turtlebah

The class 121 en route to Bridgenorth is waiting for a clear road out of West Park. Unfortunately the passengers might be waiting a while as there appears to be an obstruction on the line holding up the retaining wall!

The warehouse bridge abutments are coming along. A black 5 departs platform 1 with an all stations stopper to Chester.

That water lapping round the harbour wall looks super realistic. What's your secret??? There's no water on West Park, but i've always wanted to create a harbour scene on day.

cheers, Lez. Super helpful.

Awesome, thanks Mark.

Mark, that's amazing! Where on earth did you find such a resource? From a quick scan it looks like the glazing is compensated with a corrugated material (RPM?)? There's also a note about an aluminium finish on the underside. Incredibly useful.

It's just a brilliant representation. Seeing it at Derby a couple of years ago was also almost enough for me to switch to modelling the BR early blue period. The stock used shows such a wonderful array for multiple units.

The bank holiday seemed to pass by so swiftly without me so much as touching a pot of glue! The final choice for fixing the plasticard to the MDF was spray mount, which seems to set with such a strong and even bond. I also used a bit of superglue around the edges just to stop them peeling off and to help with the setting process. So much of this still to do.

I’be got some of that stuff knocking around. I’ll add it to the experiment

I suspect it’s going to be a while before those bits of MDF bear any fruit! i did get round to doing some MDF plasticard glue tests. The winners so far are spray mount and butanone, which both seem to work well and offer a strong bond.

Cheers G. A very sensible answer. Corrugated iron cladding I think would be befitting of West Park’s run down status. Especially with a bit of rust showing through.

Thanks Tony, it appears my initial suspicions ring true. Corrugated iron it is and thanks for the help. I haven’t used the run around for two reasons... Firstly, the crossover at the far end has only just become operational after some serious remedial work required due to some shoddy point construction. Secondly, the station mostly operates with a pilot engine as the majority of services are semi fast or long distance stoppers in the hands of 4-6-0s and so have to be turned anyway so would just follow the pilot and ECS out of the platform. Also, I thought given restrictions on the length of the layout it would give an air of more realistic operation for a terminus. I didn’t really have the space for crossovers in every platform. The one run round loop that exists will mostly be used for shunting the daily goods train to the warehouse sidings, although I haven’t totally figured out what that operation looks like yet.

And what a lovely little layout it is too!!!

I thought the selection of vids was great! And it meant I spent a couple of hours reading the thread.

Hi Colin, I subscribe to digital BRM through Pocketmags and it was on page 114 with 2 or 3 pages of videos thereafter. See screenshot below... Not a huge amount written, but enough to catch my eye and direct me to this very thread, which was hugely entertaining, interesting and inspiring.

Happy bank holiday everyone! I know that you should probably start a model railway with an exact image of how you’d like it to look, but that has definitely not been the case with the West Park station canopy. Whilst I’m very pleased with the base structure (no thanks to Dapol), the detailing needs some serious work. I’ve started toying with ideas for completing the roof and thought I reach out to see if anyone has any friendly advice...particularly regarding the materials actually used on the Western Region in canopy construction. The first photo (from www.disused-stations.org.uk) shows Snow Hill, in a rather sorry looking state. The canopy top construction is glass panels at the ridge with some sort of corrugated materials below. What is the corrugated material though? Iron? Asbestos? The next photo, although only a model, shows the West Mids Scale 4 Group’s brilliant representation of Moor St. This is one of my all time favourite layouts and I’d always try and make the effort to see it whenever it was on show. The canopy here is very similar to that of Snow Hill. The photography below, again taken from www.disused-stations.org.uk, shows a very run down Snow Hill, but you can make out the glass panelling on the overall roof front and what looks like some more of that corrugated material. The final two photos are of Wolverhampton Low Level. It’s very difficult in the first photo (also from disused-stations.org.uk) to see what the canopy roof material is. In the second photo, it’s definitely some corrugated material, but the photo is post closure and it looks fairly new in places, so could have been a temporary fix added at a later date. Does anyone know what that corrugated material was likely to be? Any other inspiration on Western Region station roof materials that can supplement a bit of glass? Given the run down nature and imminent closure of the fictitious West Park a complete and maintained overall glass roof doesn’t feel right

All this arrived in the post today from York Model Making. That's my bank holiday weekend sorted then

It was way to hot to be using a soldering iron in a stuffy attic room yesterday, but i pushed ahead anyway. I finally finished off the repair work on the crossover and two other points that had been causing minor derailment issues. Running is now pretty much seamless. I had to replace the sleeper tie bar on one point, re-solder a few other point blades to tie bars and move a couple of check rails. Even the dreaded Hornby Black 5 can navigate all the point work now. It's all a learning curve i guess. I've still got to touch up the track work where the soldering has taken place, but that can wait. Building shells should be arriving from York Model Making today! Exciting stuff!

Hi @Calidore. Thanks for the kind comments. Equally i also find the research element one of, if not the, most exciting parts. I've acquired quite a collection of western region books over the years and normally pick up one of two more at every show i attend. A nice evening wind-down activity, although i'm pretty sure my partner thinks i'm a little crazy reading books on western region signalling before bed. And yes, anything with less wiring is always welcome. I dread looking under the baseboards sometimes. I'm going to have to tidy up all the wiring before West Park is ready for an exhibition (hopefully sometime early next year), which obviously i am not looking forwards to. Electrics is definitely not my forte.

Knocked up a few more cassettes last night. I’ve probably got enough for a good running session now. I’ve also run out of pin connectors before I can make up the remaining cassettes. In addition I had to fit some plates for the cassettes to slip under (visible on the middle road below) as some were a slightly different height, which a few locos struggled with overcoming. I knew those extra copper sleepers from C&L would come in handy! Unfortunately I’ve realised that the tie bar on the crossover I’ve previously referenced is going to have to be replaced. The point motor keeps getting stuck won’t throw because it’s all a bit tight. It’ll be a fiddly job, but one that is totally necessary.

@RichardV look what arrived in the post this morning courtesy of your recommendation! It's a fantastic book and full of inspiration for short formation secondary services around the Wolverhampton and Birmingham area. For example, there's a Castle on a 3 coach stopper service from Worcester to Wolverhampton, a Jubilee on a Worcester to Stourbridge stopper, and many Hall's on Birmingham to Hereford and Worcester services (all 4 coaches). There's even a patriot in charge of a 3 coach plus sausage van stopper from Stourbridge to Worcester. All of which could be translated into a Wolverhampton West Park timetable. I'd never even thought of owning a Patriot! One thing for sure is that i definitely need a couple of large prairies, once they are released by Dapol (and money permits ), to deal with the local services. They seemed to get everywhere!

Yes G, definitely a bonus. I’d been looking for one of those files for weeks . I too almost exclusively fit Zimo decoders - the running is super smooth and I’m dead chuffed with the conversion. However, it will look a little out of place trundling into West Park with 5 or 6 box vans in tow. Modellers license and all that though. Well done on moving over to the dark side (7mm)! One day, once my modelling skills are considerably less brash, i might have a dabble. Although there’s a couple of bigger 4mm projects I’d like to have a crack at before then.

After much messing about over the weekend i finally came up with a working solution to the fiddle yard!!! In the end I decided to create a support bar going across the running lines with pin connectors that the cassettes can clip into, rather than relying on the track and track clips to create a power connection. It’s so much more robust than the running line i previously had wired up to platform 3, which only used screw contacts to complete an electrical circuit. It is also much less fiddly. The video below is a bit different for once in that it just shows some the work completed this afternoon rather than any real West Park workings. I’ve only worked up two cassettes so far, but they can now be used on any of the lines into platforms 1, 2 and 3. We now have a fully operational layout! Very much looking forward to a proper running session when time permits. I’ve got 3 additional cassettes ready to build (two of which can hold a loco and three coaches where previously any three coach trains couldn’t run fully out of shot under the road bridge). I have got a couple of four coach + 1 loco cassettes, which unfortunately do not fit on the layout, but i thought would be useful at exhibitions. The track needs a bloody good clean after the work’s been completed and before any future running sessions. I’ve heard that giving the track a run over with graphite after cleaning can really help running quality!? I will have to give it a try... The 28xx also made a cheeky appearance, but I’ve got a fair bit of work to do before it’s fully ready for service. Fitting the speaker involved hacking half the tender innards out so there’s a bit of remedial work required after which real coal and weathering can commence.

The model room is a total tip at the moment and needs a good sort out. The whole process of moving the layout a few feet off the back wall so i could get to the fiddle yard behind and start work on wiring up the lines into platforms 1 and 2 has created whole world of mess. I did find some missing files and screwdrivers under a pile of plasticard offcuts though. The whole thing needs a bloody good sort out starting this evening after the little one has gone down (luckily she’s sleeping like a trooper now!). Really not sure what the most reliable way to wire up cassettes is...For my first attempt i tried wedging a copper connector under a screw as You slot the cassette into place, but the connection can be a bit dodgy. I’m thinking of going for crocodile clips on to wired up nails for my next attempt. Unfortunately i only have about 15mm at most between cassettes given how tight the lines are in the station throat. I did finally get my old Hornby 28xx decodered and sound chipped courtesy of John at YouChoos. She’ll hopefully make it out for a spin on the layout this evening. Along with the 9F, it’s highly unlikely that either would have ever been in charge of a small warehouse frieght into a secondary urban terminus, but i just love heavy freight locos. Hopefully one day I’ll have a layout space that means I’m able to run prototypical freight trains.

After watching the select videos on this event in the June digital BRM i've spent the last 2 hours working my way through the thread! What a fantastic thing