MinerChris

Hi Jerry, Do you have any photos of John Greenwood's entry that he couldn't bring as it wouldn't fit in the car with Wadebridge and Padstow? I know this will be no match compared to actually seeing it, but it would be good to see what John made of the rules. Best Regards Chris.

Hi William. I think @bcnPete bought signals from absolute aspects previously and highly regarded them. Best Regards, Chris.

Last night's suggestion from the area group to lay a third rail at 7'0.25" fell on deaf ears...

Hi Jim, Was the end dock the part of the arrangement at Blairgowrie? I can't but help feeling sorry for anyone trying to load a cart onto a flat wagon with it trying to run downhill from the higher level ramp. Kind Regards, Chris.

Hi Jim, Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this the last part of Kirkallanmuir still in raw plywood? On an more serious note, where are you going to get your modelling card from in the future? Kind Regards, Chris.

I actually out of curiosity just did this to check my post above and sure enough, under the push pull allocation of the SR Western section Sept 1955 Carriage Working Notice, Set 373 or 374, was allocated to the 7:08 Gunnislake to Friary, Set 373 or 374, was allocated to the 7:20 Tavistock North to Friary, Moving forward to the more detailed 1956 notice, it appears that they returned on the 6:12pm and 5:00pm from Friary respectively. Again, hope that this helps. I cannot recommend the groups.io page enough for more detail than you ever wanted to know about carriage workings. Chris.

The definition of 'route' is quite broad here, I believe that in the early 50's there was a through train from Callington to Plymouth, via Bere Alston that would have been a push-pull set, though I'm not sure that it would have been operating in push pull mode over the mainline in order to keep to speed and timings. There are links to carriage working notices on the British Railways Coaching Stock group on groups.io where you can get details of the set numbers that worked this route, and from there work out which were push pull from the list on the SEMG. Pretty sure no is the answer to this, as it was transferred to the WR in 1963(?) and Class 120, Class 118 etc. DMU's were introduced for local workings. HTH. Best Regards, Chris.

Hi Richard, Before you go and solder up the corner pieces, would you be better soldering some 1/4" or 1/2" square section brass lengths up the inside of your corners? This might make the whole building less flimsy and liable to damage when: something gets put on it/ sat on/ looks at it funny and falls over. I would think some cross member pieces of brass probably wouldn't go amiss at reinforcing the structure either - ang give you something to place the floors on to solder to. Best Regards, Chris.

Hi Pete, Not sure about this, but could you use a bank of capacitors instead of a battery, with your track pickups? *(Edit - With Diodes to protect against reverse polarity) That way, no flickering and no switches to turn the LED off. If you really loaded up the capacitance then I suspect that it would stay lit for quite a while and as this is 7mm I suspect you could fit more than in the 2mm equivalent... Best Regards, Chris.

Hi Richard, I needed ash ballast for Callington Road - though to me ash is a lot lighter than your coal dust/cinders mix. In the end I used a base-layer of Treemendous Earth powder and not finding it quite fine enough, put a layer of 'dark grey modelling dust' from Here (no connection etc...) The effect is good enough for me, with the unevenness from the baselayer giving a hint of texture that I don't think I would have got if I had just used the fine powder and certainly better than other products that claim to be 2mm ash ballast. The powders were all held down with a fine misting until wet of 'quick shine multi-surface floor finish' although other klear alternatives are available. Best Regards, Chris.

My first thought was that it was an upcast shaft, but checking the BGS borehole logs told me about the two shafts of 1838 and 1876. Was the upcast in Fenwick C pit to the North? Feel free to ignore the following waffling's and rambling's in preference to someone who knows better. If I were to hazard a guess here, you are probably right in your assumption that the assemblage of buildings was probably something to do with the CPP. My guess is that for some reason, such as the mine moving to mechanical cutting or skip hoisting; that a CPP was required to separate out coal from shale, rather than grading the coal lump size using screens. This might explain why you have tracks going beneath this building to load the coal out from a bunker. If this is the case, it's entirely possible that the old screens building was still used to separate out the largest lump coal and to transfer the undersize over to the new plant. Looking at the photo's I wonder if around the same time as this was commissioned, the onsite tip stopped being used, as there seems to be a silo and a couple of other sidings to the east to potentially load out spoil to somewhere else. I'm sure that someone will turn around now and say it was the office block or something! My memory serves that the CPP tended to be a dark and mysterious place covered in black dust all the time, and nothing like the clean, window adorned, building that you have here. Best Regards, Chris,

Hi Richard, I'm not sure exactly which building that you mean, the tall concrete frame with brick/window infill building? It looks pretty empty in this view https://www.aditnow.co.uk/Photo/Historic-Photographs-Of-Fenwick_103247/ Best Regards, Chris

Hi Andrew, Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing OpenSCAD and it is the only 3D tool that I use. These issues really are just minor niggles and nusances I've run into once or twice before, not every time that I use it. If I had the time, just thinking about optimising how I build objects, and not being lazy when coding, I would probably solve these problems. The preview will only get you so far down the build tree before it gives up (100,000 elements is the default I think.) It also throws up views like below when you get to edge sums. 100,000 elements sounds a lot, right up until you start compounding curves and circles together. Best Regards, Chris.

I know that @D869 of this parish also uses it to produce his tank wagons, and the occasional coach roof. Some bloke also wrote up a quick and dirty user guide in the 2mm mag in October 2018. Sometimes I wonder about the amount of graphics memory resources it uses to do fairly simple operations. Re-rendering the entire model every time you make a change to a parameter is also pretty irksome sometimes, particularly when it's measured in minutes rather than seconds. The viewport also has some nuances that can make it annoying when you're dealing in sub mm units. Best regards, Chris.

Does this mean that you are moving (or thinking of,) away from OpenSCAD Chris? Best Regards, Chris.

Morning Eeyore Rich, I have a couple of pieces of Laurie track and Easitrack left over from doing my trackwork, a quick and dirty measure with my calipers... (and by no means a comprehensive survey) There are quite a few spots on my layout that have a similar difference in height as yours, even on an easitrack to easitrack joint. I think what happened with mine is that the bend on the rail can often spring the rail upwards at the join, above what the last chair can resist. Soldering near the chair will also soften the plastic, possibly allowing more bend to come up. In your case, and with only 2 sleepers there until the next point, I'd be tempted to cut the easitrack sleepers out and replace with PCB and chairplates. That way you have something solid to tie the end down to. BTW, when I next use more of Lauries chairs, I'll thread all of the chairs on before starting to solder the rail down. It's far easier than trying to squeeze chairs between the rail and the sleeper. Best Regards, Chris.

Just to prove that it's all horses for courses, my personal preference is to draw the parts in an older autocad style program, using closed plines. Then import the dxf into inkscape, scaled 1:1, set the line width to 0, and fill the shapes with front etch, back etch, and no etch colour's. Tabbing between parts is normally done in inkscape using rec shapes, again with 0 line width. Front and back images are then created by using the 'Same Fill select' tool to fill in the half etch colour's, black or white. The back image is then mirrored vertically before saving as PDF and sending to PPD. (After bringing both images into another screen to check everything is as expected.) I'd imagine that people are going to say that this is quite a backward way of doing things, but I for one like the simpler user command line interface of the older CAD programs. It's just unfortunate that the CAD program I have access to doesn't have fill functions. As you might see, this process isn't without risk of introducing additional errors - this signal post was missing a couple of alignment holes in a couple of the layer's. Another gotcha I've found previously is that LibreCAD couldn't really handle islands in fill, which tends to be quite important for our stuff (I can explain more if required.) One other thing that I've observed in consuming and designing etches is that some design parts to fill an etched space, whereas others design space to mark out an part. Contrast my signal post above which is the former with one of D869's wagon chassis designed on the latter principle, (helping me to fill up some space on a etch.) My gut feeling is that the latter is better, as there is less metal to be eaten away by etching, but this leads to more design work when you inevitably have to revisit a part of the design. I hope these ramblings make at least a little sense. Best Regards, Chris.

Is it a 517 perchance, from the title on your youtube video... Nice work as always Ian! Best Regards, Chris.

Hi Ian, coaches are looking good. Very timely as I've recently been distracted by some coach kits too. Do you have a mock up that you could show of this? I've always been shown the 'cardboard jig' method of forming coach sides. This often seems to bend where you don't want it to, like at the bottom of windows, and not where you might want it to, like down to the bottom of the side. Best Regards, Chris

Originally, I’d planned to use a train-table style fiddle-yard, however an in-field adjustment when transferring the track plan to the boards meant that there wasn’t then enough room to get both tracks to be perpendicular to the radius of the deck at the same time anymore. The lack of space that I had left myself to put in alignment bolts over the gap was also going to mean an overly complicated arrangement for this as well. The foundations of this design had been a wide thrust bearing, which meant the deck was specked up for 500rpm. I was going to use strips of brass on the deck to make railing stock easier, which meant trying to curve these as per Copenhagen fields fiddeyard tracks. Not wanting to make a mangle, I opted to get these laser cut in 2mm brass sheet by the good people of Argyll. So, with time running out before the deadline In June, I opted to revert back to brass cassettes, and park rebuilding the train table baseboard for a later project. Now these have had their own baseboard made, incorporating a holder for the control panel and reserved space for a coffee mug. And to round off the rest of the carpentry needed for the layout, I’ve knocked together a couple of Rice trestle legs to sit on a table, to bring the layout up to eye height. These still need some leveling feet to be attached when I can get access to an pillar drill. Best Regards, Chris.

Hello All, Like a lot of people, I think I’m ready to make the transition from Blog entry to dedicated thread for showing and telling what I’ve been doing modelling wise, hopefully this will lend itself to more short and frequent updates than the long prose that have I’ve been writing previously. Firstly, I’ll begin with a short recap, to get everyone up to speed. I’ve been trying to build a model of Callington Station, on fringes of East Cornwall for around 10(!) years now. I know, yet another Cornish BLT… However, staying away from the holiday destinations on the coast, I think I’ve avoided the worst of a cliché. Callington Station Yard © Tony Callaghan, Reproduced here with permission. The history of this little line is quite fascinating. It started out life in 1872 as the 3’6” East Cornwall Mineral Railway serving the mines between Kelly Bray and Drakewells with the quay on the river Tamar at Calstock, though within 30 years most of the mines served by this line had been closed. In 1890 it was bought by the PDSWJR – more famed of their railway running from Lydford through to Plymouth. Colonel Stevens was engaged to build the Calstock viaduct, with its distinctive wagon lift down to the quay, and connect the branch to the main line at Beer (Bere) Alston, which was completed in 1908. Whilst the main line was operated by the LSWR, the branch line remained independently worked right up to grouping, where it came under control of the southern railway and subsequently southern region. The Beeching report led to the closure of the section of the line from Callington through to Gunnislake, the remainder of the railway through to Plymouth being kept open due to the poor nature of the roads and bridging of the Tamar. Interestingly, over a century after the Kelly Bray mine closed, there is talk of a new mine, Redmoor, opening in the area. Hawthorn Leslie tanks ruled the rails during independent days, the southern brought 02’s to the branch up to the 1950’s which the southern region then replaced with Ivatt 2MT’s and subsequently DMU’s. The variety of stock was restricted by steep gradients and tight curves built to climb out of the Tamar valley between Calstock and Gunnislake. Traffic once the mines had gone turned distinctly agricultural, the railhead serving a good slice of the east of Bodmin moor up to North Hill and the market gardens of the valley. Stone traffic was still handled from the Kit Hill quarry up to the 1950’s and Hingston Down quarry up to closure. Interestingly, the station doesn’t seem to have been particularly well placed for the town of Callington itself – the mile or so between the town and the station oft quoted as being the slowest part of the journey between Callington and China. Methinks the inhabitants of the town probably preferred to take the GWR omnibus service to mainline at Saltash, rather than using their namesake station. As a side note - FGW once did this to me too, the branch train wasn't running so a taxi was put on for my bike and I to Gunnislake, most disappointing. Back to Callington, the track plan here is quite restrained, with being one of the good colonel’s light railways (I hate to say, cheap and nasty,) and being crammed between the foothills of Kit Hill and what is now the A388. The loop is somewhat unusual in that stock needs to be pushed back out of the platform in order to run the loco around. I’d summarise the bits of the station that I’ve chosen to keep, as Callington Road, as being more or less an inglenook, but with the addition of a carriage siding. You’ll have noticed here that the layout is a bit longer than the challenge dimensions of 600x239mm (green on the plan above), this is to make the layout more balanced, after the competition is held next year. The trackwork uses Laurie’s chairplates, having used templot beforehand to produce the plans for the curved points. A temporary backscene has been installed to block the scene to the challenge scene at present. The lighting rig holds up three RGBWWW strips, controlled by an Arduino, which together produce enough light to rival the sun. The layout is wired for DC and points are operated by servo’s, controlled from another Arduino installed below the baseboard. So that's more or less where I had got to in the last blog entry in January, which now seems so long ago... Best Regards, Chris.

Has the resin distorted whilst it was curing - or is it a prototypical BR curly sandwich? :-D Best Wishes, Chris

Personally I'd like to see some of these on your layout Ian, caption in 'Edwardian Devon' says 1906 so should be spot on for your timeframe. Best wishes, Chris.

Why does a half point preclude an over bridge? Just make the span a bit wider to cover it... I guess that depends on how much of the point you would stick under it though.

What about moving your yard entry point partially off scene, and having just the common crossing on the plan, something that I believe that Mr Rice is a fan of in one of his books. I Imagine that it depends on how simple you are intending your fiddleyard on being, but cassettes may be the only practical way to do this. See the below - also scribbled on the back of a 2mm envelope. Best Wishes, Chris.