David41283

Evening everyone. Over a month since the last post, but progress is continuing. I am determined this isn't going to be one of those threads which starts promisingly then fizzles out! During August I haven't had time to both work on the layout and take photos and document progress. Most of the track on the station board is laid. I am now waiting for points I've ordered for the fiddle yard to arrive. I've used some of the bits I accumulated when I was thinking of building the track to add some check-rails where the line will be inset towards the harbour spur. Hopefully this should look quite good when sunk into the road surface. This board is more-or-less completely wired up too, but I can't do any testing until the fiddle yard is done, as the control panels will be on the fiddle yard board. While I'm waiting for the points to arrive, I've spent the last 10 days or so working on some structures. The house is a copy of a scalescenes build I made previously. This was just for fun to practice scratch-building in plastikard. It may get used depending on how it turns out. I am undecided upon the signal box, I have been trying to scratchbuild a more accurate replica of Fort William signal box, but being a fair way from the platform end there aren't a lot of photos available. The box would only be around 30mm square and I just wasn't satisfied with my efforts to date. The Ratio Midland box would pass as several Scottish boxes with minor modification, just not necessarily this prototype. It may pass inspection with the finials and flue removed and a brick chimney added - with a coat of faded SCR blue on the woodwork I think it may look the part. The grounded coach body uses one of the famous "Shredded Wheat" carriages and is based upon the grounded coach body which was next to the signal box at FW. Cheers David

Just got back and unpacked from a really enjoyable day at Exmoor Rail. Nice to speak to a lot of people who'd seen the layout(s) on here - thanks for saying hello! I only took a couple of quick snaps of my corner of the show Until around 4pm and the last half hour, when I persuaded the chaps from Salisbury club running Wadebridge to run some guest trains on their excellent layout. They were very nice and agreed to let some of my stock stretch their legs a little more than Poldeen allows. A "2010" version of the Bodmin china clays.. How about a Glasgow to Padstow sleeper in 1980? Cheers David

Evening everyone, I've spent the evening getting ready for the Exmoor Rail exhibition at Minehead on Saturday. I'm planning to run both Cornwall 2010 and Scotland 1980 at different points during the day. Please excuse these quick phone snaps in dodgy light. I've run-in and added couplings to my 2 Dapol 27s which really haven't seen any use since I've had them. My 24/1 has had a good run and is ready for it's first real outing. I've been adjusting and tweaking some goods stock - a mixture of 2nd hand, kit built or just old! All is working well now though. Moving back to the future I've been having problems with my 153's which were resolved by taking off the bogies and giving the contacts a good clean - they run nicely now. After all the track had a good clean it was tested by some slow speed running from my 08. All looks good to go for Saturday! Cheers David Hi James, Do come and say hello - it's always nice to meet people. David

Hi everyone, Things are progressing slowly. The baseboards are finished and have now had a few coats of paint. The outsides are a nice "Scotrail Saltire livery" blue, the track bed grey and the loch my own murky water colour, mixed up from a load of tester pots. I've now stuck the track plan down and started to sketch out rough positions of roads and buildings. Here are a few update pictures taken on my phone, in awful light late yesterday evening. I have now received most of the parts I ordered, so track laying and wiring can start imminently. However this evening I have made this: A diode matrix for route selection. The plan is to have six push buttons for each of the fiddle yard roads and 4 for the station, rather than loads of switches and a large panel. Cheers for all the interest already! Thanks David

That is a great bit of modelling - can you explain the "WfW table method". Thanks

Hi everyone, Long time no posts... Here are a couple of quick phone pictures from the N Gauge AGM yesterday. We operated with modern stock until lunchtime then "Scotland 1980" diesels after lunch. I entered the "Graham Farish Cup" for working small layouts - which was deservedly won by Jo Alder's Newport Maesglas layout which is also on RM Web. We had a good day out and it was nice to meet so many people who'd seen the layout on RMWeb and came to have a chat. In other news there was a nice photo of the layout in the News section of Railway Modeller this month - advertising Exmoor Rail at Minehead where I am exhibiting the layout on 6th August. Cheers David

Hi everyone, After a month of enjoyable work building the pointwork for the station throat, I have had a significant change of heart. I just don't think that hand-built finescale trackwork is for me. I feel I have given it a good go and got a reasonable feel for how it will work, but I just can't shake the impression that if I press ahead with building the track I am going to create a huge amount more work which I fear will detract from my enjoyment of building, running and (hopefully) exhibiting a layout which I am really positive about. I want to be able to get the layout out, use it with my kids and take it to exhibitions. I don't want to spend the next 12 months painstakingly scratch building a whole town worth of buildings only for the points not to work, or blades need mending etc.. My main concerns are around the actuation of the points and the robustness of the tie-bar and blades assembly under the stress of a lot of use. The finetracks design simply has a 1mm long peg which slots into a hole on the tie bar. I didn't find that this held together firmly enough so I soldered the switchblades to the tiebars. However this removes any possible rotation from the joint, which (especially on the shorter points A+B) means that the blade, which you have filed to a very fine point is bent into a shallow 'S' every time the point is thrown. In this instance this is exacerbated due to the relatively large distance the blade needs to travel to allow coarse N-gauge flanges to pass through. Not only does this not look "right", but I have seen first hand many, many accounts of frequent repairs to hand-made points around the tiebar/blade area and this stress is only going to lead to failures. Reading other parts of this forum and other forums there are many, many incredibly inventive ways of actuating the points while still allowing this essential rotation where the switchblade meets the tie bar - people have invented all sorts of contraptions to allow a thin wire from each switch blade to move under the board, or flexible wire beneath the boards etc.. Anyway - I've removed the "finescale" from the title of the thread, and ordered around £200 worth of code 55 from my local model shop, along with point motors etc... Hopefully in a fortnight I should be able to update with the track laid, wired and working! Please feel free to "unfollow" if you were interested in the progress of a layout build using the Finetracks system, but hopefully I can soon have some trains moving, a harbour wall, and nice buildings being made! My conclusion, and this is maybe stating the bloomin' obvious, building your own track, whether with kits or not, isn't just building your own track - the whole lot (wiring, alignment, track laying, point motors, platform height etc..) requires more time, thought, inventiveness and effort, and I have discovered that, for me, the gains in appearance aren't worth the extra work at this stage of a project. I tip my hat to those who can see this kind of endeavour through to a reliable, robust and successful conclusion - you have gained my respect over the course of the last month. I don't feel I've wasted my time or money, as I have learnt a valuable lesson about track building, improved my soldering and discovered where my tolerances end! Sorry for the long post - I feel much happier now I'm going to get cracking with the good old Peco, especially as most of it will be hidden behind the sea wall and platforms anyway! Cheers David

Still making slow and steady progress with the track.... just the 6 switch blades to make up now. Everything so far runs very smoothly when tested with a couple of old Farish coach bogies. Cheers David

Good evening. Some actual modelling has been taking place.... After 5 weeks the Finetracks parts I ordered arrived last week. (I am a big advocate of these "cottage industries" - but I reckon they could do with taking down the "Usually ships in 1-2 days" from their website). I am going to try and use the Finetracks to build the track as if I were scratch-building. The kits themselves contain just enough rail to make a pair of points, which steers you towards effectively making your own set-track which you then join together, whereas when building your own track you tend to build flowing sections of pointwork as a single unit using long lengths of rail. (NB I have never built my own track - I get the impression this is the way!). So I treated myself to a cheapo glass placemat from a discount homeware store for around £3. This gave me a dead-flat surface to start on. I then printed out the key section of my trackplan from Anyrail5 and stuck this down, then stuck on the point templates from the British Finescale website. The sleepers and bases were then temporarily stuck down onto this. I have added a few copper clad sleepers for strength and also replaced some parts of the points where I needed to move away from the supplied design. After a few nights work, I have reached this stage, with a couple of the rails in place. I have used longer bits of rail rather than the short pieces supplied with the points wherever possible. Cheers David

You can tell that's a model. If you look closely you can just see the tension lock couplings.

Why? The sale clearly indicated that they may not be Bachmann and £28 for 5 coaches (even the Hachette ones) is still pretty reasonable. Could be a good cheap investment for someone doing a project, or some cheap coaches for a kids trainset. Even with postage it works out at just over £6 per coach. Lets keep this thread to real eBay madness, not "ha ha look what they bought".

27029 propels the stock from the sleeper into the depot yard for servicing. (from my n gauge micro-layout.)

I'm sure there's a "dunroamin" scottish layout name pun in here somewhere. However I don't think I'll ever come up with anything as good as "Kinmundy" which is well known. (Having said that I've always assumed Kinmundy is a pun! It may just be me!) Thanks for everyone's interest and ideas, I'm sticking with Invernevis for now. Cheers David

Your input was extremely useful and got me thinking - thanks for taking the time to post!

Hi everyone, I did say my research was from Wikipedia - not always known for it's absolute accuracy! I reckon I'm leaning towards Invernevis - this name is used in the area; Google brings up Invernevis hotels, Invernevis B&B's and Invernevis Care Home all in Fort William and it roughly means "mouth of the River Nevis" the location of which is Fort William. In the meantime here is a modelling carpentry update. Both boards have now been finished with sanding and filling complete. I have now fitted pattern makers dowels and heavy duty case clips (from Station Road Baseboards via eBay) to hold them together at the join. I hope people don't find this boring, but I have never fitted pattern makers dowels before. I searched the forum for advice and found that most people seem to casually note "fitted with pattern makers dowels" without explaining how. They are certainly unforgiving of any errors, so here is how I did it: Once both boards were built and the glue had had several days to dry I removed any screw heads which hadn't fully counter-sunk and sanded the faces of each board to ensure that they were absolutely flush where they will meet. I then lined the boards up on a flat surface and tightly screwed a spare length of 2x1 timber across the join where the track will be - thus ensuring the track bed was tightly together and dead level in the crucial area. The boards were then tipped onto their side and two pilot holes drilled right through with a small drill bit. I then removed the bit of timber to separate the two boards. Each pilot hole was then opened up with a 25mm spade bit - this is where things went a little wrong. As I was drilling out the recess for the pattern makers dowels into ply each lamination of the plywood tended to splinter away in one go- thus making it very hard to control the depth and I subsequently went too deep and the dowels barely met when test fitted. I remedied this by making some 25mm discs of good quality artist's mount board, 1 or 2 of these spacers were put into the recess along with plenty of PVA to bring the dowels back flush with the end of the baseboard. When the dowels were tightly screwed down through the spacers and the mount boards discs were squeezed tight it all dried rock solid after a couple of days. I then dug out the centre of the "female" half of the dowel with my dremel to allow the dowels to fully interlock. The pattern makers dowels now work perfectly, and with the heavy duty case clips the two baseboards join far more securely and accurately than I had hoped. The boards just need an undercoat now before I can lay cork tiles on the trackbed - when I get a spare hour or so I will get this done. I am still waiting for my delivery of track from British Finescale - my last order took over three weeks, so hopefully will be any day soon. I've also decided to stick with DC operation - I have used DCC before, but as much as I found some benefits, I did get fed up with all the button pressing while shunting. There is also the factor that although my fleet for this layout is 8 locos, I have many more which may well find their way onto the layout too and with decent chips costing £25-£35 the cost implications are huge. I may well order a cobalt point motor - the clearance below the track bed is 70mm and apparently they are 68mm deep! I wonder if it is possible to remove the connector block and make direct soldered connections to reduce the depth needed by a couple of cm. There's only one way to find out!! Thanks for all the interest and input as ever. David

Hi everyone, I'm still making slow progress with the baseboards which are now ready for undercoating. Regards the name - I've been doing a little more research (WIkipedia - so take this with a pinch of salt!). I think it is important that the layout has a name that anyone can easily pronounce - including me! The English name of Fort William is apparently a little controversial as it references the English Prince William - Duke of Cumberland who isn't popular north of the border. Different parts of the town have previously been called Maryburgh, Duncansburgh and Gordonsburgh. The area was historically part of the land of Clan Cameron. The areas of Inverlochy and Lochaber are also nearby. Apparently Invernevis has been mooted as an alternative name for the town. So my shortlist is: Fort Cameron - which works as a suitably scottish name to replace "william" and references the local Clan. Invernevis - a name used by many properties in the town and linked to the nearby Ben Nevis Duncansburgh - a former name of part of the town. Cheers David

I think this is where this thread needs to be very careful. I enjoy Mr Gostude getting the ignominy he deserves, but it sometimes crosses the line into sneering at those who've made a bad job at a conversion or simply made a mistake, which makes me a little uncomfortable. As an example take this one which has been highlighted as "Someone not doing their research. A badly trashed Dapol unpowered Class 27 just went for £38 yet a complete undamaged brand new one is yours from Hattons for £33!!" Here's the story. I purchased a class 27 from my local model shop for £98 (I know Hatton's do them cheaper but I like to support my local shop) I test it - all OK. I rub the numbers off as I'm going to renumber it. I carry on running the loco in and I get a puff of smoke and the lights stop working. I return it to the shop who get me a new one from Dapol. All good. I assume the broken one has gone back to Dapol. A few weeks later I spot a class 27 on ebay with the numbers rubbed off, advertised as having no lights, with the photo obviously taken on the counter of the shop to where I had returned it a fortnight ago. Having been the only owner of this loco for less than 24 hours I decide to follow the auction. I notice that the price is currently less than £10 and that it finishes at a time of day when most people won't be bidding and remember to log in for the end of the auction. I am confident in re-wiring Dapol locos (and may hard wire a chip anyway). I buy back a perfectly good loco (albeit with no lights) for £38. I e-mail the shop and explain and agree to pick it up today with cash, (where no doubt we'll have a chuckle about me winning the auction) thus also saving on the postage. So contrary to "not having done their research", I would suggest that someone has actually done really rather well. Even if I hadn't been an RMwebber who could explain the above, I still don't believe that a post which says "innocent person has spent £5 more than they could have done if they'd shopped around!!" is especially worthy of highlighting as "eBay madness". Back to my original point - Rails (sometimes - but I have done well using the "make me an offer" button with them) and Gostude deserve to be on this thread, but I think we should all tread carefully when pointing the finger at often innocent or mistaken people for "eBay madness". Cheers David

That's far better than any of my ideas! How is An Gearasden pronounced? Is it as it is written eg. phonetically "Gear - asden". My GCSE in German doesn't lend itself to Gaelic! My thoughts were far more low-brow than that: 1) Fort [any stereotypically Scottish sounding male name] Robert, Douglas etc... 2) Something nicked from Game of Thrones - North of the wall obviously! 3) Fort (William) Wallace (see what I did there!) Cheers for the suggestion. David

Hi everyone, 10 days on, and most of the structural work on the main scenic board is done. Still loads to do with filler and sandpaper, but again it is flat and level, and more importantly it is the same level as the first board! I cut the far end open so that I can have one of the iconic views in model form. I wouldn't be able to take photos from this angle, or have much of a view of the famous station facade if I had used a standard, solid end piece. I have also made a big decision and ordered the "finetracks" kits for the station. I've also purchased a pack of pcb sleeper strips from Marcway too, so that I can add a few soldered sleepers wherever I feel they may be needed. Hopefully this will give the compromise between the look of the finescale track, but with a bit more rigidity and longevity. The next decision is power supply. I am usually an advocate of DC, but the Gaugemaster combi just seems a bit basic. I'm getting tempted by DCC again..... I also feel the layout now need a better name. Fort Bill would seem logical for a shortened version of Fort William, but seems a bit of a cliche.. Cheers for now. David

An actual Interfrigo wagon (C3203). I was starting to think these were mythical things which only existed as Airfix/Dapol kits! Brilliant pictures as ever.

Managed to get the fiddle yard board put together today. A few of the parts weren't perfect, but they were dead square which made life easier. In addition to the 9mm ply, I also purchased a length of 34mm square softwood which I cut down into glue blocks to brace the corners. You'll see only one of the cross-braces has large holes - I gave up on the hole-cutting drill in fear of losing a finger after this one and resorted to just a large drill instead! As this is the fiddle yard, I plan to have the point motors etc on the surface, so there won't be much wiring underneath. There is a double layer of ply at the end which joins the other board, in order to take the dowels. It still needs a lot of work with wood filler and sandpaper, but it is strong, flat and level. Cheers David

Hi - it is all good quality 9mm ply. I completely agree re getting square cuts - unless you have access to a decent workshop it is very difficult. Most timber merchants do, so do stores like Wickes or B&Q - some people seem to get good results from these stores, but my experience has been mixed to say the least ("sorry Trev does that and he's not in today" etc). I am lucky that my local timber merchant advertises "trade, hobby and DIY" I just checked that they were happy to cut to the mm (some will only go to the nearest 5mm) and that they'd use a table saw or wall saw. I would also say the advantage of a proper timber merchant as opposed to a DIY store is the relative quality and price - I feel I get a much better quality of ply at a much lower price inc cutting. Cheers David

Thanks - yes, I am a member of MERG and as yet haven't made use of any of their kits. I am considering their DCC control system for this too.