Bann Killigan - Pat James' colliery layout reborn

[Adam FW]

Many on this forum may know of Pat James, he was a very skilled modeller who competed in some of the past cake box challenges, he was also a prolific creator of small layouts. Sadly Pat passed away last year with some of his work left unfinished.

I was fortunate enough to get a hold of his part built Bann Killigan colliery layout and I plan to develop it into something of my own, hence it will be reborn but with a lot of the foundations left by Pat intact.

 

This is the layout as he left it:

 

 

 

Pat wanted to represent a fictitious Irish colliery in the 1960s. In the foreground is a small canal, the middle section is OOn3 (12mm) track representing a 3ft gauge railway running under the colliery screens, on the top level is the colliery itself; a pit head, engine house and a OO9 narrow gauge railway with loco shed.

 

There's a lot more detail of the build of the layout in @Corbs tribute to Pat James on the Railwaymania website along with some of Pat's other work

 

https://www.railwaymania.net/pat-james-a-tribute

 

In the next post I'll probably cover the buildings on the layout and detail some of my plans for it going forwards.

 

 

[Adam FW]

Heres a closer look at the engine house and loco shed that Pat built for the layout, firstly the loco shed, this is a scratch built building, the walls are foam board skimmed with a layer of DAS clay with a brick/stone pattern scribed on (various walls on the layout are built similarly). The roof, windows, doors and guttering are plastic.

 

 

 

The engine house meanwhile is a bit of a kit bash with parts from a Wills water tank and some other kits incorporated into a foam board building again skimmed with clay. The beam engine is scratch built whilst the chimney is moulded plastic along with the roofs

 

 

 

 

 

These 2 buildings will remain intact and will be painted up when I feel confident in my abilities to paint them as well as they have been built.

 

The colliery screens meanwhile were only space claim items made from some small plastic garages glued together so will be replaced. The pit head seems to have gone through many changes, the one which came with the layout being a Hornby Scaledale item, but it's footprint is too large so will also be replaced

 

Pat also built some large oak trees to cover creases in the water colour painted back scene. These trees have remained with his family so I need to look into getting/making some new ones

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by Adam FW

[Corbs]

It's in good hands! Looking forward to see it evolve.

[Adam FW]

I now have a plan for the layout, I'm going to extend the lower tracks through a hole in the right hand side of the layout onto a fiddle yard or traverser, on the top level with the oo9 track this will now extend through the LHS of the layout and possibly loop around to join up with RHS of the track giving a loop for continuous running.

 

The intention is for it to look something like this with the cyan track being outside of the main layout and ideally being removable

 

 

 

To lay the ground works for this I've been removing some of the existing scenery on the layout, the rocks here are a mixture of papier mache and DAS clay

 

 

I then roughly laid out the oo track work to see how it looked, I'm pretty happy but will give myself some time to think about it with the track in place (using short straights in place of flexitrack) before cutting holes in the back scene

 

 

The old mockup colliery screens remain but will be replaced with a modified knightwing mine buildings kit

 

[Adam FW]

It's been a long time since I posted an update to the layout on here but work has been progressing slowly.

 

Firstly I modified a Knightwing Mine Top Buildings kit for use as the screen buildings, the larger of the 2 buildings was cut down and reshaped so that the narrow gauge line could run through it, the other one has an altered base to clear the standard gauge track

 

 

The design for for the standard gauge track work was finalised and features 2 lines under the screen building, a pass around the screen building, 2 small sidings (1for an small loco shed, the other for the canal dock) and there will also be a single track extension off one side of the layout and a double track one out the other on smaller removable  baseboards, it's all glued together with plasticard strips so that it can be lifted out and worked on in one piece, this helps me out as and makes the wiring, weathering etc easier but I need to be careful not to bend or damage the track lifting it out. It will be secured in place once it's all wired up.

 

In total there will be 6 points though 1 is a more complex 3 way turnout, all will be live frog to help my little industrial locos run smoothly

 

 

With the basic trackwork sorted holes were then drilled into the foam baseboard for the point motors to fit into. Had I known the drill I used would make such a mess of the foamboard I would have done this another way in hindsight
 

 

The holes were covered over with thin plasticard panels with hole punched into them for the point motor tabs and pin (I know the pin slot runs the wrong way in this picture)

 

 

I also laid down some colour for the standard gauge baseboard and the rock wall behind it, it needs some more blending in but I wanted the  messy bit done before I laid the trackwork.

 

 

Finally for this post (though more has been done on the layout besides this recently) I weathered the track using my new airbrush with it's battery powered compressor allowing me to paint outside when the weather's nice. All the sleepers had a coat of sleeper grime then the rail sides and other metals bits a coat of dark rust and medium rust. I still need to slip in some sleepers under the track joints but these have already been painted

 

 

 

[Adam FW]

one thing I wanted on this layout was an inspection pit and small industrial loco shed, I picked up Peco inspection pit kit and after starting with a small pit and length of track behind it but decided instead to run the inspection pit to the end of the siding and have it partially covered by the engine shed. I painted the kit so that it looked like dark stone/concrete with rusted track supports

 

 

 

I really struggled to find a suitable loco shed, most are too big and heavily built for what I wanted, I was aiming for something built relatively quickly and cheaply rather than a permanent stone structure. To begin with scratchbuilding was the obvious route to take but considering it's small size and my Elegoo Saturn 3D printer was now working I decided to experiment with designing a loco shed to 3D print using one of my locos to help scale everything

 

 

The shed is designed to look like a steel structure with Wills sheets slid into slots on the print, these would be the corrogated iron pattern and painted to look rusty.

 

 

The first one printed well but I decided that it was too large and I wanted the cross braces to be visible on the outside. The second print was much better, giving more clearance to the neighboring track and still being big enough for a J94 Austerity to just about fit inside

 

 

After practicing on a few spare pieces of the corrugated iron I decided to airbrush a rough rust pattern over grey primer and then mist on a silver coat

 

 

 

more rust was then airbrushed on top after some tinted silver was painted onto some panels to offer some colour variance, then the rivets were picked out in a medium rust colour and more rust paint dabbed on with sponges to give some texture

 

 

meanwhile the frame was painted black with some light rust added as well and it all slotted together

 

 

I'm very happy with how this shed has turned out and the use of 3D printing on larger items has been interesting to experiment with, I'm not sure if there's going to be any other opportunities to get 3D printed structures onto this layout but who knows

[Adam FW]

Carrying on from the rusty corrugated iron engine shed I decided to do much the same for the roofs of the mine screen buildings but reducing the amount of silver and upping the rust to make it look a bit older

 

I wanted the lower half of the taller building to be a bit different so decided to paint it in a typical industrial pale green, again plenty of rust was added along panel lines

 

the wooden walls will be done after this all dries and is masked off to prevent overspray

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by Adam FW

[Adam FW]

Carrying on with the colliery screen buildings, it took me a lot of experimenting on some old mock-up screen buildings to choose a colour scheme and decide on how old and delipidated I wanted the wooden walls to look. I settled upon a plain brown colour in the end to keep the layout looking muted

 

 

I also experimented with paint chipping to expose the bare wooden colour below to age the building like the rusty roofs, I tried the 'hairspray' method but found it pretty uncontrollable and made the building look like it was abandoned in the wild west rather than the old and tired look I wanted so decided to just scuff the top coat instead

 

 

For the proper buildings the completed roofs were masked off and the walls base-coated in an old wood colour (beige) then I roughly picked out individual planks in a variety of colours to make the final top coat look more varied. My sister thinks it looks like a clown house, and I don't disagree

 

 

Once that had dried I laid down some thin top coats of brown with the airbrush. Other than the beige all the colours used were Vallejo airbrush paints, compared to the mig paints which also work with an airbrush straight out the bottle these were much more translucent and more of a wash than a paint which was unfortunate as a lot of paint ended up being used to coat everything evenly 

 

 

 

As you can see in the image above I used a scalpel to add some nicks, and cuts into the walls, I wasn't happy with how this turned out in the end and it didn't look very realistic but did at least stop everything looking too uniform

 

After the paint had fully dried I scuffed it up with various bits of sandpaper to make it look older and rougher

 

 

 

 

They still need some weathering but that's them done for now, I've decided to weather, add moss and plant growth etc to all the buildings in one go to make sure it all looks consistent rather than doing it a bit at a time and still have Pat's engine house and loco shed to paint up

 

Finally a few days after painting these I was wondering around a local model shop and for sale was one of the Knightwing buildings, built, painted but unmodified. I prefer my rust effects but it was interesting to see the instructed build on it's legs rather than my cut up version