awoodford

Thanks for the kind comments chaps. Mark, I was going to build the steps from pieces of balsa, but then someone took pity and gave me a sprue of assorted plastic ladders and steps. I don't know for sure if they are the same make but the nearest I could find on the internet was a kit produced by Central Valley Model Works, an American company. Mikkel, I might have gone too high with the castle. It sits above the top level of the frame at the front so you need to stoop to see it.

Yes, the port scene has a name. There's a castle at the top of the hill, and a port at the bottom - hence Castleport. How dull, I hear you say, and you may well be right. If Google is to be believed, no other town in the whole of the English speaking world has deemed the name worthy of use, even though there are plenty that would qualify. Where the name does crop up it tends to be associated with mundane things like retail outlets and shopping malls. The town itself, climbing up the hill to the castle, was inspired by the riverside area of Durham, as depicted in the posters below by Brangwyn, Newbould and Taylor... Properties in the town offer little of architectural merit, the recent building boom having thrown up a load of quick-build housing of shoddy cardboard construction. The residents of Castleport can expect a future of subsidence, sagging rooflines and peeling wallpaper. The examples in the image below are typical of the rest... Steps leading up from the dock provide access to the town. Those beside the station come out opposite Evans' emporium and are known, naturally enough, as the Stairway to Evans... A view to the left... ...and a view to the right... That about sums up Castleport. More detailing still needs to be added. No doubt the population will come out of hiding eventually. For now though, I'm happy to leave it at that and move on to the third and final scene on this baseboard, which will be industrial. Cheers, Alan.

Hi Corbs. I'm busy building the town behind the port at the moment. Hopefully I'll get it done by the end of January and will post an update then. Thanks for your interest, Alan.

As mentioned in the previous blog, I wanted to include a couple of modeled mills in the port scene. The Royal Oil Mill was dealt with then. The other, Florence Flour Mill, has now been added to the right hand side of the scene. It was originally intended to be a tribute to Clarence Mill in Hull, an impressive landmark structure beside the river until reduced to a heap of rubble about three years ago. Much time was then spent pondering on how the heck I was going to squeeze it into the 3 inches available. However I was overtaken by events. The millers ran out of patience and took it upon themselves to throw up a hideous concrete edifice instead, a building so ugly it gives me the creeps. Letters of outrage have been written to the Tweedale Times by those living in its shadow. They knew a view blocker was needed in that corner but weren't expecting anything so bad. Rats have even been reported, but that's just exaggeration... they are still on the To Do list. The likelihood is it will be demolished in due course (the one thing it will have in common with Clarence), and be replaced with something less repulsive, but for now it will just have to do. As far as the railway is concerned, the mill generates just one outward van load of flour per week, for the pie factory at Grimley. Its probably just as well the traffic is light, as vans for the mill are inconveniently parked on the set of points at the entrance to the port, as seen in the photo. Spotting the empty van has to be the last shunting move performed before departing the port. Behind the mill can be seen the station. Although I don't run a regular passenger service, I do like adding stations. They provide a focal point for each scene and their presence hints that this place here is supposed to be miles away from that place there in the scene next door. The port still remains nameless which accounts for the lack of a nameboard at the station. However I have been assured by the local council that a naming committee has been formed and 'the matter is being deliberated with utmost celerity, weighing up the pros and cons in all aspects leaving no stone unturned'. Hmmm, not expecting anything soon then. The platform is only about 3 inches long, but its enough to cater for the railbus should I decide to bring it down here on a charter or even a tentative boat train service. Meanwhile the station canopy provides a convenient shelter for loafers wanting to watch the dockers and shunters at work. It seems to be in surprisingly good condition for what is essentially a disused station in the sad end of dockland. Perhaps I should invite some of the town's hooligans along, with their penknives, chalks and catapults, to 'weather' it. Cheers, Alan.

Wenlock, Corbs, Neil, thanks for your comments. A start has now been made on mock-ups for the second mill, at the right hand side. Once that mill has been completed I'll tackle the town at the back.

With the Tweemoor Yard scenery all but finished, I was ready to move on to second of the three scenes on this layout extension board. I decided to tackle the (as yet unnamed) port next. This was the starting point... The area is 17 inches wide by 13 inches deep. The trackwork consists of a simple fork, and not a very satisfactory one at that. I had originally installed a handmade point to a smaller radius than the Peco one in order to squeeze in a capacity of 3 wagons for each siding. Unfortunately it was plagued with buffer-locking problems. I now appreciate the importance of adding transitions to curves! I couldn't face rebuilding it, so it was replaced with the Peco point after all, which set me back to a capacity of 2 wagons per siding. As one spot was required for manipulating the brake van, that only left 3 spots for revenue earning vehicles. With the 'card and waybill' operating scheme used, that equated to just 6 waybills for the entire port traffic. As it happens I've been finding it hard to drum up much import-export business anyway. The Tweedalers are too darned self sufficient, that's the trouble, and most of their needs are provided by the dale itself. The mine and sawmill are working at full capacity so any exported minerals or timber would need to be diverted from established customers which I didn't want to do. Instead the port seems to have morphed into Tweedale's milling zone, a neglected area of enterprise until now. Anything that needs to be crushed, ground up, hammered or rendered to a pulp gets dealt with here. The railway is already moving flour, vegetable oil, animal feed and mushy peas from the port even though their respective industries have yet to fully materialize. The plan is to add a couple of modeled mills in the dock area. I'm hoping these tall structures, one at each side, will help frame the scene and funnel the eye towards the town rising up at the back. The first steps were to embed the track in cardboard roadway and add the water. The latter simply consisted of painting a foam-board base then covering it with a sheet of clear plasticard. Although the water is dead calm and ripple free, some might even say stagnant, I'm happy enough with the result. A timber quayside has been added, which I thought would look more interesting than plain brick or stone. A start has been made on the buildings associated with one of the mills, in this case an oil-seed crushing mill. At a major port not far from where I live, the waterside mills went in for grandiose names like Clarence, Premier, Grosvenor and such like. It struck me that they sounded more like hotels than anything, so I thought it would be fun to follow in the tradition by looking through a list of hotels in the phone book to come up with a suitable name for the mill here. The Royal Hotel provided me with the impressively sounding if slightly tongue twisting Royal Oil Mill. All I need now is to devise some fictional history to account for the name. The foreground track supposedly continues on to other parts of the port off scene to the left. To indicate this, a low relief box van has been located at the end of the siding. The van body was cut down from an old wagon, but as I didn't want to sacrifice a perfectly good chassis just for a set of buffers, the underframe was built up from scraps of card and a couple of nails. Here's the mill in all its glory. Its not quite finished - there are still a few gutters, drainpipes and other details to add - but you get the idea. The mocked up building at the right is not part of the mill's premises. Operated by Tweedale Oil & Cake Mills Ltd (TOCM), who took over from the former ROCM, the mill is based very loosely on structures from Ipswich and Hull. The business appears to have grown by gathering together all the tin sheds in the district. Everything has been much compressed to squeeze it into the 6 inch square footprint. The tall brick building at the back containing the silos is a very much reduced version of the original, which would have measured some 18 inches high if built to scale rather than the measly 9 inches here. By placing it behind the other buildings and hiding its base, forced-perspective properties emerged and the drastic reduction in size became more acceptable. Inward rail traffic to the mill consists of oil seed from upper Tweedale (in the season), to augment that arriving by sea from foreign lands. Outward traffic consists of oil to Grey's paint works at Grimley and the Sunny Spread margarine factory in the Slaghill chemical park. The residue from the crushed seed is used to produce cattle cake which is sent back to the rural areas of upper Tweedale. Cheers, Alan.

Good to see your layout at the Scarborough Show. Very nice. Alan.

Thanks Sigtech, much appreciated. Alan.

smiths park, northroader, wenlock, thank you for your comments.

Since the last blog the Tweemoor Yard scene has lost its post-apocalyptic nuclear winter look. Grass has sprouted from the wasteland, trees have burst forth, and buildings have popped up like mushrooms, including Mr Yardley's long awaited yard office. As can be seen the forestry department have been busy. It was a long and tedious job that can be summed up in two words - never again. On the plus side, the newly planted ancient woodland has now become something of a local beauty spot, and the railway, quick to exploit a new source of traffic, have provided an excursion platform. Although very basic, it's claim to fame is that it has the longest platform seat in Tweedale. The only other facility is a pre-loved notice board, obtained ages ago from an ex-military type who had fallen on sorry times and was reduced to hawking his stuff from door to door. Like mugs we fell for his hard luck story, but have at least now found a home for this piece of junk, even though it does still bear an old poster advertising cheap fares to Selsey (wherever that is). It's a long time since the railway ran a regular passenger service, but now and then the railbus gets dusted off and turns up here with an excursion, inundating us quiet country folk with hoards of townies. On such occasions the ladies endeavour to make their way up the steep and rickety steps and over the road towards the Kafe In The Woods, renowned for its dainty teas and creamy cakes. Meanwhile the gents prefer to sit on the famous seat, and watch with the critical attention of spectators at a chess tournament, as Mr Yardley (maestro of the marshalling arts) conducts his shunting performances in the yard. That said, once the ladies are out of sight there is a tendency for the chaps to nip across the tracks and over the stile to The Jolly Poacher. Getting down to the practical side of things, for ground cover I used my prefered method of making up a green paste from scatter material (50:50 mix of Woodland Scenics Yellow Grass and Burnt Grass) and dilute PVA glue, which is then spread over the ground contours like plaster. While still wet it is lightly sprinkled with static grass (dead-grass colour), followed by a sprinkling of green ground foam mixture, all pushed and poked about with a cocktail stick. To my eye it gives a good enough representation of rough grass without going to the expense of a static grass machine. The trees were made using the method described in an earlier blog, basically cardboard cut-outs covered with pieces of Woodland Scenics foliage. Buildings were all scratch-built from card. Cheers, Alan.

It would be as well to check beforehand that you can get the loco and wagons around those sharp radius curves. If you are using hook and bar couplings you may need to extend the hooks. The reverse curve from the set of points at the top could cause problems. It might be better to go directly from the point into the inner curve. Alan.

Nice layout. I particularly like the shot of the loco shed interior.

Continuing with the Tweemoor Yard scene, one of the things indicated in the grand plan (shown a couple of blogs back) was a road winding in from the front and over a railway bridge at the back. Unfortunately the yard has spread out more than originally intended, so the road has had to be squeezed in rather tightly at the front. Its more of an N gauge road really, one of those narrow lanes where you wouldn't want to meet a tractor coming the other way. Previous road surfaces on the layout consisted of a flat layers of painted card, and that is exactly what they look like. For the scene here I decided to use a different method that I hadn't tried before - cork underlay. This actually turned out to be rather wonderful stuff for roads. Its more flexible and stretchy than card, making it easy to add a camber even on winding roads without it rucking up or introducing unwanted speed bumps. Not only that but it also has quite a nice texture when painted. The base of the road was roughly defined in card. Some thin card was glued along the centre line where the camber is to be. This is what I'm aiming for... Glue was applied just along the edges of the cork and it was stuck in place. The surface was sealed with a couple of coats of light grey emulsion from one of those little tester pots. After that was dry, the road was coloured and weathered to taste with washes of poster paint. The camber is quite subtle, but makes all the difference in the appearance of the road. This is how the Tweemoor scene looks so far, still rather bleak. The card surround shows the eventual extent of the viewing window. I haven't taken the road all the way to the bridge as there will be a view-blocker of trees in that corner, into which the road will disappear. The next steps will be to add ground cover and lots of trees, which should brighten things up. Cheers Alan.

Northroader, Mikkel, thanks for your comments. If its sticks that he needs, I had better get the forestry people in pretty smartish. They need to hide those strange hills left behind by the land reclamation lot anyway... I knew it was a mistake going for the cheapest quote. The operating schematic is handy, particularly for operators unfamiliar with the layout. The numbers and letters refer to sidings and shunting spots used in conjunction with the card and waybill system. A waybill might give a wagon destination as, say, Grey's Paint Works 1c. If the operator doesn't know where the paint works is (an anonymous building on the backscene and a couple of tanks) he can refer to the diagram, which at least tells him that siding 1 is at Grimley and spot c is at the far end of the siding.

Tweemoor Yard is Tweedale's rather pathetic answer to Whitemoor. When it comes to keeping up with the Joneses, the Tweedalers have a lot to learn. Small though the yard is, it nevertheless forms the hub of the new extended system, where wagons are blocked together for shunting trips out to other parts. Here's a simplified operating schematic showing how the yard relates to the rest of the system... There are three sidings if you include the line that continues through to the port. I think more would have been better, but the locals are optimistic that three will be enough. As they remind me, they're not made of money and what with the ruinous cost of track parts and the shortage of suitable land, we should count our blessings. These are the proposed shunting jobs... 1. Docks branch and industrial estate (may be split into 2 trips if needed) 2. Slaghill and The Pits 3. Poshington and Grimley branch 4. Dale End (run as a seperate trip because the sidings face a different way from elsewhere) In view of the strategic importance of the yard to the region's prosperity, I was urged to get the track ballasted and fit for traffic as soon as possible. Ballasting with paste In the layout's early days I experimented with ballasting the track using a paste made from tea leaves, brown ground foam and dilute PVA glue - they happened to be ingredients I had to hand at the time. What can I say - it has a rough texture, it lies between the sleepers, therefore it must be ballast. The colour is a bit weird, sort of gingery, as can be seen in some of the photos in previous blogs. The method did have some good points however. The ballast has an inherent flexiblity which gives much quieter running than the conventional stone chip ballasting that I've used on my other layout, and it is less weighty. It's one of those techniques that seems to show promise but has yet to fully deliver. I decided to give the method just one more try on the extension. The track was first painted with a couple of coats of Humbrol Dark Earth matt enamel. As the Peco sleepers are quite deep, card was added around the edges of the track to build up the ground and save on the amount of ballast required. The card was later sealed with grey undercoat paint. An exhibition visit supplied two shades of grey dyed sawdust and some Woodland Scenics Fine Turf. The latter was labelled Soil but was actually more like soot. Equal parts of the 3 powders were mixed together with dilute PVA glue (1 part glue to 2 parts water). A dash of talcum powder was added to lighten the colour slightly as I knew it would get darker on drying. The ballasting was done in small areas at a time, the paste being pushed and poked around the sleepers and tamped down. I found that the ground foam component seems to help bind everything together and gives the paste a preference for sticking to the ground rather than the spatula. Alas the result didn't look anything like the cinder ballast I was hoping to represent. It was too light and the texture was too obviously sawdust. I also made the mistake of sprinkling some of the WS Soil on the surface of the wet paste, which made it look patchy. After musing on the problem for a few days, I finally went over the whole area with dark grey poster paint, flicked from the end of a stiff brush by dragging a finger across the bristles. That did the trick. The tiny dots of paint broke up the surface texture to make it look finer and gave it a darker more even colour. Although there are without doubt easier methods, I'm happy enough with the final result. It's a definate improvement on the earlier tea leaf concoction. Next time (just the one last go) I might try without the sawdust though, only use the Woodland Scenics and talc, to see how that looks. While we're here I might as well introduce Mr Yardley the Yardmaster. That's him there, sitting on the camp stool looking fed up at having to work from temporary accomodation in the middle of a building site. He'd be even less happy if he knew how far down the to-do list his new office has slipped. With him is his young nephew Angus on a visit from the north. He's a Boy Scout and likes to do good deeds around the yard, the little creep. Give him a hammer and he'll tap wheels for hours. Thankfully the layout hasn't yet got around to an ambient-sounds system. Cheers, Alan.

nigelb, thanks for the comment. Those carbooters probably got their drills from the same shop as me :-)

Thanks Dave. I do like making up these gadgets, and while they may look rickety they do actually work. Of course once they are all hidden beneath the scenery the operator will have to be like the pinball wizard in the old song, and play by intuition. Should be interesting. Northroader, thank you. There will be some cardboard guards on the sides of the sector plates, but hopefully the addition of scenery will otherwise stop things falling through. Alan

Good progress has been made on the new extension in the past month. I've been making an effort to get a lot of the drudge work done while the first rush of enthusiasm lasts. The flourescent lighting has been added, the track has been laid and everything is now wired and working. The weight of the unit has risen to 8lb. This seems like a good opportunity to describe the construction and operation of the gadgetry, before it all gets buried beneath scenery. Sector Plates An incline at the rear of the baseboard connects the high and low level tracks. The sector plates at each end are unusual in that they can be moved in 3 dimensions and form part of the gradient. That removes the need for transitions on the incline, so the full 48 inch baseboard length can be used to achieve the 2.5 inch rise at a constant slope. The plates are pivoted on pieces of dowel with enough play to allow for the vertical movement. Below is a sequence of photos of the top sector plate to show how it works... 1. A train pushes onto the sector plate from high level yard. 2. The sector plate control knob is turned clockwise, rolling the wheels along underneath to an over-centre position, which lifts the sector plate slightly. 3. The control rod is pushed towards the back, moving the sector plate against a stop that aligns it with the rear gradient track. 4. The control knob is turned anticlockwise, lowering the sector plate onto a ledge which sets it at track level with the same slope as the incline. The mechanism was built from odd bits of wood and lego-like wheels. Getting everything lined up was by trial and error, which is why it looks rather scrappy. No precision engineering here. The sector plate at the bottom of the gradient operates in a similar way, but as the arc travelled is greater, part of the movement is done by pulling on strings. That saves the control rod from protruding too far from the front of the layout, where it could get walked into and damaged. The bottom sector plate as seen from the rear. A bit confusing but you might be able to figure out how it works. The third sector plate, at the throat of the high level yard, simply uses a push-pull rod (green garden cane) to move it between the 2 stops. Points are also operated mechanically using green canes. Train Turntable The turntable can hold a loco plus 2 wagons. The deck is supported on more lego-like wheels (they are just so darned useful). It is rotated by pulling on strings that thread around push-pin bollards and out through plastic tube to the front of the baseboard. A couple of wooden stops limit the rotation to about 160 degrees and align the deck for either the port or industrial estate branch. A period of thorough testing (playing trains) will now take place while I contemplate how to tackle the scenery. Cheers, Alan.

Thanks Corbs. The railbus does tend to get in the way during shunting, but I don't mind the extra challenge. Alan.

Corbs, Wenlock, Northroader, thanks for your comments. The track will probably a mixture. I'd like to have done it all in Peco code 75 for simplicity, but their LH and RH points are a bit long, so I think I'll have to make up my own short radius versions instead. It'll make the difference between 2 or 3 wagon capacity for the sidings. Its a tight fit. Alan.

Tweedale was declared 'finished' over a year ago, and indeed nothing of great significance has been done to it since. It still gets operated fairly regularly though, and for a small self-contained system I've been very happy with it on the whole. However there are a couple of things I thought would enhance the operation. One is a basic sorting yard, from which trips could work out to other parts of the system. The other is a sea port, allowing the Tweedalers to join the global economy and dabble in a bit of import-export. All of which is a good excuse for extending the layout, especially as I'm now in the mood to get back into this barmy project. 　 The new extension is to be on a 48 x 14 inch baseboard, and consist of windowed scenes as before. As well as the port and yard, there is also room for a third scene which has been tentatively earmarked for an industrial estate. 　 Here are the track plans for the two levels... As can be seen there are a lot of unnatural contrivances, in the form of sector plates and a train turntables, for connecting everything together. They will be hidden away beneath the scenery, but still accessible (hopefully). The sketch below shows the general idea for the visible parts of the three scenes... No doubt things will change as construction proceeds. 　 Baseboard Construction To get things started, the baseboard frame has now been made up. It was built from 25x6mm pine strips, with 19x19mm square section for the uprights - quick and easy to cut with a junior hacksaw and glue together with PVA. Its a method I've used before, and while it's unlikely to withstand the sort of abuse that say a club layout has to endure, I've found it perfectly adequate for my own needs in the past. The frame is rigid and fairly lightweight, weighing in at 1.3 kg (a bit less than 3lb) on the kitchen scales. It will eventually be supported on shelf brackets attached to the wall. I've listed the order in which it was constructed below, in case others may find it useful. The glue was allowed to set for at least half an hour between each stage... 　 1) Longitudinal L girders for the base and top were made up by glueing and pinning together a couple of strips for each. 2) The uprights were glued to the bottom L girders. A set square was used to make sure they were vertical. 3) The cross pieces at the ends sit within the L girders and were glued to the uprights, again checking everything was square. 4) The other cross pieces were glued between the L girders. 5) The diagonal bracing was then glued in place. That quite magically set the whole thing rigid and eliminated any tendency for the frame to twist. 6) The front top Longitudinal L girder was just screwed to the uprights, not glued. It will support the flourescent light fitting, and is removeable to make working on the layout easier. The back and side pieces were glued in place. They will help support the backscene. 7) After leaving the glue to harden overnight, the main corner joints were strengthened with screws. 　 Cheers, Alan.

For some time now the denizens of Tweedale have been clamouring for better passenger train accomodation, having become dissatisfied with the old brake van that has been used hitherto. Personally I can't think of a nicer way of travelling along lazy bylines, but there is no accounting for taste, and the Tweedalers disagree. So the railway company has finally given way and obtained a Park Royal railbus. Sadly this was found to be too long for the line's sharp curves and short platforms (both practically and aesthetically), so Grimley Engineering were entrusted with the task of adapting it to suit the railway's needs. OK lets face it, Tweedale doesn't really need a railbus, but I saw shortliner's thread describing a cut-down Budd railcar in the US subforum, and couldn't resist having a bash at something like it myself. The chassis came from a Model Power Plymouth diesel, picked up at an exhibition for 16 pounds. You don't see many locos around at that price these days, so I wasn't expecting great performance, but it was cheap enough to risk a try. The body was unscrewed and removed (I'm sure it will come in useful one day)... The chassis was attacked with a hacksaw and cut down to the bare necessities... The wheelbase is only half that needed for the full length railbus, but as the motor drives just one set of wheels it looks like it would have been fairly easy to cut the chassis and move the unpowered wheels out to suit. Instead I chose to leave the wheelbase as it was and halve the length of the body (approximately), giving a dumpy little railbus more in keeping with the layout's compressed nature. The body is of course from the Dapol plastic kit. Shortening the sides was straightforward, but filling and sanding the cut in the roof to blend it in was a chore. The railbus arrives at The Pits on a test run. The crowd look suspicious. Nobody gets on. Perhaps they haven't grasped the concept of sliding doors on a train. Whatever next, disembodied voices telling them to mind the gap? At Poshington Upon Twee nobody greets its arrival. The novelty has worn off already. I have to say, its not a particularly smooth runner. On the level its not too bad, but it struggles getting up the gradient at Poshington, with a lot of wheelslip and shaking, despite a traction tyre on one wheel. Still, I enjoyed myself building the thing. Some interior details will be added in due course, which might help distract attention from the motor and ballast weight inside, though they are not too noticeable. Cheers, Alan.

It looks to me as though 'unravelled' is on the right track. Having had a search around the internet, I think they are needle-beams, traditionally used to support walls while underpinning the foundations. So they could have been pushed through the piers at a later stage while strengthening the bridge at some time. Alan.

I don’t know what they were for, but I’ve seen them elsewhere, in particular on a small girder bridge over a stream where I lived as a kid. At the time it amused us to use them for swinging under the bridge from one side of the line to the other, rather than scrambling across the track (southern electric third rail and all that). I suppose it’s possible the bridge was converted from arch to girder at some later date if the bars were indeed concerned with supporting an arch. Alan.

2mmMark, thank you. 1 year on and nothing more has been done to the layout on the scenic side, but it still gets operated most days. It suits me perfectly. Alan.