Jump to content
 

Grinding Halt


57xx

Recommended Posts

  • RMweb Gold

As Morefuninstead has indeed ground to a halt, partly due to lack of space to erect it for working on and other commitments that seem to swallow up my spare time, I thought surely I can complete a "layout" that is only 20"x11"... And so Grinding Halt was conceived. Grinding Halt will be a simple diorama of a small GWR halt with emphasis on scenics rather than being a running layout. I'll be going back to my native 4mm / 00 gauge so I can use it for display/photography of my stock once finished. However, due to Mikkel's bad influence, I'm going to give some track building a go. I'm sure even I can mange to construct a mere 20" of track! One of the reasons for this is to get it to look right (gauge aside), the other is that the more I play with plans for my "retirement layout", (still a good few years to go before I have to worry about that one), the more I think I will be constructing track on it to get the flow of the tracks as I want it, so this will give me a little taster of things to come.

 

A half scale concept is under construction.

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold

A bit of time this afternoon spent with an old box, stanley knife, pen, off-cuts of rail from Morefuninstead and the basics of Grinding Halt have come together. I fancied having the end of a siding to have a detailed wagon sat in it and found one example of a halt with siding whilst browsing 'tinternet, so in it went. All the track components have been ordered from C&L and baseboard bits will be bought during the week. I'll be going for foam-board construction to keep it simple.

 

 

post-7355-0-21211800-1306093291_thumb.jpg

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
  • RMweb Gold

Not off to a great start... firstly I purchased some Celotex from Wickes to make the baseboard. It turns out it's not the extruded polystyrene that I though it was! It appears to have fibreglass in it's make up, which would explain why my hands got extremely itchy after cutting it! I'm certainly not going to work with it, every time I pick up the piece I cut out I start itching. Next stop B&Q to try and get the correct stuff. That or just cut out a bit of scrap ply to the right size and use that instead, might be easier in the long run.

 

Then I ordered the track parts and also added in a pack of sleepers which I thought would be good to make up the wooden platform of the halt. During my browsing of the C&L site, I managed to find the ply sleepers I wanted, but then somehow ordered plastic ones by mistake. D'oh! Luckily Brian's excellent customer services means I can swap them over for what I wanted easily enough.

 

And finally the 3rd (and hopefully last problem) was when I went to assemble the Mikes Models buffer stop for the sidings, I found one of the handed side pieces was duplicated rather than having the mirror image part. An email to Holt Model Railways should sort that out.

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
  • RMweb Gold

Just thought I'd post a very late closure on this topic. I was just browsing through some pics and I found some I took when I had to abandon this project. It's a bit of a cautionary tale - do not use Celotex as a baseboard material! Contrary to my misgivings in my last posting here in 2011, I pushed on with using the Celotex. I made some good progress on the model...

 

post-7355-0-89941000-1362090490_thumb.jpg

 

The landscape was laid with polystyrene and filler and painted, sleepers fixed down and ballasted and the platform constructed using wooden sleepers (what better than wood to represent a wooden structure!). At which point it was put aside for a while. When I came back to it later in the year, it was looking like this...

 

post-7355-0-38495500-1362088441_thumb.jpg

 

At first glance it looks ok, but the curve apparent on the track bed is not due to the optics of the camera! Nope, the Celotex, when striped of it's foil coating is not stable and had warped. I actually found an off-cut in the shed recently, still with it's foil on but also warped. The following pics show the extent of the warp in many dimensions

 

post-7355-0-29533100-1362088458_thumb.jpg

 

post-7355-0-77420800-1362088475_thumb.jpg

 

At this point it was thrown back in the spare room in disgust and forgotten about. One day I'd like to see if I can salvage the track bed and finish my first foray into track building, it seems a waste to not finish it but it will have to wait for a day when I feel motivated to give it a go. Meanwhile I'm cracking on with building up my stock of wagon kits.

 

And so endeth Grinding Halt.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...