KevinH

Some photos of buildings I have been modelling

Bought myself a new toy I actually only intended on buying a decent mitre block and saw but this wasn't much more. It makes cutting these a whole lot quicker and more accurate even when recycling old baseboards. These are the long sides of the 1st triangular board.

Starting to think about further boards to the right and I'd hit a bit of an impasse with plan A (right hand side of this image) I'm trying to keep to my goal of having 610mm x 800mm boards but the lines split here with the London bound trains heading East and the Southampton bound trains heading South. Had a light bulb moment when I tried rotating one board by 45 degrees although it does mean having 2 triangular boards as fillers. That is going to test my carpentry skills! The London tracks can disappear off to the right under the Daisy Dell footbridge which I have artistically moved closer to the station. In fact the whole sidings area has been compressed somewhat. You can see the original map in the background. I got to thinking whether the same would work at the western end of the plan and with careful bending of reality it sort of does. Maybe this will actually fit in a room one day... This also means I can fit the large flour mill on the front of the left hand angled board without compression which I was struggling to achieve in planA. I'm a great believer in creating paper models before committing to plywood so I printed out the three right hand corner boards and laid them out on my dining room table I think it kind of works but I'm open to suggestions from the more experienced modellers on here. The Southampton curved line also goes downhill to Andover Town and thinking about all the different levels and slopes on these 3 boards is making my head hurt

Amazing what difference a bit of coloured paper makes And some coloured card from an incomplete kit. A watercolour pencil ( and spit) to hide the white edges and dirty it up And voila I may have overdone it a bit so will try and tidy it up when I have time

Bank Holiday weekend experiments with the Andover East A signal box Unfortunately I've not left enough space between the tracks so I've had to compress it slightly It will look better dressed with brick papers etc A view of the underside showing the construction techniques using 1.5mm balsa sheet

Some careful trimming and reglueing of the deck undercarriage (?) and handrails and its looking nearly finished - well structure wise at least. I also cut the wheels off the peco deck and fixed them underneath but I can't get the camera at the right angle to capture them I've still got to add the hand crank and what I assume is a brake lever

I'd be the first to admit that I'm tackling this project in a rather haphazard fashion. At the weekend I had an inspiration for the 50ft turntable and ordered this lazy susan bearing. Lazy Susan Rotating Aluminium... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TQT9U7U?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share The inner ring inner diameter is just under the 100mm required. I added a ring of plastic for the pit wall sawn off from the end of a waste pipe fitting and built a frame from balsa which sits in a hole inelegantly hacked into the baseboard. The pivot is a plastic marker lid drilled through with a stereo 3.5mm socket stuck in it The matching plug connects the power and is free to rotate. I cheated a bit with the deck as I had some parts from an incomplete peco 75ft turntable which I trimmed and filed to size The plan is to add some cladding to the pit sides and bottom and some underside support girders to the deck. I don't have any plans to motorise the turntable although I am tempted to add some gubbins to allow me to crank it by hand from the front of the board. More to follow when I have time to complete it...

Spent Saturday afternoon getting covered in glue as I decided it was time to tackle some scenic stuff for a change from track and points motor wiring. Here is the base for the engine/power house which housed a pump to send water from a well up to the water towers. Making steps... Steps in place and experiments with contour formers for the bank Using up all my offcuts to form a slope where according to one of my maps there were allotment gardens (present day - a car sales company) Next I got busy (aka messy) with newspaper and watered down pva glue to form the slopes It looks a bit of a mess but it's starting to resemble the picture I have in my head Paper mache complete and undercoated with my favourite mud colour. You can also see my experiments with the layout of buildings that make up the power house and coal shute

Reposting some images of the construction of boardE. This will include the junction hotel, station approach and the engine sheds and turntable The woodwork is a bit messier on this one as I'm recycling some old baseboards from my last aborted project. As ever my trusty helper kept an eye on proceedings

many thanks - sadly I can't remember the town station although I vaguely remember the level crossing. I've got that site bookmarked and have lots of good reference material - although more is always useful. In particular I'd be interested in any photos of the goods shed (west of the junction station building) from the road/car park area.

What started out as a Saturday morning job ended up taking most of the weekend. By some miracle it all fitted (with a few small adjustments) when the trackboard was put in place. I got busy with my multimeter and tested the wiring. Had to swap the polarity of one of the set of outputs on the GM500 relay but otherwise it looked good. I even managed to build a temporary control panel. Then I hit a glitch. The circuit switching the points and relay worked fine when testing each individually but when wired together only the PM2 points motor worked. Luckily I googled and found a helpful tip on this site ( thank you AndyID!) about bypassing the resistors on the relay board to increase the voltage and it was soon working. I must admit despite the burnt fingers and abundance of swearing I do feel quite proud of myself. Of course I can't really run any trains on such a limited amount of track and although I could lay temporary rails left and right I really need to start building the next board so I have more room. Next up is a simpler board to the left of the first one. Well simpler to construct as the majority of it is flat trackbed, but with much more track and a total of 11 sets of points. It's the Eastern end of the station with the East Signal Box A, turntable, LSWR engine shed (top) and MSJWR engine shed. I've compressed the depth slightly but note the blueish copies of the LSWR shed and turntable showing an alternative layout closer to real life albeit requiring the shed to be partly low relief. I'm tempted by this though as it does give the option of tacking a hidden fiddle yard behind the scenes accessed through the shed...

Spent the weekend wiring the track junction over the Charlton Road bridge. This is where the line down to Southampton used to split from the mainline to London. Looks simple enough. Three points motors and an extra latching relay to switch the long crossing frogs. However, the space under the baseboard is very restricted here as the junction is directly over a bridge. The two left hand points are also very close together. So I started wiring and swearing at my poor soldering skills... To get the two close point motors to fit I had to get creative with bending the shaft of one. It had to be cut into the baseboard as there is another track to lay directly over it.

thanks for sharing this gem - this was happening on my first attempt to use a PM2 motor and GM500 relay to power the points frog and connected diamond crossing frogs with one switch. Bypass jumpers installed and it works a treat!

Here is my latest AnyRail plan - with the board I have started on indicated by red arrows This is the bridge I am modelling and my progress so far

I agree. There are lots of interesting structures to model. My pictures above are of my first attempt at the bridge over Charlton Road. Whether or not I will ever be brave enough to tackle the flour mill is another matter...