Fastdax

Many thanks Ade! Sometimes I get carried away with the grot and the detail. Now I'm back to painting and ballasting the remaining bit of bare track. Progress is slowly moving towards the station!

Thanks John!

Must stop adding detail and move on to some of the untouched areas of Offerston Quay!

Thanks Pete!

North Light Grot The drain pipe has gone rusty and its overflow has seriously stained the wriggly tin roof below: The North light windows have a growth of moss and mould where they can't be washed. The local birds have also been busy:

Thanks Ade. It was, as the late, great Bob Ross would have put it, a "happy accident". It's MIG black enamel wash over barely-dry acrylic paint, then spritzed with a water/IPA mix. Everything reacted with everything and made those run-off trails which I immediately settled for!

North Light Roof Here's the finished roof section (apart from a bit more weathering round the drain pipe): It's lit by warm white LEDs from the inside: Those windows need a good wash!

North Light Roof For a while, I've had a foam-board mock up of a couple of North-light roof sections above the wall with the archway: I decided to press on with this design and used the mock-up as a basis for the real roof. here it is with thin ply cladding and lead flashing (takeaway container foil) started:

Thanks Adam!

I particularly like the way the light from the warehouse office fanlight hits the wall beside it. This seems to lend a tiny bit of atmosphere to the scene:

Building Lights I finished adding LEDs to the buildings' internal structure. These were a mixture of LEDs that I found in my box 'o lights - some "12V" mini LEDs (with resistor pre-wired), some self-adhesive 12V strips of 3 LEDs and some standard flat-end 5mm 3V LEDs, all in warm white. The 12V LEDs are quite bright enough on 9V. Some even needed a pre-set potentiometer in series to adjust the brightness down a bit. Here are the new lights without the building fronts on: And here's the finished effect. Not all windows get a light. Necessarily low-light photo so sorry about the poor quality: OQ isn't a big layout but I counted 40 separate lighting LEDs on there now. More to come, I'm sure.

I thought a couple of locos were enough for Offerston Quay. Now at 7, plus a railbus, plus three or four loco kits waiting their turn! The Jinties are good though. My local model shop Rails Of Sheffield did me a cracking deal on one which will become a pull-push engine.

I tend to leave the unused wire in place in case I want to add a 5V feed as well as the 9V. I also do this, which makes it hard to reverse the polarity (and also the plugs only really fit into the sockets one way round):

What is a bit confusing in these photos is that I used twin red/black cable to connect the PSU to the choc blocks, then 3-wire servo extender cables from the choc block, through the male/female connectors, to the LEDs. Servo cables always have 3 wires (5V, 0V and signal). 2-wire equivalents with plugs and sockets would be most useful for jobs like wiring up lights but would not be sold as servo cables.

Building Lights With all of this moving of the buildings, I remembered that I wanted to add internal lights to the warehouse, first-floor walkway and the office building at the left-hand end of the layout. Here's the area without buildings: And here's the internal walls and rooms of the warehouse (left) and office building (right). The warehouse wall is separate to the facade but the office internal structure slides into its building from below: I tapped off the 9V power feed installed here and created some plug-in points for the three building facades and two warehouse internal boxes. I like to use servo cables to make the buildings easily removable. The white wires are unused and clipped off short:

Thanks Barnaby!

With the buildings back in place and a bit of rolling stock:

The layout is back in place but "naked" without all of the arches, buildings etc. This iPhone panorama makes the front of the layout look convex whereas it's concave in reality: The half inch I removed does make a lot of difference to the ease of assembling and moving OQ.

Sky Paper While the layout was out of its usual position (and here you can see the wall brackets it sits on plus the amazing amount of cr@p that has accumulated below): ... I removed the old, white paper backdrop and stuck up some sky-blue paper that I've had in stock for a while now: It's not the final backdrop, which may involve hardboard or thin MDF and a photographic scene.

It's not like I can go to work! On the upside, Oscar the Spaniel is getting more daytime walks than ever

Trimming the baseboard The minor woodwork I alluded to a couple of posts back was to trim the length of the layout to make it a better fit in its room. When I measured the room, I took the length of the wall that OQ would sit back to, without making sure that the two side walls were at 90 degrees to the back wall, which they turned out not to be. The layout was built to fit the back wall and is therefore a tight push-fit between the side walls and this makes it difficult to tip the layout up to access the underside as it tends to jam. So I decided to trim a bit off the left-hand end to make this easier. Luckily only the back half of the baseboard overlaps the left side wall. The front half is across a window aperture and doesn't need trimming. So I split the layout and carried the left hand half down to the garage. Here's the end that will be trimmed: Here's the underside, showing the ply beam construction: The red line here shows what will be removed. It's only 1/2 inch but it will make the world of difference: I cut away the marked wood with a sharp Japanese pull-saw: The removed bit isn't very thick: This bit was reattached inside the end beam, to keep the baseboard's structural integrity. You can never have too many clamps!: While I was at it, I removed the bit of track at the end of the high level as it had got caught on something and broken away from the baseboard. I cleaned up the board, re-soldered the fishplates and glued the bit of track back down: I don't often get to see OQ's trackwork from this angle:

DIsplay Case I found some interesting twisty quarter-sawn grain for the top of the display case, which is the bit you normally see (until it becomes yet another horizontal surface to collect railway-related junk).

I need to up-end Offerston Quay in order to separate the halves and do some minor woodwork to the left-hand half. One issue is that I don't have anywhere to safely store my locos and rolling stock, so I made a display case to hold some of the items. The top, bottom and sides are 12mm white oak. The oak has several coats of polyurethane varnish for knock resistance. The back is 3mm white hardboard, glued and pinned, and the slide-in front is 2mm acrylic sheet. The 5 shelves are edge-ground, 6mm tempered glass with one frosted face. They are 477mm wide by 77mm deep and are held in 6mm rebates in the sides. This gives enough width for 3 x 17 foot wagons or a single 57 foot coach. It's mounted on the side of a rolling drawer-pack with a bracket underneath and screws in the top corners.

Great article in RM Rod. It's interesting to see how their take of Ramchester is subtly different to yours as documented here. Keep up the good work!

Making a single 3D item from scratch can involve as much work as building it from real, separate pieces. It took me a long time to get the window cappings and sills right on this, my tribute to Richard's stone office/store building on "Midland in Bristol": The advantage of 3D printing is that you can then run off as many copies as you want. I still have a few left over. Hmmm - I wonder what I could use them for?