Booking Hall

Hi Coline33, thank you! No, the Hattons Barclay tank is in the Burnley Corporation Gas Department livery. I live near Burnley and plan to build a gasworks layout at some point, but it does look very much at home on this one! I need to put my thinking cap on and come up with a name for the docks to tie in with the initials B.C.G.D.!!

Today I've roughly built up the ground levels of the scenic area with some corrugated cardboard and wall filler, filled in some of the sleepers in the loco stabling siding and covered the track crossing with 'stone setts lookalike' wallpaper from a well-known nationwide DIY chain to add a bit of variety to the surface textures. Although a little coarse, when painted up it can look OK as the photo below on my boxfile layout 'Brierley Canal Road' shows. Then, whilst waiting for the filler to harden off, I took stock of what 'ballast' I have. It comprises a small amount of Peco weathered ballast, an even smaller amount of Javis ash mixed with real coal fire ash, a pot of dried, sieved bonfire ash and some drying soil.

Cheers Bochi.

Thanks Lez, and good point, I should have thought of that before sticking them down but I can always knock them about a bit during the detail weathering stage. Yes, I'll be adding some bollards and mooring rings, and some tyres hanging down would look the part too. Watch this space!

Timber kerbs made and fitted to the dock wall today. Cut from 3mm thick balsa wood and painted with thin washes of dark and light grey emulsion paint.

Thanks Adam. I have to say (not entirely modestly!) that the more I look at it the more pleased I am with it, so it has all been worthwhile. That said, I'm also very pleased to be getting on with something else!

Several days of cutting card to form concrete aprons and track infilling on my lockdown dockside themed micro layout finally came to an end and were painted. Dock edge piles are now fitted.

Thanks for that appreciation and advice Lez. If only I'd planned it that way . . . . But I do now know it can be done when push comes to shove.

Thanks for the encouragement Steve. I spent some time this morning shuffling around the three sheets of Scalescenes concrete apron print that I had available, but there just wasn't enough of it to cover the area I needed it to. This was compounded by the fact that the sheets don't 'edge match' in the way wallpaper does, so it proved impossible to arrive at a convincing layout with the few sheets I had. It was bite the bullet time and try the paint option. I was nervous about this as I've so far never managed to arrive at a convincing colour for concrete, and I was doubly nervous because I feared that the card, although glued down, might bow or buckle. I scored some joint lines on a scrap piece and went over them in pencil, digging out a few gouges here and there to represent decay and cracks, then with tester pots of Wilko 'Cloudy Sky' and 'Storm Cloud' (all I had available) I went for it, stippling it on with a large brush. Yes, the card bowed, but dried reasonably flat, but the colour was too dark and too pink. I tried again, this time stippling in some white and an occasional grey fleck, and when dry I was pleasantly surprised to find it was quite similar to the base colour of the Scalescenes print. Now for the acid test, would the carefully laid card on the model stay put? I scribed some joint lines on the apron behind where the goods shed will go and went for it. Success! The colour looked good and the card stayed flat, so I quickly pressed on and did the remainder. There's some selective weathering to be done, but I'm pleased to be over that hurdle. I added the piles to the dock wall and now need to make some timber kerb edging to go behind them and between them at the top, to hide the bare edge of the card overlay. The Scalescenes kit provides a kerb and overlay, but that would be difficult to adapt and fit the way I've built this, so I'm going to make them out of balsa wood.

Well, it's taken quite a few days, and a fair sprinkling of immoderate language, to complete as much infilling of the track/dockside area as I think looks right. Would I do it this way again? NO! I would go out and buy a few kilograms of DAS clay, even if it cost as much as moondust, and I would still think it cheap! There were a couple of times I actually though about giving it up, but persistence paid off and I got there eventually. Just need to apply the surface finish now . . . . but tonight - a celebratory beer!

Thanks Steve. It could do with an access ladder and some pipework, but that can wait a bit.

Ha ha, no Cam, but I was an avid watcher in the 1960's. Perhaps it taught me more than I realise . . . .

I'm quite pleased with this.

The track infilling is still progressing slowly, and I can't say I'm exactly enjoying this bit of the build, so, as a break from it I'm having a go at making an oil storage tank, as a vertical round one will fit better in the location I have in mind for it. This is a small baked beans tin, which will be wrapped with thin card and some of the foil I removed from the insulation board, embossed with a cocktail stick to represent the plating.

Definite improvement Jerry.

Slow progress is being made with the track infilling, the most difficult part of which is accurately transferring the curved sections of track onto the card for cutting. After trying, with only moderate degrees of success, pressing paper onto the rail top to make a template which could then be cut out, I eventually had a light bulb moment and used a wagon with a pencil held against it to draw directly onto the card. This worked so well that I glued two pencils together separated by a 6mm spacer which makes 13mm at the points. Now I can draw both sides of the curve at the same time. When cut with a slight outwards splay this gives around 13.5mm on the top surface, 0.5mm less than the back to back dimension. The slight splay allows a bit of 'wiggle' room against the rail chairs. I've also been turning over in my mind how I'm going to apply the Scalescenes concrete and setts overlay. Whether to do it in small sections as I've done the ground build up, or to try and glue a whole A4 sheet over everything, rails and all, then carefully cut the rail gaps with a very sharp scalpel. Doing it in pieces will present the challenge of matching sections up, as the sheet comes printed with casting joints and tyre tracks. Doing it in one piece will rely on me being able to cut the slots accurately and without damaging the adjacent part of the sheet. Quite a problem, because if it goes wrong getting the damaged sheet up without collateral damage to the sub-layer is one worry. The other is that I don't have any spare sheets! So, for the present the jury is out on which way to go . . . .

Or some arches Jerry, as I did on 'Brierley Canal Road'?

Interesting to read your blog entry halfwit. I carried out something similar on the DMU motor bogie, but chose to turn down the ends of the Triang axles instead. I covered it in this thread and will be doing something similar with my Dock Shunter in the near future.

Today I started the laborious task of bringing the ground levels up to just below rail head height. After quite a lot of deliberation and experimentation with the materials to hand, I chose to make it a four-layer system. The first layer is 2mm card, which matches the height of the sleepers. The 2nd layer is cereal box card which oversails the top of the sleepers and matches the height of the rail fixings. The 3rd layer is 1.3mm mounting board cut as closely as possible to the line of the rail and to which will be applied the 4th layer, the printed surface finish. This all means multiple measuring, making of templates and curve cutting, with the attendant potential for misalignment. Having got the first two layers down in one area I trial fitted the mounting board, and found that as it is only 15/1000 of an inch below the rail head, it is difficult to get it all to lie level, and may therefore be scuffed when rail cleaning. So, I have decided to dispense with the cereal box layer and accept a slightly bigger step, actually around 25/1000". At least this removes one stage of cutting!

Some progress on the dockside micro I'm building in a caravan.

The last couple of days has seen progress both with the 'Puffer' and on the layout itself. The cliff along the rear has been built up in scrounged polystyrene packaging and carved into a steep, rocky face. The sea at the front has been built up by about 2mm to avoid having a gap below the dock edging, which is just under 50mm, and the edging itself has been fitted into position. The vertical timbers have been trial fitted to decide on spacing, but I won't glue these in place until the dock top edging has been fitted. This will require some building up of the ground levels to nearly come flush with the rail head and is going to involve quite a lot of cutting multiple pieces of card to be stuck down before the surface overlay is fitted. I have to take this carefully as I only just have enough printed concrete and stone setts sheets to cover the area I want, so there's little margin for error here.

Hi Sturminster Newton. It was apparently built and exhibited as drawn. The original article in the June 1988 railway Modeller mentioned that the minimum radius was just under 9" and that some shortening of some of the Peco small radius and Setrack points would be required. Although it's a clever design, getting a lot of railway into a small space, I don't think it would work very well as an exhibition layout, being two-sided. I agree, continuing the spur behind the crane 'off stage' to a fiddle yard would work well, and be less problematic than that shown on the right of the plan. I have sketched out the design making the track centres at the left hand end of the top and bottom half of the layout identical, so that they could join up if the layout was opened out along its long middle axis, with the tracks at each end curving away behind the 'spine' of buildings to fiddleyards, and that makes quite a nice arrangement in an 8' x 1' footprint. Good luck with your developments.

Thanks The Johnster, I'm realising that I'm on a steep learning curve here! No doubt what I learn in building this practice run I can do better when I get to build a larger version. I do have, in the loft at home, an unbuilt 'Shell Welder' kit, and I remember seeing how someone had converted this from a tanker to a coaster. I think the converted 'Shell Welder' is the one on the right in this photo I took at out MRC exhibition in 2018. I also have an unbuilt USS Savannah nuclear powered ship kit (that's a kit of a nuclear powered ship, not the other way round!), but that might be a bit implausible, and probably way underscale!.

Thanks for that suggestion Cam, it's better than any I've come up with so far!

As a break from the intensity of building the Puffer, yesterday I weathered the track. As this is a marine environment, I imagine the rail sides will be quite rusty i.e. a brightish red oxide, but I didn't really have the correct colours with me, only Burnt Sienna, Viridian, white, black and a tiny amount of yellow acrylic, so I had to make do. Then I glued on the backscene using 'No More Nails' and fitted the 'control panel'. After that I couldn't resist trial assembling the various parts already made to see what it will look like, and in my haste put one of the dock edges upside down!! The loco is my Burnley Corporation Gas Department Barclay tank, bought for a future gasworks layout, but which looks very much at home here. Now desperately trying to think of a name for the docks which would fit with the initials BCGD!