nomisd

Whilst I wade through what seems like the unending task of making a control panel, this has arrived. It is of course a Model Rail/Dapol Sentinel. I have got one because one operated at Greenford on loan from the GWR on occasion and I have decided that I would like to try and replicate Greenford's actual roster (as well as operate it with other industrial locos). So this is the frist loco towards that. It will need de-transferring but that can wait for now. When ordering this I sort of got another loco that I didn't really plan to get but you know how it goes... This is actually destined for mainline operation. I have been looking for a rail blue 08 but have been finding it difficult to find. I saw this under the class 11s on the Model Rail site and I couldn't really pass it up. Its completely out of my date range but it is rather nice. They both arrived this morning.

Late 70s/early 80s Rugby with many a West Midlands and East Midlands Rovers in school holidays. Three things come to mind. anything Southern, but especially 73s. class 76s anything Scottish. For a long time the solitary 26/27 that I saw was one that was at Crewe Works during an open day in the mid 70s (1976?). Went on a Merrymaker to Edinburgh in the early 1980s and saw them by the bucketful. But even at Rugby there was the out of the ordinary. One of the remaining class 44s used to work a coal train to Rugby (presumably for the cement works) in the late afternoon/early evening. Certainly in time for me to get from school to the station to see it.

Before I start cutting wire and soldering, I would like to check what I am about to do is correct. I have previously posted this and have taken the points on board. However, I would just like to check again. I have prepared the fascia for the control panel and have started drilling the holes for the switches. I just want to check a couple of points.. I am going to be using these as the innards of my panel. The bottom ones are for incoming wire, with the wires from the power supply going into the A/B terminals. The live then gets distributed to the switches with the return going off to a common return. The top ones are for the outgoing wires with the switch wires going in the front and the rear wires going to three female 15 way D connectors (there are obviously three male 15 way D connectors from the board). This is how I think the switches should be wired however I am far from confident. A type switches are for point motors and will have two LEDs of the same colour to indicate which way the points are set. B switches are for A/B controller cab control of the track with bicolour LEDs to indicate the route is set. C switches are A and B cab control with a single colour LED to indicate the route is set. A and B type switches are DPDT and C type switches are SPDT. Are these correct or am I missing something fundamental? One other question on the common return. Can a single common return be used for the whole thing? So if I gather all the returns into a single point inside the control panel and then send it out by one of the pins on one D plug to a single wire that runs around the board and is tapped into by both the track and point motors, is that all I have to do? Or do I need to have two common returns - one for track and one for point motors? Any guidance is gratefully received. Thanks.

I have finally started building the control panel so I may actually start laying track in the not too distant future! However the time over the last year hasn't completely ignored this project. I have done a bit more research and have found another loco that worked at Greenford and an intriguing rail vehicle used on the Greenford system. Looking through the IRS Records, I have found reference to a loco that was used at Greenford on test. It was the Armstrong Whitworth demonstration loco D10. Record 180 has an article about the AW diesel locos and from the information in this article it appears to have been on test at Greenford during 1933. This information seems to come from the Brian Webb Pioneer Diesel Locos book. The loco is of course available in kit form from High Level Motors. I am very tempted to get on of these as its an interesting loco. The intriguing vehicle is this The photo was taken by the late Frank Jux at Greenford sometime in the 1960s. All I know about the vehicle is whats in the photo. I think it is powered as I think the power source is all the things that can be seen on the underframe. appears to be some sort of engine. I don't think that it is just braking equipment. The handle on the underframe that extend up looks like it is some form of control lever, whether it is for a motor, brake or both. It seems to have been used to carry something that was pushed on and off to the loading dock but seems to have only been done at one end. I cannot decide if it is standard gauge or some narrow gauge. I am not sure if the two men pushing something away on a barrow on the left have anything to do with the machine or are just co-incidental. Any suggestions for the vehicles use or how or if it was powered are welcome. It has given me an idea though. The photo is also interesting as to the buildings on the left hand side, some nice details there.

Thanks for everyones input. I had sort of come to the conclusion that Common Return is the way forward with this. That is a very good question. I think that answer is best explained with my reasoning behind it. In real life it was possible for industrial locos to work over BR metals. These locos were fitted with Railway Executive plates (which I believe came from a system that the GWR originally started) and were only allowed to work over very specific predetermined bits of line (IIRC these were listed in Local Sectional Appendices for each company who had registered locos). The shared sections are my take on this. So the its more of a case what Cab B can do on the BR section rather than what can be done on the non-shared sections at the same time as Cab B being "in control" of the section. And you are correct, the original plan was incomplete. I have attached a v2. Interestingly, I actually went and looked at the track laid out on the board this weekend rather than drawing it from memory. It has slightly changed the actual layout. It has raised another question, which may actually be a somewhat naive question but I shall ask it anyway (they do say there is no such thing as a stupid question after all). I am somewhat confused by how power is supplied to points. What I mean is actual power feeds rather than the motors to control them. If we accept that relying on the rail joiner to supply the power then the power has to come from somewhere. Does this mean that each point will need to have droppers? And a follow up to this if the answer is yes, where do these feeds go to? Or am I missing something very fundamental here?

After much vacillation, I am finally starting to think about building a control panel for my layout. I say layout but its really a two in one layout, see here and here for details. I spent an inordinately long amount of time deciding how to actually power this layout, DC or DCC. I have decided on DC, mainly because I already have a Gaugemaster TS controller and its all question of economics. So for better or worse that is what I am going for. This of course now means that I have to build a control panel. It would seem that approach to take with all of this is Cab Control. With this in mind I have drawn the attached first go at it. At this point, I should point out that this (and wiring the track and point motors) is at the very edge of my a) knowledge and b) experience. I sort of get the principles of what I doing here but only just! I am not quite at looking at wire as being magical electric string but. I know that for some people reading this, some of the questions I have seem blindingly obvious but I have to admit that I am approaching this part of my project with more than a little trepidation. A couple of points of clarification before I get to my questions. Green is Cab A, blue is Cab B and purple is Cab A or Cab B. The numbers are points and the text in red are codes so I could identify how many sections I have. All track is Peco code 75 and all the points are electrofrog. Point 3 & 4 is a three way point, 5 and 6 is a double slip. will be using MTB MP1 for point motors. LS1 & 2 is in reality LS1 and 2 A and B as its a loco shed so will have isolated sections So my initial question is my diagram correct so far?! A very rapid follow up to that is there are 26 (I think) sections on the plan, excluding the fiddle yards and loco shed as discussed above. I am correct in thinking that each one of these sections requires some sort of switch? The purple sections are the parts that required DPDT switches with everything else being controlled by SPDT switches? Thanks in advance for any guidance that you can offer.

Oh the best laid plans. As I have explained in the post on the industrial half of this model, I have spent a overly long time trying to decide how to control this layout. Good old fashioned analogue has won the day and I have finally ordered point motors. This means that I can start to actually laying track. I have also ordered a couple of new mainline locos and yet more vans. With a fair wind, I may actually have a train running by next year...

There is nothing like a bit of procrastination.... I have spent the last 18 months coming to a conclusion on how I am going to control this layout - analogue or digital. I know that 18 months to come to a decision seems excessive but there was a lot to think about. On the one hand there was DC - tried and true, a bit of a pain to prepare for (building a control panel, wiring switches and so on), no modification (and extra expense) to locos and I already have a Gaugemaster TS controller. Against DCC which with seemingly minimal set up a whole world of stuff is available but it strikes me as relatively costly for an initial set up and if you go bells and whistles (literally) on the locos the cost of those start to become eyewatering (even though this is ostensibly an industrial layout, there is a large element of mainline so more than one mainline loco is required to stop it being dull for me to operate). So for the last two years I have vacillated between the two options. Every time I thought I had decided something made me reconsider. In the spirit of a new year, I decided that it was time to pick one or be forever in a spiral of indecision. So I have gone analogue. I think if I didn't already have the controller it may have been a different conclusion but that in the end swayed it. I will admit not to actually looking forward to building a control panel but its not beyond my capabilities, just that soldering isn't my favourite thing to do. As its a one time thing, I am mulling over an all singing and dancing control panel that shows set routes lit up. However, that will be at the very edge of my skills and that double slip does complicate things... So in this new found head space of progress, I finally got round to ordering my point motors last night (even though I could have done this months ago as the DC/DCC conundrum meant no difference to the choice of point motors!) which means that I may actually have started track laying before the summer is here.

No in that I have done very little since my last post here in, just checks....ruddy heck the start of December! What I have done is this which is something to do with this layout but that the point its got to at the moment. I have also got the station building, a Kingsway Models Ealing Common station kit but have done nothing with it just yet. I was about to make the plunge and buy the DCC controller and point motors and then we got household lurgi so that has taken nearly a month out of proceedings. That has now all passed and hopefully I will be back to it soon. But thanks for asking and taking an interest in my efforts.

That is a fantastic link. exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks for that/

A request for inspiration. This project has changed with its building.The initial idea was to have just a single track of all gauges with no points or anything complicated. As I started building it and finding out that the moulded tracks could be taken out and replaced by real track changed everything. When I was doing the above doodle, I expanded on an idea that came from being the new owner of four Roco wooden bodied hopper wagons. What couldI do with them, especially once I found out that the coal loads just popped out. Whilst I was making the model, it occured to me that the silverchute was on the wall of the extraction system for the whole mill. In real life it possibly was designed as a chute to get rid of the saw dust collected. It is not inconceivable that these could be collected for further use. A traffic was then created with V skips collecting the saw dust via the chute. The V ships taken to a bank and tipped into the hopper wagons. Loco collects the hopper wagon and removes the hopper wagons to the factory using the saw dust. As far as I can tell all I need is a way to lift saw dust to the chute and a tipping mechanism for the V skips. Anyone got any suggestions (including a more suitable forum) as to do achieve this?

After digging out the board, I did a bit of noodling. It started off as just a doddle for the mill general arrangement. It snowballed!

I have decided on the base board. It needs some last demolition of the previous layout. Its 124 x 69 cm. The black section on the left is a bolt on filler board. For some reason that I cannot remember, I had one board made narrower than the rest of the boards. Someone at the club I was a member of at the time made a filler board that wide to fill the gap. I think its a tempting standard gauge road bed.

I got three of the straights from the track in the set and just checked what I thought I then took the Dremel to the base. These holes were far from the correct width just to drop a length of track into so much snipping of sleepers was done until the three lengths fitted into the holes. I then glued them in and set about filling the gaps. My chosen medium for this is Jointing Compound designed for tape and jointing plaster board walls. The reason being I have a 10 litre tub of it knocking around (its a long story....). Its my intention to use it to make the roads and concrete aprons on Greenford Green so its in line with this being my test bed for that. A couple of applications and a sand later and its looking alright. I just dragged a scalpel blade down the flange way a few times until it was deep enough to run a wagon down it. Next job is to paint the base. Of course this does now call into question the premise of the title as its now going to be a sawmill in two gauges not three.

One of the other things that happened over christmas was Mrs nomisd asked if I wanted a chirstmas present. As a rule we stopped buying each other chrismas and birthday presents years ago on the basis that we buy nice things all the time, why wait for two arbitrary days? I took her up on this very generous offer so we went to the model shop near us that started this. I decided that I would get some narrow gauge stuff. They have a very nice selection of Minitrains, Bachman and Peco on offer. I was going to go for a Minitrains Deutz and then buy some track and a couple of wagons/ Mrs nomisd then spotted the Roco train set that consists of (what I think is a) freelance diesel, four bogie hopper wagons, oval of track and a controller. Why don't we get this instead? Well because the loco is not real, I don't want four bogie hopper wagons I want flats, I have a controller and I wanted track that was a bit less train set like was not the answer I gave! So we got it, Now these were all things that went through my head as were all the counters to those points. And it is extremely rude to be so churlish when someone is getting you a present. We got it home and I set it up on the table and played trains with it for half an hour and great fun it was too. Mrs nomisd pointed out she had never actually seen anything model train related working so quickly. She may have a point. I then made quite an important discovery. The track that is moulded into the base of the saw mill is actually 9mm gauge and not the smaller HOf scale that I thought it was originally. This set cogs whirring in my head.

The kit did indeed arrive at the end of the week. I spent some time over christmas starting to construct it. I am pleased to say that the kit was just as much as a pleasure to build as I remember it being. I started with the machinery contained in the mill. Some of it is quite fiddly and is made up of many parts. I decided to paint them as I went along. Mrs nomisd did question why I was painting every thing the colour that it was moulded in. Just because! I then tackled the building. Again I gave every thing a quick going over with a rattle can before I put it together. Personally I prefer this as it means that there is less masking when you paint before putting the parts together. The colour that I have chose for the concrete frame is perhaps a bit too green but concrete is a difficult colour to get right imo. And the two together.

After spending some time thinking about it I came up with Plan E - a stencil. This would mean that I could go back to the Deco style font. So I printed out a page with the letters on and using a scalpel blade I cut the letters out. This was only meant to be a test to see if it was viable and I was going to do it on a thin card but by the time I had done it, I decided that the paper would probably work just as well as card. I painted over the rubbed on letters in white. I then cut the words out and taped them to the model with masking tape a drew the outline in pencil. I then used a rotring pen to out line this and add the middles of the Os and Rs and As and then filled it in with black paint. ANd do you know what? I am pretty happy with the eventual outcome. Its not perfect but I think it conveys what I was trying to achive. The rough edges of it will be smoothed out with a bit of weathering. I seem to have inadvertently created an actual ghost sign behind the with the rubbed on letters. Quite why I didn't go down the stencil road to start off with, I have no idea but I suppose we have to work our way to the answer through trial and error.

Plan C was what the idea had started off life as - using Letraset. I scoured Amazon (which living in rural France is really my option for getting exotica like that) and found some suitable letters. There were were essentially Times New Roman which was a shame but thats life. SO I ordered them and waited a week for them to be delivered. When I got them, I cut them out individually and used normal sellotape to make up the words on. This was for two reasons. The first is that it made it easier to place the word on the the model in one go. The other was to ensure the letters were kept in place whilst putting the letters on the model and they didn't move or wander while rubbing them on. I then sprayed the whole top white. I then started to try and remove the transfers with tape. Put succinctly, it didn't work! It did but it didn't really take enough off and was laborious. I did think of using some chemical aid but had the jeopardy of a) finding the letters and b) the fear of messing up the white paint. Hmmmm, Plan D then. That was to put the Letraset onto the white paint and use that the lettering. I had sensibly ordered two packets of letters as I had foreseen mucking things up so I had enough letters. So another set of words were made up. The other thing that I tried to do was position the words better so the space at the ends and between the words was better distributed. The first go hadn't been but by the time I realised this it was too late. This time rather than just a by eye exercise, I measured it. Fat lot of good that did! As you will see from the top line, my measuring was a waste of time as I took no notice of! I think that what happened was my brain decided that the measurement between the words Great and Western was Xmm when what it should have been was ½Xmm. This was perhaps the lowest point. The moment I realised what I had done there was swearing and then reflection. What to do now?

Well that was an odyssey! I started off with Plan A. Sprayed the top half black. The idea was to then make myself some rub on transfers which I would then spray over in white and use tape to take off the the transfer and leave the letters in black underneath. I was going to make my own rub on transfers using rub on transfer paper that I acquired from Amazon. I decided that in keeping with the the idea that the fictional location of my layout was built in the 1930s, using an Art Deco style font would be nice (putting aside in reality the building would probably be an Art Deco concrete building if it had been built in the 1930s...). So I found a font in Word called Phosphate that had a suitable Deco feeling to it. So I followed the instructions to make the transfers (failing completely with the first attempt as I peeled the backing paper off just after I printed it thus rendering it useless!) and cut them out and placed them on the model to check the spacing and positioning. Whilst I was doing this, I realised what the flaw in this plan was. I would essentially be rubbing a entire block on for each word so when I took off the transfer, I would be left with a rectangle of black rather than each individual letter. I thought about it and decided what I needed to do was to cut out each individual letter and rub them on individually. So went to Plan B and I printed another sheet out and started to d this. I gave up after about three letters. Whilst the Ts and Is were easy, I soon realised the the Os and Gs were going to be very difficult (for me) to do. So I reassessed my plan and came up with Plan C.

Having just found this thread, can I say gorgeous. Looking at your supberb modelling I feel like its half five in the mid 1970s and tea will ready soon. Beautiful.

Thanks for pointing that up - I had never noticed it before. Very useful stuff there.

I did think about this but decided that I didn't want the corporate LU. AT the moment I am not sure what colour I want or the style I want the sign to be in - British Railways, BR 1960s, BR 1970s-80s. I think that I have settled on the clear thin plastic sheet and drawing the frames on. Its certainly the cheapest and easiest option. O hadn't considered seeing not in.

The results of the painting session. I have painted most of the lintels. I have not done on the side of the building that is getting the sign. I decided that it was probably easier to do those once the painting is done. I also worked out that about half of them on that side wouldn't need painting as they are under the sign. I have also masked up ready to start the process of the sign. This is probably the most masking tape I have ever put on a model. I have also tried to paint different areas of brick work different bricky colours. How successful this is I am not sure. I also han a go at the loading doors for one side. They come shut but I have cut a few out to represent opened shutters. I am currently in debate with myself as to what colour to paint the shutters. There is a voice that whispers chocolate and cream for the doors and window frames. But another that says green doors and white window frames. Haven't decided yet. Next its the black block...

\i've just realised that HOe is more 2ft 6in so read 750ish mm for 600 mm gauge on the track plan, Its monday and I have wrestling with the temperamental wood pellet burner all morning. Its finally working, hooray for heat.