kirtleypete

Likewise Jim; I used to model the SECR but it was the Chatham side of things I'm afraid. Good luck with your layout and keep us posted as it progresses. GWR...wasn't that a little tramway somewhere down in the west country?!! Peter

I hope it's not out of place to mention my new 0 gauge LBSCR layout 'Saltdean' which has a thread on the Layouts section of the forum. Peter

My new 0 gauge LBSCR layout 'Saltdean' has a thread in the 'layouts' forum. No baseboards as yet, but the station building and some wagons have been described to get things going, Peter

Here are the newly painted wagons; now I need to wait for the transfers to arrive from Powsides before I can lighlty weather them. The grey is described as a 'light lavender grey' so I mixed up a light grey and then plonked in a bit of purple, all from Tamiya acrylics. The numberplates were done on the computer, printed on gloss paper and cut out - I have done a set with all the nuimbers I'm likely to need as they are actually big enough to read. The blue background gives a nice splash of colour. Ballast wagons were painted 'bright red' which implies something more than just red oxide, so I used Tamiya flat red. The intention is to have half a dozen or so of these with a ballast brake. The LBSCR used shingle for ballast so I've loaded the wagon with a mixture of Woodland Scenics buff and brown. The only loco I have at the moment is this rather inappropriate Terrier. Peter

As I have no stock to run on Saltdean yet I've made a start on some wagons ...then at least when I start track laying there will be something to play with! All the wagons are going to be built from scratch as the available kits seem to be of later versions and I want my stock to be the early Stroudley and Craven designs. They are built in plastic card using the Slaters MR wagon chassis kit for the running gear. This is a Stroudley brake van and a covered van; they are just posed on a small diorama I made up to display stock as I build it. The brake has a brass roof as I happened to have a piece the right size, but I had to use 1mm plastic sheet for the van. The van chassis had a 9' 9" wheelbase, so the solebars had to be extended. I've built two different round ended opens and a dumb buffered ballast wagon. In my period the wooden brake blocks were gradually being replaced with cast iron ones so I've modelled some of each. Don't look too closely at the axle boxes; I was just using up oddments I had left over but they can be replaced later if I feel I need to.....frankly once they are painted black I will probably leave them as they are, with a whole layout to build I've enough to do and when the wagons are on the layout no one is going to be looking that closely at the axle boxes. Here are a couple of close-up shots, I'll post some more pictures once I've painted them of course. Peter

i've pretty much finished off the station building - some more pictures are below. Sorry about the dustbins! From this side it looks very much like a standard Myers station, which is why I like it so much.....it's almost an optical illusion. The carved stone above the right hand window is simply taken from a photo of the window at Sheffield Park. The stained glass windows on the porch are simply printed on paper and stuck in place - it had to be done on both sides of course. I've added some more detail under the canopy too. The figures are Omen, bought ready painted. If I practiced for the next ten years I still wouldn't be able to paint figures as well as that so it's money well spent. The next thing is to make the first baseboard, and then the station can be fixed in place but first I want to have it on my stand at Cleckheaton 0 gauge show in a months time. Peter

I'm nearly at the stage of beginning work on the baseboards, and I'm not sure about the best way to proceed. The layout is going to be 20' long by 2' 9" wide. The legs were going to be timber, hinged to fold up under the boards. That makes the boards heavy. Instead I'm going to use plastic trestles by Stanley (sold in pairs as a saw horse) which are light, fold flat, are nice and steady when unfolded and give a baseboard height of three feet - just what I want. That being the case, I'm now wondering whether to have four boards five feet long or five boards four feet long. My instinct is to have a few board joins as possible, but of course I do have to be able to lift them! The weight saved by not having the legs could mean the five foot board is perfectly feasable, and I think the only way to be sure is to make one and see. I can always reduce it to four feet if necessary. I use 12mm ply for the top surface and 9mm ply for the backscene, with timber framing; I'm lucky as we have a traditional timber merchant in the town who are happy to cut all the ply to the correct size. As the layout is mainly going to be track a flat baseboard is all I want as a starting point. There is one problem; if I use four five foot boards I only need five trestles...and they're sold in pairs! Peter

In the poist today came a copy of the first Middleton Press book on the lines to Midhurst, in which there are two cracking pictures of Lavant station building in the 1880's showing the parts which are covered by trees in later pictures. Naturally my model is wrong! Never mind, it's spot on for Saltdean................. Peter

Thanks for the comments - I must admit I think these buildings take some beating. I've built models of them four times before, but never for myself. Mikkel, the canopy is made from plastic card with strrips of plastic for the battens, then it was covered with aluminium foil stuck on with Evostick. This was painted with Tamiya RLM grey, then dry brushed with matt white enamel paint. This is the best way I have found of modelling the lead sheet on the real canopy. The valancing is one of my own etchings, based on the original design at Sheffield Park before it was reduced in height by the Southern. Peter

After the best part of twenty years building layouts based on foreign prototypes, it's time for a change - my last British layout was Ramsgate Harbour in the 1990's. This time I've moved along the coast to the Brighton area and Saltdean, though only the name will bear any relation to the real place. As ususal this will be an exhibition layout; I've pretty much settled now on 20' long, it's big enough to enjoy but small enough to transport and store. The imminent arrival of the Dapol Terrier was very much an influence on choosing the LBSCR, especially when I saw they were doing in in Stroudley livery. This is how my first thoughts are shaping up, though no doubt it will change as time goes on. The scenic area will be 16' by either 2' 6" or 3'. The plan says 1885 but I may well bring the period into the 1890's to allow me to use the Billington wagon lettering, and so the Myers station building can be tile hung rather than having the plaster panels used when they were first built. Talking of which.............. i can't begin work on the layout yet but I have made a start on the station building, based on Lavant with a few alterations to suit what I want. It's the Myers design of station but higher than normal because of the lie of the land; from the road side it looks conventional. I like it because it's different and on a small layout you have to have something to catch the eye. It's not finished, but here are some pictures of how it is looking so far: I'll post more pictures when the station building is finished, and then when the layout is under way I'll tell the tale as it progresses, warts and all! Peter

We took 'Mers les Bains' to Eurotrack in Southampton at the weekend and also there was Martin Petch with his 1/32nd scale Belgian trams. By the end of Saturday the Ostend tramways had bene extended along the coast, through Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne to terminate in Mers les Bains! We couldn't run them because Martin uses a different wheel profile on his garden line, but they looked very much at home posed in the station to have their pictures taken. Peter

I'll enjoy seeing that at Lenham Paul - it makes a nice change from all the HO, Peter

Do say hello if you do get there, Jon, Peter

John Smith and I have just completed our new metre gauge layout 'Mers les Bains' in time to exhibit for the first time at Southwold this weekend. It is unusual because it is 1/32nd scale, the same as Gauge 1, and as far as I know is the only narow gauge layout in this scale in the UK. Despite the large scale it is only 20' long. I won't go into great detail here, but I thought you might enjoy some pictures. We'll be at North Shields and Eurotrack later in the year - see www.smithslayouts.com for a full diary. The archway was inspired by Brantome and masks the exit into the fiddle yard. All the loco's and stock are scratchbuilt, but very conveniently metre gauge is pretty much 32mm in this scale so we could use lots of 0 scale components, including C&L track parts. Peter.

Interersting comments everyone. I rang Peco while I was installing the system to tell them about another issue; I had the track live and the back of the main circuit board touched a rail, blowing the whole board; £65 gone up in smoke. I suggested that they have a piece of adhesive plastic or card covering the back of the board so this can't happen, or at least a note in the pack warning of the danger, but they simply weren't interested. The response was basically 'so what?'. I think for signals and crossing gates the system is OK as you don't need those complicated polarity change modules which were the cause of most of my heartache. On the other hand Conrad motors will change signals too, at £3.99 each! Talking about their display unit, I saw it at York and the first thing I noticed was that it didn't have the polarity change modules attached so there were far fewer wires. To me that gave a false impression. Peter

Since March I have been working on wiring a large 0 gauge layout based on Welshpool for a customer. The baseboards and track had already been completed and I was to wire it and install the control panel. The layout was DCC so I used my favourite Lenz 100 system. The owner wanted a contol panel for the points rather than using the handheld controller; these pictures give an idea of the trackwork involved: The panel is conventional, in Aluminium with DPDT switches and red and green LED indicator lights. At the time I was beginning work the Peco Smartswitch servo system had just been introduced, and as I am probably still one of the few to have used it on a large complex layout I think my experience might be of value to others. I bought enough of the servos to operate 40 points as they come in packs of four. In the pack you get four servo motors, a circuit board which will operate those four motors, and a programming unit which clips into the board. If you want live frogs (and who on earth doesn't these days?), you need an additional four boards, one for each frog. That puts up the cost considerably. Being a fixed layout, I was faced with working under the boards on a concrete floor for extended periods so I made up ten of these panels so that I could work standing up! On the left is the main circuit board, on the right are the four units required simply to change the polarity of the frog. Just look at all those connections! The LED's on the panel had to be connected into these boards making it impossible to keep them on a separate circuit. Making up ten of these panels took a considerable time. The servo motors have to be assembled and can then be positioned under the points; they are connected to the circuit board with cables with push in plugs, very neat but not all that long on a layout such as this as I wanted to keep the circuit boards where I could see them. They can be surface mounted like this and they work really well but how many of us can surface mount all our point motors? I found that surface mounting worked well, but mounted under the board the operating wires weren't stiff enough for 0 gauge. Peco will sell more connecting cables, but at £5 a time I decided to hard wire the longer runs. The system worked, but it was fiendishly complicated and I had the following issues: 1. The servo motors have a rotating motion, so that in the centre the wire to the tie bar is high, and it drops as the crank on the servo turns. This means that it can drop out of the hole in the tie bar, and it's a pain in the neck trying to get it back when you're upside down in the dark on a concrete floor and the temperature is around 30 degrees! So, make the wire a little longer. The loco's catch it, so it has to be shortened. Then it drops out of the hole when the crank turns....you get the picture. I had forty of these to get perfectly adjusted. 2. You adjust the setting of the servo motors using a little plug in unit which you hold in one hand. You press various buttons to turn the servo, set the start and stop positions and so on. However, you need to be able to see the point blades, and the crank on the servo motor. One is on top of the baseboard, the other is underneath. I was on my own. It was almost impossible. Next time I switched on the layout some of the servos had reverted to the original setting so I had to do it all again. 3. The unit that changes the frog polarity has to be wired into the master board, and also has the connections for the switches and LED's on the panel. This means that these cannot be kept as a separeate circuit which makes fault finding a nightmare. The switches should be kept as 16v AC and the LED's as 12v DC, totally separate so that one part can be isolated. I persevered for as long as I could but in the end I gave up and took out three months work and put it in the bin: i have now redone the contol panel so that the LED's and switches are on separate circuits so that any faults can be traced easily. I have installed Conrad point motors which work well, take about 15 minutes to attach and are simple, robust, quiet and once in place can be left alone in the knowledge that next time I switch on they won't have changed. Two wires to the busbar, one to the frog to change the polarity, two to the switch and the last one to the 16v supply - job done! I'm sorry to say that the Peco system has been a nightmare from start to finish and I wouldn't touch it again with a bargepole. It's too complicated, too difficult to set up and doesn't allow for easy fault finding, three glaring deficiencies as far as I'm concerned. It might be OK on a small portable layout, but for a fixed layout forget it. If anyone else has used the system on a large layout I'd be very interested to hear what you thought of it. In future, though, I'll be sticking with the tried and tested, it's been a very expensive mistake. Peter

Do you remember the sheets of Woodhead transfers, white shaded black lettering? Most of the wagons were done with those. They were great, but I suppose Powsides do the same job now. Peter

I had a Forest layout in the early 1990's, and I've dug out a few pictures. It was 0 gauge and ran round a bedroom, the main line did three circuits of the room and went through a tunnel to complete the circuit. Other than the support legs, the baseboards werew built from corrugated cardboard stuck together with a hot glue gun, which was fine in a heated indoor room and for a permanent layout. The track was Peco and control conventioanl DC...no DCC in those days. I called it Bream Road; it had a station building based on Speech House Road and an S&W signal box & goods shed. The pub behind the station was the 'George' from the Coleford branch which features in one of Ben Ashworth's photo's which has always inspired me. The period was supposed to be the 1890's but it was always pretty flexible...the 1F tank 1720 is in the post 1907 MR black, but as it worked on the Dursley branch I wanted a model of it. The layout lasted about five years...then I met a lady and suddenly layouts in bedrooms weren't allowed! I sold off all the loco's and stock and haven't built a Forest model for myself since, but it's been nice looking back for a few minutes. Here are some pictures: Peter

It was visits to Parkend in the 70's that did it for me, though I am told that I did travel to Lydney over the bridge in the late 50's....I can't remember anything sadly, I was too young. I had a Forest layout years ago....I'll see if I can dig out some pictures. I'm delighted to see a 'Forest' section on RMWeb - I joined for the German Railways section and then stumbled across this too, a very nice surprise. I've got the LP too - it's recorded from the footplate pounding up the 1 in 30 and takes up the whole of one side - awesome! Peter