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

[Martin S-C]

Remember a lot of early diesels were built by the Big 4 and the basic shunter that replaced an 0-6-0 tank was common to all the pre-BR companies. It eventually became the 08/09/10/11-whatever-else breed so I feel these have a decent provenance.

And you gotta love the small shunters like 03s. Very quaint. Some nice digital sound setups are available for them as well.

 

Anyway, that's enough of that, sorry for going more off-topic in a pre-grouping thread than I would if I were to talk about pyramids in Norfolk!

[Edwardian]

26 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Remember a lot of early diesels were built by the Big 4 and the basic shunter that replaced an 0-6-0 tank was common to all the pre-BR companies. I

 

[Martin S-C]

Shift the "W" to the left and insert an "N" and it would look quite at home at CA

[Annie]

I saw my first diesel at age 4 and I took an instant dislike to it.  Going on a ride on the train with Mum had always meant that I would get to see one of the NZGR's huge black 'Js' or sometimes an 'Ab'.  Seeing a horrid dismal instead was a profound disappointment.  My first impression of diesels has never left me and I still don't like them.

 

While I do have an early BR layout set around an ex-LNWR secondary line in the border country it is purely a steam affair.  As mechanically fascinating and sometimes odd as the early BR diesels were I just don't run any of them.  The BR blue error is just an out and out horror story filled with interfering politicians and uniforms with silly hats along with a completely tasteless corporate image.  The BR standard classes were thrown away with some of them being still almost new and there was one stupid mistake after another.  If I perchance to meet anyone who confesses a liking for the BR blue error I tend to edge away very carefully since one never quite knows what mad people might do.

[Edwardian]

3 minutes ago, Annie said:

I saw my first diesel at age 4 and I took an instant dislike to it. 

 

Classic!

[Annie]

More work being done on the new E&GR section.

 

I put together another Hicks 'tea urn' 0-6-0 tender engine and I've also just reskinned these mineral brake vans for the E&GR.  These snaps were taken at Grimwold at the end of the branchline.  The big quarry at Stone Delving is just over the hill..

 

 

 

Being a stone district meant that I could (finally) use this station building.

 

Not the largest of station yards and Grimwold is only a village, - however it's the presence of the quarry that gives this trailing end of the branchline its importance.

 

At the further end of the branchline the line becomes almost light railway like with a dash of roadside tramway thrown in.

This is Morrow.  Not an especially large town.  The next village is named Morrow by Wen and I'm still working on things there.

 

 

And this is Passant.  Passant is the station before Grimwold and it serves a very scattered village and a wide area of open farmland.  Its claim to fame is that it has a passing loop which can be very useful at times on a well strung out single track line of railway.

 

In other news I now have all the parts of the wrought iron footbridge kit and it looks like I will be able to make a better job of the footbridge at Oakmarket.  Fortunately I won't have to take too much of it apart to fit the new pieces.

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2019 by Annie
Posted pictures twice twice

[Martin S-C]

That 3rd pic down with the curvy stone walls is really nice. There's something fantasy-ish about these station layouts. They don't look like British practice but then they easily could be in a very British alternative universe sort of way. I love those open verandah brake vans too.

[Annie]

More than likely a mixture of light railway and tramway with a dash of Colonial practice thrown in for good measure Martin.  Out towards the end of this new section it is very light railway and tramway like in many aspects.  I've built my stations on the layout's original station sites and pretty much had to accept their restricted space since carving out more real estate would have involved moving a lot of things.  Certainly a few creative 'on the ground' solutions were employed tailored around the kinds of traffic one of those smaller stations might expect rather than a 'textbook' layout following a particular railway company's practice.

The wooden station building in the pictures is based on one built by the Highland Railway and the other smaller one that's appeared in other pictures was built by the NBR.  We had similar kinds of station buildings here in New Zealand during the 1900s.

 

Yes I had a bit of fun with the stone walls at Grimwold.  It's all very much a stone district at this end of the layout so after endless hedges down on the coastal section amongst the tramways and water meadows it was nice to do a bit of stone walling.

 

Those mineral brake vans were exactly what I needed for this section of the E&GR.  They're based on north of the border 1860's mineral brakes, but similar brake vans were certainly used in the south.  They originally came from Paulz Trainz in NBR livery and I've reskinned them into a utilitarian shade of grey for the E&GR

 

The Hicks 'tea urn' 0-6-0's will be very much in charge on the branchline.  I purchased three in various states of weathering from Paulz Trainz and I have one left to fettle with a new engine spec, better crew figures, weatherboards and all manner of other odd enhancements.

 

Testing is going well with all the track black spots now fixed; - all except for one section where the trackwork has been very cleverly worked on by the layout's original creator to have all the characteristics of well worn track in much need of replacement.  I like it so I'm keeping it, but the whole section now has a 15mph speed restriction since hitting that lot at any speed just about shakes your eyeballs out.

 

More pictures soon.

 

 

[Annie]

More pictures.

 

The waterfall near the quarry.  The sound of the falling water is deafening.

 

 

The quarry itself.  I had to do quite a bit of track repair here.  The layout's original builder had tried to give the impression of temporary laid track with small radius curves and pointwork in some places, but actually ended up with something that was just about unworkable.

 

Another snap of Grimwold station.  The digital modeller who made this station building also made the station building I used at Oakmarket and Monkton Bywater.  He makes really nice station buildings, but only makes what seems to take his fancy in almost a random manner and then not very often.

 

The windmill beside the railway line.  The original layout builder had done the windmill as being derelict and out of use and the whole area around it piled with rubbish.  Well I don't do 'derelict' and 'abandoned' on my layouts and anything with graffiti on it is an instant delete no matter how good the underlying model itself might be.  So I cleaned up the area and reworked the mill's surroundings so it was a working windmill again.  It's a pleasant little scene now and looks soooooo much better.  And the sails do rotate by the way.

 

A sizeable expanse of marshy ground.  I think the post mill is supposed to be standing in for a pump type windmill, but there's no model like that available for Trainz as far as I know.  The nearby village was un-named so it became Mulling by the Marsh.  Mulling by the Marsh now has a small station too.

 

I'm going to need to re-do the footbridge at Passant since I forgot that my mid-19th century engines have tall chimneys.  The Hicks 'tea urns' only just squeak under the foot bridge.  I'd checked the clearance using an engine taken at random from my digital trainset box and of course it had a much more modest chimney of a lesser height.  That will teach me to always check clearances using the engines that are going to run on a particular line of railway.

The one shortcoming with this otherwise excellent footbridge kit is that the smoke deflectors should have been made as detached parts so they could be positioned as required.

[Martin S-C]

I like Grimwold station building very much. Those stone gable-end arches are unusual. I also like the marsh scene, a lot of work has gone into that. Do I detect some graffiti still on the windmill base? Maybe you can get a small lean-to building or a pile of firewood or some other farmyard clutter to hide it.

[Annie]

Yes the marsh covers a wide area and a lot of work went into it.  I've been studying it in order to learn a thing or two.

Graffiti on the windmill?  I'll have to check.  There's a lot of wildflowers and other plants around it so possibly they're giving that impression.

[Ravenser]

On 06/05/2019 at 03:37, Annie said:

Fair enough criticism Ravenser.  The original station area before I started work on it was a mess.  The original station building was at the top of the cutting and the station building in the pictures is the much better one I replaced it with.  In fact nothing in the pictures of Oakmarket station is from the original station that was there before.

To get the station building down off the top of the cutting would involve quite a bit of reshaping of the landscape and while it could be done it would take a lot of work to do.  I will have a think about it though.

 

Yes the footbridge isn't right, it's a bit too lightweight for the job and it should be covered, but the problem is that adaptable footbridges for the Trainz simulator are thin on the ground.  The footbridge I used is a multipart kit and it's about the only one like that available.  I think there might be more parts available for the kit that I haven't got which might help to improve things.  If  additional suitable parts are available I should be able to take the footbridge across to the other platform and add additional supports for the main span.

What was there before was an awful looking bodge of two conventional footbridges mashed together with one stairway buried in the side of the cutting so my version is somewhat of an improvement.

 

The canopies are actually LBSC and they are rather nice and are certainly better than what was there before.   The goods yard headshunt is at the back of platform 3 so there wasn't any loss of a platform with me using a canopy with a closed in back.  Previously there was a platform 4, but I didn't really need it and taking it out of use meant that I had more space to fix the mess of a goods yard.  

The track alignment and pointwork for the original station yard layout was just plain awful and it took a lot of work to make a functional goods yard out of it.

 

The other two stations pictured are completely my own work and aren't from the original layout.  The layout section I used had great looking towns and that was why I used it.  The railway side of things isn't very good at all and I have quite a bit of rebuilding work ahead of me yet.

 

 

 

The two stations you did yourself from scratch look totally convincing. 

 

The lattice footbridge has a GNR look about it to me - Newark Northgate and Kings Cross come to mind. I wouldn't have been so sharp if I had realised that was your mark 2 "clean up the inherited mess" version of Oakmarket

 

If there is no suitable digital "closed in footbridge" available you're a bit stuck where footbridges are concerned. But it's such a common situation that you can't be the only person with a station that could use one

[Annie]

I have been able to get hold of the rest of the footbridge kit Ravenser.  I now have so much more substantial supports for the footbridge as well as all the additional parts I needed to take the footbridge across to the other platform.  I believe the footbridge kit is supposed to be based on those used on the LNER, but I don't really know more about it than that.  Your suggestion that it might be a GNR bridge is as good as any.

I will do some more looking around to see what I can find in the way of a footbridge.  I know there was a covered footbridge kit available at one time, but I don't know if it is as multipart and flexible in how it can be put together as the lattice one is.

[sem34090]

More from me - I've been playing again - I've finally worked out how to get skies which aren't just plain white!

And, by way of comparison, here is roughly the same angle on my preservation-era version of the Norford Branch route:

 

And now the full selection of Preservation-era shots, some night running with the  N7...

 

 

Edited May 9, 2019 by sem34090

[Annie]

Really excellent screenshots Sem.  Alway nice to see what you're doing with your digital trainset.

 

Just mucking around with ideas at the moment.  This is a test tryout of artwork on a container mesh plonked on a container flat to see if I'm on the right track.  I think it will end up on a wooden underframe with some kind of early brake gear in the final version.  I have access to a multipart steel underframe mesh, but it's a bit horrifying to work with and makes my brain want to blue screen with all the necessary scripting to get all the bits in the right places.

 

[corneliuslundie]

I assume you bought those brake vans from the Eastern and Midland. If there is one to spare might Edwardian like it for the West Norfolk?

Jonathan

One I made earlier to a rather similar design

[Annie]

Oh very nice.  I do like your brake van Cornelius.

 

I could quite easily do a W.N.R. one, but I'd need to know what 'illiterate'  symbol had been decided on for the W.N.R. since that's what the texture patches for my digital mineral brakes are set up for.  A W.N.R. plate on the side of the solebars is no problem though.

[corneliuslundie]

Unfortunately it is a physical one, built about 30 years ago. I use Microsoft Train Simulator/Open Rails but there is almost nothing for the Rhymney, not even a suitable route, and I am not really capable of anything but reskinning PO wagons. But at least there is currently lots of pre-grouping activity even if it is the "norff".

I love the routes you build.

Jonathan

[Annie]

Thanks very much Jonathon, I do have lots of fun building up my minor railway routes. 

Don't knock the quality of your physical model.  I used to build those too you know before I became ill and I can still very much appreciate the work that goes into making a good scratchbuilt model.

 

I tried out Microsoft Train Simulator/Open Rails, but for some reason or another I could not get it to work out for me so I ended up giving up on it.  I know some folk have done great things with it, but it seems I'm not one of them.

[Annie]

I needed some iron bodied open wagons for the E&GR so I made some.  What should have been a quick job took longer than it should because my silly brain kept getting things round the wrong way.  BUT I got there in the end and I'm happy with how the two versions of the iron open wagon turned out.

 

 

[Edwardian]

Nice design, great patina

[Annie]

Thanks James.  I joined an on-line texture library and it's certainly made things easier for me with finding materials to use to create my wagon textures.  Most of the rusty and stained metal on the wagons came from photos of parts of bridges and I'm very happy with how these wagons have turned out.  They'll be mostly used on quarry workings on the E&GR branchline.

Edited May 10, 2019 by Annie
Mistakes with words

[Annie]

The E&GR covered van is now on a proper underframe.  This is still very much beta testing since I wanted to see if I could fit the body mesh onto a proper underframe instead of the make-do container flat by means of magical script incantations.  The next stage will be to transfer the artwork over to a van body mesh that has normal mapping which will improve the appearance of the van quite a bit.

 

[Martin S-C]

Fantastic texturing on those steel opens, both inside and out.

[Annie]

Thanks Martin.

 

I'm getting close to a finalised version of the GER van.  There's still some odd spot on the textures that need fixing and after staring at this screenshot for a while I've decided that I'm going to close up the 'gaps' in the planking a wee bit.  A very small number of the later steel underframed  vans have survived into preservation and they tend to have mixtures of original and replacement planking so it's not easy to be completely sure what the planking was like.