Bolton Trinity Road - trains running in the shed and garden in OO

[Jenny Emily]

It's amazing what lofts can turn up. My sister-in-law's loft turned up a few unexpected items including an Airfix GWR suburban train set that had been abandoned there by a previous owner of the house. By our reckoning this hasn't seen the light of day in at least twenty years. They thought that I was the obvious person to provide this orphaned set with a new home, so they brought it down when they visited over the weekend.

 

I took the opportunity today to see if it would still work. I suppose it is testament to toys of the 1970s that they can work still with no maintenance required. It sounded like a bag of spanners in a cement mixer, though I gather that that was the normal noise for model trains made in this decade! The video also shows in passing progress on the shed empire. When the weather warms up (-5C here last night and tonight) I have some ground cover and grass to do.

 

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[Jenny Emily]

Given its condition it was a surprise find. There were also a load of other children's toys in the same loft, no doubt abandoned by the same people. I guess some people just consider these things junk after they're done playing with them. I remember my Father telling me about how he acquired a Hornby Dublo 8F, City class and a load of stock and track from a dustbin in Hull in the late 1960s. He saw track peeking out and decided to take a look. The stuff was duly fished out and as a result still survives. The 8F was the Ringfield motored version too, so it couldn't have been all that old at the time.

 

There's another video of the Prairie running on Bolton Trinity Road. It shows off the layout a little more, though the tracking shots might be a little shaky:

 

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As a child I remmeber Hornby Dublo still knocking the pants off the Hornby offerings of the day (early 1980s) despite being around 20+ years old. This Airfix set therefore came as a surprise to be in a league above Margate Hornby offerings - I don't remember ever seeing anything other than Hornby and Wrenn for sale in model shops of my childhood.

[Jenny Emily]

A new video has been filmed of trains running on the completed sections of the layout. The scenic area is getting bigger, and as soon as I get some time to go out there, the final ground cover around the overhead travelling crane in the yard will be done, leaving only the Burnden junction area left to do major work on.

 

I'm going to be adding a crossover at the burnden junction to allow the lap around the garden when it is built to be initially be built as single track to save on expense. The extra crossover will allow trains from any line to access a single track loop. I had enough trackand motors to add this in save for a single right hand point which will probably be sourced at the next exhibition I go to.

 

Just for a change, and because I can, I've filmed some more retro stock running on the layout. As the real Bolton Trinity Street retained a lot of its steam era infrastructure in 1980, they don't look too out of place. Just ignore the RES and Dutch liveried stock in the sidings as the L1 in apple green trundles past!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhalAtuDkk8

[martin1]

_{looks realy nice,i must get something done with our loft!!}

[Physicsman]

Jenny, as a matter of interest, what have you used to ballast your track? Is it Woodland Scenics N-gauge stuff? Grey blend with other highlights chucked in?

 

It looks very effective to my eyes.

 

Jeff

[Jenny Emily]

Jenny, as a matter of interest, what have you used to ballast your track? Is it Woodland Scenics N-gauge stuff? Grey blend with other highlights chucked in?

 

It looks very effective to my eyes.

 

Jeff

 

Thanks! Actually it is (IIRC - I'll have to double check in the shed tomorrow what it says on the bag) Geoscenics fine N gauge ballast - I find OO ballast looks too coarse and is probably better suited to O gauge. The glue mix is tinted with a black ink and this highlights the individual grains in the ballast really nicely. It also seems to give a degree of variance that can make it look a little like more than one colour of ballast is present. Some of the track, where I want it to look really dirty, I've gone over with the white spirit that I used to clean the bitumen paint from a brush that painted over the clout nails on the roof! This colours the ballast quite nicely, but you have to be really sparing as it soaks away like anything, and can discolour all the lineside grass too if you are too gung-ho with application (which I discovered initially to my cost).

[Physicsman]

Many thanks for the info!

 

I've always used Woodland, but I'll take a look at the Geoscenics. I agree about the N gauge - the "00" seems very coarse - more like mini boulders.

 

Best wishes,

 

Jeff

[Jenny Emily]

I've double checked, and it is Geoscenics ballast I've used. The ink is from them too. I met them at the LYDCC show last year in Rawtenstall, at exactly the same time I was stocking up on building materials. He had a display of the different products used on little test planks and they looked good. As I was picking them up there and then, it saved a lot on postage too. I bought 2Kg and it seems to have been enough to do pretty much all of Trinity Road. I have around 100g leftover, but will need that when I finish off Burnden junction.

 

I've been working over the last week at the yard end of the station (between still-to-be-built Orlando street bridge and Bolton East box) and have finally about finished this awkward corner. I've departed a lot from the real Trinity Street, because I wanted a goods yard capable of being shunted separately from the main lines. I've taken a few features from the trackplan of 'Grove street' (the way the run round loop was integrated into some of the headshunts) and enlarged it a little. It is all wired as a separate section powered from a Gaugemaster Model E controller, and has three isolating sections so that several locomotives can loiter within it.

 

The overhead travelling crane is a Walthers kit. These kits are like faerie dust do get hold of it seems, but I bagged one off a stall at the Nottingham show last year whilst exhibiting 'Grove street'. I had wanted one for 'Grove street' at the time of building but could not get one. I didn't have an immediate use for it when I found it, but thought it best to get it whilst available.

 

The track has been inset using 2mm mounting card, and a load of mud/muck has been washed over the top using the method I came up with whilst building 'Grove street' (thread easily found from the link in my signature at the bottom of the post)

 

This is just before the ground covering:

 

 

This is with the mud in place:

 

 

I have since cleared out the last bits of junk that didn't make it into the scrap yard at 'Grove street' from my scrap box to make the area under the crane a little more cluttered.

 

The buildings scattered around are all the remains of either salvaged card kits from an old layout, or what was left in my bits box from the old kits that I inherited from my Father-in-law's loft. The weighbridge hut is one of these, from a now defunct Superquick kit. It was a pain to build, as was the watertower that came with it - Superquick have definitely improved since these were on offer! They are now replaced in their range by a different watertower and weighbridge kit.

[Physicsman]

I've double checked, and it is Geoscenics ballast I've used. The ink is from them too. I met them at the LYDCC show last year in Rawtenstall, at exactly the same time I was stocking up on building materials. He had a display of the different products used on little test planks and they looked good. As I was picking them up there and then, it saved a lot on postage too. I bought 2Kg and it seems to have been enough to do pretty much all of Trinity Road. I have around 100g leftover, but will need that when I finish off Burnden junction.

 

 

Hi Jenny,

 

Many thanks for checking the details. You are making rapid progress with the layout - I'm jealous (lol) as I can't even begin to build my baseboards 'til I finish the garage conversion. Withdrawal symptoms loom!

 

I hope your shed is holding up. It would be a great shame if your excellent efforts were ruined by some good old Bolton weather!!

 

Jeff

[Jenny Emily]

The shed is holding up well despite the best efforts of the wind and rain, but I'm checking regularly for leaks. There was one minor damp patch over a couple of inches at floor level on the back wall which was traced to the previous owner of the house having treated the space behind the shed as a skip. This meant that debris was against the shed wall in places, and had in turn attracted moisture that was being held up against the panelling. I cleared out huge amounts of old degraded roofing felt (remnants of some previous bodged attempts to reroof the shed?), rotten lengths of fence timber and, bizarrely, a large wrought iron gate. I cannot find anything wrong with the gate, and it looks like the original one for the house from 1927 - I've put it to one side for a wire brushing and repaint. It's handy as the existing gate is wooden and has started to show signs of rot.

 

There's not been anything new on the layout, however I've been contemplating the construction of Orlando street bridge. I will need to get some more plastikard for doing the sides. I've got an idea in my head, though it will involve very careful measuring and cutting to produce all the bits to convincingly model the relief work of the original iron bridge. The base construction underneath will be thick card braced with balsa just as I did for the Trinity road bridge under the main station building.

 

I dug out some old Hornby Dublo locomotives and stock from storage in my parents' loft and gave them a run. Some of the coaches were bought new from Hattons by me in the early 1990s. Well, I figure that he was the dealer, and got them from Meccano when they went bust, then he sold them to me. Just a small point that at the time he had had them tucked in his stock room for 30 years! Amongst other things I remember buying the very last full brake in maroon that he had for £12.

 

Compared to my more recent locomotives, these little critters are really noisy. They always seem to me like they bludgeon their way through trackwork. Still, not bad for stuff that is around 50 years old!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOOh9PKB7vQ

[Jenny Emily]

Work has become very busy over the last week, which is a good thing. It means that I haven't done a huge amount of modelling, though using the last of some of the modelling materials that I had in stock I've tried to advance the area around the Burnden fork. Luckily with the weather warming up paint and plaster dries a little quicker than a couple of months ago!

 

I didn't have any Polyfilla for building up the embankment sides in this area, however the plasterer who redid our chimney breast left half a bag of something called 'board finish' which I used instead. It seems to react and dry much like polyfilla, but the best thing was that it was effectively free because it was otherwise only going to go in the bin. I love recycling!

 

I've done another video of trains at work on the layout, trying to get a few new camera angles. I've had a Bachmann ETHEL in Intercity livery for a while now. It normally lives in a display cabinet, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to pair it up with a Bachmann Super D and some Intercity/Regional railway coaches for a 'railtour'.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FwYIARJRaQ

[Jenny Emily]

With the weather being a little warmer, I've been building the terrain in the final corner of the shed. This is nominally where Burnden fork would be, but of course the line actually has to curve to pass under Bradshawgate to reappear as if coming from Blackburn. So this area is entirely freelance without a shred of thought for the real location.

 

Actually, I've quite enjoyed building in this area as it's given me the chance to build in some landscaping. The cutting sides are made from card formers with scrunched up paper stuffed between and a layer of 'board finish' over the top then painted and grassed. Ultimately there will be more trees and bushes, but I've run out of materials for those and money has been a little tight as my partner's work has dried up following the near collapse of their principal client. Still, the bare grass will suffice for now.

 

Since these pictures were taken, the last of the hillside around the merit plastic tunnel mouth has been added and I'm just waiting for the goo to dry before grassing it all. The tunnel mouth came from my Father's loft - we have no idea of its origin; only that there were two of them and that they had come off some-one else's unknown layout. I painted it all over in Humbrol #67, followed by a wash of cream acrylic to pick out the mortar when this had dried. Final weathering was done with five different shades of watercolour artist's pencils in greens and browns, though the camera fails miserably in recording any of this detail.

 

To break up the otherwise rather false looking retaining wall, I cut up the parts of a coal loader that was salvaged from an old layout that were made from balsa strip and rebuilt the bits into some brace supports to look like the retaining wall has weakened and has been shored up. The signal has been very much hacked out of remaining bits from Ratio kits (finished within hours of finally seeing the reviews of the excellent Dapol signals - "build the kit and the RTR version will come"). Many thanks to the members who supplied me with the leftovers from their 486 kit and the instructions that allowed me to make enough sense of the bits to make this distant signal.

 

The trackwork in the large cutting is waiting for the obtaining of one right hand medium Peco point, however I seem to be getting outbid on every Ebay auction for them by morons wanting to pay more for secondhand than Hattons sell for new. Though as the tunnel portal currently goes nowhere, the trackwork is only needed for when I extend into the garden so I can wait for now.

 

A few pictures from the world's worst photographer (me) armed with what should be in some-one more competent's hands an okay camera:

 

[Jenny Emily]

I've uploaded a new video that shows some of the developments out in the shed. I've finally had chance to finish off the approach cutting to the tunnel with the grass done and track and ballasting in. I hated every second of putting in the point motors in underneath - PL-10Es are a pain in the neck to line up perfectly. One thing that I did discover is that the new wire I got is too thin, and I had to double it up to get all three motors to reliably flick together. One handy tip is that a long length of wire attached to the live feed of the CDU makes a handy test probe under neath - brush it direct to the contacts on any motor and watch for the pin moving gives you a handy indication of where a multitude of problems actually lie.

 

I have used up the last of the blue paint used originally to paint the backscene on the shed walls above. It has lightened the room no end and makes the backdrops to the video somewhat nicer. As the paint had no further uses to me it seemed the best use for it. The layout was well covered with newspaper before painting commenced, and the tiny drips on the paper proved at the end how worthwhile this precaution was.

 

I took the opportunity to get out of my display cabinet a few unusual items to run. My NRM Robinson 8K got paired with the unlikely combination of RTC Laboratory 14 'Wren', a blue/rey TPO (modelzone commission), a BSK support coach in maroon (NRM), Satlink GUV (Model Rail) and a Network south east GUV (Signalbox). Also visible is the Bachmann A1 that I bought at Arcadia models secondhand with my birthday money. The southern region green MkI coaches with it are disturbingly different shades of green - Bachmann seem to have changed the colour between first release and subsequent reruns.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CdfPuwbc9U

[Jenny Emily]

Despite the cold weather, we escaped the snow here and I've been out filming in the shed again. Most of the more recent work has involved sub baseboard level with a lot of extra track feeds going in and clip plugs to span baseboard joins so that the whole thing can theoretically be easily dismantled and removed from the shed. It isn't that I plan to remove it, just that I felt it was best not to tempt fate in case I did have to remove it for whatever reason.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-J_aVuzo8A

 

I've also taken a picture of the completed trackwork and terrain in the tunnel cutting as a comparison to the picture further back in this thread. Apart from Orlando street bridge and platform level buildings/canopies there isn't much left to do. The slope above the tunnel mouth will eventually acquire a few trees and bushes. The tunnel will ultimately be cut through to allow track to continue into the garden.

 

[heathwardle]

Looks great. I'd be interested in what you use for the canopies and buildings. I've been looking out for a realistic (Bolton) canopy "off the shelf" for a while with no joy.

I have the austerities too - think the red one is Harry from Walkden Yard (?), the real Harry is now at an engineering company in Horwich after standing in a scrapyard at Chequerbent till the late 80s.

[Jenny Emily]

I'm not great at scratchbuilding, so my thoughts were to use a combination of a load of the Dapol plastic canopy kits with the building parts minus canopy of the Superquick island platform buildings underneath for the buildings/canopy on platforms 1-3. I still have to work out what will work for the two storey buildings on platform 4/parcel platform though as due to space constraints, my platform is much narrower than I would have liked.

 

I'm fairly happy to live with a 'suggestion of Bolton' than a brick-perfect copy of the real Bolton, so I'm hoping that that will look okay.

[Physicsman]

Hi Jenny,

 

Enjoying the vids and photos. What did you use for the tunnel portal in your post of 7th April? Is it a PECO product?

 

Btw, agree with your blog re. St Trinians: steam engines and delightful young ladies. What's not to like indeed!!

 

Best wishes,

 

Jeff

[The Stationmaster]

Hi Jenny,

 

Enjoying the vids and photos. What did you use for the tunnel portal in your post of 7th April? Is it a PECO product?

Btw, agree with your blog re. St Trinians: steam engines and delightful young ladies. What's not to like indeed!!

Best wishes,

Jeff

The tunnel mouth looks to me very much like the one originally produced by Merit and last heard of being marketed by by PECO (who too over the old Merit range). There were originally both single and double line versions and they always looked very good in my view (and yes, I watched St Trinians too, and yes it was good although it was shame stockings seemed to have gone out of fashion when they made that one).

[Physicsman]

Careful Mike!! The trend of our conversation may embarrass Jenny!

 

Thanks for the tunnel info - they do look excellent. Will be interested to hear where Jenny got hers from.

 

Jeff

[Jenny Emily]

Will be interested to hear where Jenny got hers from.

 

 

Stockings or tunnel mouth? It takes a lot to embarrass me. There were plenty of ladies visible with their stocking tops showing in the St Trinians film. It never ceases to amaze me how everyone else in the film seems to take the sight of a sixth former in short gymslip with stockings and suspenders clearly visible in their stride.

 

I believe all the train sequences were shot at the Longmoor military railway. It looks to have been a fine facility, and a shame it couldn't have become a preserved line when the Army finished with it.

 

The tunnel mouth is indeed a Merit one, found in my Father's loft (there were two of them) though neither of us has any idea where it came from. The theory is that they were amongst a collection of Hornby Dublo that we bought as a job lot some time in the 1990s.

[Philip52LC]

I always enjoy "Tales from Bolton Trinity Road" be they in words, pictures or video. To me this is the essence of railway modelling bringing out the enjoyment rather than angst and it does encourage me to carry on trying to build small and compact layouts.

 

Regarding "St Trinians" I recordered it yet again, only to watch the train sequences and nothing else of course!!

 

I too understand they were filmed on the Longmoor Military Railway and it is indeed a shame that it never became a heritage railway site. Probably wrong place, wrong time syndrome.

 

Philip

[Physicsman]

Stockings or tunnel mouth? It takes a lot to embarrass me. There were plenty of ladies visible with their stocking tops showing in the St Trinians film. It never ceases to amaze me how everyone else in the film seems to take the sight of a sixth former in short gymslip with stockings and suspenders clearly visible in their stride.

 

I believe all the train sequences were shot at the Longmoor military railway. It looks to have been a fine facility, and a shame it couldn't have become a preserved line when the Army finished with it.

 

The tunnel mouth is indeed a Merit one, found in my Father's loft (there were two of them) though neither of us has any idea where it came from. The theory is that they were amongst a collection of Hornby Dublo that we bought as a job lot some time in the 1990s.

 

Thanks Jenny.

 

I was, of course, referring to the tunnel mouths and Mike (Stationmaster) was therefore correct. I wonder if they are still available - probably not as they are a half-decent product!

 

And, being a gentleman of good standing, I wouldn't dare ask you about your stockings!! I do agree though that political correctness didn't seem to be a feature in 1950s films, so nobody payed a blind bit of notice to the appareil of the young ladies. And I'm not complaining!!

 

Keep up the good work (I refer to the layout, of course!!!).

 

Best wishes,

 

Jeff

[The Stationmaster]

Sorry to nick Jenny's thread but you might find the equivalent is Peco Cat No. LK32 Jeff - although I'm not sure what they are made out of (the original Merit plastic was rather 'soapy' and flexible but took paint quite well).

 

And yes - all the St Trinians railway filming was done on the LMR (Longmoor Military Railway) - I think it was probably the last major filming job to make good use of the network there as it started to be reduced not long after. Unfortunately by the time I got anywhere near it in the mid 1970s it had as good as disappeared and although i was there on 'official business' there simply wasn't the time to go relic hunting.

[Jenny Emily]

It's all gone quiet at the moment because I've been away on business a lot and spending nights away in far flung corners of the country. The up-sum of this is that I now know what Ipswich by night looks like, but the downside is that time in the shed has been somewhat limited. Consequently there have been no further videos of trains running, and actual modelling progress has been limited.

 

I have, however, finally made a start on the road deck of Orlando Street bridge. No photos as yet, but I made use of the very last bits of balsa from a Javis jumbo balsa bundle bought ten years ago and only just now finally all used up! I suspect they cost a lot more now than the £5.99 price ticket that was still on it! These strips were used to make a lattice similar to that which forms the Trinity Road bridge/station building deck and which can be seen in a couple of the much earlier videos. I then cut out from 2mm thick mounting card the top which was glued on with Bostik. It then occurred to me that a lot of the low angle video shots that my partner likes to do would show up the very obvious model construction, so I elected to cut a second piece of 2mm card that I glued on the underside, so that I ended up with a flat top and bottom and the balsa sandwiched hidden in the middle.

 

It's really light and yet very strong. It merely rests on the piers (that are fixed to the layout) so that it can remain removable for access to the trackwork for whatever reason. There is some quite complex pointwork directly underneath, and I suspect it would be clever to be able to get very clear access to these! The bridge sides will be made from plastikard, but I need to get some more to do this and as I'm off to Colchester tomorrow for work at 5:00am, this is unlikely to happen until next weekend at the earliest. I do have the plan of how I am going to construct the sides to mimic the decorative cast iron sides of the real Orlando street bridge, but I'll have to wait and see whether it works out as well as it did in my Mind's eye when I get the materials.

 

Elsewhere in the shed I've finished off the wiring. The bits that I've done are not currently essential for operation as I haven't actually cut track that crosses baseboard joins (I figure that unless I need to, I won't) but I felt it was a good idea for completeness to add it all in. So there is now a ring bus for each track that effectively circles underneath the layout connected by droppers to the track above and which crosses the baseboard joins via plugs that can easily be pulled apart. It's probably a similar idea to what people always go on about for a DCC layout and it always mystifies me why there is this impression that a DCC layout needs something special. Surely a DC layout should have much the same to eliminate all dead spots? So I hope that at a later date I can dabble with DCC without actually having to do any adaptation. It is amazing though how much wire a relatively small layout uses. I think I've used enough to have laid a single strand of wire all the way from the layout to the real Bolton Trinity Street! (or at last it feels like it).

 

Keeping security in mind, I have added a sturdy steel bar across the shed window on the inside. I figure that no matter how well everything else is intruder proofed in the shed, it is as well to make sure that a scrote cannot just smash the single sheet of glass and climb through the hole. They'll have to be a very triangular and small shaped scrote to manage it now!

 

My computer also runs nicely out there now. The keyboard and mouse are visible in some of the later videos, but there is now a monitor mounted on the wall. The wires are run behind the layout, so it's all nice and neat, and I can watch my grand prix out there nicely. It connects to the main LAN at the moment via a PCI-PCMCIA adapter card and a laptop wireless card, with a spare wireless router perched in the back bedroom window for its access point. However, at the moment whilst all works if I can raise the computer box to the same height as the layout, in practice this isn't practical, and I await a second wireless adapter than plugs to the ethernet via a cable and whose receiver can be placed in the window of the shed with line-of-sight to the router providing the access point.

 

And finally, I have retreived from my parents' loft a large box of Meccano from my childhood. I intend to experiment with building stuff from this to make the two bridges that will ultimately be required to connect the shed layout into the garden, bridging the gap that keeps the garden from burying the shed at one side. The resulting bridges will, of course, be well treated and painted to stop them rusting. Before anyone gets upset at the idea of doing this to Meccano, I should point out that my childhood toy was rescued from a bin in Looe behind a shop that used to be there selling an eclectic mix of Meccano, O gauge Hornby, Hornby Dublo and paintings. A lot of the pieces are somewhat rusty already and have a few bends to knock out too.

[Jenny Emily]

It's been a while since I posted, because the day job has gone wild and I've been doing 6 day/70 hour weeks which has put a little crimp on doing much modelling. However, I have started building Orlando street bridge, and it's coming on nicely. I've only been able to build one side because I've run out of plastikard, but I'm pleased with the results. To represent the cast iron of the original, the side has been built up from layers of plastikard. I used a 2" strip for the main bit, with 1/4" and 1/8" strips for the detail on both sides. This actually makes quite a strong and surprisingly rigid beam. The triangles are cut from a 1/2" strip and have since been decorated with different shades of Humbrol enamel to try and replicate the ornate decoration of the original.

 

Gosh! This is hard to type on account of using my partner's Norwegian keyboard which as I have to look at the keys and don't touch type makes it rather hard for me!

 

Some pictures of bridge progress: