Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench

[Caley Jim]

True Sem.  All the period literature describes the colour as 'lead grey' which as we well know can be just about any shade of grey you care to name.

I've said before that I think we get far too hung up on the colour of wagons.  Grey was mixed from black and white pigments in whatever proportion the foreman painter thought appropriate and it was not done with any precision from day to day.  Two wagons could come out of the shops on consecutive days, each a slightly different colour.  Give them a few days in traffic in the smokey, sulphurous atmosphere of c19th industrial Britain and they would be a different colour again, especially if they were carrying coal.  I've heard it reported that a former LNER painter said that the only time the top brass were fussy about colour was for the top link locos.  Any way, if anyone says that the colour is wrong there is a simple answer :-  'Prove it'!

 

Jim

[Annie]

Thanks for the reality check Jim.  I think I was having a 'Doubt Myself' day yesterday, but I did do a couple of more NBR vans with differing 'grey' colour variations and loaded them up to the DLS as well.  I heard back from a Trainz modeller who builds seriously nice UK layouts and he said that he thought my NBR vans were excellent and the colour was fine; - so there you go, - just me being silly about things again.

[Annie]

Another couple of imaginary PO wagons for the Hopewood Tramway.  A little whimsey does no harm and is a lot of fun.  I actually have a lot of 'proper' PO wagons, but by the time I've frowned over trying to decide whether they are appropriate for my area and whether their livery suits my time period I've lost all interest in playing trains.

 

 

A new engine on the Hopewood Tramway; - a Kerr Stuart 'Victory'.  It's an older model from Paulz Trainz and a very nice engine to drive too.  Because I've been a good customer in the past Paul will often give me more models than what I've asked for so now I have four Kerr Stuart 'Victory' tank engines and I'm not sure wot I'm going to do with them all.

 

 

 

This is why I ordered the Kerr Stuart.  This is the nasty gradient on the line to the Mollywood portal (which will one day be replaced by an actual modelled representation of Mollywood).  The little Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0's were really struggling with taking a train of loaded sand wagons up this gradient and while I could ease the gradient fairly easily I don't want to.

 

 

Bluebell Sands is coming together very nicely.

 

 

I've done a little more work on the new station at Downes Farm.  At the moment the line heading off towards the right hand background of the picture ends in a set of buffer stops, but it will be continuing on further.  I'm having to lay an embankment in place and do some other ground work before tracklaying can proceed.

I like my silly little tramway, - it makes me happy.

 

Edited November 17, 2018 by Annie

[Annie]

More Hopewood Tramway snaps.

 

 

 

[Annie]

Another wagon from Dreamwalker Wagon Works.  John Ahern's books were an enormous influence on my railway modelling way back hundreds of year ago when I was in my late teens.  That the Madder Valley Railway has been preserved and is being carefully cared for is also a very good thing.  So I decided that I would have a Madder Valley Railway wagon, - or maybe two, - on the Hopewood Tramway.

 

 

Another snap taken along the Hopewood Tramway.  This is the farmyard near the Hopewood on Sea junction on the tramway.

 

[Lancaster622]

Fantastic Annie, making me want to fire up T:ANE again!

 

It's landscaping I struggle with, any tips?

 

Just to keep in with the thread

 

1725 a North Eastern Railway 1001 'Long Boiler' plods slowly over the viaduct approaching Barnards Castle

 

[Annie]

I think the key to good landscaping is finding the right ground textures, trees & etc as well as hunting out the right models to suit the layout you're building.  I will say right off for a start that there is a huge amount of completely underwhelming poor quality scenic material on the DLS and it's only by dogged persistence that I've been able to find the materials that I use.  The other thing is I have a very visual memory and and I draw on all the things I've seen and liked from films and books as well as the scenic landscape where I live. Even though it's rural New Zealand and not Britain by and large plants and trees do grow just the same and in the same places and it's only details like tree species that are different.  The dirt and ground colours I use make a big difference as well and I try to get the lighting adjusted properly to set the mood and character of the layout.  The Hopewood Tramway is nice and cheerful and Summery and makes you want to take a stroll along the beach.  On the other hand my 1860's NBR layout looks windswept, chilly and drear and if it's about to rain at any minute.

[Annie]

More imaginary PO wagons. Nearly all my layouts have had the premises of 'Nuttey & Slack, coal merchants' somewhere on them, but up until now they've had no wagons to call their own. There should be three, but I accidentally deleted one of them. Not a big problem as I can easily re-do it.

 

In other news my favourite mouse broke and I'm having to use an old clunker of a cheapie WiFi mouse which I don't like.  A new mouse is on order, but it won't arrive until later next week.

[Annie]

After studying photos of John Ahern's rolling stock I decided to make a representation of one of his goods vans.  The original model vans have very little detail so I made some best guesses and added some extra bits.  Overall though I think it's not too bad.

 

Edited November 18, 2018 by Annie

[Martin S-C]

I've said before that I think we get far too hung up on the colour of wagons.  Grey was mixed from black and white pigments in whatever proportion the foreman painter thought appropriate and it was not done with any precision from day to day.  Two wagons could come out of the shops on consecutive days, each a slightly different colour.  Give them a few days in traffic in the smokey, sulphurous atmosphere of c19th industrial Britain and they would be a different colour again, especially if they were carrying coal.  I've heard it reported that a former LNER painter said that the only time the top brass were fussy about colour was for the top link locos.  Any way, if anyone says that the colour is wrong there is a simple answer :-  'Prove it'!

 

Jim

Actually the pigment ratios were set out in company instructions and paintshop foremen were highly skilled and proud individuals who made every effort to get things right. No self-respecting railway company (i.e. all of them) would allow wagons to out looking non-standard.

 

That is not to say however that between repaints (which might be as much as a decade) different paint finishes did not react differently to varying conditions of sunlight, moisture, oil, grease and general dirt so you could see considerable variation from wagon to wagon.

 

That having been said I do think the standard NBR grey was a little darker and bluer than depicted in your image Annie - but then yet again I might be perceiving a different colour completely because of the settings on my monitor and PC graphics card.

[Martin S-C]

If you are seeking whimsical wagons Annie, here is a real one I have always liked. Some years ago POWSides did a 4mm scale kit of it but I have looked long and hard and haven't found one yet.

 

[Annie]

Actually the pigment ratios were set out in company instructions and paintshop foremen were highly skilled and proud individuals who made every effort to get things right. No self-respecting railway company (i.e. all of them) would allow wagons to out looking non-standard.

 

That is not to say however that between repaints (which might be as much as a decade) different paint finishes did not react differently to varying conditions of sunlight, moisture, oil, grease and general dirt so you could see considerable variation from wagon to wagon.

 

That having been said I do think the standard NBR grey was a little darker and bluer than depicted in your image Annie - but then yet again I might be perceiving a different colour completely because of the settings on my monitor and PC graphics card.

And the situation is not helped at all by the only preserved example being painted in a high gloss mid grey that certainly isn't the right colour either.  Your comments certainly are useful Martin and while I agree that the paintshop foremen did know what they are doing service conditions would certainly throw the dice on what shade of grey could be observed from the lineside.  I ended up doing some other colour variations with the NBR vans representing different states of weathering and decided that would do

You point about monitor and graphics card settings is valid though.  I changed my graphics card just recently and I immediately notice the difference in the way it rendered colours as compared with my old one.

 

And I really like that PO wagon.  The lettering would be tricky to get right though since it's nowhere close to being a standard font which means a lot of it would have to be hand drawn.

[Martin S-C]

Could you lift a texture direct off the image? The livery is white on black anyway.

 

As to fonts and so on, I am not sure there is such a thing as a standard font on PO wagons. The names of companies, people and places were usually compressed or stretched to fit the space available, as you can see with the two renditions of "Llantwit" on the above wagon. The font has been vertically compressed and letter spacing adjusted on the smaller lettering. I suppose you can use an image editing program once you have the base font and alter the dimensions.

I wish I could make my own transfers as once you can digitally manipulate images the sky is your limit but I'm a techophobe.

Edited November 19, 2018 by Martin S-C

[Annie]

There certainly isn't anything such as a standard font for PO wagons Martin.  In many cases Arial, Tahoma or Verdana can be used as a basis to provide a template for further graphics manipulation, but for some letters they really are plainly not correct and need to be reshaped.  The 'Llantwit' wagon is an absolute classic in terms of letters being compressed to fit the space.  With the 'Nuttey & Slack' PO wagon I used 5 different word processing fonts to create the lettering, but with it being completely imaginary I could make it easy on myself and avoid having to compress and reshape the lettering in order to strictly follow an existing prototype.

 

With the 'Llantwit' wagon being black and white it would be possible to use the photo as a basis for making a texture.  My GER wagons a couple of pages back are based on a texture made from an official GER photo and they turned out nicely.  The only problem is though with it being an end door wagon the two sides have to be the opposite of each other which would make things a bit difficult.

 

There are some forum members who make their own transfers Martin.  Perhaps they might be able to help you out.  I'm not really sure what's involved with making transfers to fit scale models as with the digital models I make I'm working entirely in a digital environment where textures have to fit a 3D mesh and sometimes the mesh stretches or compresses the texture in odd ways that have to be taken into account.  'Scale' as a design concept doesn't really have much to do with it.

[Martin S-C]

Could you isolate the lettering as one layer, reverse the image of the wagon side for the end door issue, paint the (now backwards) lettering out on that side and re-apply the saved lettering layer?

When I was involved in MSTS from 2001 to about 2010 I didn't do any 3D modelling and only a small amount of retexturing of others models but I do recall it was a fun challenge to tweak textures to get them to fit different places, etc. I made a few of my own textures in Paint Shop Pro and even MS Paint but my efforts were pretty crude.

[Annie]

I think I can most probably do something with it Martin.  It just depends on how adventuresome I'm feeling when I fire up Paint.NET to have a go at it.  If all else fails I'll take the end door off it and modify the ironwork to suit.  That might sound like an awful bodge, but I'm willing to roll the dice and predict that Llantwit's wagons weren't all ones that had end doors if I have to.

 

While I still have most of my early models archived away I don't show them off to anyone these days because while they aren't exactly awful they are very plain and basic.  All steps along the way to making better models and evidence of the fact that it's important to have a go even if you're not very sure about what you're doing.

[Annie]

More imaginary PO wagons.  To the casual observer they seem to be no more than digital Po wagons, but in fact they are 'thank you' models from me that use either the real names of content creators for Uk Trainz or their Auran ID details.  There will be more of these to come as I work my way down my list.

 

Edward Heaps, - creator of digital locomotives that are truly outstanding.  Has recently uploaded models of just about every A1/A3 Pacific there ever was to the DLS.  He has also made a goodly number of NBR, Caley and Highland locomotives as well.

 

 

Ray Whiley, - Dukes Denver Designs.  A lovely now elderly gentleman who has been making scenic assets for Trainz right from the very start.  The models he has on the DLS number in their hundreds.

 

[Annie]

Completing my foray into Madder Valley tributes I made up a representation of the Madderport Gasworks wagon.  Taking a tall sided 8 plank wagon mesh as a starting point I used old fashioned  'litho' techniques to represent the gapped 'hungry' boards typical of many coke traffic wagons and overall I think the final result isn't too bad.

 

[Martin S-C]

 

[Annie]

Thanks for posting the Madder Valley pictures Martin.  I had made the base coke wagon textures for another project, but decided to use them for the Madderport Gasworks wagon.  I can see now that John Ahern's model was an 8 plank wagon without the slatted 'hungry' boards so now I'm wondering to myself if I should have another go at it.  The 7 plank open wagons are tempting me as well since I recently made myself a good base grey 7 plank open wagon texture template.

[Annie]

Someone over on the Trainz forum suggested me building a Madder Valley layout for Trainz.  I'm still thinking about that as I don't think it would be all that straight forward or easy to do.  The first problem would be to decide which version of the Madder Valley to build since there were at least three known versions of the layout as it was progressively upgraded and extended.

 

The first layout.

 

 

The second layout.

 

 

And what the Pendon Museum must have now is the third layout which seems to be on two levels going by the excellent little video they have on their website.

 

Apart from all that is trying to capture the character of the line which is largely due to all John Ahern's lovely handmade buildings.  Substitutes chosen from what is available on the DLS maynot be all that effective at pretending to be Madder Valley buildings.  Anyway I'll think about it and I'm not promising anything.

[Annie]

As a break from building wagons I'm converting my TS2009 'Cairnrigg to Balessie' layout over to TANE (Trainz: A New Era).  Lots of scenery bits and ground textures no longer display properly so I'm having to work on replacing and upgrading them.  The main thing though is that the layout does still work and all the buildings and railway infrastructure  are in their right places.  I'm bringing the time period of the layout forward from the 1860's into the modern era of the 1900's as well.  It was fun running all my old mid 19th century models, but the big problem was that they are nearly all old models from the TS2004 era and they had a lot of faults and shortcomings that couldn't be very easily fixed.  With me making models that are for the 1890's-1920's period it makes a lot of sense for me to change eras.  All my 1860's stuff will be gathered up and archived so it will be safe enough should I ever want to do anything with it again.

 

A quick test run to make sure everything works.

 

 

 

The yards at Cairnrigg are gradually filling up as I sort out all my rolling stock.  The NBR locomotives are by Edward Heaps (edh6) and are seriously superb models.  The NBR coaches are also Edward's work and the goods wagons are all either Edward's or my own ones.  So I'm still very much sticking with the NBR even though the time period has shifted.

 

[sem34090]

I may have to consider trying the MVR trackplans in TS...

[Annie]

Be my guest Sem.  I would be very interested to see what you come up with.

[Martin S-C]

Someone over on the Trainz forum suggested me building a Madder Valley layout for Trainz.  I'm still thinking about that as I don't think it would be all that straight forward or easy to do.  The first problem would be to decide which version of the Madder Valley to build since there were at least three known versions of the layout as it was progressively upgraded and extended.

 

 

And what the Pendon Museum must have now is the third layout which seems to be on two levels going by the excellent little video they have on their website.

 

 

The Pendon set-up is the second plan but with the top left 90deg corner past Flitch's Farm deleted. This alters the relationship between the various buildings between the girder river bridge behind the loco shed and Bert's garage. I have visited it several times and this is the only difference I can detect other than some cosmetic repairs to scenery. The Gammon End branch terminus is several inches lower than Gammon Magna. I'd estimate about 5 or 6 inches. I believe the branch falls a little past the Brickfield and the mainline cilmbs between Cuckoo Island and the Madderhorn.

 

At the end of the Gammon End station plan the small goods dock is now an island platform with the right hand track (on the plan) extended. See the attached photos.

 

Might you be able to take textures from some photo close-ups of the model?

 

I am only 90 mins drive from Pendon and would be happy to take any more pics or notes you may find helpful. I have quite a few pics via t'internet and my own photos already.

 

Brickfield with main line climbing at left through Madderhorn tunnel and branch descending on right.

 

Three views of the new straight section from the girder bridge to Much Madder station

 

 

 

Extended siding beyond the loco release at Gammon End.

 

...looking at the track break immediately left of the red box car, this is probably a piece of dead cosmetic track added recently by Pendon staff.

Edited November 25, 2018 by Martin S-C