Annie

47 minutes ago, Tom Burnham said:

Always useful to have a Terrier on hand!

Yes indeed! According to my layout's history/backstory four Terriers were purchased second hand from the LBSC by the Affiliated (Imaginary) Railway Companies.  They were generally tidied up, painted in the A.(I).R.C's black livery, converted to the vacuum brake and arrived just in time for the GER to take a controlling interest in the Affiliated Companies.  

Since they'd been purchased for working over the companies' more lightly laid sections and branchlines that was where they went and generally got on with it without too much fuss and mostly without being officially noticed.  When the M&BHER's 'Jack of all Trades' 0-6-2T 'Sharpies' were withdrawn after the arrival of GER 'Intermediates' and C32 2-4-2T's at Moxbury shed it was found that there was an urgent need for shunting engines so the Terriers were sent for and pressed into service.

They are awfully good fun to run about and shunt with.

Trip working is always a good way for me to cheer myself up.  Steve Flanders had some new things he asked me to test and after that I set some of the local passenger engines off running on their schedules and then spent an hour or two with Terrier 'Hopewood' shunting wagons about and taking them places.

I didn't take all that many snaps because I got busy with shunting or else train spotting at Bluebell Magna and Moxbury.

My old GTX 960 graphics card sometimes drifts its setting about a bit and this time around it produced a dreary morning instead of a Summers day.

Bluebell Magna goods yard.

The 9.30am local from Moxbury comes dashing past.

The mysterious 'works' at Bluebell Magna.

Leaving Beaky's Hill Halt behind.

Fetching the coal delivery for Moxbury gasworks.

I'm struggling with being sleepy, but I'm managing to push on with clearing off the long layout table in my bedroom that used to have my Lego railway layout on it.  After my Lego layout was dismantled it became a general dumping ground and working my way down through it all is like some kind of model making related archeological dig with both misplaced useful items and complete and utter junk being all mixed up together.  Having a fatigue illness doesn't help either because often things will get put down somewhere and there they will stay with other things getting dumped on top of them and so on and so on.

My plan is to setup a simple 3 rail O-27 layout on this layout board, - which is in actual fact a 6ft 6in X 3ft interior door.  Having somewhere that I can run some of my older coarse scale wagons on and generally bunt them about with my green 0-4-2 tank engine will hopefully help to encourage me to push on with my other 'O' gauge projects.

Wantage Tramway group on Farcebook.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/rtwantagetramway/?multi_permalinks=7179175858794098&notif_id=1701001794493376&notif_t=group_activity&ref=notif

I have little time for most of the social media garbage on Faceplant, but I've found some of the special interest railway groups to be worthwhile.

It was a good many years ago now, but I've just remembered a friend taking me to see a Gauge 1 model railway.  It was a partly in the shed and the rest doing a circuit of the garden type of line and the retired owner was an ex-Swindon Works employee.

A lovely gentleman, - he gave us the tour, but the thing that I remember most of all was that all his engines and rolling stock were made from cardboard.  They were really stunning pieces of work and there was nothing about them to give any indication as to the material they were made from.

Why cardboard? you might ask.  Well what he told me was that he worked in cardboard so he could keep his wife company in the house during the evenings instead of disappearing into the shed and thereby causing any strife between them.  He had a neat and tidy small workbench in the living room and that was where all the magic happened.

He had tried out 'O' Gauge for a short while, - and he showed me some of his 'O' Gauge models which were nice pieces of work as well, - but decided in the end that Gauge 1 was the scale for him.  

For some reason I never was one to carry a camera about with me so I can't show you any photos unfortunately.

May I tell  motorcycling story? 

The worst motorcycling accident I ever had was when a learner driver pulled out of a stop sign right in front of me on a country road and wrecked the Suzuki GT380 I owned at the time.  With nowhere to go I had two choices, taking flight over the roof of the car when the bike  T boned the side of it, or stepping off the back of the bike and trusting to the leather jacket and layers of clothing I was wearing to protect me.

I stepped off, came down bit of a bump well tucked in and all seemed good with me sliding well clear.  My bike hit with a bang and bounced away into ditch where it screamed its poor heart out until someone thought to shut it off sometime later but the engine was wrecked by then.  That wasn't my biggest problem as the learner driver had frozen up screaming their head off worse than my bike, didn't brake, kept jabbing the accelerator and frog hopped the car across the road and cracked me straight in both my knees with the car's bumper.  I still have an impressive scar across my left knee 40 years later, - though it has faded a bit.

After all the medical drama, - my Mum demanded that I come back home, - no doubt so she could keep a close eye on her wayward daughter.  For a full day at least I got the 'told you so' treatment and even the old hoary story of the chap down the end of the road who crashed his bike into a lampost and ended up with having a steel plate put in his head was trotted out.

The thing was I was going to need transport once I was on my feet again and I couldn't afford a car. 

Any breath of getting another bike and Mum would have gone into full lecture mode all over again.  Then I saw a Jawa sidecar outfit advertised in the local paper at a price i could afford.  I pointed it out to Mum. 

'Oh that will be nice and safe for you', she says brightly while I'm doing my best to keep a straight face and not give the game away.

After the Jawa eventually expired after I could find no more spares for it.  I got a Honda CB350 twin next and put a chair on that.  It also got the GT380's rear wheel with its bigger brake and stronger cush drive as well.  Fitted into the Honda's rear forks like it had been made for it.  That outfit could just about go anywhere and I loved it.  Then (sigh) too much life happened and I had to sell it and bikes faded out of my life.  I really miss riding a well set up outfit (sigh).

23 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Choose from these, and this is only one maker: http://www.drewry.net/TreeMill/Drewry_cars_Gallery.html

Fascinating.  Not surprisingly the larger types are post-1920s vehicles.

I do like this one though despite it being a post-grouping railcar.  It looks very useful.

https://www.drewry.net/TreeMill/multimedia/Drewry1929Graces_Loco_Drew.jpg

This Westinghouse petrol electric railcar was operated in New Zealand circa 1914.  I don't know how successful this one was, but the NZGR persisted with IC railcar experiments with varying degrees of success right up to WW2 and beyond.

Like the NER one it seems to have a fair bit of cooling gubbins attached to its roof.  Apparently the NZGR one was similar to the one the GCR purchased from Westinghouse.

17 hours ago, Annie said:

Latest silly idea and cheer up picture combined.

 

And further to this picture I found this one to go with it.

It would be 10 years ago that I purchased this 009 tram engine bodyshell from Shapeways.  It's plain what prototype it's based on.  I never did anything with it though, - firstly because I found 009 to be just too darn maddeningly small and secondly because I didn't like the printed bodyshell's rough surface.

44 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Who might have provided the petrol tramcars is not known.  There were examples of railcars in 1903, e.g. a petrol-electric railcar of ACsEV (Arad & Csanád United Railways), built 1903/1906 ff. by Johann Weitzer AG in Arad with an internal combustion engine from De Dion-Bouton and electric equipment from Siemens-Schuckert:

 

More than likely this railcar would have proved to be underpowered, but I must confess that I like it, - I like it a lot.

Cooling looks like it might have been a problem though since what looks like a radiator on the leading edge of the roof seems like it's a bit too small.

https://railwaymatters.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/petrol-electric-railcars/

3 minutes ago, Porkscratching said:

I love the way you said you bought yourself some locos for "research purposes".. Epic 😁

😃😀😄

Very important and secret research.  😉

Latest silly idea and cheer up picture combined.

30 minutes ago, CKPR said:

When I was building US 'craftsman' kits, the advice was always to use white spirit or isopropyl alcohol as the thinner / medium for paint, not water, so as to avoid swelling of the wood and raising of the grain. Although PVA dries hard (and shiny !), I found that if used in diluted form,  it does exactly this.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions CKPR.  Water applied to cardboard or wood when making models is rarely a good idea.

I always like to poke around on the Smallbrook Studio website to see what they have and just now i discovered this interesting conversion kit.   https://www.smallbrookstudio.uk/store/7mm-NG-Rhea-Kit-to-alter-the-new-Hornby-budget-range-0-4-0-into-Hunslet-style-saddle-tank-p582670858  

Normally I don't hold with the imported American nonsense of Black Friday sales, but Ironhorse Hobbies are doing free postage during the sales and their Hornby Railroad 0-4-0's are the cheapest in the country this weekend.

Sooooooo I've purchased a 'not a Percy' R30200 OO RailRoad BR 0-4-0T and a classic R3064 Railroad OO BR Class 264 'Pug' 0-4-0ST 56025 'Smokey Joe' for research purposes.

The loco bodies themselves will be useful kitbash fodder with both being saddle tanks and while I have O-16.5 narrow gauge projects in mind I have always wondered how easy it might be to regauge one of these Hornby 0-4-0 chassis.

In other news my new Tamiya curved scissors and design knife were delivered this afternoon so things are starting to move along very nicely.

3 hours ago, MrWolf said:

Digging through boxes of old magazines I have so far found Iain Rice's Woolverstone in the May 1990 Railway Modeller.

Looked up the May 1990 issue of RM in the digital archive, - found the Woolverstone pages, - and Wow!  Absolutely beautifully realised railway modelling so typical of the late Mr Rice.  I could spend hours looking at those Suffolk images of a time now long past.

I've heard of PVA being used to harden cardboard, but using it diluted would surely run the risk of sagging and distortion.  I don't think I would like to try it. 

The 16mm carriages are interesting, but when I was doing mine I did them using wood only with packets of lolly sticks from the local craft shop getting a fair bit of use.  I would use various types of thin modellers plywood as well, but that could get a bit expensive when used on larger models.  Good old coffee stirrers were very handy and for larger sections of wood I would raid the kindling box for suitable bits with a nice grain and cut them to size with a razor saw.  I wasn't keen on balsa as it's too soft and stringy with coarse grain and nearly impossible to get a decent finish with it.

2 hours ago, harris0169 said:

PS: this is also a good (short, tantalising) read... John Fownes doesn't use Shellac but just cheap spray paints form "pound-type" stores (well the article mentions Wilko):

https://issuu.com/mortons-digital/docs/rmm007

page 56/57

 

This is the only article I can find on John's work with any detail.

 

Phil Parker shows a picture of his work in this post:

https://philsworkbench.blogspot.com/2015/06/great-central-railway-model-event-2015.html

And there is this page I wrenched out of the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160418021844/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/instalek/cardboard.htm

Cheers

 

Andy

That's certainly interesting about John Fownes using cheap spray paint instead of shellac.  I take his point about the possibility of shellac making cardboard too stiff, - though that sets me wondering if using polyurethane works in the same way as John's paint due to it having a degree of flexibility.

25 minutes ago, harris0169 said:

Was the polyurethane varnish solvent or water based do you know?  Just thinking about warping of card with water-based anything.

It was solvent based Andy.

I should see if I can find any shellac flakes locally.  Living out in the rural countryside is lovely, but not so good when it comes  to finding any kind of specialist materials.

11 minutes ago, Porkscratching said:

Your polyurethane varnish idea sounds a good plan, the initial layers could also be thinned down to assist soaking into the card. 

Exactly that.  The trickiest bit on the milk van was soaking the paper I used to to make the panelling before and after cutting out the delicate paper doily.  Somewhat as an experiment I glued the paper panelling in place using polyurethane and it turned out fine and it's still as good as the day I put it all together.

Edit:  When I tried using CA I used several tubes of very cheap CA glue from the Two Dollar Shop so the experiment didn't cost me much.

1 hour ago, Tim Dubya said:

Another good source to keep you awake is The Magazine Exchange.

It was through the Magazine Exchange I was able to find some GER carriage drawings that were only available in ancient back copies of model railway magazines.

18 minutes ago, Porkscratching said:

For your amusement here's a thing I dabbled with in card (from amazon envelopes)  just as a kind of rough try out "toile" of an idea to then make in metal of some sort (tin?) which I never did naturally. 

It's circa 10mm (easy to calculate!) to the foot so slightly bigger than O gauge, I simply printed some line drawing, front, top, sides etc, views of a Hunslet loco on paper, glued it to the card, cut the bits out, glued 'em together. 

It's been abandoned, dropped and knocked about on the floor by the cat etc etc, but was all fairly square when I made it, and I reckon the method of building  would work as a "proper" model if you then impregnated the card with CA, varnish, or whatever to stiffen it. Pity it got bashed up I'd be almost tempted to rescue it and build it as a rough card model myself now 😁

That is really impressive and as you say it wouldn't have taken much to make a proper model of it.

Back in the day shellac was used to strengthen card, but that can be difficult to find these days.  I tried using cheap CA (superglue) once and while it certainly worked the fumes were fairly horrible and made me feel ill. 

Using clear polyurethane was a lot more successful and I have an ex-LSWR milk van I did some years ago that's been bumped around in boxes with other tinplate rolling stock and it still looks reasonably good.

An interesting page I stumbled upon almost by accident.  http://www.nevard.com/showcase.htm

It's all 4mm scale, but the layout builds are quality work and are bursting full of good ideas.

Edit:  And here......  https://www.flickr.com/photos/nevardmedia/sets/72157612020895249/

I started an archeological dig in my room to discover a potential site for building a layout only by the time it was midday it was 28 degrees and my brain stopped working for the rest of the day and I had to sleep.  I hate our Summer.  18 degrees and grey skies is my idea of a perfect Summer's day.

4 hours ago, MrWolf said:

I've mentioned it before that as a youngster I was given a pile of old model railway magazines, this is the one which was the very first inspiration.

Gosh, - the MRC, - I remember that.  Unfortunately I don't remember that particular issue.  Going by the cover image though I can see why it would have been a source of inspiration for you.

Small local railways serving their communities in their own individual way.  Iain Rice was brilliant at capturing the spirit of that in his layout designs.

'Light Railway Layout Designs' is my own well thumbed favourite.