Booking Hall

Things have slowed down a bit. I spent a day playing testing the track having painted the concrete and ballasted, to check everything still worked. A few areas needed cleaning and some minor adjustments carrying out, but otherwise all was good. I checked the line and level of the bridge and added some packing pieces to some of the pier bases for good support and then decided to tackle the goods shed. The angle of the track serving the shed, and its location, means that it has to be an odd shape, a trapezium in plan, which in turn means an asymmetric roof and a bit of arithmetic to work out the fall on the rear wall to maintain an even roof slope. I designed the shed with openings to utilise the Scalescenes sliding and roller shutter doors from the low relief factory free download, but having cut the sides out and blutacked them together on the layout I wasn't happy. It's too large on such a small footprint. So I spent a day thinking about it and as a complete change, made a 7mm scale model of the caravan I'm living in for the present. I think it will be possible to reduce the overall height and still have workeable door openings, although I may ditch the sliding doors and just have roller shutters instead. Hopefully that will result in a building more in scale with its surroundings. The intended finish is red brick walls and a corrugated iron roof.

Ha! I've more than enough trouble with trams on the club layout we're building!

Bad luck, I hope you told him where to put it . . .

Global warming . . . ??

Bit more progress on my dockside micro, with the dock wall edge finished and a road overbridge built from balsa and card.

Well, building the bridge has taken considerably longer than I anticipated, but I'm happy with the result. The deck is 3mm balsa wood sandwiched between 1.3mm mounting card facings. The balustrade is 2.5mm mounting board with facings and detailing cut from cereal box card, the capping being 2mm grey board. To get the curved section I dampened the core board and clamped it to a biscuit tin overnight and applied the facings afterwards, to avoid wrinkling. The shaped beams below the deck (spandrels?) are cut from 1.3mm card. The pavement is some ancient Superquick stuff glued to card and the whole lot is painted with grey emulsion paint. It needs weathering, but I'll wait to do that with my airbrush when I finally get back home. For the photos the bridge has just been placed on the layout and the balustrade is not yet glued in place. I'll do that after fixing the main structure down. All the mounting board I use I get from a picture framer who has boxes of the stuff taking up space in his workshop. Some of the pieces (the 'waste' cut from the centre of the card he makes the frames from) are quite large, and to get rid of it he burns it in his stove! Following my first visit to 'acquire' some I returned to show him a model I'd built using it. Result - an endless free supply of good quality card!

Thanks again Paul. I didn't know about the proposed preservation scheme, but then, Milford Haven was not a place I paid any attention to before starting this model. It seems like it was a fascinating place, and I feel that I'm beginning to know a small part of it quite well now! I hope the shunting engines found good homes.

Very good Cam, I enjoyed that. Thank you.

Hello Paul, firstly I'm very sorry to hear you've been got by the virus, and I hope that you're soon back to good health and don't suffer any lasting effects. The additional photos are much appreciated as they show views that no-one else seems to have photographed! I particularly like the small industrial diesel shunters. There are certainly ideas there I can use, so thanks once again. The bridge is taking quite a lot longer than I expected, but another few hours should see it completed and fitted in place. I'll post some more photos then.

I have an unfortunate tendency to make life hard for myself. I was planning to make the bridge piers simple rectangles covered with blue engineering brick paper, but having looked at some photos of the prototype inspiration for this model, Hakin docks at Milford Haven. I saw that the actual bridge was a 1930's concrete structure, and decided to build something similar. So, it's taken me nearly all day to make four piers!

Yes, I'll either have to make or buy some. The quayside will not look complete without them!

I decided that the next job was to ballast the exposed track, and started off with the oil tank siding, using sieved soil to start with, graduating to bonfire ash where the rail tanks would unload, then back to soil again as the rails disappear under the bridge site. To be honest, when it was don, it all looked pretty much the same, there being only a few degrees of colour difference between the two materials. It was OK, but I would have liked a bit more contrast, so I went on a scavenger hunt and came back with a potful of gravel washed off the road. I washed and dried it and then dismantled the caravan roof vent to get the flyscreen out, it being the only piece of mesh available to me. Sieving the gravel through this produced a reasonable quantity of ballast-like grains, albeit still not lightish-grey, but I used it anyway with some of the darker stuff in the loco siding. Now on to the bridge. This will be made from a sheet of 3mm balsa wood sandwiched between two layers of mounting board to stiffen it up. The piers will be made the same way. Ordinarily, I would design these in AutoCAD, then print them of and stick them to mounting board and cut them out - in the same way you make the base layers for Scalescenes kits, but I don't have a printer here so it was back to basics and carefully draw the shape out on some cereal box card to use as a template. I need four completed piers, so have to cut eight card outers. The balsa wood core will be 6mm thick for these items, painted when completed to represent concrete.

Hi JCB 3C no. 2, thanks for the positive words. I haven't made a start on the wheelhouse yet, but I think I've seen some other posts on RMweb discussing the same thing. Something to do with the difference between a 'Puffer' and a VIC32, but I didn't study it in detail. I'll have a look at it when I restart on it. Building the road bridge at the moment.

Railway Scenics do a download print for them https://www.railwayscenics.com/downloads-paving-paths-roads-texture-sheet-downloads-blue-diamond-chequer-paving-texture-sheet-download-p-1586.html

I used a flattened out beer can as the keeper, stuck to the backscene support. Just go into your local offie and test the cans on offer with a magnet until you find the ones made from steel. Assuming you don't get thrown out before that, buy some, bring home, pour the beer down the sink and there you are! Of course, you could drink it if you really must . . . .

Thanks Paul, glad I'm doing your plan justice. It's good to get the official seal of approval

Thanks for all your comments and reassurance about the colour. I'll leave it as is and look forward to seeing it after a few coats of varnish. All that's happened today is some colour splodged on the cliff face, the filled areas colour washed and the oil tank siding ballasted (hadn't done this when I took the photo).

Hi Adam, yes, that's the one. He's a very entertaining presenter!

Well, here's my attempt at painting the 'water'. As usual, I think I've made it too dark, but I assumed, being a dock, that the water would be deepish. Perhaps if I drybrushed the tops of the ripples with a lighter bluey whitish colour that might lift it? What does anyone think please? I've also added some brick and stone prints sections to the cliff face before painting, to represent repairs over time to the crumbling and unstable stone, especially below where the bridge will spring from.

Good suggestion Roja, though whether I can achieve that kind of subtlety is another thing entirely. Might try when I put the varnish on.

That's the idea Steve, browns, greens, murky blues etc, darker colours to suggest increasing depth of water. Then several coats of varnish for the shiny surface.

Next on the 'to do' list was coating the cliff face with something that would take paint better than the virgin polystyrene, and to give the water area some texture. After watching a YouTube video on how to create a sea texture I decided to go with the 'toilet roll sheets stippled into place with watered down PVA' method, and I have to say, it does look good! It did cause the cardboard I used to overlay the sea area to bow a bit, but it's returning to shape now as it dries. Tomorrow I can get some paint on both of them. This build is certainly pushing me to use new techniques, and I must say, I'm enjoying myself.

Lifebelts - check. Thanks for that advice Colin, I'll add it to my 'finishing touches' list. And I'll also have a look at the map!

Borrow away Adam! I think I got the idea from another modeller anyway, following which I nipped into the store and ripped of a sizeable piece from their 'sample' roll. It's very cheap that way!

Glad it's looking like a proper harbour Cam, and thanks for that suggestion. I could use it to hide that nasty gap between the bottom landing and the sloping string course.