Leaderboard

Over the last couple of weeks I've managed to get the final scenic baseboard constructed. This board will house the completely fictitious sidings to a mill. I've already got most of the mill buildings which are based on Ebridge mill in Norfolk. The board is a slightly odd shape to incorporate a removable section which will lead the track round to the fiddle-yard. This is made removable so that the bed which sits in the railway room can still be used when needed as a bed! At the other end of the layout the overbridge is coming along nicely. This is mainly cut in 1mm MDF with a frame of 3mm. I've painted with Humbrol brick red, applied mortar with 'Wilko' own-brand fine filler and then applied some washes of Vallejo Acrylic grey. The white painted section is for sighting the advanced starter signal which is just in front of the bridge. The wing walls will be buried to around 40 degrees in the sides of the cutting. The original bring looks like this. It is a 5 segment arch bridge, which means that there are 5 arcs which form the elliptical shape. Following some discussion on the Scalefour society forum I was appraised that just drawing an ellipse in CAD wasn't accurate as the builders would not have been able to make form-work based on an ellipse. The internet revealed how to construct a 5 segment arch with rather too many uses of the word 'bisect' for my humble brain. Still it's Scalefour - getting it - Alright! A fair amount of consolidation and re-pointing has happened on the bridge so I don't trust that the weathering now is what it looked like in 1955. There is probably quite a bit less soot and a lot more lime leaching out of the brickwork now. Moving on the the fiddle-yard I had another go at making a cassette. This time I used a base of 3mm ply rather than 6mm. This has several advantages over the earlier version. The 3mm version has a little flex in it and actually sits better on the baseboard. The difficulty of making two surfaces completely flat over the size of the cassette meant that the original 6mm version had a tendency to rock along its length. Secondly the use of 3mm ply means that I can make the tongue and groove joint in two layers of different sizes, this then gives some vertical alignment which the earlier version didn't have. The cassette and the entry track can be brought together and we now get horizontal and vertical alignment. I've also drawn up a first experiment for the 'cassette clamp' which I'll try to cut over the next day or two. David

After nearly four months off the workbench, due to Railway Commissions - the Shack is back to be finished. To be honest there wasn't a much to do - main undercarriage, wheels, props, a few aerials/pitot tubes, some painting and an awful lot of transfers! Prop assembly - 3 parts to each prop, 8 props and once painted 9 decals per prop! Painting the main under carriage wheel bays - while I was doing this, the wheels & undercarriage struts & doors where in paint. Adding the transfers - there's a lot! Once the wings where decaled up underneath, I fitted the undercarriage. Props test fitted at this point and rear props had the shaft hole opened up to ensure they rotate (no innuendo please)! Both wings done and glued on. 72 decals later the props where added. Finished Shackleton and a cameo... And a Christmas treat - The Three Wise Avro's.. Till next time TBG

In the comments under my last post I mentioned the Gwalchmai Light Railway, a fictional branch line near to Aberffraw. Here is a map and 'history' I have created of the line (historical inaccuracies in italics). The red line shows the Gwalchmai Light Railway, the black line the RAF Mona extension, constructed in 1915, meanwhile the blue line is the Aberffraw Railway. The black-dash line is the Aberffraw Railway (Llangefni Extension) Act line, part of which was planned was constructed (the yellow line), except under a different Act of Parliament in 1880, after the Llangefni Scheme failed. This was the Capel Mawr Railway, a line built similarly to the Aberffraw Railway, as its conception implemented by the Aberffraw Gabbro Company, owned by Thomas Gwyn. It was built due to the fact that Gwyn had bought a quarry for the Aberffraw Gabbro Company in 1875, in anticipation of the Llangefni Extension. It never came and the quarry industry at Capel Mawr didn't take off as quickly as Gwyn would have wanted. After a few years of slow progress, Gwyn decided to create a new scheme in 1879, called the Capel Mawr Railway, the proposal was more successful as the newly planned line would be much cheaper, so there was much more investment from Llangefni. In 1880, the Capel Mawr Railway Company received the Capel Mawr and Llangefni Railway Act, allowing the railway to be constructed. The LNWR operated the line from the outset after an agreement with Gwyn and the Aberffraw Gabbro Company. The quarry at Capel Mawr closed in the 1880s: like that at Penrhyn, connected to the Aberffraw Railway; making the line partially redundant. However- it continued to run, but with only passenger and farm traffic to keep it going. Eventually the branch received a Parliamentary service. The Capel Mawr branch finally gave up the ghost in 1932, as it was too expensive to run with too few passengers and goods to supply it.

Brickhill progress update. Next tasks: signalling and snow fences.

After another evenings work the GWT mk3 TGS is now finished, sort of, when refitting the roof the plastic was very brittle and shattered. Trying to glue it together didn’t get a satisfactory result, so I will remove the Hornby glazing and fit a new roof from a Lima mk3 I need to take some dimensions to see if it’s viable, but an alternative approach would be to use a Hornby mk3 roof chopped off its sides and glued in place, which would get a better match with the rest of the reje

Hi. Bit of an odd ball posting this time, when are they not? The first three photos go back a considerable period of time. The first one is the cover of the first dedicated railway book I bought. Railways had featured in other books such as the Odhams Press publication How it Works and how it's Done. . but this was my first real railway book. As may be seen from the cover it is the script of a B.B.C. broadcast. On the title page it quotes, A dramatisation of events that occurred at a vital Cross-roads on the path to victory on a certain day in 1944 between the hours of 10am and 10pm. The 6th June springs to mind but the book was published in June so presumably the broadcast was before that. Also the forward to the book by the then Minister of War transport is dated 2nd June. So make of that what you want. There is a good selection of photos in the book if any of you would like me to attach them sometime .I was 15 at the time and had been working a year. The second photo goes back to 1962. It was taken at the Leeds Model Railway Exhibition for publication in the Yorkshire Post Paper. It's my son and myself. He was nine at the time and is due to become a Grandad in April. The Leeds Exhibition at that time was held in the Corn Exhange, and was that a dusty place..The Aire Valley did three shows there and the layout got a nice coating of dust. There was no way to dust it and in the end I thought it antiquated the layout. The third photo was taken at a show in Huddersfield organised by the Yorkshire Area of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society in 1964. It's my youngest daughter, now a double Grandmother, holding a model, not built by me of a Corris loco. Hovering just off scene is the builder of the model ready ready to catch it if the worst happened. It was handed back undamaged. the remaining photos all-though recent are of an older subject. It's a model I built about 1965/66 of Emmet's Nellie and train. I think this was the time when Emmet's locos and stock were popular with modeller's. I think the loco chassis is Triang. I remotored it last year. The coaches are scratch built and have an oil lamp for illumination. These are made from a grain of wheat bulb with a short length of brass tube for the oil container and a Chinese style hat on top. These and the bulb in Nellie's headlamp are the original ones. It is now in the possession of the fore mentioned daughter. It is normally kept in a display case but gets to run round the Christmas tree each year. I am also including a photo of a HIAB sea crane I built from a kit I got at the Blackpool Model Boat three years ago. Once again this is in the possession the afore mentioned daughter works for HIAB in the main office in Ellesmere. Think that's about it for now. Cheers. Derek.

Hi again. Back to the A.V.R. When constructing the Aire Valley stock and locos the drawings I used were very simple, not much more than basic dimensions . The early items of stock were built from card and details were drawn straight onto the card. OXO tin locos were built on the cut and fit method..All this is a bit hazy now. It is going on 60 years ago. Anyway stuff did get built to what I considered reasonable for the time..At some point I thought it might be a good idea to make "official" drawings of all the stock. These were not working drawings but drawings of the completed items. These were done on paper with pencil. There's a total of 25 drawings. Locos and passenger stock were done one to a sheet, freight stock up to four per sheet. The paper size is 8"x5" which may have been half foolscap =A5? Early Railway Modeller article drawings were done on paper and pencil but that's another story. These stock drawings have have kept very well, maybe because the were not exposed to light but they are not suitable for reproduction Then at some point I discovered what I call blue print paper. It's a good quality blue tinted tracing paper. Possibly the most interesting drawing was the one for the Gears on Aire Valley article. This was drawn double the size of the R.M. page. The scale of the drawing was 8mm to the foot except for the NTS items.. When reproduced the drawings were 4mm to the foot...I'm guessing this was not new One never knew how C.J.F. felt about you doing something like this The layout drawings, I preferred to call them surveys,a term cribbed from the Madder Valley, which I did for the Aire Valley Adventure series and the Redevelopment in reverse article were done to a scale of 2" to the foot. Big headed I know but I like to think these drawings helped to to define the articles. That's as maybe. These two surveys were taken to new height by Hero member tee bee. He is a bit of a computer whiz kid, though I use the term kid loosely. He took the 1971 drawing of the whole survey and removed the old Saltaire. and replaced it with the 1974 survey of the rebuilt Saltaire. When I first saw the new combined survey I didn't twig it and had to have it pointed out to me. I'm not sure if this drawing has had a public airing so I will attach it. Thank's Tom for this icing on the cake. Returning to the stock drawings. These have all been copied in ink on the blue print paper. These are on roughly A4 size paper and have been reduced to a total of ten drawings plus one small supplementary one. I am attaching the first two sheets. I did a blog last night on the above. I thought I had inadvertent lost it. If you get two versions of it, my apologies. Cheers. Derek. , .