Leaderboard

A bit of progress on the project. The first underframe. Relatively straightforward though I fixed it down to a flat board when soldering to prevent distortion. The kit provides for a variety of the brake systems fitted during the life of these coaches but for my period the simple westinghouse arrangement is correct. Some slight removal of the lower edge to clear the wheels on a curve, but that can’t be seen from the side. A row of bogies ready and waiting. An underframe in position, it pushes round the layout and through pointwork quite smoothly. Some more underframes then bodies.

First off I must apologize for the long delay in posting a blog, the truth is that for the time being at least, I cannot spend as much time as I'd like on model railway's. Therefore, after what seems like an eternity, here's part three of 'De Snitzlton'. This blog covers the design and construction of a trailing bogie / pony which I considered a last resort 'steam assisted uncoupler' method as I much preferred the original design that featured in Part 1, but this design failed to deliver. This blog also illustrates the construction and wiring of the locomotive to run on DCC. What is Fun Town ? : Fun Town is a small table top module that can be used alone or form part of a larger unit, it fit's like a jigsaw piece to the Walls Traverser Cover to create a small 36" x 18" layout over the top of Snitzl Town's traverser. Done so far : Overhead Tram, Jules Verne's Flying Ship, Steam operated Traverser, Market Stall Wagons and Market Stall Engine without DCC uncoupler. Still to do : Steam Tram, Stall Replenish Wagon, Animated Figues, Hot Air Balloon, Interior racking & goods for the Warehouse, Gantry Crane and anything else that may be appropriate, in other words, a bit of fun. Regards Snitzl Thanks for Looking.

The 'Victory' class was a class of ten built in 1917 for the Inland Waterways and Docks dept. Post war they were sold off by the Railways Operating Department, mostly to collieries. There's a detailed history here at Planet industrials. The ADR bought two of these from the ROD. They had outside cylinders and were quite powerful locomotives. They were numbered 666/7 on absorption. They received a moderate Swindon rebuild. Another had been purchased by the Brecon & Merthyr. This loco was numbered 2161. It was given a significant overhaul in 1922. The B&M loco was sold in 1929, and lasted to 1951 in colliery service. Both the ADR locos reached British Railways. This sketch of the beast is intended to portray the later GWR configuration on at least some of the class with GWR dome and safety valve cover. They seem to have had new tanks in GWR days with prominent riveting, but I don't do rivets in my sketches. The drawing owes a lot to Planet Industrials and in particular the Don Townsley drawing on the web page for their upcoming model. However the beast is completely redrawn, and, for instance, I've steered something of an intermediate course between the GWR weight diagram B13 and the Townsley drawing on some aspects, notably cab window position.

Over the last couple of years I have made a fair number of wagons, still not enough but I can now run fairly representative goods services. However folk may have noticed that the passengers are poorly served by just two rakes of coaches, and both of those are a bit shorter than they ought to be. So time for a bit of coachbuilding. The Grampian Corridor Stock, built 1905 was really the CRs finest. Large proportions, very comfortable with great attention to ride and insulation, electrically lit and with corridor connections. A successful design, and as more were built their use was extended to other parts of the CR network. I think that allows me to run a rake of them, and anyway I fancy a go at building some. Caley coaches do kits for several diagrams. I bought these a few years back, so now is the time to get on with it. Ok, so bogies first. These are in four sections folded up and fitted with some very nice brass castings. The three parts of the frames sit on tabs on a sub frame assembly like so. The tabs fold back in line when it is painted and the wheels are in. You could solder it all up solid, but the idea is to allow compensation with the two halves rocking on the longitudinal axis, and the other part rocking laterally . The assembly looks like this from above. Press studs for bogie mounting are provided in the kit, but I’m probably going for a more conventional nut and bolt arrangement. Here is the first assembled with a coat of paint. It runs very smoothly and the compensation seems to work a treat. Not the best of photos, but it gives an idea. Right, so off to build the rest.

I have recently replaced the platform lights hopefully giving more of a western region feel. The post was cut from cardboard repurposed from old sketchbooks. I have found this material gives a good representation of the concrete used for these 1940/50's lamp posts. The lamp fitting was turned out of some laminated plastikard, mounted in a mini drill and turned to shape. A small piece of brass wire creates the fitting . The post is painted a humbrol wood colour and weathered with powders to create the concrete look. The previous lamp posts were revamped to create under canopy strip lights.

I recently realised that all of the basic technology needed to operate a micro-layout (direct current circuits, voltaic batteries, primitive motors) had been developed before the 1840s started. Reading a bit further, I discovered the US inventor Thomas Davenport - not the very first person to build an electric motor, but almost certainly the first one to use it to power a model tramcar in the mid-1830s. His design was elegant, but not ideally suited for today's smaller scales: I also stumbled across Alfred P. Morgan's 1913 The Boy Electrician on Project Gutenberg, with its clever chapter on building a model electric tramway and this simple design (Fig 315) for a "A Pole-Changing Switch or Current Reverser": Well, Tinories is supposed to be a portable layout that can be set up and operated anywhere, and I had always planned to build a very basic battery controller. This simply had to make the locos move backwards and forwards; for my own use I considered acceleration and braking to be unnecessary fripperies, and only the thought of soldering had deterred me from knocking something together earlier. Inspired by the pioneering vision of Davenport and the optimistic ingenuity of Mr Morgan, I finally set to work: The base of the controller is just a plastic lottery card covered with Humbrol copper (MET 12) paint to disguise its origin. It only occurred to me afterwards to check that enamel copper paint isn't conductive; luckily it isn't! A drawing pin is glued to one end of the card. This is the pivot around which the actual controller moves. Edit: I would now drill a hole through the card and push the drawing pin through it, gluing it to the underside of the card so that the pivot is a bit more robust: A short length of PECO flexitrack was glued to a second strip of lottery card, using pre-soldered fishplates and a terminal block to make the rails live without any soldering: A hole was drilled through the centre of the terminal block so that it could drop over the drawing pin that had been glued to the base of the controller: Then the first terminal (taken from another electrical terminal block) was glued onto the base, at the opposite end of the card to the drawing pin. To my surprise, it was actually very easy to stick the curved underside of the terminal to the plastic card with generic super glue:: The next step was the only one which required any care. I pressed one of the rails against the first terminal, and then glued the second terminal in place so that it touched the other rail and made a circuit. (A multimeter isn't necessary for this stage; a lamp or buzzer - or even a loco - would be just as effective in showing the right location to complete the circuit). Observant readers will note that I need to buy a new 9 volt battery: The same for the third and last terminal: ... and finally a short wire between terminals 2 and 3 so that they become positive or negative depending on the rail that is making contact with them: It's possible to customise the controller to taste, but I decided to leave it at that. I didn't even need to glue a knob onto the controller arm because a 9 volt battery fits snugly between the rails of 16.5 mm track and provides a convenient grip: Update 22 May 2021: just an additional photo showing the 56 ohm dropper resistor I use to get the Bachmann Norris loco to crawl as slowly as possible. It varies by loco, so the deWitt Clinton needs a much smaller dropper to run.