KH1

As some of you may know The Severn Valley Railway is pretty much at the bottom of my garden and although the distance between the rails is a bit more than I prefer it still attracts my interest and of little Iz as it is nearest place to get an ice cream which is the normal bribe for dragging her down there to look at trains again. To make up for all those ice creams I was on my way to the gym this morning but got rather distracted by this; Unfortunately I only had my phone with what looks like a steamed up lens but worth sharing. This is bit of traffic chaos is due to the steam gala this weekend but plenty of action already as a quick visit later on proved. Doing well with the bus now but more on this soon.

Ah! Before anyone beats me to it I think I have just answered the first question - That will be a job for Baldrick then!

Yes, and remarkably top heavy contraptions they were too - mind you, I guess that if the pigeons were fluttering around inside they would not have contributed any weight! Two other thoughts - how were they cleaned out and what did they smell like?!!!!!

No blog for months and now another one - just like .......... Have been meaning to add a bit more road transport at the town end in fact I actually fancy a traffic jam just to show how efficient the railway if! Getting WW1 period vehicles is in 1:43 is not easy, so tired of waiting for me to get around to a complete scratch build I was seduced by a Corgie Thornycroft bus. This is unusual in that it is actually 1:43 but is I think based on a 1925 model. The other big problem is that I absolutely hate seeing shiny die cast models on otherwise very good layouts - drastic action was called for. Unfortunately I just got stuck into it and forgot to take a before pic but if you are really interested a quick search on Corgie Thornycroft J type should work - it was a rather nasty brown! It did not give in easily but I soon had a rather alarming number of bits which when attacked with Nitromors ended up like this; I have used the London Transport Museums 'battle bus' as a reference and have made various modifications to make it resemble this more closely and to make the detail much finer. First the easy bit - boarding the windows; Then I hacked off various bits such as the railings on the top and wheel arches and have replaced these with much finer versions soldered up from brass and Nickle Silver. Next up were the wheels which were far to modern being full of air! After a good trawl through my junk box I was not able to find any suitable wagon wheels so out with various pieces of brass tube and rod. Unfortunately cutting the tube was not as easy as I would have liked. I had intended to part them off on the lathe but my parting tool was completely blunt and is refusing to be persuaded to be otherwise. I ordered a new indexable version but took too long to arrive so improvised. I cut the rims and tyres as close as best I could with a hack saw then faced off on end in the lathe. With a flat bit I then drilled a scrap piece of timber to the appropriate depth and then filled away until the tube was flush with the timber. Not exactly precision engineering but got it to .1mm which I was more than pleased with. I really regretted having started this when it came to soldering the spokes but I think the end result is rather good. Next pic shows the wheels united with the chassis. The bonnet has been re-profiled and the massively over scale cab front has been replaced; Only mud guards, head lamps, rear wheels, steering wheel, gear lever and a bit of painting to go!

It certainly did come on little rolls but I wonder if that is the retail pack and these are bulk orders? These big rolls are very evident on one of the video clips that are available although it is impossible to see if it is actually barbed - it could just be plain wire but I can think of no obvious use for large quantities of this. Anyway, as you say it looks good!

I know, it has been a while! Sort of just got out of the habit of blogging about my exploits coupled with the lovely things that life has a habit of throwing at you. There has been plenty going on however and have actually managed to record some of it so there may be a few retrospective entries coming up. I was actually thinking back to why I started this blogging lark and it was largely and it was largely to act as a big self imposed kick up the bum to get things moving towards my first exhibition. Well twenty odd exhibitions latter I need another one as have three more this year after a Summer break and I have quite a list of things I want to sort out. So back to blogging and that metaphorical kicking! To start things off again I am killing two birds with one stone. I promised (some time ago!), to show a fellow WDLR fan some ways to make wagon loads and just thought that this would be a good way so here we are - wire. I have been looking at new loads for my wagons, looking at loads of pictures and what movies there are and am planning a few new ones. There are some very good shots of wire, presumably barbed, in large rolls. At a show I bought some white metal ones from Skytrex to inspire me and at £5 for 8 I needed to either win the lottery big time or get creative. Getting creative however and much to my regret seems to come far more easily than lottery wins so I soon though ' I can do that!'. Down to a craft shop and a roll of 11 though beading wire which comes in all manner of colours for £1 - £2 a 22 meter roll. Next time I will not use bright copper colour! Next about a 60cmlength was wound around a convenient length of tube - I used 20mm and then a short length was twisted around the coil with pliers. The excess wire will just break off neatly. Repeat so you have three ties and there you have it - you just need to do it again, and again and again! It is actually quite therapeutic and can be done while watching the TV or being lectured by my wife on why I should be spending my time doing something more useful! A quick spray with grey primer, a dark wash to fill out the shadows and a rust wash or dry brush and away you go. The coils in the wagon are just placed there individually but what I will do is make up a false floor and build some whole wagon loads which were often of mixed material possibly including posts or things I can't remember what the name is at the moment for supporting the wire. Hopefully the next post will follow soon. UPDATE! Found the image I was working from

Ah! One step at a time has lot to be said for it in such circumstances!

You can get photos printed on blinds now.

At last - my views in a vote have been acted on! Was bouncing around Wales today and on seeing a nice barn thought of you and your shed and how a nice 'makers plate' over the door would finish it off nicely. My Uncle had one on his barn that said 'Atcost' - how the company ever made any money is a mystery to me!

I am for round!

You can have Up the Line again if you want Andy - either the full 22ft or just the town section which is 12ft I think. Kevin.

What is the actual date?

Try this for another approach to home etching that I have used very successfully http://www.nigellawton009.com/Etching_for_Beginners_Version_5.htm Tank, pump, heater and other supplies came from http://www.esr.co.uk

Sorry to spoil your weekend! Is all set up now and ready to go.

I must point out that the title of this post does not infer that there is to be a roller coaster at the Ludlow Exhibition tomorrow, in fact, something far more exciting will be there - my layout! The roller coaster is more a description of life here at the moment but that would actually fail to express the magnitude - a whole theme park might be more accurate! Anyway, that is a very roundabout (theme park - get it?), way of apologising for lack of recent posts. There has been some stuff of interest to readers of this blog however. The Doncaster show was an interesting experience, very busy both days and made all the busier as I was on my own for most of it. Got a lot of support from other exhibitors however which was much appreciated as was the real ale pub crawl with the crew from Roundtree Sidings who were my immediate neighbours for the weekend -could have been sharper on Sunday morning however! There has been much activity with show bookings for next year but write these up when I am sure exactly which ones I am going to be able to make as there are a few clashes. So if you are in Shropshire with nothing better to do (and lets face it there isn't much to do in Shropshire - which is why I love it I hasten to add!), do come over to Ludlow Race Course and you might just be able to see my new secret weapon in action - more on this when I am sure it is working properly. For now though I will leave you with one of a set of new pictures took recently for a rather exciting magazine article that is in preparation now - more news soon.

Maybe, just, maybe, it fits that gap a bit too perfectly and might look a little more natural if it were partly obscured by the trees on the right.

Thanks Tim, nice to be appreciated - and thank you to Simon for his able assistance. The mystery of the load things has also been solved but will elaborate in next post.

This was going to be Happy Christmas message, then things got hectic. Then it was going to be a Happy New Year message, but I got ill. January has been a blur so here it is - Happy February! I couldn't put it off any longer as at some ridiculous hour tomorrow morning (Sat), we are heading off down the M5 for the Yate show - anyone in the area please do drop by. I have been playing with various projects recently, mostly restarting and even finishing a few stalled ones. I have been taking the odd picture so will write these up in the fullness of time. One little job that I have finished though are some more wagon loads. I have spent quite a while looking carefully at many pictures and film and came to the conclusion that there are very few examples of wagon loads except for ones I have spotted already or ones carrying full (and usually cheering!), loads of troops which although in no way impossible to recreate it would certainly be very time consuming, expensive and probably beyond my abilities. So, it was out with the balsa again! I found a murky film of several wagons with large wooden frames with what looks like chicken with attached. Had not seen these before and after a little research worked out that they are probably for revetting dug outs - any confirmation would be appreciated. I was able to scale them from the dimensions of the wagon so drew one up in PhotoShop and produced a template sheet on A4 for 15, covered it with double sided tape and then (eventually!), found the balsa stripper. I then made up a simple jig to cut all the bits to length and got stripping away. A bit of PVA later and I had assembled my first sheet. Ah, the chicken wire.... last week I found myself in that Aladdin's cave that is the Hereford Model Center where they had some Greenscene 7mm link fence material at the princely price of £3.49 I think it was a packet. Well I bought one packet to see if it would work and then decided that if it did I wouldn't be able to afford enough of it as the amount in the packet was pretty small. Anyway armed with that one packet as it was going to be easier to show than explain I went to the local haberdashery - oh yes we still have a very good one of those! A few minutes latter after being taken aback by the range of colours available (psychedelic purple 7mm chain link fence anyone?), I walked out with a meter in a neutral grey for just £1.50. Not wishing to put Greenscene out of business or anything as I know it doesn't jump into those little plastic bags by itself but you can make an awful, awful, awful lot of fencing with a meter of dress net as I found it was called. Once dry these were peeled off and I started again. Once I had a pretty large pile of them I stained them with a wood dye and Indian ink solution and let them dry off on the radiator - I hasten to add that the light was very poor for this shot and the white balance is all off so no, the wall is not that colour! And finished Just in case I don't manage another blog before next weekend and given my recent performance that is highly likely I am out and about again but this time heading the other way up to Doncaster - Saturday and Sunday at the race course.

One thing to try is running it up in a dark room - shorts then often give themselves away with a flash. I also remember once having a problem in one direction only which was due to the throw out on the motor shaft reducing the clearance of the flywheel in one direction only.

Looks like you are using a core less motor - it will need the back EMF on the chip switched off to work properly but not sure this would cause a problem at this stage.

At Peterborough I had a chat with someone from the Royston club about taking the layout there next year however someone dropping out and a quick message to me has turned this into this Saturday instead! So, if you are around about North Hertfordshire do drop in. This has meant a slightly accelerated look at the snag list from the last show but has hopefully resulted in a couple of useful improvements. First up was to lok at a couple of locos that had misbehaved - couldn't find anything wrong with one of the Baldwins but the other had blown it's chip up. Unfortumately I don't have any sound chips spare at the moment so had to put in a TCS T1 to which I have added a stay alive capacitor buy soldering direct onto the chip - not for the faint hearted as they say. Some slightly heftier pick ups has sorted out one of the 20hp Simplexes but another one had blown it's chip too. Again I didn't have a spare DCC Concepts Zen chip so just thought I would try it with a TCS - what a difference! I have never been happy with the Zen chips as despite my best efforts with CV values they just always seem to be off or full on with the TCS I have got the loco to go absolutely reliably at a crwal which covered on foot of track in fifteen minutes! Only problem is that the chip and capacitor are nearly as large as the loco itself so have them on an umbilical cord and will dump them in a wagon behind. Hardly a long term solution but will be interesting to see how it performs under exhibition conditions. I also looked at the Baldwin Gas Mechanical with a view to getting the connecting rods back on which will make a lot of prople very happy! Unfortunately they will remained dismayed as found that the chip I had put in is fouling the requisite hole. As it is working perfectly now I am not going to disturb it just yer. I did disturb the Crochat however and had a play with the boggie pivots as I had found that it was getting beached on certain points on the layout eith the driven axles not making contact with the rails. Think I have sorted it now and had it at an even slower crawl than the Simplex with it covering half of the 8x4 test track in an hour and forty minuets before I dcided that I had some wet paint that I really had to watch instead. Other thing I did was to take up one of Trevors suggestions to speed up putting up the pelmet by replacing the captive nuts with a stud and using a butterfly nut from above. Here is one with my little jig for getting them all the same length. I forgot to take a shot of the finished article but it looks suprisingly like a piece pf wood with a bolt sticking out of it!

Well Expo NG went off really well in the end despite some last moment difficlties with my entire rosta of opperators going sick on me at the last moment. The day was saved however by super hero Tevor standing in at the last moment even if this did entail me driving fifty miles in the wrong direction over tractor infested country roads to pick him up up and drop him back. Admited,y there were far fewer agricultural vehicles on the return leg at 1am in the morning but that was more than made up for by the fog! Despite all this excitement it was a very enjoyable show withlots of appreciative vistitors and lots fof people I hadn't met in a while to make things interesting - a while being 30 years in one case! In some ways it was a little bit like preaching to the converted as it was a very WDLR savy crowd so more time was spent talking about gearboxes than the overall picture like at Peterborough the other week. Still fun just a different kind of fun! And talking of a different kind of fun this was abundant at the Apedale members day yesterday where Simon and I got given a real WWI protected Simplex to play with up and down the field railway. Here is me thouroughly enjoying myself; And here is me being rescued after embarasingly staling it on a hill start right at the very end of the line; This whole expiriance only increased my admiration for the people who did this for real, in the dark, with the doors closed, with people shooting at them and pulling several tons of explosives. It also made me appreciate that a bloody big profesional Canon camera is a liability in such circumstances and that this picture just proves that it it is not the best thing to try a selfie with!

Very, very convincing - well done!

That would have been PLM Castaways I think who were in the opposite corner - Peter Blackham was next to me with his transfers. Their contact details are; 12, New St, Merry Hill, Wolverhampton, West Midlands , WV3 7NW GPS: 52.5707897,-2.168181900000036 Phone: 01902 570810 They do not have a web site and only attend two shows a year (Burton and Telford O gauge), so everything has to be done the traditional way by post and or phone. Most of my figures came from here but several are from Dart Castings and S&D and are policemen, air raid wardens, postmen and other such things either suitably modified or just hidden away a bit so not too obvious!

After having finally recovered from the Peterborough show I have been able to turn my attention to a few little things that have been on my todo list for quite a while. I warn you now this is probably not the most exciteing post ever but might get a few people thinking. Will cover the crowd control first. I must point out straight away that I have nothing against the Great British public (or at least not those who come to model railway shows!), but having a layout which is operated from the front and with rather labour intensive couplings, they do get in the way rather! The big advantage of course is that it is far easier to actually talk to people which is something I do enjoy and think there should be lots of at shows. At Peterborough there was quite a substantial barrier and it did mean we could get all the uncoupling done without having to shove anybody out of the way. Knowing that EXPONG can be a bit of a scrum I have been considering some sort of barrier. I have left it too late to get any comercial system (having to be small and portable is a problem), so have resorted to DIY namely two bits of ply and my wonderful barbed wire. I usually find somewhere to drape my wire (which is just twisted string but looks very effective), and it gets loads of comments but now it is going to have to earn it's keep. I have found a couple of bits of old ply, drilled them to fit on the end boards and and made some notches at the other end to hang the wire off. I am hoping the wire can be kept taught enough but have deliberately not made the suports too sturdy as the theory is that if anyone did lean too hard on the wire they would break before pulling the whole layout over. We shall see; One thing that really does take time when setting up and dismantleing is screwwing in the supports for the lighting and facia. I have still not worked out a way of hinging them and still being able to pack everything in the car so the bolts are going to have to stay for now. Using a power drill to tighten up the nuts has been considered before but the problem was that the holder for the socket was too big to fit in the chuck of my cordless drill. Answer - one, find some time, two, find an old socket extension and three, mutilate it on the lathe! After much screaming of tortured metal I had produced this. Before; After; No great feat of engineering but should do the trick. Only other thing I have done with it is a wrap of red insulation tape so I can find it in the bolt bucket. And finally - multimedia. I have long wanted to show people the various pictures that the layout is based on and have considered printing them out and sticking them to the facia boards but why do this when you can involve electricity! A little while ago I picked up a bargain tablet which, although not in the same league as our iPad is fine for the job intended. The various pictures were collected together and cropped to the correct size, a photoframe app was downloaded and I now have a slideshow. A suprising amount of time was then spent working out how to mount it properly but eventually ended up with this; Am just hoping that it will not make the facia too heavy but have extra Velcro ready and cable ties if that is not enough. If you are anywhere near Swanley in Kent this Saturday do come along and say hello.