Dave John

I have a 15 drawer bisley which sits on a 5 quid castored plant pot stand from Lidl. This sort of thing only cheaper. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/25-30cm-Wooden-Plant-Pot-Square-Wheels-Mover-Trolley-Caddy-Garden-Flower-Stand-/123462846362 All the assorted storage I have in the railway room is on castors, makes moving things about to get access to the railway a lot easier. For that matter so is the railway itself. https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/2091/entry-19250-the-baseboard-waltz/

I do enjoy the old advertising posters. Google the Caledonian golfing girls and see what they sell for now. https://www.antikbar.co.uk/original_vintage_posters/sport_posters/golfing_girl_caledonian_railway/PS0563/ Ouch.......

I upload videos to YouTube and then add the link to my post. This does mean that you need to start a you tube account. Make sure the videos are set to public on Youtube. The link is a long string, just copy and paste it into your post. Have a go, even I managed to get it all going.

Keep it as disposable floor cover. Put it on the floor in front of your layout when you are doing wet works like ballasting or scenery. When it has been dribbled on by pva / paint / plaster etc throw it away.

"Photos of engines at the period of interest are mostly taken from ground level; certainly good views of the tender top rear were not the photographer's priority!" Er, aye. On the plus side the CR had no water troughs. Though the crews seemed to mess about with tool boxes. Sometimes you just have to guess.

Yes Regularity, I have now added it. The wiring to the tender is done too.

Very nice Mikkel. There is pattern here. You have made a cracking model based on a few of the rtr parts. I have made a model with 4 of the original kit parts. Really we have both ended up as scratchbuilders. Down the line I will end up with a pair of RoS 812s . I have a sneaking feeling that I will wish I just started from scratch.....

Thanks all. I think I got the tube from squires Londontram.

I made up most of the tender body and then spent a while getting things level. Set the buffer heights and shim the compensation beams so the footplates are lined through. Then place the loco and tender on the tightest curve I have ( about 48 inch radius ) and that gives me the minimum length for the tender - loco drawbar. The Caley coaches tender kit includes these, but the size I needed was between the two. Easily adjusted. I put the whole thing together and ran it up and down for a while. Tender needs a bit of weight but apart from that smooth. It is always satisfying to see what is essentially a scratchbuild run well. But something was niggling at me. The overall look was right, but somehow the line of things was broken. I went back and looked at photos of the real thing. It dawned on me. Cab doors. The Caley liked cab doors hinged on the tender side plates and opening out. In the shut position they covered the lower half of the cab handrail. They shut them. Looking at pictures of engines out on the mainline they are well and truly shut. Well, they would be. The ballast is a long way down and going past rather quickly. Doors are a good idea. Ok, I then wondered how everyone else had tacked the issue. I searched, I looked, I went away. You see cab doors on tender locos are one of the modelling worlds little secrets. We ignore them, particularly in the smaller scales. I am as guilty of this as the rest, I have built tender engines and quietly ignored the gap. In rtr terms the gap is often the size of the grand canyon to get the thing round train set curves but even in more accurate layouts they seem to be quietly ignored. The problem is simple, models go round tighter curves than real trains so the door would either be too big of too small. Even with my 48” curves the door would have to shrink and expand by 3mm ish. Time for a bit of a think. I ran the D1 and its tender up and down a while and had a tidy up of the bench. A thought struck me, the doors don’t have to shrink and expand, they just have to appear to shrink and expand from a normal viewing distance. Sliding doors in effect. I dug out some fine brass tube, 0.8 mm od, 0.4 id. 4 sections about 20 mm long were inserted into the tender as parallel to the body as I could make them. Ok, the top two intrude into the coal space, but thats where the coal will be. Next I made up some doors, 10 thou brass with 10 thou spring steel wire as the runners. These slid into the brass tubes like so. The hooks at the front go round the lower part of the cab handrails. So with the tender and loco together at the biggest angle between them you get this sort of telescopic action. The proof of the pudding is in the watching….. I’m actually quite pleased with that. It’s probably been done before, so I wouldn’t claim to be original. Just a first for me. Paintshop next. Might take a while.

Through truss girder. Go to Glasgow on google earth, then follow M8 west and onto the M80. In street view you can clearly see the big one over the M80.

Thanks Tony, I'll have a good read of their site, might treat myself.

That is an excellent result. May I ask, did you buy a bundle pack from Ghost or did you source the printer and toner/paper separately? They seem to do do the toner cartridges for a large number of printers, some of which are no longer available so any pointers as to what I should be looking for? Thanks

True knuckles and I have had a lot of hassle with shaving the insides of whitemetal kits in the past. The tops of the splashers there are 10 thou brass and they clear by less than 1 mm.

I have got on fairly well with some free time over new year. The last difficult bit of the body was getting the roof soldered on neatly and adding the cab handrails. The spectacles were giving me a bit of grief, and awkward thing to form in brass. So I stopped and thought about it. 10 minutes later I had enough to do a fleet of engines thanks to the silhouette. The dome and chimney from the DJH kit fettled up reasonably, safety valve and whistle are from Caley coaches. So next step chassis. Calculate the shims needed, carefully clean and paint the frames first. Rear wheels and gearbox in without problems and nicely square. I sometimes find quartering problematic but this one required very little adjustment. The backscratcher pickups are from my bits box of very small springy contacts taken from old electronics. they actually are double contacts but are only the width of the rear of the flange. So, put it under the body and stick it on the track. This is where you normally find the coupling rods foul at the top of their travel, but lo, it ran. This is a dry run, not even oiled it yet. A bit grainy wthj me just holding the camera, but it gives the general idea. Most of the tender is done too, getting there .

You are getting good at that Caley lookalike livery Corbs. Really if it hadn't been for that silly grouping thing I could be having lot of fun. I have an ROD sitting in a box. Why ? Well the Caley borrowed 53 of them. Much as I would like that to be borrowed in the Glaswegian sense of the word it was official, but I'll do something with it when I have done messing about with my D1 "kit".......

Heh , it does look rather like a flying banana Mikkel. The stuff does show up faults well and it is easy to mark with a pencil.

The silhouette software will print to a printer if you want. So far it does all I want, and I just wouldn't be without it now. I used it today to make templates for cutting brass. Draw them, cut styrene, glue to brass, cut round them.

Getting the boiler and footplate fitted together was a time consuming task. Try, file a bit, try again, file a bit more. When in place I could make the spectacle plate and get the whole thing looking a bit like a D1. So here it is actually sitting on the track. Also seems to pass the push along through points and curves without the wheels fouling the body test. In theory that means the Gibson wheels will be fine. From the rear with the motor and gearbox in for a trial fit. There is room for some weight above and to the sides of the motor which I think will be needed. The centre of gravity is ahead of the leading driver due to the boiler and it wants to come back to between the drivers. Ok, this is the backhead from the kit, together with the wheel and worm drive cover. Hmm. A bit of help from the silhouette produced a styrene laminated one which is pretty close to the drawing and can be detailed reasonably easily. Also it can go in after the rest is painted. Since I have slimmed the width down to about scale size the DJH roof is now too big. It is too thick as well, so I thought it was simpler just to solder one up from bits of brass. Should be a fair bit of free time next week so things should get progressed at a better rate. Happy new year to all and I hope your modelling goes well in 2019.

Lidl Maryhill today. Basic Parkside soldering iron and stand kit. £5.99 .

Interesting build Corbs. If you are going to extend the tanks in line with with the size they are now to the smokebox the front splasher/sandbox would look a bit odd since there would be no way to fill the sandbox. Unless of course you make the tanks all the way down to the footplate. Just a thought.

Boiler next. Hmm. I had a look at the DJH one and decided to give it a bash. Well, quite a few bashes. Removed the alignment tags which didn’t align, got it in a jig of scrap wood bits and whacked a lot of lowmelt solder at the gaps. I then filled all the bits that needed filling with lowmelt and attacked the whole thing with a variety of knives, sanders and files. Most of the “detail” on the castings was overscale and I would have removed it anyway. So after a fair amount of work I now have a decent starting point. The whole thing has been given coats of gap filling primer between sanding down sessions, the stuff does seem to fill scratch marks and makes it far easier to see where further work is needed. It is the first time I have used the gap filling primer. So thanks Corbs, I saw the way you used it to fill and highlight areas for rework and borrowed the idea. A bit of an out of focus pic , but you get the idea. Oh , and I painted some wheels… Now the fun of getting the boiler and footplate fitted together.

Indeed, an excellent solution. Good to see you are having a lot of fun with the laser cutter too. Those geared ends are most impressive in wood.

Clever way of getting the alignment right.

I have made some very bad mistakes with paint in the past . These days I cut a bit of something like foam board or plasticard about 3 " by a couple of foot long . I spray the foam board with primer , leave it , If ok I prime the model. Then I spray 6 '' of the the foamboard with the model colour. If its ok ,I spray the rest , if not , next 6" gets sprayed till I'm happy , then the model . Next a sample of the other oversprays or hand paint colours. when dry I look at it carefully, if not happy do more , if ok , do model. Then transfers, try them on the foamboard if ok, do model . Then some lining. Finally varnishes. Do the foamboard bit by bit, if not try a different one . See if it is ok with the lining and transfers. I know this sounds like a longwinded method but I am lost with modern paint chemistry. Paints are just not what they used to be and I can't keep up. I would agree with the above comments about time , a couple of days at least between coats. Longer if its wet weather, RH seems to affect it. My only real advice here is do a test sample first and label them , I am slowly making up a load of these test samples to help me.

Oh, just the normal mix of saws and sanding discs on the mini drill to cut them out. The thin brass for the splasher tops can be cut with scissors , then formed to shape with round things from a cocktail stick upwards. Lots of pins and clamps to hold stuff in position while soldering.