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whart57

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  1. whart57

    Picking up again

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    It's been a while since I last updated this blog. Admittedly the Christmas break had something to do with that, but also that much of our efforts since the Dorking show have been on dull things like maintenance or on finishing off things already reported on. Our minds are now being concentrated on the fact the club has an open day of April 6, and that means we need to organise ourselves better.
     
    One major issue we had on returning from Dorking is that between the exhibition and the next time we got the baseboards out the track at the baseboard joins had received some serious abuse.
     

     
    Two joins were really badly damaged and a third seriously so. This despite the baseboards having heavy chipboard protection while in transit. A number of options to rebuild the track were considered and then at the Uckfield show we saw some PCB based baseboard joiners. These were copperclad and cut to match the sleeper spacing of PECO Streamline track. All well and good, but we don't use Streamline track. Nevertheless we bought a pack and tried out the principle on the join between the fiddle yard and the main layout where it didn't matter that the sleeper spacing for an inch or so was wrong as that bit wasn't sceniced anyway.
     
    This proof of concept was successful so now came the discussions whether we could live with the wrong sleeper spacing - no - whether we could somehow modify these joiners - messy - or just copy the principle. That's what we did. We had a bit of glass fibre PCB and using adhesive vinyl stuck on the sleepers we wanted to retain and the bits under the rails. Cutting the vinyl on the Silhouette proved better than manual methods. Then we put the PCB in an old margarine tub and poured on ferric chloride solution. A couple of hours later we had a nicely etched bit of PCB. Then came the boring bit, fretting out the gaps between the sleepers. That was three "short Wednesdays" (evenings only meetings) to produce the three bridging pieces we needed.
     
    Cutting out the damaged track sections, scraping out the old glue and ballast and then glueing in the bridges and soldering rail over the gaps took about three hours per joint, but the results are promising. The final action was to saw the line of the baseboard joint with a razor saw.
     

     
    We should have a track painting and ballasting session or two before April to mask the sections, but a look along the track gives us confidence that the work will blend in nicely in the end. The remaining bought in bridging pieces have been passed to the builders of the club's junior layout - which does use Streamline track.
     

     
    While your blogger was engaged on that, other things were going on. A lot of track fencing has been put in, along with gates where appropriate. The level crossing is unguarded but that doesn't mean that the station yard was open to all and sundry.
     
    A lot of work has also gone in to the river, mill stream and landscaping around the watermill. Our prototype is Warnham Mill, a mill dating back a couple of centuries - local legend is that the dam, weir and cutting for Red River were dug by French POWs in the Napoleonic Wars. Warnham Mill sits just inside the A24 ring road around Horsham and the mill pond is now a nature reserve. The mill building and the mill workers cottages still stand though and plans are advanced to make these.
     
    All that is material for later blogs.
  2. whart57

    Reflections from back at base

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    The Dorking show was an interesting experience, and back at base we had time to reflect. One surprising area of interest for visitors was our timber work. The Club chairman had offered us a curtain to modestly cover the baseboard legs but we turned it down, thinking that the "layout under construction" tag was better met by having everything open. It turned out to be a good decision. Many people asked about our designs.
     
    The baseboards were discussed in an earlier blog, but as a reminder I'll post a picture from back then.
     

     
    The main bearers are from two 100mm wide parallel strips of 6mm ply kept in alignment by regular wood blocks. Cross members are glued and screwed and triangular bracing beams keep the corners at right angles/ This structure means we can have a curved baseboard edge which is not only more aesthetically pleasing but breaks away from the parallel to the edge trackwork that screams "model!"
     
    When this photo was taken the boards were mounted on a frame built for another layout. Since then our carpenter, Lee, has made a set of legs specifically for this layout.
     
    As with the baseboards, strength comes from shape rather than heft. The legs are tee-shaped, formed by taking two relatively thin timbers and glueing and screwing them to form a tee-girder. Two legs are them mounted together with cross braces, again from relatively thin timber. Screw-in feet allow for height adjustment. Hopefully the diagram will make this clear, the right hand diagram is the fixed leg structure.
    The fixed legs support either the end of a baseboard or a suitable cross-member. Removable bracing, secured by 6mm bolts with wing nuts for rapid assembly/disassembly, connect the fixed legs together. Since the dimensions between legs will vary, each set is built individually. Clearly marking up which goes where is something we have painfully learned is essential.
     
    The result is a layout infrastructure that is light but strong and rigid. As the club meet in a church hall and layouts need to be erected and taken down each working session, minimising weight is very important. Some of our boards have to be lifted onto a six foot high shelf, and the legs similarly hand on a high hook in the store. However this has proved a successful design
     

  3. whart57

    First encounter with the general public

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    "Is it EM?"
     
    That question, asked two or three times, was the least expected one. Our layout isn't but the question is a ringing endorsement of PECO's Code 75 bullhead track and how that is a major advance on what was offered before for 00 gauge modellers. The gauge may be wrong, but nearly everything else about this track is right. The result is that the trackwork of a steam era branchline can be reproduced effectively.
     
    Good track means that it is worth getting the ballasting right as well as things like platform edges, bufferstops and that tricky area of the cess between ballast and vegetation. We are still getting to grips with some of that, but Holbrook station has shaped up very nicely. A few passengers were temporarily placed on the platform for the Dorking show, but a more accurate representation based on pictures of Northiam and Bodiam taken in the 1930s will be there next time.
     

     
    The station building was completed in time for the show, and included the guttering, with downpipe that provided the sole flush for the gents urinal. Interior details included a 3D printed stove to keep the passengers warm while they waited for the infrequent trains.
     
    On the yard side the groundwork was roughed out and given its first surfacing. Like the station platform, the yard needs a less generic scenic treatment. Coal is not surprisingly the primary form of inward goods, so a coal merchant's steam lorry and an open wagon in the process of unloading have been made. Bedding them in and adding the details such as scales, sacks and labour is work for the next few months. Overall the view into the yard seems right for one of the smaller Stephens stations
     

     
    The Stephens railbus attracted a lot of interest as it trundled back and forth. It is now DCC chipped - a single function decoder lying in the trailer car. The motor is a very small can - only 8mm diameter - and there is an issue in that it surges when first starting. Once on the move it is very controllable but it does behave as if the driver had a heavy foot when starting. Possibly a chip designed for N gauge and thus more sensitive to low levels of back EMF might improve things as might adopting 2mm scale practice of light wire pickups pressing on the axles rather than relying on electrical connectivity through the bearings. Interior details, light fittings (no actual lights) and the roof racks are needed to complete the vehicles.
     
    Visitor interest was also shown to another bit of rolling stock. A 3D printed body for the loco "Gladstone" from the film Oh Mr Porter has been purchased from the Will Hay Appreciation Society along with a second hand Hornby Electrotren 0-6-0T from a well known Liverpool model railway supplier. Light Railway aficionados will know that Gladstone was in fact the K&ESR's Northiam with a half cab and a ludricrously tall chimney with a serrated crown on top. The Northiam cab has been restored with some Plastikard work and the chimney shortened to normal size. Additionally the buffer spacing was widened to 00 gauge spacing - the maker of Gladstone had clearly used the Electrotren H0 dimensions - and a lot of grinding and carving done inside the body to get it to sit at the right height. It was hoped that converting the Electrotren chassis to a 2-4-0T would be straightforward but sadly that is not the case. For now it will run as an 0-6-0T. At the show the body was unpainted, but perhaps that is what drew people's attention to it
     

     
    Not very good picture I'm afraid, it's a snapshot from a video. The two wagons are of interest as they are the first efforts of two of the club's junior members.
     
    Trees have started appearing. The construction method has been described in an earlier blog entry, but many visitors at the show asked about that. At the moment the trees are in their leafless winter state, that too is something to be worked on over the next few months.
     
    One thing we learned is that our baseboard alignment needs refinement. Although the boards align accurately we found that variations in height between opposite ends of two boards opened up gaps at track joins. That caused derailments and while we got those sorted at the show a more robust approach was needed. That will be this month's work.
     
     
  4. whart57

    Decision time on priorities

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    August was a productive month, but there is still much to do to get the layout ready for the Dorking show, even as a work in progress job. We're hoping that some of the things we are trying to do are of interest to visitors, there will be plenty of other layouts with trains running on them through completed scenery. We can't escape from the fact though that making models of real buildings is a lot more time-consuming than throwing together a Metcalfe kit or that making trees from thin wire takes longer than using Woodland Scenics products. Results are more interesting though.
     
    Two buildings should be completed in time for the show though. A 4mm scale version of Bodiam station will be our Holbrook station, and just over the road from that station will be our Dog and Bacon Inn, relocated back in the cottages the real one vacated in Edwardian times. Present state of play is shown here.
     

     
    Just for reference, here is the real thing.
     

     
    These cottages didn't draw the attention of many photographers and we have had to rely on snatches in publicity shots taken for the Dog and Bacon after it had moved to the building next door to determine that the whitewashing of the brick probably happened after our period.
     
    Holbrook station is also taking shape
     

     
    We need another sleeper built buffer stop - the ones at Bodiam are our prototype - and some platform furniture. The platform surface will be ash but the planked way from the goods office door to the platform edge is already in place. In the goods yard we already have a steam lorry ready to go on - see earlier blogs - and a part unloaded coal wagon is under construction by a member who is not part of the core team. We chose to have a sleeper built platform facing rather than brick.
     
    One comment here regarding track. Your author has spent the last twenty years in 3mm scale using 14.2mm gauge track apart from an interlude experimenting with 13.5 mm gauge - both gauges intended to be a more accurate representation of standard gauge than 12mm gauge. Your author was therefore a bit concerned about adopting 00 gauge. However the PECO Code 75 bullhead is such an improvement on the normal 00/H0 fare that all concerns have gone, and the British Finescale point kits complement it beautifully.
     
    It will be noted that some grass has appeared. The Noch Grassmaster has been out, probably a little too lushly. Brambles and other weeds will have to be applied and where the grass has encroached on the track cess, some will have to be scraped out.
     
    However, time presses. We will be at the Ashcombe School, Dorking (RH4 1LY for the satnav) on the weekend 30 Sept/1 Oct, doors open 10 am and we have only two long Wednesdays. We aim to have some things running, and we aim to have at least part of the layout looking decent. Otherwise we will be sharing our ideas, techniques and anything else of interest. And there are going to another 20 layouts to see as well. If you come, please come over and say hello.
  5. whart57
    The club chairman spoke to our team this week. There are going to be 22 layouts at the joint show with Dorking club on 30 Sept/1 October. We did say that we could make that 21 but were firmly told "no way". So over the next two months we will concentrate on making our efforts as interesting as possible as completion to exhibition standards is totally not feasible. If it ever was.
     
    One of the issues we have had since the beginning is that Horsham club do not have a dedicated club room. We do all our stuff in a church hall - one that was once rocking to the sounds of the Rolling Stones (well before they were famous obviously) - but one with limited storage and one where we have to set up and clear away each week. Still, we have finally got some space in the cupboard so the baseboards can now be available on short Wednesdays too.
     
    But we have a station sign:
     

     
    Colonel Stephens railways were not shy to advertise their presence, or exaggerate the comprehensiveness of their services, complete with exhortations to support the local railway or to ride on home-made steel rather than imported rubber. So we will do the same.
     
    The bridge over the River Arun is progressing well too. Side railings have been fitted and all that remains is the decking and the track itself. But we couldn't resist a little posing.
     

     
    Other scenic treatment is progressing. There are quite a few trees in various stages of construction with club members beyond the immediate team contributing, and the landscaping using foam plastic is proceeding well. The base of the River Arun is in place but there is a lot more work to do around the Warnham Mill site.
     
    A country lane to run behind the Holbrook station goods yard is under construction. The sketch here shows the sort of thing we are trying to achieve.
     

     
    The gates will give access to the cattle dock located at the end of the long siding. The dock only sees occasional use and the treatment of the ground will reflect that. The main traffic on the long siding is domestic coal and the access road for that is a bit up the lane. The backscene on this part of the layout is on the right hand side of the lane.
     
    One final success story this month is that the DCC controlled point-motors were programmed and tested. This may only be a light railway layout but the plan is for full DCC operation. We don't want to get bogged down with section switching and operators jumping around switching points. Route setting where selecting a route from a specific fiddle yard siding to a destination on the layout automatically sets all points correctly and operates any signals there might be is what we are aiming for.
     
    Aims for August are to get the track ballasted and all electrics tested. After that its finish as much as possible of the landscaping and install the low scenic features like the cattle dock and station platform
  6. whart57
    After the Club's Open Day appearance, our target for April was to wire up the two baseboards we had. Additionally we had to do some prep work on scenic features.
     
    The wiring was done on the two "Long Wednesdays" in the month. The layout is to be wired for DCC operation so the first task was to lay in the track bus. This was created using thick power cabling salvaged from an office rewiring many years ago. The cable was originally intended to carry 60+ amps so is a little bit overkill on the power front but your blog writer had it lying around. The outer plastic shield was stripped off and the two inner cables were run through brass eyelets screwed into the underside of the track sub-bases. As the cables are each a single copper wire, they can be bent to shape and they stay like that.
     
    Dropper wires were then soldered to the rails. One of our junior members gained his first experience of soldering on this task and he did pretty well.
     
    On the second Wednesday the dropper wires were soldered to the track bus. A small section of insulation was removed, the copper cleaned up with a bit of emery and the dropper wire wrapped around and secured through soldering. All nice and robust and no loss of voltage detected in testing.
     

     
    Inter-baseboard connections use male/female terminal connectors, cut to provide four way connections
     

    Two connections are for the DCC trackbus and the other two reserved for a 12v DC power bus for things like point motors and servos. Other club layouts use 25 pin D-type connectors, sometimes referred to as RS-232 though that standard is not really an accurate description. Your blog writer has lived with those in the IT industry for decades and hates them with a passion, hence they are banned from this layout.
     
    A test run was done at the end of the last April meeting using an Electrotren 0-6-0T and success meant the April target was achieved.
     
    Horsham Stone roofing
     
    It's been mentioned before that our chosen area has a distinctive architectural trait, namely Horsham slates on roofs. These are locally quarried slates, a form of sandstone created aeons ago when a layer of calcium rich rock got pressed between layers of sandstone. It's unusual, not many quarries contain it and it is quite tricky to work. The key factor for modellers like ourselves is that Horsham slates are significantly thicker than tiles or Welsh slates and thus need a different approach to being modelled. The slates are also irregular in size which adds to the challenge. We do have a club member who has laid such roofs for real and he has given us good advice.
     
    One of the first buildings to be tackled is this row of cottages.
     

     
    Until around 1905 these cottages housed the Dog and Bacon pub, which still exists in the newer building next door. Our intention is to restore the pub to its original home. As will be noted, the left hand cottage is probably from a later date, being both taller and having a clay tile roof. The right hand cottages however have a Horsham stone roof.
     
    Various experiments were done, and it was settled that the slates would be modelled using textured paper and thin card. A bit of jiggery-pokery was done in GIMP to create a map of the roof from this picture and then a cutting plan created for the Silhouette cutter. This meant that the two layers of paper and card would line up perfectly. Once stuck together the roof could be built up in the normal way.
     

     
    It's a bit fiddly, but the result looks good. Our ex-roofer gave it the thumbs up, which is as much as we can hope for.
     
    Next month is grit our teeth and do track ballasting as well as make a start on landscaping.
  7. whart57
    June was a hot month, but we still got quite a bit done on the two "long Wednesdays". The first Wednesday, a short one, was a distraction night. No work was done on Chesworth - or the other layouts - while club members headed out in the fine evening air to play with live steam.
     

     
    Unfortunately the footpath was the only surface smooth enough to get a decent run on. To be fair to the little Mamods though, the gravel on the car park was scale boulders. Maybe play with model tanks next time ...........
     
    More serious work for us started on the second week. Much is still work in progress so this month your author will concentrate on what we plan to achieve.
     
    The three boards we currently have take a single track light railway past a water mill and farm before taking a curve into a wayside station. The wayside station is ultra-simple - a single platform, no loop and a couple of sidings. The prototype we are basing this on is the K&ESR's Frittenden Road, although the station building will be one of the corrugated ones on the K&ESR's southern section. However the non-railway buildings will all be models of real locations around Horsham and for the watermill we have chosen Warnham Mill, about a mile out from Horsham town centre on the road to Dorking. Horsham museum have an archive of pictures and the curator found us this one of Warnham Mill in 1905.
     

     
    The mill is still there, apparently with the mechanics still in situ, however its most recent use was, we think, a dog grooming parlour. However as some remedial work had to be done to the dam holding back the water fairly recently, some plans were downloadable from the council's planning portal. From that work could be started on producing plans to 4mm scale.
     

     
    Our railway line has the same relationship to the Mill as Warnham Road does in real life, so the line has to bridge Red River and Boultings Brook. Boultings Brook goes through a culvert but Red River is a more substantial waterway. Apparently it was dug out by French POWs during the Napoleonic wars. Some idea of the scale of the works can be seen from this picture taken fifteen years ago from the Warnham Road.
     

     
    The road bridge needs to be replaced by a rail bridge, and again we have gone to the Colonel Stephens railways for inspiration. This bridge near Eastry on the East Kent Railway is our inspiration
     

     
    All that is very much work in progress so photos of their rendition in model form is for another time.
     
    Tree Workshop
     
    We estimate we are going to need twenty to thirty trees on this part of the layout. Sussex is after all a county with a lot of trees, a legacy of the former iron industry. Before Abraham Darby, up in Shropshire, pioneered smelting iron using coke, wrought iron was made smelting iron ore with charcoal. The process required a lot of hammering to force out the impurities, as well as a lot of charcoal. Hence the trees, which were once regularly coppiced to produce charcoal. It is also believed that Warnham millpond once drove water powered hammers for a forge before the mill was built. Whatever the case, this month we held a tree making workshop.
     
    We are going for model trees created with a wire armature. Florists iron wire is one possibility, but we are also experimenting using stranded copper wire salvaged from old mains leads. Four or five strands of wire are twisted together using an old fashioned hand-drill, a number of those twisted groups are then twisted together and the large bundles tied together with thin brass wire. Branches are bent to shape, the fine ends teased out and then trimmed to length. A mix of Polyfilla and PVA glue is splodged over and then the whole lot given a coat of primer. That's where we are right now, colouring the trunk and branches and adding foliage is next month's project.
     
    Most club members had a go on a short Wednesday night.
     

     
    An example of the bare tree shape possible:
     

     
    We are attempting to make our trees recognisable species. To begin with we are concentrating on ash and birch, and we don't have room for a fully mature oak. We will need to attempt some oaks but they will need to be half relief trees against the backscene.
     
  8. whart57

    May's Progress

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    The vagaries of the calendar meant that the month of May had five Wednesdays, and as a result three of them were so-called Long Wednesdays when the club meets from 2.30 in the afternoon through to 9.30 in the evening. The work this month was pretty heavy on the carpentry front, which can really only be done on the meeting days when there are enough hours to make it worthwhile setting up.
     
    Our carpenter, Lee, delivered the third baseboard frame at the start of the month meaning we now have the set needed for the scenic parts of Phase One. As written in earlier blogs, we have a target of 30 September to aim at when we are expected to be present at the club's joint show with Dorking club, and for that we are working on having the section with the passing station operational and the broad brush of scenic treatment complete. The third baseboard did mean that we couldn't put off making proper legs any more.
     
    In order to keep the legs as light as possible a tee-girder-like arrangement with cross-bracing was drawn up
     

     
    Adjustable feet are fitted. The fine weather this month meant the first legs could be constructed in the garden. Two Wednesdays a month is not enough time to make the progress we need so work at home is essential.
     

     
    Now we have the third baseboard we also need to lay track on it. Fortunately it is only a single track so progress was quite swift.
     

     
    The track bed stops short of the far end because the plan is to cross a watercourse, in real life, Red River, a tributary of the River Arun which flows from Warnham lakes to join the main River Arun just west of Horsham. Warnham lake is formed by a dam and in our period a water mill used the flow to drive its water wheel. The mill is still there and though much of the equipment is still in situ it is no longer functional. Our layout will include a 4mm scale model of the mill building. Drawings are being prepared from photographs and dimensioned from planning documents lodged with Horsham District Council some twenty years ago.
     

     
    Downloaded brick paper will be added with the correct arches and lintels added - amazing what you can do with computers - and when that is done it gets taken to a local printer to print on the thickest card he has - 500gsm apparently - so we have effectively made our own building kit. The process has been piloted on a home deskjet so confidence is high that it will work.
     
    Meanwhile, in the world of the mundane, the track needs painting prior to ballasting.
     
    The new baseboard legs can also be seen in this picture.
     
    We are using acrylic paints, mixed by our own eyes rather than using Railmatch or similar. The sleeper colours looked fine. This was a mix of Burnt Sienna and  a dark blue and then tweaked with Sap Green and Yellow Ochre. Some discussion ensued about the rust colour of chairs and the sides of rails. A real red oxide seems too bright. Acrylic paint darkens as it dries however so a decision was deferred to the next meeting.
  9. whart57

    A busy March

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    Well the Chesworth team took their place in the hall at the Horsham club's Open Day and despite it being April 1st did not make fools of themselves. The Wednesday before there had barely been any track laid, but after an extra "long Wednesday" (March 29, being the fifth Wednesday of the month, was supposed to be just an evening session) all the rail was down on the two baseboards so far constructed. This meant we had something to show for our work since January even if we couldn't actually run anything yet.
     

    Just before the doors open at the Horsham MRC Open Day
     
    Despite not running trains we still had a day's worth of visitors to talk to, and none of us had much of a voice by 4 pm. We had a rolling Powerpoint show on a TV next to the layout (well actually Libre Office, your blog author is a Linux fan) which gave a hook onto which we could attach what we were trying to do and we found we had two different audiences. The model railway enthusiasts, including our neighbours from Dorking who had brought along a layout, were more interested in the track (PECO Code 75 bullhead), the points (British Finescale kits) and the method of baseboard construction. The other halves and curious locals were far more interested in the local history aspects we aim to bring to this layout.
     
    The above picture is shown because it shows something that immediately grated with us. On the previous Wednesday we were laying track at a pace brisker than the number of weights available and glue drying time allowed, so improvisation was required.
     

     
    The result was that we failed to see a bit of a kink in the through line. Not bad enough to cause running problems but irritating none the less. That will be fixed in April.
     
    Meanwhile at the Open Day we had the opportunity to populate things a bit and happily it looks like we have the proportions right for a Colonel Stephens style wayside station. The trackplan is that of the K&ESR's Frittenden Road with just a little bit of shortening so it would have been disappointing if that wasn't the case.
     

     
    The coal wagons, steam lorry and Bodiam station building are all the work of club member, Malcolm Covey. The building is work in progress, as is the Stephens railbus set in the other pictures.
     
    The reason for choosing British Finescale point kits over PECO's completed offerings is that points can be bent to fit the location. The whole trackplan, including the future plans, has been drawn up in Templot and using Templot print-outs the BF point bases can be made to fit by cutting through some of the webbing holding the sleepers. The result is that nice flowing curves through a turnout without introducing a straight section are achievable, and it doesn't have to fit PECO's geometry
     

     
    The April Open Day provided an early target for this project, one that meant we had to roll up sleeves and get on with it. Yesterday provided us with another target in the form of an invitation to the Dorking show in late September. The team is increasing in size so that is an achievable target. What it means is that the sort of light railway trains we envisage will have to run through something passing resemblance to the Sussex countryside of 100 years ago and not over bare boards.
     

     
    It's doable, and it does focus our April efforts onto wiring, point control and filling the gaps on the framework. Tune in next month for how well we've done.
  10. whart57

    A start is made

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    Wednesday 18 January became the official start date of Horsham MRC's Chesworth project. That night there was a presentation - a complete Powerpoint jobbie beamed onto the wall with one of those computer driven projectors - to the whole club membership, and the following Wednesday work started in earnest.
     
    (Horsham club meet on what are called "short Wednesdays" and "long Wednesdays" in St Leonard's Church Hall in Horsham. Short Wednesday meetings are from 7pm to 10pm (clear up starts around 9.30) but on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays the meeting starts at 2.30pm and it at these "long Wednesday" meetings that most layout work is done.)
     
    The first long Wednesday projects on Chesworth concentrate on stock-building. Chesworth is intended to be set in the period from 1925-30, chosen as being a century before when the layout is aimed at being on the exhibition circuit, so rolling stock needs to be suitable for that period. It is amazing how much "steam era" freight stock available as RTR is therefore unsuitable. About half the kits available as PECO Parkside or from other kit-makers are from the post-1930s period too. However the first batch of wagon kits have been sourced and constructions started.
     
    The keenest constructors are the club's youngest members, which is heartening to say the least. Warhammer seems to be providing the early learning experience in the same way as Airfix did for the retirement generation. Photos of the results will appear in a later posting.
     
    Trackplans and Baseboard Design
     
    Your blog-writer has got to grips with Templot. The result has been to turn the outline Anyrail plan shown in the introductory blog into a working document that can be printed actual size. Templot also breaks the link to commercially available geometry which may or may not be a good idea. The purpose of the initial proof of concept layout is to test whether British Finescale's Finetrax kits can be used simply as crossings and switches. Elsewhere on rmweb there are postings from people who have done that but we need to try that for ourselves before over-committing to that approach. Currently the Templot plan looks like this:
     

     
    Turnouts are either A5 or B7 and there are no complexities such slips or diamonds. To begin with though only one of each will be required and the A5 in the yard of the small passing station has been deliberately kept as a divergence from a straight track as a familiarity test before attempting to put a curve through the neighbouring B7. Your blogger has worked with Wayne Kinney on developing the Finetrax range for 3mm finescale so there is a high degree of confidence in that product.
     
    The plan is also to use open frame baseboard construction. The scenic treatment requires some streams and rivers so although there will be no gradient changes other than the one required for gravity shunting, the ground to the side of the tracks will have to go both down and up. A flat baseboard is therefore unsuitable. A design has been drawn up for the framing of the first two boards.
     

    Next stop the timber yard
     
    Buildings
     
    For the proof of concept layout we will require three buildings. The station building will be based on Bodiam (K&ESR). This has the advantage that it is still standing and is accessible thanks the the K&ESR heritage line. It is also an easily recognisable Stephens design. Outside the station, and forming a place for the eye to rest and stop continuing into the fiddleyard will be a country pub. The plan is to recreate the Dog and Bacon which is on the edge of the last little handkerchief sized bit of Horsham Common, and close to the junction with the real Wimblehurst Road which will be the station name on the layout. The difference is that our pub will not be the Edwardian pebble-dashed pub of today but the row of three wooden cottages that held the pub in earlier years. A Wealden hall house style farmhouse is also desired, but at the moment no suitable candidate has been settled on.
     
    Work on Bodiam has already started, and drawings for the Dog and Bacon are being prepared.
     
    Lastly
     
    An idle conversation led to the suggestion that a coal merchants steam lorry might look good in the goods yard next to some guys bagging up a heap of coal dumped from a wagon. By coincidence a member saw an unbuilt Keil-Kraft kit at a swap-meet a weekend or two later, parted with a couple of coins and then put it together.
     

     
    That prompted another member to recall his grandfather had actually driven one of these in the 1920s for a local coal merchant. So all is looking good.
  11. whart57

    February progress

    By whart57,


    Monthly Reports
    It's been a busy month for the still small team working on this layout. The first two baseboards have been built and the trackbeds cut out. As these tasks were done by two people and the pieces only came within touching distance on club nights, the process of fitting track bases to the open frames will happen in March. The construction of the baseboard frames using the sandwich technique has delivered light and strong baseboards. However some modification had to be made to the design to achieve the rounded corners desired.
     

     
    This shot is taken from what will be the viewing side. The fiddle yard will be to the right and the backscene will be given a curve on the grounds that the sky has no corners. A more detailed view shows the construction details better
     

     
    We've gone for DCC Concepts supplied baseboard aligners though stopped short of the super-deluxe version that also bridges the electrical track bus.
     
    The track beds were marked out by reversing the Templot design and printing it back to front. That meant the paper templates could be stuck to the underside of the ply leaving the working side pristine. Ballast and paint covers a multitude of sins, but the concern was more about difficult to remove glue splodges. Templot can print the lines for the edge of the ballast and the total width of the track bed including the cess. The decision has been made to model the cess as photographic evidence suggests that track work on the Colonel Stephens lines was still generally in good nick in our late twenties period. Ten years later things might be different, particularly on basket cases like the Selsey Tramway. The same technique will be used next month to cut the cork underlays representing the ballast and then track-laying will start.
     
    The kit building school
     
    One of the aims of this project is to create an opportunity for members to develop and hone new skills, and the most enthusiastic take up has been from our junior members. We bought a selection of Parkside (from Peco), Cambrian and Slaters wagon kits and three of our juniors have taken some and built them under supervision. Club rules require a responsible adult to attend alongside our juniors, and that adult has also been the one supervising when things like knives are used. We think that is probably better.
     
    These wagon kits are very good. The pieces fit together well, Parkside probably best of all, and some pleasing results are being obtained by these young and inexperienced builders. The first coat of paint was applied before the picture was taken.
     

     
    So from left to right, Midland Railway 8 ton van (Slaters), RCH 1923 seven plank (Parkside), LSWR 10 ton van (Cambrian) and GWR open (Parkside). And the average age of the builders is not even in double figures.
     
    Planning for scenery
     
    Some more detailed work has been done planning for the scenic treatment on the first three boards. The plan currently looks like this:
     

     
     
    Developments since last month are, firstly, that we have found a suitable prototype for the farm building. It's actually not far from the centre of Horsham and is today surrounded by the houses put up on what were the farm's fields in the 1960s. We found this atmospheric picture posted on the internet by our local newspaper
     

     
    The spire of St Mary's Church can be seen in the mist behind, so avid followers of our summer game will also know that Horsham's cricket ground where Sussex played at least one county game a season until a year or two ago, is also in that direction. The Historic England website has a picture from the 1920s of the farmhouse from the front which is viewable via this link: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/BL25327/004
     
    The image on that website shows the farm with a clapboard front but today that has been removed and the original medieval framing with plaster infill has been restored. We in the club are not architectural experts but this farm does look to be a typical hall house found all across the Weald in Kent and Sussex. As such it fits our aims.
     
    One challenge it, and various other buildings planned, will give us is how to reproduce the local Horsham stone roofing. This is made up of sandstone slates 4 or 5 cm thick, so a bit over 0.5mm in 4mm scale. More on this next month.
     
    In our researches we found something else unusual which is now the subject of experiments in how to make a model. On the outskirts of Horsham, one road over from the real Wimblehurst Road, there was a "Wood Hoop and Broom Merchants" in the 1920s. The brooms were besom brooms, or witch's brooms to most of us, and they were made on site. The birch twigs for the sweeping bits were collected locally, presumably, in the form of coppiced branches some ten to twelve feet long, and were stored on stacks the size of haystacks. The completed brooms were bundled up in dozens or possibly double dozens. We have a photograph but unfortunately not in a form I can load up here. If we can solve the issues of how to represent this works in 00 scale then it will be a very unusual addition.
     
    Next month
     
    The club has an open day on April 1st (we've heard all the comments already, thanks) so March's two long Wednesdays will be dedicated to seeing if we can get a bit of track laid for then.
     
     
     

  12. whart57

    The concept behind Chesworth

    By whart57,


    Plans and Concept
    The concepts behind the Chesworth layout are in two groups. For the club, the raison d'etre is to have a project that any interested member can join to learn, develop or show off their skills. Those skills can lie in baseboard building, track laying, scenery, kit building or even scratch building. All those are required for Chesworth. The club is also embarking on something new in that in its fifteen year existence it has not yet built a 00 finescale layout. For that reason the project is phased, and phase one will be a small section of the overall plan that will be taken to a high degree of completion before moving on to the more ambitious phases. The end result also has to be a layout which can be taken to exhibitions.
     
    The design concepts behind Chesworth are to create a fusion of an accurate representation of a Colonel Stephens light railway such as the Kent and East Sussex with accurate representations of buildings club members see regularly as they pass through Horsham town. The layout plan is an end to end design which is to be operated as a "shunting puzzle", with the mixed trains picking up and dropping off wagons at wayside stations and industrial sidings according to instructions from one of the systems used to simulate freight movements. The general idea of the layout plan is thus:
     

     
    The back story here is that the Sussex town of Chesworth had been left off the railway map despite the LBSCR’s attempts to close off every possible route to Brighton. A rail connection was not achieved until 1899 when the new Light Railways Act made possible a light railway from the town to the LBSCR main line at Gatwick Racecourse station. A single line was laid to a terminus in a part of town known as the Bishopric. The terminus was convenient for goods traffic but the proximity of a brewery, the town’s gasworks and the weekly cattle market caused complaints among passengers. Consequently a ¾ mile extension was built in 1905 to a platform behind the parish church. This became Chesworth Town station and the original Chesworth station was renamed as Bishopric.
     
    Light Railway enthusiasts will see parallels between this and the efforts of the Kent town of Tenderden to get a railway, even to the extent of the citizens of Tenderden getting their railway but initially getting fobbed off with a station over a mile away bear the village of Rolvenden. Other K&ESR parallels are the cattle market, Biddenden's monthly fair provided a lot of livestock traffic for the K&ESR, but there is also a Horsham connection in that livestock markets were regularly held on the street actually called "Bishopric" up until WW1 and possibly later. Horsham was also home to the King and Barnes brewery until 2001 and, like all medium sized towns, possessed a gas works in the years before natural gas came in from the North Sea.
     
    For operations this design offers a decent number of freight locations. It also focuses the requirements for rolling stock, much of which is intended to be kit-built even though the ranges of 00 wagons from the manufacturers is now quite extensive. Kit-building is however a skill some members have and others would like to try
     

     
    If the railway parts have a strong K&ESR flavour, the scenic treatment is strongly rooted in the Horsham district. One challenge we will have is reproducing our unique "Horsham stone" style of roofing. Space limitations will mean that the brewery and the gas works will have to be generic, but the rest of the non-railway buildings are intended to represent real buildings in Horsham town or close by. The actual Bishopric will provide a pub and cottages dating from the early nineteenth century back to medieval times. One of the town's former water mills - now redeveloped as an apartment block - is also slated for inclusion along with some interesting town houses of a design not seen much elsewhere. A country pub in a clapboard building and either a half-timbered farmhouse or a watermill are proposed for the country area.
     

     
    This then is the concept. Only Wimblehurst Road station will be tackled initially as a proof of concept. Construction will also start with the small stuff like buildings and stock, though with a club Open Day looming in April, some track-laying will likely be required before then.
  13. whart57

    Building the Sand Hutton wagons in 1:32

    By whart57,


    Rolling Stock
    It's been a while since I added to this blog, but it is time to report on some progress. I mentioned in an earlier entry that I had made a master for resin casting of one of the War Department wagons used at Deptford and later sold to the Sand Hutton Light Railway. A drawing by Roy Link of one of these wagons appears in K.E. Hartley's booklet on Sand Hutton, and the same drawing was also published in Link's Narrow Gauge and Industrial magazine. Roy Link's drawings were always good quality so a 1:32 model in Plastikard was quite achievable.
     
    And there it remained until I did a demonstration of resin casting one night at the club (Horsham Model Railway Club). That pushed me to making the mould from RTV and producing a number of castings as part of the demo. That demo was reported on the club's Facebook page and I reproduce one of the photos taken here.
     

     
    Another thing that pushed me along a little was that I had obtained some 14mm diameter 00 gauge coach wheels from another club member and they proved simple to re-gauge for 14mm gauge. I have to admit though that the wagon castings sat on a shelf for most of 2022 until I was looking for a small project to use as a break from the work on the main layout. At that point I took them down to the shed and started painting.
     
    I felt that industrial wagons need to be quite heavily weathered so the first step was to paint the wagon bodies a bare wood colour. Overpainting with a slightly darker colour achieved a bit of a grain effect after which the inside was treated to a bit of light sanding and a wash of the darker colour run over it to give a bit of a distressed effect. The outside was then given a basic grey colour. When that was dry, really dry, small streaks of paint stripper were applied with a fine brush. The effect was to lift the grey paint to look like it was peeling. Memo to self: use acrylics for the wood effect next time. Fortunately the dark yellow colour of the underlying resin meant that losing my carefully mixed wood colour as well as the grey wasn't a complete disaster.
     
    Vigorous application of a glass fibre brush completed the old paint work effect.
     
    The iron work was first painted a rust colour and then, when that was dry, a weathered black colour was dry brushed over. This works quite nicely to give the effect of ironwork which is rusting but still has a lot of the original paint on.
     
    Lettering and numbering was then required. I don't have a printer that prints white ink and nor did I want to go to an outside supplier of transfers as I didn't think that would be cost effective. Instead I used the Silhouette cutter to cut out letters and numbers from white transfer film. These were then applied as if they were transfers. I had tried this technique in 3mm scale and found it a bit fiddly. The Thai alphabet didn't help either. However in 1:32 scale and nice bold letters this technique works beautifully.
     
    The wagons still require final weathering and at the time of the photographs the dumb buffers hadn't had the weathered black dry brushed over them but I think the overall effect of these wagons is pretty good.
     

     

  14. whart57

    Modifying the locomotive chassis

    By whart57,


    The locomotive
    The great thing about the Roy Link Bagnall kit chassis is that it works just as well for a 1:32 Bagnall Sipat as it does for a 7mm scale 7" Bagnall. That is to say that the wheel diameters and spacing, the length and width and the positioning of things like cylinders, smokebox and cab are the same, give or take a millimetre for both. However, as with the 7" Bagnall, the valve gear is a little bit of a mystery. Bagnall's had their own patented valve gears, first the Baguley gear, and then the Bagnall-Price valve gear. What's supplied in the kit doesn't appear to be either but as part of the gear is an eccentric which was often fitted inside the frames it could be a representation of either. This is something for a later blog because so far I haven't cracked it.
     
    The modifications I have done so far are purely for model railway reasons. As mentioned before, I wanted to make this model locomotive battery powered and radio controlled. The radio control is by means of a Deltang receiver supplied by Micron Radio Control. The power comes from a 3v LiPo battery, also supplied by Micron, as were various sundries such as a charger driven from a USB port and various plugs and cables. The other important item is the control box, which is like a standard model railway controller except it communicates to the loco receiver over WiFi.
     
    At the moment all those pieces are in their packets, awaiting the time to install them. The first thing that needed doing on the control side was to make sure the loco body work could accommodate them.
     
    As the radio control kit and the battery are 3v rather than 12v a different motor would be needed. The choice fell on the now ubiquitous N20 motor which can be acquired in 3v, 6v and 12v versions. The reason for choosing this is that in the 3mm Society we have the benefit of Geoff Helliwell's work with these motors and Geoff has also designed motor bogies and loco gearboxes around these motors. As 3mm finescale is 14.2mm gauge and my 1:32 18" gauge project is 14mm gauge then Geoff's designs should fit nicely.
     
    The N20 motor is about the same size as a small Tenshodo or Mashima motor. The main difference is that the N20 is provided with a spur gear train to provide the gear reduction. It is for that reason that the motors are offered not just for different voltages but also with different speed ratings. Geoff recommends the 300RPM version for slow locos and 600RPM for mainline stuff. 300RPM it was then. Data sheets for the N20 can be found on the internet quite easily
     

     
    Geoff Helliwell provides kits to mount these motors to 3mm Society members and I acquired one of these from him. This 3mm scale 0-6-0 mechanism built by Geoff illustrates how suitable these motors and gear trains are as a replacement for a Mashima or similar (photo: G. Helliwell, reproduced from Mixed Traffic)
     

     
    The actual drive to the wheels is via crown and pinion gearing, which is much more efficient than a worm and wheel. It is possible to put the pinion directly on the motor and drive the crown wheel directly but that requires more space inside the frames that 14.2/14mm gauge permits, never mind the 12mm gauge of TT. Hence the need for some idler gears. The bits Geoff supplies to 3mm Society members include an etched nickel silver mounting on which a stub axle for an idler gear can be soldered - the idler gear held in place by a circlip - and holes etched in the right places for the motor and drive gears. Geoff also supplies a small brass jig piece for positioning the motor mounting at the correct distance from the driven axle (photo: G. Helliwell).
     

     
    This all makes for a very straightforward assembly (photo: Geoff Helliwell).
     

     
     
     
    On my 1:32 scale Bagnall the Roy Link design has the motor mounted vertically so it fits inside the firebox. The same can be done with the N20. As the motor does not have to sit across the frames as it does for a 12mm gauge chassis the idler is not required. Unfortunately it is still not possible to drive the crown wheel directly because of the limitations of gauge and back to back, so an indirect drive is still required as this detail shot shows.
     

     
     
    The only small problem is that the final drive pinion requires a length of axle mounted inside a long bearing and that also goes up into the firebox but then fouls the white metal casting. Some of this had to be cut away, but fortunately that could be done internally without showing anything outside. The N20 is also slightly longer overall, thanks to the spur gearing, than a Mashima but as the boiler and firebox on the 1:32 model need to be placed a couple of millimetres higher than on the 7mm scale model, that can be accommodated.
     

     
    So I have the mechanism built and working. Next up, sort out the valve gear and add stuff like the brakes.
     

     
     
  15. whart57

    Upsizing the bodywork - 1: The Funnel

    By whart57,


    The locomotive
    The Roy Link kit I am using is for 7mm scale, but I am building this small 18" gauge Bagnall to 1:32 scale, a third as big again. Because Bagnall's seemed to scale the functional parts of their locomotives to the gauge they were going to be used on, most things below the footplate don't require modification, and nor do the functional bits, such as boiler, firebox and water tank. The human bits do, so the cab has to be higher, some of the controls - handbrake in particular - need to be upsized, and because humans don't like coal smoke in their faces, the 1:32 model requires a much taller funnel. This picture shows the funnel that had to be made next to the cast funnel supplied in the kit

     
     
    Now I have a Peatol lathe (now sold as Taig lathes) so the obvious route was to turn the funnel from brass rod. Thanks to the kind offices of Nearholmer of this parish I now had a GA of a Bagnall Sipat loco and was able to use that to make a dimensioned drawing of the funnel to use as my guide.
     
     
    The first step was to mark off the positions where the different features would be on the brass rod. At this stage accuracy to within 0.5mm is all that is required, in fact that level of accuracy is plenty along the length of the funnel. It's the cross-sectional dimensions that require the digital vernier's attention.
     
    The next step was to drill a ⅛" (3.2mm) diameter hole the length of the funnel. The purpose of this is to provide a means of alignment later on.
     
    I decided to work from the base end of the funnel so that the top was at the chuck end. I have a compound slide so I was able to set it to cut a taper of 1.5º and shape the main part of the funnel. Now the important part is not the actual angle of cut but the cross-section measurements at the top and bottom, so about halfway some adjustment was needed to the compound slide setting. Making that adjustment while there is still a fair bit of metal to remove means that further adjustments can still be made if necessary.
     

     
    I did cheat a little in that I used the radius of the cutting tool as a form tool for the curvature at the cap end, as well as putting some rounding in at the bottom end.
     
    Creating the flaring at the base of the funnel is one of the more difficult tasks in loco building. Some advocate filing to shape, others creating a huge blob of solder to carve, or doing the same with filler. I thought I'd try an old John Aherne method, page 82 of "Miniature Locomotive Construction". That required creating a cone shape and afterwards boring it out so it only had a thin wall. The cone shape was made first. The compound slide was set by eye to create an approximate cone and then refined as the last cuts were taken. With the slide set to the angle to the last cut on the outside of the cone the tool could be changed and a boring tool fitted to bore out the inside to a depth of 3.6mm
     
    The funnel cap could now be shaped and the funnel parted off. The funnel was then turned around and fitted in the chuck - a bit of masking tape wrapped around it to protect it from the chuck jaws - and the end faced off flat. The final step was to reset the compound slide to 1.5º and bore out the funnel pipe for some distance.
     
    This is not the first time I have tried this classical method of forming the base flare of a funnel, but the method as described by Ahern does require three hands and a flexible spine. One hand to hold the funnel upright, another to hold a small block of wood on top of it as protection and a third to hold the hammer used to persuade it into shape. Plus that flexible spine so you can see what you are doing while tapping with the hammer. As I don't have that third hand nor that flexible a spine any more I thought I'd use a vice and hold things with a jig.
     
    The jig was a piece of steel turned to the diameter of the model's smoke box. It then had a ⅛" hole drilled in the side. The four jaw chuck allows this to be done accurately. A piece of ⅛" silver steel rod, which I have to make axles from, was then used as a locating pin. The funnel could be mounted on that and it would be accurately held at a perpendicular to the former.
     

     
     
    Before attempting to apply any pressure however, the base of the funnel needs to be annealed. That means heating it to a dull red heat and either quenching it or allowing it to cool naturally. This softens the brass and makes it more amenable to taking up the desired shape. Then jig and funnel were put it the vice and the whole lot gently squeezed.
     

     
     
    The funnel needed a couple of trips back to the blowtorch for further annealing. I didn't do this the first time and the flaring cracked.
     
    Photographs of Brede and its sister locomotives do not show the funnel with its flaring directly on the smokebox. Instead the funnel is mounted on a thick plate. From the drawings it looked as if that could be made from 1/16" thick brass, the sort of stuff we used to make loco side frames from. So I had a bit lying in the drawer, unused since c1985. a hole was drilled and a piece cut off and then bent to shape over the former. The funnel was then soldered to this, again held upright by a ⅛" rod inside.
     

     
     
    The final step was to return the funnel to the lathe and very carefully, using the lightest of cuts, trim the base to be a perfect circle.
     
    And that gave me the funnel shown in the first picture. Next time I'll report on progress with the cab.
  16. whart57

    A scenic interlude

    By whart57,


    Scenery
    This project is a source of light relief from other projects and as I needed to clear the lathe away to make space for the airbrush in order to work on stock for the main layout, further work on the locomotive was paused. But I used the corner of the work bench and the paint drying time to make a tiny, 40cm x 10cm, display mount. The purpose of this mount was two-fold. Firstly to have something to display the loco and wagons on since a layout is a very long way off. And secondly to adapt my scenery building skills to a much larger scale than I am used to.
     
    My eventual aim is to produce either a small layout or a set of cameo sections that suggest a small industrial tramway set in the 1920s. Like the actual Brede tramway my imagined tramway links a works with a small wharf on a tidal creek. I'm thinking more brickworks than waterworks though with the bricks being shipped on on a small sailing barge, hundreds of which plied their trade around the Thames Estuary. Like the real Brede wharf though the imaginary wharf can only take fully laden barges on the spring tides so the line to the wharf is only used a couple of days each fortnight. The surface of the rails should not be shiny, but again not as heavily rusted as the web. The loco is intended to be battery operated with radio control precisely so that this sort of rusty track can be modelled.
     

     
     
    A short length of track is modelled here to test the track laying method. Sleepers are the sort of beech sold for beading, cut to the same dimensions as those used on the Sand Hutton Railway, i.e. 1 1/8" long, 5/32" wide and 1/4" thick representing the 3' x 5" x 4" of the prototype. The beauty of 1:32 scale is that Imperial measures can be used throughout. The modern internet was a help though in determining the dimensions of the 20 lb/yard rail used at Sand Hutton and that came out as code 80 flat bottom rail being appropriate. The rail was spiked to the sleepers, though pilot holes of 0.6mm diameter do need to be drilled first. I worked out from photos of Sand Hutton that sleepers were spaced at 30" intervals, so they were spaced here at 15/16" intervals. I assumed ash and cinder ballast and the coarser grade of ballast sold for 7mm scale gives a very nice result.
     
    This imaginary line is assumed to run on private land without crossing public roads, i.e. not requiring a Light Railway Order or anything bureaucratic like that, so I thought the most likely route would be to skirt the edges of fields so that the main field could still be used for grazing or crops. The back edge of the display mount is therefore modelled as a hedgerow, a mature one that was already there before the tramway was built. The main scenic feature is a farm gate. The thinking is that the farmer, possibly a tenant, grazes cows in the field beyond and these need to be taken down for milking every day. That means there is a very muddy track and a boarded crossing over the tramway.
     
    No railway runs over completely flat land, not even in Holland, so some small level changes were created using bits of foam salvaged from packaging. This was then smoothed over with Polyfilla to create the base. The churned up track was modelled by repeatedly poking a broken off cocktail stick into the wet Polyfilla. It was coloured using acrylic paints, yellow ochre and burnt sienna mostly with tiny amounts of red and blue - no white or black. I think the effect of a track churned up by livestock has been achieved.
     
    Plans for a farm gate were found on the internet and a model made to 1:32 scale out of ply. Not the entire thickness of ply but a single layer carefully pared off. This was 1/32" thick corresponding nicely to the 1" thick dimension of timber used by the repro gate manufacturer I found on the internet. The gate was then painted with acrylics to look like weathered wood from pre-creosote days. Gateposts were made from the same beech as the sleepers but planed to be a scale 4" square.
     
    Three techniques were used for the hedge. The core of the hedge is assumed to be something tough and resisting like hawthorn or blackthorn. This is modelled using rubberised horsehair - a good old traditional railway modelling material - pulled apart quite drastically. After shaping to fit it is sprayed with blackboard paint and then with spray glue. While the glue is still wet  the pieces are rolled around in a tub of Noch (or Gaugemaster) leaves. I blend different shades of green leaves to reduce uniformity.
     
    I discovered by accident that polyfibre teased out very thin and then covered with Noch leaves in the same way as described makes good brambles. The final touch is to spot white acrylic paint over the "bush" to represent the flowers that bramble bushes are covered in in early summer.
     
    The final touch is to use small pieces of lichen - another old favourite - to represent the miscellaneous bits of herbage at the foot of the hedge.
     
    That left the grass. I have a Noch Grassmaster, a retirement present from a major computer company would you believe, and used that. This has to be done in stages. A base layer of short stuff, 2.5mm, is laid first. This looks like a well manicured lawn but bear with it. On top of that is laid a layer of long stuff, some 6mm long but mainly 12mm long bristles. Very small amounts are put into the Grassmaster tank and the hairs are teased up using the static electricity from the empty machine. Some three or four passes are needed to get a decent effect. I scattered some yellow flock on after the final pass while the glue was still wet to give the impression of a good mix of celendines in the grass.
     
    No matter how hard you try to cover everything, there are always bare patches. No matter, a dab of glue and a few Noch leaves and you have the start of some dandelions. Spotting these with bright yellow acrylic paint completes the effect.
     
    In the end I found this a far more satisfying exercise in 1:32 than I ever did in smaller scales, and to complete this entry a photo with my half built Bagnall 0-4-0T nosing its way along the hedge.
     

     
     
  17. whart57

    Starting work on the locomotive

    By whart57,


    The locomotive
    The Brede tramway only had one locomotive, a pony substituted for it when the locomotive was out of service for maintenance or other reasons. So I envisaged only having one locomotive in this project too. There were two obvious choices. One was to build a small Bagnall loco like the one actually used on the Brede tramway, the other was to build a model of the small Hunslets used at Deptford by the War Department and later sold to the Sand Hutton line in Yorkshire. I had better documentation in the form of drawings and photos of the Hunslets but the Bagnall design won out because I had a kit of one, albeit for a 2' gauge line and to 7mm scale.
     
    This kit was designed and produced by Roy Link in the 1980s, and was, I believe, still available from Narrow Planet until fairly recently
     

    I really wanted to model a 18" gauge line though, and I also wanted to model in a scale larger than 7mm scale. I had made a start on the kit but idly thinking about things and making measurements and comparing them to drawings I came to the conclusion that the kit could be modified to suit both 1:32 scale and an 18" gauge prototype. How well it managed was not apparent until a day or two ago when another rmweb contributor posted a drawing of a Bagnall Sipat class in response to the opening entry in this blog. A little jiggery-pokery in GIMP and I was able to produce a drawing where the outline of the Link kit was superimposed onto the Sipat drawing.
     

     
    The chassis is pretty much spot on and while some bits of the superstructure need remaking to a larger scale, a lot is re-usable.
     
    I also wanted to try radio control. One of the issues I have with models of narrow gauge and light railway prototypes is the shiny rails needed for good electrical contact. Track also has to be well made because electrical continuity is the first thing to suffer with uneven track. Compensated chassis aren't quite so badly affected but a rigid four wheel chassis will stutter as a result of poor continuity long before anything falls off the rails. I thought that having a battery powered loco controlled by radio would mean rusty and uneven rails would be a possibility.
     
    The technology to do that is now available and not that expensive. Lithium-Polymer (Li-Po) batteries pack a lot of punch for their size - rather a lot of punch if you see some of the YouTube videos of these exploding. However in those horror cases it would appear the disaster factors were the fact they were big power-packs to drive aerial drones and they were being abused by fast charging procedures. Small 3v Li-Pos didn't seem to be so scary.
     
    A 3v battery implies a 3 volt motor. These are now easily available in the form of the N20 motors used in all sorts of devices. These Chinese motors have the reduction gearing in the form of tiny spur gears rather than a worm which means they have a good bit of torque despite the low voltage. A fellow 3mm Society member, Geoff Helliwell, has done a lot of work on developing motor bogies and locomotive mechanisms in 3mm scale using this motor type, albeit the 12v version, and I was able to draw on his work. The motor itself fitted where a standard 12v motor was meant to go, thus pointing itself up into the firebox
     

     
    Obviously a worm wheel was now out of the question - unless I wanted ultraslow running - but the Helliwell concept uses a crown and pinion arrangement. An idler gear was needed to offset the motor, else it wouldn't go into the firebox of the superstructure.
     

     
    The arrangement was tested using a couple of AA batteries and found to give an acceptable top speed and enough oomph to pull some wagons.
     
    I'm now at the stage where I really need to commit to finishing the valve gear in order to finish the chassis, and I have to admit, that is a little bit of a scary thing given the motion doesn't have a lot of waggle room.
     
  18. whart57

    So what is this all about then?

    By whart57,


    Initial planning
    Or as those who know me may be saying, "this isn't Thai, it isn't 3mm scale, what are you up to?"
     
    Well indulging myself in something completely different. I have dabbled in 7mm scale narrow gauge in the past, mainly modelling 2' gauge industrials so it is not completely off the wall. However I never came up with a suitable layout concept to take it beyond just building a few kits. In the process though I acquired a number of books, was an original subscriber to Roy Link's Narrow Gauge and Industrial magazine and generally got a feel for that sort of railway. Living just a dozen miles from the Amberley Chalk Pits museum didn't do any harm either. So my interest in Industrial narrow gauge has some history.
     
    Now on the layout front, I have a layout under construction. I wouldn't say it's an exhibition layout but exhibiting it is not ruled out. It's my Maenamburi layout based on modern, well nearly modern, Thailand railways. It's progressing as fast as one man jobs do, or at least as fast as one man jobs progress when nearly everything has to be researched, designed and built from scratch. Then I have a couple of 3mm scale projects but these are not intended to develop into layouts.
     
    Maenamburi however is four metres long and setting up with the off stage bits of fiddle yard and loop requires another two metres. That is possible in my present abode which has downstairs rooms which can be opened up to ten metres long space. At my age though I have to recognise that some downsizing will be required some time and that in the next ten years or so I may find myself with a much less generous space in which to indulge my hobbies. Maenamburi will probably not fit and the idea of a terminus to fiddle yard 3mm scale layout does not appeal. Something else is needed.
     
    The more I thought about large scale narrow gauge, the more I realised it need take up no more space than a OO set track layout. An industrial 0-4-0ST on 2' gauge is no bigger modelled to 7mm scale than a standard gauge tank modelled in OO. A 350mm radius curve, one of the sharpest in OO set track, works out as 50' radius in 7mm scale, which is quite generous for 2' gauge industrials. And why stick at 7mm scale, why not go further to 1:32 scale? This is a military modelling scale so figures, vehicles, oddments like tools and bottles are easily available.
     
    I had already made an interesting discovery. Years ago I bought a Roy Link kit of a 7" Bagnall 0-4-0ST in 7mm scale and intended for 14mm gauge. I started building it but as usual with me other interests got in the way. Around that time too I obtained a small booklet on the Brede Waterworks tramway, an 18" gauge line used to carry coal and materials to the waterworks serving Hastings in Sussex. There was a drawing of the line's solitary locomotive, also a Bagnall product. I compared it to the drawing in the Link kit and discovered that for most of the major dimensions - wheel size, wheelbase, length, width, boiler length, firebox size - the larger Bagnall in 7mm scale and the smaller Brede Bagnall in 1:32 came out the same, give or take a millimetre. Obviously the cab needed to be made higher, and thus the funnel longer, but most of the Link kit could be used to make the Brede Bagnall in the larger scale. And 14mm gauge is almost spot on for 18" gauge in 1:32.
     
    A second impetus came from a most unlikely source, Channel Five's Great Model Railway Challenge. I was a team captain in the second series. Those not involved in the programme are probably not aware that teams have to submit their plans and make preparations for every round up to the final even though most teams are eliminated in the first round. We didn't make it beyond the first round but had we made it to the final we had an off the wall design where instead of vanilla OO we would use OO gauge track, actually PECO On16.5, and model large scale (1:32) narrow gauge. The theme was "Surprise surprise" so we thought one surprise would be that every figure on the last layout would be a giant compared to the OO figures seen earlier. Obviously we couldn't buy locos and stock so the plan was to hack some Hornby Smokey Joes into something vaguely narrow gauge and resin cast some suitable wagons. The wagon type I chose was the War Dept four wheelers from Deptford which ended up on the Sand Hutton line. And I had made the master out of Plastikard. It seems a shame not to use it.
     

     
    The Brede Tramway booklet also provides a framework for my tramway. The Brede tramway initially ran from a wharf on the River Brede. This wharf was at the limit of navigation and was served by barges coming up from Rye Harbour. These barges brought the materials for building the waterworks and then, for about twenty years, also the coal for the pumping station. From the wharf the tramway headed across the fields to a small depot where the loco was maintained. This was also the closest point the road got to the waterworks, and in the later years of operation coal was brought to this point by steam lorry. From the depot the line set off again across the fields to the pumping station. These features, wharf, depot, etc can all be modelled in a relatively small space as cameos, and that is how my thinking is headed at the moment.
     
    First off though I need to build the stock
  19. whart57

    Picking up the story again - part 2

    By whart57,


    Thai railway layout
    As I said in my previous piece, my intention with this layout was to create a bit of nostalgia through recreating a number of cameos from my visits to Bangkok. Additionally I wanted to include some signature pieces that would firmly place the layout in Thailand, since I have met very few railway modellers who know the slightest thing about Thai railways. That meant that the layout would have to be based on Thonburi rather than be a representation of Thonburi. An example of one of these personal cameos is how rail enthusiasts generally see trains arriving at Thonburi.
     

     
    This arrival over weed infested track, and grumbling past the squatters' shacks at no more than a brisk trot is quite typical. I have replicated that at the entry point to the layout where, once the layout is operational, trains will enter from the fiddle yard. Scenic work at this point is the most advanced so I can offer a snap to allow others to judge how successful I might be.
     

     
    As an aside, this picture also highlights some of the issues modelling an unusual prototype in a scale that is not mainstream throws up. Although the gauge I've used is 9mm, neither N nor OO9 track from PECO or other suppliers is suitable. The sleeper size and spacing is far too wrong to be used and the code 80 rail of OO9 is too heavy for my taste. So track has been handlaid using code 60 rail - which PECO sell for OO modellers to create SR electrics 3rd rail from - soldered to copperclad sleepers.
     
    Scenic scatter products are of course suitable for a range of scales, but the mainly German suppliers have a blindspot regarding tropical vegetation. I still haven't got palm trees and banana trees that really do the job. Some are available from the wargaming market, but these tend to be the types found on Pacific islands, not the species of SE Asia. Presumably the fact the US Marines won the war against Japan but did not gain much glory in Vietnam has something to do with the skew among wargamers.
     
    Another Thonburi scene I wanted to recreate was the engine shed as it appeared to someone walking up from the pier served by the river boats. This was something I had done many times on my visits to Bangkok, and so have a number of other railway enthusiasts
     

     
    Mine won't be quite so impressive. fewer shed roads and therefore only two of the three gables. Another feature that is an obvious part of the Thonburi scene is the water tower. Presumably this has been kept to service the handful of preserved steam locomotives, or perhaps no-one has ever got around to taking it down. Whatever reason, my layout had to have one, and fortunately a good representation could be made by making some modifications to a Kibri kit. The fact that German HO scenery is often actually 1:100 scale helped here. The tank diameter of the kit was only a millimetre more than scale based on my estimation of the prototype's size from a Google satellite view.
     

     
    The one thing Thonburi lacks from a model railway operational point of view is freight traffic. On one of my trips to Thailand I visited Chiang Mai and was able to spend a couple of hours looking around Chiang Mai station. Chiang Mai would make a good layout in my opinion. It's a terminus, has a loco shed, a small oil terminal and on the afternoon I was there, signs of some freight carried in closed vans. (I never ascertained what though.) Chiang Mai would not suit my requirement for a nostalgia layout however given I was only there for a two day conference.
     
    The other place I had seen freight traffic though was on the Mae Nam branch (Or Manum, converting Thai to Latin script is not a consistent thing). This was in fact my first introduction to Thai railways as the J D Marriott hotel my company put us up in was less than a hundred yards from where this branch has a level crossing over the very busy Sukhumvit Road. You could hear the occasional hooters of the night-time trains when you were struggling to sleep against the instincts of jet-lag at 3am. Later I would get to see some trains running on this branch, unfortunately never on an occasion suitable for taking pictures. Eventually I was able to spend some time on a free weekend walking part of this line, just to see where it went basically, and then came across the small marshalling yard at Manum.
     

     
    This certainly had freight, but it was not really that interesting over the railway fence. On the other hand the end of the line at Thonburi was a bit more interesting, the rails just disappearing into a building site.
     

     
    The track plan I had worked to did assume this was how the layout would end.
     
    Earlier I mentioned signature items that would set the layout in Thailand. I thought this tuk-tuk repair shop might be an interesting item
     

     
    Another ubiquitous feature around Bangkok is the 7-11 mini supermarket, so space for one of those needs to be found
     

     
    The most iconic feature I can think of though is a Buddhist temple, complete with chedi and bell tower. There is actually a temple beside the line at Thonburi, and there are some photos from the steam era showing a loco in front of it. I tried to take a picture like that but the modern drivers moved too fast for me. In any case that particular temple is too big, so the search was on for a smaller, but still interesting temple. I found a suitable candidate on the Rama 1 Road, and on my last visit took enough photos to allow me to model it.
     

     
    The external accessories are eminently suitable for modelling too
     

     
    A start has been made on this, with some help from my daughter who can work Blender well enough to create files that Shapeways can work with
     

     
    In the next instalment I'll conclude with the final concept of my Maenamburi layout
     
     
  20. whart57

    Picking up the story again

    By whart57,


    Thai railway layout
    How time flies. I last added to this blog over two years ago, so it's probably time to pick things up again. I have worked on the layout, though progress is probably not as spectacular as might be expected after two years. My involvement in the Great Model Railway Challenge did mean it gathered dust for a year, but since the end of 2019 some steady progress has been made.
     
    In earlier blog pieces I described individual features that I had created, now I think might be the time to describe the framework in which they sit.
     
    Like many layouts, this one is an exercise in nostalgia. I have acquaintances who have built models of the railways they remember from their train-spotting youth, typically these are late BR steam or blue diesel layouts, choice depending on the age of the builder. Others try to recreate a past “golden age”, perhaps Pendon is the foremost example of that. For me it is about recalling the perks of what were the best years of my working life, when I had the opportunity to travel to far-flung corners of the world. And of those my favourite was Thailand. Between 2003 and 2016, when I retired, I had the opportunity to visit Thailand something like a dozen times. Most visits were short, generally a weekend break in the journey back from somewhere else. The fact that there are no direct flights from the UK to Australia - all require a refuelling stop in Asia - or the Philippines, helped in this. However this did mean that I rarely got the chance to venture outside Bangkok.
     
    For a railway enthusiast, or railfan as the international term seems to be, that wasn't a major problem. Within Bangkok and its neighbouring provinces there are quite a lot of things of railway interest. The famous train through the market at Maeklong is easily reachable from Bangkok using a couple of SRT commuter services, and at a ticket price of 40 baht (less than £1) there and back. Other draws were the marshalling yard at Bang Sue - now being rebuilt as Bangkok's main railway station - the terminus at Hualamphong and various relics around the city. At that time there were still abandoned steam engines at the Ekkamai museum, at Makkasan locomotive works and left rusting away in a coach park on the Kamphaeng Phet Road.
     

     
    This little Krauss 2-4-0T was literally rusting away when I saw it in 2010. I'll be surprised if it is still there ten years later.
     
    The main attraction though, and one I returned to on nearly every visit, was Thonburi station on the west bank of the Chao Praya river. Once I found it was easy to get to using the BTS "skytrain" to Saphon Thaksin bridge and then a river boat from there to the Siriraj hospital pier, I made the trip regularly.
     
    Thonburi was the original Southern Line terminus and thus the start of Thailand's meter gauge mainline network. Thailand's first railway was meter gauge, but this was the short, and isolated, line from Bangkok to Pak Nam, only a dozen miles or so long. This line was electrified and became an inter-urban tramway in the 1920s and then closed in the 1960s, a sacrifice to King Car. Ironic then that the Bangkok metropolitan authority is now spending billions of baht on extending the BTS to Pak Nam. After that, the first mainline railways in Thailand were standard gauge. Thailand's leaders of the time manoeuvred to retain their independence from European colonial rulers by playing off the European rivals against each other. With British pressure coming up from Malaya and French pressure coming from Indochina, then asking the Germans to build the railway network was a sensible plan. So German engineers planned and laid the lines going north from Bangkok and they chose standard gauge. For the lines going south this would not prove to be a good idea. The British in Malaya were building railways to Penang and Butterworth and these were meter gauge, conforming to the standard being applied in India for second grade lines. Thailand had already lost territory in the south to the British so it was imperative to get better transport connections to the border before the British found another excuse to move the border north again. A century or so ago the concept of international borders outside Europe was a lot looser and was based more on where tribute was traditionally paid by border peoples than on agreed lines on maps. A southern line was needed, but as it would inevitably link up with the lines in British Malaya, it would have to be meter gauge. It was also have a different terminus from the German built lines as it would approach Bangkok from the other side of the Chao Praya river. Hence the station at Thonburi.
     
    During the 1920s the northern and southern railway networks would be united under a single management and a bridge would be built across the Chao Praya. The standard gauge lines were regauged (a decision now regretted given the interest in hooking up to the Chinese railway system) and Thonburi would become a backwater.
     
    The final change at Thonburi would come in 2004. The government was interested in expanding the Siriraj Hospital next to Thonburi station, but there was a shortage of land. So it instructed the SRT to donate the land Thonburi station stood on. The small halt at Bangkok Noi, half a mile down the tracks, was renamed Thonburi and became the new terminus. The locomotive depot remained as did the carriage stabling. The goods depot was closed as was the original Thonburi terminus. However the buildings weren't demolished but were repurposed for use as a museum to medicine. When the building work for Siriraj was complete, the Thonburi station pier was reopened and a park laid out between it and the old station buildings. Former SRT loco number 950, a 2-8-2 Japanese built locomotive from 1950, now stands as a monument to its railway past.
     

     
    Elsewhere in the museum the original platform canopy has been retained and refurbished
     

     
    Within the museum grounds the tracks have been lifted. Outside however they remain, the old line simply cut off leaving the bizarre situation of a fully functional level crossing with lifting barriers and lights still in place despite the last train having passed this way over sixteen years ago.
     

     
    I've heard other rail enthusiasts describe Thonburi as railway heaven. And I certainly thought it was a place where anyone interested in trains could have a good time. There were only a limited number of trains a day but that meant the staff were quite relaxed about crazy farangs wandering about with cameras. Goods traffic, whatever there was, ended when the goods station disappeared into the Siriraj hospital complex, but the yard was still used to stable old rolling stock. Thonburi also had a small locomotive depot which, a bonus this, was also responsible for housing and maintaining the small fleet of steam engines the SRT use on special occasions. These are out in the yard along with the diesels used for day to day services.
     
    Initially I just did research on Thai railways, photographing and measuring rolling stock and some locomotives and producing drawings and articles for Continental Modeller. I also made a few models so inevitably I began to consider building a layout. The layout would have to be more freelance than an accurate portrayal of a place, not least because I wanted to be free to create my own idealised picture of my experiences in Thailand. However layouts need a trackplan and it soon became clear that Thonburi offered much as a location to base that trackplan on. Bangkok offered a number of stations. Hualamphong was clearly too big and complex as was Bang Sue. Wongwangyai was too limited, it was merely a single line terminating at a single platform and only saw diesel railcars, and Makkasan had a nice station building but was dominated by the works. Nowadays it is also dominated by the concrete pillars holding up the Airport Express line.
     

    The advantage of modelling Wongwangyai - no pointwork to build. The disadvantage - look at all those figures that need painting!
     
     
    There was also Mae Nam, a freight only station in SE Bangkok. If I wanted to do an American style freight line layout, then the Mae Nam branch with its range of sidings and industries served would fit the bill, but I lack the large basement a layout like that demands. The image below is from an uncompleted article on Bangkok's stations
     

    Thonburi however ticked many boxes. It had a good range of facilities, it had a limited train service - a serious consideration given that all rolling stock would have to be handbuilt - it had a loco shed and the more I looked at it, the more I was convinced that it could be compressed into a buildable track plan. I based the plan on a screenshot from Google Maps
     

     
    It's possible to make out the individual locomotives and rolling stock and that gives some idea of scale. To do this to scale in HOm would require some 10 meters length. I could shorten that by modelling in my preferred scale of 3mm to the foot and that would only require a bit over 8 meters. I had four meters available. That would require a fair bit of compression but it's doable. Some compression is achieved by using model railway geometry on the turnouts, but serious compression requires the number of sidings to be cut back. The loco shed was reduced from a five road shed stabling twenty locos to a three road shed stabling six and the number of carriage sidings cut from five to three. But a workable trackplan was achieved.
     

     
    I retired from work in 2016 and that meant I had the time to really crack on, as well as the space as I no longer needed my home office. A start had been made on building baseboards but by the end of 2017 the baseboards had been built and the track laid and wired. How things went from there is something for the next blog.
     
  21. whart57

    The carriage shunter

    By whart57,

    It's been a few months since my last blog entry, partly because I been distracted and partly because it's summer and things like the garden need more attention. However some progress has been made on Maenamburi, in particular on doing the artwork for an etched brass sheet. I use etched brass to save time making fiddly things, to achieve consistent results and to work to greater accuracy than I can manage myself using file and fretsaw. It may be useful for readers for me to give a shout out to PPD, who have done getting towards a dozen of my projects over the years and who do a decent job for a decent price. And they will take on projects as small as A4 sized sheets. I draw up the artwork using the Inkscape free drawing package and then send PPD some pdf files, however I'm sure others on rmweb have dealt with this topic in far greater detail already
     
    This latest sheet was a right miscellany, Thai level crossing gates, the ornamental eaves decorations for a Thai temple, signal arms to 1:100 scale to replace the HO arms on Viesmann signals (the HO posts are the right height for 1:100 but the arms are too big), and experimental motor bogie for a GEK Co-Co and, the major item, a sort of kit for a Henschel shunter. I say sort of kit because any kit manufacturer putting that level of completeness out would be roasted. Perhaps I should use the term "scratch aid" as used by Allen Doherty of Worsley Works fame. It's this shunter that is the topic of this blog entry.
     
    The "fact" behind a lot of Maenamburi is Bangkok's Thonburi station. At one time Thonburi was the terminus of the line from Bangkok south to Malaysia and Singapore but after the Chao Praya river had been bridged the chief trains were redirected to the main Hualamphong station and Thonburi became a backwater. Some fifteen years ago the actual Thonburi station was closed and the land "donated" to the Siriraj Hospital for an extension and today's Thonburi is actually Bangkok Noi halt, as an old nameboard still says.
     

     
    Talingchan, incidentally, is the junction with the mainline of the Southern Line, and as the sign states, the original Thonburi was 866 metres back down the line
     
    The Thonburi station buildings weren't demolished, at least not this time though the USAF did for the original building in 1945, and they have been restored and are in use as a museum. Not a railway museum even though the old platform side is still nicely presented.
     

     
    But I digress. I should be talking about a feature of operation at Thonburi as it is today, and why I need a six wheeled shunter.
     
    All the trains that serve Thonburi are what the SRT call "Ordinary Trains" in other words third class only, stop at all stations trains with basic facilities. Something to bear in mind if your holiday firm offers a trip to the "Death Railway" at Kanchanaburi by train from Bangkok. Two trains a day go to Kanchanaburi and Nam Tok, a couple more trundle down the Southern Line halfway or more to Malaysia and in between them a railcar set shuttles back and forth to Salaya, a small town some 25 kilometers from Bangkok.
     

     
    I want to replicate the sort of operation seen at Thonburi on my layout with one piece of fiction added, namely I want to include a train that requires deploying one of the SRT's Class 158 sets. But that is for a later blog.
     
    Although Thonburi is effectively a single line terminus, it is still operated as a mainline terminus. On arrival the train engine is uncoupled and trundles off to the shed, leaving the train carriages in the platform road. A small shunter is kept at Thonburi solely for the purpose of collecting the carriages and shunting them into the carriage sidings where the cleaners can sweep through and do tasks like fill up the water tanks. Whether the shunter is operated by mainline qualified drivers or by trained station staff I don't know, but the shunter does nothing else. In any case the operation involves hauling the carriages further along the line and then reversing them into the carriage sidings which lie parallel to the platform roads. The trackplan of Maenamburi was designed with this specific operation in mind.
     
    That then requires a shunter. The Henschel shunters the SRT bought in the 1980s looked to be quite do-able as an etch, and were also prototypically correct. The shunter at Thonburi is one of these.
     

     
    As can be seen, the design is nice and boxy without difficult curves, unlike most diesel and electric classes. Even the cab roof is angular. There was a line drawing in Ramaer's book to use as a basis, though it is inaccurate as well as very small. However as the overall dimensions of Ramaer's drawings are generally correct even if the details aren't, this was the starting point. Fortunately too, I had photographed one of the class from the Rama 1 road bridge at Hualamphong some years earlier so I had that all important from above shot for the roof details.
     

     
    I ordered a suitable motor bogie from Hollywood Foundry - the ordering process allows you to specify the exact wheelbase - and then, as is so often the case, it lingered in a box while I worked on other things. However earlier this year I started on the artwork, driven I have to say by the need for some of those scenery bits and bobs mentioned above. The shunter was drawn up really to fill up space on the sheet. However drawn up it was, using the normal conventions of black being unetched, white as etch through, red as half etch from the front and cyan as half etch from the back.
     

     
    In May the files were sent off to PPD and a week or so later a brass sheet arrived in the post. Then I discovered I had mistakenly removed all the halfetch lines from the back. Aaargh! Nothing for it but to manually score them in. Fortunately I hadn't turned them into full etch lines and fortunately there weren't too many. Eventually I got round to building the shunter.
     
    So where are we now? Well the basic body has been soldered up and almost ready for the primer. Which means I'm probably half way towards completion. However a quick shot of the work done so far in the company of some rolling stock does give me confidence this will turn out all right.
     

  22. whart57
    It's been a while since my last entry. I had to take time out to do something about lighting the layout since the absence of it was causing me problems assessing whether the colours I was mixing when painting buildings were right or not. Something that looked good on the workbench by the window was way too dark in the unlit corner of the room. However I now have two strips of daylight white LEDs mounted over the layout and that problem is solved.
     
    That done, attention could be turned back to the layout itself. My next goal is to have the first baseboard scenically (near) complete. Still a way to go but I think I have the buildings arrangement sorted. This overview gives the idea
     

     
    Obviously, a lot is still under construction. The coaches in the train are still unfinished as are most of the buildings, The palm trees are the wrong sort and will need modifying, and - well the list goes on and on.
     
    This second shot shows the area from another angle, this time without the train
     

     
    Now, I have been moving the half built constructions around and I think I have the positioning right now. I will need another squatter's shack between the bigger one and the banana plant (unpainted I hasten to add, they are bright green but not that bright) and probably another one further along too, but I don't think there needs to be any more standard houses.
     
    So what is fact and what is fiction? Well every building, so far, is based on a real one. The fiction comes from having to guess what is on the other sides from where the photographer (usually me) was standing, and from the fact that these buildings were in reality several miles apart from different parts of the city. To help me here I consulted a couple of books on Thai architecture. Where I didn't know what reality was and where assuming the far side was the same as the near side didn't feel right, I put in a standard feature from the book.
     
    For example, I snapped this house in a soi off the Rama I road.
     

     
    The location is quite cramped and it might have helped if I had gone further in and taken more pics, but as always you think of this months afterwards. I did have a couple of pics to help with more detail on what is visible in this photo, and Google maps (satellite view) allowed me to estimate the dimensions of the overall footprint. What is fairly plain though is that this house has been modified and extended over the years. According to my architecture book it was quite normal for Thais to start with just a single room and an open living area and then add to it as prosperity, family, or both, grew over the years. That is what appears to have happened to this house so my guess was that the bit I couldn't see was the original, the clapboard section a later addition and the final pieces were to enclose the open living area and part of the undercroft.
     
    The next step was to make a working drawing in Inkscape
     

     
    The "oldest" part of the house was drawn out as having traditional fa pakhon panelled walls, the other wings with the style I could see from the photos.
     
    Now this is where the benefit of having a Silhouette Portrait cutter comes in. Modelling that fa pakhon style would be incredibly tedious to do by hand, however using a drawing package and the cutter, 5 thou thick overlays to simulate panelling are quite easy to do. The Silhouette was also useful for cutting out the glazed panels around the living area, from 10 thou Plastikard this time.
     
    Others on RMWeb have blogged about using Silhouette cutters in far greater detail so I am not going to cover that ground again. As far as I am concerned this purchase has revolutionised my use of Plastikard. Panelled doors, window frames, that sort of thing is easier to do with a cutter and the results are far more consistent. Items like the balustrade of the right hand house in the middle picture would be impossible otherwise, as would the screen in front of the living area. Well maybe you could etch it but that would be relatively expensive
     
    All in all, I think I am on the right track here
  23. whart57
    One perennial problem for layout builders is how to fill the foreground of layouts. It's not always a good idea to lay tracks right by the baseboard edge but if not then something has to fill the space. Obviously that something has to be low in height so as not to obscure the view of the trains, which limits the possibilities. For layouts set out in the countryside it's not difficult to get out the grass machine and scale cows and create a meadow or two but you can't do that in an urban environment. I have a number of ideas, a parallel road, a car park, hard standing next to a siding, and I will use all of those, but with some three metres of baseboard edge to fill I still needed another idea.
     
    Inspiration came from an unlikely source - the Guardian newspaper. The Guardian normally has a big centre page photo feature in its weekday print editions, and on Tuesday 5 September the subject was a single - double page - image of the Ratchada night market in Bangkok, taken either from a tall overlooking building or possibly from a drone given that it was an aerial view but not from too great a height. I had considered a market scene but the examples I had in mind were in large shed like buildings and thus too tall for the site to be filled. The Ratchada night market on the other hand was made up of rows and rows of small gazebo like canopies, presumably of the standard 3m x 3m dimension, and from the open sites where the stall holder hadn't bothered with the canvas cover it was clear that the canopies were on standard collapsible frames too. A night market made up of lots of these portable stalls looked an interesting idea, particularly as the canvas was of bright, but different, colours. When I suggested this to my wife - who is my arbiter of whether a feature might be of interest to the majority non-ferroviarophilic population - she was enthusiastic about it.
     
    The Bangkok night markets have an interesting history. Of course there have been street vendors in Bangkok and other cities for as long as anyone can tell, and my first experience of such a market was on my first visit to Bangkok when my company put us up in a hotel on the Sukhumvit Road. At that time the pavement between the Asok interchange and the railway crossing at Ploenchit was a solid ribbon of small stalls selling clothes, designer knock-offs, tourist tat, and - after 9 pm - some extremely dodgy videos and some nasty looking weaponry. How you are supposed to get one of those spinning knife jobs past customs is a mystery I never tried to solve.
     
    Recently I have read that the Bangkok city authorities propose to clear the Sukhumvit Road stalls. I can understand that. Apart from reducing the pedestrian traffic on one of Bangkok's major thoroughfares to single file - and if you get stuck behind a Middle Eastern type and his multiple wives all browsing the stalls then progress can be very slow - it is also rumoured that there is a strong underworld element demanding protection money from the stall holders. The city will lose something though.
     
    However Thais are entrepreneurial so the demand for low entry cost retail facilities is high. The night markets provide that and by creating a critical mass in one place also attract custom. The first was apparently the Rot Fai market held in the north of the city next to the more famous Chatuchak weekend market. "Rot Fai" means "railway" and it was so called because it was on land that was once part of the Bang Sue railway yard. After a few years though the land was required for development so the market moved to On Nut in the south eastern suburbs. Since the market catered mainly for local Thais the fact it was way off the tourist track didn't matter much. Interestingly it retained the Rot Fai name even though there was now no railway connection. However even though it was out in the sticks of On Nut, Rot Fai market proved popular among young and youngish Thais as a place to go, meet, eat and shop. The people behind it then thought of expanding and a couple of years ago opened up a second site at Ratchada. This site is closer to the city centre and is more accessible using public transport. This Ratchada market is the inspiration for mine.
     
    I had to solve one technical problem though - how to make fifty odd gazebo like canopies. Or maybe more. The space to be filled is some 40cm x 20cm and as each canopy is 3cm square that means some four or five rows of thirteen stalls. Additionally the canopies needed to be of uniform size but not perfectly uniform. I think I have a solution - vacuum formed plastic.
     
    This technique is not entirely new to me. Like many others of my generation I struggled with the vacuum formed plastic sails of those Airfix ship kits like the Endeavour and Revenge. Unlike most though I have played with a vacuum forming machine. This was some forty years ago when I had a job as a lab technician. From that experience I had a rough idea of what I needed to do. I knew it would be possible to mould plastikard round a former of wood or plaster of Paris if I could get the plastic warmed up to around 100℃ and provide some decent suction. A hot air gun of the sort used for paint stripping would probably achieve the former, and the household Miele vacuum cleaner would have enough suck for the latter. The machine I used all those years ago heated the plastic with a couple of electric heating bars mounted in the lid and had a lever operated suction mechanism, and that did sheets of 18" x 12". I was going to be far less ambitious, something of the order of 4" x 3".
     
    I then set out to make a small vacuum forming tool using off cuts of MDF and 9mm ply, which I had from building the baseboards. The drawing below shows the schematic layout
     

     
    In the actual implementation, the vacuum chamber is extended sideways so that I can fit the vacuum cleaner hose from the top rather than from underneath. A couple of waste pipe fittings left over from a plumbing job made a nice connector which could be Araldited in place. A stack of MDF and ply pieces drilled through and with the centres cut out form the business section. Four M8 bolts with butterfly nuts are used to screw them down and thus clamp the Plastikard sheet. At this early stage a test was done using a metal bottle cap as a former, and some 10 thou sheet was successfully formed around it, picking up detail like the screw thread and the serrations quite well. After that I moved on to making formers for the gazebo canopies.
     
    The first canopies I tried were simple pyramids, though I did put a bit of a bow in the vertical formers to simulate how canvas sags. I then cast Plaster of Paris around them and the idea was that this would form a depression into which the hot plastic sheet would be sucked. It didn't work very well. One of the problems was that air was sucked from the sides the mould and this pulled the hot plastic sheet too far and it popped.
     
    I then made the canopy in reverse using plastikard, and cast little pyramids using plaster. When I had four of them I stuck them to a small piece of ply and drilled small holes around them for the suction. To seal the bottom of the support I cut up a cheap mouse mat bought for £1 from - well, where else? Strips of the thin rubber made a more airtight seal.
     
    Now I can get reasonable results, occasionally quite good ones. Ten thou Plastikard gives a nice result but it can stretch too thin and pop before it has fully taken on the desired shape. Fifteen thou gives a better result. The most effective technique so far is to play the hot air gun over the Plastikard sheet, watch it bubble up, settle flat and then start collapsing around the formers. Then, and only then, switch on the vacuum cleaner to suck the softened sheet down and around the formers.
     
    That is where I am now. In a week or two I'll come back and report on whether this potential solution becomes a real one.
  24. whart57
    Another short progress report.
     
    I have determined that 15thou Plastikard gives the best results, 10 thou thickness is too prone to blowing through before the full shape is taken up. I have also learned not to panic while using the hot air gun. What happens is that the Plastikard first bubbles and deforms, then it flattens out again. If you keep applying heat then it starts to sag and its when you can see the highpoints of the underlying mould appearing on the surface that you hit the power on button of the vacuum cleaner. The plastic is now suitably soft and a good result can now be obtained.
     
    I have now made the first half dozen canopies and built supports for them from Microstrip.
     

     
    Now that I have drawn out a plan for the market in the available space I find I don't need quite so many, about thirty rather than fifty. Still a bit of a task but nowhere near the work it would be making each canopy individually from scratch. The big task will be populating the stalls with goods on sale and people.
     
    Just for reference, this link should bring up a pic of what I am aiming to create
     
    https://www.justgola.com/media/a/00/12/77391_og_1.jpeg
  25. whart57

    Visualising the scene

    By whart57,

    Right, the baseboards were built, track is laid, wired up and tested. Now is the time to consider what is going around the tracks - i.e. the scenic treatment. Some might say that the time was actually earlier than that, that the scenic treatment should have been considered before a rail was laid. Well in broad terms it was, but in detail certainly not. I knew I wanted an urban setting, my station would be placed somewhere within the Bangkok city limits, but my thinking has been evolving over the time the layout has been in planning and construction.
     
    Very early on I decided my location would be fictional. Partly this was due to the practicalities of researching a location 6000 miles away, or rather the impracticability of that, and partly it was because none of the Bangkok stations I knew had the sort of backdrop I wanted. I don't think this is an unusual situation in railway modelling, very few layouts are exact representations of a particular location. However as far as possible I wanted my layout to have models of real buildings set in their actual immediate terrain. I also wanted the overall effect to give a good representation of Thailand as it is and not how people expect it to look. But if we are going to take a warts and all approach then it isn't absolutely necessary to place the warts centre stage. I do want an overall positive representation. After all Pendon glosses over the fact that many lived in very straightened circumstances in the Vale of White Horse in the 1930s.
     
    The railway side of things is straightforward. Station building, platform canopies and signal box are being lifted straight from Thonburi, the locomotive shed will be a cut down version and those ancillary buildings (offices, mess, refuelling plant) will be as close to Thonburi's as I can get with the information available. Another structure is a large corrugated iron shed used by the permanent way department, though it appears that by 2016 squatters had taken over part of it. I had a number of photographs of this and using Google Earth to estimate the overall dimensions I was able to put together a drawing to work from. That is now awaiting painting.
     

     
    For the non-railway side of things, my thinking has evolved. I wanted to have traditional Thai houses and a Buddhist temple, but I also wanted to include the sort of shops and shop-houses I saw around Bangkok - a 7-11 mini-supermarket is a must - and I wanted to reflect the modern side of Bangkok. And naturally there had to be somewhere to put street traders and have a market. Not THAT market though, others can fiddle with servos to make collapsing awnings but not me.
     
    The outline design I am working to then is to have an urban village of traditional houses at one end. There is an example of this near Thonburi from which I have taken some inspiration, but I'm not following that slavishly. I have some good photos of three storey shops from some sois off Sukhumvit to work from. One actually housed a fish and chip shop, not the sort of thing you expect to see in Bangkok, but another was home to a 7-11 store. This "traditional" end of the layout is also going to have a temple. Most of it in half relief unfortunately as I don't have space for any but the smallest temples in full relief. Finding a suitable example to model took some time though. There are two temples near Thonburi station. One is a magnificent example but far too large to fit on the layout. It does appear in the background of many archive photos of trains at Thonburi. The other was way too small, more like a little chapel, and bore as much resemblance to the sort of temple I was looking for as a Baptist chapel does to Canterbury Cathedral. In the end I found one through the city tourist map the hotels hand out which had helpfully marked every significant "wat" (or temple) and simply walking down the roads that had a few on them. One on Rama I road fitted the bill. I took loads of pictures - isn't digital photography great - and made some sketches. Again with the help of Google Earth I estimated the size of the main prayer hall and so far I have a quick mockup made of card sitting on the layout to give an idea of the effect
     
    (As a complete aside, Rama I road crosses the throat of Hualamphong station, a great sight from the bridge is the Hualamphong pilot loose shunting coaches, there are clips on YouTube of that)
     
    The key feature I want though, in order to really fix the Thai theme is the golden tower used to store relics. I think it's called a chedi but I stand to be corrected on that. The wat on Rama 1 road has one of the right size and type, typical I understand for Bangkok's Rattakanosin period in architecture. Modelling that will prove an interesting exercise.
     

     
    The middle background will be taken up by the locomotive works, and that means I will have to figure out a way of building the water tower. Thonburi shed is home to the SRT's small stud of working steam engines which get a run out a couple of times a year on Specials, presumably that is why the water tower is still there
     

     
    The other end is intended to reflect modern Bangkok, and I covered this in my first blog entry. This is where I intend my model of Starbucks to go and where I hope to find a home for the Kibri tower crane - which is to 1:100 scale despite the HO label on the box.
     
    But now, what trains are going to run in and out of my station?
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