NittenDormer

Is it too late to mention Easter Saturday (currently due in 6 days time, the Saturday after Easter Sunday)?

And just to prove I have been working, here is the finished Scalescenes warehouse, including rather fiddly signage. Strange how there isn't a 'warning, dinosaurs' sign included. Note the garish mount card used visible in back view - one green, one red. Both were cresm on the other face.

I had hoped to be able to present some fully complete terraced house backs for my next post, but I have been getting frustrated with the slowness of the finishing touches. As a diversion, not only do I now have a nearly-finished low relief terraced houses kit, I also have a couple of partially-built tunnels and the 'free' warehouse. Top logic, eh? No pics this time as I seem to be so bad at attaching them anyway.

Been struggling to achieve right angles in 2 or more planes when glueing. Tonight I suddenly realised I had the perfect accessory at hand... Megabloks (other construction systems also available).

Oops, here are the pictures.

5 weeks since I started the Scalescenes low-relief terraced house backs, they are about finished: I say about, because they still need to be weathered to a more grimy (grimier?) Northern satanic-mill town look, various scratches need covering up, and they need placing. The row will be stepped as shown (approx rise of 1thickness mount card (1.4mm) per pair to sit corectly on my 1% angled (1 in 100) baseboard surface. And finally, the 'about' is because the kit includes an outbuilding/back gate backyard. Which has a whole lot less parts and no windows, so I reckon another couple of weeks at the most. Who knows, I may yet decide that the back room is the bathroom, and add some sink/toilet pipes. Where were bathrooms in houses like these? But not tonight, because I have done an unusual amount of cycling this weekend (not mentioning figures, this isn't a competition), and my legs are so tired I can't think straight.

3 weeks since my last post… have I been idle? In a word, no. In another word, Scalescenes. I need a row of terraced house backs along the back of the layout. The Scalescenes kist fits the bill – and helpfully, I can reuse/reprint to make as many as I want. At £5 the kit is not going to break the bank, although the printing costs might – my last trip to Staples translated as £1 per sheet for printing (£3 USB fee, paper 20p, colour print 65p if you must know). I now have a colour printer, which will help for that oft-quoted advantage of downloadable kits – if you mess it up, just print it off again. If only it was that easy… My card kit history started with the Metcalfe Platform Shelter, being given away free at a shindig at the National Mining Museum (of Scotland) when the Borders railway opened. I rather enjoyed it, so graduated on to buying them –pub, signalbox, cottages, school… Time the next step up – downloadable kits. I started with the free Scalescenes coal office (in black and white). Then a tunnel entrance. OMG. All that hacking through 2mm thick card. Exhausting. Next the arched bridge. OMG even harder. So many more parts! Then the medium station. At least the tunnel and the bridge didn’t have windows! And now the terraced housebacks. Printed at 90% scale. Using 1.4mm card instead of 1mm card. Since the 2mm thick card should now be 1.8mm, and the 1mm card 0.9mm, this has led to a fair degree of what some call ‘fettling’ (and I call ‘bodging’). I have to say, if you want to get modelling-time-value-for-money, Scalescenes is the way forward. I started my first print of the kit in October (3 blocks, 6 houses). 4 months on, they are nearly finished. Time for the second batch. And this time, total focus. No more baseboard building in the garage, I am on a mission! Other shortcuts: instead of building one block at a time, I am doing all 3 at once, which means making 3 or 6 of the relevant part at the same time. Will this be quicker? I started with the 3 ‘wall A’s, the end wall of what in architectural terms would be called the sticky-out bit. After 2 evenings, the pieces were all cut out: 9 card formers, 3 paper cover sheets, 12 window holes. Then I remembered that I had to cut out 30 windows and glue the frames to clear Christmas card boxes. By the end of week 1, 3 x 'wall A' were complete. The next week saw 6 x ‘wall B’ (the sides of the sticky-out bits, smaller, only 6 windows and only 2 thicknesses of card) AND 6 x ‘wall C’ (the main body of the house, only a single card thickness, but 12 windows to cut out) completed. Oh yeah, I am unstoppable! Wall B parts here: [adopt Geordie accent here] Week 3 in the Scalescenes house. the interior is well under way. Can I beat the record or is it all going to go horribly wrong?

With those flags fluttering at the bonnet corners, your limo up to Glasgow should be easily identifiable! Looking forwards to seeing this beast.

Woo hoo! The basic trackplan (crudely drawn, not 100% accurate etc) has appeared? Fiddleyard is at the top, 'viewing side is from the bottom.

And so today it is time to share the trackplan. Most layouts start with a ‘what if’. Mine is no exception. Here the ‘what if’ is: ‘what if the Pennines were proper mountains? The basic roundy-roundy format is roughly 50% scenic, 50% fiddle yard. Was there a way of getting more running distance out of the same space? Of course there was. And so, with my beginners inexperience and blind optimism, I hereby enter the world of gradients. In short, practically everywhere apart from the fiddleyard is on a climb of mostly 1.6%, just over 2% at tight points. Good job I am going to be running diesels! A few tests of my existing stock revealed that of my 30-year old Hornby 47 could manage 6 coaches, a class 50 would barely move on the flat, and a Lima HST was useless. My Railroad P2 on the other hand, was still fine with 9 carriages. Nonetheless, I have developed a sudden interest in DMUs and other short trains. My trackplan, which I have attempted to attach but have no faith in my ability to succeed runs like this: Trains leave the fiddleyard at the back heading right, loop through 180 degrees and climbs along the front of the layout until it is high enough to cross over the FY entrance at the left end. Then they curve around again 180 degrees again to reach the station on the middle level (height gained about 140mm). Heading right (again, a one-and-a-half turn spiral gains another 100mm to pass right to left along the back of the station. Then a 4-level helix returns them to the fiddle yard. All this – spirals, changes of direction etc – are prototypical. If you look in the right place. My main inspiration is Wassen on what is now the ‘old’ Gotthardbahn in Switzerland, which uses spirals, switchbacks and shortened freight trains to get to the 1100m-high summit tunnel, all chock full of impressive but necessary engineering. Wassen sits between two 180 degree curves, so that the village is passed 3 times, from below, level with, and above. The station, on the middle level, is facing the wrong way – to get a train to Milan, you get a on a train facing Zurich, and vice versa (these are in opposite directions, for those of you unfamiliar with the geography). See the map at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_railway. There is also a good video at http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/1380/entry-12071-4-hmm-what-does-aussichtspunkt-mean-wassen/ So have I solved the 50:50 conundrum? No. Instead of trains passing through the scenic section once, they pass across 3 times. But the return spiral uses so much track that the visible/staging ratio is still 50:50. But I still get a lot more track in the same space. As I think I might have said already, this has much potential to go horribly wrong. But its going to be fun until it does.

And so, after the appropriate 'lurking' apprenticeship, it is time to start a layout and a layout thread of my own. Watch with bated to see whether I will emerge triumphant or crash and burn… To stat with the basics: Scale – ‘OO’. Which should really be pronounced ‘oooh’ rather than ‘oh oh’? Era – sometime from my own childhood (1980s) to the present. Not entirely narrowed down yet. I am not sure I have sufficiently clear memories to model anything beyond 5 years ago. Diesels, then, which will become extremely relevant shortly. Location (inspiration) – not a specific prototype, but based on my youthful experiences of the trans-Pennine route – rain-soaked valleys of blackened stone and declining mill towns, winding valleys, urban viaducts. Location (actual) – garage. At present not lined/insulated in any way – I want to wait and see whether this hobby is going to be long term before committing to this expense/comfort. Size – obviously it is going to fit the full length of the garage (about 5.5m, or 18 feet). It would be rude not to. Naturally, there have been various expansions from the original plan during the design stage, until at one point it was longer than the garage. Oops! It is going to be 4'6" feet deep, (I will have access to both sides), which is the narrowest I could make it to fit in a 180 degree turn at the ends. Baseboards – I don’t feel on a strong enough footing to claim permanent ownership of the whole garage, plus my kids might want to play table tennis table now and then. So it is going to be built as 9 boards with a max size 4.5 feet x 2.5 feet, that can be stacked away when needed. Obviously, also at the back of my mind is the belief that my layout-building is going to be so FANTASTIC that exhibition organisers from far and wide will be clamouring for my presence… Trackplan – to follow, once I get the hang of uploading files, but continuous run. Current status – Boards 1 & 2 under construction. I started off a year ago with a train set and a sheet 8 x 4 foot plywood (9mm) cut into quarters by B&Q (note the Imperial/metric mix – be on your toes for more of that later), supported on 2 x 1 (well, 44 x 18mm) timber. That gave me a flat earth surface to experiment with things like curves and gradients. I discovered an inability to cut wood at right angles (admittedly, with a panel saw). A fair bit of reading and forum-browsing later, I can now do a lot better with a jigsaw, although the cuts are often at 88 degrees rather than 90. What to expect – slow and steady progress. I have no intention of rushing, partly for financial reasons – to spread the cost across a longer period. Time is the other factor. I bought the Scalescenes ‘terraced house backs’ kit in October and still haven't finished it. Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Quite possibly. I did try to start with a smaller, more finishable track plan, but since it wasn’t going to excite me like this one does, it seemed like a step back rather than forwards. And the name? Prototypical in the sense that it is a real place, but not strictly speaking geographically accurate - it is a cemetery in Irvine, Ayrshire, but the name was too good to waste.

Some of your staircase suggestions remind me of Crystal Palace. Looking forward to seeing the overall roof.

I like the metric / imperial footprint versions - a 3.28 foot wide baseboard is going to be a challenge to measure! Regarding the subterranean fiddle yard, you don't necessarily need a helix with that space - a straight track sneaking round the outer edge and disappearing into a tunnel would be a potential alternative.

Thanks Jim, I couldn't work out whether it was for cosmetic, practical or prototypical reasons.

Jim, just been reading most of this, then skipped a few pages and the layout has completely changed?? Really enjoying getting a feel for the thought process and all your building. Its all good stuff. One question though - the incline against the wall back right of the shed - is there a reason why the double track splits going around the corner? (Assuming it still does?) Cheers and keep up the good work.

Utterly inspiring modelling. If I can get my OO gauge a quarter as good as this, I will be pleased. On he subject of 'cameos', don't stop with Lucy the elephant. Can you find room for Kirk Douglas in chunky knitwear (possibly on a ferry), Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton generally causing mayhem and a 2mm scale Frank Sinatra with a POW train? Not geographically accurate, but why split rivets?

I am looking forwards to seeing this in the flesh in Glasgow. Any chance of modelling the Lourdes Pilgrimage trains? One or sometimes two would head off in July for Dover/Folkstone. I presume they also ran during your era. Don't know if hospital cars were used on the English side, by the time I went in the 80s, the worst cases went on road 'jumbulance'. The French train was often loaded on two platforms (Calais? Boulougne?) and then joined up and certainly included stretcher carriages. At the Liverpool end, you would need a fair smattering of priests and nuns. 4mm scale rosary beads?

I am thinking of buying the Hornby ‘Flying Scotsman’ train set on a well-known on-line retailer named after a South American river if the price drops below £90-£100. The idea is that, having bought the P2 Cock o the North ‘Master of the Glens’ train set for a similar price last winter, it is an affordable way to get a six-carriage train of teak carriages, plus a choice of locos to haul them, for under £200. (Going by the RRPs on the Hornby website, the same rolling stock bought individually would tally up to around £300, or £350 for the two train sets. Plus I get a couple of loops of track that I’m sure I can find a use for. Even just the FS loco + 3 carriages from Hattons tally up to £88. Without a box.) Knowing pretty much zero about the prototypes, are the Hornby LNER teak coaches any good? Any glaring errors I need to be aware of? (Wrong bogies, wrong length, that kind of thing? I would have 4 composites and 2 brakes – is this a vaguely realistic train composition? Unless the details on said South American river are wrong, the carriage numbers with FS are different to those with COTN, which is nice (disclaimer: I bought the Master of the Glens in January, don’t know whether the current sets have different numbering, or perhaps the current sets are from a different production batch?). Just in case, how difficult is it to renumber these? What would be recommended to improve the appearance? Is there flush glazing available? Detailing kits? Any other thoughts/comments? Note that I have never yet customised any RTR stock before, unless you count dropping them. (Plus I have 2 young children, hence the ambition to stick to less valuable stock items for now.) Thanks all.

If modeling in the 1990s, be sure to include a cuddly rabbit in a hammock stuck to the inside of a top floor window from when my sister lived on Kings Road. Old Liverpool Central would be my dream layout. New Liverpool Central could get by with no actual trains, just some noise and a slight shaking of the layout.

Well, I've just discovered this thread and caught up from the beginning, intersting reading, informative and enjoyable. Fascinating to see adapations and plans changing as the build progresses. (Have to confess to skipping most of the electrics bit, way over my head.) I must also confess to a fascination with the background clutter as much as the views of the baseboards. Was that a box of tomatoes? Keep up the good work, you are well ahead of me in the build process. (I am still at the stage of mere thoughts and uncut plywood.)

Thanks EJ and DavidC for your detailed comments. My tablet thing is mot allowing me to suitably rate your replies. Follow on question: what is the difference between Hornby fishplates snd Peco railjoiners? I thought they were basically the same thing?

Planning my first mid-life (as opposed to childhood) layout so stand by to be bombarded with questions... One day, I might know enough to be able to provide answers. Space limitations mean that I will need to use setrack curves (Hornby rather than Peco, but I don't think that makes a difference) with 67mm centre-to-centre spacing at the ends, but would like a more realistic-looking 'six foot' on the straights (the streamline standard of 50mm sounds ideal). Has anyone mixed the two spacings already, how easy is it to transition between them and any pitfalls I need to look out for? Also, since the genuine centre-to-centre equivalent would be around 11 feet or 44/45mm, has anyone gone closer than 50mm? Again, does it work, and hazards to look out for? There are things I know I don't know, but there are also probably things I don't know that I don't know (as Donald Rumsfeld also knows) OO gauge, nearly forgot to add. I know it is not accurate gauge, which is why I am asking about centre-to-centre rather than pure six-foot. And most importantly of all, should 'setrack' have 1 't' or 2?