Revolution Mike B

Well at least I'm not going to be short of people to help me crash the trains

Good to meet you at Warley yesterday Brian. Keep up the good work on that 4TC and it'll be interesting to see what you do with the other pink Heljan Mike

I saw Dave Fenton this weekend at Warley and I'm glad to see the poor bloke is now becoming overrun with orders. I've long been championing his system and as someone that's installed, dismantled and reinstalled again over the last year a fair few control boards and motors, it's safe to say that it does what it says on the tin. The only reason I didn't use his stuff on Oak Road is that I wanted something I could plug and play quickly with no messing around fitting frog switches and extra wires meaning Cobalt IPs were they way forward. That said, I'd still have preferred to use Megapoints due to the quieter action and better adjustment. We've found that if money isn't the driving force, the Auto Frog solution makes fitting the stuff a lot easier, especially for DC and now that Dave is working on some stuff to avoid the '12' board, things should get a lot more interesting. If we could get a bracket that was like the Peco Smart Switch one then I think things would really take off because I'm not convinced with the ally channel. Mike

Funny you should say that Scott

I tried so hard to see this layout but couldn't get anywhere near due to it being 3 deep in spectators.....both days! That says a lot about it. Well done for keeping so many people entertained at the weekend

Back from Warley and and I have to say a massive thank you to Matt Taylor of Gaugemaster. I was short on a double station light and didn't really want to buy a whole pack just for one light - now these aren't cheap Chinese ones, they're the nice DCC Concepts ones that are a fair bit of money. I asked if they had any spare ones kicking around that I could buy as a one off and Matt gave me a whole pack for free! There was just one condition......that I take Oak Road along to their Gaugemaster show in 2018.......well I'm hardly going to say no am I?!?! Some of you may be thinking.....whoopee, a £12.95 pack of lights....what's all the fuss about? These guys very rarely give any discount, let alone give stuff away and just by offering to help out with something simple, it made my weekend. I know I've mentioned a few other shops that have helped out but to get Gaugemaster on-board is fantastic. I should also say thank you to Richard Johnson too for his input. It's nice to see some retailers making sure you get good service for your hard earned money. To my surprise, that's two shows lined up for 2018 and Fareham RailEx for 2017, just from you guys talking about my layout on here. Quite humbling! Mike

Good to see LR behaving itself this weekend and I'm afraid the big hole at the right hand end trumps James' shops (sorry James). I took a video with my phone stuck on top of the left hand road bridge of the XC HST and when I showed it to my wife just now, she said 'I thought you were going to a model train show not train spotting? That's when you know you've built yourself a fantastic layout. Well done guys and great to see you again. Mike

Cheers Marcus They match up now

Thanks buddy. The paving sheets are good old Slaters hacked around to fit the curves etc, the Wills ones were a bit too big for the look I wanted. Castle Cary has a really odd assortment of slabs in strange colours and laid in weird ways - it looked different to the normal 'regimental' paving and I figured it would be easier to model something less uniform as people wouldn't notice the mistakes. I'm still playing around with the tarmac surfaces though because I'm not 100% happy with them. The darker colour in the picture above looks good on that section of the platform but on the larger sections it looks wrong. Obviously the colour can vary from one end to the other or in sections but I'd like to try and get it somewhere near believable. Mike

Note to self: When working on two boards that join each other, make sure they're joined together and not in different rooms..........it'll avoid the platform being the wrong height and the wrong colour. You'd have thought I'd have learnt my lesson from getting the ballast the wrong colour........obviously not!! With that rectified, I set about redoing the tarmac sections that I messed up yesterday. They're not quite finished yet so I'll post an update for anyone that's interested when I get back from Warley. To brighten my mood, I thought I'd take a picture of my bargain Olivia's Sound Voyager bought from a trader called Mr Creswell at the Worthing Show. I wouldn't normally mention names but the Voyager had a couple of niggly issues and he was quite happy to take a fair chip on the asking price, unlike a few other people who'd rather cut their nose of to spite their face. Top Man! Anyway, the train now standing at Platform One is the 19:08 Cross Country Service to Radiator, calling at Radiator only! It's only got to travel 18 inches but I bet it'd still be late....and stink of s...!

Not really sure I'm exceptionally good at buddy but thanks anyway!

What a nice comment....Thanks Bill

Well, here's a not-so-good update. I managed to build the rest of the station platforms but not all has gone according to plan. After running out of liquid poly, and no other shops being open except Hobbycraft, I had to make do with some Humbrol stuff instead of my usual cheapo brand. This was the first not-so-good bit because the Humbrol stuff absolutely stinks and......it started to distort my platform edges! Ok, there may have been a bit of user error whereby I used a bit too much but it almost turned it to chocolate!!!!!! I didn't follow my own example of using filler for the tarmac and instead opted for plain sheets of plasticard because it was a larger area, this was the second not-so-good bit. It's dead flat and looks like the stuff that comes out of a dogs backside (I'm being polite and leaving my Tourettes this side of the keyboard). I'm not sure how to remedy this because there's a third not-so-good bit too.......I've not put the right number of paving slab rows in and looks complete tosh too! It's all a learning curve I guess so as per my usual method.....that'll be me redoing it again then.

I still haven't changed my opinion on Steam John, but this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite threads on RMWeb and I'm so glad you've kept on putting up new posts. Mike

Really enjoyed myself on Saturday Ian, it's a pleasure to come along and crash / derail / short out the entire layout drive trains. Looking forward to the next outing!

That's some of the best modelling I've seen for a 'throw it together' layout James! You've made a better job of that than some of the 'exhibition quality' layouts I keep seeing out on the circuit. Awesome stuff.

If it were me, I'd paint the whole wall a solid colour, then throw (not literally) a wash at it and then dry brush it with various random colours......or alternatively, you can follow Al's excellent method mentioned above by Marcus. I'm only just getting to grips with the process so I take advice from everyone and then stick all of their ideas together.....one of them is bound to work! If you want to go really top notch, Mr Allan Downes has an excellent tutorial in the 'Anything you can do' thread.

If anyone's coming along to see Tidworth, I'd avoid the Saturday.......I may be crashing a few trains....

So, inspired by James Making (and the rest of the Loftus Road Nutters), I thought I'd have a go at some 'interior' modelling.....and due to the fact that my Ratio 'Castle Cary' station building wasn't the straightest building in the world, I dismantled it and set about correcting it. Now on the two times I've been to Castle Cary, I didn't think to take any pictures of the inside of the building so therefore I've created something from memory that'll do the job..... Ok, I know this is never going to win any prizes for being the best or neatest bit of modelling but if I don't have a go, I'll never improve. Hopefully, I can tidy it up a bit and once the roof is on, and the lights installed, nobody will notice my errors. In the meantime, if anyone has any pictures of the seats in the waiting room at Castle Cary, or happens to know what they look like, I'd be very grateful as I need to make some!

May as well make it a roundy roundy

Given that my HST is nearly 10 ft long, you'll get a 50 and 5 MK2s in to that space if it's right up to the buffer stop. The loco is longer than the coaches and if the coaches are close coupled, it'll be ok.

I'm not sure how people think my trackwork is great when you compare it to this Dave, it looks amazing and as for the bottom picture.....if I couldn't see what looks like wiring in one of the windows, I'd swear it was real! Mike

PANIC ALERT!!! PANIC ALERT!!!! Our club exhibition manager has just asked me if I'd consider taking Oak Road to our Fareham RailEX 2017 in October. Great.......except I've got a lot of plywood still showing on all four boards Time to pull my finger out and get the station finished. Still, on the plus side, at least trains will run on it and everything works. There's a lot to be said about DCC and a simple layout plan

Hi David It's a mix of medium Woodland Scenics' Buff and some Calci Sand (for Vivariums) put through a very fine sieve. Cheers Mike

Yes please mate, that would be brilliant! Mike