Departmental203

Haha, I ran across those PCAs on the Saturday and didn't have any second thoughts about it since they were complete and had metal wheels which is what I was really after! I'm sure given other exhibitions there's going to be a good selection of depressed centre PCAs kicking around a stand somewhere, even in 2024 where even wagons do lighten your pockets quite quickly 🤔 And yeah, thanks for the offer, like I say, I have little knowledge about the finer points of non engineers wagons, particularly the more modern bogie types so any help in that department will be much appreciated! Regards, Jules

Hi, it does feel quite weird coming back after a long absence but I suppose it's a good way to build up suspense I suppose 😉 well just the inevitable of life things taking charge. And it's a bit of a shame about the Sea Urchins but I really did want to diversify my wagon collection from all things engineers! Well instead of a rotting Sea Urchin, I'll probably have a Coalfish or PCA dumped with a hot box or similar. Hi Jo, as thankful as this info is, it's put a little seed of doubt in my mind about 37254 as it's repaint came slap bang in the middle of my operating period! I'm still leaning towards Colas as it's how I remember 254 given I only picked up rail photography in recent years. But I won't rule out IC just yet though! What surprised me though is I haven't seen too many people have a go at 057, given it's popularity when it was in green. I feel even Accurascale have missed an opportunity there but they seem to be buried with current day celebrities with all of their releases! I've committed to removing all of the moulded handrails but a trip to the model store is required since some of my blades have gotten too dull to make a clean job of it. Well thanks for the kind comments/pointers gentlemen, I hope to keep providing some form of entertainment here! Jules

Hi all, it's been a little bit and quite a few things have happened in the interim period so I might as well give a quick update! As some may be aware, I've made the decision to dismantle my current layout Torness Yard and now I'm planning to do a wagon repair depot, based off the one at the south end of Millerhill Yard. The result will be something much smaller in size but now the opportunity to run a variety of wagon types has arisen, something I've grabbed with both hands! The result of this is I ended up spending over £100 in wagons at Model Rail Scotland and told myself "keep away from the locos!" Oh dear, the crazy things one can spend their money on, as we shall see later..... Turned out to be quite lucky especially with the cement wagons, bagging 6 Hornby/Lima depressed for £20 complete with metal wheels and a Bachmann JPA for £25 (albeit in battered condition) that will hopefully one day be modified to represent the type seen working out of Oxwellmains. And the Cavalex BBAs are easily one of the best RTR wagons I have ever seen, I now seem to have 2 of them working into my possession! I've tried to represent wagons that are seen on a regular basis passing through Millerhill and it provides a nice variety to my hitherto uniform lot of engineers stock. To recoup the costs somewhat and to accommodate the proposed new fleet of wagons, I have sold quite a few things, aiming at things that are out of period such as the Rudds and Sea Urchins that you may have seen on this thread. Well, now they are no more and have found new homes, it would be nice to see how the new owners take these on and hopefully they'll see a higher level of completion and more use! This extends to a few locos and a DMU since I don't do passenger stock anymore. Rounding things off with the wagons, I managed to get my scratchbuilt MHA looking all pretty with the paint, decals and varnishing complete and now it's a matter of waiting for the varnish to fully cure for a few weeks before it receives the "engineer's treatment"! The lamp brackets were made from a piece of bent brass sprue soldered to a piece of wire to act as a mounting peg, which was pretty awkward to do. Ok, now onto the "crazy things one can purchase...." basically, I've now got a farm with a couple of Class 37 purchases! This one was bought from eBay at a fairly reasonable £95 given it has full working lights and 21 pin capability, this will eventually be reworked to represent 37254 but I need to do a little more investigation as to when it lost its Intercity colours in favour of the Colas house garb. As pleasing Intercity is, my image of this particular 37 is strictly yellow and orange so most likely I'll go down the latter route. Next up is more interesting...... This is one of the first Bachmann 37s with the basic chassis that only has 8 pin capability, 2 driven axles per bogie and 4 wheel pickup. Rather backdated by today's standards and as you can also see, one of the corners of the bodyshell has broken off, which might leave you scratching heads as to why I bought it. This is another eBay purchase, from a person who clearly wanted to part with it. I wanted to challenge myself in seeing how far I can take this loco in terms of functionality and detailing and give it another shot at glory by giving it some desperately needed TLC, lights and extra details! I plan to swap the chassis on this model to one of the newer examples which has all wheel drive and pickup and the ability to support lighting but still only has 8 pin capability. I still haven't found out if the bodies and chassis can be easily swapped however there are strong similarities to both designs so I'm confident it's feasible. This one will become 37057 when it was famously seen around the network in its heritage guise, including (what it seems) a working boiler. So far, a start has been made to repair the damage, I've used small pieces of 60 thou black plasticard cut into wedges and stuck together to follow the curve of the body and left to dry. I plan to use epoxy and brass etch to reinforce this piece as it's in a vulnerable area. As for buffers, Sutton's Loco works do some very nice ones intended for their Class 24 and 25 models which I plan to adapt to fit this one. For consistency, I have removed the original Bachmann buffers at the other end, now both ends of this model look equally distressed! Now, I'm trying to see if I can cleanly remove the moulded handrails at the cab doors in favour of homemade brass ones, one has been removed with a decent level of success so there's no turning back now! More Tractor news, I have finally decided to take the plunge and I have bought one of the Accurascale ones, this one representing 37607 in it's initial DRS guise with the rectangular logos, I plan to eventually strip this off and put "compass" branding in its place, bringing it forward to my operating period of 2015-2018. However, I don't think that will materialise for a while given my fear of ruining a well detailed and expensive model! I was surprised that a few retailers still have a few in stock so one was snapped up as soon as my payroll came through as I don't think they'll be hanging around for too long. Inevitably, people are selling used examples around the £200 mark and beyond......😬 Completing the update, I have pre ordered Accurascale's model of 37218 in it's "retro" repaint that was unveiled over a year and a half ago at Crewe Gresty Bridge and again, I plan to rework it into its prior appearance when it had the large DRS "fade" vinyls. I figured this one won't hang around with the retailers for too long hence the commitment, as much as I don't really go for the latest models, I can safely make an exception to this case! I've also done the same for Dapol/Rail's of Sheffield's Class 88 which slipped under my nose for months and put my deposit as soon as I knew about it! Rounding the loco side of things, I bought a secondhand Class 67 in EWS livery for south of £100, an opportunity which wasn't to be missed! I'll be away for a few weeks with exams around the corner but I do have some pretty exciting things for the summer at least! Regards, Jules

Ah I see, never mind then! To be honest I made this assumption based on the photos on Martyn Read's website while I was doing research for my own OAA based of the much older Hornby model, which incidentally turned out to be the same one as yours 100023! I did find a pic of this one dated 2016 just before scrapping and doing the planking in different colours was quite an interesting exercise. And that's cracking work on your one, need to pick mine up and finish it off haha 😄 P.S. since I model the 2015-2018ish era, the real example only made it into this time bracket and was in storage, so now I have the little guilt of having a model that didn't operate in that time in real life.......well Rule 1 applies!

From what I heard, wooden bodied 100048 with Redland extended height ends made it to the very end of OAA operations on the network last year, apparently outsting all of the mesh examples! Sadly, this one had the extended ends and cutouts in the lower body to accept ratchet strap mounting points so will need to be added to accurately represent it. Photo from Martyn Read's excellent website although beware that a lot of his pictures are dated around the mid 2000s so bear that in mind. From what I'm aware, I'm not sure about the fate of any of the other wooden bodied ones so I recommend typing in your desired wagon number into Flickr search, chances are, one or two photos will pop up which isn't ideal but better than nothing! OAAs worth looking up are 100033, 100088, 100098 and 100099 as they seemed to escape mesh conversion but could have been withdrawn by your modelling time. I did the same one as EWS60065's model of 100023 in it's final years and that OAA research has still stuck around! Jules

Hi guys, thanks for the comments and I didn't know that the wagon works at Millerhill was still used for its original purpose, thought it was just used to stable locos between engineers duties. I have a few pics from a Colas driver on my laptop seeing some locos stabled there, including an 88 that was less than 3 years old at the time peeking at the weeds! I plan to replicate the stabling somewhat by shuffling locos on and off for added interest and give my growing fleet of locos something to do as well ;) And I wasn't aware of anyone having a crack at Oxwellmains, sure it would be quite an impressive beast once finished.....hope that gets underway Jules

Hi Bill, sorry for the late reply (life stuff getting in the way somewhat) but I do like this concept for a layout that has restricted length and I think it's quite clever, which allows you to get scenery on the whole length, but has one caveat....you do need a fair bit of girth which, sadly my room as it stands, doesn't offer. I only have 2ft of depth at best even with the layout right up against the wall and I also plan to operate it from the front in my house and from the back whilst exhibiting to allow a decent bit of flexibility for different situations. This also creates a question mark with the fiddle yard design as I would ideally would like a cassette to allow stock to be swapped with ease but how do I allow for both front and back operation with this? All of these questions I hope to answer soon as the opportunity to get really stuck in this project arises soon with uni work dying down for the summer! Also ta for the pics, they were helpful to visualise the concept and it might be one I may pinch for a future layout (!) Jules

Hi Bill, thanks for providing some insight. It's not an idea I've considered before, and with some clever design, it could work. What would be very helpful is if you had a diagram or a worked example of the concept so I could get a good idea of how this would work. What I'm imagining is one end of the layout will have the repair shed and the wall facing the operator would be removed so you could access the rolling stock from there? So you have three walls of the building visible but an access hole to swap rolling stock within the confines of the repair shed? From memory I don't really recall any layouts that don't have fiddleyards but I have seen sketches of some and I have to say, very clever! As I say, although I have a fairly clear idea of what the layout could look like based of Alcanman's design, I wish to keep my options open and explore different possibilities in the name of creativity! Thanks, Jules

Hi Alcanman, this looks like the Tees Yard model I was talking about! This is the kind of thing I'm aiming for, not a "as much track as possible squeezed in the basebaord width" approach but with enough to play trains with, it seems to be a hard balance to get right given 6ft of scenic space. I recon I have 2ft for the fiddle yard which should be enough for my longest loco (Class 60) plus my longest wagon (JNA Falcon) so we can have some serious "super shunting" to happen! Hope you don't mind if I nick some of your elements from your Tees Yard layout 😉 as for example the real location at Millerhill is surrounded by trees and has a rough dirt road for DB staff vehicles and there's no way they would keep grass from growing absolutely everywhere! Thanks for posting this and the kind remarks, hope to provide some entertainment good sir Jules

Hi all, I have made the decision to dismantle Torness Yard and replace it with something more manageable. I have explained the details of my reasons for doing so and the beginnings of the replacement layout in another forum so I'll put the link for that here to avoid repeating myself. Was this layout a waste of time? No actually, it taught me a lot of things, not just about the importance of having level baseboards (!) but the importance of composition and provision of space when it comes to building and designing layouts, trackwork and wiring. I plan to recover the trackwork and the ballast for the future layout and I have made a start on this. Paused for a moment to allow me to focus on uni work but will continue afterwards. With that, I'll close this forum but my workbench thread should still be alive and kicking as well as the new layout forum so, new beginnings, as they say! Thanks to everyone who has reacted and commented here and passing advice on in general. Jules

Hi all, For those who are in the know, I've been working on a home based layout, Torness Yard for a couple of years now (7 if you really want to count 😬) which was going to feature a small terminating station for Scotrail DMUs and a small engineers yard to keep my engineering wagon needs satisfied! Regarding this, I made the decision last month to halt progress on this and dismantle it. The reasons for this decisions are a bit of a list but basically, I had too many frustrations with it which made me lose my mojo for it. A combination of tight trainset curves, short sidings which meant I could only run 4 wagon trains (at a stretch) and 2 car DMUs, point motor gremlins, lack of operational flexibility and the fact it took half of my room. The last straw came when I found that there was a big dip in one of the baseboards which meant that when I tried to use Kadee couplings, the wagons would pull on the couplings, meaning that no uncoupling took place due to unwanted tensioning! I figured to fix that, I would have to rip up the track on that baseboard anyway. Additionally, regarding my future as an undergrad engineering student, the next 3 years or so could go anywhere with potential of moving out from home thus I figured something small and portable would be best, which would also allow me to exhibit as well. Bit of a rant there but I'll stop there and move on to the interesting stuff! Anyway, I'm in a small group called the Scottish Modellers and two years ago, we started a "layout in a box" challenge where we would have to make complete, working layouts to fit in boxfiles made by the Really Useful Box Company. I talked to the member who did the baseboard cutting for this (he has a laser cutter) and he was happy to cut out a few basebaords for me so I could, become a late entrant to the challenge. However, to avoid the pressure of having to meet deadlines with other commitments, I'm not in the competition but I'll still be able to have baseboards done by someone other than me, which I'm relieved about! To be able to reuse the now extensive list of engineers stock I've got, right for the start, I settled on some sort of wagon repair depot as I realised I didn't have the space to represent an engineers yard or even part of one. This would also allow me to model wagons I've never done before, and at Model Rail Scotland, I already diversified with my wagon purchases! After a bit of research, I was attracted to the WRD at Tees Yard but someone on here did a nice version of it himself many moons ago so I wanted something a bit more unique to avoid duplication. I remembered that on the south west end of Millerhill has some sort of shed with sidings going through and next to it, which I realised was a wagon repair depot. Although it's no longer used for this purpose, I liked this concept and the basic trackplan for this quiet corner of a busy yard was ideal for what I was looking for, shunting interest without cramming lots of track on a small baseboard. Basically, my idea is crippled wagons would be shunted on the line beyond the first row of trees behind the blue building, stop at a kickback (out of shot to the right) and reverse into either the shed or one of the adjacent sidings for the wagon to get patched up and get rolling again! I don't have space for three sidings so I'll settle for one, which still should allow some interesting shunting movements to occur. Additionally, I'll shorten the trackwork so it can all fit in about 6ft of space. In other words, the trackplan is based on Millerhill with the compactness of Tees WRD. I've attached one of Tees for comparison (credits to the owner). Much more modellable than the expansiveness of the one at Millerhill! Although I plan to have the scenery based off the one at Millerhill, this could change as the layout design evolves. Although I have a good idea of what the track layout will be like, I decided to put it on a piece of paper to have it as a record. I have two slight variations in the track layout, although I'm leaning on the top one, the other one is included for completeness. Of course, there's still a lot of final details to sort out but I feel this one could work out well, provided I plan carefully and remain open minded. Dismantling of Torness Yard has been paused for a moment to allow for studies but with a two week Easter break around the corner, hopefully by late May/early June I'll be ready to start this new project. Hopefully, more updates to follow as I refine the design and make some major decisions (basebaord size, fiddle yard type being the main ones so far) and I'll likely be active with the workbench, which as stated, will have something other than engineers wagons for maximum entertainment! Thanks for reading and happy modelling all. Jules

Yes, my apologies, turns out that they use the new models but have the old artwork! Not the first time that's happened to Hornby but infamously, there have been cases where the artwork was correct but the model was wrong 🤔 In that case, I'll probably try to look for old/cheap HAAs/MHAs as donors for my last conversions (but never say never as they say 😁) so will be a case of looking for unboxed examples hidden away at exhibitions! Jules

The 60 I bought was a secondhand version which was missing the detail pack including the ploughs. Hope wasn't lost as I found that a chap that goes by the name Rusty Rails does a 3D printed version of these ploughs which look quite good so I'll be modifying those anyway! https://www.rustyrailsmodelling.com/shop For the MAA, I've seen two or three models of that and all of them to my knowledge used the early iteration of the Hornby MHA, which was basically too tall for the real thing. From my experience you can find them in exhibitions as I'm guessing Hornby produced a fair amount before realising they dropped a spanner in the works! Although, given you have a chassis already, the scratchbuilding route would probably be more viable as it's not too tricky as the body structure of those wagons isn't that different from normal MHAs. I hope to get the Class 67 + MHA pack that Hornby did a couple of years ago which curiously has the early version of the MHA. My plan is one becomes an ex MAA and then the other two will be two more scratchbuilds of the later bodied version for consistency's sake! Jules

As some of you might have read in my workbench forum, I've been on a year long exile from here due to personal reasons, now that things have calmed down somewhat and a resurgence in mojo a few weeks ago, some more progress has been made on the layout as I got tired of it just collecting dust, not getting much attention..... The more I looked at the sidings in the "ballast yard", the more I loathed the ridiculously tight curves I employed to create as large of a gap between the sidings as possible and decided to take the fairly drastic action of ripping them up and relaying them! Additionally, with my switch to Kadees, I found that the delayed uncoupling would really struggle on such curves and took the opportunity to fit permanent magnets underneath the tracks. More on that later! As a quick reminder, this is what this end of the layout looked like before the "destructive" work commenced, with the eyesore curves there for everyone to view! To remove the ballast, water in a Fairy bottle did a surprisingly effective job of dissolving the glue and I could use a screwdriver to scrape it off, being careful not to damage the Sundella surface below. Give or take 2 or 3 days and this is what resulted! I did slightly damage the Sundella surface in a few spots so fresh wall paint was used to seal in the damage. I find that painting Sundella surfaces is an effective way to reduce damage and it might be able to keep moisture out which is detrimental for the compressed paper material. The track was easy to take up as it was simply nailed in place and it was cleaned up after removal to get rid of the glue deposits and stuck ballast. The aim was to have the sidings at as gentle of a curve as possible to appeal to the eye and allow for reliable delayed uncoupling, which I did using these rectangular neodymium magnets I got on eBay to keep things simple. I felt that using electromagnets would have complicated things a bit. To take the magnets, I cut a recess in the surface (really easy with Sundella) and made sure the magnets were far apart enough to ensure the Kadee couplings would open reliably in both directions using a piece of plastic square section. After I relaid the siding, I couldn't resist popping my 68 and some wagons on it to take a few shots! These views made me regret my clumsy 15 year old self's decision to have these very train set type curves on such a key part of the layout with bogies in full swing! Work has started on the second siding to the right of this one, which will be more difficult as I don't have much baseboard to work with! Thus, a "part 2" to this should follow, whether that comes out in 2 weeks or 2 months is at the mercy of uni, work and general life things! Thanks for reading, Jules

Funny that you say that James, I seem to have the opposite problem as I model the 2015-2017 period and keep getting models in early privitisation liveries secondhand, EWS, Transrail and two tone Freightliner grey being the worst offenders! I tend to stick to secondhand anyhow to keep the costs down (student's budget) but getting fruitful bargains seems to become increasingly challenging....hopefully the wave of new models can encourage younger modellers who don't have as much money to throw away to get started without having to resort to Lima! And yes, I can confirm youth seems to have a bargaining power for getting stuff on the cheap....I'll have to take advantage before time inevitably runs out 😂 And if you ever encounter the Junction Box, definitely check them out as they seem to remain very level headed with their prices (such as £100 for a 37/5 or £28 for a Seacow) but thanks, will check out Ellis Clark given the opportunity 😉 Jules