Northroader

Looking at the two old plans, the larger of the two engine sheds placed facing the town looks as if it really ought to be for goods traffic? Otherwise the only sidings left were on the corner facing the foreshore.?? Would make a nice old time setting.

You can find them as RTR as well. Atlas f'rinstance.

The main work at present is surface texturing along the rest of the depot, blending in with a new road which is being laid, mainly formed from greyboard, and nothing too inspiring to look at. As Alice said before she tooled off after the White Rabbit "A post without piccies, what sort of a blog is that?" So, here's a picture of more freight wagons to be getting on with: Two 40' boxcars, showing the bedrock vehicles for any 50's North American layout. Away from the bulk carriers of coal or iron ore, these vehicles were most likely to be on a freight train or in a siding. The nearest one is what is termed a "composite" car, the framework being steel, and the body a mix of wood planking for the sides and floor, and steel sheet pressings for the ends and roof. This construction typified the era from about 1910 to the 30's. I built it from a .060" plastikard shell around a wood block. Bogies and couplers were screwed to the block and an overlay of vee groove plastic sheet formed the side planking. The ends and roof were done by me making resin castings, the roof by using a steel boxcar roof as a pattern, the ends from a 5+5+5 corrugation master I made myself. The trouble is you will detect how some warping has taken place. The other boxcar is the type which followed in the 30's, the wood sides being replaced by flush sheet steel panels. This one is RTR straight out of the box, by Intermountain.

I can't see me ever getting into DCC, (too many notes of the other kind), but it would be rather nice to have chips which ran to the rhythm of a G & S operetta.

Up to now, work has gone on without being tailored for a particular system. However, the buildings, which do need to be related to a company, are forming, so I have to come clean and say the line to start with will be modelled on the London Brighton & South Coast Rly. Since I retired I have taken up walking as a way of trying to keep fit, and one favourite area for this is the countryside of Surrey and Sussex, home country for this line. Away from the strip Bognor to Rottingdean, the coast ain't bad either. Like every other pregroup railway it had its own character. From a Washbourne point of view, it fulfils the need to have a pool of modellable small tank engines to pick from, probably more so than any other line, as some of the old lines rather surprisingly were quite restricted for this. If you go for around 1880, a lot of the old Craven types hadn't been replaced by later Stroudley standardisation, but were running around in the new paint job, and you could go on picking out suitable ones forever, it seems. First need is for a station building to put on the platform. As a temporary measure I'm using a shelter made for another line, based on the one which was at Buxted, which I think is a really attractive design. This is mainly ply construction, although the valancing is vee groove plastic sheet. You don't have to look too hard to see where my finger curled over when picking it up and repairs were needed. There are also a few small people appearing, although an expert like ChrisN of Traeth Mawr will probably shoot me down in flames on costume details. As a small terminus it is limited for the facilities it offers, and I am making a larger building, which is a version of Hever, but shrunk in the rain. However, since work started Major- General (retd.) Edwardian has cast his eyes over the proposals, and I have been threatened with an adverse B.o.T. report. For a time I considered a crafty wheeze of having the Washbourne Ladies Orphean Society doing a recital when he did his inspection, when he would forget all about his tape measure, but I realised our Inspector is a man of iron, having camped for months in the wilds of Stainmoor, and unbending in his purpose, so the new building is being reshaped.

The new "by-pass" opened at Wootton Bassett this week. This runs parallel to the railway on the south side of the line, joining the roads out to Lyneham and Broad Town, and permitting the two rail overbridges at each end to be closed in turn and renewed. From a rail fan angle it doesn't really give any improved viewpoints for camera work, the west end being below track level and behind scrubland thickets, and the east end rising past the aggregate siding, which has more thickets, also no parking anywhere except for a single field turning. At the east end besides the old narrow brick Brunel overbridge for Broad Town, there is a footbridge besides it. The old footbridge is on the west side, still open, but coming out as being too low, and a new one on the east side, set higher, which is currently having the approach ramps being built. The Broad Town road bridge is now closed, and preparatory work going on for demolition.

Fond of copper, eh?, must be the gypsy in your soul.

"Lovely chips, dearie, they're King Edwards" "Thanks, love, I want some King Arthurs."

"Oh, alright, then, spam, spam, spam, n' chips...?"

"There you go, guvnor, large portion of chips straight out of the pan, salt and vinegar?? Oh, right, how about a nice sausage? Pasty... Oh..."

Now that's more like it, clean 460s and mucky everything else's.

Looks a bit shiny for a 28?

No, after WW2, old disused airfields were the favourite place for doing driving lessons. Acres of space, zilch traffic, and enough room for the "instructor", usually a family member, in the family car, not dual drive, to correct mistakes before things got out of hand. I used to sit in the back while one of my pals, twelve, got lessons from his auntie. Hope you get the lead back in your pencil soon, Phil.

Guilty as charged, m'lud. Can you hit b.o.t. Inspectors with "rule 1"?

My efforts have been concentrated on the small left hand section, and I can give 'before and after' piccys of this. The factory needed bringing forward, and I've fitted locating dowels. The brick paper on the front has faded, you can compare the upper storey with the lower, which was covered by freight cars. A new layer has been fitted, and two coats of Humbrol flat varnish applied in the hope it gives some protection. They seem to have changed the formulation since the last tin I bought, maybe for the better. Then the tracks have been ballasted, and magnets are starting to appear, although my Kadees aren't taking the bait yet! Ground cover done, I must keep an eye open at a show for a grass grower, if not a Van der Graaf generator. Finally a patch has been applied to the scenery to cover the gap at that end. I've trimmed the picture to show the view blocker in action, covering the line entrance, and helping with the "presentation" A Canadian Pacific 40' steel boxcar is parked at the factory, these also ran over the CNR, of course. This car has appeared on vaughan45's "new O scale layout" thread, where Jasond of this parish identified it as an Allnations build. It's about sixty years old, built to different methods than now, but I'm very fond of it. You'll have noted that the CNR branded its newer cars "Serves all Canada". The CPR regarded it as a total waste of space, and came back with "Spans the World". There's a 'Royal Hudson' loco. in front of the globe, flanked on one side by a DC-3 ? airliner, and a ship on the other. Remember the "Empresses" coming up the Mersey to Liverpool?

Talking about Gateshead shed, I couldn't help with staffing conditions, but it always gave me the impression in the steam/ diesel era as running hard to stand still. You'd get there by walking over the High Level bridge, and pick your way through some really ancient buildings, with the offices of the Electric Traction Engineer (not at South Gosforth) then the old Noah's Ark station for Gateshead, which had become part of the works, which had run down again after trying to help with repairs in WW2. I think there was a fruit wholesaler somewhere in there. Some of the loco facilities spilt over into this area, then a nice new concrete apron and brick concoction for diesels maintenance, and a tangle of dirty old sidings and roundhouses beyond, with coaling and such beyond that. The mechanical foreman was a dear old boy who was rather stranded by diesels, the electrical foreman much more with it. As it was sited in the middle of a big city, in a cramped dirty setting, low paid shift work would have trouble attracting staff.

Another plus for the flat top handles occurred to me the other day when using them. This is that if you pick them up to turn a train, you can do 90 degrees of the turn, rest the end furthest from you on another cassette in the yard, change hands holding the front handle, and complete the full 180 degrees. Of course, now I've got the fiddle yard up and running, I can do some test running, and prove what a crap modeller I am. First job was polish the rails after ballasting, and make sure flange ways and tie bars were free of grit. Then I've done some packing to maintain the "top"(rail level) on the run off one of the roads into the fiddle yard,and also the curve on the front siding. One of the point throws needed adjustment before I was getting a feed. I suspect that in the long run I might have to change these, for now I'm just keeping an eye on their performance. Then three goods wagons which had an earlier type of coupling needed this changing to the type shown in a previous post. This brings the line into a more or less operational level, so just dealing with more faults as they happen. As this was going on, I was also making a platform for the station. This was made from a 3mm. ply top cut to shape, and two lengths of nominal 2x1 timber glued under. There is cork underlay all across, and the platform level comes just below the buffers. The surface is covered with a layer of cardboard, and individual slabs are marked in with a pencil and scored with a Stanley knife. A paper strip is glued along the front to represent the edging, being scored and bent over 3mm at the front, and joins also scored in. I allowed slabs 3' x 2', and edge slabs 2'6" wide, and randomly 4' or 5' long. The front face is covered by a dark red brick paper. Then paint the slabs, various mixes of grey and tan Humbrol, with some thinned down washes, and wiping off with a tissue. I'm always concerned about printed brick papers fading, so this got two coats of flat varnish. Then there was a final scuzzying up with chalk dust. The platform is located using wooden dowels, and there are more dowel holes for the station building. When it's in place, there's a very noticeable gap, of around scale 2', between the platform and the train, because of the throw over of the 044T going through the points, lucky the train is in front. The other thing is the platform is very narrow in front of the station building. Why didn't mum and dad tell me to build my baseboards a proper width before they put me on a train at 18?

So he made a speech, but it was in a burrow.

It's enough to drive you quackers.

Here are two freight cars for the line, RTR straight out of the boxes, with homemade loads. There's an Atlas 50' mill gondola, and a Weaver 36' two bay hopper car. Both have had Kadees fitted, and a repaint. The hopper has had two copper slugs tucked into the vee between the hopper slopes to give some more weight. I always like heavy cars, in the hope it gives steadier running, and the trains are all short, so the locos. don't have such a job to do. For the gondola I took a strip of wood and cemented plastic strips across the ends. Vertical stanchions, from plastruct tee section with chamfered tops, were glued to this, and painted the car colour. Then it was a job of cutting up discarded Christmas tree branches, with length to just fit across inside the car. A fine tooth razor saw was used to get a nice clean cut. These were glued in layers on top of the wood strip using pva bond under each layer. This then represents a pulp wood load, which can be found quite extensively travelling from the forests to paper works, or ply or chip board plants. For the hopper I cut a piece of hardboard which just fitted inside, resting on the tops of the hopper ramps and the central divider. It needed notches to clear the side stiffeners in the middle. Then I glued four small pieces of ply spaced regularly on the hardboard to form a core for some low mounds, which were made from polyfilla with some pva added, and smoothed. A paper "fence" was glued around the outside of the hardboard, which is the stage reached in the picture above, before it was all painted Matt black. Then I filled up with crushed coal covering the plaster. The good thing about coal is you can break down full size lumps very small and it still looks realistic, although looking at the finished job I could probably made it smaller. It was glued down the same as ballast, using diluted pva bond with a spot of washing up liquid from an eye dropper. When it was dry, I peeled the paper back, recut the notches, and touched up with Matt black. The two cars got a paint coating from a mix, which is my take on CNR mineral brown, being two parts BR freight bauxite, to one part SR freight umber. The lettering was the old CDS transfers, and then just some scruffying up.

Doctor, I just get stabbing pains when I reach in me ar@e pocket.

You'd think while they were spending all that money, they'd have put the Boxpok wheels and the air smoothed casing back on?

On the micro switch point operation, how about slider switches? The centre tag goes to the frog, the outer tags to the two running rails at the point entry. Then place with the axis of the switch pointing at the point, and connect the point tiebar to the slider part of the switch. There seem to be several favoured ways of doing this, I use a brass rod passing through a hole drilled in the slider, with brass tube collars either side. This way you can leave small gaps to allow the switch travel more than the point throw. As the switch slider is only a hard plastic, you have to watch drilling, and soldering the collars. Then mounting the switch, if you cut a hole in the b/board for the switch to go in, you'll find the mounting screw holes will come very close to the edge of your hole, and it might be better to mount the switch on a brass plate in a bigger hole. Sorry, back to sweaty young ladies in the gym....

Today I thought I'd go and see what was happening down to Newbury. They're doing quite well with the base tubes, I'd guess well over half are in. Things are a bit sparse, Rdg. west to Southcote, and it looks as if problems haven't been resolved where there's an embankment above boggy ground, such as west of Southcote, and east of the racecourse. The sidings at Theale look barren, and also the run in to Newbury. Otherwise there's quite long stretches of base tubes in, some gaps, here and there a tube half in. There aren't that many over bridges on this stretch, I did wonder about the old brick bridge at Aldermaston, but Thatcham station overbridge is done, and work is in progress on a small girder bridge by the old grain elevator at Newbury. I ended up in the Dundas Arms at Kintbury (two pints of Ramsbury gold, and a very tasty bacon samwidge since you ask) On the way back I checked out Reading - Didcot. There are quite a lot of structures in leaving Reading, so a good deal of the flyover has masts, more gaps at the Scours Lane end. Beyond Tilehurst things are really heartening, on the downside the earth cable is up as far as Goring, apart from a small gap at Pangbourne station, and the wires are up on the relief lines most of the way to Basildon bridge, again save for Pangbourne. The main lines have a smaller amount of catenary only. Beyond Goring they're well on with masts, head spans, register arms, just short of bits here and there, pretty well all the way to Tescos, but I'm afraid I missed the leaning mast mentioned above. Head spans all over the South end of Didcot station, and more past the station to Foxhall.