Bomp

I think I stand a good chance of doing something with my next project. I've got an old wardrobe door and stripped it of hinges and stuff, put a frame round the bottom, and stuck a layer of cork/cardboard from an old notice board on top. The plan is to make something small enough to keep and work on upstairs and, I hope, to finish. Inspired partly by the latest Model Rail I'm going for a small shunting industry type set up, and inspired by a recent Model Rail, I'm going to have narrow-gauge exchange sidings as well. Here follow progress pictures thus far: The door. with the frame and cork. with the first track plan down (I only have those points etc so I've got to work with what I've got). Tonight I hope to decide on my track plan then lay it and fill in the plain track. I may well try some sort of point mechanism, like slidy rods or something. The cork is nice and thick for making grooves in.

I got City of Manchester, in black with the semi-streamlined smokebox. I also have a photograph of Princess Alice in the same condition (more or less, to my untutored eye), and a plan to rename/number my new one to go with my own Princess Alice. I won't post the photo of the steam Princess Alice, because I don't know who took it etc. However, I will put up a photo of my renamed loco when I've done it. I'll see about hacking the bogie as well to make it look better. I might even weather her slightly. After all, she will be running in an early British Raiways period.

I've got a Fleischmann 0-4-0 electric loco which I'm never going to use unless I modify it in someway. So I'm planning on fitting a chip (I can't quite see how to go about it, but I'll keep at it and publish my results if I manage it), fitting lights, amending the couplings from the continental ones it's got, adding larger sprung industrial type buffers, carving off the cast handrails and fitting wire ones with knobs, fitting proper grills instead of the cast plastic ones and repainting either in a fictitious livery or based on what Bass/another Burton brewer may have painted it in if they'd had one. I'm retaining the pantograph as there are sidings with overhead served by a mainline out of sight, and it charges its batteries there as well. Did I mention that I'm modifying it in my head so it's got batteries as well as overhead? When I've got any pictures (I may have to reassemble it for a "before" picture), I'll put them up. Or I may leave it in pieces and find my £12 manky one rather than learn on the £80 new one. Anyway, they'll be pretty much of a muchness when they're done, as they share a chassis, and they'll both get lights etc. Now to hit eBay and get some LEDs unless anyone has a better source?

Please may I be excused not making any more progress and not updating the blog recently? I've had to do that nasty work thing they make me do in good modelling time. On the plus side, I've only got 8 hours tomorrow, then I'm off until Friday at 5pm, and my brother's coming to see me tomorrow for a couple of days, and then I've got to entertain some children during half term, so I think a bout of Ben playing on my trains while I tidy the basement and lay more track and solder stuff together and what have you is in order. I used to be terrified that he would break things, but in all honesty, as long as I keep the particularly special things safe for playing with only by me or only while I'm close by and hands on, he can play with what he will. While I've always been into prototypicality to a degree, if he grows into it all well and good, if not, then let's make a completely fantasy layout for him. He likes dragons and knights and dinosaurs and things, so the possibilities are appealing. Maybe a large scale garden fantasy layout with the Bachmann G scale stuff I've got. That would be fun. And big enough that he can build stuff and paint it without having to worry too too much about balance. That's all for now, up early in the morning for another nasty early shift.

Taken by Ben, a bit jerky, but still, it shows it works!

In case anyone cares (and I know it's not to do with the layout, but the layout is laid out under the books - does that count?). The collection there is my older collection. I daren't re-read Asimov, as last time I tried, instead of being awestruck at the ideas, I was terribly disappointed by the clunky writing style, and I don't want to spoil it. I also have newer books, by the likes of Peter F Hamilton, Richard Morgan and Alistair Reynolds. And Iain M Banks.

These pictures show most of my interests. The bookshelves hold most of my science fiction collection, mainly Asimov, Clarke and E.E. "Doc" Smith, much of my texts from my classics degree and some of my railway books. And a couple of buses parked on the front. Anyway, the first picture is the other end before being cleared: Then the board cleared ready for track laying to begin: Then three of work in progress getting towards the end result. This is not the end result now, but I'll get some more pictures done soon and stick them up.

Right. I've found the problem. They were too big! I'll just do this one, of one end of the new board before I cleared it for work, then I'll get to the rest of them once I've seen whether this works okay! Back soon, with luck.

The plan was to upload some pictures - I don't have enough words to paint one let alone several! However, something has gone wrong within the Bomputer, so I can't upload pictures to here or to Flickr on Firefox or Interweb Explorer. Rest assured I'm taking them as I go on, but they'll all have to come as one big lump when I manage to make it all work. For now, then, I have moved the various buildings around, as I realised that I couldn't see the engine shed which I've put between the brewery buildings and the main lines at the rear. I've obtained another Peco point and taken one up from the other piece of layout, which leaves me with one Y point to change, then it'll all be nickel silver. And once it runs well, I'll finalise what's going where and start scenery. I've saved the coal bits from the bottom of the bucket (I remembered just before I nearly tipped them all on the fire), so that can go with some ash around the shed entrance. I'm collecting tubes and things which look likely to make useful scenic material, just waiting for the inclination and the opportunity to coincide!

I think I'll get me a couple of his cheap second hand fitted wagons and have a play. They do sound like what I need.

I've got one more kit to build which will fit in with what's there already, a Metcalfe goods shed. After that, it's what I can make with what I've got. I've got a whisky tube which looks like it would make a good fermenter, and with judicious application of pipes and chimneys left over from other kits and a dose of imagination to suggest that there's more brewery out of sight I think I can cobble something vaguely plausible together. Bearing in mind that this is yet another sketch, if it all goes horribly wrong, I can scrap it and start again again.

With help from middle little Bomp, I've laid most of the track and soldered some feeds and worked out where the buildings are going. I've taken some pictures but as before, I'll have to try to upload them somehow. If I fail here again, I'll stick them in Flickr or something. I'm beginning to think that I may have made the access a bit short for getting lots of wagons into the loading areas, but that will have to have been a constraint of the site when they were laying the track. The buildings were there first, so the track had to go round them. More later, if I get back down today.

I was going to post some pictures, but for some reason I failed to upload them. I'll get Mrs Bomp to try for me later, but in the meantime I'm off downstairs to see how far I can get tonight. What I've done so far is to clear the board and start playing with the track and buildings I can find to see what I can put where. It's all much easier to think through now I've got DCC and I don't have to worry about sections or whatever. I never had them previously, and only ever used siding and things that I could feed from the main line or isolate using points. I've got some nice tight clearances and sharp corners in what I've planned so far, but I've run out of small radius turnouts. I can only find my longest ones now. I can either see if my father in law has some spare for now, or take up the ones in the other section, but I'd rather not do that now, because I'd like to keep that bit a bit longer. Or I may just take it all up as a nice practice and use it again now. I can see some chances to try different scenic bits and bobs. Some will be filled in using the hobby foam technique from Keyhaven Key (I think), some with "normal" ballast, and some with cinder ballast after the fashion of Catcott Burtle (edited to get the name right. It was bugging me for ages! Imagine, being so inspired by a layout that you can't get its name right!) I'm going to bed early tonight so I can get up early to carry on. This time I am determined to do the scenic bit as well as playing. Fortunately I have another layout now, so I can do some scenery and then play on the other one! Bargain. Once I have a final notion, I'll do a plan and put that up on here. More pictures when I can do it. Maybe on Mrs Bomp's computer?

I have a large board which has been used as a fiddle yard in the past. This is in the other piece of basement which is going to be cleared for an extension to the layout. In the meantime, I am going to make myself a shunting layout on this board while I wait to clear the rest of the basement. I will use this to practise wiring a DCC layout from scratch rather than trying to bodge a DC one to DCC. It will also be smaller and therefore more likely to be finished scenicly in more detail than the current one is. I intend to lay a double track mainline (or maybe quadruple track...) at the rear ready for the extension, or I may simply leave space. I don't know yet. What I do know is that if it turns out to be workable and worth keeping, I don't want to have to take it up later. I don't have that many suitable buildings, so I will have to make or buy some more. Clearly there will be the brewery and the warehouse I already have, but the rest will start off being whatever I have to hand. I'm going to start this afternoon, so I'll stick some pictures up to show progress. As usual with my layouts, it's going to have to be made of what I've got rather than planned and built using the stuff I should. Fortunately I have quite a few points and things lying around waiting to be used. Watch this space...

Last weekend while shopping for chips which my man didn't have, I got tempted by the black 04 in the pictures. He has a sale on so it was a good time to get tempted. Then he showed me another one, in green, in "as new" condition, but already chipped. I couldn't decide, so he let me bring both home to decide in my own time. Being an awkward sort, and having run in the new mechanism and compared its performance to the as new one, there's nothing in it, so I'm going back on Saturday to see if he'll let me keep the new black body with the chipped mechanism. Then I'll find me a detailing pack for the body I keep and do my first ever diesel upgrade (I'm thinking etched grills etc). Ideally I'd like to put real lamps but that may be a step too far. I don't know until I've worked out what is possible with available equipment and how to do it. Maybe light guides rather than actual LEDs in the lamps? I suppose that if I'm upgrading the loco it doesn't really matter whether I keep the green one or the black one, but I like the black one as it is for now. Plain black can't be too hard a livery to reproduce myself if I have to. I could also take the opportunity to fill in the bite out of the buffer beam. Having two shunting locos makes me think that my brewery is loaded with money, and it can afford one loco for each direction, thus meaning that I can have shunting locos with a coupling on one end and the other end looking "right" as with main line locos. Until I settle on a suitably unobtrusive coupling system, that is...

The first two chipped locos parked in the brewery. It's the same brewery from the previous RMweb thread I did. I'll be filling the rest of the ground in once I've stopped playing for a while. Maybe at the weekend... In the meantime, it's filling a nice gap in the quiet night shift driving seat modelling time!

Thanks! Something to think about while I drift off to sleep after my night shift!

Being a Burton boy, it's going to be Burton, but much smaller and not based on Burton beyond the names and the wagons. One day I'll try to make what I've got look like Burton with the right bricks etc, but for now it's local names more than anything else. I'll look into the couplings - now that shunting is fun (it never was before) I'll need something quick and reliable, if only for the outer vehicles on fixed rakes.

I had never before known the joys of shunting. Now I have an 04 and an Austerity chipped, I can play in my modest brewery for hours! All I need now is a remote uncoupling system. My man is selling second hand stock with Kadee couplers - is it worth stocking up on the stock while he has them? How do you uncouple them? Would I find the answers to these questions with a tiny little bit of looking myself on the search function or internet rather than asking my helpful readership to do all the work for me? Maybe someone would like to come round and do it for me? Am I just getting silly now? Why are most of my phrases phrased as questions?

I've just wired in my first ever hardwired decoder, following Trains4U's J94 guide. As is to be expected, I did some bits my own way, but it worked first time! Advance warning for my in laws - I'll be going there soon for help with grinding the weight away to fit the decoder. Now I'll have to wire my sidings so I can play shunting. I built a couple of headshunt type things when I was laying them as I intended to use DCC in the long run, and now I've got to work out how to wire it. This whole DCC thing is nothing like as scary as I'd made it out to be to myself, so I think I'll carry on trying to see what works and what doesn't. And what doesn't work I won't do again! More later and maybe a picture when I've got the whole thing back together and found a camera with batteries.

I've had my decoder tested, and it works fine, but I can't get the white light to light on my dummy power car. I can't work out how my meter works either, so I can't check the light with that. I've got the control desk out and I've tried touching it on the contacts on the chassis by hand with the power on and I can get the red lights but not the white ones. Could I have broken it already? And if so, why only the white one? At the weekend I'll try everything I can think of, then pester my father in law and if all else fails, I'll only ever run it with that one at the back. The problem there is that I prefer having the dummy leading as it closes the gaps between the coaches. All this will be academic when I lay my "proper" layout with the gentle curves where I can have close couplings on everything that needs it. That will be nice. Just got to plan my system now.

Is to follow the Trains4U guide and put a decoder in Cadley Hill No 1 so I can play in the sidings and justify the effort to add power to them. First, I need to get another decoder when my man gets some in. Birthday in two months and 4 days, so not long to wait!

For the first time I tried my HST power car (only one - I'm still sorting the lights on the dummy) yesterday. On DC the powered car copes with 8 Lima Mk IIIs up my (stupidly steep) hills with barely a murmur. However, with the chip fitted, it keeps on cutting out. Only on the hill, though. It's fine on the level. Am I overworking it? When I get back from work tonight, or more likely in the morning or afternoon before work tomorrow, I'll try it with a gradually diminishing load and see where that gets me. Then I'll try it with the 50 on Airfix MkIIs on the other line. Update when I've got an answer, then more questions about whether I've exceeded the potential of the entry level system already...

I got the Hornby Select system for Christmas, so I'm down to three locos at the moment as I need to get more decoders. I'm hooked on DCC from the very start! My son and I spent a good hour on the first afternoon watching the lights change from white to red and back again on my 50 without it moving an inch. So far I've just connected the two DC feeds which I had on the old set up to the output from the Select, and it works fine. I never had any sections or similar, I always use/d points to isolate sections (by which I mean stranding things in sidings...). My chipped roster thus far is one Hornby 50 and the two power cars. My local man has run out of chips, so I'll have to wait until he gets more. Although I could get my models from other places, I like shopping locally, and he matches internet prices without even trying, and he's the most friendly shop keeper I know round here. Currently I have a dumb bell shaped figure of eight along one wall, but I'm in the process of clearing the remainder of the basement so I can go for a two double track circuit (either two independent or twice round - I haven't decided yet) along walls 25 by 15 foot. Should be good, and it's a good way of spending the dull night shifts imagining what I can do. A couple of queries, should anyone look or know the answer... I have no droppers and it works fine. I take it that if it's working fine as it is there's no need to do anything further? I'll suck the new longer layout and see whether I need droppers on that.