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Far Wittering - inspiration from a 1984 Railway Modeller


Booking Hall
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Fewer interruptions during the last two days meant more progress, and the main structure of the platform is now complete. The vertical faces have to be clad with some 300+ 'sleeper' sized balsa strips, which will be stained to look creosoted. I do it this (much more labour-intensive) way as the sleepers take on different colouring from the woodstain, and look much more natural than simply scribing the joints on a longer piece of balsa. After they're on, a horizontal rail will be fixed along the top edge, to support the sleeper platform edging, and the top can then be infilled with lightweight filler or card and the ash surface added. The design sketch should make it clear.

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18 hours ago, mullie said:

Just found this - another follower, looks really good.

 

The Triang Hornby Cleresoties can scrub up nicely, these are mine.

Thanks Mullie, your clerestory's look good, mine are waaaayy to clean at the moment!

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The platform is nearly finished, with 301 stained vertical timbers on and 64 full size scale sleepers forming the edging. The infill is real soil from the garden, dried and sterilized in the oven, sifted and sprinkled onto PVA. A few gaps to make good when it dries.

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With the platform largely complete, until it is fixed in position and signs, lights etc added, attention has turned to the loading dock and cattle pen. This has been built in similar style to the platform, assuming it was built largely from old sleepers, although the cattle pen uses concrete posts from the Ratio range. Annoyingly, these are only drilled through in one direction, meaning that you have to drill them yourself on the adjacent face in order to use them as corner posts. The cobbled surface is a piece of wallpaper from B&Q.

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That's the loading dock and cattle pen largely finished. There are a few more details to add, such as fencing at the rear edge and steps down to track level, but I'll wait until a bit later to add them. I want to get the main structures ready to 'plant' so that ballasting can commence, but I'll need to build a coaling stage first . . .

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For the light railway look I'm aiming for, I fancied having a small corrugated iron building as the station, located at the station yard entrance rather than on the platform. This follows the original designers intentions also. One of my all-time favourite films is 'Oh, Mr Porter!', which was filmed at Cliddesden on the Basingstoke to Alton line, and I found that a card model design download for this actual building was available from http://www.amodelrailway.co.uk/shop/index.html for a very modest sum, so one was duly acquired. Having started it I'm not too happy with the way the corrugations are modelled, so I've decided to use the design as a template and clad it with scale corrugated sheets. The plastic offerings from the trade are too thick so I'm having a go at making my own by using a door threshold strip as a former, rubbing some foil from a takeaway container with a finely pointed stick. The corrugations are just 1mm apart, which is exactly to scale. I have to say though, crouched on the floor in a doorway is not the most comfortable way of modelling, so tomorrow I'm off to B&Q to buy a new strip I can fix to the bench!

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17 hours ago, andyfoulger said:

door threshold strip, brilliant - I haven't seen this method before.

The platform looks very impressive.

Thanks Andy. Not my original idea I'm afraid though. I was tempted to follow Rev. Peter Denny's example on his EM layout 'Buckingham', and use the long toothed rollers from the focussing rack of old plate cameras as an embossing mill, and whilst I have a few such cameras, they are probably considerably rarer than in the 1950's when PD came up with this idea, so I ditched that.

 

First elevation of the building done, and I'm very pleased with the look of it. It's fiddly, but I wanted to re-create the prototypical use of overlapping sheets, so smaller pieces it had to be! There are 15 separate pieces on here.

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A few days of intermittent work has produced these three elevations. As it will be barely visible on the layout, on the rear elevation (the one without the doorway) I simply used full height strips of corrugated sheet and just butt jointed them. Seeing them together like this shows just how much more prototypical in appearance the front elevation is with correct overlaps, despite being much more time-consuming to do. One elevation took me two hours, the other took 10 minutes!!

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All station wall parts now clad and painted using GWR Light Stone as a sort of generic light-ish wall colour, and the windows made by the old-fashioned method of drawing the glazing bars onto acetate using a ruling pen loaded with thinned paint.

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Well, that's the station building almost finished, just the rainwater pipes, roof finials and perhaps a posterboard or two to add. Then a spot of weathering. I like it, it's got a lot of character for a simple building. For those who are interested in doing something similar, there are 101 separate pieces of corrugated tinfoil on it - that's two takeaway containers-worth - so a Chicken Madras and rice should sort it!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not much progress in the last few weeks. I got distracted in detailing a Hornby TPO for a parcels/mail train for the club layout, and I still have a stowage vehicle to build to run with it, but with the first vehicle finished, and the much appreciated gift of a fine tip temperature controlled soldering station and tube of solder paste from my daughter for Fathers Day, I got cracking on the etched brass wind pump. I'm thinking that it looks a tad short when placed next to the water tank, which is where it will be on the layout. Either that, or perhaps the water tank is a bit large for a light railway, so I might build a pump room out of brick with a concrete roof for the wind pump to stand on. To make it more interesting, I could partly recess the brick base into the ground, and have some steps down to a door.

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That wind pump is looking superb. You wondered about the size of the water tower though, I would tend to agree that it has a rather over-sized and heavily constructed  appearance. But conversely, most light railways were driven more by ambition than anything else and they might have anticipated a future need for a large water supply!

Here is a more down to earth example, a recreation but close to an original design from the Mid Suffolk Light Railway:-DSCF1976.JPG.2cd7ab86640e0f1f216ee415a9e08013.JPG

 

Steve W

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Thanks for your observations Steve, and I like the Mid Suffolk example, it has loads of character. I think I'll have to place things on the layout to get a better sense of how they look before deciding whether to raise the windmill, or build a smaller water tower. Watch this space . . . !

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Placing the various assembled parts on the layout decided it - the tank is too large, it is out of scale with the other structures. Shame, because i really like it and spent quite a lot of time detailing it. Oh well, I'll just have to build another layout after this one to use it on :D

 

So, a quick re-hash of the tower I designed and built for my boxfile layout mocked up in card looks much better. Interestingly, I did a quick calculation to estimate the capacity of the smaller tank, which comes out at a scale 5000 gallons. In contrast, the J83 pictured with it has a tank capacity of just 800 gallons, so even a tank this size has adequate reserve capacity. Right, now to get on and build another one!

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23 hours ago, sb67 said:

Far wittering is really starting to look good, it's already got a great light railway atmosphere, looking forward to seeing some more.

Steve.

Thanks Steve, I was hoping that I was beginning to capture that 'atmosphere', but it's nice to have it confirmed.

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Made a start on the replacement water tower. I still liked the idea of a concrete framed one, and after doing a bit of on-line research, came across this one on the Warwickshire Railways website, at Whitacre Station https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/mrwj1174.htm  It's just the right size and has an interesting frame design, so I drew one up and cut the frame out of balsa wood.

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