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On Friday the new tracks in the loco shed were scheduled to be ballasted. This photo shows the ballast train arriving in preparation of the work in hand.

Progress on one of the 4 semi-detached townhouses on Station Road alongside the south side of Twickenham Junction – these houses will be half-relief and form the back drop to the western station throat. Tried n tested Terry method: laser etched 2mm MDF with cereal packet window overlays and acrylic laser etched windows and doors Come and see how these and other buildings, trains and trackwork are progressing at our July Open Day – free entry on 23rd July – please see the accompanying video https://youtu.be/BIw0BRN0_Js . Look forward to seeing you there!

A sneak preview of the Station Road semis – villas – townhouses whatever you want to call them… Here the raw front walls, side returns and the block of steps (to be cut into 4). The tall opening on the right and left of each building is the front door (to which the steps will lead). The rectangular cut out on each house is the basement/lower ground floor window Lots to do, but this is a good start – as ever laser cut in 2mm MDF

Not an easy object to photograph…this is the Kingston Up line – the line that links with the flyover. This is a straight ramp followed by a level curve that connects the fiddleyard with Twickenham all of which has been designed to sit on the inner edge of the fiddleyard boards. Gawd knows where we’re going to store it! Come and see it in place on the layout at our July 23rd Open Day…

What is this picture of you ask? It’s a transition board – it is a linking board between the fiddleyard and Twickenham. This is the St Margaret’s /London end, hence the three tracks. It is much simpler than the Country end which will hopefully appear in a month or two – all in good time for our Open Day on July 23rd – come and see us!

We, at Northwick, like the unusual and obscure vehicles (as shown by our model of the transformer train and others). Here is the beginnings of a slightly less ambitious (but interesting nonetheless) couple of projects. A tar wagon (also occasionally used as a water bowser) Anglo Persian Oil Company twin tanker (diag 1581) The two wagons after receiving a couple of coats of primer

Some of you may have recognized a couple of photographs in this month's (May 2016) issue of Model Rail. A few months ago, the Facebook page of the Model Rail magazine posted a question concerning cameos on people's layouts. I responded to this by providing pictures of some of my cameos that feature on Northwick. Not long after, I was asked by a member of the editorial team if they could use my pictures in the Q&A section of the magazine, of course I said 'yes'. The result was this article on page 99. .

Here’s a similar underboard view under one end of Twickenham’s fiddleyard – the wiring is easier as everything is in straightlines and if you are wondering, the point motors (PECO) are all surface mounted…

So here’s board three again as promised at the end of last summer – all the wiring is in place on this complex board – the three grey plastic baskets help to protect the MERG panels sitting underneath them – all I have left to do is to hook up the point motors to the MERG panels and test the whole thing. Joy!

Perhaps not the most exciting pic, but this was momentous! This 2-BIL motor coach was testing the three main running lines on TJ under power (DC only) for the full length of the layout – all passed with flying colours to my immense relief. Twickenham runs… We’re planning an Open Day this summer (details to follow). Come and see how we’re getting on!

The January workday in a lovely warm Kerswell Hall – here we’re testing the strength of a Bulleid Q1 on the gradient that Down Kingston trains will face climbing towards the flyover on TJ. Climbing at 1:33, the Q1 coped with 12 on – about the limit for the pick-up goods – but wouldn’t have managed another wagon. She was slipping a little, but was able to restart on the grade…

TJ is going to need a fair few EMUs… In the bad old days before messrs Hornby and Bachmann got their act together, sourcing EMUs for TJ was going to be tricky. I developed a tic about this and figured that if I grafted a Tri-ang EMU cab front and roof onto a Bachmann EPB, you’d get something half respectable looking and which ran like liquid silk – here’s the end product about three years later. It’s 2-NOB 1862. I’ve done two of these to run as a 4-car train. (If you are wondering, as the Southern had a toilet obsession, NOB stands for No-Bog!)

The story of Mini Me. A few months ago I heard of a company called Modelu who scans you and creates a model version with a 3d printer. I thought that sounded like fun and as they were appearing at the Great Electric Trains exhibition in Gaydon I thought I'd give it a go. The initial scan only took a couple of minutes and I think the results are quite impressive. Here is the original scan that was made and emailed to me before it was printed. 2 weeks later the 2 figures I ordered arrived, printed in a red resin. Both figures painted and ready to plant. One of them is destined to be a fireman on one of my locomotives while the other will be on the layout itself. The non loco Mini me gets involved in a conversation between crews around the grounded coach that's doubling up as a bothy. Northwick will be at Warley this weekend so come along to check out this figure and compare it to the prototype (I should be behind the layout helping operate it for most of the weekend). Modelu (http://www.modelu3d.co.uk/)will also be at Warley this weekend so if you fancy a mini-you to give your layout a truly unique feature then why not check them out.

You may well ask! At the club’s recent Saturday workday, I spent the day repairing track – 5 defects needed sorting. If you look at the inner two rails in this picture, they’re sporting brown plastic rail joiners near the crossing vee of the point and metal (soldered) rail joiners 7 sleepers to the right…somehow some previous track-laying had left a 6mm gap by the crossing vee on both rails; they needed an insulated gap, but not that insulated! So I spliced in new (longer) sections of rail fed through the sleeper chairs and mechanically linked with the insulated rail joiners and soldered the metal joiner to the existing rail. Not pretty, but it works, has solved the problem and by the time it’s painted, no one will ever know!

A test shot of the Albany’s windows. These are laser cut/etched acrylic with a self-adhesive protective coating. The whole window is painted in white primer and then etched so that what is peeled off is the clear ‘glass’ section, leaving behind the window bars and frames We’ve had major problems with the laser cutting machine (It’s been replaced!), hence the slow progress. Hopefully we can move ahead on this now… In the meantime, I’m still doing electrics and some track repairs on the TJ boards…

It was good to see you, thanks for your support. We look forward to seeing your footage. :-)

We have a couple of pages on Facebook if you need more news and pictures of this layout. The main page :- https://m.facebook.com/TDMRCNorthwick The temporary group for the run up to the Warley show : https://www.facebook.com/groups/764170956999010/?fref=ts And for more general information about our club (Twickenham & District Model Railway Club) and our other layouts our website is http://www.tdmrc.org.uk/index.html

Clive's been beavering away with the original water tank at Twickenham - here it is largely complete with a copy for his own layout. The structure likely formed the front entrance to the two-road loco shed at Twickenham (itself second hand from Richmond in 1850). Kingston had a similar if larger arrangement. When Twickenham's shed was demolished in the 1890s, the tank was left to serve the three water cranes around the station site. It still needs a roof and painting, but is largely there...

A behind-the-scenes breakthrough! Okay, this is the Common Fiddle Yard - so called as it's designed to be able to accept any project on the front. It'll be Twickenham Junction to begin with, and here is a standard class 3 tank trundling along road 7 (as proved by the green LED on the gantry) - this is on DCC in a member's garage with all route setting working. He deserves that big grin - he's been beavering away this summer as these photos prove... Lastly, to show the extent of the work - happy bunnies watching 3 archetypal Southern locomotives trundling around the crossover board - spot the route selection gantry - control is temporary to prove that it all works. Very smooth it was too

Hurrah! Board 3 traction wiring conquered - complete with a celebratory cup of tea :-) Sorry to labour the point: this is DCC and this is the base level of wiring. Point motor power, point crossing-vee feeds, MERG data, and Digitrax data wiring still has to go on all four baseboards. Less than for sectional-control analogue wiring, but only just! I chose to sleeve all wiring to make labelling and routeing clearer to understand. A bit overkill, but does make it easier to see what's going on. Point motor wiring will have blue sleeving to differentiate. I won't bore you with update photos of the next wiring phase. I'll post a pic when board 3 is finished - won't be for a while! The heavy black sleeving covers the UP and DOWN traction buses; yellow sleeving covers the droppers going to the rails (one dropper to each separate piece of track), to each point motor for switching the crossing vee and also the point motor looms are sleeved in yellow. As before there are lightbulb overload devices protecting sub-buses and also each point motor feed (highest likelihood of shorts is at a turnout of course...) Any questions - please do come back to me!

Here's the Albany again! This time it's self-supporting - i.e glued together (super glue) and also has all sides, ends and some floors - note also the pediment which the pub no longer has in real life. Twickenham Junction is set in 1961 (or 1955-1965) and at that time the pub had the pediment on it proudly bearing the brewery name... Terry's trialing laser etched acrylic for the window frames and the windows - more on that for a future edition - and the next stage is to create some window frames (as in decorative external plasterwork) in MDF. Watch this space!

Here's board 3 again. This board is the most complex in terms of track and wiring. I've just laid the two DCC traction buses in (the two lots of heavy red and black wires at the bottom and towards the top of the board), all the traction droppers are in place (the 12 bundles of wire - bundled together to keep them out of the way whilst I progress the wiring) and now I need to group wiring together to create the two DCC districts (split UP and DOWN) and the various subdistricts (protected by lightbulb overload devices All being well, I'll post an update in a few days to show progress with wiring - exciting eh?

Here is a link to a video of the new turntable mechanism being tested. https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=qd73qs_1lkc

Success at last! The Albany in raw and basic form. One of the Terrys has been beavering away with a laser cutter on 2mm MDF and produced many of the main components to create this key Twickenham Junction building - the real pub is still there of course altho' the eagle eyed will spot that the parapet has changed since the 1950s

Illustrious T&DMRC members working on both Twickenham Jct and the Common Fiddleyard - the 14-road fiddleyard destined to serve TJ and hopefully many other projects too. Both projects are at the wiring phase hence so many shots of boards on their sides and lots of wires. AND this is DCC....