whart57

Five weeks to go to the Club Open Day. It's time to focus on priorities, and not try to rush the completion of things that aren't going to be finished anyway. Stockwise I have two completed locomotives, a GE "shovelnose" and an Alsthom, and I have a shunter that runs but is unpainted and not detailed and a class 158 set that runs but still requires the glazing to be completed and the painting finished. I have four finished coaches and a further three on wheels but far from finished. There is also a smattering of completed and part-built freight stock to populate yards with. So the main job here will be to fit couplings to the things I expect to move but don't have them. I use Kadee H0n3 couplings which work as well as H0 Kadees but are better suited to my smaller scale. I am trying to complete the main temple building together with the bell tower and the chedi. Mostly this is a painting job. I occasionally do a bit more landscaping but that is no longer a priority. Two major jobs need doing. I am reverting to DC for electrical control. I wanted to go DCC and that is how the layout is wired, but I am concluding that the Bull-Ant motor bogie with its three worm gears draws too much current for the chips that can be fitted inside the locos. I have had a number of chips blow, one spectacularly while a chassis was on the rolling road. I have concluded that reverting to DC is simpler and more sure of success than trying to fix the DCC issue. Reverting the locos is simple, just a couple of links on the 8 pin socket to connect pickups to motor, but some section switching will have to be installed. The other major job is to make some legs. Originally I was going to lay the baseboards on two six foot tables but I'm not really keen on that, and nor is the exhibition manager who has more demand for tables than he has tables. I just need a few days dry weather so that I can do the dusty woodworking out on the patio. I have the design created for the club's Chesworth layout to work to. Those legs are light, strong and quite fast to build. More pictures as subjects reach the point where its worth taking their picture.

Paint rails first, then sleepers, finally ballast.

Exactly who is obsessed with the abolition of fox-hunting? Some people might like the police to be a bit more energetic in enforcing the law that was passed twenty odd years ago and not let a few posh boys get away with their sneaky games, but I wouldn't call that an obsession. It's the aforementioned posh boys who can't let go of the fact that for most people to debate was settled back around the turn of the century.

Seventeen went to Thailand in 1945. Two were subsequently sold back to the FMSR a few years later. They were somewhat under-powered compared to the Thai Pacifics and as the Japanese had left large numbers of their very good C56 branch line engine behind there wasn't much lighter work for them either. Most were scrapped in the 1950s along with the half dozen Werkspoor/Beyer Peacock 4-6-0s from the Dutch East Indies. The fact they were non-standard and spares hard to come by was what had them off to the breakers yard early. Two apparently remain in Thailand as museum pieces, though where now could be a mystery.

A couple of carriage roofs have now been cut out, given formers and tested on the carriages they are intended for. I tried both 30 thou and 40 thou Plastikard. The old hoover I use for suction (a 20 year old Miele) needed a bit of servicing as its last job had been to clean up after decorators and that had clogged the filters. Cleaned up inside though and it could deal with the thicker 40 thou just as well as the 30 thou and that is what I will use for the rest as it is a bit more rigid. On the carriage front I will need about ten. I have three complete and one 95% complete. Three more are at the stage of the one in the photo, namely basic shell done and painted, bogies fitted and, now, a basic roof. Two more are just a basic shell with a further two still flat etches. Give it a year or two and I might get there. With April 6 fast approaching I have also been doing more on the carpetry - node the missing 'n'. I've been trying a different approach to the wilderness areas. I start by painting the area a basic earth colour using cheap acrylic paints and then cover that with a mix of 6mm and 12mm long "grasses" using the Noch grassmaster. After the basing glue has set and the excess vacuumed off, some areas are treated with a bit of glue and a dusting of Noch "leaves". Areas where the grass is a bit bare are painted with thin PVA and scattered with Noch leaves quite thickly. Small pieces of lichen are dusted with leaves or flock for bushes and some featured plants placed. I'm still experimenting with other ways of representing broad leaved plants. American war gamers refighting the Pacific war require tropical vegetation and things like palm trees and banana trees suitable for 20mm and 25mm wargaming figures can be found on the internet. Quality is very variable, and some offerings would certainly be unknown to the experts at Kew Gardens. But careful selection and a bit of repainting can give good results. A trio of banana plants are intended to fill that hole in the herbage, but the paint is still wet at the time of writing. Some other ideas are being worked on involving offerings from China via Amazon. If they work I will report further.

The handwritten DAT sign in the driver's window certainly suggests that sort of special, though the fact the overhead is still in place and functional suggests that the operations department of the GVB still regarded the line section as "needed". There were (are) certainly sections of tram tracks still in the road in Amsterdam but from which the overhead had been removed. But the "still needed" bit obviously hadn't been passed to the roads department at the council when they tarmacced the Vijzelstraat. The type of tram used suggests a special too. The motor car has had 1000 added to the number which is painted on in a non-serif script. That means post 1967. By 1967 however line 5 had been a bus route for two years. The fact the tram has been fitted with line 5 corner lamps and a large 5 in the bow-collector is probably down to these bits still being in the stores. (The modern line 5 to Amstelveen follows a completely different route)

Tram tracks exposed with gauge bars showing was (is) not that unusual in Dutch cities where most side streets were (are) formed of bricks laid on a sand base much like our posher drive ways. When services work is required the whole lot was lifted but often the tram track left in place to minimise disruption to the tram service. There are signs that the road has been closed for roadworks on the left of the photo. In any case the tarmac scraping is not in the side street (Reguliersdwarsstraat) but in the main road (Vijzelstraat). The other point to make is that the first thing to be removed when a tram track is taken out of use permanently is to take down the overhead. The fact the overhead was still in place and operational suggests the GVB still had a use for that section. Which was, as I posted earlier, as a return loop to truncate services if an accident or derailment prevented trams continuing on to the Central Station.

Found it Interesting are the ad hoc tools being used, The guy on the right is using the rod the trams carry to switch points when the automatic switch either hasn't worked or isn't there. The side street is up apparently though in Dutch cities like Amsterdam side streets are generally laid with loose bricks that are easy to lift and put back. The track's normal use was as an emergency loop for trams coming up from the south (back then lines 16,24 and 25) so they could return if there was a blockage between Muntplein and Central Station. Clearly hadn't been needed in a while.

I haven't been able to find the picture but in Amsterdam it has at various times been possible to hire a vintage tram set for occasions like weddings, the existence of the museum tramline in the south of the city with a connecting line to the main network makes that possible. That does mean that trams occasionally use tracks not in regular use. On a number of occasions this has required the chiselling out of tarmac from the rails while the bride patiently waits in the tram car.

And don't they make you think of German branch line stock of c.1900?

Looks pretty German doesn't it? So probably goes back to the first (standard gauge) railways in Thailand which were built by German engineers. The "Library Train" at Bang Sue and the carriages in the former museum in Chatuchak Park are of a similar style. There don't seem to be many photographic records of trains on the Maeklong or Paknam railways of the early days. A van I photographed in the yard at Mahachai looked very Belgian Vicinal though

The Overground has gone from zero users to 3 million a week in a couple of decades. There is more potential as ULEZ and LTNs make the car a less attractive means of getting to the outer boroughs from just inside or outside the M25. The way the Overground was presented though meant it was not obvious whether or not an Overground train from a mainline junction, Clapham Junction for example, went to where you wanted to go. The new map helps in that, and it will presumably be posted in one form or another at stations across the South East.

One major reason for increased life expectancy is the massive fall in smoking. Among the less-visible charges against our failing government is their somnambulism at the wheel while the tobacco companies pushed vaping on the populace. The price will be paid for that in years to come, but it would have been seen as "anti-business" to have insisted on strict controls from the outset.

I do think it is a shame that the line from Euston to Watford running through Metroland wasn't called the Betjeman Line. After these lines honouring women, ethnic minorities and the gay community (Mildmay hospital was at the forefront of AIDS research), a line named after an elderly white guy with a railway obsession would make me feel valued. 😁

Some London conservatives are saying the line naming rights should have been sold to raise money. That could be quite confusing though as we might mix up all the Middle Eastern airlines they'd end up being named after.

The names are the cheap bit, the important bit is giving the lines brands that actually match where the trains go. The Overground is operated as separate lines so to help travellers - and visiting travellers most - breaking the map up is actually well worth the cost. It will probably repay in terms of extra custom.

Just a quick update. I've been doing more work on the temple. The main buildings are primed and will get their basic colours over the next week or so. Meanwhile I have been preparing Silhouette cutter files for more of the gilding on the gateway and the gables of the temple. Still a bit of a way to go there. The main work has been on completing an enlarged vacuum forming tool. I wrote about this in detail some years ago on the blog It has proved very successful for producing small items such as the canopies of market stalls, corrugated iron sheets and even the sides of a 4mm scale Stephens railbus. However I never made it big enough to shape carriage roofs. I have now corrected that and have made a version that can produce items up to 8" (200 mm) long. As the Thai 3rd class carriages I am modelling have roofs a shade under 180 mm long this second version is big enough. This weekend I produced my first efforts. Shaping the plastic is only half the story of course, and now I am making the first complete roof. When that is done I'll produce pictures

You can probably shorten the gardens by up to 30% without it jarring. Don't forget that you are looking at the model differently than in real life - unless like Rishi Sunak you go everywhere by helicopter 😁 - so full length gardens might look wrong anyway. You may need to rotate the whole terrace a bit so that there is less reduction needed on the shorter gardens at the top.

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.

Now if he was promoting radio-controlled and battery powered then he might be onto something.

Well back in the day of the ubiquitous Great Western BLT there can't have been a cove or hamlet in Cornwall or Devon that wasn't blessed with a railway branchline it didn't have. That's not what you mean, surely? I considered a number of imaginary railways, hard core freelance if you like, ranging from reconfiguring the North Kent coast, to re-running late medieval history (an independent Gelderland with its own railway system linking Holland, Germany and Belgium) or even making up an independent nation. Then I discovered Thailand's railways and that was foreign enough.

Watch the Alice Roberts serial on Channel 4 for a taste of Egyptian Railways.

A YouTube video has been posted recently confirming than No. 61 is indeed among the exhibits at Hualamphong.

A very good layout I saw a few years ago was an British outline one built by modellers in the Netherlands. Though I did think it was a little unambitious of them to choose the Great Eastern in the flattest part of the country ........

Well the first locomotives in Thailand were German, as were I suspect those in many other places away from the British Empire. In the Netherlands the State Railway bought British - a lot of Beyer Peacock - but the Holland Railway bought from Borsig. The alliance between Germany and Ottoman Turkey probably meant German engines and stock across the Middle East in the Ottoman Empire.