Darwinian

So the D37 is approaching the home straight. Completed bodywork just needs some detail painting and fitting the commode handles (hmmm.) There is a basic interior to provide compartments and a guards area all done in plastic card and ratio seat mouldings. You can see that the "smoking" signs are oversize for the widows but they look better than a blob of paint and the rub on, early period ones I used in the past are no longer available. Once this is done I will be making use of my MERG membership and building the servo operated signals. Learning curve on the horizon!

Thanks MrWolf, and I didn’t tempt fate by showing them as the satin varnish has gone on nicely. Still plenty of opportunities to botch it all doing the glazing, interiors or weathering. Gulp.

The D37 has now had the livery applied. Black/Gold lining is from Fox and the rest from the HMRS Pressfix. I find the tiny numbers really difficult to apply in the waist panels and these are about as good as I could manage. Both sides shown prior to application of a protective coat or two of satin varnish.

Back to the wagons. The GWR open is just about done, although I may revisit the weathering, it's a bit uniform. The fictional P.O. needs buffers and I had planned to put steel heads into the plastic mouldings but the heads are out of stock everywhere I've looked so I ordered some cast buffers with integral steel heads from Wizard Models and have cut and drilled off the plastic buffer housings. The fading lettering looks a bit more believable in reality, the camera is cruel.

For the first time for nearly 4 months trains were running again into Cwmhir. 5223 arrived up with a 6 wheel toad to collect the colliery fulls from the exchange sidings. The shunter uncoupled the van. (Dingham coupling being operated by a buried permanent magnet). And 5223 ran forward into the loco release. Much to my surprise everything worked until one combination of point settings produced a short. After a frustrating few minutes trying various switch throws to see if the point motors were not going fully home to change the frog polarities I remembered that in hot weather the expansion of the rails was causing a short where the rails either side of a baseboard joint were touching when they were not supposed to. Sure enough slackening off the inter board catches solved the problem, so I will have to remove a little fro those rail ends.

Well here is my rendition of those brackets: They are from 15 thou black plasticard. I think the upstand part is possibly a tad tall. How they would have been painted is unclear from the image above and the pictures in Russel only show dirty roofs. As to when they appeared, my guess is they were a feature from new. The picture from stevel above looks like the lake livery and the loco tender has the Great - Garter Arms -Western style. The pictures of the D37 in Russel vol 1 show it in postwar days (BR?) and the brackets are visible in both eras.

That’s perfect as it clearly shows the brackets from that end whereas I had only been able to find views from the compartment end and a lower viewpoint. Thanks for posting it. Although they are sufficiently prominent that I had better add them to my model.

That was my thinking too but they don’t seem to appear consistently between diagrams. They look as if they bracket between the roof deck and clerestory side to me.

The diagram of the D37 in Russel vol. 1 p187 and pictures on p182 appear to show a pair of some sort of bracket on the lower roof deck above the van area. Something similar appears on some other clerestory brakes, but not all. They clearly are not roof board brackets so what are they, were they on all examples of the D37 and how do they actually fit? If this can’t be answered I think I will leave them off my model. Any thoughts welcome.

As promised: In more or less ex works condition. The P.O. wagon has been hand lettered for a brewery in Cwmhir (fictitious of course) and is actually a nod to our daughter (one for our son done already). The lettering on that was done with a Posca pen (0.7mm) for the off white and a 0.4mm black permanent marker for the shading. Both vehicles were brush varnished with Galeria acrylic matt varnish. The Posca lifted a liittle so I made sure any streaks were downwards. The 04 had been gloss varnished with another Windsor and Newton varnish and needed two coats of the matt to knock it back.

I've been back to working on the open wagons. Hopefully I will get them ready for their ex-works photo next week. I sat down to apply the lettering to the GWR 04 wagon only to find my Pressfix sheet had run out of GW letters the right size and Tons Tare scripts. Quick online order to Fox transfers was delivered in two days. The ability to slide the GW letters around is a definite bonus of waterslide transfers. I do however find that compiling the wagon number and Tons Tare using waterslide transfers is a lot more stressful than Pressfix. The bits that have been applied tend to lift and shift very easily. Luckily I do have enough Pressfix numbers left to do the numbers on the wagon ends, that are always more of a faff as you need two hands to hold the wagon and another two to apply the transfers!

Don't you just hate the way the gremlins creep back in when you're not looking. Hope you get it sorted easily enough.

Thanks for your kind words Mikel. I will try to replace as many missing images as I can. I was vaguely aware of the existence of communal bread ovens and was reminded by a piece on TV about the origins of the Lancashire hot pot.

The D37 Brake is coming along nicely and I've done the undercoats (Halford's rattle can etch primer on the body/bogies and standard primer on the roof). This one will be in the normal late 20s Brown and cream livery, single black and gold line plus heraldic shields. My standard concoctions of Vallejo air acrylics for the main colours, although the brown has come out a little lighter than previously for some reason. There are about 4 airbrushed coats of each colour. Masking along the waist panels was done with Tamiya masking tape and then the rest covered with el cheapo masking tape. So far so good. Forgot to do the clerestory sides brown though, doh!

The two issues I found with the bogies were. 1) The inside bearings significantly increase the rolling resistance compared to pinpoints. However they are the bearing points for the axle springing. It would probably be possible to ditch these and just fit pinpoints. I'm not convinced these springs actually deflect in practice as the coach is fairly light. 2) Clearance on the brake shoes is very tight, they need to be carefully trimmed if fitted.

This turned up on a search of the site today: I'm planning to try something similar but using a fibre optic into the lamp instead of wires and LED.

Thanks for that. Posts duly ordered. Now I have all the bits I need to start.

That's a splendid photo of the bread oven and a better angle for modelling purposes than the one on their web site, thanks for sharing. It also helpfully shows the arrangement in the doorway so I can get on with modelling that now. i'll post a picture when I get to that stage. It will go next to the cottages on Cwmhir which are at present the scalescenes ones. I have also made enough progress on the D37 for some more pictures. compartment end has the alarm gear, this is scratchbuilt from bits of wire. The chain connector housings were from square section brass rod, filed to half round and then slivers cut off with a piercing saw. The saw is then used to cut a small clearance slot in the flat edge for the cross rod to pass through. And here is the whole coach with it's roof. The scroll irons need adjusting and the underframe needs a lower step for the guard, a gas cylinder and the brake rodding. Can anyone explain how the guard's brake would be connected to this? Where in the guards area was the brake standard?

That’s brilliant, I’ve not seen 20t wagons loaded with props before. Now I’ve got something else to try.

So the open is done and I've also built a coopercraft 04 so back to some layout modelling. Time to have a go at the Bread Oven. As the St.Fagans museum's bread oven https://museum.wales/stfagans/buildings/georgetown_oven/ came from Merthyr it seemed a suitable prototype to follow and my row of miners cottages would be about the same period as the Rhyd-y-car terrace. Doing some rough scaling from a Modelu figure and the pictures on the Beamish museum site of a gentleman firing (?) theirs I came up with a plan for the model. I have tried to allow for the distortion caused by the viewing angle on the St. Fagans picture but might have made it a bit too wide across the front. Here is a cereal card mock up to test the idea.

Given that the props were likely stored in the open at docks and pit it seems unlikely they would be sheeted. There are certainly pictures of whole trains of props travelling up “the valleys” that are open. Several different ways of loading them depending on their size too.

Of course it also depends how much sideplay you need and how much the hornblocks/bearings stand proud of the frame.

Completed gear compared to standard kit version (single sided in this case)

Now that’s what S. Wales valleys railways were all about. Nice work Johnster.

Well putting together (soldering) the brake gear took as long as the rest of the kit. This is the "Before" style of brake on the PD wagons which are the same Cambrian Kits underframe. And here the masokits version, although I haven't put the brake handle and it's rack on yet, which are a marked improvement in appearance over the simple and rather chunky plastic kit ones. I assembled these onto a base plate made from part of the etched fret waste areas. Masokits brake components do not seem to be available any more. I could have used the Bill Bedford ones as seen on the LMS D1666 kit shown earlier in this thread but I couldn't find them! I know I still have some left, no doubt they will turn up when i'm looking for something else. Just got to do the second set for the other side now. No cross link as this represents a wagon that has had the second set added, having been built with brakes on one side only.