Dave Searle

Looking forward to seeing this - mine are still in primer! Cheers, Dave

Hi, Yes, I have two FGW 165 & a 166 set ready to build (so far - we will need several more 166s). They are very nice, just need to get round to making them up Cheers, Dave

Hi, After a long period of relative quiet, things have begun to move again on the layout. At a recent working Saturday we built the main span of the lighting fascia. This is a single span of 20 ft built out of three sections firmly bolted together. The fascia is 4mm birch ply on a framework of timber. This will probably be supported on a pair of timber supported fixed to each end of the layout. When we built this, the layout itself was unavailable, as it was still at Phil's house being wired. The basic parts and a rear view: The front being ably supported by the team: The rear showing minimal sag when only supported at the ends: This Monday Phil returned the boards with the wiring complete and just needing some final testing in a fully assembled configuration. The control panel mounted above the fiddle yard (it hinges up for access): The rear of the panel: The undersides of the boards, somehow I managed to photograph some boards the opposite way round to others. Board 1 Board 2 Board 3 - the central one, which is underneath the control panel: Board 4: Board 5: As you can see a lot of wire and wiring has gone into this (& I forgot to photograph the fiddle yard control panels). So many thanks to Phil for all his hard work. There are still some LEDs to be added to the panel and another power supply to be built. We've got some acceptance testing to do and then we can make some more progress. Cheers, Dave

Hi Eric, Very nice - I like the effect of the 8-carriage set, nicely close-coupled. Nice touch with the spoked wheels on the brakes and the enlarged windows in 3rd class. Do you have any issues with the weight of the coaches (even after your efforts at reducing it, there's still a lot of whitemetal) and the haulage power of "Wandle"? Cheers, Dave

Hi Ian, Many thanks for bringing Banbury at the show, I'm just sorry I was so busy that I didn't get a chance to spend as much time watching it as I would have liked and only spoke to you briefly. There are some positive comments about Banbury on the N Gauge Forum. Cheers, Dave

Hi Ben, I need a slightly embarrassed/sheepish grin smiley After all the activity earlier, we've rather ground to a halt. We're waiting for the Phil to finish the wiring. He got a full-time contract job in January and work on the wiring stopped, The contract has now finished and he has restarted the wiring. Visitors to the Alexandra Palace may have seen the control panel on the club's demo stand there. In the interim we've done a few small things, but not really worth reporting. I've started on the site office and we're looking into the two northern footbridges. Bill's started making some trees. David's nearly finished the autoballasters. Hopefully Phil will get the wiring finished soon and we can then start some scenic work. Co-incidentally, I received today a large parcel from the excellent NGS shop containing 10 Osprey, 10 Salmon and 5 Mullet kits, so the project is still alive, if not very active. Cheers, Dave About to head off to help the NESCOT setup.

Hi Ian, Thanks - I'll see what N Gauge Lines have at the show. Cheers, Dave

Hi Ian, Excellent detailing - it's adding layers of depth to the model. I like the chain fencing - what are you using for it? I need something similar, but with a very fine horizontal square mesh for a couple of foot bridges - at the moment I'm considering using stiffened stretched nylon tights! Looking forward to seeing you at NESCOT this weekend. Cheers, Dave

I had the chance to see this excellent layout in the flesh today at Eastleigh and have a chat to Ian. This shot shows something of how well he has captured the environment of the station: Well done - I'm looking forward to watching further progress and seeing it again in the future. Cheers, Dave

Hi Ian, very impressed with Banbury, our team needs to catch up, then possibly run some through services? Cheers, Dave

Hi Ian, Many thanks for that information. I've found a place (Flexfireleds.com) offering 5m strips outputting 5,200 lumens (600 LEDs per strip), so two of those would work, However, they are £128 each. I agree that they will be much easier to support over the length we need. I'll do some more searching and see what our budget is for lighting. Cheers, Dave

Hi Ian, Thanks for your suggestion, I've been doing some estimates for the light output required. One a previous layout we had four 150W floodlights over a layout length of about about 3.25 meters. Each bulb was rated at 2100 lumens and gave a good, bright, lighting effect. Making some assumptions: - that the light was spread fairly evenly - we will be putting the lighting on this layout at about the same distance from the track level. I estimate that we need a lighting level of about 2.5 lumens/mm to get the same level of lighting (a total near 13,500 lumens for the 5.4 meters of visible layout). Looking at some figures from the Screwfix catalogue for some T4 and T5 fluorescent tube fittings, this could be nearly achieved with six 849mm 21W Sylvania T5 tubes (2,100 lumen each giving 12,600 in total) or six 747mm 30W T4 Halolite tubes (1,800 lumens each giving 10,800 in total). These would cost around £90-100. I am trying to work out what the light output actually is for the LED strips that your link pointed at - there is a figure of 505 lumens for 6.54W, but the strip is rated at 48W. so is that 3,700 lumens (0.74 lumens/mm)? I've seen some other 5m LED strips that give a lighting level of around 1.2 lumens/mm. Unfortunately these cost around £250 each and we would need 2 to get near the 2.5 lumens/mm level. So the jury is still out Cheers, Dave

We've been quiet for a while. Phil is is making progress on the electrics, but few of us realized the sheer volume of work going into it - the inter-baseboard connectors alone took 1000 soldered joints. A lot of the wiring we put in just to get the layout running for our show last April has either been stripped out and replaced or moved. For example, the inter-baseboard connectors are now under the scenic side of the layout rather than the fiddle yard. He has now finished the basic wiring: - the droppers from the rails to tag strips, - the 60 point motors to tag strips - most of the main control panel. There is still the linking together of the tag strips, the fiddle yard controls and the LEDs for the main control panel. I spent a day helping him over the Christmas break and we managed to do the droppers for the scenic side of one of the baseboards - here are before & after shots, above and below the board: The wires are added - blue (feed), black (common return) and green for switching the frogs: Then soldered up: Each of the 60 point motors needs to be connected to its tag strip: The main control panel is coming along, the switches are wired up. Still to do are the LEDs to indicate the point settings (black dots in the first picture, white in the second) and some switches for uncoupling electromagnets. The control panel is designed to be mounted on the centre baseboard above the tracks. It is hinged to allow it to be lifted up to access any stock below. It controls the scenic side of the layout - the fiddle yard is controlled from two dedicated controller at each end of the yard. There are 6 "zones": - Red and black for the up and down main lines, controlled by the fiddle yard operators - 4 zones for Hinksey yard itself (orange, purple, blue and green) which are switchable between any of the controllers: C & D for the scenic side & the 2 fiddle yard ones A & B. Phil is a very neat wirer: He reckons that the control panel alone has taken over 50 hours so far. Meanwhile, I've made a start on the site office trellising using Scalelink 2mm etches with 1mm square and 1mm x 0.5mm brass strip to create the framework. So some progress, albeit quite slowly. Cheers, Dave

Hi Bernard, it looks as if there is a 2mm mesh that might be suitable. Many thanks, Cheers, Dave

Following the Carillion autoballaster last week, and spurred on by seeing the sample Farish JJAs at Warley, David has been pressing on with the transfers on the first of the Network Rail HQAs: These N Gauge Society kits are making up into some superb models. From this batch we will end up with 5 Carillion, 10 ex-Railtrack and 10 Network Rail versions. 25 wagon sounds like quite a lot, but we will probably need at twice that number eventually. When I mentioned that to David - he muttered something about having to get on with building his own layout I've made a start on plans for the site office/mess room, estimating sizes from Google Earth, Bing and photographs. The main building is some 55' x 10' with a secondary one 20' x 8'. The smaller one looks like a ribbed container, so that may provide a starting point for the model. The larger one will need to be built up with larger sides, windows and doors. These are discretely tucked away behind a lattice fence about 130' long and about 9' high: I was thinking that plastic strip would be easiest for the lattice fence, but someone else suggested brass etches. Does anyone know of an existing range that has something suitable? Many thanks. Cheers, Dave

Thanks Chris, I am beginning to think that fluorescents are probably the way forward. After looking at the Lighting Pelmet thread (http://www.rmweb.co....g-pelmet-design), I now have a 30W Halolite T4 tube and this looks quite promising - we'll probably need about 6 of these. At the Tolworth show on Sunday, I had a good look at the lighting on the Crawley club's West Tilgate (which is a similar sized N gauge layout to Hinksey) to see what they had done. The pelmet controls where the light lands and splits into two part (which each then fold in half) for ease of transport and to protect the tubes. They have used standard sized tubes. This gives us some useful ideas. In other news, David is making progress on the Carillion autoballasters. The transfer is just held on with bluetac at the moment to see how it looks. And Phil came along with the plan for the control panel. So some quiet progress is being made. Cheers, Dave

Hi Oldddudders, Many thanks for that report of your experience. I had noticed that there are different output levels from different LED light strips, but it does sound as if we need more light than these would provide. We may need to look at wire track systems, as I'm not keen on having to support the weight of fluorescent tubes. Some more thinking needed. Cheers, Dave

A quiet few weeks. We had a working Saturday recently which gave Phil the chance to make progress with the wiring. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for him, real life ("paid work") has taken precedence for the last few months so he hasn't been able to make as much progress as he would like with the mammoth task of wiring. He focused on getting the remaining point motors in place and wired up. In particular the scissor crossovers at each end of the fiddle yard. These proved to be tricky as the point motors needed to be offset from each other so that they would fit. This meant that the operating wire had to be joggled so that it was offset and came up under the right part of the tie bar. This can be just seen on the left hand point motor here. Then the crossover had to be wired up - quite a lot of wires and I'm not sure it's finished yet. Here is a view of most of the wiring for one of the end boards. The other end board will be almost a mirror image. This is what the top of the same board looks like Meanwhile I have been doing some experiments with ballast, using Chinchilla dust as this is both fine enough and cheap in bulk. I've been using Johnson's Klear diluted with water and a drop of washing up liquid and sprayed on as a fine mist. I've also tried adding some watercolour paint to see if I can get some different colours. It is quite a slow process, as even using a commercial ballast spreader leaves quite a lot of tamping into place and tidying up with a dry paint brush before fixing can take place. Following a visit to a club member's house to inspect his outside lighting, we are now looking into the possibility of a LED strip for lighting the layout. These have around 300 high intensity LEDs in a 5 metre length and would only need a lightweight support structure. Given that they need to be at least 3 feet above the layout we hope they will provide adequate illumination. We would love to hear from anyone who has used such lighting and whether it was effective, before we commit ourselves. Cheers, Dave

We have now got hold of some more 2" square aluminium tube for the support beams. These are cut into six 80" lengths to make up two 20' rails to support the boards. Two basic lengths: To join the beams together we have used some wooden "tongues" make from some 2" inch square oak that our tame carpenter had lying around in his workshop. These have been planed down to be a good sliding fit inside the aluminium tube and one end fixed to one tube with screws: We were then able to place the beams on the trestles. In the longer term we will need to create mounting points or brackets on the trestles to maintain consistency and allow clearance to tighten up the bolts that join the boards together. In the club room the floor is fairly level, but we will also need to introduce some means of ensuring that the beams are kept level before putting the baseboards on top, possibly by some screw adjusters or a set of shims. And place the baseboards on top: One great advantage is that the beams make aligning the board ends much easier as they just slide into place. We haven't added anything (yet) to prevent the boards moving along or across the beams as the weight of the boards seems to be enough to keep things in place. We will probably review this later. Finally a photo of my new toy (from Dapol). Cheers, Dave

Last night saw the completion of the curved ends to the backscene. These are made from pieces of hardboard forming a natural curve between the existing structural backscene and the wing pieces of the two end boards. There is a small square wooden upright fixed to the back of the front wing piece to provide a solid location for the front edge of the curve. Using this the hardboard was bent to the right shape and cut-outs added for the trains to escape. We needed to remove a bit of the cork to ensure the hardboard bedded in correctly. Finally then the curve edge was feathered to merge into the main backscene and fixed with small screws. There will be some filler added eventually to smooth this transition and some trees placed in front to distract the eye. This end will have a road bridge to partially disguise the train exit holes And the other end will have a footbridge as the scenic break. Cheers, Dave

We've been quietly working over the last few weeks filling in all the missing sleepers and adding extended sleepers needed for the cosmetic point motors and hand levers. I also started to add the orange pipes and concrete trunking needed to protect the cabling. I thought I had got the hang of where they went, until one of the club members, who is a retired signalling engineer, said that I'd need a few more than I had done. He volunteered to draw up some plans showing where the pipes and cabling would go. It is a much more complex subject than I had realised: cables are needed for signals, point motors, point heaters, track circuiting, TWS, distribution boxes, etc. He also helpfully explained the purpose of some of the "odd" boxes just visible in the undergrowth in photographs. Here is where we are currently: So we'll see what still needs to be added. We've started thinking about the curved corners to the backscene and tried out some hardboard to get a feel for how it would work: We've also been looking into trees - we'll need a lot for this layout to fill in about 20 feet of background to a depth of a couple of inches. So a mix of detailed ones and filler ones will be needed. Here are some ready made ones from the Model Tree Shop, which are quite nicely detailed and not too expensive: We will need some taller ones and a lot of bulk as well. Cheers, Dave

A quieter evening's work last night. Well it was, once Bill had finished grinding down the points of some screws with his Dremel. These were projecting through to the front of the back scene from the new mounting brackets on the back and in danger of causing injury. We have started adding the "missing" sleepers. We had left quite large gaps between the sleepering on pieces of track when adding the rail joiners. As we were under a time pressure originally to get the track laid and running we didn't have time to add the cosmetic sleepers as we laid the track. So now seemed as good a time as any to retro-fit them. As can be seen the gaps look quite obvious and call attention to themselves. With some careful work cutting and sliding the "filler" sleepers into place the visual feel of the track improves tremendously. Here you can see two new "wooden" sleepers (brown) and two "concrete" sleepers (light grey), in both cases one each side of the rail joint. We also added sleepers near the baseboard joints. Here they have to be fitted around the small woodscrews that are providing physical location and support to the ends of the rails. The lower joint has been modified, the top one awaits its sleepers. The screws themselves should eventually be hidden by the ballast. There are still quite a lot to do, and we also need to think about other items that need to be added before ballasting such as point motors on extended timbers and cabling passing under the rails. Does anyone have recommendations for cosmetic point motors in N gauge? We were so quiet this week that other club members wondered if we were "sleeping" Cheers, Dave

Thank you both for your kind comments. We used straight timber with very few knots from a good timber merchant (Champion Timber) which cost £45. The 20 brass hinges were from B&Q and cost £15. That gives £60 for four trestles, so £15 each, probably still cheaper than commercial equivalents and we could choose the size (in our case 36" high and 33" wide across the top bar). The fact that they fold makes storage easier. Cheers, Dave