Black Sheep

]As the title says really, there has been some more progress on Milliedale starting out with purchasing all the points required to build the scenic area and purchasing some solid 15mm thick MDF for the board. This has allowed for getting the track plan from the wall into reality including the pointwork around the baseboard join As you may notice in the next few pics, the board has not only been cut to shape but also the turntable has been sunk into the board and various structures built and placed where they are likely to be. Next on the to-do list is the washing up to avoid "you had time to do that but not to wash up" conversation and then basically build the ridge to support the board tops and the framework to go with them - a little like littlemore's baseboards, but much less ornate! hope to have a train run sometime soon! think the gradient of the canal wharf line might lessen as I build and see how it looks.

@Mr.S.corn78 - Was it you that out bid me for a set of six of them on ebay a few weeks back? @devondynosoar118 - I've not come across the overlays for peco kits, are they available in N gauge?

The correct meccano parts have been aquired - just need a baseboard to put it in.

As you may, or may not know my layout has a canal / coal interchange siding loading coal from canal boat to the railway. When deciding a company to undertake this I spotted at work some Parkend Navigation Collieries wagons (which were bought by a customer before I'd managed to buy them) so since then I've been buying them up on e-bay, one came with weathered frames which kind of forced my hand with weathering, but then again, saying ''forest of dean'' and a running number of 330 wouldn't really work for a layout set in the peak district. all Parkend wagons are Peco (out of production and e-bay's supply has dried up) there are two exceptions, the 7 plank (the Parkends are 7 plank) at the right hand end in the photo is a Penistone gas company wagon (Dapol) which has gotten slightly lost, bought as it's where I went to school. The other exception is a 5 plank 2mm society kit from when I was looking into building in 2mm which has been roughly hand lettered with 'Parkend' - my aim is for it to look as though the company has bought a 5 plank wagon and to avoid it getting lost into a wagon pool has sent someone into the yard with a pot of paint. Does it look right or does it look like someone has tried to letter a wagon badly?

indeed, the canal and railway lay next to each other, my plans for future railways do actually include Bournville. there is a scale model of the factory and it's canal and sidings, but it is a very very small scale.

Really liking it, any more details of how the point 'motors' are made and fitted? thinking that might be the way to go with mine.

Someone should do this, the development of steam locos would have been vastly different! surely train lengths and thus station lengths would have been shorter as you'd fit more people in each coach?

why? keeps kids entertained and perhaps interests them in modeling

I do remember a railway layout that appeared at the Wakefield exhibition a few years running when I was much much younger that came with a list of 25 things you had to try and spot on the layout ranging from a scout camp to santa, someone having caught an old boot while fishing etc was quite popular

I was going to model Lakeside of the Lakeside and haversthwait steam railway, although I was going to have the building survive and the track work, main rolling stock would have actually been late LMS but sometimes run it as blue diesels. currently lakeside runs using 0-6-0 austeritys or 08 shunters or occasionally, fairburn tanks and a bunch of either ex midland or BR mk1's I'd have been using more black 5's and ivatt tanks had I had the space and time to build it. Might do one day.

I'm deliberately setting my railway in the Peak district / Yorkshire dales as I'm quite fond of stone buildings and rural landscapes having grown up in south yorkshire, as such I need to model somewhere realistic for the buildings that will be placed on my layout. although I do have a North Eastern footbridge (Hornby lyddle end) on an LMS layout...

Don't joke, seriously don't joke, we had to speak to the council about neighbours. bizzarely the volvos are either really well parked or feet away from the kerb, it's the small cars that are on the kerb most of the cars on the street have their door mirrors intact, except a citroen berlingo which has had a towing mirror added to make up for the missing mirror glass of its standard mirror (if that makes sense) there is also a porsche with a selotape repair to it's soft top rear screen most cars are blue or silver

is it the norm to look inside a loco's body for identifying marks? just wondering as this would require taking the loco apart as I don't have much space on which to mark N gauge locos etc thinking of painting something onto the underside as an identifying mark

Looks well enough made to sell as knocked down kits for people to then apply detail to! I shall not know the pleasure of chunky building for some years as I'm in the starting stages of an N gauge layout. 00 or perhaps even an 0 garden railway one day perhaps

Indeed, my house is one of about a hundred in the row, broken only for a small alleyway to the 'backs' and built in the late 1890's I believe. the frontage of each house is such that if every house owned an original mini there would be space to park it outside your own house and get it in and out of the space, however there are five volvo estates and a number of 4x4's that park on our road and a few vans, it's just round the corner from both the school and the centre of the small town that has become a suburb of the city located a 10 mins walk down the hill. as such, squeezing into small spaces has become second nature and I now get confused when given lots of room in which to park! I'll take a photo at some point to post.

If you'll excuse the very quick chop job in photoshop, here's my proposed Deltic HST DMU. as I said before, Deltic chopped in two, finish the back end of each power car with half a coach, insert dedicated stock between the two (or regular stock for that matter) and away you go!

not on the street I live on!!! have a mix of cars with wheels pointing all over the place, some cars a foot or more from the kerb, others tucked right up against it, some cars half on the kerb and often cars squeezed into a gap you wouldn't have thought possible. so, anyone modeling a terraced street in modern times, pick a random mix of cars, vans and 4x4's, add a classic car to the mix, put a blindfold on and place them parked up each side of the street, the result will be quite realistic if my road is anything to go by!

What about a DDMU (Deltic DMU) ? basically split a deltic in two, one engine and cab at each end, putting half a coach onto the back end of the cab and engine and putting more in the middle to make a set - you've got a 1950's HST set going on. infact, I might well do it myself!!!

Rich, Photos will be posted when i've sorted one or two problems out with them.

Today I got my Peco turntable kit, it was also the last time this month that my wife will be on night shift so it is now built, painted and weathered. although I've followed the instructions carefully, when I put my black five on it for the photo and tried to turn it by hand I found it really quite stiff to turn. I intend to aquire some meccano parts and make it turn by means of a hand crank, but I'm just wondering if there is a way of making it turn smoother as every loco on the layout that wants to run round its train in the station will be using the turntable. I'm also wondering if I can wire it up using a feed direct from my control board instead of from the track it's lining up to as, in my mind, this would give less chances of a short circuit.

Its been a while since I posted a new entry on progress, but there is little to tell. I've got some base board frames, there are points waiting to be paid for at work and a goods shed partly built. I've put a set of dowels on to join the two boards together and then put the plywood ends on, finding that I need to put a plywood spacer in due to a miss-calculation on dowel length and wood width, but the main problem is that I've lost my wood glue and need some panel pins from the DIY shop which will be tomorrows job before work. I'm also figuring out legs, I'm wanting them to fold to the board for storage but also wanting to 'crate' the layout, although using the legs to crate along the long side of the layout instead of the ends might be an idea so still pondering.

I one day hope to model lakeside station, windermere as it was in 1948 (nationalisation-ish) but also fancy running it as a modern day layout the building was demolished in the late 60's due to ''pier strengthening'' and it is now a preserved line - but what if traffic had continued enough that it's still there, possibly running partly alongside the preserved route? why not? surely part of the point of building a model is to have the option of ''what if?'' I'm currently pondering modeling my current layout as what if nationalisation had not happened - would the LMS be running a deltic and some DMU's in the 50's? what would it's colour scheme have been on DMU's? indeed, the other reason for modeling something, want to model a main line station served by a class of the LNER's number 10000 'hush hush''? why not? it was a prototype that was built to see if it would work and was abandoned, but what if it had worked and been put into service, would the A4 have been displaced? my layout perhaps should be just a single line widening into a run round two platform station with goods loop - but I want trains to be able to pass each other - it's built for my enjoyment so it has two lines (partly because this will help with actual running of the layout) I know someone who used to enjoy sending a Union Pacific big boy round his 1920's midland layout - I'd join in by running Bill and Ben on the narrow gauge section. If you can't enjoy your hobby, why bother? I understand the enjoyment someone would get from accurately modeling York (for want of an example) in the steam / diesel transition period who would be very accurate with detail including stock used I can understand someone who wants to model accurately but occasionally run a locomotive that's from a different company or different era for the simple reason of ''i like the loco''

Thanks Donw I'm planning on getting a set of waggons that work has had in stock for a while that haven't shifted making the coal exchange whaf effectively owned for that company, I also plan on weathering them to the point of looking decrepid - I'm happy doing this to buildings and trucks, but not so much to coaching stock or locos, as such my locos will look rather new!

and here I was planning on using cereal boxes as underlay!