“BEYOND DOVER”

[Mikkel]

Mange tak. Glædelig jul og godt nytår!

 

 

[Northroader]

There was a post today over on “Wright writes” which I felt was worth linking to, in case you’ve missed it:

 

 

[Northroader]

AZULEJOS POR SÃO LUCAS.

 

A bit more has happened with the station building. It started off with a 12mm ply base, then a 5mm foamboard shell. Now I’ve covered it with a thick cartridge paper, to give it some more texture, and then a wash in white acrylic paint. One very noteworthy feature of a lot of Portuguese buildings is the use of glazed tiles, commonly white with a blue design, but you san see them in other colours. I gather it’s a centuries old cultural tradition, and many railway stations use it. The larger stations can have murals of quite heroic proportions, such as the concourse at Porto São Bento:

 

The second panel on a railway theme is interesting, as it shows Portuguese railways also used the large block bells. (See page 17) Of course, my station is too small and simple for the big designs, just having tiled panels on the lower part of the wall. I did a download of a repetitive pattern, and printed it with a reduction of 50%. The tiles come out too big with this, really it needed 75% reduction, but I found the print lost definition and became too blurred, so I’m using oversize tiles. A good tip would be to print your tiles, then design the building to fit, I was really lucky that the pattern came right for the panel sizes. The tiles were cut to size and stuck in place with UHU, and then got two coats of satin varnish. A shiny finish gives them a better look, but I find anything done on my printer always suffers from the ink fading, and I feel the varnish will help protect this. The building has raised strips round the corners and the doors, I used some card to do this, painted a sort of peachy colour mixed in acrylic, and a bit of Miliput filler under the door arches.

Edited January 13 by Northroader

[Northroader]

IN FRANCE, STOP FOR LUNCH.

 

Edited January 19 by Northroader

[Mikkel]

...and then mow grass between rails 🙂

[Northroader]

PANTILES.

 

(watch the spell checker carefully, there’s a tendency to drop the “l”, with unfortunate consequences)

You can meet up with pantile roofs in places like Somerset, but they do tend to be associated with the warmer, sunnier climes over the Channel. I’ve been sitting on a couple of sheets for ages, with doing a French station roof in mind, but the station for São Lucas has come up, and they’ve come in for this.

 

The roof has a base of 2mm ply glued down onto the walls, then a pyramid of ply built up with more strips of ply forming an infill from the edge to halfway up the pyramid. This gives a firm support to overlaying sheets of pantiles. Slaters do flat plastikard sheets which are embossed, but the sheets I’m using give a good relief representation, which is why I went for them. They’re done by a Spanish firm, Redutex, and I thought they were quite pricey before Brexit, now……!!!, and they’re not particularly large either. The plastic is quite soft and floppy, so although I’ve scored the back of the sheet along the change of angle, they still tend to look like a curve. One item needing care is that they’re self adhesive, but when the backing paper is peeled off, the thin adhesive sheet underneath can come up with it, rather than stay with the tiles. I’ve found that the mould they're made from must have air bubbles, there’s tiny little pinheads on the surface which need to be scraped off. My design of roof is quite wasteful, because all the diagonals mean that offcuts can only be thrown away, with all the tiles overlapping in a downward direction only. Now if I’d have gone for a station which didn’t have a hipped roof, but had a low pitch with square ends, the sheets would have gone further. In HO scale Wills do pantile sheets which have a relief finish, and before now I have done a design in the Continental Modeller for an Italian station built round Wills sheet dimensions. I should really have learnt from that, now I’m waiting for postie to arrive with another sheet, as two weren’t sufficient.

Edited February 1 by Northroader

[TheQ]

Very effective that Pantile roof, nice to see it on a well modelled building. I'll be needing some for a French model, but as you say... Ouch as to the.cost.

This house on an extension uses pantiles , as do many houses in Norfolk and Suffolk, . This house mainly French tiles , also available from Redutex.

[Mikkel]

They don't make station buildings like that anymore. Very attractive!

[5944]

Very impressive. It's not too bad for N gauge as sheets are the same size so go almost twice as far! 

 

I'm lucky that the station I'm modelling doesn't need Redutex sheets, the tiles are flat enough I can probably get away with strips of paper. The rest of the building will be awkward enough to construct though!

 

[Northroader]

Nice building, without looking it up, it looks like an Austrian design and with a FS logo. Tyrol?? 
And a quick Google…. So it is, looks like an interesting prototype you’ve got there:

 

[Northroader]

SWEDISH RAILWAY SETTING.

 

 

I have to thank @Schooner of this parish, for alerting me to this shot. Just occasionally you get a totally formed picture that you can damn near do a complete model from, and I think this is one. A railway pier linking into a ferry service in 1880, in this case somewhere up the Gulf of Bothnia, that leg of the Baltic up between Sweden and Finland. A setting a bit like Tollesbury Pier in Essex, or Bantry Pier in County Cork. Statens Järnvägar, Swedish State Railways, had a very good selection of Beyer Peacock locomotives in their fleet, and if you fancy doing some browsing, you’ll find quite an attractive system.

[Schooner]

Just waiting for @rapidoandy to announce a 'generic' proto-literate little BP loco...

 

😇

[Northroader]

They do some very nice stuff, but all 4mm. scale. I meantersay….

[Schooner]

Hahaha, fair! But it would fit in rather nicely with the rest of the family*...

 

 

Updates in 7mm due soon, though :)

 

Edited March 18 by Schooner
*Which I really must get round to finishing. Only one loco there without a jobs list, and that was made by someone else!

[Northroader]

SWEDISH BEYER PEACOCKS.

 

As it’s Easter, here’s a parade of elegance, some of the old engines running on Swedish State:

First off, a 2-2-2, which you also get in Scotland, the Netherlands, or Portugal.

 

Then a 2-4-0, firstly in its preserved state, which also shows the livery, Olive green with black and white lining out, then after a rebuild, Belpaire firebox, and spark arrestor added. This looks like an early built up pattern, most of them appear to be a casting, and to me they do nothing to help the appearance. Perhaps choose the 1880s era before they became widespread?

 

What about a nifty little 0-4-2ST?
 

So to the class F. Looking things up in my Bradley, the LSWR directors needed an engine capable of working the newly built Ilfracombe line, steep gradients but also lightly built. They had learnt to grow wary of Mr. Beattie, junior’s, bright ideas, and he was told straight to ask Beyer Peacock. They proposed copies of their newly built Swedish engines, and the Swedish Railways engineer gave a glowing recommendation to Waterloo. (It must be one of the few times an English company took advice from a foreign railway?) Much later the Ifracombe line gained heavier rail, and the “Ifracombe Goods” became a popular asset for various light railways, the Colonel Stephen’s Museum site doing a handy words and music article on them:

 

https://colonelstephenssociety.co.uk/light railway modelling/light railway modelling - ilfracombe goods.html

 

Now here’s a funny thing. There’s a variety of plastic storage boxes which had stuff crammed in them Willy Nilly before my house move, and I’m slowly trying to make head or tail of it all. I knew there was some small American C&W items in the Continental C&W box, which I’ve turfed out and put in the right box, but then down in the bottom of this box I spotted an old chassis I was doing twenty or more years back, a 6’ 4-6-0, which isn’t the sort of thing I’m into now. Get it out and see what could be done, and do you know, the wheelbase is within 4” of an Ifracombe goods, and I’m not going to start a fight about that.

Any 4’6” drivers around? None in the wheel store but there’s some in the projects box, and the 6’ drivers will be most useful in other projects. The frames are a bit deep, take a 4mm strip off along the top so the platform can sit lower, trim the extension over the lead bogie off and a bit of a scallop underneath. Re drill the pickup guide holes and fit plastic tubes in, and touch up the paint. There we are…

Where to now? Sweden? LSWR? Colonel Stephens? I fancy all or any of them, but there’s no back up rolling stock been made for any, so the chassis will have to go back into the queue waiting superstructures. It does have much more potential now than it did have.

[Donw]

you mean you have a queue  of chassis awaiting bodies?  Ut seems to me you could have three bodies for the one chassis now there's economy  for you. After all none of the three would be running together.

Looks good though.

 

Don

[Schooner]

4 hours ago, Northroader said:

...choose the 1880s era

The answer, almost regardless the question :)

 

4 hours ago, Northroader said:

Where to now?

A side each, Shirley?! As long as one of them is LSWR... 😇

 

If any of the better (not larger) manufacturers were brave enough to lauch one (or, better, a small range, as presented with such charm above) of these British independent designs I'm certain they'd boost the maker and the hobby as the Peckett W4s did those years ago. Come oooonnnnn!

Edited April 1 by Schooner

[Northroader]

Well, Hattons were very popular with their “generic” range… (what’s that? Oh, yes….)

[Schooner]

Ooof, true!

 

Mind you, snaffled up pretty quick, and another company has informed me that I shall owe them money for a little 0-6-0T now in their production queue.

 

Dunno what it says about Hatton's the business; but Hatton's the manufacturer had a remarkably strong record.

[Northroader]

RED/GREEN - COLOUR BLINDNESS.

 

A snowy night in 1875, and I’m sorry to say two of the B.P. Singles were involved in a tragedy with the premier trains in Sweden. I thought I’d post this as a look into operating circumstances back then, and it’s not from a link you’d expect on RMweb, but most interesting.

My first move when joining BR  was a trip to the Crewe works, which was the nearest to where I lived, for a medical, including a colour blindness test, and the need for this ties into what happened back then.

 

https://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/MollonCavoniusOnLagerlundaCollision.pdf

 

 

[Keith Addenbrooke]

3 hours ago, Northroader said:

RED/GREEN - COLOUR BLINDNESS.

 

A snowy night in 1875, and I’m sorry to say two of the B.P. Singles were involved in a tragedy with the premier trains in Sweden. I thought I’d post this as a look into operating circumstances back then, and it’s not from a link you’d expect on RMweb, but most interesting.

My first move when joining BR  was a trip to the Crewe works, which was the nearest to where I lived, for a medical, including a colour blindness test, and the need for this ties into what happened back then.

 

https://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/MollonCavoniusOnLagerlundaCollision.pdf

 

 

A tragedy indeed.

 

My own red / green colour blindness was confirmed when I was a naval cadet many years ago now: being unable to distinguish between port and starboard lights ruled out a career in the service (as a cadet I was a bandsman, so just had to be able to read music), Keith.

[pete_mcfarlane]

Colorblindness runs in my family. Only an hour ago I was googling the numbers on Humbrol paint tins to work out what colour they were. These days there's a mobile phone app called 'Colorgrab' which tells you what colour things are - really useful. 

 

[froobyone]

26 minutes ago, Keith Addenbrooke said:

A tragedy indeed.

 

My own red / green colour blindness was confirmed when I was a naval cadet many years ago now: being unable to distinguish between port and starboard lights ruled out a career in the service (as a cadet I was a bandsman, so just had to be able to read music), Keith.

Similar story to me. On acceptance to the RAF and when asked what trade I wanted to go into, the officer almost spat his tea out when I said "Weapons Tech sir". He said "You're colour-blind! How are you going to fix the wiring in missiles?" Good point. I'd actually forgot I was colour-blind at that stage of my life. No one ever mentioned it in art. Either I was really lucky with colour choices or the teacher knew I'd never be an artist and thought they'd leave me to it. Jokes on them, I spent thirteen years as a CGI artist and worried every single day, about every single colour...

Best 

Dan

[Mikkel]

12 hours ago, Northroader said:

RED/GREEN - COLOUR BLINDNESS.

 

A snowy night in 1875, and I’m sorry to say two of the B.P. Singles were involved in a tragedy with the premier trains in Sweden. I thought I’d post this as a look into operating circumstances back then, and it’s not from a link you’d expect on RMweb, but most interesting.

My first move when joining BR  was a trip to the Crewe works, which was the nearest to where I lived, for a medical, including a colour blindness test, and the need for this ties into what happened back then.

 

https://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/MollonCavoniusOnLagerlundaCollision.pdf

 

 

 

Setting aside the tragedy for a moment, the authors clearly had a lot of fun researching that case.

 

Holmgren's little trick is very clever, it must have been exciting to analyse the lamps!

 

[Donw]

if I remember correctly colour blindness seems to be carried on the X chromosome. Thus my father couldn't pass his colour blindness on to me but my sister had to be a carrier with a 50% chance of passing it to a son. For a girl to be colourblind her mother must be a carrier and her father colourblind.

My father had been a steward on an aircraft carrier where colourblindness was not an issue.

 

Don