Dave John

Atmospheric pictures, though if the lady in the first pic hailed me like that I would open the throttle and head for the hills........

Thanks for the pm, looks a very neat way of doing it. The figure of 32 looks high, but 22 will be needed for the 6 road traverser and the 5 road storage yards. Thing is thats two lots of six and two of five , but only 4 dowels since they are in a nice straight line. That way I'll be able to run round a train easily at both ends of the layout. Thats the idea anyway, might not work in practice but worth a go.

Much has been said about couplings over the years. I like the Alex Jackson coupling, simple, unobtrusive, cheap and reasonably reliable. Yes they get out of alignment and sometimes get bent beyond repair, but what coupling doesn’t. The hassle with couplings in general isn’t coupling them, its uncoupling them. I have been thinking about this. My layout is traverser to storage yard, and I want to run around at each end. then some sidings , and a shunting back move off the main line. Thats 32 places where I could do with remote uncoupling. Hmm. On the last layout I had tried solenoids and iron nail droppers in a few places. Kinda worked, but you had to be quick or else they got very hot and needed vaguely awkward holding a button down while operating a controller type things. 32 of them isn’t going to happen. So I have been experimenting. Yep, I have been messing about with magnets again. Thats it in cruel closeup. 3mm long , 1 mm wide. Sits 2-3 mm above rail height. Underneath the board its really simple. two sticks and a magnet 20mm x 5 mm. Still a work in progress. I might move up a size for the magnet under the board. Of course if you have a set of parallel tracks in a storage yard you can just add more magnets on the same bit of dowelling. Could even have the magnet moved by a servo or a wire in a tube if its in an awkward to get to place. One thing is clear though. I am going to have to be careful about my AJs. Over the years I have made them by eye and my eyes are not as sharp these days. Time to order some jigs and start giving them all a going over.

A neat way of doing it.

The coach looks very impressive.

The devil in me ( Its the whisky ye ken ) just wants to nick all the pictures of these buildings and then set up a spoof estates agents website. Really it would be fun to see how few folk realise they are actually models and start to bid stupidly large amounts of money for them. Ok, its a daft thought, but I'm off to bed giggling at the idea.........

I have some wagons with paper clip formed droppers Richard, but I found them to be a bit unreliable on the last layout. I have however been messing about with magnets, so I have left the droppers off later wagons until I come up with a method I am really happy with. I am also thinking about forming wagons into short rakes, perhaps 3 or 4, then using 3 link in between and ajs at the ends. I already do that with coaches. Portchullin Tatty, nice models and useful site. You are right, works plates needed. I think I have some NBR developments ones somewhere, must dig.

Hmm, art is the right word. Over the years I have seen a lot of your stuff, I keep trying particularly with regard to stonework. Many thanks for the inspiration.

Oh, a bit of copperclad pcb. Usually 1 mm thick , since I have loads of it. Pre-tin it with a gap , glue it to the bottom of the wagon and solder the ajs to it . I always isolate the couplings, had a silly fault with them conducting years back .

I popped into my local modelshop for some supplies. ( Pastimes, Glasgow. All sorts of interesting stuff, lots of secondhand. ) Pottering about I noticed that oxford had added a Newbattle PO livery to the NB Jubilee wagon, so I bought one. Well here it is out of the box. Nice crisp printing. Ok, perhaps not perfectly to the original drawings, but bearing in mind that many wagons were built to this general diagram by an assortment of builders for various customers there were bound to be variations. Main problem, its 00. Having converted a couple of these last year I can report that EM wheels on 26 mm axles wouldn't fit, and if I used the oxford 25mm axle the rear face of the plastic W irons would need to be thinned a bit. I therefore opted to use 51L etched pre group W irons and some whitemetal axleboxes. So 5 minutes later…. The most noticeable error on the body is the loop hinges are wrong. No biggie, clip the old one off, drill 0.4 through the door, add brass ring. Also a horse shunting loop. Close up some of the bolt positions are a bit out, but from normal distances ( and given the PO variations) I’m not going to move them. From underneath its what you would expect. The solebars just needed a tiny amount of thinning to clear the W irons. I drilled through the V casting and the end of the brakelever, a bit of brass wire gives strength and lines it all up. There we are. A bit of detail painting and light weathering and I think it looks ok. Better than I could manage doing that livery by hand. I know that historically it would have mainly lived in the east, but I’ll stretch a point. After all, the base wagon is less than a tenner, so I’m happy to buy one in the vague hope that rtr manufacturers see that there is a bit of a market for pre-group stock. Might even encourage them to cast their eyes to the west…..

This is a picture of the CR crossing the Kelvin adjacent to what was Partick Central station. It is a girder bridge with a support formed by two circular stone pillars. The girder ends are equally supported on the pillars. The pillars themselves are not in line with the flow of the river, water just swirls about them. You can still see the bridge on google earth, the angle of the pillars is about 45 deg to the water flow. So I'd say fit the pillars to suit the girders not the water. Sorry about the picture quality, I wanted to capture the Kelvin in spate which tends to mean in the pouring rain.

Some very interesting modelmaking. I too enjoy a bit of lathework, there is satisfaction in removing material from the solid bar to create a part. But 3d printing isn't cheating, its just the opposite process, putting liquid material together to form a shape. Mouldless casting really. So I think that machining from solid and 3d printing are complimentary techniques, just a case of choosing the best process for the task.

They look much better in green. They never did look like anything the CR had.......

Sometimes it is just about setting yourself a challenge. It may work out, if not chalk it up to experience and have a go at something different. If everyone just stuck to what was known to work we would all still be using 3 rail tinplate track. Anyway, for a bit of general silliness I made this one go up and down instead of along the track. Pointless but fun. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dave_john/8035090191/in/photostream/

The door is fine, its the pub thats leaning ....... hic....... another pint of that please...... I like the heavy wooden frontage, I have seen many small pubs like that. The frosted glass windows are right, it was illegal in many places to have the inside of a pub visible from the street. Late 1970s in Glasgow for instance.

Hmm, watching with interest. Are you going for radial on the front axle or a dummy bogie ?

Um. There are pics of bits of engines on my blog. In a sort of EM as it happens. Now I'm not an expert, but I like wheels on rails. Electricity goes up, force goes down. So, I have messed about with all sorts over the years. I like compensation, I have never got on well with springs. I accept thats just me, others do very well with them. Really once you start building your own chassis it comes down to spending a lot of time working out what suits you. My little old Caley pug has just a fixed rear axle and a swinging tube front axle. It can shift 20 assorted wagons, half of which are whitemetal. One thing I learned a long time ago. Its not what the standards say that matters, its what works for you.

Many thanks, I'll get some and give it a try.

I do like the effect you are achieving with the stonework. May I ask which brand of lightweight filler you prefer?

True Mikkel, the coal burning in cities would have built up a soot layer much quicker. There was also another effect; many public buildings were painted black at the death of Queen Victoria. Apparently it took years to wear off some of them.

Paint just isn't what it used to be. Neither are thinners. I now do a trial shot of everything before committing to a real model. The more notes I make about what I have done the more confused I get. So, no advice other than try a sample first.

Having had a relaxing time building a wagon its time to get back to building a layout. So, next step, getting a spot of paint on that viaduct. Well, more than a spot really, it ended up at 9 foot long so no way would tiny tins or small tubes cover it all up. Musing on this I thought about tester pots. Over the years I have accumulated a boxful, picked up very cheap as last years colours and that sort of thing. Several dozen of them in fact, so I dug them out and had a play. Most were matt emulsions but I found that several coats over a general purpose primer covered the styrene sheet of the viaduct rather well. Not only that I could mix them and add pigments easily, quite a fun exercise as it turned out. So, method decided. Then of course I began to think about colour. I had photos of the viaduct at Bowling, but of course they are 130 years after it was built. Clearly the builders were trying to make the concrete finish emulate stone, after all a prestige company like the CR ( and for that matter its shareholders) would want to see their money invested in structures that looked as if they would last like stone. Looking at period pictures it seemed to me that the strength of colour was much more solid than it appears today, but I still had to think about the shade. Anyone who has drilled or cut into stonework will see that the colour inside the stone is very much better defined than the surface. The same is true of concrete, if you want to see what the original mix looked like you have to cut into it and see what the aggregates were and whether something was added to shift the colour. To cut a long story short that is what I did, choosing for my tests a few concrete structures long since abandoned, but known to be late 19th century. I found that the builders had done a pretty good job of recreating the deeper reds and pinkish orange hues of the sandstones used for so much of the Victorian building in the West of Scotland. Just between ourselves I think that sometimes the modern fashion for weathering everything is a bit overplayed. Some do it in a subtle manner, its difficult to get just right. The thing is that if you are modelling pre group, and certainly pre ww1, it is clear from the available photos that things were not left to become severely weathered. Stock was cleaned, stations swept and painted, structures regularly maintained. I am depicting the viaduct barely a decade after it was built so it would still be a new build with very little deterioration in colour and almost no surface spalling. I have therefore gone for fairly solid colours, if I do any weathering in the future it will be very light. Anyway, sorry to be a bit longwinded. Still a fair way to go, but here are some pictures of progress.

Nice work, I like the brickwork colours in there.

Single brick garage wall with maybe 5 foot of brick above your tunnel should be straightforward. Chris Ps method should work fine. Heres one I did earlier, though a slightly bigger wall: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/2091/entry-18432-on-planning-compromise-and-tunnels/ Just a thought, would it be an idea to buy a ready made opening window and install it so it opens to the rear of the layout. You could make a removable bridging section between the inside and outside layouts which you just fit for running sessions. Cures the weather and beastie problems.

I keep looking at this thread. There is just something about the photos I really like, the whole thing works out really well. It all just works somehow, and its something I'm aiming for. Anyway, off to put a bit more paint on a viaduct.