Whiston and Cogenhoe Quarries

[Warspite]

16 hours ago, Barnaby said:

Wow I had missed some news you have had some poor health, glad to read that you are slowly improving.   To be honest your symptoms are as close to Covid-19 as you could get, have you had your vaccination yet, I've had both mine?

 

I look forward to reading about your ongoing build from your new room.

That new room looks fantastic. 

 

Take care, stay well & get healthy.

 

 

Regards

 

Thanks for your good wishes. It’s certainly been a difficult 14 months and as I’ve had to shield, I’ve been virtually housebound since coming out of hospital. It’s ironic that when I’ve had the time to work on the layout, I lost my mojo to do any physical modelling and consequently made very little progress. It seemed much easier to make adjustments to my track plan on the PC or just do other things. I am thrilled about the new room but my loss of mojo coincided with a need to tidy up the house and garage and my wife’s cunning plan to move most things railway related to the new room, now named ‘The Doghouse’ for reasons I cannot imagine! I now have a railway room full of old layouts, stock boxes and railway magazines and books and I haven’t had any appetite to sort it all out yet. However, I still have the layout’s original location in our shared study and I have designed it with the flexibility to move it to the new railway room when I can and then extend it .

 

Although I’ve hardly posted on here, I’ve been following your layout updates and saw what you had decided on point control. I had already invested in the Peco SmartSwitch system with everything operated by the Sig-na Trak. I got mine sometime after you when I read how you could set up a ‘display’ for each loco. The trouble is I spent a lot of time deciding how to operate the servos – above baseboard, below baseboard etc. – until I was satisfied that I had adopted the best method. A lot of trial and error and that’s with only four remotely controlled turnouts! I’ve now started to lay track and you’ve given me the incentive to start putting more updates on here.

 

It’s good to hear you’ve had both jabs; I’ve had my first and getting my second one soon. You too, take care and keep safe.

[Warspite]

I’ve finally made some progress on the layout. I changed the track plan (again) to make things a bit more interesting and provide additional siding capacity for the small locomotive fleet. I’ve now laid and wired the track and installed the servo operated point motors.

 

The layout consists of three scenic boards totalling 2550mm x 700mm (8’ 4” x 2’ 3½”) with a 1090mm (3’ 7”) traverser board. The ground rises towards the top right so the engine shed is at a slightly higher level than the track which comes in from under the bridge. The foreground falls to the front of the layout.

 

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Warspite
Edited to replace lost images.

[Warspite]

I’m building the engine shed from the Buzz Models ‘small industrial shed’ laser-cut kit. I chose to use two kits to make a double length shed. These are well designed kits and the ‘shell’ of the sheds goes together very nicely.

 

 

Buzz provide sheets of corrugated styrene sheet but you need to cut these to size to represent the corrugated metal panels found on these buildings. I managed to photograph some old corrugated buildings not far from home and represented the haphazard pattern of the panels on the model. I initially tried track pins to represent the rivets holding the panels in place but these looked over scale so I used fine wire instead. Very fiddly but I thought it was worth it in the end.

 

 

Having already painted the first half of the shed, I somewhat belatedly went back to my Tonks’ books and found many of the ironstone sheds had windows. I managed to add two of these on the front half without having to cut away too much of the wooden structure.

 

 

I haven’t added glazing yet but I think the windows actually improve the look of the shed.

 

Stephen

Edited December 15, 2023 by Warspite
Edited to replace lost images.

[Barnaby]

That's very nice modelling work Stephen.   

 

Best

[Warspite]

39 minutes ago, Barnaby said:

That's very nice modelling work Stephen.   

 

Best

 

Thanks Barnaby. 

 

I've got to put corrugated panels to the side and roof on the second half yet together with the front, rear and the other side. But, it's coming on!

 

Stephen

[Osgood]

The Buzz kit x 2 arrangement captures the character of the old Woolsthorpe shed at Cottesmore, so most appropriate!

[Warspite]

Two years and four months later...

 

Sorry for the lack of any updates but the layout had to take a back seat due to many other demands on my time. I have dabbled with a few things on the layout in the intervening 2+ years but intend to commit more time if I can... my wife just read this and laughed!

 

In the meantime, I've just edited those of my posts with images to replace the lost ones so that anybody reading this thread for the first time will get some idea what it is all about.

 

Stephen