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whart57

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  1. whart57
    Many, many, years ago when the only colour on the covers of model railway magazines - or indeed inside them - was the title bar, and when the price was still in shillings, there was a series of articles describing an author's layout under the title "Fact and Fiction in Cheshire". It was a big layout covering LMS, GWR and LNER and the reason for the title was that the layout was both prototypical in operation and had freelance aspects in the form of connections and services that might have reasonably existed but in actual fact didn't. Over the years this "might have been" approach has proved popular and I have certainly sketched out ideas that were based on a tweak of the historical narrative.
     
    Some ideas I have had for SE&CR themed layouts have involved lines that were only mooted actually being built, such as an SER branch from Chilham to Faversham, to lines that were built but not in the historical way, such as musing that the independently promoted Leatherhead to Horsham line was snapped up by the SER (whose line to Reading crosses it near Dorking) instead of falling into the hands of the Brighton and thus Horsham had an SER terminus as well as its LBSCR junction station. The wildest ideas involved a mediaeval storm scouring out the Wantsum and thus in the 1840s, Reculver being an important port worthy of a line from Ashford.
     
    None of those ideas advanced much beyond the sketch book phase, though I do have a photocopy of an 1840s 25" to the mile OS map of Horsham on which I pencilled in a diversionary route from Warnham to my SER terminus on what was then the edge of town. The reason for doing that was to identify potential buildings to include in the scenery and thus to fix the location of my fictitious station. Facts in other words to sustain a fiction.
     
    To some extent the driver was to create a model which meant something to me, and if I didn't like the real railway that was there or if it was impractical to model that, then create an alternative fiction. Thus, because I wanted a light railway and I wanted it set in my locality, I dreamed up another part of the Colonel Stephen's empire called the North Sussex Railway that meandered from somewhere near Horsham to the mainline at Gatwick Racecourse. And I actually started building this. I didn't finish it but a friend took the part-built layout off my hands, borrowed the stock I had built for it, and did a lot more work on it. I believe it was exhibited at the Beckenham show this last weekend - its third outing.
     
    I have continued the idea of building what I like - fact - and linking it together through some fiction, to my present layout. This is still under construction and will be for some years - it is after all my retirement project - and I hope to report progress in this blog from time to time. However, to give an example of this fact and fiction melange, let's consider a branch of Starbucks
     

     
    The fact is that this branch of that Seattle coffee chain is real, and also that I personally have consumed many coffees, croissants and frappacinos there, usually while perusing their copy of the Bangkok Post or using their wifi to read the online version of the Guardian. It's also a fact that it is an interesting building well worth making a model of. The unfortunate fact is that it is not by a railway line, it is not even close to a railway line.
     
    However it is on a main road, and main roads frequently run alongside railway lines. So my model will sit just in front of the backscene on a similar road to the one it is on, except that on the other side of the road is the railway and not some hotel/apartment complex. The railway tracks are also based on a real location and have, in reality, a road running alongside. Just a different road.
     
    On that particular road is a location where I snapped a scene I would like to include on the layout
     

     
    That should be possible. However the facts now need to have a fiction to tie them together. The building under construction here is an extension to the Siriraj Hospital, and its construction required the closure of the Thonburi terminus on the Chao Phraya river and the renaming and upgrading of Bangkok Noi halt to becoming the new Thonburi station. That closure and relocation did actually make it possible to fit a decent representation of the factual trackwork of the present Thonburi into the space I have available, but I don't want to stick to the factual because that means I can't include my flights of fancy. A fictitious station then. How this fiction fits into the factual State Railway of Thailand is something for a later blog. For now though I have a Bangkok terminus with locomotive servicing facilities but just a shack for the station building and a line that clearly went further at one time. All pretty close to the factual Thonburi. On the other side of the road though is not the Bangkok Noi canal but a street from the other side of the city. Will this merging of fact and fiction work? Well I hope so.
     
    In the meantime construction of Starbucks proceeds
     

  2. whart57
    I could say that this all started from a cancelled meeting, I don't really remember. What I do recall is being in a room in the J W Marriott with a free day thinking "what shall I do today, I know, I'll go and look at some trains". The MRT Subway had been opened a year or two earlier so getting down to Hualamphong station couldn't be easier. Skytrain to Asok, down the steps to Sukhumwit on the MRT and then the subway to Hualamphong. Heck of a trek from the MRT at Hualamphong to the mainline station but then you could say the same for the hike from the Victoria Line to the Midland platforms at St Pancras. And thus started my Thai love affair. There was something about the mix of the modern and the traditional, nay archaic, along with the fact this was all narrow gauge and Asian.
     
    I was fortunate in that over the next three or four years I had regular business trips to SE Asia and Australia and a weekend stopover in Bangkok could be slotted in quite easily. As a result I went to hunt down the derelict steam engines outside Makkasan works, sniffed around the yards at Bang Sue and - of course - took the train down to Maeklong and ride through THAT market. I even managed to get up to Chiang Mai - had to go by air unfortunately - and look round the station there. Chiang Mai is basically a single track terminus and has all the features of an Ashburton - small engine shed, goods shed and goods sidings. OK there's an oil depot rather than a coal yard, but you get the gist. It was then I started thinking seriously about building a layout based on Thailand.
     
    A layout, but based on what? I thought of Chiang Mai but discounted it as I would only have one more day there and would be unlikely to get back to do any further research. Makkasan was a possibility and on my next visit to Bangkok I spent a morning photographing and measuring the station building and sketching out the trackplan. Makkasan has some really nice features, the station building is quite attractive and it is also the junction for the freight only line to Mae Nam. The junction is before the station and the branch line slews off in the general direction of the station car park before crossing a road and disappearing through a gap in the trees. Downsides are the huge loco and carriageworks, the fact that part of the site is under the Expressway and now, that the pillars holding up the Airport Express line are an eyesore parallel to the line. The main problem though is that the line here is Roman Road straight and that for operation some curves would have to be provided and I didn't have the space.
     
    Elsewhere in Bangkok, Hualamphong was obviously way too big and the terminus of the line to Maeklong , Wongwangyai, was merely a single track and a single platform. However there was another Bangkok terminus, Thonburi, which I had not yet visited. These days of course you can do a bit of a virtual visit, but this was before Google Streetview had got as far as Asia. Unlike the other Bangkok stations, Thonburi is not on the metro which is why I hadn't yet got out there. But then I discovered the river boats. I could get to Thonburi by Skytrain and then riverboat, so I did. Bingo. I had expected Thonburi to be another minimalist set up like Wongwangyai, but no. This was a proper station complete with carriage sidings and loco facilities. What is more about half of it had been chopped off. Where you would have expected the line to go to the terminal platforms was now a huge building site. The passenger station was now an exceedingly modest affair - a main platform, a secondary platform and a small shack for offices and ticket sales. Not only that but the trains were modest too. A typical Thai passenger train is eight, ten, even sixteen coaches long. Out of Thonburi they were only five or six at most. I still had just the pint pot of space for a layout, but now I was only trying to squeeze a quart in and not a gallon.
     
    I'm not an experienced layout designer but it did occur to me that shrinking a track plan to fit a space cannot be done without thinking about the aspects of operation. At Thonburi the key movements, apart from trains arriving and departing, is the locomotives going to and from the shed and refuelling point and the carriage shunter moving carriages to and from the platform. By this time Thonburi had no freight depot - that was under the building site too - so I'd think about freight later. It did seem that freight wagons were brought to Thonburi for repair and maintenance though.
     
    I made some sketches, but I found that using the satellite feature of Google maps gave me a better basis to work with. I took a screenshot of the satellite view of Thonburi at the best resolution possible
     

     
    I could then import that into a drawing package and make a drawing overlay of the actual trackplan
     

     
    Even though a large chunk of Thonburi had been lopped off to build a hospital extension, what remained was still a lot more than the available space. Not unusual of course but this is where the creative thinking starts.
     
    It was around now that I finally gave up on the idea of building this in HOm. My British outline modelling had been in 3mm scale and building this layout in 3mm scale on 9mm gauge track had its attractions. One being that in 3mm scale train lengths of four carriages were easy, five or even six would be the maximum whereas in HOm anything over four wouldn't fit. Likewise on the freight side, in 3mm scale I could create enough length to pass an eight bogie flat container train with engine and brake van, in HOm the maximum was six once the extra lengths of turnouts had been taken into account.
     
    Later on, when explaining to Thai work colleagues what I was doing - and discovering I was more familiar with their railway network than they were - saying I was building it to 1/100th scale didn't sound as daft
     
    Having made the decision to work in 3mm scale, aim for five coach passenger trains and eight bogie trucks plus brake van for freight, I started work on the track plan. I had a four metre long wall in my home office which would be available on my retirement - which was then only a couple of years away - so that is what I would design for. I'm not really an operator so I didn't build for operating at home, in fact I'd rather use the space for scenics. One attraction of Thonburi was the shunting carried out within station limits. I'm not a Templot fan and I hadn't discovered AnyRail so I drew out the plan using Inkscape. I created templates for the turn outs and also for locos and carriages so I could easily check siding lengths
     
    Apart from length. the other compressions were to reduce the number of tracks in the carriage sidings and reduce the engine shed to three roads from five and cut down how many locos could fit one each track.
     

     
    I then started building baseboards, and once the boards were built I printed out the track plan full size - easily done with a vector drawing package - and laid it out as a final sanity check before tracklaying
     

     
    Things have moved on since then. I have retired, that wall has been cleared of work related clutter and the four boards of the main layout are along it. Track is laid, wired up - for DCC - and about half ballasted. I really should overcome the reluctance to ballast the rest - it is so tedious ...... - but I have been working on creating a fully sceniced section I can use for photos.
     
    One post script. Last year I paid my last visit to Bangkok and went over to Thonburi. Watching a loco coming off shed in order to take a train to Kanchanaburi I suddenly realised there is no direct path from the headshunt at the loco shed to the passenger station. Locomotives have to do a little shimmy in front of the signal box. I haven't included that, I didn't know it was there, but on reflection I think that could get really irritating on a model railway.
     

  3. whart57
    I accepted at the start of this project that commercial support in the form of ready to run locomotives and rolling stock would be non-existent. That's not a new experience, some forty odd years ago I started serious railway modelling by choosing to represent the South Eastern Railway in the 1890s and there was no commercial support for that either. The difference between now and then however is the range of technology that can be brought in to assist. I have a personal computer with drawing packages which I use to produce art work for brass etching and laser cutting, I have a Silhouette cutter that I use to cut thin Plastikard with, and these days home resin casting is feasible and safe. All very different from those days where scratchbuilding was slow and laborious.
     
    There being no commercial support does remove the temptation, or pressure, to deploy a loco or carriage type on the layout because a model is available rather than because it fits the overall scheme. Funnily enough though, the temptation to include items because you like them doesn't go away, and the problem I have with Thonburi is that there are things I want to model which are not appropriate for a strict model of Thonburi. I had encountered that issue when considering the scenic treatment, hence my station is more generically Thonburi than accurately so. With the locos and rolling stock though there is the danger of everything just being a free for all and there not being any theme, the curse of freelance layouts. Back in the day you'd have thought no Southern branch in the West Country missed out on it's own bit of the Atlantic Coast Express if you went by the layouts featured in the Modeller, and I did not want to revive that phenomenon.
     
    My starting point is the timetable of the real Thonburi, photographed at the station itself (and two pictures stitched together for this blog)
     

     
    This is actually quite a nice timetable for a layout. There are two sorts of trains. One is described as "Comuter" and these are made up of a two car railcar set shuttling back and forth. (Salaya is a small place some 19 km from Thonburi). The other type of train is the "Ordinary train", basically an all-stations stopper with only third class accommodation. There are two runs to Nam Tok (this is the infamous "Death Railway", the one built by Allied POWs and Thai and Chinese forced labour) and two heading down the Southern Line for a few hundred kilometers. As far as stock is concerned these trains require me to make a pair of Japanese railcars and a number of third class carriages. I did the necessary measurements while in Bangkok a few years ago and had drawings published in CM. I've also produced the artwork for etches of the third class carriages and currently have two built and a further three under construction.
     
    One thing I would like to include though is an excuse to run the Thai version of the BREL Class 158. As the layout is being built in England and could potentially be exhibited in England, that is really a layout requirement. (The other "by popular request" item is of course THAT market, but that's not going to happen. Someone else has done it already anyway)
     
    The major shortcoming though is the absence of any freight. Thonburi did have freight facilities but that was before the last 500 meters of line were donated on government order to the Siriraj hospital extension. Bangkok does have a suitable freight only terminal, so the idea is to somehow combine that with Thonburi.
     
    The terminal in question is Manum (or Mae Nam in some translations). It's in SE Bangkok, on the other side of the river from Thonburi. It's one of the end points of the freight only Khlong Thoei branch. I am preparing an article on this line so I have a summary map already drawn up.
     

     
    The traffic on this branch is crude oil in and refined products out to an oil refinery and containers to a dock on the river port. Just the sort of thing I have in mind. On my layout plan I have trains coming in along a single line which serves the passenger station and then the line splits so there are two exits at the other end. On the real Thonburi these were the lines to the original passenger platforms and freight shed, but on mine I envisage one leading to an oil refinery off stage and the other to a ship dock where small container ships dock. (The large behemoths can't come up river as far as Bangkok).
     
    Now Thailand's first railway, the Paknam railway, ran through this part of Bangkok too. In reality the Paknam railway was never connected to the rest of the system. It was also turned into an inter-urban electric tramway some time after World War One and was closed in the 1960s. In the near future it is likely that the overhead BTS Sukhumvit line will be extended to Paknam, it's getting there bit by bit. That is fact. Now my alternative history is that the Paknam railway was linked to the main network by a line laid towards Chachoengsoa, possibly the junction is near the present Survanabhumi airport, the freight traffic to the river ports was run over this rather than building the line from Makkasan and that sometime in the 1990s, land requirements for redevelopment caused the last mile or two of the Paknam line to be closed and passenger services turned towards the freight stations and a new, temporary looking, station building erected and platforms laid to service passenger trains
     
    In this alternative history I can run oil tanker and container trains and on the passenger side I can have railcars serving Paknam - the Paknam Comuter - and ordinary trains to places like Kabinburi and Rayong.
     
    That leaves that desire for a 158 set. Well, the notorious resort of Patthaya lies on the way to Rayong. In reality Patthaya has one train a day connecting it to Bangkok's Hualamphong. In this fiction it will gain a Rapid Train from my station, operated by a class 158 railcar set - the Patthaya Express.
     
    So, in my alternative Bangkok, the city has an extra passenger terminus. In addition to Hualamphong, Thonburi and Wongwangyai, there is the terminus of the South Eastern line. As this is a combination of Mae Nam and Thonburi, the name of Maenamburi might be appropriate - and with a meaning of "river fort" it sounds reasonably authentically Thai as well.
  4. whart57
    Further to my earlier blog, I thought it might be of interest to post picture of the beast.
     

     
    This is just a quick pic taken with my mobile phone but it shows the layout. I had just heated and sucked a piece of 15thou sheet round a pair of canopy formers.
     
    I can get six goes out of one standard sheet of Plastikard
  5. whart57
    I won't say I have mastered the technique of home vacuum forming, but once I was getting consistently acceptable results for my market stall canopies my thoughts turned to other uses for this technique. And I didn't have to look far. Across the tracks from where the market was starting to take shape is the large corrugated iron shed that in reality belonged to the SRT Permanent Way division. A photo of this appears in an earlier blog entry.
     
    Now, when I built this I was quite pleased with it. I thought it captured the spirit of the original quite nicely. In isolation it still does, but now that other buildings are starting to appear in that corner of the layout and providing context, the overscale corrugations of the Slaters sheet is becoming more noticeable. The Slaters sheet is after all intended for 4mm scale and I model in 3mm scale. I was also finding that the Slaters sheet looked completely wrong if I used it to put a roof on a smaller building, and given that corrugated iron roofs are very common in Thailand this was an issue I couldn't duck for much longer.
     
    Over the years various techniques have been tried to produce representations of corrugated iron. I have heard for example of a roller built by Stewart Hine, a giant of creative solutions to modelling problems back in the 60s and 70s, that gave thin copper sheet 3mm scale corrugations but I have never seen one, nor any of its output. A decade or so ago too I came across some 3mm scale corrugated panels made from steel that were being sold at a 3mm Society event. (Edit: I have since been informed it was the late Dave Martin who sourced these items and sold them at Society events) These were generally being used as wagon loads or for standing in yards, and being made of steel could be given a natural tint by leaving them out in the garden for a few weeks. I bought some as I was building a model of Bodiam station at the time. However not only were these sheets expensive, they proved very hard to work with. (Bodiam station was eventually built as an etched brass kit, I believe some are still available to 3mm Society members through the Society Shop).
     
    Etched brass was of course another possibility but the success I had had of vac forming suggested this was worth a try so I dug out these corrugated sheetlets
     
    My first step was to check that these steel pieces were actually correct to scale. No point expending effort on making a mould from them if they were badly out. I thought a quick Google would turn up a BSI or other standard, but amazingly, no. Builders' merchants were happy to state overall dimensions of the sheets they sold but they presumably assumed that all their customers knew what the pitch between ridges would be. Eventually I found a tender from the Nepalese government for the supply of corrugated iron for the construction of rural housing that set out a detailed specification. My experience of government and corporate tenders is that they are usually written to come up with the answer you first thought of, so I felt I could assume that this specification matched what the world's steel manufacturers could supply and wasn't the Nepalese government devising something from first principles. However, my little corrugated steel sheetlets turned out to be spot on for corrugation pitch and sheet width and were long enough to represent most of the standard lengths required in Nepal.
     
    The next step then was to create the mould around which I would form the plastic. The chamber of my home made device is some 10cm x 8cm so the mould has to fit inside of that. I don't have to worry about air leaking round the outside of the mould because the main seal is where the plastikard sheet is clamped down on top, so the base of the mould can be a loose fit with a working area of around 8cm x 7cm. How much clearance you need at the sides depends on how deep your mould is, obviously in this case it is shallow so not much space has to be allowed for the plastic to get into the deeper crevices.
     
    My basic mould is a 4mm ply base with a 4mm or 6mm high strip underneath to hold it above the exhaust holes and give a clear exit for the air. Pieces cut from a cheap mouse mat (£1 from Wilco) provide a better seal so the greatest suck is applied where I want it. The formers for the shape I want to mould are then stuck on top. In this case I was able to stick 16 of the steel sheetlets onto the play base. The final step is the vital one of drilling holes for the air to be sucked through. These do not have to be big, 1mm or 1.5mm diameter is enough, but they do have to be fairly closely spaced around the formers. I drilled twelve holes around each sheetlet.
     

     
    Then came the moment of truth. A 11cm x 11cm piece of ten thou sheet was clamped over the vacuum chamber, heated up with the hot air gun until it started to flop onto the formers and then the vacuum cleaner was switched on for a few seconds. The result was everything I hoped for, nice corrugations and in pieces wide enough to use. The suction also makes the plastic thinner so that the 10 thou is closer to five thou over the formers. I checked this with a micrometer to make sure I wasn't imagining things. The result therefore approaches prototypical thinness, though not thin enough to overlap pieces in prototypical fashion. Five thou is the equivalent of half an inch in 3mm scale, still quite a slab.
     

     
    Clearly then the product of this technique can only be used for cosmetic detail. That's not really an issue, as model buildings need to have a good solid core anyway. So as a test I build a model of a small shack, a structure typical of the small squatter's dwellings that line the tracks in much of Bangkok. This shack would have corrugated iron walls and roof with an open living area under cover in front. I constructed a basic core out of 40 thou Plastikard and then laid the corrugated iron representations on top of that.
     
    Each "sheet" needs cutting out individually. A sharp scalpel does this nicely, with a steel rule as guide and following the path of the corrugations. Prototype sheets are three foot wide, 9mm in 3mm scale, but in order to allow for the fact that sheets are mounted with one corrugation overlap, these model sheets are cut a little over 8mm wide. I follow the corrugation that is just over 8mm over from the first edge, and this makes it 8.3 mm wide according to the Vernier. The piece is then cut to length, normally a scale eight foot for walls or nine foot for roofing (that Nepalese document specifies 2.75m - aka nine foot - for roofing) and then I sand a little bit off the back at one edge and sand across the edge at the other to create a tiny lip. This means that when pieces are butted up against each other there is a small but perceptible height difference to simulate the overlap. I did try a prototypical overlap, as can be seen on the back wall of the model shack in the photograph, but it looks a bit crude to me.
     
    Then finally painting. Photographic evidence suggests that roofs suffer far more from the elements than walls. I have painted the walls to suggest the galvanising is holding up. This is a mix of matt grey and metallic steel. A lighter shade of grey and steel was later dry brushed over in order to highlight the corrugations. On the roof though the combination of rain and hot sun has stripped off the protective coating and the steel is now open to the air. And rusts as steel does. I still need to dry brush a redder oxide colour over the roof as well as add more details to the front - next problem is how do I simulate the washing hanging up to dry - but this test looks good to me. That PW shed is going to have to be rebuilt unfortunately.
     

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