Newton Stewart 1955-65 - the PP&WJR in OO

[Wheatley]

The raised hinges towards the right of the last pic were added before the ground levels had been finalised, and were temporary. They were also massive, being loose pin door hinges, so the boards  have been back in the garage for more carpentry (not allowed to saw in the dining room) and they've been replaced with some much smaller ones an inch or so lower down. Here one of Dumfries' Black 5s (or it will be when I've renumbered it) brings a Stranraer - Dumfries train past the loco  shed, represented for the moment by a couple of bits of foamboard. The boundary between the bare ply and white painted board on the left marks the limit of the scenic area. The front-of-layout scenic profile boards are creeping round from the right.

After it has been through Newton Stewart station the train will complete its circuit of the garage and go over the white board again, but this time following the line with the three coaches on at the back, behind the Black 5.  This will be hidden behind the cutting side at this point, and the clearances are very tight. 

The triangular stripwood marks the bottom of the cutting side. All critical point motors are surface mounted where possible for ease of fault finding and rectification, those on sidings will generally be underneath. I was using the Hattons ones which were absolutely superb, but they've stopped production so the rest will have to be the  Gaugemaster PL-10 clones. 

All the boards either lift or hinge out of the way for access to the fiddle yard below and also to wiring etc, I need to sort out some neater props though ! The right hand boards in this view, including the lower one with the bird box (!) on it, also hinge clear of the floozy* cupboard which houses our stepladder, rake and a few other things which wouldn't fit anywhere else. (*So called because that's obviously where I keep the floozy with whom I spend so much time in the garage). 

Another view of one of the new hinges, the hidden line spiralling down to the fiddle yard and some new cabling carrying power from the station board to the peripheral boards. This bundle  brings power from the station boards over the door and across the lifting flap. The cables include some Halfords 5 amp car wiring which should minimise voltage drop over this 4 metre or so run, the 25 way D-sub connector will be the permanent arrangement replacing the chocolate block connectors. 

This is the other end with the station boards to the right. All still a bit temporary, it will be neater than this !

[Wheatley]

A bit further along our Dumfries-bound train is approaching the West box and the junction with the Whithorn branch.

The cardboard mock-up of the bridge was made from measurements of the real thing, unfortunately the PP&WJR did not use Peco Streamline track centres so it will need widening a bit when I build the real one.  Behind it the bit between the bridge and the Black 5 is the lifting flap across the door; the fact that this carries the most complex bit of pointwork on the layout is another decision I should have perhaps revisited at the planning stage. 

Enough of the scenic formers and end profile boards have been added to allow the permanent hinges and clips to be added. The lever frame for the West Box is below, 29 of the 38 levers in the real one will be represented, missing out spares, facing point locks and the off-scene up distant. 

It's actually a double hinge, it's too long to work as a single piece without hitting the ceiling so it folds and hinges back on itself at the same time. There will be a more permanant latch to lock it to the wall when I start adding scenery to the station boards but for now it usually lies flat on top of them when not deployed. The hidden fiddle yard lifting flaps are still down across the door in this pic, see the last pic in the previous post for them in their stowed position.

[Wheatley]

Some unprototypical motive power trundles in from Stranraer. The cutting side which hides the Dumfries-bound line has been added from offcuts of 6mm ply and some triangular stripwood,  bought for a long-forgotten job and left seasoning in the garage for several years. 

The cutting side and the ground above it only just clear the hidden track behind it (marked here by some GBL coaches) and several options were considered - laminations of card, aluminium mesh and fibreglass, foamboard, even aluminium sheet. I didn't think any of these would be robust enough, the board edges are vulnerable when being moved around to be worked on, so I went for ply and strip wood. 

 

The fascias have also been added, the track in the foreground is the Whithorn branch with the loco sidings marked out in tape and the main line behind.  The two boards which make up the shed area are hinged at the extreme left and right hand edges, the sloping joint is deliberate to avoid the baseboard framing catching the scenic end profiles catching  on the adjacent board. 

The fascias are over height and will be cut down slightly. The foreground at  this point, in front of the Whithorn branch, is the edge of the local cemetery so the left hand end of this board will eventually have a line of gravestones and some ornamental trees on it. 

 

The edge of the lifting flap also now has the scenic formers at an angle so one closes on to the other rather than scraping down it. The coaches on the hidden Dumfries-bound track are quite low down now. 

Edited March 1, 2023 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

On the station proper some temporary framing has been added for the lift off section which will accomodate the down platform, station building and forecourt. This pic shows how much it encroaches into the central well, but more importantly it severely restricts access to thd cupboards underneath. It will therefore be stowed when not in use. It has been surfaced with scrap corrugated card to make a template for the 6mm ply top.  

 

The workbench folds away or can be removed altogether. 

 

At the far end of the station, this is the East box with the descending tracks to the fiddle yard behind - front descends clockwise towards Dumfries, rear anti-clockwise to Stranraer. They cross under the goods yard which is under the tool boxes top left in the last photo.

 

The rearmost track is level with the road under the 29, and would obviously be visible under the bridge ...

 

 

... the plan is to take the far side of the embankment over the nearest hidden track with the backscene bracketed off the wall rather than fastened to the baseboard, more or less between the two hidden tracks. As this clearly involves a fairly significant degree of Making It Up As I Go Along, more card mock-ups will be required. A bit of mirror will take care of the blocked off bridge. 

[Wheatley]

Now you see it ...

 

 

... now you don't:

 

 

Blimey it works ! Needs a bit of fettling but I'm quite pleased with that. 60 thou mirror styrene from Hobbycraft, it should have been 7 quid for a roughly 8 x 6 sheet but the till didn't recognise it so it was free ! 

[Wheatley]

Not many updates recently perhaps but the tedious job of  wiring has continued, along with redoing some of the more jerry-built bits of carpentry where enthusiasm conquered ability, particularly around baseboard joints. 

 

Wiring has now reached the only non-scenic board on the upper level, this is Board N where the scenic tracks can either be set to a continuous run, or dive down into the fiddle dungeon via the hidden spirals. It was originally planned to be two boards but that was simplified, as a result it's a bit awkward to manouver. 

 

As always the Whithorn  branch complicates things by cutting across the Newton Stewart - Dumfries track, which is itself complicated by being double track af this point  as it goes through Goathland on the way (do keep up) and Goathland's  crossing loop doesn't quite fit on the Goathland boards. 

 

The result is this flat crossing, built on a single sheet of copper-faced PCB as that seemed like a good idea at the time. Two Peco code 83 flat crossings would have been simpler but the geometry didn't work. There isn't really a plan other than sucking it and seeing, and soldering in one bit of rail at a time. Gapping and wiring it could prove intetesting, especially as I've drawn the red and black lines on the opposite way round to the rest of the layout ...

[Wheatley]

Whilst I pluck up courage to tackle the flat crossing, I filed up a couple of sets of point blades for the trap points in the loops behind Newton Stewart platform. A very high tech jig was used:

 

Up goods at the top, branch (passenger) platform below. Never let anyone tell you that passenger lines never had trap/catch points in them !

 

They're a bit short but they'll do for now. 

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

Back to the crossing. All the rails are soldered to the PCB and insulation gaps cut with a slitting disk where needed. Link wires have been added underneath to link sections with the same polarity, here coloured in to stop me getting lost . 

 

On each crossing two corners of the diamond could be soldered up solid because they were all the same polarity, but two required all the adjacent rails isolating from each other to prevent shorts. The easiest way to do this was to cut both rails back and epoxy a small bock of styrene in to form what is effectively the frog of a very obtuse vee. Code 100 track on this bit so a bit of 40 thou sheet was laminated to a bit of 60 thou, the frogs made oversized to be trimmed back later.

If this crossing was on the scenic section I'd have had to add all the check rails from actual rail. But it isn't so I didn't. More 60/40 sandwich. Check rail gaps are about 1.5mm. 

 

Finished (apart from the bit where I was holding it with pliers to spray it black.) 

 

 

In the end the wiring wasn't as complicated as I thought. I had started off thinking that as the two running lines on the Goathland board and the Whithorn branch were all separate sections then I'd have three separate track feeds and a common return. But they don't need to be separate on this board - only one train can run at a time - so they are all wired to the same feed and kept separate from the adjacent boards. 

Edited November 18, 2023 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

Back in the shed after a few weeks off distracted by a  nice warm indoor workbench and decorating. The crossing is now plumbed in:

 

The bridge over the Whithorn branch which forms the scenic break at this end is also temporarily in place; nowadays this is a two lane road forming a link between the main A75 and the A714 to Barhill, but in the 1960s it was apparently an occupation road and the bridge is only 12 feet wide between parapets. There a description and a useful drawing in Swan but the stonework is a bit of a guess and based largely on a distantly view in a Derek Cross colour pic. Structure gauging coach (Dapol 12 wheeler) in the foreground. 

 

And this is the main line view looking into Goathland tunnel: 

 

The black paint is because everything behind the tunnel and the Whithorn branch road bridge / backscene will be covered over with the crossing in the tunnel. Although it will be hidden you'll know it's there - everything makes a very satisfying noise clattering over it !

[Wheatley]

I was supposed to be finishing wiring and fettling baseboard joints but I got a bit distracted by the station building. The walls were partly detailed with window frames etc in the flat before being assembled, the gap in the far corner is for the glazed timber waiting room and parcels office walls. There is a further timber extension to go on the right hand end. 

 

The whole of the down (Stranraer-bound) platform and forecourt is now a removeable section, eliminating baseboard joints across platforms. 

 

 

A wider view. The pins are holding the Peco concrete platform edging in position while I do some gauging tests with the LMS dining car in the background, at the moment the platform gap is slightly less than what my Peco track gauge thinks is correct which looks good but needs checking against some wider locos. 

 

Goods yard throat is loosely laid out, the black hatching just to the left of the loco smokebox marks the position of the footbridge which in turn fixes the final position of the station building, the near end of the island platform and the top if the embankment on the far side   

 

The nearest end of the station had a rather nice station garden laid out. Most enthusiast photos only show it in the background or just catch the edge of it, but a Facebook local history group turned up a couple of nice photos of the rest of it including cold frames and an entire potting shed which doesn't appear on any published photos or the LMS Ratings Plan ! This will be the first part of the layout to be fully finished scenically but don't hold your breath ...

 

Bachmann Std 5 (which needs renumbering as 73100) and a typical 'late Port Road' Bachmann/ Hornby Mk1 CK/Porthole BSK set. 

[Wheatley]

The kink in the near end of the baseboard edge was annoying me :-) Typically it was one of the few bits of baseboard framing that was actually glued !

 

 

Back to the cardboard mockup building for now, boxes of screws standing in for the water tower further along. The tool boxes at the back aren't standing in for anything, they're just permanently in the way ! At least the Ivar workbench is now on casters, and has acquired the top vice bit of the Workmate, which was also always in the way !

[RobAllen]

I’ve just caught up with your thread. I’m impressed!

[Wheatley]

Thanks Rob, there's a great deal of trial and error involved though !

 

One of the advantages of having the whole down platform and its buildings on one board is that it fits on the dining room table so I can work on it in comfort. I've made a start skinning the platform surfaces with balsa, two layers of 1/16" laid at 90 degrees, the forecourt is a single thicknes of 1/8" because I'd run out of 1/16". The tarmac surface will go on top if this, probably in thin card, the balsa allows any minor undulations in the surface to be taken care of with a sanding block first. The big hole full of tools is for the station building, which needs to be a bit more complete before I fit the platform surface around it. 

 

Talking of trial and error, the Peco concrete platform edging is perfect for Newton Stewart, the down platform having been rebuilt in concrete in (I think) the 1920s. But because the platform edge forms the edge of this module, rather than use the Peco sections as they are supposed to be - glued to the baseboard and the platform built up behind - I formed a false platform edge in 15mm square stripwood screwed to the baseboard top with the Peco edging stuck to it. That way the platform edge could overhang the other board slightly and the position of the edge could be adjusted by moving the screws. In the end a filler piece of 2mm stripwood (old venetian blind slat) was used as a filler as well. The first two attempts to fix the Peco edging to the stripwood using hot glue just resulted in a lot of practice in scraping cold hot glue off plastic and wood, the third attempt using double sided foam tape was much more successful. 

[Wheatley]

I can't do any more to the platforms until the station building is complete enough to be set in position and boarded around, so I've been channelling my inner Geoffs Kent/Taylor - this is the wooden tea room / parcels office on the Dumfries end. The extra bit of wall on the right is part of the main building: 

 

 

The glazing bars are sticky printer label sliced as thin as I could manage with a brand new scalpel blade. Once the slightly wider top and bottom frames were in place that left a pane 16mm high to be divided into 5 equal panes. So 3 and a smidge millimetres. Rather than try and guess four smidges consistently, here's an old O-Level Technical Drawing tip:

 

Draw a line on an angle of a length divisible by 5, in this case 20mm. Then mark off 4mm intervals.  On a drawing board with a parallel motion T square drawing the glazing bars in using the marks on the sloping line is easy, on a bit of plasticard you need to draw two sloping lines at either end of the piece and join the dots up. 

 

The incomplete glazing bars towards the left hand end will be covered by poster boards but it meant the horizontal bars could be laid as a single strip. The missing glazing bars towards the right hand end are prototypical, I've no idea why !

 

The weather boarding is a mixture of Evergreen sheet and (before I realised you could get weatherboard sheet) 10 thou planks laid individually. All the square section timbers are Evergreen. 

Edited January 18 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

Looking a bit more like a building now, this is the road/forecourt side with the tea room / parcels office extention nearest: 

 

 

The stonework around the windows is 5 thou sheet stuck over the Slaters embossed stone, it will shrink into the mortar courses so will need a wipe over with some filler before painting. The real ashlar trimmings were flush with the coursed rubble used for the rest of the wall but cutting out all these was tedious enough without trying to inset them ! 

 

 

Platform side. The working drawings for this were done in 2017 as soon as Andrew Swan's  book came out (saving me a trip to West Register House to see the originals !), and the walls were set out a while ago. On sticking everything together I realised I had got the double doors on either side of the building leading to the booking hall about 6mm offset from each other so I altered them to be directly opposite each other. On checking Swan later for something else I noticed that the PPR had built them about 18" offset from each other so I'd been right to start with ! They'll have to stay wrong. 

 

 

The boarded over window had a small poster board, totem and gas lamp fastened to it so I decided boarding it over was probably correct. The others marked with crosses will have larger poster boards covering the whole window. 

Edited January 23 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

Very little workbench progress recently due to not having had a workbench since February while we decorated the living room (very slowly). 

 

There has been some progress in the shed, albeit of the "fixing things which should have been done properly in the first place" variety. One of these was the baseboard joint at the Dumfries end of the platforms. This was built without dowels as the boards hinged up to allow access to the fiddleyard for maintenance, and therefore had to be able to move past each other without anything catching. An increasingly Heath Robinson-ish arrangement of split hinges and cabinet catches developed, none of which really worked but all contributed to the increasing number of holes in the baseboard top and frames. 

 

So earlier this week I made a few more holes to find all the screws holding the frames to the mating edges, removed them and tidied up the edges ready for new frames to be fitted. 

 

 

This time the new bits of framing were  prepared on the bench with dowels and bolt holes fitted to be fitted as a single unit. The steel strip mending plates are holding the boards in the correct position using the Up Main as a reference. 

 

All screwed back together. The missing bits are the trap points at the ends of the loops on the left, and the horse dock siding and headshunt on the right. 

 

[Wheatley]

And I have a new workbench !

 

[ardbealach]

Its always enjoyable to have a 'keek' at a fellow modellers library as well!  A few of the titles match my own.  (Alisdair)

[31A]

Far too tidy! 🤣🤣  Looks very smart.  Good library!

 

Did you buy the workbench, or did you make it?

[Wheatley]

5 hours ago, ardbealach said:

Its always enjoyable to have a 'keek' at a fellow modellers library as well!  A few of the titles match my own.  (Alisdair)

I thought the bookshelf would get more interest than the neanderthal carpentry :-) The plastic boxes below it are (part of) the 'to do' pile. 

 

4 hours ago, 31A said:

Far too tidy! 🤣🤣  Looks very smart.  Good library!

 

Did you buy the workbench, or did you make it?

And it  has to stay tidy otherwise the door doesn't shut !

 

It's a load of IKEA Besta units piled on top of each other with one of the shelves on runners and some home made drawers added. 

[31A]

2 hours ago, Wheatley said:

It's a load of IKEA Besta units piled on top of each other with one of the shelves on runners and some home made drawers added. 

 

Thank you, very interesting - I may investigate. 

[Wheatley]

Another bit which should have been done differently in the first place is the baseboard joint where the Code 75 Down Main to Stranraer joins the Code 100 fiddle yard track. There's a useful bridge here to form a scenic break and the join was originally on the skew below it. It was a regular point of derailment on testing, originally put down to the skew, so it was changed to a perpendicular joint by sawing a bit off one board and screwing it to the other.

 

Of course all this is going on in one of the most inaccessible corners of the shed, the boards are nearly 4 feet wide here. Usually this isn't a problem as boards can be moved out of the way and the fiddle yard boards are strong enough to kneel on, but to fettle a baseboard joint you obviously need both boards in place. I need to do a tip run too !

 

 

So this was the state of play with the new perpendicular joint in the track, the join between the baseboards is now just this side of the red paint brush. 

 

 

 

Oh, and all this is going on on a 3rd radius curve. Main line to Stranraer in the foreground, goods yard headshunt / 'long siding' parallel to it. The BG is on the start of the Dumfries-bound dive-down in the opposite direction. 

 

Turns out the joint was actually narrow to gauge as well as being on the squint so time to saw up a new Peco double curve and sort that. Bombproof copperclad baseplates are recovered from the previous version. Work has moved to the comparative comfort of the station board using the base of the island platform as a temporary workbench. 

 

Edited May 17 by Wheatley

[Wheatley]

Sleepers snapped out one side of the join and the baseplate soldered in. I don't have a Code 100 track gauge so to avoid a repeat of the tight to gauge issue the amount of unsupported rail is kept to a minimum. 

 

 

And the other side:

 

 

"BLACK INSIDE" is written at regular intervals around the layout to remind me which is the common return wire when the boards are being worked on upside down and back to front. 

 

 

All done. The long siding will get slewed across later to eventually terminate in the V between the other lines. The real one went a few yards further but it will still be long enough to dump a few 'COND' wooden wagons on awaiting breaking up and giving the impression  of more stretching away under the bridge. 

 

The Code 75 FB Streamline on the main line is temporary so will be pinned rather than glued. It will be replaced later with some copperclad sleepers and etched BR3 baseplates - they should be BR1s but the Colin Craig ones are unobtainable so Mike Clarke's BR3s will have to do. (They should be 3 elastic spikes per baseplate, they'll by 2x spikes and a sort of flat tang, which is near enough for me).

Edited May 17 by Wheatley