Introducing Chrism1964 and Elterwater

[chrism1964]

Good morning, I'm Chris and I'm a model railway addict 😁

 

I've been modelling in, ahem, n-gauge for some five years, with the result that my "spare bedroom" is no longer usable as such, being completely filled with my model of the Coniston Railway and the back half of my through lounge is eaten up with a large large junction station and MPD very loosely based on Carnforth - the latter being because I managed to cobble up a working coaling tower and needed somewhere to put it.

 

Over the last couple of years I've been taking full advantage of my club's acquisition of a 3D printer, turning out getting on for 100 coaches (both for me and the club), 50 or so wagons, mostly to run on Peco chassis kits, and several Furness Railway locos running on modified Farish Jinty chassis.

 

The last lot of coaches I made was a rake of Royal Mail stock, for which the only source I could find for the transfers was the 2mm Association, so I signed up. Oooer, that was a big mistake - I started looking at all the other goodies in the shops, and through the back issues of the magazines and thought, "Hmm, that looks like another layout would be interesting". So, the credit card's taken a hammering and I've started building a small layout in 2mm Finescale.

 

Rather than making this a very long-winded first post, I'll start to cover the layout once this one's been approved by the mods.

 

[chrism1964]

OK, it's been approved, so on to the layout. Why Elterwater? Well, in the late 19th century there was a proposal to extend the Coniston Railway to Elterwater, in the heart of the Lake District, to provide access to the quarries in Langdale. If it were built, the Furness Railway would operate it. However, it never was built so as an extension to my Coniston Railway model it offers me a completely blank canvas - although, of course, I won't be able to set them up for through running.

 

This is the plan I came up with;

 

it's a blatant theft of the track plan from Ashburton, but relocated a few hundred miles north. It won't have a train shed and what was the maltings siding will be a transfer wharf to shift slate from a narrow gauge tramway to standard gauge wagons for onward shipping. The grey & yellow bit on the right is a three-track sector plate with a few spurs for running locos around or just storage. This will be concealed by a representation of a fell. The whole thing is a bit over 6' long by 18" wide and is designed to fold up to fit in the car - the sections to the left and right of the blue lines fold up and over the middle section.

 

Track will be a combination of Easitrac for the plain track and Finetrax turnouts, the latter to be operated by wire in tube.

Coaching stock will be my n-gauge Furness Railway coaches rewheeled and freight will be, initially at least, my Peco chassis based FR wagons also rewheeled.

Likewise, motive power will be some of my FR locos which run on modified Farish Jinty chassis so can be rewheeled using the Association's conversion components, some easily and others with a little more effort.

Control will be plain DC, with the controller fixed behind the sector plate.

 

Whilst waiting for my first orders to arrive, I started on the fell so here is the general idea;

 

The fell has now been roughed out  so it looks less like Kryten's head;

 

 

The fell landscaping has been designed so that, when the layout's folded up it will clear any structures on the main board, although it may need some tweaking as the overall build progresses. It may look like it won;t fit, but I assure you it will - the two sections of the fell are raised up and angled (for access to the sector plate) so when it's lowered to the storage location, just above the track level, the whole thing's about 5" lower than when it's stood up. The grey, square hole in the fell is needed  to clear the coaling stage and water crane. The plan is for it to be be a small tarn with, possibly a small waterfall feeding it - it will be neither as large nor as rectangular by the time I've finished. if I can't get it looking right, I'll dig it all out and turn it into a small, disused quarry.

 

Since that last pic, more progress has been made;

I've put all the track down - not perfect, I'll be the first to admit, but it seems OK.

It's all been loosely wired up for testing, next time I lift the boards I'll finish that off properly.

I've rewheeled a few coaches and wagons, primarily for testing the track but they seem to run OK so they'll serve for a start.

I've lashed up a loco conversion - again, not perfect but it is adequate for testing and notes have been made of what I didn't do right so I can do  a better job when my next Shop 3 order arrives.

 

The next step is to tidy up the cesses and install the point rodding so it's ready for ballasting. At that point I'll be able to lift the boards to turn them around for taking more photos.

 

 

[bécasse]

In stealing the track plan from Ashburton you have also stolen its Achille's Heel for use as the basis for a model railway, namely a kickback siding that can only be shunted by horse (interesting in any scale let alone 2mm) or hand.

[chrism1964]

11 minutes ago, bécasse said:

In stealing the track plan from Ashburton you have also stolen its Achille's Heel for use as the basis for a model railway, namely a kickback siding that can only be shunted by horse (interesting in any scale let alone 2mm) or hand.

I've set it up to allow locos to shunt it - a bit of added interest since they have to work from the other end of any stock compared to shunting to the sheep pens or goods shed.

 

I might consider horse shunting later - plenty more to do first 😉

 

[25kV]

This is great!  My dad's 009 layout is of the same unbuilt line, albeit in a tiny bedroom space and obviously as a narrow gauge, rather than standard gauge, operation.  His layout has stations at Hodge Close quarry (at the summit of the line), Little Langdale, and Elterwater, albeit on a very non-prototypical track plan. 

 

Here's the yard at Elterwater, just by the post office ... with a slightly out of gauge visitor.  😉

 

 

[chrism1964]

21 minutes ago, 25kV said:

This is great!  My dad's 009 layout is of the same unbuilt line, albeit in a tiny bedroom space and obviously as a narrow gauge, rather than standard gauge, operation.  His layout has stations at Hodge Close quarry (at the summit of the line), Little Langdale, and Elterwater, albeit on a very non-prototypical track plan. 

 

Here's the yard at Elterwater, just by the post office ... with a slightly out of gauge visitor.  😉

 

 

Looks good.

 

I have, of course, no idea what route the proposal was considering - if they even got as far as thinking about a route.

It's nearly 200' ascent from Coniston to the road summit, 250' to Hodge Close and 300'+ down again to Elterwater in a much shorter distance so I reckon they'd have needed quite a tunnel or to swing some way east, closer to the west shore of Windermere.

[25kV]

1 hour ago, chrism1964 said:

Looks good.

 

I have, of course, no idea what route the proposal was considering - if they even got as far as thinking about a route.

It's nearly 200' ascent from Coniston to the road summit, 250' to Hodge Close and 300'+ down again to Elterwater in a much shorter distance so I reckon they'd have needed quite a tunnel or to swing some way east, closer to the west shore of Windermere.

That's right - I don't know what the preferred route would have been, but I did plot a rough gradient profile of the Hodge Close summit route on Google Earth, and managed a solid 1-in-40 on both sides!  Probably not suitable for your average standard gauge line...  With some considerable earthworks (my dad likes Swiss spirals) it would be an easier climb, but G.Earth won't let me do that. 🤔

 

 

It would be fascinating to find out what the promoter's plans were, back in the day.

[chrism1964]

10 minutes ago, 25kV said:

That's right - I don't know what the preferred route would have been, but I did plot a rough gradient profile of the Hodge Close summit route on Google Earth, and managed a solid 1-in-40 on both sides!  Probably not suitable for your average standard gauge line... 

 

Definitely not - I've worked a 1 in 60, using more modern main line locos than the FR had, and it's darned hard work with the shovel. With smaller locos, especially hauling mineral traffic 1 in 40 would not be very practical. The Coniston Railway had a short stretch of 1 in 49 on the climb out of Broughton but the rest was more in the region of 1 in 100 and all the mineral traffic was, of course, downhill..

 

Quote

It would be fascinating to find out what the promoter's plans were, back in the day.

 

Like I said, I doubt if any serious plans were made. I've only found one reference to the proposed extension and that was only a couple of lines in a book.

 

 

 

[chrism1964]

Well, progress has been slow - quite a learning process involved, but I'm getting there. The current state of play is that all the track's down, the rod-in-tube point control is fitted, everything's wired up & tested and the point rodding's gone in.

The next job is to try and avoid gumming up the points - firstly with sleeper grime and secondly with ballast and glue 😄

 

 

 

 

Those aren't the real platforms, BTW. They are just placeholders so that I could see how far back some point rodding could go and will also serve as edge markers when I start ballasting.

 

I'm gradually learning with the  loco conversions and now have 2 done, although one's not running quite right. It's "graunching" a bit. It sounds like one axle is slipping so I think I haven't got the quartering quite right so more attention is needed. I think I've found out why my first conversion attempt failed badly - it looks like the washers on the N-Class motion & pony truck etch are just that, washers, not the proper crankpin washers. Getting a sheet of the proper ones and also switching to solder paint instead of flux-cored solder has resulted in better results, which is encouraging since I have a couple more conversions planned.

 

There's been a change of plan for the freight rolling stock. It's currently sitting on rewheeled Peco chassis but I've tried the Association's etched kits so I'll be making a load of those and putting the bodies on them instead.

 

Haven't decided on what couplings I'll use yet. I've got a few D&Gs to try but I'm also rather impressed with the automatic magnetic 3-link couplings that Stuart Bailey described in the Dec/Jan 2008/9 issue of the Association magazine.

Like he said in his article, I, also, haven't found a reliable way of uncoupling. I tried a magnet below the track to overpower the coupling magnet and pull the chain away but that just made the wagons do wheelies. I also considered something rising through the track to "snag" an axle but can't be sure that the desired coupling in a train would "break" instead of any others, so it'll probably have to be a pole that is used to gently part the vehicles. If I go down that route, I dare say that a similar approach could be used for screwlink couplings on the coaching stock and locos.

 

On the subject of coaching stock, I've now rewheeled the four Furness Railway 6-wheelers and two FR bogie coaches, and I have a couple more (different design) 6-wheelers to finish off - I printed the latter some time ago but they didn't like some tight curves on my n-gauge layouts so I didn't complete them. They do appear to be happy on Elterwater, though.