Leaderboard

Evening all, Following on from my last entry, I wanted to undertake some tests on the inset track and ballasting for the layout. The only ballasted section will essentially be the track along the front whilst most of the area depicted had a concrete type apron. As mentioned before I have had a few disasters on my 2mmFS layouts with both of these so thought a few tests would be a good start rather than wade in. I assembled a 60ft length of C+L plain track on a 5mm foam board base and this was first sprayed with track colour weathered sleeps as a base. I then built up two different options for the concrete hard stand using 5mm foamboard and a card top layer. The first option runs the card tight to the rail, whilst the second option stops it short to create the gap as described by Scott in a reply on my last blog entry. I then filled this gap with a proprietary ready mix filler which was sanded when dry so slightly lower then the rail - this is twofold, firstly to create the infill gap and secondly to have something slightly lower for when cleaning the rails. I then applied two coats of some acrylic paint although I am not so keen on the brush strokes. Ballasting was then applied using two types of ballast obtained from Green Scenes at a show. Looking at the prototype pictures I wanted to create the very dark (almost black) ballast seen at the dries rather than my usual light grey ballast. PVA and water with some detergent was applied using an old syringe and left to dry over night. Incidentally, my son and I prefer the slightly larger ballast than the smaller and I purposely did not buy ‘7mm ballast’ as people tend to say it’s overscale. This morning, I first picked out the chairs in acrylic rust colour and then toned them down later with weathering powders. The same mix of black and brown powers was applied to the ‘concrete’ running the black powder into the small groove next to the outer rails. Joints in the concrete were scored with a scalpel then gone over with a 0.7mm lead pencil, adding a few cracks too. Finally I applied some static grass to the track and also in the cracks as well as the groove alongside the rails as I am modelling the scene circa 1983 just before it closed, so would like a little evidence of neglect. Overall I am very happy with the results. To get rid of the brush lines to the concrete I might spray the top layer of card before applying it in place. I might do this in sections too creating some thin joints rather than scoring them. This now allows me to start to prepare the base for the inset track on the layout and then get the ballasting on the go. Once these two large elements are done it will allow me to turn my attention to the dries buildings...and I have started to have some thoughts on those too. As always, comments welcome, Pete

At the end of the last blog I said I was going to try and 3D print a lever frame. I knew that this was probably going to be at the extreme end of what the printer could handle. The results were promising with a few issues. There seem to be a couple of issue, firstly the levers appear to have been attracted to each other by the surface tension of the resin. In most cases the bulk of the lever was actually printed correctly but as they came out of the printer the levers were stuck together. Secondly the very tops of the lever appear to have lost the plot slightly, on several of the levers there was a distinct step where half way up the handle of the lever. I can see a couple of options, I could try and add some support between the levers but I think this would be a pain remove, possibly almost impossible. The other option would be to print the levers separately and make the base with some holes to glue them into. I tried to break and re-seat the handles on the worst offending, the result wasn't too bad. I tried the frame in the box, this photograph is greatly magnified. I did a couple of other prints at the same time, the platform face includes a number of tie-bars to stop it falling down. I was able to draw these up, they are about 5mm in diameter. Finally I also printed a sack of potatoes off the Thingiverse, While all this was going on I went into the arboriculture business and finished off some trees and bushes. I have quite a thicket to plant now. David

My old copy of Tweedale Byways (1908 edition) includes a sketch of Frog Fen Lane, which I've reproduced below... It looks a pleasant enough spot. I imagine the artist sitting happily beside the dusty road on a lovely sunny day, the only sounds being the gentle tinkling of sheep bells and the chuckling of contented chickens, with maybe the odd skylark thrown in for good measure. If you were to have wandered along and informed him that the area was to be designated as a 'green field site', he would probably have complimented the authorities on their forethought in safeguarding this slice of rural idyll. At that point you would no doubt have wished him a good day and walked on, not wanting to disillusion the poor fellow. The photo below was taken from more or less the same spot, but some half a century later in the 50s/60s... The frogs, sheep and skylarks have all gone of course, but strangely enough the chickens are still there. The industry moved in so fast that there was no time to round them all up, and a feral population have infested the site ever since. Actually I've quite surprised myself at how quickly the industry has come together. It's amazing what a looming exhibition deadline can do for motivation. There are still small details that can be added, road signs and so on, but as with the other scenes those can wait until later if I have time left over. The buildings were constructed using my preferred medium of cardboard, but most have been faced with Slater's corrugated Plasticard. I never quite know what is the best way of gluing these dissimilar materials together. UHU glue seems to work quite well in the short term, but I've found it goes brittle over time and the surfaces can come apart. The method used here, though it was more of a bother, was to add a paper backing to the plastic, bonding it by soaking solvent (Mekpak) through the paper to the plastic. I then used PVA to glue the paper-backed plastic to the card sub-structure. I have a feeling it may be more stable than the UHU, but that has yet to be proven. The chimneys and pipes are based on paper tubes. They are rather fragile, but at least having the layout contained in a box reduces their vulnerability somewhat. However the large chimney has already gained a dent at the top, where it was struck by a meteorite. Bends in the pipework consist of sections cut from wooden or plastic curtain rings. Paper collars were added to one end of each straight and curved piece, then a great time was had plugging them together. The pipework could really do with more supports, but the space was too tight fit any more in. As you might guess, track cleaning is tricky, but then the whole layout is a rabbit warren so that's nothing new. It involves the use of a stick with piece of paper towel wrapped around the end which is then carefully manipulated betwixt and between the obstacles. No abrasives or solvents are used but it does a satisfactory job. It's still not clear exactly what goes on at the Frog Fen Lane works. An industrial spy once noted that wagon loads of innocuous materials arrived and drums of noxious substances departed, mostly to Castleport where they were loaded onto a barge and dumped in the Twee estuary. The railway is unconcerned. Traffic is traffic and it pays the bills, with the added bonus that the leaky drums work wonders at keeping the track free from weeds. Cheers, Alan.

Cement dust builds up gradually on the tank sides, forming a crust as time and precipitation both do their work. In places the weight of this buildup is too much for the grip of the gunk on the metal of the tank, and lumps fall off. On the model this effect can be shown by using a cocktail stick, or similar precision tool, to chip away at the previously created mess. The pointed end will remove small areas at a time, or it can be used at a much shallower angle to reduce the height of the lumps more quickly than an old brush.

I've volunteered to take the tractor test bed to the Tutbury gathering next month so I've been doing some more work on it ahead of that. All of the work so far is 'below stairs' so visitors may not see much visible difference from it's state last year at Chelford but in fact quite a lot has changed. The first big change is that the curtain track has now been relaid to run dead straight instead of following the line of the Esso siding. This makes manual steering more predictable - previously it was a bit tricky to drive when the carriage was on the curve, so trying to steer the tractor along the straight road of the Esso siding turnout was not easy. Old... New... Second I've made the swing arm about 20mm longer and added a new gear into the train. This means that the magnet can reach 20mm further out on either side of the centre line. Several of the el cheapo moulded chinese gears have been replaced with machined ones from HPC. A couple of cheapo ones remain where I still need thin gears. Thirdly there is a little sensor (called a slotted optical switch) part way along. The carriage has a rectangle of black plastikard that passes through the slot, breaking the light beam. This allows the Arduino to 'know' how far along the track the carriage is. So why bother when it was working OK anyway? Well the other big item on the 'to do' list for the mockup was to deal with the gravity shunting that was used in the 1950s to gravitate oil tanks from the bromine works gate back onto the road outside the Esso depot. My original plan was to build a separate contraption with an electromagnet moving along another track. I did some experiments with small electromagnets and found that anything small enough to fit just wasn't strong enough to do the job. Plan B was to have a rare earth magnet mounted on a servo so that it could be either engaged or not with the tank to be moved. After sketching several ideas which all looked like a lot of work I started wondering if I could avoid the job entirely and do the gravity shunt using the tractor drive. To cut a long story short I found that I could... but the tractor drive would need more 'reach' and the Arduino (the brains of the operation) would need to know exactly where the magnets were instead of just knowing the general direction in which they were pointing. The Arduino software naturally needed a whole lot of work to make it do new things. The final piece of work has been to replace all of the curtain track mountings. They had been done fairly quickly (i.e. badly) by just screwing down into bits of strip wood glued to the cross members along with Blu Tack and bits of wood or card to pack things to vaguely the right height. This was OK to get things working but on the real layout they wont be accessible from above so I needed to design some new mountings that can be adjusted and removed from below. The new ones use Tufnol blocks drilled and tapped to take machine screws and an aluminium angle cross member that is removeable from below. Finally while the thing was turned over I took a picture of the carriage from underneath from where you can see the two stepper motors and the bits that keep it on the curtain track.

Since the last blog the Tweemoor Yard scene has lost its post-apocalyptic nuclear winter look. Grass has sprouted from the wasteland, trees have burst forth, and buildings have popped up like mushrooms, including Mr Yardley's long awaited yard office. As can be seen the forestry department have been busy. It was a long and tedious job that can be summed up in two words - never again. On the plus side, the newly planted ancient woodland has now become something of a local beauty spot, and the railway, quick to exploit a new source of traffic, have provided an excursion platform. Although very basic, it's claim to fame is that it has the longest platform seat in Tweedale. The only other facility is a pre-loved notice board, obtained ages ago from an ex-military type who had fallen on sorry times and was reduced to hawking his stuff from door to door. Like mugs we fell for his hard luck story, but have at least now found a home for this piece of junk, even though it does still bear an old poster advertising cheap fares to Selsey (wherever that is). It's a long time since the railway ran a regular passenger service, but now and then the railbus gets dusted off and turns up here with an excursion, inundating us quiet country folk with hoards of townies. On such occasions the ladies endeavour to make their way up the steep and rickety steps and over the road towards the Kafe In The Woods, renowned for its dainty teas and creamy cakes. Meanwhile the gents prefer to sit on the famous seat, and watch with the critical attention of spectators at a chess tournament, as Mr Yardley (maestro of the marshalling arts) conducts his shunting performances in the yard. That said, once the ladies are out of sight there is a tendency for the chaps to nip across the tracks and over the stile to The Jolly Poacher. Getting down to the practical side of things, for ground cover I used my prefered method of making up a green paste from scatter material (50:50 mix of Woodland Scenics Yellow Grass and Burnt Grass) and dilute PVA glue, which is then spread over the ground contours like plaster. While still wet it is lightly sprinkled with static grass (dead-grass colour), followed by a sprinkling of green ground foam mixture, all pushed and poked about with a cocktail stick. To my eye it gives a good enough representation of rough grass without going to the expense of a static grass machine. The trees were made using the method described in an earlier blog, basically cardboard cut-outs covered with pieces of Woodland Scenics foliage. Buildings were all scratch-built from card. Cheers, Alan.

With the Tweemoor Yard scenery all but finished, I was ready to move on to second of the three scenes on this layout extension board. I decided to tackle the (as yet unnamed) port next. This was the starting point... The area is 17 inches wide by 13 inches deep. The trackwork consists of a simple fork, and not a very satisfactory one at that. I had originally installed a handmade point to a smaller radius than the Peco one in order to squeeze in a capacity of 3 wagons for each siding. Unfortunately it was plagued with buffer-locking problems. I now appreciate the importance of adding transitions to curves! I couldn't face rebuilding it, so it was replaced with the Peco point after all, which set me back to a capacity of 2 wagons per siding. As one spot was required for manipulating the brake van, that only left 3 spots for revenue earning vehicles. With the 'card and waybill' operating scheme used, that equated to just 6 waybills for the entire port traffic. As it happens I've been finding it hard to drum up much import-export business anyway. The Tweedalers are too darned self sufficient, that's the trouble, and most of their needs are provided by the dale itself. The mine and sawmill are working at full capacity so any exported minerals or timber would need to be diverted from established customers which I didn't want to do. Instead the port seems to have morphed into Tweedale's milling zone, a neglected area of enterprise until now. Anything that needs to be crushed, ground up, hammered or rendered to a pulp gets dealt with here. The railway is already moving flour, vegetable oil, animal feed and mushy peas from the port even though their respective industries have yet to fully materialize. The plan is to add a couple of modeled mills in the dock area. I'm hoping these tall structures, one at each side, will help frame the scene and funnel the eye towards the town rising up at the back. The first steps were to embed the track in cardboard roadway and add the water. The latter simply consisted of painting a foam-board base then covering it with a sheet of clear plasticard. Although the water is dead calm and ripple free, some might even say stagnant, I'm happy enough with the result. A timber quayside has been added, which I thought would look more interesting than plain brick or stone. A start has been made on the buildings associated with one of the mills, in this case an oil-seed crushing mill. At a major port not far from where I live, the waterside mills went in for grandiose names like Clarence, Premier, Grosvenor and such like. It struck me that they sounded more like hotels than anything, so I thought it would be fun to follow in the tradition by looking through a list of hotels in the phone book to come up with a suitable name for the mill here. The Royal Hotel provided me with the impressively sounding if slightly tongue twisting Royal Oil Mill. All I need now is to devise some fictional history to account for the name. The foreground track supposedly continues on to other parts of the port off scene to the left. To indicate this, a low relief box van has been located at the end of the siding. The van body was cut down from an old wagon, but as I didn't want to sacrifice a perfectly good chassis just for a set of buffers, the underframe was built up from scraps of card and a couple of nails. Here's the mill in all its glory. Its not quite finished - there are still a few gutters, drainpipes and other details to add - but you get the idea. The mocked up building at the right is not part of the mill's premises. Operated by Tweedale Oil & Cake Mills Ltd (TOCM), who took over from the former ROCM, the mill is based very loosely on structures from Ipswich and Hull. The business appears to have grown by gathering together all the tin sheds in the district. Everything has been much compressed to squeeze it into the 6 inch square footprint. The tall brick building at the back containing the silos is a very much reduced version of the original, which would have measured some 18 inches high if built to scale rather than the measly 9 inches here. By placing it behind the other buildings and hiding its base, forced-perspective properties emerged and the drastic reduction in size became more acceptable. Inward rail traffic to the mill consists of oil seed from upper Tweedale (in the season), to augment that arriving by sea from foreign lands. Outward traffic consists of oil to Grey's paint works at Grimley and the Sunny Spread margarine factory in the Slaghill chemical park. The residue from the crushed seed is used to produce cattle cake which is sent back to the rural areas of upper Tweedale. Cheers, Alan.

I have to make some change of plans. So, I have to skip my third IKEA challenge. A couple of years ago my wife made a serious fall. Now she is diagnosed with an acquired brain injury (ABI). This means we have to make some adaptions in our home. One of the things she wants to change is removing smaller things that we have to keep clean by dusting, including the small diorama’s that are standing on a cabinet in our living room. We have already found a solution that was fine for both of us. But more about that in a later entry. For my third Ikea challenge I had designed a coal delivery scene. On the website of John Day models, I saw a nice coal lorry. But I like Austin models and he has also an Austin K8 flatbed lorry. I asked him if it could be used as a coal lorry. I included a photo from internet with my request. Then he offered me to make an Austin K8 coal lorry. So, for the first time in my modelling career I built a white metal car kit. I have to thank Daryle Toney for his, very helpful, support. As you know I like to create little scenes. To create the scene a used a scenic set from the John Day range: RDS 2 Coalmen and coal load. I placed the scene in a diorama I built in the past. I hope you like the final result. I have enjoyed building it. As usual suggestions and comment are welcome. Greetings, Job

Ok I have just gotten back from my trip to England and have got some things that I have completed and other stuff to share. I will share these in different posts just to make things more tidy and other things I need to finish. I managed to get my hands on a triang dock shunter for £4 from Ron lines (really recommend purchasing stuff from them) and decided it would be the perfect addition to my colliery group that I am working on. All I had to do was paint it and change some other features but apart from that not much changed. This first image shows the dock shunter before I painted and modified it and the second image shows how it looks after I finished working on it

Simond had it spot on in his comment on my last post - I guess the glimps of a roller bearing was a clue. A very new departure here and a pretty steep learning curve but made much easier by some good advice from Giles and Pikey on the RC thread - if you have not already guessed the Foden is now Radio Controlled. Although a bit of an indulgence for the current layout, as in real life, the Foden will eventually be demobbed and will feature large in a new post war creation. There was a rather lengthy wait while some motor options were shipped from China but who can complain at the prices, This was actually quite useful as I was able to complete all the slightly tedious detailing and even spent three evenings recreating the wheels which I was going to use from the kit but a) found they were not particularly round and b) I can now say it is totally scratch built. So here it is with painting and weathering still a work in progress; The radio control is now fully working but it has been a bit of a nightmare as constantly taking things in and out has meant a series of broken wires and conections but now everything is in place I hope that is at an end. In the next pictures you can see the steering servo neatly in place in the fire box and all the other gubbins in the water tank. Power comes from an Ipod LiPo battery under the rear a 2mm worm and gears I found on Ebay perfectly. The only downside is that at 90rpm it is a bit too slow. I bought a second one so may experiment with fitting the shaft to a higher reving gearbox but just happy that the thing moves for now! Next thing of course is that I have to create a body but I have an idea for that. I did do a video of it moving on the layout but can't seem toget it off my phone at the moment so until I have overcome yet another bit of technology you will have to put up with some pics on the layout; I can see great potential in this RC thing and have several more projects in mind and have even bought in several parts to experiment with getting a 20hp Simplex on the move. Oh, did I mention that it is completely scratch built?

I am continuing the debugging of the track. Following the test of the turnouts from the Up main line into the engine shed with the 3F - shown in the previous videos - testing with my Hornby Black 5 showed that all was not well with the double slip. The Black 5 had an annoying habit of mounting the crossing V at the coaler end of the slip. This double slip was the first 'complicated' piece of track I ever built and has only recently come into full operational use. If you look closely at the slip you will see evidence of a partial rebuild of the slip - new solder - as I re -aligned the far crossing 'V', wing rails, closure rails etc at that end of the slip. The Black 5 now runs through without falling off - result :) . Black 5 '44965' coming of shed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY_ASkofNvk Black 5 '44965 ' entering shed coal road https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Y9q03CxwU

One of the better things on the Internet, I reckon, is Google Maps Street View. I'm a great fan. While there are those who like to walk off their Sunday lunch with a nice stroll along the prom or through the park, you're more likely to find me sneaking around some of the world's more seedy neighbourhoods in the company of Google's little yellow fellow. It was on one such trip, to Ostrava in the industrial heart of Czechia, that I came across the inspiration for Tweedale's new industrial scene... Image capture from Google Street View. URL... https://goo.gl/maps/Uq4KzsXk1Ap The site is some species of iron works where thanks to Google you can just wander around among the abandoned blast furnaces and other weird and wonderful structures. Its weedy and rusty and oozing with an atmosphere of past glories. Well worth a visit if you are into that kind of thing. Just follow the link above and roam. The features that appealed to me in the image, and which I hope to incorporate in the model, were the zig-zag conveyers, the chimney with its 'crow's nest lookout', and the claw-like piping on the side of the building. I've no idea what it all does but I like what I see. By the way, the current street views here date back to 2009. More recent photos show the place being developed as a technology museum and, in my opinion, fast losing a lot of its character in the process. A number of buildings have since been demolished, including some of those in the view above. The weedy track beds are being replaced by neatly manicured lawns with picnic tables, and a torpedo wagon lurking in a shed in the street views has now been placed on a plinth outside. Getting on to the model, the image below shows the area to be developed. There's a fork of track with a capacity of 3 wagons per siding, a track configuration I'm rather partial to. The trees in the background, spilling over from the Tweemoor Yard scene next door, are not really compatible with the grim industrial setting I have in mind, so I've decided to block them out by inserting a new sky backscene in front. Admittedly it reduces the area available for scenery quite considerably, but it should at least help speed up the construction time. I've mocked it up here with a brooding grey sky. I've seen this done to great effect on some exhibition models, but it seems pretty radical and I'm not sure yet whether I have the confidence to actually go with it myself. I'll leave it for a while to see if it grows on me. Some building mock-ups have been added below, to test how to fit things around the tracks. The stash of frozen pizza boxes is a godsend here. I'm just shuffling shapes around at the moment, trying to find an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, before worrying about the textures and details. Although the prototype was concerned with iron, the model will be less specific to allow for a diversity of traffic. It might end up as a vague kind of processing plant with a meaningless name, like the 'Central By-Product Distillation Works' that used to exist in Middlesbrough. The road across the tracks is something else I'm not sure about yet. I quite like the way it leads you into the scene, but it would reduce the siding capacities if I want to keep the roadway clear between shunting movements. On the other hand, by introducing some petty rules for the train crew to follow when dealing with the crossing, it might add a bit extra to the operational challenge. Plenty to think about. We'll see how it evolves. Cheers, Alan

A former member of the Midland area group recently donated his box of unfinished projects and other bits and bobs so that the group members could make use of them. I picked out a part built Gresley BG which looked like a nice model which was crying out for someone to finish it. I have a bit of a soft spot for parcels stock. Some photos and words about progress to date... The coach as retrieved - basically two sides, two ends and a floor I don't know much about its origin - this is the only clue. I assume it's a shot down 4mm etch but I'm really not sure. The scale seems to be about 1:150, so half way between 2mm and 'N'. A rather unusual choice... which made finding a roof a bit tricky. I cut the ducket and gangway ends from plain brass - a change from all that computer stuff... although I did draw the gangway ends in CAD and then stuck a print of the drawing to the brass. A gangway being assembled. No real plan here - more a case of 'make it up as you go along'. Seemed to work OK though. My original plan was to use an Ultima roof that had been in my gloat box since the 1980s. I think I bought it at IMREX if anyone can remember that far back. Unfortunately when I measured it I found it was pretty much right for 2mm scale and about 2mm too short for this kit. Instead I decided it was time to get to grips with 3d curves and then got Mr Shapeways to produce the goods. Still needs some sanding though - admittedly the 3d printing artefacts run in the same direction as the planking beneath the covering of the real roof but I think the finish is too rough. A somewhat ropey shot of the coach so far. The underframe fittings are a combination of 2mm Association and Ultima stuff. The guards footsteps still need to be done from scratch. The roof fits width and length-wise but I didn't try to fit it to the top profile of the etched coach end. Instead I used the prototype profile so I need to modify the etched end to fit the roof profile... which would have been easier if I had left the gangways off until later. Makes a change from my usual over planning. Oh, and it will be a 'BGP' - or pigeon van if you prefer because these lasted longer than the 'pure' BGs.