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TheSignalEngineer

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  1. TheSignalEngineer

    Quick Mineral Loads

    By TheSignalEngineer,


    wagon loads
    After a mad flurry of restoring some old Airfix 16T minerals I turned to doing a few loads for 3H Coke Hoppers. Two of these I built a long time ago, the third came second hand from the web.
     
    Although these were being done for the coke hopper, the same method can be used for any open wagon and any mineral load.
     
    As I was doing three I decided to cut a template first. This was done from 80 thou styrene and sized to sit on the lip below the raves.
     

     

     
    Next was to make the base. As the load needs to cover the gaps between the raves thse need to be quite thick, so having a scout round in the odds box I found some offcuts of foam board and some 6mm balsa. I used balsa for the latest ones as it is cleaner to carve than expanded polystyrene but some of the previous batch used two layers of foam board. A couple of legs are needed at the ends to keep the load level so these were made from balsa strips 10mm wide which I found is easy to glue on and gives more rigidity if the load is to be taken in and out.
     

     
    These were assembled and the top of the balsa carved to the profile required with a craft knife, then test fitted to make sure it was the correct height and shape, and as I wanted them to also run as empties that it would come out easily.
     

     

     
    All that remains is to colour the top and sides with the colour of the load, coal, ballast, stone, ore, etc spread the top with PVA and sprinkle the chosen mineral. For coke I use crushed smokeless fuel.
     

     
    It's then ready for checking the fit. This one is waiting for the load to be finished off.
     

     
    Other examples under construction using the same method are power station coal in a 21T Mineral using coal dust as the topping and a 7-plank of crushed anthracite
     

     

  2. TheSignalEngineer
    Over the last few years whilst planning a layout but not having enough spare time to build it I filled a lot of odd hours preparing rolling stock. Much came in secondhand, so there were general repairs, weathering and minor upgrading in progress. This Blog will be the story of ongoing cut'n'shut jobs to produce things I want but can't get RTR together with buildings and other jobs in the railway room
     
    A big problem is storage. This topic comes up repeatedly around the site. My work in progress usually resies in small cardboard or plastic trays recovered from various packaging. Whilst this is OK for throwing bit in for later use when stripping a model it isn't much use for keeping stock in a handy place when not on the layout. Cardboard stock boxes seem fine for long-tern storage but don't look robust enough for what I had in mind. Plastic boxes from Really Useful Box are good, I've got several for various purposes but they tend to be a bit pricey.
     
    Being ever a bit of a bodger I headed off to my timber stock to try some experiments. I found a few nice offcuts of nominal 3" x 1/2" strip and a lot of 6mm pine offcuts. I looked at sizes, already having an IKEA cabinet with drawers of a similar depth which I use for tools and materials. The cabinet is about 24" x 18" so I set about making some trays that size. Strips if 3/16" wood were fixed across inside the bottom to stop the stock from from moving around. Now for testing time. I filled a tray. Great - it held about 60 wagons. I put 16 coaches quite easily in the next, with a little bit of modification to the strips it went up to 18.
     
    Then I tried locos. Disaster. The full tray was too heavy to handle and awkward to get in and out of the shelves. Back to the drawing board. I decided to cut a tray in half, producing two trays 18" x 12". These turned out to be much easier to handle and held 28 wagons each. The othe was done as well which gave me room to store over 100 4-wheelers of 9', 10' and 12' wheelbase. The finished article looks like this.
     


     
    Now off to modify to take coaches and locos. then build a rack under the layout for storage
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