Fairport Mk2

[1722]

Super work, particularly the woodwork around the board.

I’ve often wondered about a floating shelf as a baseboard myself, how solid does it feel on the bracket?

Looking forward to progress.

[47137]

The whole assembly is pretty solid. Ikea put some capacity figures for the Lack shelf in their instruction leaflet: 5 kg hung on wall board, 15 kg hung on studwork or masonry. Even the smallest of these figures is quite a lot for a small layout.

 

If you had a bare shelf on its bracket, there is free play vertically of about 5 mm at the front edge of the shelf. Of course the shelf sits down under its own weight, so this play is only by lifting it upwards. I’ve got a 300 mm deep ply backscene fixed to the shelf, and with the layout pushed back so the backscene is touching the wall, there is no free play at all. The big bonus is the recess inside the back of the shelf, which accepts a batten as well as the bracket (photo in the first post in the topic).

 

There are two small holes in the underside of the shelf and screws supplied to fix the shelf to its bracket. This is sensible for a book shelf but for a layout I like the convenience of being able to take the model away from the wall to work on it. The screws would remove all the free play.

 

The shelf is quite a snug fit onto its bracket (the two steel prongs) and it needs some care to get them both aligned with the holes in the shelf when you want to slide the shelf into position. I suspect the longer version of the shelf would be a bit tricky to install onto its bracket, maybe a two-person job.

 

There are a few sizes of shelf and I think they would make a good basis for a fiddle yard. The construction inside is a sort of cellular cardboard, with strips of chipboard around the edges, so it is not too easy to fix things to the surface except with glue or by cutting a large hole and gluing in a piece of wood. Also wiring inside is much more difficult than a conventional baseboard. But plain track should be easy.

 

The finish is a high gloss, rather smart really and it looks good in my room, and of course you get a finish on the underside of the layout too which is a bonus if it is in a room where you might be sitting down and looking up underneath.

 

- Richard.

Edited December 23, 2017 by 47137

[Allegheny1600]

 it's more troubling to me when my layout topic has 1,400+ views and no-one seems to want to add anything :-)

 

 

Hi Richard,

Please, do keep posting! As Marc mentioned, sometimes folk just don't know what to say!

I hope it's nothing more than that but I worry that some folk don't take an interest because you're using an unusual scale (for UK outline). I don't do a lot on here because I get a feeling of anti-anything not British RTR 00 but I may be mistaken.

The fact that you do keep rising in viewing numbers may well belie this, hopefully. I certainly find your work interesting and inspirational, however.

 

Interesting figures on how much load the IKEA shelves can bear btw, they must use good rawlplugs.

Cheers,

John.

[47137]

I've encountered (and endured) people at shows who come across as personally threatened by British H0 - as though it challenges the very core of some sort of belief system. I expect some of them are on the RMWeb too. There are some pretty insecure people out there - when I took one layout to a show, a guy strode up to me as soon as the doors opened and delivered a 20-minute rant about the inadequacies of my entire model. Clearly he had read my write-up here, and needed to make his opinions known to me in person. I'm sure the anti-whatever brigade are out there, but they rarely appear in this rather pleasant and gentle little corner of the forums. Long may it stay here like this.

 

- -

 

I want to tackle a "processing plant" to be the industrial installation at the end of the layout, in front of the mirror. I have the Faller kit for an old-time cement works (their p/n 130951) and this has loads of parts to get me started - silos, pipes, ladders, walkways and so on. This is the box cover:

 

The vertical elevator can go at the front to hide the front edge of the mirror. The mirror will enhance the number of silos and the size of the plant.

 

This ought to keep me happy for hours.

 

It will be Christmas soon ... best wishes to everyone who has enjoyed this topic or my blog during this year, regardless of course of whether you have written anything on them or not. Happy Christmas.

 

- Richard.

Edited December 23, 2017 by 47137

[47137]

Rants over forever.

 

I also promised myself no more posts until after Christmas, but the Faller kit is like Christmas and birthdays all rolled into one. It contains hundreds of parts, some for the model on the cover of the box, some for at least two other kits. Truly this kit plus something from the Wills "Modern" range and some Plastruct ought to yield every industrial structure on the island.

 

Looking for "balance" on this part of the layout, the processing plant at the left needs to look sensible against the trees and cottage (or something else) at the right. So I have taken the parts of the elevator and some of the silos and glued them together into sub-assemblies for a first mock-up.

 

This view is close to how I will usually look at the model:

 

Two views from steeper and lower angles

 

And all of this in an assembly barely 40 mm deep:

 

The up-ended container here represents a chimney. After I took the photos I tried out parts of a low-relief warehouse in its place, but it just looked like "low relief". Whereas, a model chimney with a rectangular cross-section will actually look like a square chimney.

 

I like this, I can imagine one or two more mirrors appearing around my layout.

 

- Richard.

Edited December 24, 2017 by 47137

[cklammer]

Hello Richard,

 

 most cement works contrast very much with their surroundings: it very often looks to me as if aliens have plonked down in the middle of the landscape. So cement works live from the contrast they create in respects to what is around them IMO!

 

Merry Christmas,

Christian

[kevo]

Hi Marc . just wanted to say  hendre lane  is one of the best depo  type layouts  ive seen  really well done  

[47137]

Hi Kevo - yes - there's masses of inspiration on here. The challenge for me is to make it work for my own schemes, without wholesale plagiarising. I might have chosen a less ambitious structure for my first attempt with a mirror, something a bit more robust would have been good - but I've started and I'l finish :-)

 

Christian - yes - the structure can look pretty stark, but it needs to allow a physical balance across the whole layout. So the structure is going to be quite a bit lower than the building on the cover of the box.

 

It is not actually a cement works. It is the processing plant for industrial waste, pretty much the hub of the local economy. I need to alter and add to it, to make it look like something not seen elsewhere. I wrote a visitors guide for my blog a few years ago, but it was too incomplete to make sense. Here is an extract from my present draft for Fairport, written up a while ago but your post is spot on ...

 

 

During the 1960s, the World was gripped by a new age of innovation. The moon landings and supersonic air travel made copy for headline writers everywhere, but the discovery of an astonishing mineral called “fytes” (pronounced fy-tees) and found only on Shelf went unannounced. Put simply, fytes acts as a catalyst with liquefied industrial waste to extract numerous heavy metals especially palladium, cadmium and lead. The process of conversion turns any mixed slurry of unknown provenance into an apparently harmless liquid, which the islanders are dumping into the sea.

 

Fairport is the western terminus of the railway, and the waste reprocessing plant is here. Uninformed visitors have been heard to remark that the processing plant resembles a historic concrete batching plant, but its purpose is really quite vital to the local economy because it removes the heavy metals from the otherwise bulky and worthless slurry. Regular railway traffic here usually includes tank wagons, bullion vans and parcels traffic. The plant has its own diesel shunter, one of the 1970s Matchbox MB-5 class.

 

Fairport is also the terminus of the islands’ new tram-based passenger service. The newest tunnel has proved too claustrophobic for the island’s ageing fleet of steam and diesel engines, and the government has bought a modern tram from Bombardier. The railway has also acquired some sleeping coaches from the old London-Paris Night Ferry service. These can been put into use as camping coaches for visitors.

 

It is most fortunate the location has a siding, because the intensity of traffic quite belies the remote location and lack of population. The railway’s permanent way train is usually stabled here too.

 

The village benefits from its exposed location, where the prevailing winds keep the air fresh and clean, in spite of the intense industrial activity. Over the years, many of the locals have developed peculiar ailments, not seen elsewhere in the world, and it is good to see the new passenger platform is fully-accessible to all.

 

The story is in a state of flux at the moment, I struggle to write enough detail to set the scene but not so much I define the model. The idea is to portray an idyllic place, but with a certain unease in the air.

 

- Richard.

Edited December 26, 2017 by 47137

[47137]

I am putting the model of the plant together on an offcut of plywood. I had to shorten both sidings to fit this in. Construction is going to be a mixture of wood, card and styrene:

 

I know this topic is tagged "British H0" but the only thing I have done different to an 00 layout so far is setting the height of the buffer stop. If this was 00, I'd put it about 2 mm higher in its rebate in the plywood.

 

The mirror is a harsh judge and I ended up fixing the vertical steelwork to the wooden walls in a way which let me adjust things to keep verticals truly vertical. I put small brass pins into the wooden walls, cut off the heads and then pressed in Milliput to hold everything together. I had to trim this blind because the model was in position on the layout, and the photo makes things look worse than they really are:

 

Here is a new mock up for the end of today:

 

The mirror really does play tricks sometimes. I think it is showing my window blind, but the computer is too far away from the layout to go and check.

 

I was stuck on making a half-round chimney for the corner until I hit on two lengths of quadrant beading glued together. The square chimney is four lengths of 6 x 6 mm strip wood, all glued together touching at the top and with spacers between them at the bottom. The power house is a piece of foam board with strip wood behind it. This building ended up looking a bit like a public toilet so I added the duct work and I can brick up one of the window openings too.

 

I like the old Hornby Dublo hut here, even though the window shutters are a bit romantic. I think the important thing is to vary the depth of the models as well as their height.

 

I can see a possibility for vertical lettering on two sides of the brick chimney. For example "P EAST" on the right and "P WEST" (in mirrored letters) on the left. P meaning "power". I'd like something more imaginative if anyone can suggest. Ideally, the mirrored text to use letters which are symmetrical left-right or I can make from others.

 

- Richard.

Edited December 27, 2017 by 47137

[Huggy]

Just caught up with this, having been away for a month pre-Christmas. Great stuff, Richard; lots of ingenuity in a small space, and using not only a comparatively unusual scale and stock and buildings to go with it, even the baseboard is "different"

Edited December 28, 2017 by Huggy

[Huggy]

Oh, and what a prodigious work rate too; well on the way to completion while I've been on me holidays - respect!

[47137]

Hi Huggy, thanks for this and welcome to the forums.

 

In the past, I have tried to write about only things I hadn't seen written up in the mainstream press. With time, I am running out of fresh ideas so I am now writing more about techniques which are my first attempt. I am sure I have read about Lack shelves (and of course mirrors) elsewhere on the RMWeb, and it is good they seem to be working for me.

 

Progress has been satisfying but do bear in mind, my models have very little detail in them. I am trying to keep edges crisp and clean, but there is always a chance I will decide on something else so for example at the moment the power house is pretty minimal. I do have trouble visualising things and it is best for me to sketch in all the main elements of the layout full size and then either progress them to completion or do something differently. Ideally I'd like to have a set of parts to build the scenic setting, with everything set out on a table waiting to be glued down pretty much at the same time. This ought to help me avoid excessive "finishing off".

 

Today I emptied the layout and painted "the sea" onto the back scene. The sea is another match pot of emulsion from Wickes, this one is called "Rock Pool":

 

The backscene could end up very simple, just an empty sea and an empty sky, but I might quite like this.

 

I do find putting the layout into a convenient place helps so much for this kind of thing, and this is so easy with a micro. I would be cautious of ever building a permanent layout where I had to do this sort of thing in situ.

 

- Richard.

 

[47137]

I would never wish to say anything detrimental about Wickes' emulsions palette and I'm sure there are many lovely bathrooms decorated in "Rock Pool". However a broad strip at the bottom of the sky really does make an excellent representation of the open sea, on a cloudy sort of day with hazy shadows.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

I can see a possibility for vertical lettering on two sides of the brick chimney. For example "P EAST" on the right and "P WEST" (in mirrored letters) on the left. P meaning "power". I'd like something more imaginative if anyone can suggest. Ideally, the mirrored text to use letters which are symmetrical left-right or I can make from others.

 

- Richard.

 

I've remembered the styrene alphabets by Slaters, I can glue some letters on backwards to make mirrored writing.

 

At the moment my best idea is CAILLIN and FYNNE 2. This would look mildly industrial or businesslike. Also there is the same count of letters and spaces in both parts, so the two sets will be vertically the same height.

 

This is a transliteration of "Blond(i)e 2" into Manx; their second album was "Plastic Letters".

 

- Richard.

[47137]

Oh, and what a prodigious work rate too; well on the way to completion while I've been on me holidays - respect!

I've had to take two days off. One for work, the second to lay new carpet in the railway room. The physical effort has caused a third day off, leaving me to dream about fictional place names.

 

If I can tackle the roadways tomorrow then I'll have the basic shape of the model all set up by New Year, and this will be a nice achievement for the holiday period.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

The area for the bus stop is layers of foam board, mounting card and some MDF pavement from KS Laser Designs. The kerbs are styrene. The idea is to add the road surface on top of this, with a shape to represent the crown of the road:

 

I have set the angle of this arrangement to look best from the usual viewpoint of the layout at home. I would make it weaker if the model was for show at an exhibition, where viewers would be standing square in front of the layout. I have also set up an access road to the processing plant, but white card on a white shelf does not show up in photographs.

 

Most of my effort today has been choosing angles and setting heights and gradients. I have probably put more time into setting up the locations of the roadways than the arrangement of the track, but somehow an odd scale foot in one direction or another really does make a difference to the overall look of the layout.

 

This post marks the end of my holiday project, to set up the basic layout. My next tasks are to build more structures. The passenger platform I have mentioned before will now be a works platform, long enough for one coach instead of two. The tram platform will be long enough for the Flexity, with an access ramp instead of steps if there is room. I have got space between the two sidings for some kind of open lagoon to hold liquid waste. When I have all of the basic structures set up and their bases glued down I expect I will put in the ground surface. Then ballasting, ground cover, and building detailing. There ought to be short length of OLE for the tram too.

 

I can fill the tracks with three bogie coaches, two bogie tank wagons, a main line engine and a shunter. This showed me how crowded the layout could be if I try to do too much. So if I can set up the two platforms and the lagoon, a site gatehouse (the Peco/Merit coal office) and one or two mature trees, this seems enough.

 

It is difficult to glue things to the Lack shelf. I rubbed down the glossy surface to provide a key, and contact adhesive works fine but PVA and some spray adhesives do not. So it takes ages waiting for contact adhesive to dry between adding parts of the landscape. Next time I might cover the whole of the top of the shelf with something like 2 mm MDF before I add anything else.

 

- Richard.

Edited January 2, 2018 by 47137

[marc smith]

 

..........the Faller kit is like Christmas and birthdays all rolled into one. It contains hundreds of parts, some for the model on the cover of the box, some for at least two other kits. Truly this kit plus something from the Wills "Modern" range and some Plastruct ought to yield every industrial structure on the island.

 

Looking for "balance" on this part of the layout, the processing plant at the left needs to look sensible against the trees and cottage (or something else) at the right. So I have taken the parts of the elevator and some of the silos and glued them together into sub-assemblies for a first mock-up.

 

 

The up-ended container here represents a chimney. After I took the photos I tried out parts of a low-relief warehouse in its place, but it just looked like "low relief". Whereas, a model chimney with a rectangular cross-section will actually look like a square chimney.

 

I like this, I can imagine one or two more mirrors appearing around my layout.

 

- Richard.

 

Hi again Richard,

Yes, I agree - those Faller kits are amazing. They're really quite adaptable and flexible and you often end up with lots of useful detailing bits & pieces that you can use elsewhere

Nice work putting it together - it's looking really good, and as has already been said, places like Cement works, and even quarries can often look as though they've been "plonked" into the landscape in reality...

.... I think it's just a question of blending and weathering it into the scenery when everything else is complete....

 

As others have said, don't worry if it seems like you aren't getting lots & lots of replies to the thread..... I don't think it's particularly indicative of anything

It might even be a sign that you're making a good job of this little layout, and no-one has any criticisms?

 

Anyhow, good to see some progress on this project, and have a happy new year matey

PS. Re the link section, I'd thought of this before, for linking a couple of projects together

but set against your wall (which looks like a clear sky type backdrop) you could even turn the link into a suspension bridge.... it would then be a separate "scene" in its' own right

Just another (possibly crazy) thought....

 

Marc

Edited January 2, 2018 by marc smith

[47137]

Well ... the main "Shelf Island" baseboard is essentially three micros linked together with track. I have an urge to paint these linking parts a dark grey, and the link span would be the same. The idea being to represent "modelled places" with "somewhere else between them". I haven't seen this done elsewhere. I did run the idea past a well-published model maker (at a BRM layout at a show) and he smiled and said he thought it would be a bit avant-garde for many people. It would, however, reduce my ballasting task for the whole layout by a great deal.

 

I have a three-arch masonry bridge (a Continental kit) intended for another part of the room (an un-built module) and this bridge could indeed hang in the space of the link span as another scene. I need to be careful with the sea level, because a plunging ravine might look good in its own right, but a bit odd if a river here seemed to be going uphill to its estuary. I'm not sure about a suspension bridge ... I thought they had too much flex in them for railways? Although of course Hornby do their Grand Victorian one.

 

There is an unexpected effect from the mirror. When the layout is lit by general lighting in the room, and different room lights have different colour temperatures, the mirror picks up the lighting dominating the rear backscene. This leaves the reflected image much the same colour as the rear backscene, but significantly different to the identically-painted strip of backscene hiding the front edge of the mirror. This in turn means the model elevator seems to be dividing two different-coloured skies. I suspect a dedicated layout lighting rig is called for.

 

- Richard.

Edited January 2, 2018 by 47137

[47137]

The loading platform between the two sidings (my post #35) looks awkward to me, and a walled pond seems much better:

 

I can suppose the pond is associated with the power plant, or outfall from the waste processing, or even simple rainwater. I called it a "lagoon" before, but "pond" sounds just as wrong, and "basin" or worse "reservoir" sound too grandiose. No idea what the proper name is. I think it connects the different levels of the two tracks quite nicely.

 

I have added a roadway along the front of the processing plant. This is a scale 4 m wide for a one-way street used by HGVs. The siding in the foreground here is climbing at 1:50 (between the yellow pins) while the road is falling at 1:20:

 

I wanted the road to be an exit-only route from the plant to the public highway but I ran out of space for an exit barrier beyond a gatehouse. So I've had to move the barrier to the other end of the gatehouse and call this an entrance:

 

And back at the bus stop, I've planted and rotated the tree so its branches just clear the top of the bus:

 

Some of these features are glued down now but most are still resting loosely in place. There will always be a trade-off between kits and making my own models, and while the Merit coal office could make a passable gatehouse it will always look like a Merit coal office. Likewise the Wills platform halt - which incidentally seems to scale better for H0 than 00 - will always look like the Wills kit.

 

So as I firm up on the general arrangement of the landscape, I've got to decide which models to build. I guess, the main thing is to set out bases for major structures such as under the gatehouse, and fill in the gaps in the un-built ground. I can swap one building for another in the future.

 

- Richard.

Edited January 2, 2018 by 47137

[cklammer]

Maybe call the pond a basin?

[1722]

 Likewise the Wills platform halt - which incidentally seems to scale better for H0 than 00 - will always look like the Wills kit.

 

So as I firm up on the general arrangement of the landscape, I've got to decide which models to build.

Personally I like the Wills platform halt. The fact you've only used a couple of bits of it, although still showing it's origins, also makes it look less typical. On Little Lawley I've used the Wills pagoda but have 'bashed' it to make it look a little more unique. There's no harm in using kits as a starting point at all. 

 

That said, I like the cottage you've built previously, so I'm looking forward to seeing any scratch builds.

 

Enjoying seeing this progress. 

[47137]

Maybe call the pond a basin?

I think it needs a noun modifier, perhaps "settlement pond" or "evaporation basin". A term which does not necessarily give any great meaning, but immediately says "industry" not "village duck pond".

 

I need to paint this before fixing it to the layout. I've tried Precision Paints "concrete" with a dusting of fine sand, but it will end up looking like I've clad the model in sandpaper. I suspect the inside walls could be an oily, almost black finish. I will keep experimenting.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

Personally I like the Wills platform halt. The fact you've only used a couple of bits of it, although still showing it's origins, also makes it look less typical. On Little Lawley I've used the Wills pagoda but have 'bashed' it to make it look a little more unique. There's no harm in using kits as a starting point at all. 

 

That said, I like the cottage you've built previously, so I'm looking forward to seeing any scratch builds.

 

Enjoying seeing this progress. 

I am hoping to make a pedestrian access up the ramp of the platform, a bit like this one on the Sudbury branch platform at Marks Tey (photo in November last year):

 

In a way, I wonder if a few Hornby platform sections especially their curving ramp would be a fair starting point.

 

If I stay with the Wills kit I need to rebuild my model with another kit to make it twice as long, and I think add some more uprights underneath it - it looks unstable to me in its present form.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

To try to build the layout as efficiently as possible I have been working up the ground level, and leaving spaces to hold the various structures. So far I have six spaces, all set up to hold the base of something. This is the space for the gatehouse:

 

The processing plant and the pond will drop in here:

 

I have worked up the various models to a state so their bases exist and are a snug fit in the spaces. Hopefully everything will lightly jam into place when there is some paint around them. The ground surface so far is entirely foam board and mounting card, packed up on strip wood, more foam board and on itself.

 

I am using a glaziers' putty (acrylic) to caulk the joints between the pieces. This includes joints to be part of the visible model, like along kerbs, and joints which will eventually disappear under more scenic layers. The idea is to provide a filler which is slightly flexible but strong enough to hold. I bought the putty for a DIY job and it sticks well to all the materials on the layout so far. Used in fairly fine beads around 2 mm thick it dries out in hours.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

The last major structure for the layout is the tram platform, and I've worked this up today:

 

The basic platform is mounting board and strip wood ...

 

... with styrene editions especially the Peco platform sides:

 

The whole thing sits on a stripwood glued onto the baseboard:

 

I think I have stepped in something because the Peco ramps, while a bit steep for wheelchair use (1:8), have let me end up with the access ramp nicely close to the pavement:

 

The whole model is flexible enough to be glued down and align with the top of the pavement. The area at the top of the ramp hides the wire-in-tube for the points operation.

 

Having done this I looked at the visual balance again. The tram platform has enough "substance" to complement the processing plant at the other end of the layout, but this balance will be spoilt if I add a substantial platform for the "main line" in the middle of the scene.

 

Personally I like the Wills platform halt. The fact you've only used a couple of bits of it, although still showing it's origins, also makes it look less typical. On Little Lawley I've used the Wills pagoda but have 'bashed' it to make it look a little more unique. There's no harm in using kits as a starting point at all. 

 

I've ordered up two more of the Wills kits to build the main line platform.

 

This has been a productive weekend.

 

- Richard.

Edited January 8, 2018 by 47137