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Docks away!, or, making a virtue out of a necessity . . .


Booking Hall
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Having finally got my printer to work I was able to print out the Kingsway 2016 free Christmas download kit comprising two shops and a seedy looking pub, just right for my docks area. So the last few days have been spent layering this up to give it a more 3D effect, and making the pavement on which they will stand. I particularly like the contrasting architectural styles of the two shops.

 

This part of the build was not without its problems however. I got this far with the frontages, in all quite some time cutting out windows and various layers, but had not finally resolved exactly how to curve or step them to fit in the triangular space left for them. I decided to print out a quick black and white version using a different printer so I could fold it to shape and thus determine the shape and curve of the footpath. It was only after I had made the footpath and tried the colour version on it that I found the mock up version was slightly smaller, about 1/4" in length, than the colour one, which wouldn't now fit where I had planned it on the pavement, this despite both printers being set to print at 100% - most peculiar!

 

Having invested so much time in detailing the frontages I felt I couldn't scrap them, so an extra piece of pavement was added to increase the length slightly. Problem overcome!

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

Well, after that lovely, long, dry, sunny spell, the miserable weather we're now having is proving beneficial for the layout at least! The bridge was weathered using both the airbrush and weathering powders, as were the workshop and shops buildings, and it is now glued into position. Before glueing down the workshop building and remaining pavement sections I traced their outline onto the top level and painted the road surface to suit. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to get a perfect match with that already painted on the bridge, I planned to make these sections a shade or so darker, to suggest that the two had been surfaced at different times, and I also had to think of a way to disguise the joint between the two. Filling the gap was my first thought, but it was uneven and that would introduce a further material to the mix, so in the end I set into it a strip of plasticard in the hope it would look like an expansion joint. The 'town' road surface ended up being too dark and didn't look at all realistic, so I brushed it with some talcum powder which improved the appearance and also made it smell nice! 

 

After that I glued down the workshop and pavements (but not the shops yet as I'm having to lean over this part of the layout quite a bit at the moment, and that chimney pot is rather vulnerable) and started on the scenic landscaping. Two layers of static grass have been applied so far over an 'earth' base. The gravelly 'yard' to the workshop entrance is finely sieved Chinchilla dust with watery washes of mucky paint applied.

 

A trawl of the internet produced some suitable posters and I stuck them to a hoarding which will be planted in the rough grass between the workshop and the bridge. The Ratio GWR spearpoint fencing which will run along part of the top of the cliff face has been painted 'Council Green' and some concrete panel fencing is being made to enclose the workshop's rear yard.

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Activity in the last few days has been directed towards putting up the iron and concrete fences and adding overgrowth to the cliff top and parts of the cliff face. There is a little more still to do. The iron fence is Ratio GWR 'spearpoint' fencing but this can pass for use pretty much anywhere. I see from the packaging that it is no longer known as 'Ratio', but now comes under PECO's 'Parkside' range. The concrete fence is built up from Scale Model Scenery's 3D printed concrete posts with cereal box card for the slot-in panels, which I made 6ft x 1ft, all painted with 'storm grey' emulsion paint and a bit of dark grey blended in. It needs a little toning down to blend it all together. I'm not sure why, but I have a particular penchant for this type of fencing.

 

For some of the weedy shrubs and bramble-like plants, I experimented by making up some clumps of green polyfibre (Hornby), dabbed with PVA and then sprinkled with dark and light green scatter. This seemed to work quite well so small lumps were teased out and glued onto the static grass base. Dark green clump foliage foam sprinkled with yellow flock represent Gorse bushes, another favourite of mine, and are very common in untended areas like this.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A tale of two water cranes.

 

Moving on from the cliff landscaping, I started to detail the locomotive siding and wanted to install a water crane. Easy, I thought, just paint up and add a drainage gulley to the old Tri-ang one I have, let it into the ground and blend it in. But when i got it in there, fortunately, not fixed down, I thought it looked too tall. It was even taller than the oil storage tank behind it. Putting a scale ruler on it I found that it was over 22ft high! I wanted to use it, but it was no good. Having seen how it looked I knew I just couldn't.

 

So, I had a choice, buy one, or make one. I chose the latter course. An hour or so later, after a bit of online research to get an idea of actual sizes, I had turned the main parts out of aluminium and brass on my lathe. Another day or so and, voila! This looks so much more 'right than the Tri-ang one!

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Jumping about a bit, I wanted to try and resolve the arrangement for the large oil storage tank and its associated infrastructure, so, after a bit of thought I've started making a small building to house the pumps and valves to control the direction of flow. Pipework going into this building will be added with track-side connections and the tank itself will be re-positioned slightly nearer to the bridge to allow more room for the building and vehicles etc. I re-read this article from the March 1964 Railway Modeller to give me ideas.

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11 hours ago, Booking Hall said:

Jumping about a bit, I wanted to try and resolve the arrangement for the large oil storage tank and its associated infrastructure, so, after a bit of thought I've started making a small building to house the pumps and valves to control the direction of flow. Pipework going into this building will be added with track-side connections and the tank itself will be re-positioned slightly nearer to the bridge to allow more room for the building and vehicles etc. I re-read this article from the March 1964 Railway Modeller to give me ideas.

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Just doing my weekly supermarket order and see 16 rolls of Andrex Classix down from £8.95 to £6.50!!!

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Pump House now finished, an enjoyable little project. I expect that the prototype would probably have asbestos cement walls, or perhaps Masonite (treated hardboard), sitting on a brick plinth to raise it off the ground, and be painted. The roof would probably be zinc and the window a steel framed type. The variety and subtlety of building types and styles fascinates me.

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Reading up on the history of the prototype of the Airfix class B tank wagons, and on tank farms in general, I learned that both tankers and tanks were fitted with steam heating coils to improve the flow of the more viscous 'heavy' oils carried and stored. Unfortunately, that made me want to incorporate steam pipelines on my model, and the obvious source of such supplies is the boiler/power house at the back of the transit shed. So, I've set myself the challenge of installing said pipework and this means crossing the track at some point. I've chosen to do this at the shortest crossing point and started by building a pipe bridge.

 

Pipelines of this nature are of course insulated to ensure that steam and not just hot water actually arrives at the point where it is wanted!, so after an unsuccessful attempt to replicate this feature using 3.2mm welding rod (too stiff to bend readily) I decided to use aluminium wire and some rubber insulation stripped from old electrical cable. This too may prove too awkward to fiddle into the shapes and locations needed, so I may end up just using the insulation sleeving on its own.

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On reflection, it seemed a daft idea to strip off the rubber insulation and then reinstall it on some more wire. Why not just use the old cable 'as is', so that's what I did. It was flexible enough to allow me to bend it to shape, but firm enough to stay in the shape required. I made some pipe stools for it to sit on and installed it at the foot of the cliff. It isn't quite finished yet but I need to get the fuel tank that serves the power house installed and piped up first, so a fuel line can run alongside the steam lines over the pipe bridge. This tank also needs a small pump house so I knocked one up from some card and home-made corrugated iron sheet (foil takeaway contained embossed on a door threshold strip). I decided to use a Ratio oil tank picked up secondhand instead of the Wordsworth oil tank as it is a bit smaller.

 

The finished ground surface in this area of the layout is finely sieved Chinchilla dust painted with washes of brown/black emulsion, and whilst the PVA glue was still soft I ran a road vehicle over it to create some tyre tracks.

 

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Booking Hall said:

home-made corrugated iron sheet (foil takeaway contained embossed on a door threshold strip)

 

Now, there's a former I've never thought of!  Now you've described/shown it, I can see how that works on the one into the room I am sitting in right now! What a tip! Thanks!!

 

Steve S

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Thanks Steve. It isn't my original idea, but it works very well if you can find some threshold strip with the right pitch of corrugations. I described the process in a bit more detail in this post from my 'Far Wittering' thread.

 

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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10 hours ago, Booking Hall said:

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!


Strangely enough, I did just that earlier today but they didn’t have anything suitable!!

 

Of course, it never occurred to me to buy a new one and put it down in the house and use the existing one at the workbench...

 

Doh!

 

Guess I’ll be back again tomorrow!!

 

Steve S

 

PS

As a complete OT aside, the threshold strip in the dining room here is the only one in the house that is actually a commercial product! All the others were bespoke made for my father by a chap called Stan Brown, who played 3rd cornet in the brass band I learnt to play trombone in for as long as I was there as a player, and also when I later conducted! He was a truly remarkable cornet player, one of only three I have known who could make a cornet genuinely sound like a full on jazz trumpet! (The other two were an Irish-Mancunian road-digger called Derek Debotte and my old instrument teacher, Mr Brian “Raz” Mather, a genuine brass band legend!)

 

Told you it was OT!!

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