hartleymartin

Where did you get those stirrers? I've never been able to track them down. They happen to be about right for doing industrial railway tracks with code 100 rail in O gauge.

A new version of the plan. I decided that I could get a better layout from four 1,000 x 600mm scenic baseboards. It is only 400mm longer than the previous design, but I think gives a more favourable overall span. Lengths are compressed slightly - around 80-90% of scale size. Modelling trains from the era 1902-1905, the orders were that the Manning Wardle locomotives were allowed 3x four-wheel goods vehicles plus the KA type tramcar carriage on the down journey and the up was allows 4x four-wheel goods vehicles. The length of the station platform road will more than accommodate the maximum train size for this era. Not shown on this diagram is the road bridge which will hide the exit to fiddle yard, but also that there were large embankments at that end. The dead-end of the line is comparatively sparse and I may have to concoct some scenis features for that part of the layout in order for it to work scenically. Just to put it into perspective, a fully laden down train will be just 830mm long and a fully laden up train 970mm long.

I find a lot of vans get "side suck" where the sides curve inwards after a few years. I started putting 6.4x3.2mm styrene strips on the inside of the van and a couple of cross-struts, usually one either side of the doors. This gives a bit of extra structural rigidity to the body and prevents the sides from bowing inwards over time.

You can get sprung W-irons as an add-on kit. Slaters sell them. There are also a few 3rd party suppliers.

A good tip with scratch-building is that you don't have to make every single part yourself. You can make use of ready-made components if they are parts which are either too complex to make yourself or require tools/equipment that you don't have access to. Premier Components make a nice range of coupling rods and connecting rods. Some prototypes have ready-made chassis kits. You can also get components such as buffers, couplings, chimneys, domes, boiler back-heads, etc pre-made as castings. Also look around from suppliers of pipe and tube. You may be lucky that you can use a section of brass, copper or plastic pipe which is already the right diameter. Don't limit yourself to one material. Make use of brass, nickel-silver, pewter/whitemetal, plastic, wood, etc. You may find that you prefer certain materials to others. Make the model modular - you want to be able to disassemble the model into sections which will make painting, decals and detailing a lot easier. You may also find that you have to partially disassemble the model in order to make adjustments to or lubricate the motor and gearbox. I find it particularly helpful if the sections are held together with 8BA screws.

Whilst a lot of scratch-builders work in brass, you can do plenty with plastic sheet and bits of PVC pipes and tubes. By sheer co-incidence, there are many locomotives where a 25mm or 32mm pipe is within a fraction of a millimetre of the correct diameter of the boiler.

The easiest way to start out in O gauge is with Peco Track and an RTR locomotive such as those offered by Dapol and Minerva. I would also recommend getting yourself a few wagon kits. Peco, Slaters, Parkside (now owned by Peco) all have good offerings. There are also quite a few small suppliers which will give you a variety of older or more unusual prototypes such as: https://pregroupingrailways.com O gauge is still very much a builder's scale - you'll make things from kits, but there are also lots of parts suppliers these days and it is a good size for starting out in scratch-building which is significantly easier in this size.

He also did one on building a 4-4-2 Tank Engine, which I found a very useful read.

A re-design of the kit is that the body and roof will glue up as one piece and the floor/chassis will be a separate piece. I have to re-design a few things since the arrangement of the tabs and slots assumes building the body on top of the floor, but this will ensure that the roof forms perfectly to the body.

Are those king-posts/queen-posts available as a separate part from Slaters? They look like something I'm going to need for a scratch-building project?

There was an article some years back in Railway Modeller and/or Continental Modeller on converting this exact turntable into a 45 ft O gauge turntable with a new deck. I don't have an index and only buy RM and CM sporadically. Someone here might know more and can help you.

The only trouble with plasticard is that I've had warpage problems over the years and as this is an unsupported roof over an end verandah, I want something that will stay put for the most part. At one stage, I was going to just use strips of scale timber glued together and sanded to shape in the manner of carvel planking, but not something I'd recommend.

Can anyone offer suggestions as to suitable card materials for the roof? Whilst it was cut in 0.8mm laser-ply, I have found that the roof is too stiff, and the sides will leave irregular gaps. I'm wondering if it may be better to design it so that the roof and body are one piece that separates from the chassis for the purposes of interior painting, detailing, etc.

Had to make a few adjustments to the roof underframe. It was about 1mm too long and needed a few passes of the file down the sides to fit inside the built up body. Had a real hard time figuring out how to attach the arc roof to the frame, until I remembered that clothes pegs are basically lots of tiny spring clamps.

Test build continues, and a few more corrections need to be made. Buffer-beams are a few mm too narrow. Not sure how I let that goof get to the laser-cutter. However, the buffers - Slaters MR, which are extremely close to this prototype - are the correct press-fit and the coupling hook - Dapol, pre-assembled dummy screw link - fit correctly. Just have to get the etches for the plates drawn up. Those will just be held in place with glue as they are decorate only.

Fire seems to be a bit of theme with this model project. There were four prototype KA tramcars. One was sold off to a private railway and lost in a fire in the 1950s. The sole survivor of this class was restored in the 1980s, but lost in the 1993 Parramatta Park arson attack.

Test-build under way. So far I've only needed one sharp hobby knife, one steel rule, one small file, one bottle of CA Glue and one paperclip. The fun part will be writing up instructions for a kit. Oi Vey! I put an alternate headboard on each side. This one is for display at the March 2020 Aus7 Forum, where in addition to the Expressions of Interest I already have, I would hope to be able to take orders for a kit.

For those who may be interested, some weeks ago I began work on the KA "Tramcar" Carriage and today the first set of laser-cut parts arrived. A few blunders in the design to fix up, but I could cobble this into a model. There has been sufficient local interest to do a run of these as kits, so I need to improve things before I can sell it as a kit rather than a "kit of parts" Follow the thread on this development here:

I wish I get see more of those British Pathe films. Jane to Jollity of the Wantage Tramway looks interesting, but only 1 minute is available.

Thanks Dava, I am fortunate that my own home is quite safely far from the fires, but several places that I visited in the past few months have been hit hard by this year's bushfire season. The little village of Balmoral in the Southern Highlands was completely destroyed, and I had driven through there not 2 weeks before. The Railway Museum at Thirlmere deployed three bogie water tankers with over 100,000 Litres of water near Buxton, just up the road from Balmoral, for the local Rural Fire Service to use as an emergency supply. A great local initiative, and I had been hoping and praying that they would have no need of it. Sydney has been suffering on and off with some severe smoke hazes which were almost as bad as London Smog just after WW2. Two men from the Horsley Park Rural Fire Service unit (not more than 15 minutes drive from my house) lost two members just before Christmas when a burning tree fell on their Firetruck. Bushfires are a fact of life here in Australia, but these have been the worst since the 2009 Victorian Bushfires - a year when large swathes of the country were either burning or by cruel irony, washed away by floods.

Test piece arrived today. A few minor blunders with the dimensions of the tabs and slots, but everything else has come up pretty much as I had hoped. This shows how the layers are built up to form the ends. The prototype carriage had louvered timber shutters inside the glass to provide shade - very important in sunny Australia! The sides and alternate headboard panelling came out well, though one of them had mis-aligned etch lines - one of the many tiny corrections/improvements to be made. The floor peice and under frame. The frame members here are cut from 2.5mm basswood. I originally planned to do these in laser ply, but these have turned out much better. The roof has a series of formers and a thin sheet to form the arc. I originally planned to have tabs to locate the roof, but I am considering changing the roof to either thinner ply or perhaps a type of thick card which would more easily form the arc.

I've used standard Hornby controllers and more recently a standard Gaugemaster hand-held. My locomotives are all small 0-4-0 and 0-6-0s and rarely haul more than a 5 or 6 four-wheel goods wagons and I've never had a problem.

Hi everyone. I'm looking at scratch-building an NSWGR M40/Z11 4-4-2 Tank locomotive. The superstructure isn't going to be a problem, as it is a pretty straight-forward prototype. My questions at the moment relate to building the chassis. In particular, I am wondering about the arrangement for a front bogie and the trailing axle. I believe the prototype had some form of radial axle. Should I build it basically as a 4-4-0 and have the rear axle free-floating? *edit* I will be building this in 7mm scale, 32mm gauge, GOG Fine Standard. Builder's photo from Wikipedia and article linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_Wales_Z11_class_locomotive

Not much to report. Just waiting for the laser-cutter to send me the first test piece.

Hi Zach. One thing to check is the weighting of the wagons. NRMA standards don't apply here. The Gauge O Guild recommends that wagons should weigh at least 1 gram per 1mm length over the buffers, and no wagon should weigh less than 125 grams. Or about 1 ounce per 1 inch length of wagon, over the buffers. Also, with goods vehicles, there should be about 3mm or 1/8" gap between the buffers on straight track. This will help prevent derailments on curves. Otherwise, it is the usual case, of read instructions, take things one step at a time and if something seems wrong, check it. Have fun with British prototype modelling!