Dave John

Happy new year to everyone. So not one for celebrations and fed up with the dead time twixt Christmas and New year I decided to make something. I looked about and ferreted in various boxes, what did I have at my disposal? One last sheet of 10 thou styrene. An idea formed, a brake wagon. Something that has been sitting in the back of my head for a while. So I dug out the wagon book, scanned and sized the the drawing and re-read the section about them in the book and the CR forum. Brake wagons were essentially an open wagon with a brake stanchion on it. Their original use was was as a brake vehicle in yards or short trip workings. The one I’m making was built under Drummond but a further 41 were hurriedly converted from old wagons in 1905 when the BOT complained that the CR had been running short trips on the mainline with no brake van at the end of the train. The drawing is not detailed, more of an outline. However the salient features are that these wagons were just 12 foot long with a 6 foot wheelbase. They were however weighted to 10 tons. They may have been converted from earlier wagons, but no details below the solebar are known, nor has any photo of one turned up. ( If anyone has one, shout ). Why two ? I designed the bits in the silhouette software, worked out how many of each part was needed and transferred them to a cutting sheet layout. Came to half a sheet of styrene. Click, click click. Nuff said….. Some parts cut and laminated. Fiddly to stick together, but coming along.

If this ever turns up at Glasgow for the SECC show then shout if you need a body to help ...........

Pickups. Not easy , but they are absolutely vital. I'm fortunate, I have worked in electrical engineering all my life. Anything scrapped with relays in gets the relays stripped out before it goes in the bin. Not for the relays , but for the contacts. Here is a closeup. There is a bit of copperclad on the frames in a sort of fork shape split don the middle. That gives a pad to which the pickups are fixed. They consist of 11 thou guitar string with the gold contact pad from a relay contact soldered to the end. Don't get me wrong, I buggered about with bits of bent wire for years before I realised that the longest wire possible and gold on ns just worked.

Very nice. You will be printing a large mint sweet for the polar bear to sit on ?

One of the few advantages of modelling the Caledonian is that all the FPLs, cranks, tie bars and things were all boxed in with timber built covers. Which of course I have meticulously modelled.....

Are they both the same class ? 683?? could be J71, J88, J73, J66 or J77. Could the rear one be a J77 ? . Deep valence, separate square sandbox, rounded roof and the lubricator on the smokebox suggest it might be ? Just a thought, and something to liven up tea time.

Very atmospheric with excellent lighting.

Well, towards the left middle of the centre photo is a building, originally a foundry, latterly a scrapyard. The original Partick Thistle football ground was about 800 yards the other side of that. Long gone. Not that I can be arsed with football. If I wanted to watch dumb animals in a field I would have become a shepherd.....

Another alternative is to use the self adhesive "lead" foil that is sold by angling shops for weighting flies. It can be moulded into the stonework and slates and when toned down does look very Lead like. This sort of thing; https://www.fishingmegastore.com/fly-tying-materials/-adhesive-lead-foil~4106.html

Interesting question Mikkel. Stone walls were very much a part of the vernacular architecture in the urban areas of the west of scotland. Miles of them were built during the victorian period, not just for the railways but for everything else too. Indeed some go back much earlier. ( Go back far enough even the Romans built one ! ) In the west end of Glasgow many were to enclose estates and as these were sold off as parcels of land for other use the walls were just retained. There is a modern housing estate up at Dawsholm, I think the boundary wall of it is part of the original estate, possibly mid 1700s. Anyway here is a more detailed photo of the boundary wall at the site of Partick Central, the tenements gone to be replaced by modern housing. It is about 5 foot high on the street side. To give you an idea of the extent of it this not very good photo shows about 2/3 of the length of it. Both photos 2003, most of it is gone now. They would however have looked very different in Edwardian times when they were much newer. This is a section of retaining wall, originally for the NB. It has been stone cleaned and now has the colours that would have been seen a century ago. That is in bright morning sun, it looks redder in normal daylight. Outside of the urban areas the CR used timber fencing, so I think its more a case of locality rather than it being a particular CR style.

A couple of highlights of 2019. I finished the mainly scratchbuild of a D1 and made a signal box. A photo of both. I have also improved my lack of photography skills by reading what you lot do and taking notes. If I ever get lining right then you will never hear the last of it.... On a serious note, I do enjoy all of the threads in which folk make things and record their progress. That is how I learn and improve. So many thanks to all that post progress, thats the part of rmweb I really enjoy.

Cheers Mikkel and asa, have a good one.

I wish everyone a good Christmas with a chance to drive a few trains and enjoy some modelling time. So here we are, a Christmas special. Many thanks for all the encouragement, discussion, hints and tips you have all contributed. I enjoy reading and learning from RMweb, keeps my enthusiasm going. All the best, Dave.

They have built up rather well, you can never have too many wagons.

Hang on. The "transformers" used for halogen lighting are very often PWM switched mode power supples and that rating of 11.6 V at 4.9 A assumes that it is connected to a 50 W resistive load. Even then it is usually a PWM output equivalent to 11. 6 V , not true DC. There is usually a bit that says Load "20 W to 50W" on them. If you connect them to a load of less than 20 W they don't generate any output at all, or worse they put out a string of higher voltage spikes until a resistive load is connected to the output. Very nasty if the load is inductive , such as a point motor. My advice, bin them before you damage the model railway stuff. Yes there are loads about, I have removed and scrapped hundreds of them. If you are replacing the lamps with leds then use 240 V Gu10 lamps or MR 11 12V Leds through a proper led driver.

Well observed and finely detailed modelling. The tilt has come out so realistically, it really does look like canvas. I do like the last picture of the collection, quite a fleet there.

There is a clip of a paternoster style storage unit at about 8 minutes in this video; There must be a locking system at the ends to accurately align and switch power to the chosen track, all 30 of them. Clearly a project for a whole weekend rather than just up to tea time.

Depending on your scale and period Severnmodels, Langley and Scalelink are worth a look.

Heh , well, the problem is that strictly speaking anything from the Edwardian era would be silent. I suppose what might be about would be film about traditional manufacturing methods or transport which reflects the era.

I'd agree, the nature of urban sound has changed, traffic particularly busses and lorries do seem to be the predominant sound these days. It is a valid point about manufacture, all the local factories have gone so that is no longer part of the soundscape. There was a foundry and a boiler works close to Partick Central, and two shipyards within half a mile. My guess would be that the sound that travelled furthest from them would have been hot rivetting. Add to that all the sounds from the Clyde itself, hundreds of ship movements daily. Further research needed I think, depends on what turns up in film archives.

Well, there it is. I made up a circuit that plays one of nine tracks at random, with selectable intervals. Two sounds can be triggered by the IR detectors which will go out of sight beyond the end of the layout. A whistle as a train enters the station and a different one as a train approaches the traverser. The whole lot is sat neatly in an old pa amplifier case with its own mains power supplier. This seems to make it immune from transients on the railway itself triggering sounds. The speaker is an old hi fi bookshelf type tucked away under the layout, gives a distant feel to the ambience. A couple of pics. I could post circuit diagrams if anyone wants them, but as with the IR board you probably wouldn’t do it this way unless you happened to have the bits lying about. Sadly I am the sort of person that does. Mair chips than a chip shop. One sound every 3 minutes or so seems ok for a start. There are various sounds of railway activity, whistles, shunting, a genuine Caley westinghouse pump and some of a townscape, horses and carts clattering by, some church bells. They do sound as I would imagine them to across a distance. Sourcing the sounds and processing them was actually the most time consuming part of the whole project. If I come across a bit of sound I like I will borrow it, the good thing about the sound module is that the mp3s are on a micro sd so changing them is simple. The big question is do I like it? The honest answer is that I haven’t made my mind up yet. Ask me this time next year how much of the time I have had it switched on while running trains. As I said in the last post this was something I wanted to try cheaply and the whole thing has only cost about a tenner so if I don’t like it its no big deal. Photos of nice blue trains will resume now I have got that itch scratched...........

I also found that a few soldered copperclad sleepers helped a lot to hold points more rigidly than all plastic sleeper construction. A bit of brass shim between the rail and the sleeper and you can't tell the difference with a cosmetic chair and a bit of paint.

Oddly I have recently been having a mess about with ambient sound. I wanted a relatively cheap solution since it might just annoy me and I would end up not using it. Anyway, a first play about.

Another vote for ipa. Cloths do snag, something like this which can be knocked up with bits from the junk box and uses cheap roll up filters as the pads reduces the risk of hitting anything in tight areas might help.

Heh , I saw the Who live way back, high energy gig . Er, when I still had some energy. Mind you, I now have a silhouette and a stack of 10 thou slaters best. Politicians, me , I could cut them out by the sheetload and in all honesty they would when laminated to 20 thou be better than any of the idiots on the ballot paper today .. Stuff it , time to pour a last large dram, turn all the layout lights on and drive the last train of the day .