the body were catching on that useless upright pip on the tie bar. Quick knife attack and everything is running smoothly. Am really thinking that I ought to make a start on the control panels though - not looking forward to this.

Very dull and wet today so a perfect day for building duckboards - but how. Firstly, what out of? Plastic micro strip would be great but could turn out pretty expensive as each board needs 30cm of material. Brass no go for same reason. Card cheap but too bendy so it had to be wood really. Guess it is the obvious choice for something made of wood. Now, how? I first thought about making up a jig but the chances of getting bits glued in would be very high and if had to wait for glue to dry each time before removing from jig it would take forever. Then I hit on a cunning plan. I drew up a template in PhotoShop, duplicated it a few times and printed a load out on a sheet of A4. A bit of double sided tape was then stuck over and the cross pieces laid on then the length ways bits glued on. Now, here is a little known fact about British duckboards - they come in two sizes, one with the length ways pieces widely spaced and then the other with the long bits placed to fit inside the first one to interlock - clever eh? Having worked out how to do it I found some sheet that I had hanging around which I though was balsa but turned out to be basswood. After several failed attempts to cut a long strip 1.7mm wide with a balsa stripper I had another brainwave. I cut a strip off the end 10.5mm wide and was then able to cut the little strips (all the same length), by pushing the piece into the stripper - far easier and remarkably I still have all my fingers. After peeling a few off and staining them and my fingers separately yet another idea struck me and I stained the remaining ones while conveniently on the sheet. This had the added advantage of loosening the sticky tape so they came off far more easily. here they are ready to go Here they are in the trench. Not the corrugated iron placed to disguise the baseboard joint. And one outside the new dug out. When I come to make more for the wagon loads I will get some proper balsa as will be easier to cut or even ready cut strips.

Phew! I had to dig deep to find this blog, way down the list as it's been some time since my last waffle. Time for a nice cuppa I think. Which reminds me why I dug out this blog. I've been pretty busy of late with one thing or the other and concequently no modelling has been done so here's a little something to keep this space alive. This :- I've often thought about what could be done with these cartons once emptied as they're made of nice fine white card, just crying out for something to be made out of them. I opened it out carefully and as they're only tacked together with spots of glue here and there the flaps and sides were hardly damaged. I thought it would make a large warehouse/goods/engine shed and at around a scale 40ft x 33ft, a nice size. so I started marking it out so it had large windows down one side, a personal door and large sliding doors on the front opening. This done I set about cladding the walls? I wanted a brick base around 4ft high and corrugated iron for the rest of the structure. I planned to use material from Wordsworths models collection designed by Mike Martin and available for free download from his website. I originally hoped to get the complete structure from the one box but found I needed extra card for the roof panel which I attached to the roof sub-panels. here's a picture of the opened out box, marked out and partially clad :- I downloaded enough copies of Wordsworth's 'line side huts sheet 3' to provide the windows and stuck those to the panel I had previously cut out and mounted these to a frame so as to make the window recessed, same with the personal door next to it. For the inside of the windows I merely drew out the frames with black marker on a white background, this gave the impression of light coming through from outside. Once this was done and most of the corrugated iron cladding was fixed I glued up the 2 rear corners and then finally the 2 front corners, first cutting an access panel in the floor so I could press down from inside when fitting the roof and gain access to clad the flaps once fixed. I then added the pre-clad roof panel and touched in where any white card was showing, adding a little weathering here and there. I mentioned making the roof panel from extra material and this was obtained from a box of biscuits from Lidle's, the box had a predominately green finish and so I cut out four panels, laminating them together to make the 2 main doors which I suspended from a length of handrail wire using some plastic handrail knobs I had in the box. This is how it looked when I had finished, not the most glamorous of buildings but just an old rough tin shack. so not bad for next to no cost, maybe one day when I get round to doing a layout it might fit in up the back somewhere. cheers for now Roly

Have been busy with the grass machine, didn't take long actually but has made a huge difference and is making this end of the world seem pretty much finished. There is still a fair amount detailing to do but have made a start with weeds and you can just see the flags waiting to be used by the control point - need to find a suitable figure for here. Did get a bit carried away and made a shell hole which I now need to fill with rubbish. Altogether pretty pleased with the progress and will soon be able to start work on the next board along.

Hi I finally been able to work on the layout again. I have relayed the track over one of the baseboard joints, see below. The mainline has been relayed in code 100 track, because the cassette sits better on it, than on code 75 track. I've been experimenting with various supports for the cassette to ensure alignment and good electrical connection. I have also decided to add a dedicated programming track, see below. The next task is to relay the track over the other joint, and then to wire the fiddeyard properly, including a plug in connection from the controller, making sure that the wiring is fixed down to the bottom of the baseboard. Julie PS I'm having problem uploading pictures, because of slow internet speeds.

Aside from running out of ideas and being in desperate need of linking a lever frame with my TOUs so that I commence scenic work I have been slowly putting brick after brick individually in various walls. I have a plan to produce my own brick paper 'kits' for the three station buildings (station building, signal box and weighbridge hut/goods office) on the computer using photographs of actual bricks arranged to proper bricklaying practices in as much as I understand them before printing them on sticky backed papers and wrapping them around a laser cut former. The latter so the sizes of the building and openings are more accurate than I can cut by hand. Fortunately drawings of the station building appear in the OPC line history and the signal box is a standard type that is covered in the Ericplans book. The weighbridge hut/goods office is similar enough to the one in this book to have just the West window changed for a smaller one, as indicated by pictures. I began by getting frustrated wrestling with GIMP until I realised that a vector graphics program was what I required. I downloaded Inkscape and got moving reasonably quickly after digesting a few tutorials. It is quite tedious work and initially I wanted to get a feel for how long copying and placing individual bricks would take but things have progressed reasonably quickly and some re-use is possible. For example opposite sides can never be seen together so you only never need draw one side of the building before making allowances for the window openings. No-one would know that the bricks repeat unless they read this! Thus far I have the weighbridge hut/goods office structure brickwork completed and have made a start on both the signal box and station buildings. The first step was to draw out a side and end. I drew these polygons with no border so that the line width does not need to be considered. I wasn't going to attempt to use the brick photographs as it was because of matching up the tile and patterning issues. I planned to use the bricks but not the mortar. I drew the mortar outlines in an off white colour as a series of rectangles. These brick outlines have no fill and the outline is a scale 3/8". I used four sizes - stretcher, header, queen closure, and a header plus stretcher for 'corner bricks'. When drawing these you need to consider the thickness of the mortar outline. The error is tiny but over the length of a building the error accumulates quickly. Inkscape allows snapping to the bounding box and to use the centre of the outline for the bounding box rather than outer edge of the line. This makes putting the 'bricks' together really easy. It is tedious though and at the moment there is only the mortar. Once I started drawing the bricks I found that I needed to adjust the sizes of the walls slightly to fit the bricks but these really are small alterations. Once you have all the mortar drawn in it is time to add the texture. I cut out the individual bricks from a texture available freely on the internet that had a colouring that I liked. I used paint to do this and copied each brick into inkscape as a separate bitmap. Try to use just the bricks and not select too much mortar. Resize the brick textures to the size of stretchers, headers, &c. and then duplicate and add the bricks. Using the snaps align them to the mortar outlines and then place them on a layer behind the mortar. Here's a crop of what it looks like I've printed this out onto paper and built it up around a shell of mount board to get an idea for how this method will work. and placed it in approximately the right position in the yard. It requires the glazier and tiler to visit now. I think this will work well and so am continuing to work on the other buildings. The bridge is taking some time because each brick also requires rotating to fit the arch. A lot of time will be saved painting things later though and I really quite like the effect. I must work on making the corners more square though.

Well, that was the most fun I've had making a model and I'm a little disappointed to have finished it. I still have to bed it into the layout so that'll be a bit more fun but it'll be a while until I can get round to that. And this is where it's going.... I can do no more until that white space at the back has been filled for which I have had several very helpful suggestions. (This blogging lark is great - free advice!!) But what will go there? It's a case of breaking free from the paralysis of indecision and getting on with it.

An unexpected day off due to rather a lot of snow and a good opportunity to tinker with the layout and complete a few projects I'd temporarily lost interest in. The garage, modelled on the Foundry Garage in Denbigh, has been patiently waiting for the "Foundry Garage" and "Flame" petrol signs. At last, it's finished and ready to go somewhere on the layout - not sure where though just yet. Talk about lack of planning. The trouble is I see something i'd like to have a go at modelling and then work out where to put it.

I have several motives for writing blogs (I have another one on Google). First is to leave a record for my grandchildren - I would love at least one of them to be motivated to take up this absorbing hobby at a much earlier age than I. Second, I have discovered a whole community of fascinating and friendly bloggers. Third, because it's a very good way for me, a relative newcomer, to pick up lots of helpful tips directed specifically at what I am doing. For example, Scanman (Ian), took the time on my Thatched Cottage recommended to me a book I'd never heard of, Cottage Modelling for Pendon, which is now on order. And Halfwit (Paul) suggested on The Olde Shoppes post that the town square need busying with people. A good and helpful observation. Thank you Ian and Paul. Anyway, this model started out as a model based on (that cop out phrase again) The Old Rectory where Sir John Betjeman once lived - voted the finest parsonage in 2008 apparently. My small grandson said it was a hotel. I have no idea where that came from, but hotel it is. The iron work of the sign is made from tubular styrene. It looks overscale so if anyone has any other ideas for wrought ironwork then please let me know. Preferably not metal - I'm too cack handed to work metal. Round the back is a fountain made of DAS. Well, it's supposed to be a fountain but the fish looks odd, I'm going to have another go.....eventually. There are lots of other unfinished jobs I will get round to.....one day. I see that the wretched low backscene makes an appearance again in both photos. It won't happen again. A second, better, layout is already beginning to take shape in my head. I'll finish this one first of course ..............