Northroader

PANTILES. (watch the spell checker carefully, there’s a tendency to drop the “l”, with unfortunate consequences) You can meet up with pantile roofs in places like Somerset, but they do tend to be associated with the warmer, sunnier climes over the Channel. I’ve been sitting on a couple of sheets for ages, with doing a French station roof in mind, but the station for São Lucas has come up, and they’ve come in for this. The roof has a base of 2mm ply glued down onto the walls, then a pyramid of ply built up with more strips of ply forming an infill from the edge to halfway up the pyramid. This gives a firm support to overlaying sheets of pantiles. Slaters do flat plastikard sheets which are embossed, but the sheets I’m using give a good relief representation, which is why I went for them. They’re done by a Spanish firm, Redutex, and I thought they were quite pricey before Brexit, now……!!!, and they’re not particularly large either. The plastic is quite soft and floppy, so although I’ve scored the back of the sheet along the change of angle, they still tend to look like a curve. One item needing care is that they’re self adhesive, but when the backing paper is peeled off, the thin adhesive sheet underneath can come up with it, rather than stay with the tiles. I’ve found that the mould they're made from must have air bubbles, there’s tiny little pinheads on the surface which need to be scraped off. My design of roof is quite wasteful, because all the diagonals mean that offcuts can only be thrown away, with all the tiles overlapping in a downward direction only. Now if I’d have gone for a station which didn’t have a hipped roof, but had a low pitch with square ends, the sheets would have gone further. In HO scale Wills do pantile sheets which have a relief finish, and before now I have done a design in the Continental Modeller for an Italian station built round Wills sheet dimensions. I should really have learnt from that, now I’m waiting for postie to arrive with another sheet, as two weren’t sufficient.

W.H.Smith stock packs of white card, so I got one of these and cut the end of a sheet into strips, with short cross cuts, and these went down to give a textured slate roof. Then some paper strip to get the flashing, and just another card strip on the top to link into the fancy ridge tiles. Now there’s just the chimneys left.

I would be looking at fitting the back room in Barbados.

Bought a house, he says. Just like that, simples. ?????

I thought brother Schooners thread was the most appropriate place to shove this link, which covers a lot of nautical goings on in bygone days: https://abdn.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=44ABE_INST:44ABE_VU1&collectionId=81151714200005941

He won’t manage against spikey toes.

I gather if you start looking on Russian sites things called Trojans can happen. I had it happen on one of my threads, and not really knowing what they were or how to treat them, I’ve kept clear since.

A. You’ve got something nice and tall left foreground, otherwise it’s all flat. Composition, dear boy.

If it’s any help, the GWR broad gauge track wasn’t solely done in bridge rails. Besides the known stretches done using conventional cross sleepering, round Exminster and Lelant, there was also stretches using “Vignoles” rail (flatbottom) I’m sure this is what’s shown in the old photo of Abingdon station, if you study the shadows cast. Not much to go on for the sleepering, transverse or baulk? My fancy is it’s done with a baulk supports, but so well ballasted you’d have difficulty deciding. So, you could use ordinary rail soldered down to copper clad strip. I have done this before now, with the transoms full width to set the gauge and the longitudinal baulks added as in between infill. This may help if you want to do a particular scale, but I would echo others on here and say use 4mm or 7mm, that’s what the BGS items are available in, axles and wheelsets being the key jobs. Consider the picture again. Small terminal station, running line, and siding, set in 1860. What more do you need?, no need to expand outwards, just do a runoff on to a “fiddle stick”, maybe the exit covered by an over bridge, and you’re in the business of running nice little broad gauge trains in a small space. Here’s one I’m doing now, in 7mm scale, but for 5’3” gauge, on this theme. Main board size is 33”x12”, say 840mmx300mm. Construction is using an A1 10mm foamboard sheet, with ply facings and foamboard “framing”, nice, light, compact. I think I’d make it 15” wide for a GWR line. Would I do it for a GWR line? Well, last year I had a major operation and downsized where I live. In the process my 7mm seven foot jobs and references were slung, and four months after the move I’m going round “why did you do that!, you fool?!?”

Nothing to show you now, and talking small sizes of buildings in 0 scale, but in the past I’ve painted embossed plastic sheets for bricks or stonework by an overall wash, using Humbrol flat paints, maybe patchy dabs of slightly different tone. Then do a paint mix for mortar and load a sprinbow pen, going along all the courses and risers by hand. This is tedious, but the courses aren’t as prominent as when you’re flooding and wiping. p.s. There’s always doing this, which looks great for old buildings: https://www.westernthunder.co.uk/threads/old-parrock.6209/page-5#post-172805

IN FRANCE, STOP FOR LUNCH.

That was Academical.

Well done, that is a lovely little loco, and thanks for the honour of giving it my moniker.

https://www.gnrsociety.com/locomotive-class/bury-type-0-4-0-goods/

AZULEJOS POR SÃO LUCAS. A bit more has happened with the station building. It started off with a 12mm ply base, then a 5mm foamboard shell. Now I’ve covered it with a thick cartridge paper, to give it some more texture, and then a wash in white acrylic paint. One very noteworthy feature of a lot of Portuguese buildings is the use of glazed tiles, commonly white with a blue design, but you san see them in other colours. I gather it’s a centuries old cultural tradition, and many railway stations use it. The larger stations can have murals of quite heroic proportions, such as the concourse at Porto São Bento: The second panel on a railway theme is interesting, as it shows Portuguese railways also used the large block bells. (See page 17) Of course, my station is too small and simple for the big designs, just having tiled panels on the lower part of the wall. I did a download of a repetitive pattern, and printed it with a reduction of 50%. The tiles come out too big with this, really it needed 75% reduction, but I found the print lost definition and became too blurred, so I’m using oversize tiles. A good tip would be to print your tiles, then design the building to fit, I was really lucky that the pattern came right for the panel sizes. The tiles were cut to size and stuck in place with UHU, and then got two coats of satin varnish. A shiny finish gives them a better look, but I find anything done on my printer always suffers from the ink fading, and I feel the varnish will help protect this. The building has raised strips round the corners and the doors, I used some card to do this, painted a sort of peachy colour mixed in acrylic, and a bit of Miliput filler under the door arches.

And another one sees the light..

Er, Kevin, this friend of yours, you could tell him of a chat we were having some time ago, which might convince him of the way forward? (And a picture which has survived the Great Photo Crash!!!)

Then you wonder at small sailing vessels coming up the ship canal to Manchester, suppose they’d need a tugboat?

I think the 4plank job is very modellable, if only we knew what the cast plate says. The solebars look flitched, no crown plates, then there’s the vertical strapping at the ends, no corner plate or straps except for a wrap around at the top, the end isn’t a flat top but raised in the middle with tapering flanks, and no diagonal strapping, presumably the continuous top plank provides the support. Continuous top plank on a four planker? It’s got both sides brakes and levers, so it’s really quite up to date. edit: p.s. I thought the coaling operation looks good, a line of p.o. wagons James Ke??? of Liverpool, dumb buffers on the siding, and a more modern one dangling over the ship. I hope they’re going to lower it down a bit and shovel it out, no end door to open, “Bombs away!”…

Nice set of pictures here: https://www.westernthunder.co.uk/threads/halstead.12154/

Do you know, Stephen, looking at your enlargement of the near end, I think I can see a pair of retaining straps bolted to the plank and passing behind the buffer head to secure the plank.

So there’s a nice big thick plank each end. That’s a different way of going on, anyway.

I’m quite sold on doing a version of Lyddlow Goods with passenger accommodation added: https://micromodelrailwaydispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Issue204_finished-compressed.pdf

Can we talk about 4plankers as well on here? If so here’s two as match wagons. In the yard of Horsehay and Dawley station in Shropshire. The Horsehay Co. specialised in girders for cranes and bridges. I can see how the girder is chained down on the bogies, I can guess that they are linked by a rigid bar, I can presume the underslung chains are for traction forces, but I’m mystified how the buffing forces pass from the wagons to the girder.