John Brenchley

Thanks bécasse, much appreciated.

Thanks very much Its good to get confirmation from someone living nearby who's familiar with the location.

Thanks very much Doug and Matt. It took quite a while and did get a bit tedious at times but it certainly changes the look of the layout. Now I just need to smarten up the bushes behind the station building - repeated leaning over them has severely denuded them of leaves. Best wishes John

The embankment and the trees Back in August last year I asked for help as to where it would be best to place the trees on the embankment and river bank at the front of the layout. Readers may remember that there has to be a compromise between the actual location with its dense mass of trees and the model which has to allow for visibility of the buildings behind the trees. There were lots of useful comments and bécasse kindly put together this suggestion to move trees around to create groups that were less evenly placed. Six months later and in amongst other modelling projects, the vegetation has been completed. Below is the finished embankment from approximately the same camera position. I don't think I quite stuck to bécasse's suggestion though. There are fewer clumps of trees and each group is a bit more loosely spread out. A lot of smaller trees and bushes have been added in between and ground cover vegetation added as well. Possibly the spacing is still a bit too even though probably less obvious as I didn't think about it till a study of the picture. The aim has been to create "viewing windows" between the trees. Below are some closer pictures taken through these various windows. Starting off are two pictures taken through the far right hand window above the stables. Moving to the left, the next window is in line with the footbridge, allowing the two pictures below. Finally, two pictures taken in front of the goods yard. I have two more buffer stops to install as can be seen in the above picture. The latest little bit of modelling I have done was to put together a Langley white metal kit for a coal wagon which can be seen in in the foreground of one of the pictures above. Being white metal, the model is a bit crude, particularly when compared with some of the magnificent carts recently added to Copenhagen Fields. I did change it a bit as I wasn't too happy with the sharpness of the corners of the wagon base nor the sign board at the front. I filed off the sides of the wagon and replaced them with plastic strip, also replacing the sign board with one cut from plastic and using thin wire for its supports rather than the thick white metal ones. The name was typed up and reduced to size in Photoshop and then printed on highest quality paper on a printer at work which gave a sharper image than my cheap laser jet printer. The names are simply glued to the plastic. The article on Tavistock in GWRJ number 17 has the following information on coal operations at the station "Other Merchants included Thomas Bailey of West Street, Alf Butcher, Bill Fellowes, Green and Snell. Bailey had a shute at the back of the goods yard which fed supplies to his own yard below". The low level lane at the front of the layout (today named St Johns Ave) lead to some of the coal merchants' buildings below the coal siding at the Plymouth end of the station (to be modelled on the next baseboard) so it seemed appropriate to use the name Thomas Bailey on the cart. I have no idea what period he operated and it may well have been post WW2 but in the absence of any other name, his was the one I chose and it seemed appropriate to site the wagon on the lane, driving away from his yard with a few sacks of coal on board. I didn't use the seated coalman that came with the kit so Mr. Bailey himself is from a box of Preiser plastic people. He started out as a road worker with a shovel which had to be cut off and his hard hat was cut down to more the shape of a soft flat cap. Reins were added from dolls hair. A rather cruel close up is below. Maybe one day I'll find a better quality model, either etched or 3d printed but at the moment this one just about satisfies the 2 foot rule. Best wishes John

Thanks Great Bear I have to admit that as originally taken, that picture was rather dark. Luckily, Photoshop has a feature to allow lightening of the shadows and darkening of highlights. The camera was at the end of the baseboard, looking the whole length of the train shed. The picture was then cropped to close in on the footbridge.. Other than changes to the shadows, cropping and occasionally adjustment of the white balance, I don't make any other adjustments to the pictures though my Olympus camera does have a tendency to produce images that are a bit brighter than they should be. Best wishes John

The Footbridge Tavistock had a fairly standard style of GWR footbridge spanning the three tracks between the up and down platforms, immediately adjacent to the station building and trainshed at the Launceston end. It had open girders and supports below each side landing, wooden planked sides to waist level for the lower staircases, metal sides for the upper stairs and the walkway over the tracks plus the standard GWR corrugated iron roof. Luckily, I had several useful photographs that could be used to estimate dimensions plus I also borrowed a copy of A pictorial History of Great Western Architecture from the local library, and this contained scale drawings of similar (though not identical) footbridges. Some pictures of the actual bridge are below The model was constructed from a mixture and nickel silver, brass and plastic. The information sheet below was put together to illustrate the construction method. 2mm Association members will have seen it before at the time of the Association’s model competition but modellers from other scales who read this blog may find it more informative than a lengthy written explanation. To enable easier access for track cleaning, the model can be separated into four parts – the two side staircases, the over track walkway, and the roof. Eventually, the two sides will be glued to the platforms but for the moment, the bridge just rests on the layout. A couple of pictures of the completed model taken outdoors are below plus some of it in position on the layout. Best wishes John

Thanks Jim Its quite possible that my spool of wire goes back that far as well, though I don't know why my father had it as he wasn't into models or electronics. Best wishes John

Hi David Thanks for your comments on the thread. Yes, you are correct about the Tavistock box being made of blue brick. I cannot recall if I had the colour pictures in GWRJ No 17 at the time I built the model signal box. The camera I have has a tendency to enhance colours a bit too much so in reality the bricks are a bit duller than the computer screen suggests - probably more like brown brick than red brick but I agree they could probably do with a bit more purple in them. Best wishes John

The Yard Cranes (final) So finally, the yard cranes are complete. For the chains, I experimented with trying to create loops (ala Jim) but as he found, couldn't create a long enough length that didn't keep breaking. In the end I took the simple approach and twisted two lengths of wire together. The wire is probably older than I am as I inherited it from my father, masses of it wound round a large wooden cotton reel - some softish, I suspect mainly copper wire but with a dull purple colour coating that can be scraped off by dragging the wire through a fold of sandpaper - perhaps it was originally intended to be used for motor winding. Its about 0.25mm thick. The finished chain is a bit soft so is not easy to keep straight, but stiffer wire like phosphor bronze was a bit too springy to stay twisted. The cranes were given a substantial clean up in an ultrasound tank and then sprayed with an undercoat of Tamiya grey primer and a top coat of Montana Colours MTN 94 matt spray, London Grey, leaving 24 hours between coats. Weathering started after a further 24 hours with a wash of diluted dirty grey enamel and then the following day some dry brushing was done with various mixtures of grey, brown, red and maroon matt Humbrol enamels to create dirt and rust patches - trying to keep it quite subtle as I wanted the cranes to appear in reasonably good condition. The chains started off with a coat of darker grey than the crane followed by dry brushed with touches of the rust colour. A couple of pictures below are taken from each side of the layout with the cranes in position in the goods yard. And finally a more distant picture to include the River Tavy below the station . In conjunction with making the water tank and yard cranes, I've gradually been moving along the embankment adding more vegetation. Working from left to right, I've now got about half way along, following the recommendations for the various tree positions discussed in earlier posts. One of the gaps between clumps of larger trees allows this view of the goods yard. Best wishes John

The Yard Crane (5) The kit instructions for fitting the various gears say to start with the “rachet gear and handle”, pictured on the left below. It is to be positioned “against inside of r/h body side, handle nearly horizontal”. However, from viewing the middle picture below, I think there may have been a misunderstanding of the handle position possibly caused by a misinterpretation of the side elevation drawing. Certainly, there appears to be a handle in line with the top of the gear, but as per the middle picture, there is actually a separate shaft just above the gear with a handle each end, but these handles are on the outsides of the crane body (one is visible with the end painted red in the picture). To represent these handles, I drilled extra holes in the sides and added the cross shaft and simply bent each end at a right angle. In her model, Julia used a proper small gear, much thicker and more suitable than an etched one. Not having anything suitable to hand myself, I made use of the etched gear, having first trimmed off the handle. It’s really too thin, but at least serves to fill in the space and add to the general cluttered appearance inside the body. The right-hand picture shows the finished effect with all the various cross shafts added plus a thin shim of brass to represent the vertical link between the two shafts. Moving next to the left-hand side, this basically comprises a lower wheel (the brake drum) which is attached to the brake lever below it plus an upper gear wheel and housing above it (referred to as the left-hand gearbox). The left-hand picture below shows how it all should look, with the top part of the brake wheel just visible behind the gear wheel. However, the way the various etch layers are assembled causes the brake wheel to be completely hidden as can be seen in the other two pictures. To prevent this, I cut away parts of solid cover piece to create a crescent shape to cover the bottom part of the brake wheel and a quadrant shape to go behind the right-hand side of the gear wheel. The pictures below show the revised assembly. Although I may appear to be critical of some aspects of the kit, I must also give credit to the quality of the etching – as an example, the gear wheel above can be seen to be beautifully etched. The gear box on the right-hand side of the body assembles without any need for adjustment and is an excellent representation of the real components. The multitude of rivets are of course missing but in this small scale, I’m not going to worry about them. The final part of assembling the crane was to add pully wheels and the chain protection bracket to the jib. The instructions suggest using wire for the bracket but from looking at Julia’s pictures it seemed as if the sides of the bracket were in fact narrow angle rather than rod – producing such small angle would be too hard but I compromised by using some narrow strips of 5 thou nickel silver with a piece of wire soldered across the top. The long tie rods appeared from pictures to be flat strip so again I cut these from some 5 thou sheet rather than using the wire supplied with the kit. To get the angle of the jib correct, I laid it and the base on top of a 2mm scale copy of the drawing, lining them up carefully before soldering the two together. The completed second crane is below – just needs the dreaded chain to finish it off. Best wishes John

Christmas Greetings Best wishes to everyone from Perth (the one down under) Not a snow scene as its summer here in Australia and we don't get snow in Perth. In fact its bright and sunny and we are heading for a high of 42C this afternoon - said to be the hottest Christmas day ever recorded in Perth (too hot for this Pom) Best wishes John

Thanks Kevin Looking at that link, I am interpreting it correctly to mean that he is offering the file free for anyone to print from? Just needs someone with a suitable printer? Best wishes John

Hi Kevin An interesting and diverse collection. Do you know where the 3D printed Cordon came from please? Are they still available? Thanks Best wishes John

The Yard Crane (4) In the two weeks since the last update, the yard crane hasn’t progressed very much, other than to solder the sides to the base and to the other cross pieces nearer the top plus make some modifications to the base pieces. As supplied, the etch comes with a sub floor that is designed to sit about 1.3 mm above the main floor and for the first crane, I installed this as per the instructions. However, from looking more closely at Julia’s photographs it appears that this sub floor only existed at the front of the crane and stopped just behind the main pillar. In fact, the photos also suggest that the main floor did not extend past the column either, but I drew the line at removing this part of the floor as I needed something substantial to keep the sides fixed together. Also, there is a slight triangular extension of both the main and sub floors at the front of the crane, between which there is a heavy ring of metal. I’ve no real understanding as to what this did and the kit does not make any provision for it. However, for the second crane, I thought I would try to incorporate it. The left and centre pictures below show this feature. I used the exiting sub floor, turning it round 180 degrees so that there was spare metal at the front and filed the triangular shape that extends beyond the front of the crane. I retained the position of the large etched hole near the front so that I could use the pillar to help locate it. A small bit of spare etch filed into a triangle was also added to the front of the main floor and another piece of etch, bent into a ring was soldered in between. Finally, the right-hand picture above shows that there was a vertical cross piece maybe a foot or so deep at the back of the crane, right at the bottom and this was replicated with another piece of spare etch as nothing was included in the kit for it. The pictures below show the crane body soldered together and incorporating the extra bits described above The next stage will be more interesting to do as it involves adding the various wheels and gears that make the crane body so distinctive. Best wishes John

Thanks very much - progress is slow but another update is just about ready.

A useful recommendation thanks Becasse. It's something I must try to remember next time I can't find the right size strip of scrap metal. Best wishes John

The Yard Crane (3) An aspect of the crane body that I thought quite prominent was the covers that existed on the inside of the body, presumably to protect the internal gears and wheels. Two of Julia’s pictures below show that they existed on both sides of the body. They are quite noticeable on the pictures of Julia’s model, but the etched kit did not include any way of representing them and without them, I thought the inside of the body would look a bit too open. Not really knowing the dimensions, it was all a bit of a guess, but I found the edges from left over wagon chassis etches were a bit over 1mm wide, so I used these to bend up suitable shapes as below. Where the gaps were too wide to fill in with solder, I pushed in bits of brass rod and soldered round them as well. The above pictures show one of the covers soldered up for the first crane. As I had already soldered together the body sides, base and cross members for this crane, it was a bit tricky to install the covers and be sure they were in the correct places but its all a bit out of sight once the crane is finished so didn’t seem too important. With the benefit of hindsight, the covers have been fitted to the sides of the second crane before they are soldered into the box shape as this makes them much easier to locate in place. I did try including a spare etched wheel in one of them, not very successfully so decided it wasn’t worth doing on the others, being almost invisible from most viewing angles. The shape of one of the covers on the right hand side isn't quite right as the hole isn't in the centre of the cover but it will be impossible to tell once all the other bits and pieces are added to the crane. And yes, one of the covers did overlap the sides slightly in real life – its not a soldering error! Best wishes John

I suspect you may be right Jim It's a shame as this mars what is on the whole a very good etch Best wishes John

The Yard Crane (2) Before commencing on construction of the crane body, I had one main concern that had arisen from reading two reviews that had been written up in N Scale Society magazines by modellers who had built the kit. In both reviews, the comment was made that they could not get the ends of the jib to fit outside the body of the crane. If one modeller had had this problem, I might have put it down to an error in construction but for two people to have the same issue, was cause for concern. I went back to the drawings in GWRJ and found an inside dimension for the crane body of 2’ 10 ¾”. Allowing for the thickness of the metal sides, an approximate dimension of 3’ seemed likely i.e. 6mm in our scale. Measuring between the end of the jib that I had already put together came out at about 6.15mm so I was happy enough that this had been built correctly. The etch is designed for the floor and sides to fold up into a U shape from a single piece but when I did this, I found that the external width measured about 8.2mm, clearly 2mm too wide. Looking at the pictures on Julia’s website, her crane body looked to have the correct proportions, but it could also be seen that her sides were soldered to a separate floor piece, not folded from a single etch. I haven’t asked her, but my suspicion is that she did not etch these parts but cut them separately from sheet metal so when N Brass Locos wanted to market a complete kit, they had to add a crane body to the etch but somehow drew it 2mm too wide. The left-hand picture below shows the relative width of the body compared with the jib ends I definitely wanted the jib ends to fit outside the crane body, so my only option was to break the U shape apart, narrow the floor by 2mm and then solder the separate parts together. On the right is a picture I took at this stage in construction of the first crane. All the other etched cross members also had to be reduced by 2mm – it was much harder to hold it all together and solder squarely but worth it in the end. I’m now about to repeat this process with the second crane so will post further pictures in due course. Best wishes John

The Yard Crane As mentioned in my recent post on the finished water tank, I have now built one of the two GWR 6-ton yard cranes that existed at one time in the Tavistock goods yard, just needing to sort out a suitable size chain before painting it. The evidence for there being two cranes is very clear from the aerial photograph from the Britain From Above website which is dated 1928. Later photographs perhaps only show one crane, but as the model is set sometime in the mid to late 1930’s, I decided that two cranes were still appropriate. The kits are sold by N Brass Locos and include a beautifully delicate piece of etch, various thicknesses of wire plus two brass castings for the main support column and for the cable winding drum. My understanding is that the etch is based on one originally designed by Julia Adams for her model Highcleres. A couple of pictures of her crane can be seen via this link. https://modelopolis.blogspot.com/2013/01 I suspect that some changes were made to Julia’s design as the N Brass Locos etch includes one or two extra elements not apparent on her model but also excludes some parts and at the same time it appears to have introduced some errors, mostly minor but some more significant. Julia also sent me several pictures she had taken of the crane at Fawley, and they have been invaluable in helping me understand what the completed model should look like. Hopefully she won’t mind if I include on or two of them to help illustrate this post. Detailed drawings of the crane were published in the preview issue of Great Western Railway Journal, and these have also been really helpful. I decided to start with the jib and was delighted to find that holding the parts against a photocopy of the drawing reduced to 2mm scale gave a perfect match for size and angle. As can be seen from the picture of the etch above, the sides and top of the jib come attached by a couple of tiny tabs, with the base being a separate piece. The instructions suggest that the sides can be bent up and then soldered to the top but in practice, I found the tabs were so flimsy that even one bend caused the parts to separate. In practice, this was a good thing as it enabled me to solder the sides slightly inset on the top, allowing creation of the outward facing L shaped framework which would not otherwise have been possible. The light is reflecting rather strongly in the above picture, but I think it should still be possible to see the L shape in places. One error in the instructions is that they say to cut off the lower ends of both the top and bottom pieces where they extend past the lowest cross bar. This would have the effect of removing the webbing from the L where it is fixed to the outside of the crane base but from Julia’s pictures below it is clear that it should only be removed from the top layer of the jib, not the bottom. In the picture above, I forgot to remove the ends from the top but have done so later on. Another error that is apparent from the above pictures is that the lowest cross pieces are etched too near the base of the jib and prevent it fitting sufficiently far overlapped over the base of the crane. Also missing is the lowest crisscross framing on the base piece of the jib. I therefore removed both the top and bottom cross bars, replacing the lower one with a thin strip of 5 thou nickel silver fitted higher up and also adding two more strips to form the crisscross. They are a little thicker than those of the etch but will be so low down on the jib that this shouldn’t be too apparent. The finished version of the jib for the second crane is below. I still need to add the pully wheels and the chain protection bracket. I’ll take picture as progress continues with the base of the second crane and post later on. Best wishes John

Thanks Jim I might try that and see how I get on, but the length I need might be too long if its likely to break. I also thought of twisting rather than knotting the wire between each loop so can try that as well. Best wishes John

Thanks Jim This time difference is a nuisance - I'd gone to bed without seeing your reply - no chance of a sensible question and answer conversation. Can you clarify what you mean by a "thumb knot" please ( is it like the first of the two knots in a reef knot?) and how you used the drill - was it a case of twisting/knotting the wire round the drill, then moving the drill along and twisting again, ie making one loop at a time? Thanks John

Thanks for the helpful comments Izzy, Jim and Jan That small bit of chain looks very good Jim. Jan - I also Google the Sinnet style but it looks a bit complicated and I wonder how easy it would be particularly if the wire was a bit stiff like phosphor bronze. Was the wire you used softer Jim and what thickness was it? Best wishes John

Thanks Izzy Is that the Ship Model Forum? I found that and a modeler there (David Griffith) refers to the braided wire technique as described in his book - unfortunately not much help without the book and he doesn't expand on the method in the forum posts. Best wishes John

Thanks Kit PW I've had a look at the site you mention, but suspect the chain may be very similar in size to that which I already have - the finest they list has a link length of 1.1mm which seems to be about the same - still likely to look overscale. I think I model in too small a scale to get suitable chain for this type of crane. Best wishes John