Caley Jim

OOps! Sorry! I mis-read my elderly ABC Combined Volume. Virus strikes again! (C-nile one). Jim

45670 was New Zealand. Jim

Having drawn up the artwork for all the windows, fitted them onto a sheet and made sure they were all well tagged (the last two jobs are arguably the most tedious and time consuming in my experience), the sheet went off to PPD on Friday morning. I've now turned my attention back to the station building. Having worked out how the walls were going to fit together, templates were drawn out and printed. These were then fixed with Pritt-stick to 40thou styrene and cut out. The window and door opening were cut through the paper and once the paper had been removed a hole was drilled in each opening and a piece of broken fretsaw blade in a pin vice used to cut just inside the marks, finally paring to size with a scalpel. The 40thou was then welded to some embossed stone styrene and cut to size. The part at the top is the base, around which the walls fit, and the top part of the parcels office front wall is where the etched panel with the company name goes. Next up will be to fit the stonework around the windows. As i mentioned before, the 5thou I have is rather old and a bit brittle, so how easy it will be to use for that remains to be seen. I might have to use 10thou and rub it down a bit as I think the scale 1½" thickness may be a bit too much. Jim

That'll be sometime in late March then? Jim

How often do you need to wind it up? Jim

When painting this PO wagon from a. HMRS photo I discovered that Plean QQuarry (near Stirling) supplied stone for the Bank of England building in Threadneedle Street. Jim

Have you tried it without the rods on? Will it drive the one axle? i would doubt your ability to hold the motor and the chassis together in a stable enough way to draw conclusions. Far better to have some means of fixing the motor in place IMHO. Jim

Sometimes the mind sees what it thinks should be there, even though it isn't! Someone once commented that my CR Jumbo had 'brakegear and sandpipes', though it doesn't have the latter! Jim

I too found Fusion slow on my machine and will be sticking with AutoCAD meantime. I have dipped my toe into 3D with it, but a lot of steep learning still to do there! Jim

I too much prefer a satin finish on my coaches and locos as it much 'softer'. On coach roofs, it wasn't just that they became dirty, but that the white paint used was lead based and so reacted with the oxygen and sulphur in the air, turning grey. Jim

It may have been 'The Premier Line', but the Caledonian was 'The True Line'! Jim (sorry, couldn't resist!)

I too have just downloaded the free version of NanoCAD and , as @richbrummitt and @2mm Andy have said, it appears very much like the 2007 version of AutoCAD which I am using, having the same combined command line and pointer input. Displays slightly differently and I now find that it has put the NanoCAD icon in front of all of my .dwg files instead of the AutoCAD one! They still open with AutoCAD as default, though. Jim

Indeed! You can't do the second until you have reasonable competence in the first. You also have to be able to do a certain degree of 'mental origami' to figure out how to create what you want, especially if your designing things with multiple layers to be folded over on one another. Some experience of assembling other peoples designs is useful as it can not only show you how to do it, but in some cases how things could be done better, or at least for easier assembly. I don't claim to have totally mastered the latter! Jim

Laying the parts out on a fret to make the most economical use of the space can take as long as drawing up the parts in my experience! One of the benefits of CAD is that you can change things around as much as you want without having to re-draw it. Likewise fitting the frets (or individual items) onto a sheet for the etchers. Jim (who's currently doing exactly that with window and door artwork.)

Would like to help, Jerry, but as an AutoCAD user (which is probably overkill) I've no experience of any of the free packages. I'll send you an email with Bob Jones' notes on the basics of etching art work generally if that would help. Jim

My apologies, Malcolm. C-nile virus again! Jim

There's an area of Sydney called Wooloomooroo. Where else in the world is there a name with the same pair of vowels repeated four times? Jim (graduate of GLGW?)

Especially if you live here in Perthshire Also paired with Bland in NSW Australia. No-one is thankful when the road's closed by a landslide after rain, which it has been on regular occasions recently. The diversion is around 50 miles long! Jim

I formed a little 'fishplate' from copper shim around the base of the b/h rail and soldered that to the heel of the switch with half its length projecting. This was then slipped over the end of the closure rail and the toe of the switch attached to my design of p/b wire stretcher bar. Jim

Finished drawing up the buildings this evening. This is the block I'm basing them on : I've placed a print of the drawing in situ on the layout and I'm fairly happy with it. The slope of the street on the layout is a little steeper than that on which the prototypes sit, so I had to introduce a 'step' in the block at the lower end. This will almost half fill the street behind the goods yard. Now to draw up the artwork for the various windows etc. Jim

Thanks, @nick_bastable and @richbrummitt, but I find the container of Crystals work well enough. I just have to empty it and replenish the crystals every six weeks or so. Encouraged by the positive comment on the low-level photos, I've taken a few more. I can't get the lens of my phone in a position to see through the bridges over the colliery branch or the exchange sidings, but here are a couple from on the bridges. First, looking towards the sidings: Now looking the other way from above the colliery branch: And finally a view from the goods yard looking towards the warehouse and livestock landing: The loose-heel switches show up rather well in the last two shots. Jim

There's also a village called 'No Place' near Beamish in County Durham. Jim

How about Somewhere, Anywhere and Nowhere? Jim

Great stuff Ian. I particularly like the open postbox. Jim

Little further progress to show as I've been drawing up the artwork for getting the windows and doors for the station building etched. I decided it would be a good idea to draw up a few more of the buildings running down the street from the station and get the windows for them done at the same time, so that is currently a WIP. On a whim I took a couple of 'ground level' shots through the bridges at either end, just to see how that looked. A passenger's view from the end of the platform. Subsidence was common in mining areas. And a driver's view as he approaches from Bonkle. The 'arches' are the supports for the polythene sheet covering the layout when it's not being worked on and the object behind the water tank is a container of moisture absorbent crystals. Jim