TurboSnail

I found a good excuse to start another project by picking up a cheap C Class at the Alexandra Palace show - a well-used example with glue marks, some lining missing and apparently a few running issues. All I really wanted from it was the tender, which will get repainted at some point anyway. I'll be able to find another use for the chassis and it seems to run ok on a 9v battery, so I'm sure I'll be able to fix it up. The tender, with a minor modification to the electrical connector, couples up nicely to another Bachmann chassis (and it runs so the wiring must be the same). I will need to add some tender pick-ups, as the loco chassis only picks up off the drivers. This is likely to be quite a long-term project, but my hope is that this will eventually become the proposed SECR Atlantic - when the first batch of D Class locomotives were suffering from corrosion and priming issues, Wainwright drew up plans for an Atlantic in case the D Class could not be made to work satisfactorily. Water softening solved the issues so the Atlantic never advanced. I have a basic line drawing from the RCTS "Locomotives of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway" book, but haven't tracked down anything better yet - if further drawings are unavailable I might fill in the details using D Class parts as they seem similar.

With my old Anycubic Photon having given up the ghost (screen glitches meant it wouldn't print properly) I had the choice of repair or replace - normally I'd go for repair, but I've already done this repair on this printer once before, and technology has moved on so much in the 5 years or so since it first came out, so I have now replaced it with a newer model. The print shelf is looking a tad smarter now! I'm not planning on upgrading my tupperware though... Some of the first things to be printed on it were some bits for the diorama, including this pipe bridge and the flanges and valves for the pipework (the pipes themselves are aluminium wire). I'm pretty happy with it so far - it's not streets ahead of the old printer in terms of overall part finish, but there are noticeably fewer errors in prints, less warp and it's much faster.

Suggestions always welcome - bit late to add any more to it, but it is a bit more varied to the eye than to the camera. One of the issues of my modelling space is that in winter it doesn't get much natural light during the day, which makes all my photos come out a bit dingy if I don't wait for the next day!

I was reminded why I don't weather things very often - the left end wall of this building ended up with some obvious black streaks from the weathering powders. The back wall isn't great either but I can't really do much about that, the end wall is small enough for me to attempt a repair. The photos show, in order - first attempt at weathering, painted over with mortar colour, coloured back in, and second attempt at weathering. It's still not great but better than it was, at least. I was planning for some 3D printed bits to go in while doing the ground cover, but my printer has finally given up the ghost, so this project will be on hold for a bit while I replace that.

Showing the overall layout - I've got a few more bits to print out and the buildings need weathering before doing the ground cover

I build too many locos. Well, if such a thing is possible. But in the absence of space for a bigger layout, I'd like somewhere to put them on display rather than hiding away in boxes. I've got a display cabinet but it's a bit dull having locos against a grey background, so I'm challenging myself to build a few small dioramas this year. Hopefully this a) is easy enough to complete, being relatively small projects and b) distracts me from making so many locos! The first one is underway, and is meant to represent a fairly generic industrial site, with an old brick building one end and a later extension at the other. I've got a few doors and windows to add before putting the track in - which will be home to my Barclay 0-6-0 and Hawthorn fireless locos... and maybe the recently announced Rapido ones too! I'm already being distracted by thoughts of what the next display could be...

One of the more recently completed locos, a Howard petrol shunter - I've got plenty of long-term stuff on the go and wanted something I could do in a day, so this fit the bill nicely. Nice simple enjoyable modelling without having to work out why everything doesn't fit properly!

I'm not familiar with how they make those resin cast buildings but I suspect the cost is largely tied to the physical size of whatever moulds they have to use, coupled with (and this is pure speculation) probably lower expected sales numbers. While I've 3D printed a lot of locos, I've never got fully on board with it for buildings, not sure why. I prefer to use plasticard sheet around a card shell, but do use 3D printing for some details like doors and windows. However, it's less fun when, as I did on Friday evening, you dig out your stock of plasticard for a weekend project and discover it's gone brittle and now shatters at the slightest touch of the knife! The Slaters thick stuff is fine, as is the SE Finecast sheet, but whatever this other brand is is now virtually unusable.

It's a bit of a mix up, this loco - I combined a 14" and 16" Barclay a while ago to make a Grant Ritchie 0-4-2ST, which I still haven't completed. This loco uses the leftovers from that project, so it's a 14" with some heavier-duty elements. The cab is a 3D print based on "John Howe" at the Ribble museum, the chimney is a spare from the Grant Ritchie project, the bufferbeams are extended with plasticard and the dumb buffers are offcuts of oak. I still need to add some brass cab spectacle frames, but I haven't had the etches for that done yet. I wanted to use this loco as a test for further home-made transfer experiments, this time using clear paper instead of the white backed I had used before. That meant I needed a relatively light colour body - it's slightly less garish in person! The lining and lettering were again based on "John Howe" and came out ok - the yellow lining suffered a bit, but the stronger colours came out fine. There is some silvering in places, but not too much and hopefully will become more or less invisible if I ever get round to weathering it.

I made a few tweaks to the Ruston 44/48 kit prior to re-release, so felt I needed to test build another one. Done in a few hours over the weekend, I now have the Heinz version (green - with the bigger radiator header tank) to go with the "as-built" (blue) version I made a few years ago when I originally designed the body. A fun little quick build, as opposed to some of my projects which can go on for years... more on one of those later.

Found a photo of my old 3D printed 4-wheeler model in OO (sold it years ago, so couldn't just take a new photo!), it's a tad basic but I was pretty happy with it at the time. I was planning to redo the CAD at some point to make some improvements with information I'd picked up in the meantime, but never got round to it.

It looks like this, runs on a Rapido J70 chassis, and hopefully you don't mind the self-promotion, but it's available as a kit here: https://www.oakhillworks.co.uk/shop/barclay-fireless/ Needs a couple of finishing touches and some weathering to tone down the rather lurid colour scheme, but it'll take a bit of courage before I get to that.

Interesting thread, I've been attempting to build a "standard" 0-4-0F for several years, but never managed to get the chassis quite how I wanted it, and I didn't have the Allan/Allen book with the measurements at the time. I did make a model of an 0-6-0F in the meantime though, by measuring up the one at the Gretna munitions museum. Worth a visit just for that!

I'm glad they fit well - that's something I spent a lot of time and test print effort on. I did a set of transfers for the Manning Wardle using the same technique I described the other day, I have since sold this model on but I think it came out reasonable well, barring some issues with the red shading on the text.

I promise I haven't paid anyone to promote my wares! (I cannot comment for Gary though...) Always happy to look at almost any prototype if there are drawings available. Can't guarantee it would happen any time soon though, very busy at the moment! I do have a Terrier or two in the donor pile... Not sure what else might fit the bill other than the aforementioned examples. The Fletcher Jennings might do the job though I assume a light railway might want to provide its crews with a rudimentary cab of some kind. One project I've wanted to tackle for a while is bashing a P Class into something more "generic" to represent a light railway engine - or possibly modifying the FYNR kit and pairing it with a 4-wheel tender. If in need of something bigger, depending on era, the SER O Classes were staples of the light railways in Kent once withdrawn from mainline duties.

It depends a bit on budget - I was trying to do it all myself using an ordinary inkjet printer, and the clear transfer paper for that doesn't hold light colours very well at all, they stay semitransparent. When I did my SECR green N Class (the proposed one, not the later 2-6-0) most of the loco was painted black and I used transfers printed on white transfer paper, which held its colour much better. I would illustrate this with a photo, but RMweb is currently giving me "-200" errors! I believe professional printers could do much better, and on clear paper, but that was a bit out of my budget for a converted Bachmann E4 bodge job!

With the outer panels having nice simple 90° corners or smooth arcs, it might be relatively straightforward to make those up as complete lining panels with transfer paper and an inkjet printer - relatively being compared to painting multiple thin bands and applying each individual lining transfer by hand...

The dog took me for a walk yesterday, and I managed to convince her that she'd enjoy tramping round the woods at Folkestone Warren looking for any traces of the original Warren Halt station. This was in all likelihood a futile exercise, but we both needed to burn off some Christmas excess... The current station (or at least the remains of one of the platforms closed in the 1980s) is still visible, however, that station dates from 1924 and is therefore not pre-grouping enough for this section! From looking at NLS maps, I think that the original alignment was further north by about 30-40m, before being buried in the 1915 landslides. Buried by up to 65ft of material in some areas, which was why I suspected the trip might be slightly pointless, even with a Border Collie in tow to sniff out any signs! The approximate site of the old footbridge (marked in red on the map): We did, however, find a large section of what looked like a cutting, marked in black on the map, in roughly the right location for the old alignment, and some foundations of something (a concrete culvert and a section of wall/foundation) in the blue-ringed area. And we both got some good exercise and made it home without the cliffs collapsing on us, so I'd call it a successful trip! NLS maps link of the area: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=16.8&lat=51.09661&lon=1.21167&layers=168&right=osm Worth looking at your local area and seeing what you can find!

I'm wondering what I could do with the chassis to improve it a bit for this application. I don't want to go down the route of swapping wheels, though I might be able to 3D print centres for the existing wheels. The conrods could potentially be replaced with a set from the old-style Terrier, as they're a bit chunkier. I think my donor chassis has metal brakes, could swap those for wooden blocks (or find a wooden-braked chassis). I'll probably also swap the motor and add a flywheel to try and tame the shunting speed a bit, same as I did on the Fletcher Jennings J

Reading through a book on Manning Wardles, it turns out some O Classes were built with 4ft wheels rather than the standard 3ft 9in. With a wheelbase of 6ft 3in + 5ft 9in, that makes it close enough for my purposes to fit a Terrier chassis (4ft wheels, 6ft + 6ft wheelbase) and gives me something to tackle over the holidays!

Yes (for now)

To anyone who's been asking about my 3D printed loco bodies, there are now a whole bunch available to buy via https://www.oakhillworks.co.uk/products, as well as some of the wagons I did a while back. Apologies for that brief commercial interlude, now back to modelling whatever obscure things I can find...

You might notice I've found a lining style I like... this loco was the reason for getting that set in the first place. It's missing some lining around the cab, and some on the sandboxes, but otherwise not too far off the real thing (the green looks darker in real life). A couple of compromises - the wheels and wheelbase aren't quite perfect, but can't improve that without going to a custom chassis, I'd rather keep the RTR one for it's running qualities (especially now I've added a flywheel to it). This also means the tank is a tiny bit too tall (<1mm) but overall I think it works pretty well. Still needs a light weathering, cab windows, Salter safety valves and some lead sheet in the tank. Happy with it for now though!

The transfers are from Fox, and the cab side plates are custom transfers that I drew up and got produced by Railway Mania. The paint is Humbrol 67 Tank Grey, a bit darker than most RTR manufacturers use but I think it gives the impression it's not fresh from the paint shop.

Eventually, after about 3 years and at least 5 failed attempts, I've got a Hunslet 22hp with running qualities that I'm happy with!