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5 hours ago, JiLo said:

Simply stunning!  Very atmospheric layout, and the attention to detail with regards the road vehicles is something you very rarely see

JiLo, sincere thanks for your kind words!    

 

One of the many reasons for this model was to show off some of my 1/76 scale road vehicles, but I hesitate to put too many pics of them on here, 'cos it's mostly about trains!

I don't do proper scratchbuilding but I do like playing around with commercially available bits, and the post war period up 'til the 70's is  well catered for.   I was briefly the truck manager for one of the lesser known readymix concrete companies in the 1960's, so here's a bit more personal nostalgia!

 

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Mid 50's Leyland Comet, 2nd series .   Purpose made chassis and mudguards, Base Toys cab and wheels. The mixer came from a German articulated mixer in Ho scale, but the drum was a huge 10 cu. metre thing, so I turned a new one from a scrap of plastic to represent the 6 cu.metre drums  more usual in the UK.

 

Best, Mike

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1 hour ago, JamesGWR101 said:

 

Your'e welcome. What rolling stock will you be using?

 

 

In truth, James, not much!  

 

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A tiny yard like this would have had very little rolling stock - a few tired old coal trucks delivering coke to the brass foundry,  a couple of twelve ton vans bringing chemicals and waste paper to the paper mill - and stretching credibility a bit far, a couple of gunpowder vans bringing bagged cement for the new council house estate being built up the road!  

 

On very rare occasions, it's possible that a redundant Siphon G might be pressed into service for the waste paper loads, but it is very rare, and the photographer missed it last time !!

 

Best, Mike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cement GPV's

 

IMG_3663.JPG.fe51b9e042c83141aa02d90bf5ec6793.JPGHere they are being unloaded, and you can see from this poor quality photo that they are bit oversize, - too wide, too high, and too long - I'm not a rivet counter - I have always thought that overall atmosphere beats absolute accuracy every time - but it's a shame when makers (Dapol, in this case) are so careless, especially when the detail in the mouldings is otherwise high quality.   I know BR had a few GPV's built with a 10ft wheelbase, but the vast majority were 9ft, so why not make the model like that?    

 

 Rant over!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMG_3631.JPG.2da25b05904faa0608b61bb4935354cb.JPGHere the cement bags are being fork- lifted on to the Karrier artic for the last leg of their journey to the building site.  The Karrier is a Base Toys tractor unit pulling a Ledo trailer;  the cab is a bit late for the fifties, the one-piece windscreen didn't arrive until 1962, but otherwise quite a good representation.  
(And it looks as if someone has borrowed his girlfriend's bike to ride to work on!)

 

 

Best,Mike

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4 minutes ago, Spotlc said:

 

IMG_3631.JPG.2da25b05904faa0608b61bb4935354cb.JPGHere the cement bags are being fork- lifted on to the Karrier artic for the last leg of their journey to the building site.  The Karrier is a Base Toys tractor unit pulling a Ledo trailer;  the cab is a bit late for the fifties, the one-piece windscreen didn't arrive until 1962, but otherwise quite a good representation.  
(And it looks as if someone has borrowed his girlfriend's bike to ride to work on!)

 

 

Best,Mike

 

I think the lorry being loaded up is a nice touch to the layout. I like little details like that

 

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Siphon G's

 

These are very rare visitors to New Prospect Lane, so to see two together is most unusual!  Built originally by the GWR for milk churn transport, they were used in post war years for parcels, newspapers, even pigeon racing transport(!) and BR built some in the mid fifties that ended up as Enparts transport.

 

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The inside framed version is based on an old Lima model, but has been tarted up with a Wizard Models detailing kit, etched bogies and correct size wheels, though the bogie side frames are not quite right, and the gangway connector should be the suspended type, not the scissors type, but that's both down to my laziness!   The outside framed Siphon is an Airfix/GMR/Hornby model.

 

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A different view of the outside framed Siphon G. These are pretty good, the bogies are correct and considering that this model is more than thirty years old the detailing is excellent,  the girder frames are bit too meaty but my only real gripe is that they are very difficult to fit Kadees to - it can be done, but there isn't much room for mistakes!

 

Best,   Mike

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More Sack Loads


Small yards serving particular industries often shared their facilities with road transport, and  at the time that many of them were built the only forms of road transport were carts or wagons pulled by horses, so  yards often appear quite small and cramped by modern standards, and NPL is no different.

 

Here are a couple of pics of lorries being loaded with sacks of something (?) from the BR former meat van, which is being used for general goods, now that fully refrigerated vans have been introduced for meat goods movements. Well, that will do for a story!   In fact, an Airfix kit that I bought for €1.50 as a partly built kit that had lost it's doors!  I put it together and made some doors from card and posed them open with a few sacks inside, just to sit in a siding.

 

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Bristol HA. Mid to late 50's. Introduced in 1956, they were early pioneers of fibreglass cabs, and were serious load haulers fitted with 10.6 litre or 11.0 litre diesel engines by either Leyland or Gardner.  Only made for British Road Services and their contract companies, never in private ownership, so this one is a bit of a fake but it's one of Base Toys better offerings!

 

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Karrier.  We have met the BR Karrier before, and the forklift, which I think is supposed to be a Conveyancer, I'm not sure, - but note the total absence of a safety cage or even a rudimentary crash bar.  Good old days - Not!

 

Best, Mike

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1 hour ago, Jerry1975 said:

I do like your road vehicles, very nice.

 

Jerry.

 

Jerry, thanks again for your encouragement!   Like I said in a reply to an earlier comment, I'm a bit hesitant to put too many road vehicles photos because this forum is mostly about trains, but it probably doesn't bother anyone!

 

Best,  Mike

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1 hour ago, OOman said:

Mike great pictures of your progress and your layout. You have a nice selection of rolling stock and road vehicles.:good_mini:

 

Thanks again, Kevin!  With a small layout only a few bits of rolling stock are needed - too many and it looks overcrowded;  same goes for motor vehicles, although in the fifties there were lots more trucks in yards than is common now,  but it's possible to swap them around and get a totally different look!

 

I like your latest tiny diorama - very good!

 

Cheers, Mike

 

 

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Motive Power 

 

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Here is NPL's Class 08 shunter pushing a very tired looking ex-LNER 20ton brake van. This has been modified to take the LiPo battery that provides the power for the 08, which involved fitting doors to the verandah at one end to hide the battery, and making the body into a "lift off" unit, complete with Gilbert Ellis, the ever watchful guard!

 

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This is the view with the body removed. I folded up a simple battery holder from 22g sheet steel, and the battery is just a push fit in this - the contacts are on a bit of circuit board, contact is made by a foam pressure pad, because try as I might, I could see no way of fitting even the tiniest switch without butchering the body even further.

 

Apart from drilling two small holes in the chassis for the connecting cables, and a little hole in the exhaust vent to see the receiver LED, the loco itself is quite standard, the Deltang receiver going in the same place as the DCC chip did before. (In case you wonder, one of my neighbour's young children managed to wipe away some of the smaller details from the loco before I retrieved it !!)

 

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This is the view from the other side, showing the Pololu voltage regulator which maintains a constant 8.4 volts to the receiver regardless of the battery output voltage.  You can just see the connecting cables to the loco under the buffer beam, and the foam pad that keeps the battery contacts.  The two vehicles are joined in holy matrimony by Kadee couplers with the tails removed, because they will never be divorced!

 

Having a separate vehicle for the power supply does mean some loss of useful space in a siding, for example, but it also allows for a much larger battery (600mAh) than would be possible if it were fitted inside the loco, and in fact the Bachmann 08 is made in such a way that it would  be difficult to fit anything but a tiny battery, which would have only a very short runtime.

 

When I first started looking into battery/RC I used an old Hornby Hymek with a ringfield motor as a test bed, and of course, there is loads of space for batteries, directional lighting and so on in that, and smaller locos do present a challenge, but the resulting degree of slow speed control has to be seen to be believed, plus rusty rails and very little wiring, except for the point servos and lighting!

 

Best,  Mike

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Jerry, thanks for your encouragement!  The brake van is a Bachmann, but I think Hornby do something similar. Nice, because it has a short (10ft) wheelbase!

 

Bill,  sadly, I took no photos of the 08 when the body was off, and it was some time ago, but from memory the receiver went where the DCC chip had been. I used  a Deltang RX63 receiver which is very tiny - 16.6x9.6x4mm - it can handle 1 amp at up to 13V. Since this was really a test bed I didn't bother with directional or cab lighting so the chip has only 4 connections - two for the power supply, and two going to the motor. All the radio gear came from Micron Radio Control:

http://www.micronradiocontrol.co.uk/rx_dt.html

and you can choose to have the lead out wires pre-soldered, and the chip shrink sleeved for a modest couple of quid, which I did. You will have plenty of room in 0n 16.5 for any kind of battery, but I used an OK Cell LiPo PP3, which is nominally 9V, but has a micro USB port for recharging from any 5V source, which avoids the need for a dedicated charger, plus they have charge/discharge protection built in.

 

If you are well up in electronics I'm sure this could all be done in house, but my knowledge of electronics could be written on the back of a postage stamp in big letters(!), so I'm content to use commercially available kit, and then work out how to  fit it all together. There is an RC forum in RM web, and it has lots more info.

 

Best,   Mike

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A bit about Gronks and Speed

 

These 08's were the most numerous of  any class of locomotive built for Britains railways, just under a thousand were built before production ceased in 1962. They had a 6 cylinder turbocharged English Electric diesel producing 350 bhp, weighed 50 tons, and almost all of them were governed to a maximum speed of 15 mph.

So, pulling or pushing a 20 ton brake van there is a starting load of at least 70 tons, and despite having a lot of tractive effort (35,000 lbf/160kN) for a relatively light engine, they do not accelerate like a modern car! (Consider for a moment that a medium sized modern car, say a Volkswagen Golf 1.6 diesel, produces around 105bhp and weighs about 1.4 tons!)

  

Not a wholly fair comparison, since the Golf is entirely mechanical, whereas the Gronk's final drive is electric, and electric motors can produce almost 100% torque at very low revs, but the difference between the power to weight ratio of the two is enormous, and explains why the locomotive will only slowly reach it's governed speed of 15mph, even light engine.

Of course in a yard, dockside, or quarry, - all frequent subjects for small layouts, there were almost invariably stringent speed limits in force, 10mph max being quite normal and 5mph max by no means rare, for both rail and road vehicles.  Additionally, most shunting involving manual coupling/uncoupling was done at a brisk walking pace at best, frequently less, say about 4mph.  

 

I try to get to a few exhibitions every year, in both France and the UK, and there are often lots of beautifully made layouts on display, where the builders have gone to great lengths to achieve an amazing degree of realism, but the effect is frequently ruined by trains accelerating like a sportscar, and then running at scale speeds approaching Mach 1! (If you model the TGV's running between, say, Paris and Strasbourg it might be OK - they have in excess of 12,500 bhp available, and a service speed of 320km/h or 200mph, and some German ICE sets are similar, but on a little model like this set in 1950's England - NO!)

 

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(One of my earlier efforts!)

 

You can do a simple test using this site: http://www.modelbuildings.org/free-scale-speed-calculator.html
You'll need a tape measure and a stop watch, or timer app in your phone;    choose your correct scale and a distance (they are Imperial only), time how long the train takes to travel it, and enter in the box.   Simple, and I bet you will be surprised!

Best,   Mike
 

 

 

 

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50 minutes ago, OOman said:

Mike I like your black & white picture really atmospheric.

 

Kevin, many thanks for your kind words!   The pic is from a layout I started some years ago, when I got back into railway modelling - I still have it but it's unlikely ever to be finished - too big, too complex, and badly thought out!   Still, it's what got me interested in smaller layouts!!

 

Best,  Mike

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