Scotland Street

[John R Smith]

This is very nice work, David. The atmosphere of "place" is being created in a very positive fashion.

 

Your "pillars" on a masonry building or bridge would usually be called 'pilasters', but in this context I'm not so sure. I love the windows!

 

John

[Devonbelle]

I can only echo what John has said, and more.

 

Lovely looking layout - can't wait to see grime applied - I found some Scottish freight backwaters in the mid 80s, Cameron Bridge with the co2 traffic notably, what you've built has got me reminiscing - lots of scope for dirty McRats (26s/27s) and class 20s pootling about with van fits and covhops.

 

Great stuff - look forward to more progress photos. Paul

[Ian Smeeton]

I have often wondered about the spelling of numpty.

 

Is it as above, or with a silent g, k, or even p?

 

Off topic, I know.

 

Regards

 

Ian

[Simond]

I always assumed it is as written above.

 

It would appear that the OED agrees.

 

http://public.oed.com/appeals/numpty/

 

Never seen an alternative spelling including silent letters, but then I haven't been looking (til you asked )

 

Best

Simon

[Astir648]

It occurs to me that the only time I have ever seen "numpty" written down was on a mug - one of a set, each with a Scots slang word on it, and that's how it was spelled on the mug. I'm not sure how anyone decides correct spelling of a slang word anyway, perhaps there's a linguistic boffin in the bowels of the OED who decides...

[Astir648]

A little more progress.

 

A little hunting on eBay has produced two road vehicles for the layout. One is a diecast Bedford TK lorry which someone has added a wooden load bed to, making it look pretty good as a coal lorry for the layout. The front of the cab could use some improvements but as I intend to use it with it's back to the front of the layout that probably won't be necessary.

 

 

The second vehicle is a 1960's British Rail van. To be honest I'm not sure where this would fit into the layout and, having tried it in a couple of locations I don't think it looks "right". It could just be that it's still incredibly shiny, so weathering it will probably help, but it also needs to look like it belongs somewhere so the jury is out on it for the time being.

 

 

I've been working on the coal-yard area. Firstly I have created a brick wall in the tunnel-mouth, with an aperture for a locked gate, as per the prototype Scotland Street Tunnel. This still needs a lintel added and then the bricks need weathering and varying, to stop them from looking so pink and perfect! The wall is Redutex sheet, mounted on a piece of foam-board. 1cm behind it is another sheet of foam-board, painted matt black with a little grey, to create the impression of depth in the tunnel.

 

I have built a (very) low relief corrugated iron lean-to to go in the back corner of the coal-yard. It represents the back of a shed, as the first step in creating an illusion that the coal yard is bigger than it really is. It's actually a ridiculously small space so I need to make it seem larger. Ideas so far...

1. The Skytrex coal staithes and office have been ditched, as they are simply too big.

2. The new coal staithes will actually be quite slim, especially compared to the Skytrex ones - repeating the technique I used with the bonded warehouse roof, which is actually very shallow. As the layout can only be seen from the front I can get away with a little of this type of thing, if I do it sparingly.

3. An angled wall will appear from behind the (as yet un-built) distillery building behind the distillery headshunt and will be partially blocked by the coal lorry. The idea is to make it seem that the coal yard continues out of sight beyond the wall.

4. The track in the coal yard will be surrounded by stone setts, hopefully making the total ground area look bigger.

5. Some sacks etc will be put on the coal yard side of the goods platform. In reality I'm sure the coal merchant would have made use of it, not least because it would have been convenient. Again, it will make the coalyard look bigger...hopefully.

6. Whatever else I can think of or gets suggested to me!

 

 

The wriggly tin shed is made of Slaters 7mm corrugated styrene sheet, cut into scale sized sheets (). These were then glued onto a sheet of foamboard, which acts as the shell of the building. The sheets were prototypically overlapped and the fixing bolts were made by drilling 0.5mm holes through the styrene and pushing dress-making pins through, snipping them off at the rear and gluing with araldite to hold them in place. The roof was made in the same way. I have deliberately modelled a shed with single-pitched roof, sloping down to the entrance on the far side. This allows a very slim profile (1cm) as most of the roof is out of sight. Hopefuly some paint and lots of rust will make it look the part.

 

David

[Simond]

David

 

The Bedford van. It's shiny but somehow the wrong kind of shiny. There was some discussion a week or two back, on Cwm Bach I think, about polishing Pecketts - with toothpaste, 2000 grit wet&dry, Solvol Autosol, T-Cut, all sorts of arcane abuse with abstruse abrasives!

 

I'd suggest you try something like this to get a more "scale" finish on your van.

 

Your going to have a bit of fun with the wriggly tin. Looking forward to that! Bitumen paint and rust?

 

Best

Simon

[Astir648]

I'm not sure Simon - I have a hankering for red oxide, but I also think that original galvanised grey will allow me to show off the condition of the building better, with variations in shade of grey and a nice contrast with the rust.

 

Decisions, decisions...

[Alex TM]

Hi David,

 

Just wanted to say that this is a great thread, and an even better project.

 

I live just over twenty minutes' walk from the site of Scotland Street; I also know some of the southside areas around Newington and beyond where some of your other influences come from, and combined I think they really work.  I'm looking forward to seeing this finished (and exhibited?).

 

Regards,

 

Alex.

[Astir648]

Hi Alex.

 

It's a small world - I first got interested in Scotland Street in the early 1990's, when I had a flat in Eyre Place, just around the corner. I was fascinated by the idea of a small urban yard, carved out of a low-lying patch of ground between two tunnels, though by then the railway was long-gone.

 

David

[railwayrod]

Nice work David. Keep it up.

 

Like the photos and your description of how you do things.

 

Rod

Edited March 15, 2016 by railwayrod

[Astir648]

It's amazing the difference a splash of paint can make! The corrugated iron building now has a coat of light grey acrylic and  Railmatch dark rust acrylic strategically dry-brushed, with reference to on-line pictures of corrugated iron buildings. The interesting thing is that no two sheets of the stuff seem to rust in the same way, even on the same building and often with little relationship to where a particular sheet happens to be on a building. 

 

 

I painted it under a spotlight and the grey looks a shade or two darker than intended when viewed under the LED lights on the layout, but I don't think it's worth re-doing it.

 

With that done and dusted it was time to get on with the roof capping on the bonded warehouse. After some experimenting I decided to go with Raymond's suggestion of using thick tinfoil for this as it seems to reproduce the prototype material without too much persuasion. Pie-dish material seems about right and, rather than scrape the pastry off I bought a life-time's supply of foil pie dishes for £3.

 

 

 

The sides are a bit too wiggly to use, but the bases just need to be flattened with a thumbnail. I cut it into 15mm strips and laid them over 1mm diameter brass rod, before squeezing the foil around the rod between two finger-nails. The prototype material is formed round wooden poles so this copies it nicely.

 

 

To save money I then replaced the brass rod with the same diameter of styrene rod, trimmed one side of the foil so the overlap is 3mm wide and stuck it onto the slates with double-sided tape (if both sides were visible then both would need to be trimmed to 3mm).

 

 

I painted the capping with a coat of Railmatch early freight grey acrylic as it looks about the right shade and will be easily reproduced later if I need to touch it up. The pic shows painted to the left and unpainted to the right, with a big shadow in the middle to show what a poor photographer I am!

 

 

The final touch is the steel straps which hold the capping in place. I'm making these from 1mm wide strips of lead foil - thanks for the idea Simon! As I drink the sort of cheap wine that doesn't have lead foil round a cork (screw tops all the way round here!) I Googled lead foil and found sticky-backed stuff, sold in fishing tackle shops for making flies sink better and it's ideal.

 

 

Onwards and upwards. The next step will probably be the malting kiln building, which will bring a few interesting challenges...

Edited March 14, 2016 by Astir648

[Simond]

David

 

Glad the wine foil was an inspiration!

 

Good tip re the sticky-lead. We are well supplied with fishing tackle shops, so that's easy!

 

Thx

Simon

[Astir648]

A little more painting and some careful positioning of the lead strips and here is the finished roof capping, which looks OK I think. I forgot to distress the slates on the warehouse roof before adding the capping, so that will be a bit fiddly to do. Oddly when you cut 1mm strips from the sheet of sticky-back lead foil they corkscrew as they come away - I've no idea why they do that, but they're easily flattened again before cutting to length and sticking onto the painted foil.

 

 

My other task recently has been to sort out the area behind the platform.

 

Firstly I amended the brick wall in the tunnelmouth. This was made from Redutex, which has a marvelous texture and is slightly flexible so that it's easy to make a convincing joint between two sheets. However the bricks, although supposedly weathered were very clean and perfect looking, so I spent a couple of hours painting individual bricks in with Railmatch brick acrylic, tinted with varying amounts of black and yellow. I think this has made it look rather more like rough industrial brick-work and less like the frontage of a home counties 3 bedroom house!

 

It'll still need weathering down but my plan is to do the entire layout at once, to ensure consistency.

 

 

Next I added some graffiti in white paint. I'm pretty sure the multi-coloured geometric-lettered graffiti "tags" seen everywhere today hadn't been invented in the 1980's so I needed something more authentic. I seem to recall a lot of graffiti comprised unintelligible initials, presumably of gang names, so I have used B.T.D. (for Bracken The Dog - he's a Jack Russell, so gang membership is probably in character for him). I couldn't resist including "Romans go home" in incorrect Latin as a nod to Monty Python...

 

Next I added a lintel to the doorway into the tunnel from a scrap of balsa, painted concrete grey and I made a up a gate from styrene strip and rod, using the same technique as for the window grilles in the warehouse. I was going to mount it squarely, but when I tried to put it in place for this photo it slipped into a leaning position. This makes it look nicely vandalised, so I might keep it like that.

 

The addition of some ready painted oil drums I found on eBay and a couple of whitemetal pallets I've painted with oily black stains and this end of the layout is beginning to look quite promising.

 

David

[Simond]

John Cleese was so uncannily like the Reverend Ted Smailes, my Latin master (in mannerisms, language and sideburn-pulling , but not even slightly in appearance) that it still makes me squirm today. Classic.

 

Best

Simon

[Astir648]

Oh the temptation to descend into a Monty-Phython-fest....

 

I've made a little more progress on Scotland Street. I have been re-thinking the coal-yard and how to make the most of the very limited space available. I have a Skytrex coal merchants office, which I adapted to make half relief and also a set of Skytrex coal staithes. The problem is that the office simply takes up too much space, even at half relief and the coal staithes are too deep and being solid resin, can't really be amended.

 

So it's back to the drawing board. I'm keen to suggest to the viewer that the coal yard continues out of sight behind buildings, as otherwise it's just too small and I think a coal yard without a little coal merchants office is simply incomplete! So I've put together a low relief (1cm deep) building. it's deliberately the rear of the office, to indicate that the front is where the rest of the yard is, but hopefully it has the look of a small brick-built coal office.

 

It's made from a sheet of 5mm foam-board, with Redutex brick work stuck on - this stuff is so easy to work with and looks good. I've touched up a lot of the bricks in varying brick shades, as I did with the tunnel wall.

 

 

 

There's only one window and it's well over to the right-hand side, to make way for coal staithes in front of the wall. The window lintel and ledge are of painted balsa, as are the barge-boards at the top of the wall.

 

 

I've deliberately built the gable end of the building, as I think that looks better in low relief than the face of a pitched roof (I seem to have got away with it in the bonded warehouse, but it's not ideal).

 

 

Roof slates are cut from grey card, as with the other buildings and attached with double-sided tape. I'll make a window-frame to fit from styrene strip and I'll add the ends of the guttering on both sides from some whitemetal Scale Link parts. Here it is in place, though the slates aren't complete yet.

 

 

For the coal staithes I have bought a Modern Motive Power kit. As with all MMP stuff it's fabulously over-engineered with etched brass stanchions and best of all an etched brass jig to accurately add the holes and marks left by the chairs. As the kit essentially provides a big heap of stanchions and sleepers it will allow me to be flexible as to the size and shape of the staithes. They will go in front of the coal office and should leave enough space to do something imaginative in the space between it and the corrugated iron shed, using some walling, the coal lorry and a load of coal sacks!

 

Unfortunately I can't do much more of this part of the layout until I finish the stone setts the coal yard will sit on. I was using Redutex for these and the required sheets have now been out of stock at DCC Supplies (the UK distributor) for 4 months! I'm tempted to rip up the Redutex and start again with something else, but I'm not keen on textured plastikard and although scribed plaster is very tempting it's a slow process and would involve a lot of awkward leaning, because of where the layout sits, above my desk. (All other suggestions gratefully received)

 

One other thing I've been playing with is a couple of rather nice etched brass "BEWARE OF TRAINS" signs from Smiths. These are a nice touch for the distillery buildings, but painting the letters in white proved a challenge. Even with a magnifier, a very fine brush and my wrist locked against the table to keep it steady I just couldn't touch the letters in accurately. After a bit of head-scratching I came up with an a different approach. I brushed white enamel paint thinly over a piece of smooth flat steel (actually the handle of a set square - necessity is the mother of invention). I then held the back of the black-painted etch with a blob of blu-tak and pressed the sign into the white paint a couple of times and the result is quite acceptable.

 

 

 

David

[Simond]

David

 

couple of similar techniques I've tried;  use different paints, so you can wash the white off without spoiling the black - and you can paint a pencil eraser with the white, very thinly, and then press your etch onto that.  Also useful for cobbles, bricks etc.

 

best

Simon

[Astir648]

Gosh it's been a week since I posted anything. I will admit to having stepped away from the railway long enough to re-qualify in my other hobby, flying gliders (full size ones, not models!). After a few months away from it I had to undergo a couple of check-flights with an instructor, to ensure I hadn't got rusty and instructors do like to entertain themselves by doing something imaginative and unpleasant with the aircraft, before saying "you have control" and sitting back to watch you sweat the recovery. So having got through that successfully it was good to get back to Scotland Street.

 

I've been neglecting rolling stock a bit recently, whilst focusing on buildings, so I thought I'd do a few overdue tasks on the rolling stock side of things. To start off with I blackened some brass three-link couplings with gun blue. This proved to be a success - drop them into the gunk, leave for a few hours and then wash it off to find a nice matt black finish.

 

I thought the Ixion Fowler needed a name - all the best industrial engines have names, and usually something short. As the Fowler shunts the whisky distillery siding and having a partner named after a Scottish island made the choice fairly obvious, so RONA it is. It also means I can claim brownie points from the real Rona, but pointing out that I'd named a rather old and small engine after her maybe wasn't such a good idea! The name-plates were etched for me by Small Planet, who gave a great personal service.

 

 

 

The layout really needs a box van or two, so I thought I'd spend the Easter long weekend building a JLTRT kit I've had lying around for a while. It's the first JLTRT kit I've made and I was surprised on opening the box to discover the entire body was one complete resin part, as was the chassis. The only work to be done was the addition of brake gear, W-irons etc, plus buffer beam furniture and a few other bit and pieces. It only took about 6 hours to complete the kit ready for painting, compared to probably ten times that for a good brass kit.

 

 

However I was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the parts, resin, white-metal and cast brass: all required very little fettling before fitting. The design of the kit seems well thought out and I'm delighted with the quality of the end result. 

 

 

 

It's now ready for the paint shop. I also need to add transfers on a couple of other wagons, then I'll probably get on with the malting kiln building.

 

David

 

 

[HealeyMills]

Hi David,

 

Wow, the completed build looks superb.  Did the brake rigging come along with a full set of instructions?

 

Looking forward to seeing you paint/ spray this and if you could give us plenty of photos of that process it would be a real bonus too.

 

Thank you for sharing this build.

 

Regards

Lee

[Astir648]

Hi Lee

 

Thanks!

 

I didn't take many photos of the build because it went together so quickly and easily! The instructions describe the use of supplied 0.7mm brass wire for the brake cross-beam and pull-rods but they actually supplied plastic rod. I used the rod for the cross-beam but used 0.5mm brass rod for the pull-rods, which seems to look ok to me.

 

They also REALLY need to get someone to proof-read their instructions and get rid of the many typos, but that's just me being niggly and doesn't really impact on the model!

 

David

[Astir648]

Recent days have seen me dabbling in a variety of tasks on Scotland Street, including buildings,scenery and rolling stock.

 

First up I made a start on the kiln building. This is a tall, narrow structure in which barley grains were heated before being spread on the adjoining malting floors. It was given an extra floor some time in the 1950s or 60s and as a result has a corrugated steel roof and upper side walls. The front wall represents that nightmare of 20th century Scottish architecture, the harled wall. South of the border this is called roughcast or pebble-dash, but in Scotland almost every building is coated in the stuff, usually in a drab and depressing shade of beige or grey. 

 

There aren't many prototype pics of the building, but the two below show the lower part of it in the 1960s, behind a railtour locomotive and the second picture shows it in the 1980s, after all the track had been taken up.

 

 

 

The structure was made of 2cm deep foam-board, in the same way as for the bonded warehouse. Recreating the harling walls realistically required some experimentation. I tried using builders' sand but the grains were too large. I found some fine sand which seems about right. After some experiments sprinkling it onto coats of various types of glue and varnish I found the most realistic finish was achieved by mixing it through acrylic paint (in a suitably drab shade) and painting it onto the walls.

 

 

 

My next task was to start preparing the coalyard for laying setts. Having waited over 4 months for DCC Supplies to get more of the relevant Redutex sheet into stock I tried contacting Redutex in Spain, who have lots in stock and will be posting some to me this week, so that's one problem solved.

 

To prepare the track for the setts I need to attach the flangeway, made from OO rail at a uniform narrow distance from the rail. At the other end of the layout I tried gluing rail to the edge of thick plastikard but that proved to lack the robustness I need, plus in the coalyard the track is curved, making that approach much harder. Instead I am cutting pcb material into strips, sliding them between the sleepers and pinning them down. After cutting the copper to avoid short-circuits I'll solder the flangeway to the copper cladding. I can then build up the space between the two flangeways before sticking the Redutex in place.

 

 

 

Finally I have returned to a part-completed wagon project. This is a Modern Motive Power 16 tonne mineral wagon kit. Nice and simple you'd think? But no, it's MMP so the level of detail is wonderfully insane. I also have a part-built MMP class 08 and I love these kits. You'll never get a rapid result, but the quality of both the design and the etchings are simply breath-taking, compared with some I've seen. More importantly the instructions are excellent, allowing a relative novice like me to achieve a surprisingly high standard, though I suspect nothing like what a really good modeller could achieve with one of these kits.

 

With the chassis complete and the hornblocks built up (8 folds on a strip of brass, then it and a whitemetal casting soldered round the Slaters bearing) I spent this evening making a spring. Yes, just one spring, but what a spring! None of your whitemetal or plastic castings, this is a working, detailed structure, with all six leaves fitted separately. I will admit to using some naughty words whilst putting it together but I'm chuffed with the end result. Just three more to do!

 

 

 

Onwards and upwards.

 

David

[AngusDe]

I've sketched out various 0 ideas for my various spaces, but never managed anything as nice as this, brilliant stuff.

 

These ideas bubble to the surface every time I visit my local model shop and see the Dapol Terrier, all I need is a Scottish back story for one, but given panniers made it to Helmsdale, easily created!

 

Like I say, all very inspirational and evocative!

 

Angus

[Astir648]

Thanks Angus - that's great to hear. The Dapol Terrier does look like a good locomotive for a shunting layout. How about a dockside railway? I think there's tonnes of potential there.

 

David

[Astir648]

Well it's been a couple of months since I've posted on here. My work always gets crazy-busy in May and June and this year was no exception. I've managed to find time for an occasional small dabble with the railway but not to post anything about progress. With the work backlog up to date at last I think it's time for a catch-up.

 

The MMP open wagon kit is still a work in progress, though definitely one I will return to soon. However I gave in to my desire for a Heljan tank wagon and I wasn't disappointed. It's a very nice model, with independent suspension and excellent detail. I'm justifying it's presence on the basis that the malting kiln could well have been oil-fired - this is the 1970's after all. Of course this does drag me closer to the inevitable day when I will have to gird up my loins and face the need to weather my rolling stock...

 

 

Other progress has included the completion of the kiln building. Since I last posted about it I have added barred windows and a chimney made from plasticard tube. the roof was made from corrugated plasticard with bolt heads made from sewing pins. This is basically the same technique I used for the corrugated steel shed in the coalyard, but here I was trying to capture the more modern style of industrial profiled steel sheeting. I used plasticard angles to create the fascias over the apex and wall-heads and painted it in darker grey, without rust. The profile of the sheeting should really have been more squared  than normal corrugated iron but I couldn't find anything suitable and as this is a low profile building, with the roof edge-on to the viewer I think I've got away with it. I've also added a little weathering to the wall, but this is still a work in progress.

 

 

I have also finished the flangeways and setts in the coalyard and in front of the bonded warehouse. Soldering rail to copper-clad board worked very well for the flangeways and stock runs very smoothly.There's a little voice in my head saying "the setts would have looked better if I'd carved them in plaster" but the Redutex sheeting looks ok and the location of the layout above my desk would have made it awkward to accurately carve setts...that's the excuse I'm going with, anyway!

 

 

 

One other little bit of progress was a cable drum kit I bought on eBay. This is made from laser-cut MDF and looks astonishingly good, even without painting or weathering.

 

 

The final and biggest piece of progress is with the back-scene. At present all the buildings, tunnel-mouth etc are leaning in place, so I'm looking forward to having a rigid back and sides to the layout to allow me to fit these properly. The back-scene is made of sheets of 5mm MDF with a laminate coating on one side. A timber batten frame on the back gives it structural integrity and my plan is to screw it to the baseboard, together with similar scenes for the two ends of the layout, to create a (hopefully) fairly rigid open-fronted box. The laminate was sprayed with grey rattle-can primer before painting. As I have the artistic skills of a particularly philistine orang-utan, this was placed in the hands of Rona, my partner, who has done a cracking job of painting a realistic sky with acrylic paint.

 

 

 

The finishing touch will be to create the impression of the Edinburgh skyline using photographs of Edinburgh tenements, greyed down slightly, to make them look a little more distant. They will be printed to size on matte photo paper and glued on. I'd like to add either Arthur's Seat or Edinburgh Castle Rock in the far background, but there's a risk of looking like the lid of a shortbread tin, so I'll see how it goes!

 

Next step will be an MMP coal staithe kit for the coal-yard. Oh, and I've pre-ordered a Dapol Class 08 - it seemed almost rude not to!

 

David

[John R Smith]

That's all looking very good, David, thanks for the update. I think the setts look just fine, I don't see that they would have been any better if you had carved them. It's very easy to get carried away in any scale, but most people end up with far too much relief on brickwork, slates, paving, roads etc even in O Gauge. If you look at real tarmac, paving, bricks and so on there is remarkably little relief as pointing is usually brought pretty flush and tarmac is rolled flat. After all, a quarter of an inch in our scale is only 0.15mm, so the temptation with Das or whatever is to go carving away and end up with a caricature of the real thing.

 

John