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Morphaniel

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    http://www.morphaniel.com

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    Carlisle
  • Interests
    All kinds of railway modelling, computing, gardening and small holding

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  1. Going back to this - excellent - question... Rails shipped my LH medium to me today. Into the teeth of a postal strike, naturally, but after three years of having a hole in the middle of my layout track plan my patience is well polished 😀
  2. Thoroughly agree with most postings here... as a 'subscriber value' gift this knocks the socks off most of the competition (although I did appreciate the budget airbrush from one of other mags!). The quality is excellent and and has obviously taken someone quite some time to do - they must have briefly considered not including the ads, which have always been wrapped around the content - my own paper archive of RMs had the ads stripped away 11 months out of 12 just to save space in my loft but they make a fascinating read as the decades go past. I don't enjoy reading electronic facsimiles on a screen or iPad as I want to relax when I read for leisure so will buy the current issue in paper for as long as they sell it but it's fabulous to have access to the full archive when you want to lose some hours of time...
  3. Thanks all.... very interesting and it's certainly answered my question. I do realise that modellers of all kinds might be interested in simulating 'scale length' panels but P4 is associated with 'greater realism', so I focused the question - no offence intended... I model in 00 using Peco track myself and am considering cutting the track into scale panels in my yard layout. With the turnouts across the layout the standard track lengths will have to be cut anyway and it seems like an easy additional nod to real life - I am using bullhead rail and C&L plastic fishplates. I shall have to look into the question of the sleepers!
  4. I'm not a P4 modeller and don't aspire to be but I have recently been musing about scale rail lengths on layouts set prior to the 1960s and was wondering whether P4 or similar finescale modellers lay track to scale length? The wisdom of the Internet suggests that mainstream rail lengths between the second world war and the '60s was 60ft on the mainline and 45ft on branches (subject to repair/relaying - and of course there were dozens of standard rail lengths in use in earlier years and for specific operating companies prior to the war, but let's keep it simple ). I have heard of some modellers who notch rails at scale length or use cosmetic fishplates but it struck me eventually that the P4 standard may have something to say on the subject. I haven't been able to find anything about rail length on the reference pages I've looked up though and rail length is rarely, if ever referred to in articles in the model rail press. Can anyone enlighten me?
  5. Thanks! I saw something similar at an exhibition a few years ago, so I don't claim the idea. I should have said that this new version was done for me by RazorLAB...
  6. Well, the gang of labourers haven't turned up to date... but in the meantime a whole cityscape has been built outside the layout... I got this professionally lasercut in black card to the same design as my original paper print. The paper print was showing signs of wear and the card strengthening was extremely complicated to cut out cleanly. In the intervening months I have also spent much armchair modelling time thinking about the track layout, with the result that I am back on the pure yard them in which shunting is the name of the game and run around loops and the like aren't required. So the new track plan is this: The entrances into the yard are on the right, under a cut down Metcalf viaduct that crosses the board. The curved line ends inside a Ratio carriage shed and the two parallel tracks on the left end inside an engine shed. With all the track being Peco Bullhead, the eagle eyed will have noted the pivotal reliance on a double slip in the centre of the plan. I'm a patient man... So the view of the layout currently looks like this:
  7. 3 Episodes in and I'm enjoying it very much - not only that but the viewing figures quoted appear to be backed up by increasing interest outside modelling circles. The number of colleagues who have come up to me at work to talk about the show has been outstanding and I noted that the Guardian TV Guide last Saturday picked up the show as a highlight and wasn't condescending in the write-up. Modellers are forever complaining that the the hobby is dying out and a successful show of this nature cannot do any harm, particularly as the efforts being portrayed will strike a very close chord with parents and children who may be giving half a thought to train sets as Christmas presents already. I am very impressed by the two hosts, both of whom appear not to be modellers but display real enthusiasm across the three days. On my wish list for the next series would be the replacement of the endless brief shots of the Fawley Hill railway with an equally short exploration of the more typical model layouts in the 'sheds, garages and lofts' of the country that are referred to in the opening titles. The layouts produced on the show achieve their purpose and are entertaining but I don't see any reason why a minute or two could not be spent looking at the more careful work produced by the teams in normal circumstances, for instance.
  8. Agreed. While the pre-built items were clearly of good quality, they cannot have seriously believed they were within the rules and did their brand a disservice. My wife (no modelling fan) rated them badly as soon as they started to claim they couldn't be beaten and I'm pleased that Kathy came out so strongly in favour of holding to the rules.
  9. This isn't the point.... the Bake Off contestants are all competent bakers - the competition element is precisely because they have a time limit imposed. Even if you compare the top ranking chefs appearing on The Great British Menu then the time limit becomes the differentiating factor. This is not a programme attempting to show how good modelling can be, it is a competition about what can be achieved in 24 hours.
  10. Progress so far... The backboard is a single sheet for the full 8 foot length. The tolerances in my fitting of the end boards of the baseboard kits meant that bolting them together tightly caused the centre to ride up a little. With them slackened enough for the boards to sit flat, using the full length backboard adds stability and strength. This whole unit can easily be lifted and spun around at present. The backboard bolts on with a number of bolts and wing nuts and will not have scenery attached directly to it so it can easily be removed to make the layout portable. Having painted the backboard white, I have ordered a lasercut screen from Razorlab (http://www.razorlab.co.uk) to replicate the townscape background on the original version of the layout. I never got beyond cutting out the first two A4 sheets of this and it will be £50 well spent to have the full 8 feet cut professionally. Trackwork has been delivered to the site - what I need now is a 4mm gang of labourers to turn up...
  11. I thought long and hard about this because I had plans for the white space to the right of the sidings. But in the end, especially given the length of the lower spur, I had to agree that some method of getting a loco out from behind it's load was going to be necessary to make operations more interesting. Since I don't have the space to do something fancy, I simply extended the two lower sidings and connected them, as below. ​It's not just armchair modelling either - now that Christmas is over I have a few days free for practical work! Happily the Grainge and Hodder baseboard kit arrived before Christmas. Beautifully packaged for transit it's incredible how light the boards are compared to my previous hand built job. 6mm ply instead of the 9mm I used previously but they must also be using a fundamentally lighter type of ply. The boards in the kit were straight and clean and the joints were tight enough for a solid dry fit but should certainly be tacked as well as glued if you're going to move the board much. I tacked them using a light duty electric stapler charged with 14mm nails and was relatively generous! The boards come with end panels that contain cutouts to accept 25mm pattern makers dowels, which is perfect for me as I had trouble fitting these to my earlier boards. I also have my 2.5mm cork sheet for the top surface. As I said above, I'm not a big fan of cork but these baseboards are so light that I suspect the cork will be very useful to dampen the top surface vibrations and will also allow me to pin track while the glue dries.
  12. So here we are, closing in on the end of 2017! it wouldn't be true to say that Back Yard has been abandoned exactly, but progress since my last post has been achingly slow. Of course, I don't claim the record for slowness, lack of achievement or any such thing - we all know that railway modelling has a high failure rate! What I have mostly been doing since the last post is firming up my back story in my head, collecting a few more locos, thinning out the collection just a little to marry up to the back story and getting more freebie wagons from the Bachmann Collectors Club. And I have definitely been spending almost all of my modelling time reading about other people's layouts, rather than building mine... I visited Warley for the first time this year. After spending all day in the show I came aware inspired by the trader's stands, rather than the layouts and as a result, I have taken the momentous decision to do a rebuild of Back Yard in an attempt to address some of the niggles that perhaps are dampening my enthusiasm for actually getting on with something - and hopefully a second go should improve on the mistakes and compromises of the first one. The first issue to be tackled is the baseboard. My own attempt, illustrated previously, was robust and flat but heavy and with a poor baseboard joint that the track has never been fettled over properly. I have now decided to buy two laser cut baseboard kits from Grainge and Hodder. This changes the footprint of the layout slightly to 2400mm length from 9 feet but the width remains the same at 18". The second issue is the trackwork, which was previously Peco Code 75 clumsily adapted for a more realistic sleeper spacing and laid on cork strips. The cork strips have been a big problem. They are poorly laid under the pointwork and the thickness varies slightly - all of which means that the trackwork is occasionally not as flat as I would like. Most importantly, this is a yard layout and having track on cork strip doesn't make sense. So for the track, I have decided to build my own instead... Hah! Just joking I have decided to use Peco bullhead... I still like the idea of British sleeper spacing and have looked at all of the alternatives to Peco track many, many times but there is a high proportion of pointwork in my yard and I want it to look good (and work) and I don't see that happening if I don't use off the shelf points. I considered Marcway and even spent quite a bit of time trying to make the invisible part of the DCConcepts Legacy track page stay visible long enough for me to look at their upcoming pointwork but in the end, I concluded that my modelling efforts would be best served by sticking with Peco. Of course... that means that all of my pointwork in the yard is now large, where it was small, so I spent some hours with XtrkCAD to come up with a plan revision. Oh yes... and I will be laying the track on cork sheet roll. Partly because I have some and partly because it will allow me to pin the track while the glue dries easily. I'm fairly convinced that that is the main advantage of using cork at all. Comparing the new plan (above) with the original, you can see a short siding missed off in the centre, the bottom left siding/shunt is rather short and the top right siding omitted. The short siding never made much sense and losing it was already decided before the trackwork decision. The short siding/shunt on the bottom left is temporary (I hope!) to be lengthened by replacing the long bullhead point with a short one if and when Peco provide one. The shunt length prevents access to the adjacent siding by almost anything that is coupled to a Class 66 or similar but if XtrkCAD is correct, my Hattons Garratt will just make it and I have quite a few small locos for shunting the yard... It may not be pretty or prototypical but I still like this plan. The vast area to the right hand side that has no trackwork is mostly occupied by a viaduct, which partially hides the track behind it, which for all practical purposes is my fiddle 'yard'. There seems no real need to do anything else. At home there is no more space and if I ever get this finished and show it, I will need to knock up a storage board that will connect here. In the meantime, I have a length of track where stock can be lifted on and off 'backstage'. I'm continuing to use DCC - I like it. Pointwork is controlled by analogue slow action motors. I used Tortoises before and could easily re-use them but I am seduced by the Cobalt range and will almost certainly make the change as I already have their switches and much else besides. More soon. Don't hold your breath
  13. They are superb, especially for 4mm - the level of detail is just fantastic! You said it was a 1980s office though and while I'm not a railwayman, I was surprised to see computers on the desks. You'd certainly be forgiven for using model computers in place of green screen VDUs but I am a bit surprised that an office such as this would be computerised at all...
  14. Dave, Bit late replying to this but a couple of years ago, there was a stand at Workington Model Show from a model shop in Botany Bay that specialised in American kit buildings (certainly Walthers but a fairly broad choice). I rarely go to Botany Bay myself but Googling does turn up a reference to Hoyles Model Railways The Shunters Yard, which I guess is them, if they're still there... Roger
  15. Another vote here - not least because my own effort at a hard standing is currently stuck at 'shiny'!
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