Jardine Jn - 80's N gauge with the odd 37/4

[MatP]

Hi All,

 

I thought I might start a thread on my Scottish terminus layout, in case anyone is interested and after receiving some very useful help on a Scottish prototype location in another area of this Forum.

 

Briefly, my layout is a terminus serving an imaginary town on the proposed but never-built line from Tulloch (West Highland) to Kingussie (Highland main line to Inverness). Because it was supposedly built with the North British working from the West and the Highland Railway working from the East, and those companies more or less hated each other, the two companies ran into opposite sides of a joint-owned terminus: there never was a through route. The line was justified and kept open mainly by the construction in the 1920's of a huge, hydro-electrically powered Pretext Factory near the town. The town itself is called Jardine Junction (named after my wife's Scottish, admittedly lowland, clan) but because of damage sustained to the original town station in the Cyberman invasion of 1968, a new station was built in the early 70's on part of the Junction yard.

 

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures to see if people are interested. The oil depot on the right is a mixture of some parts of a Kibri German N gauge kit, a scratch-built hut and a lot of 1mm rod. The railings round the top of the tank are Kestrel fencing, trimmed and bent after softening in very hot water. The piping is based mainly on Google Street View images of the oil sidings at Fort William. I painted the pipes red because it seemed like a good idea at the time - I now know it wasn't, but there's no way to do a repaint because the model is too delicate. The red railings are, however, prototypical (as in the oil depot at Lochavullin in Oban - thanks to members of this Forum for directing me to photos of this mysterious location). The depot still needs a chain-link fence, I am waiting for them to come back into stock at Scale Model Scenery, who in my very humble opinion do the best kits for these.

 

I used Woodland Scenics iron ore ballast. In retrospect it's far too red as well - I'm still trying to find low-tech ways to tone it down. I wanted the station building to be modern and pre-fab in appearance but didn't want to do a direct model of Fort William. This building is bashed out of a pair of Outland Models 1:160 scale convenience store kits (so as to have big windows front and back) and has a fully-detailed interior, including cash registers in the ticket office. Outland Models are a Chinese firm that sells direct via eBay.

 

As you might be able to see in the general view, I'm currently working on the right-hand end of the layout. My main project at the moment is to produce another array of pipework to attach to a pair of Hornby cement hoppers. You see plenty of cement unloading depots on model layouts but (if I may be so bold) very rarely do you see the pipework that takes the cement from the wagons to the hoppers.

 

I'd also like to add that the collection of models on the layout was built up slowly over more than 30 years - a lot of the rolling stock was bought second hand. Even the expensive-looking 37418 in the background is a spare bodyshell from BR Lines / Farish Spares on a ten-year old chassis. 

 

 

Regards,

Mat

[stivesnick]

HI Mat 

 

Looks a really good layout, certainly interested in hearing and seeing more. How do you operate the fiddle yard, it appears to be a bit of a reach over the layout.

 

Nick 

[MatP]

Hi Nick,

 

Thanks for your comments. It's a little bit of a reach to the fiddle yard, but the whole layout is only 2'2" wide and about 3'3" off the floor (I'm 6'), so it's possible. I don't do a lot of rearrangement of stock in the fiddle yards either, just loco swaps and run rounds. There are three separate fiddle yard areas (representing Glasgow Queen Street station, Glasgow Mossend freight yard, and Inverness. I generally use the front track in each as a reception road - a train will enter this and be uncoupled. Then another loco will remove the stock. 

 

One thing I certainly can't have, given that the layout is up against a wall and under a sloping ceiling, is any kind of backscene. Instead I've just made a firm line with the scenery to try to emphasise what is model and what is 'backstage'.

 

Regards,

Mat

[MatP]

Hi modellers,

 

I've been doing some work at the other end of this N Gauge layout, including a cement terminal (for unloading PCA powder wagons). This isn't exactly a common Highland feature (Inverness notwithstanding) and to be honest was inspired by some photos of the small facility at Barnstaple. But a rapidly-growing new town might need a lot of cement....

 

What I wanted was to add a full set of plumbing to a pair of Hornby "Lyddle End" cement hoppers. As I said on another forum, you don't seem to see this modelled very often, and indeed detailed pictures of cement unloading facilities are difficult to find. As far as I can tell, a lot of cement storage silos had loose pipes that dangled down from the structure - Syston, for instance. 

 

I wanted something a bit more permanent-looking. I found a few pictures of the cement terminal at Bletchley (next to the Bedford branch platform), enough to proceed. These installations aren't particularly complicated, all they need is an air pipe to force the cement powder out of the wagons and a second pipe to carry the air-blown cement powder to storage.

 

Anyway, here's a photo of the pipework under construction. The two pipes are 2.5mm and 1mm diameter. The bottom pipe is actually just a strut (but made from round rod because at the time the only photos I had made it look like there were two air pipes...).  The take-offs for various things are made from bent bits of rod; the flanges on the 1mm pipe are made from the 2.5mm pipe, and the flanges on the larger pipe are made from wrapping 1mm wide strips of self-adhesive paper round and round and round...

 

On the right hand side are two upward-pointing pipes, which hook underneath the Hornby hoppers.

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

Edited June 22, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

Hi,

 

(I thought I'd send the photos of the cement unloader one or two at a time).

 

At Bletchley, the compressed air comes from some way away. For my model, I thought I'd build a little compressor house. This is made from Expo brick plasticard, which appears to be vacuum-formed. The good news is that the material is thin and easy to cut. Less good news is that it doesn't take paint particularly well, I have found.

 

The louvred doors and panels were actually cut out of an old plastic kit for a GWR 'pagoda' waiting room... The doors have 10 thou x 40 thou frames, which look not half bad I hope but will be almost impossible to see when the building's on the layout.

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

[MatP]

Hi again,

 

Here are the final photos - the first shows hoses added from different diameters of wire. Actually, I didn't have any thin black-coated wire so had to paint some... The hoses sit on tiny brackets on the structure, made from 1mm x 2mm pieces of 10 thou plasticard. (Also in this shot is an experimental piece of decorative chapel walling for my other layout, which is 1950's Welsh Valleys - it's Auhagen factory walling with chunks cut out, and sections from the top half of Ratio GWR railings glued in).

 

The second photo shows the completed installation in situ. The locomotive is, appropriately, 37425 "Concrete Bob" (like a lot of my locos, it desperately needs snowploughs). The bridge and surrounding scenery in the background are also of fairly recent construction.

 

The last is a close-up which, if you squint, shows the pipework going up into the hoppers. I guess I should paint the hoppers grey but they are quite expensive nowadays (not when I bought them!) and at the moment I feel I'd rather keep them in mint condition.

 

Bestest Wishes,

Mat

Edited June 22, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

Och, here's another update from my little Scottish Utopia....

 

In some of the previous photos in this thread, there's a mysterious white building in the background. This is the one-piece moulded shell from the old pre-Bachmann Farish engine/goods shed kit. I picked it up at the very first Leamington Spa N gauge show for a couple of quid. This being the 80's, the goods yard is mainly now used as a distribution hub by MacArcady Construction and they needed some more storage space. I decided to use the Farish shell to scratchbuild a small warehouse.

 

The shell is moulded in translucent plastic, which I was able to use to my advantage by including some skylights. Basically all I've done is to clad the shell in 2mm-spaced planked plasticard, to represent a modern steel-clad industrial building. I found some roller doors and a plain steel door for human ingress in the spares box (from a Walther's factory kit). These are let into slots cut into the Farish shell, to give them some depth.

 

I also found a couple of spare Pikestuff window frames, for the skylights. The window frames on the back of the building are scratchbuilt from microstrip to resemble the Pikestuff ones.

 

It still needs some guttering and of course painting. I'd show you pictures of the building on the layout but my attempt yesterday to paint-weather the card "concrete" surface of the goods yard went a bit wrong, and all the edges (which I thought I'd stuck down hard) have curled up in a most immoral manner. Bah.

 

I have been doing so much modelling since the lockdown started that I now have a permanently sore neck, from spending hours craning over my modelling desk. I hope that nobody else is suffering from similar symptoms, or from excessive exposure to Liquid Poly fumes, or indeed, spending too much time in online modelling Fora.

 

Regards,

Mat

 

 

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

'Afternoon all!

 

The warehouse now has its guttering and is in the paint shop (that's the same disreputable board as in the above photos, just the other way up). I've also been trying to flatten and re-glue the card surface of the goods yard. A segment of it is currently being squashed under a big jar with about a fiver's worth of 1p and 2p coins in it.

 

On the layout, meanwhile, here's a shot of 26038, fetching out a Poole-Farish long wheelbase chassis for conversion into an OTA timber wagon. I'm going to attempt to scratch-build one or more examples of the 2+5+2 stanchion type that were originally painted blue and white and worked from places like Arrochar to Workington.

 

You will be forgiven for thinking that the general concept of this depot resembles Buxton more than anywhere in the Highlands... 

 

Anyway, 26038 is a standard Dapol loco which I bought about ten years ago. Unlike a blue 26 which I bought at about the same time, and which has never put a foot wrong, 26038 has never been a very reliable runner. Recently it started smoking and refusing to move (reminds me of when I was a teacher). In a fit of bravado, I stripped the loco down, and after about half an hour I came up with this:

 

 

The problem was the tiny white component, circled in red. I'm guessing it's a capacitor providing RF-interference suppression. [EDIT - it's a combination diode that forms part of the lighting system - see Steven B's post below. That explains why the lights no longer work on that end of the loco]. That was the cause of the smoke (and perhaps the main cause of the loco's general unreliability across the years). Having unscrewed the PCB and spread things out, I connected power to the loco to see if the smoke was in fact coming from the capacitor. But having exposed the capacitor, there was now enough oxygen around it for it to burn out completely (and fairly spectacularly).

 

Since these things are usually in parallel with the motor, I hoped that the loco would still run, and it did - in fact it now runs better than it has ever done. The burn-out was therefore very good news. All I had to do was to reinsulate some wires that had melted insulation due to having been in contact with the capacitor. I did this by thinning down some Humbrol model filler with Liquid Poly to produce a thick paint.

 

After another half an hour's fiddly reassembly, the loco now runs fine - though for some reason, even though I detached and reattached the lighting plug-socket very carefully, the lights on that end of the loco now don't work... Sigh!

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

Edited June 26, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

Here are a couple of photos of progress in the buildings department - firstly, the warehouse for Jardine Junction has now had some paint.

 

 

I've also been working on a little something for my other N gauge layout - no point in starting a separate thread for it. It's called "Ffynnon Garw" and is set in the western Welsh Valleys in the late 50's. I built the layout about 15 years ago and it's been in storage for ages, but with the RevolutioN 56xx on the horizon, I dug it out and have been sprucing it up.

 

Years ago, I bought a Lyddle End, Methodist Chapel. It's a bit small by the standards of Welsh chapels but fits the space available (FfG is a very small layout). To make it a bit more believable, I thought it could do with a fairly ornate enclosure, as many Welsh chapels have.

 

I started out with some Auhagen factory walling, which is 12mm high and has panels between wider brick columns. I cut out the top half of each brick panel and replaced it with a section of Ratio GWR spear fencing, again cut in half horizontally. I also needed to make some half-length panels to fit the site. There's a small gate at the back for the minister to make a quick exit if necessary; I still need to find some suitably ornate gates for the front, and maybe make a noticeboard.

 

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

[MatP]

Prynhawn Da...

 

Lots of little bits of progress to report on today... the chapel is finished, the warehouse is in place and I have made a start on a scratchbuilt OTA timber wagon.

 

First, Y Capel Methodistiaid (the Methodist Chapel). This photo was actually taken on my other N gauge layout, "Ffynnon Garw", which has a Welsh Valleys, 1950's setting. Those of you whose eyebrows go up at the predominance of a certain type of building on this layout should be assured that I bought most of them in a discounted batch when they first came out, to celebrate the start of a new job. A few I bought cheaply as they were damaged, needing repairs to damaged brickwork, guttering etc... Anyway, the chapel now has some gates (made by hacking about some more Ratio spear fencing) and a scratch-built noticeboard. If you look at the back yard of one of the bay-window fronted houses, that shows the Auhagen walling that I also used for the chapel, but unmodified.

 

 

But this thread is really about a 1980's layout called Jardine Junction. Here's a photo of the warehouse (with Shakin' Stevens-approved colour scheme) in situ. The loco, 37043, which looks amazingly long at this angle, is a model of a 37 that stayed in West Highland use well into 1987, making it one of the last of the split-box West Highland 37's to give way to the 37/4's (though it had lost its name to 37412 by this stage). Like several of the Eastfield large logo split-headcode locos, it has data panels under the cab side windows for some reason. Unlike its Eastfield 37/0 large logo brethren, it has a grey roof and very few stickers / symbols on its nose ends (faithfully left off!). I have also modelled the Scottish "rally-style" extra headlights. As usual, I haven't got round yet to adding snowploughs.

 

 

This loco was bought from eBay as a green-liveried non-runner, a couple of years ago when such locos didn't sell for silly money. The buffer mountings were cracked, but that was OK as I was going to put scratch-built 1980's style buffer beams on it anyway. The loco also needed three gears replacing and, of course, a repaint. A few years ago now, I was part of the team that repainted D6732, the 37 on the North Norfolk Railway. This loco was returned to as-built external condition, with newly-fabricated cowlings around the buffers. So, here I have taken a 1960's-condition model 37 and brought it into the 1980's. Karma rebalanced...

 

Finally, here's the OTA wagon that I have started fabricating. It's going to be a model of the 2+5+2 stanchion type, in light blue and white livery. The ends are 20 thou plasticard with various bits of 20x20 and 20x40 strip added. The floor is 1mm-spaced planked plasticard, with some 20x40 strip edges. The chassis is a Poole-era one that I happened to have lying about. It is unmodified apart from reducing the size of the moulded mounting plates for the buffer shanks, so that the vertical struts would clear them. The first end took about an hour to make, the second a mere half an hour. But time is a readily-available commodity at the moment...

 

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

Edited June 26, 2020 by MatP

[Steven B]

Nice work.

 

The burnt out component on the class 26 is a twin diode, linked as you've found to the lighting circuits. It's a weak point on Dapol models of the time. I've had issues with one class 26, two HST Power cars and a pair of class 86s.

 

Steven B

[MatP]

Thanks Steven - that gives me 'closure'! I've edited my original post about the repair, accordingly.

 

To be honest, I'm not that bothered about lights working or not, so it's no major loss. On the other hand, the lights (and everything else) still work just fine on the Minitrix 27 that my Dad bought me over 40 years ago - but then it is a rather simpler machine.

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

[MatP]

It's a muggy old day. Fortunately, I have air-conditioning. Unfortunately, I don't have it in the hobby room.

 

Anyway, first of all, I built the ends and floor for a second OTA. Now I have two of these 80's wagons, I'm going to try leaving them alone with some Wimpy Burgers and Spandau Ballet on the radio, to see if they'll breed. I don't currently have any donor chassis to make more.

 

 

The loco, 37403, was originally a Farish 37408 (a special edition released about 20 years ago). I changed the "8" to a "3" with some T-Cut on the end of a cocktail stick, and also removed some of the original printed nameplates as the new name (Isle of Mull) would be shorter than the original (Loch Rannoch), again with T-Cut. A bit of matt varnish disguised the shiny patches left by removing the nameplate ends. I also added some Scottie Dog transfers as the Farish originals were a bit anaemic, and painted the headcode boxes black.

 

I then started adding stanchions to one side of one of the wagons, along with a representation of the pockets they sit in and the triangular gussets that reinforce the pockets. It took a VERY long time (though that includes several false starts). I also really wished I hadn't stuck the edge strips to the floor, so I could have worked on it separately. At least I'm modelling the type of OTA that only had 9 stanchions per side, rather than 12...

 

 

All best,

Mat

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

Here's an update on the OTA wagon project for "Jardine Junction", for your amusement and possibly edification.

 

I've finished construction on the first wagon. I've added the remaining stanchions, the anchor points for strapping the logs down, the lamp irons and handrails on the ends, and the four central box-section brackets that hold the wagon to the chassis. The real ones also have a myriad of little reinforcing gussets on the solebars, but they are so small I think there is no point trying to fabricate them. Also, the base plate of the Farish chassis is a bit wide, so there's not really room for them anyway.

 

Here's a picture of the first wagon, taken on my Welsh layout, because the lighting is better than on JJN and it's a gloomy old day. The wagon looks rather incongruous in the 1950's Welsh Valleys though, and the lady in the yellow coat is clearly shocked. All sorts of other bits and pieces can be seen lurking in the background behind this little Eden, including Jardine Junction to the top right.

 

 

The photo has exaggerated slight deviancies from vertical in some of the stanchions, making them look worse than they are. There are some which are going to get a tweaking, all the same.

 

The chassis I have used is a Poole-era 20'9" WB one, as seen on the Farish OAA open wagon, VBA van and single-container wagon. I could have used the more recently-designed and more accurate one that's on the current OBA and OCA models, but decided not to, because:

 

a) the couplings are more co-operative (the ones on the OCA are particularly stiff and unyielding)

b) the wheels don't have a tendency to rub against the underside of the floor, as on the OBA

c) the Poole ones are cheaper

d) by using the Farish container wagon as a basis, I didn't have to throw anything away. I just took the container off to use elsewhere.

e) a homemade superstructure would never be as finely detailed as a modern RTR wagon. Using a simple chassis designed 30 years ago means that the wagon has approximately the same level of detail across the board, drawing less attention to the chunky bits.

 

I would love there to be a ready-to-run OTA in N gauge (never mind the full range of variants!!!) - but given current production costs and the desire of the majority of modellers (or just the most vocal and influential ones, maybe) for ultra-detail, the RRP of such a wagon would surely be £30-odd. They'd probably be sold in a single, minuscule batch which would disappear overnight and then reappear on eBay a couple of years later for the same cost as a return ticket to the Moon (each).

 

This wagon cost less than £10 to make, including the chassis, though it required 179 separately-cut plasticard components, and took A Wee While To Make. But I'm in no hurry, and do feel a small sense of satisfaction.

 

It's now time for paint - light blue "Thames Board" livery, as seen on the West Highland in (e.g.) 1986.

 

My second wagon is only part-built, but I think I will need to de-cross my eyes and get a serious neck massage before attempting any more stanchions. 

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

[MatP]

Painting of the OTA has taken a while, using a range of disreputable brushes, but the wagon is now finished. I tried putting a full range of transfers on, but without success - for instance, not having any actual OTA transfers I tried cutting the CTA out of a sheet of RECTANK transfers, hoping to be able to overlay an O onto the C. But the things were so small that trying to move them into final position on the wagon caused the transfers to scrunch up (even with loads of liquid). As some of the numbering on an OTA goes behind one of the brake levers anyway (meaning I'd have had to cut the Farish brake lever off and then fabricate a new one), I decided to give up. And as for getting THAMES BOARD onto the end, life is just too short. It would require positioning 11 0.5mm square letters at each end of the wagon and would only be legible under magnification anyway. To my knowledge, nobody makes a one-piece transfer. So I decided not to bother...

 

However, one distinctive feature of these light blue wagons was a big advertising panel on each end with various contact numbers for the timber company. I have added a representation of this sign - using the bottom half of a red-circle-STOP-board transfer. On the bottom of these signs are several lines of text, which in N gauge is far too small to read. At least this put some sort of signage on the wagon. You can't really see the solebars on the wagon anyway when it's on my layout - a benefit of having the layout height at 3 feet, meaning you look down at an angle (and from several feet away).

 

Here's the finished result - the photo's a bit blurry but I am pushing the limits of my camera.

 

 

I have a second one to finish off - I might build some more but not straight away.

 

The even more blurry loco shunting my prototype OTA is 37423 in Railfreight triple grey (or "New Railfreight" as my friends and I called it at the time). In this guise, the loco is anachronistic for 1987, when my layout is set. 37423 was not repainted into Railfreight Metals or named "Sir Murray Morrison" until well into 1988, by which time the miasma of Sprinterisation was already starting to tickle the nostrils of the West Highland Scots. In fact, you might even say that putting a loco in mixed-traffic livery into a freight colour scheme was a portent of the end of loco-hauled passenger trains on the West Highland. That's why my layout is defiantly set in 1987, when the 37's were unchallenged and unthreatened.

 

On the other hand, I saw a Farish 37412 in Transrail livery for a very modest sum on eBay (back in the days of yore when unfashionable 37's were quite cheap secondhand), and 37423 was a straightforward conversion. Admittedly, 37423 did have numbers on its headcode boxes and I have not replicated this: as with the OTA numbers, their tiny size meant that they were beyond my skill to apply.

 

I got rid of the Transrail logos, names and numbers with T-Cut, added new numbers (this took hours for some reason, they just wouldn't go on straight...), Shawplan nameplates, double arrow symbols and Metals logos (but not Eastfield depot plaques, I don't think they were ever applied). 

 

Or, in effect, I renationalised the loco

 

Best Wishes,

Mat

Edited July 3, 2020 by MatP

[MatP]

Hi All,

 

Not much to report at the moment, apart from an awful lot of fencing going in. But having just finished scratchbuilding my first OTA, I've seen a report on the N Gauge Forum that the ex-Chivers OTA kit (and many other such products) is slated for re-introduction by the following company:

 

http://five79.co.uk/

 

There's also some discussion of it on this Forum, I now see:

 

 

I have no connection with this new venture (unless there is a strange astral connection that caused this announcement to come just after I had scratchbuilt an OTA) but I wish it every success!

 

Mat

[1977joey]

Hi Matt,

 

As a fellow N Gauger modelling the 80’s too, I don’t know how I’ve missed this.

 

Great looking layout, considering me a follower 

 

Cheers,

Mark