Blacker Lane D.P.

[Ruston]

Apologies for the rubbish photos, taken on mobile phone.

 

 

This would be my dream home. No neighbours, dogs free to roam, a drive full of knackered classic cars and and industrial railway right on the doorstep. 😁

Edited October 29, 2023 by Ruston

[sir douglas]

and the occasional tresspassing photographer

[5050]

On 29/10/2023 at 17:01, Ruston said:

Apologies for the rubbish photos, taken on mobile phone.

 

 

This would be my dream home. No neighbours, dogs free to roam, a drive full of knackered classic cars and and industrial railway right on the doorstep. 😁

And no gas, no flush toilet, no double glazing, no insulation.  A real home from home.......................🙃

[Ruston]

I started to build the engine shed.

Wills corrugated asbestos sheeting and laser-cut roof trusses. I had bought the laser-cut MDF roof trusses at an exhibition and so made the shed to fit these but the proportions looked all wrong. Too tall and too wide.

 

So I started again, from literally from scratch, using a sheet of Plastikard.

I think that will look much better. It will be clad in corrugated aluminium sheet. There were no doors on the shed at British Oak and the roof trusses were very visible as there was no sheeting at all across the front, so this will be more prototypical.

[Ruston]

I'll be getting rid of that water tank too. It seemed like a good idea at the time!

[Ruston]

You think more of those rotten old cars than you do of me! By the way, does my bum look big in this?

[Ruston]

A small amount of progress.

 

Some cladding on the shed frame.

I cut the supports of the water tank down, but it still doesn't seem right. It doesn't suit the situation at all.

 

[doilum]

The water tank needs to be just above cab height. They were suprisingly common in Area 8. A low level diesel tank might work.

[Ruston]

There's been no progress to speak of but I did run a train and took some snaps after fixing D2049. The Stay Alive that I put in it wasn't working, so has been replaced.

 

 

 

These Accurascale MGR hoppers are the bees knees.

 

 

[03060]

Some great shots there Dave, your layout certainly seems to be springing into life now and has certainly captured the look and feel of the British Oak site without being a direct copy of it. I love the end on view of D2049 approaching the road crossing .... marvellous !

 

Regards,

Ian.

[Ruston]

Stoneybridge Structures, I think they are called. The people who made the laser-cut water tank parts that I bought at an exhibition. I built the parts into a tank that was to go on Charlie Strong's yard but never made it any further than being stuck with black tack onto a shelf in my shed, where it was used to hold oiling pens. I remembered it a couple of days ago and rescued it, gave it some Plastruct legs and a lick of paint.

That's more in proportion with the engine shed. It needs some pipework but otherwise I'm quite happy with it and can get on with the shed and its environs now. I ought to have made the shed longer, so that it can accommodate a 650HP Paxman, but, TBH, I don't like them. They will come out to play now and again but they have to be my least favourite of all types that worked at British Oak. Ugly, ungainly and built in Swindon. I am however looking forward to the Class 11, which will fit in the shed.

 

Edited November 29, 2023 by Ruston

[Ruston]

I didn't like the roof on the workshop. It's an etched brass kit and the roof is made from just two panels, which are perfectly straight and uniform. It was totally at odds with the scruffiness of the shed, so I've put some of the same corrugated foil on the workshop.

 

[Ruston]

I didn't get as much done, today, as I would have liked. I made some ballast and then put some down in the shed area. I then spent hours looking for that little squeezy dropper thing to apply PVA with. I just about turned the shed upside down looking for it. I cleared loads of junk and filled the recycling bin. I eventually found it somewhere that I had never been looking and where it had no place being - in among a tray of paints, on my workbench.

That's going to take days to set now that the temperature in the shed is getting into the minus zero range overnight.

[Ruston]

Slow progress, putting off the day that I have to tackle the screens building.

 

I have now filled the space between the rails with "concrete". I had cut a strip of thin plywood and had scored it to represent sleepers laid longitudinally but the gap for the flanges looked huge and the chairs seemed to really stand out, so I decided to have the track inset into concrete instead.

 

It's one of my modelling pet hates when people attempt inset track but you can see the chairs and sleepers through the flangeways, so I was determined to do better than that. In the photo in the previous post you will see the sides of the rails, and the chairs, are visible on the outside of the gauge. I filled these gaps with Milliput and smoothed it so it would come to slightly below the rail tops. I reckoned that the Milliput would hold the rails to gauge even if I cut out all of the sleepers, so that's what I did once the Milliput had hardened.

 

The sleepers were cut out and trimmed flush with the inside of the gauge. A length of 1.5mm thick styrene was cut to be a precise fit inside the gauge and a length of cork cut and glued to the styrene. The cork was cut to allow the back-to-backs of RTR loco wheelsets to clear by 0.3mm. The entire insert was painted before being glued in place. Now there are no chairs, no sleepers and no spaces, just as it should be and as close as RTR OO gauge will allow.

 

 

[Ruston]

Another of my posts where I don't actually do anything.

 

3 hours ago, Ruston said:

putting off the day that I have to tackle the screens building.

I've been thinking about this a lot. I've made working loaders before and they make for an extra and interesting aspect of layout operation but they have their downsides.

 

The first is building and making it work. No easy task in itself.

 

Then there is the inevitable mess and spillage. No matter what's used as a load or how well the loader itself works, I have never made one where 100% of the load remains in the wagon on loading. Some always hits the floor of the wagon and bounces out onto the floor (of the layout), where it accumulates. Accidental spillage due to operator error adds to this. To clear it up involves brush and vacuum cleaner, but more importantly, a building that can be lifted off the baseboard in order to access the area. More hassle in the design and build stage.

 

There's also the material. The only thing that looks like coal is coal. I don't care what anyone says, this is a fact. The working loader that I did in O gauge used real coal that I smashed and sieved to pieces of 2 grades, the smallest being approx 3-4mm, which in O doesn't look terribly oversized, especially given that deep-mined coal was graded into some pretty large sizes for some uses. What's supposed to be coming out of BL is opencasted coal, which went mainly for use in power stations. Small stuff.

 

If I were to smash the coal down to a realistic size for power station coal, in 4mm scale, it would be not far off grains of salt. It would make one hell of a mess with spillage and the amount of dust could cause problems with keeping the track clean.

 

I'm now thinking of using fixed loads that are placed in the wagons and lifted out in the FY. I already do this with the scrap loads on Charlie Strong's scrapyard and the steel coils on Watery Lane. It's not an exhibition layout, so the only people who I have to please are myself and the friends who come and operate the layouts now and again and if they say anything about it then they can Foxtrot Oscar. 😁

 

The shunting at the screens can still be reasonably interesting as the trains need splitting to get into the screens sidings and by shortening the screens building in length, the placing of the loads can be done on the terminus end, where only 3 wagons at a time will be able to fit. This means that a number of movements is still required to load a train and get it ready to go out.

 

With no loose coal being loaded at all, the loads of the internal use wagons will need to be lifted out at the staithe but one at a time as each wagon is shunted to the tipper house, so there is still as much to occupy the operator of that train as there would be with a loose load. The only difference being that the hand of god lifts the load out instead of it being tipped. Any additional wagons for this run won't need all of the faff of altering them to actually discharge their loads. I wish I'd bought some of those BRM/Rapido NCB internal use wagons now.

 

Anyway, that looks like being the way forward.

[Barclay]

I think that's a good decision - coal is very messy, but, as you say, nothing except coal looks like coal! I have read painting/weathering articles and books where people go to a lot of trouble to make other stuff look like it because they claim the real thing cannot be scaled. It looks just fine to me.

 

Last year with the imminent ban on sales of domestic coal I saved an ice cream tub of it for future loco and wagon projects, just to be on the safe side.

[Ruston]

On 13/12/2023 at 08:32, Barclay said:

I think that's a good decision - coal is very messy, but, as you say, nothing except coal looks like coal! I have read painting/weathering articles and books where people go to a lot of trouble to make other stuff look like it because they claim the real thing cannot be scaled. It looks just fine to me.

 

Last year with the imminent ban on sales of domestic coal I saved an ice cream tub of it for future loco and wagon projects, just to be on the safe side.

I didn't know it was being banned. It hasn't been allowed to be used around here since I was very young. The entire district became a smokeless zone and I remember my granny not liking the fact that she had to use coke on the fire instead of coal.

 

I never thought a time would come where you can't simply find or buy coal anywhere. I wanted some coke for wagon loads not long ago and thought I'd just stroll through a public footpath that goes through my old infants school and pick a couple of pieces off the pile that was always in the playground for use in the heating boiler. Not only is there no pile of coke in the playground but there's no longer a public footpath and the school has a fences and gates round it that would put a maximum security prison to shame! How times have changed and not for the better.

 

I've got most of the coal that I used on the O gauge, so it only needs crushing into finer pieces. I've also got an ice cream tub of coal, from Kellingley Colliery, in reserve.

[5050]

On 13/12/2023 at 08:32, Barclay said:

Last year with the imminent ban on sales of domestic coal I saved an ice cream tub of it for future loco and wagon projects, just to be on the safe side.

Whilst tarting up Braynerts Sidings for DEFine show in January (look it up!) I've found several jars, tubs etc. of coal in various gradings - plus a large lump that came from trackside at Foxfield. I didn't pick it up but it came my way in due course.  I'm treating it as an investment and potential useful addition to my pension😇

[Ruston]

Now that I've decided on not having a working loader I can decide on the footprint of the buildings. I'll plan this out and lay some concrete patches for the supports and then ballast around them, before making and planting the buildings.

 

The last time I did a colliery yard was on the O gauge Royd Hall Drift Mine and, to be honest, I was never happy with the ground coverage for the pit yard, screens and washery. It looked no different from the ballast on the rest of the track and the sleepers, rails and chairs were all visible. I've noticed a few colliery-based layouts that have ground cover that doesn't look proper too.

 

The track in area around the screens at British Oak, and on almost every photo of every colliery yard I've ever seen was up to the rail tops in with years of accumulated mud and spilled coal, so I want to try and do this but the flanges and back-to-backs of OO models have to be considered.

 

To start with I've made a ballast mix that's much darker than on the rest of the layout. It uses only coal and sand this time. It could do with being put through a finer sieve.

So that I don't have to lay this stuff on as deep as the track height I'll probably cut and lay card in the area first. It'll take a lot less ballast to bring it up to the level.

[Dunalastair]

9 minutes ago, Ruston said:

 

The last time I did a colliery yard was on the O gauge Royd Hall Drift Mine and, to be honest, I was never happy with the ground coverage for the pit yard, screens and washery. It looked no different from the ballast on the rest of the track and the sleepers, rails and chairs were all visible. I've noticed a few colliery-based layouts that have ground cover that doesn't look proper too.

 

The track in area around the screens at British Oak, and on almost every photo of every colliery yard I've ever seen was up to the rail tops in with years of accumulated mud and spilled coal, so I want to try and do this but the flanges and back-to-backs of OO models have to be considered.

 

 

 

 

I think it might depend on the period - and also the age of the installation. A quick photo search seems to turn up both extremes and everything in between. But I agree that it should look better 'mucky' and I look forward to seeing what you can manage within modelling constraints.

 

 

 

 

[Mol_PMB]

I wonder whether the flangeways could be filled flush with a very soft dark grey or black sponge material? Maybe worth experimenting. 

[Ruston]

2 hours ago, Mol_PMB said:

I wonder whether the flangeways could be filled flush with a very soft dark grey or black sponge material? Maybe worth experimenting. 

It could work in 7mm but I think that 4mm wagons, especially the kit-built 21-ton hoppers, would be too lightweight for the flanges to push down the sponge.

 

2 hours ago, Dunalastair said:

 

I think it might depend on the period - and also the age of the installation. A quick photo search seems to turn up both extremes and everything in between. But I agree that it should look better 'mucky' and I look forward to seeing what you can manage within modelling constraints.

 

 

 

 

This is chopped from a photo of the British Oak screens, found on the interweb. Obviously in wet weather. The rails can barely be seen.

 

And one in dry weather, by 5050's friend, Bryan.

Pretty much the same only not looking wet. Only the line at the far right, on which no coal loading took place, shows any sign of the sleepers and chairs.

 

The above photo is facing toward Blacker Lane with the single road loader standing away from the larger two-road building.

I'm going to do something similar but in reverse to give a broader expanse of low-relief building as a backscene.

That's just a rough approximation. I'll probably not have it extending so far to the left. That was going to be for lorry loading but that could now be supposedly done under the backscene building and the lorries would then drive up toward the camera, cross the two tracks in front of the loader and go off down the left hand side of the building. The left wall and far corner will have trees as the backscene.

 

How the area is looking at the moment.

[Mol_PMB]

23 minutes ago, Ruston said:

It could work in 7mm but I think that 4mm wagons, especially the kit-built 21-ton hoppers, would be too lightweight for the flanges to push down the sponge.

Yes, you're probably right. My mind tends to work in the larger scale.

The key would be to maximise the size of the sponge to minimise its stiffness, effectively make a deep pit the full width of the 4-foot for the sponge to go in. Perhaps use a flexible adhesive like copydex to attach a surface finish, though that would be minimised in the areas the flanges actually run.

This principle is actually used in reality on some inset track with wide grooves that form a cyclist-trap - a compressible insert is laid in the groove that's stiff enough to support a bike but squashes under the railway wheel flange.

[Ruston]

Black Milliput is the answer.

 

I'll need a couple of packs just to cover the area under the loader, but I've just put some down in front and at the sides of it. To make a crossing I rolled sausages of it and laid them inside and outside of the rails and smoothed them down, as I did with the shed concrete. I got a couple of diecast lorries and pushed them around to leave tyre tracks around and across the rail tracks to the loader and to clear the flangeways I pushed an old Lima stone hopper and a Triang wagon chassis up and down. Their flanges are deeper and the wheels broader than anything I'll ever run properly, so ought to have pushed the Milliput out of the way. I'll find out, tomorrow, when I put power to the tracks again and attempt to run a loco and wagons up the sidings.

I sprinkled some sand and fine coal on but I'm not sure that will stick.

 

[Ruston]

A small side project.

 

Various pictures of the screens area at British Oak show a wheeled air compressor and a towed vibratory roller sitting in the dirt. There are a few 3D prints and kits about for wheeled compressors but I've not seen any towed rollers. I found an old Corgi Raygo 600 roller in my local model shop and paid just £2 for it.

I think these Corgi Juniors were supposed to be 1/64 scale but that looks on the small side and the prototype Raygo rollers seem to have been available in different sizes, so it'll do for 4mm, I'm sure. I was going to use just the roller and frame as a towed unit but I've decided to use the entire thing. It needs a bit of  alteration, detailing and a repaint.