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C126

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  1. C126

    11. Somewhere to park your digger.

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    Waiting for the paint to dry on my wagon-loads, I knocked up a little shelter for the aggregate merchant's J.C.B. yester-day.
     

     
    The area on the right will be filled by the office building and a couple of motor-cars.  Now I am playing with modelling clay again, ballasting the right hand - general merchandise sidings - side of the yard.
  2. C126
    Just a quick note to dispel the superstition of thirteen 'posts', and show my bodged soldering of the wires to the control panel for the main 'East Yard' part of the layout.  Of course, one pair of power-input wires was too short, so I had to solder 6" extensions to reach the correct input socket.
     
    The back of the panel:
     

     
     
     
     
    The two isolation sections (Goods arrival and departure), with wires on the right of each track (away from the viewer):
     

     
    I will fill the gaps with painted modelling clay in an attempt to make the holes less obvious.
  3. C126
    I finished a model cab office yester-day to use for my aggregate merchant.  It has not endeared me to white-metal kits - the brick-work is decidedly 'un-matching' and I glued one side out of true - but I am ridiculously pleased at how the colours have turned out.  The mortar was painted in acrylic first, all over, and then a sponge dipped in brick-coloured brown no more than caressed over the walls, so as not to paint over the mortar.  This needed to be done a few times, to get a darker and darker shade.  Then one starts the never-ending cycle of painting doors, windows, and sills, re-painting walls that have been dabbed with fittings paint, then re-painting the fittings, then touching up the walls again, until one goes quite doolally and has had enough!
     

     
    The interior needs to be done, and eventually, I fool myself, I will be able to scratch-build my own from brick-sheet and with a chimney for a coal fire, but overall I am content.
     
    Owing to the lack of a local aggregate merchant's name to steal in the 1972 'Brighton Area' telephone directory, I used the one of a much-loved toy-shop from my childhood instead.  I thought it sounded right, and must decorate the tipper when I find the lettering.  That vehicle's livery is chosen quite at random, of course...
     
     
  4. C126

    50. Milk 'n' More... ballast.

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    I should have arranged something special for my fiftieth 'post', but progress is neither so orderly nor inspiring, so here are just a few more pictures and words as a few more steps forward are taken.  Thanks to Grandad's Train Shop of Selby getting a bag of ballast to the Post Office at 09.05 on a Monday morning Recorded Delivery for me, I spent last weekend doing more gluing, and this weekend painting the ballast and making a milk-discharge siding.
     

     
    The viaduct walls have been detached, of course.
     
     
    After the shambles of the goods yard, I have not ballasted the points, and can not achieve the shade of 1970's station track dirt wished, but I can try more washes of differing shades over the next few weeks until I get bored.  With some of the ballast becoming un-glued when painting, I spent the 'drying time' knocking up a hard-standing out of card for the milk-discharge siding.  More surprises trying to mix a concrete colour of 'pale grey with a yellow tint', adding yellow turning the grey a green hue.  I assume the black pigment is really dark blue.
     
    I made a low wooden fence out of drink stirrers beside the milk siding, as even in the happy-go-lucky 1970's there must have been some protection for milk personnel from a 'shuttered third-rail' alongside for the passenger platform.  I kept it low, so figures can be seen.  Mention of the third rail means composing a new shopping list of drill-bit, insulation pots for every fourth sleeper, and Code 60 PECO flat-bottom rail.
     
    I was also going to try and find some card and wet-&-dry paper in town, for a platform surface, but decided to leave that for another pay-day.  Until then, here are a few more photographs.
     

     
    The '71' pretending to be a '74' Electro-Diesel arrives to collect the empties.  In the background, a Hornby 2-BIL waits to depart south for Tilling.  It was the latter's first time out of the box after purchasing two years ago, so I did not have the courage to couple the coaches together properly; please excuse the incorrect gap.
     
     
     

     
    The milk siding from what will be the station platform.  A small shed to house pumping equipment is intended to sit behind the left-hand buffer-stop.
     
     
     

     

     
    Two more shots of the loco.  No prizes for guessing I find them oddly handsome.  Only now do I see I should have spent more time painting the 'insides' of the brick parapets.  Another job to add to the list...
     
     
  5. C126

    22. Time for a chat in the aggregates yard.

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    Another couple of photographs trying out the positioning of my new figures.  The coal lorry driver watches his mate fill a coal sack at the hopper.  I need several stacks of sacks around the place, I realise, and a load for the lorry.
     

     
     
     
    Lacey's lorry driver pauses to chat to the digger driver on his tea-break.  Mr Lacey is unaware of the proximity of his grubby employee outside to his glistening new motor-car...
     

     
     
  6. C126

    3. Christmas interruptions to service.

    By C126,


    BR Blue Goods Yard.
    Alas, preparations for Christmas have interrupted progress, but I attempted a 'photo-shoot' to-day, and have tried to add header pictures.  The main picture is a view across the mineral yard, with 73 113 departing with a train from the agricultural warehouses (one needs to use much imagination to see the cardboard boxes thus!), and I hope I have added a view in the general goods yard-to-be.
     
    This weekend I hope to start building coal- and aggregate-yard pens.  Scoring squares of 2mm. plasticard to look like horizontal sleepers did not look good (and proved my eye-sight is not as good as it was), so I bought some balsa wood to cut into individual OO sleepers, to then glue together between 30mm. of rail as posts.  The aggregate pens will be a more modern concrete design, made from cardboard.  But as we all know, 'The best laid plans...'
     
    [The photo has loaded as a 'Header' as hoped.  The milk tank is where the station viaduct will be, there being a siding for discharge to a bottling plant under the arches.  The P.M.V. is on the far passenger/etc. platform.]
  7. C126

    55. A Ghost-inspector calls.

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    Just wished to add my paean to Revolution Trains' S.R. General Manager's Saloon, 'Caroline'.  Arrived on Monday, and on initial inspection it looks excellent to me.  Taking the precaution of un-packing it on a white napkin, only the coupling hook fell off, which I am too ham-fisted to re-attach.
     
    Here it is, arriving at Atherington Victoria upon news of an out-break of Victorians populating the platform.  (Please forgive my flippancy, but I have nothing better in which to pose it.)
     

     
    To paraphrase someone else on the thread, 'it is a d--n sight better than I could make from any kit!'  The orange curtains bring back happy memories of S.R. E.M.U.s in the 1970's.
     
     
  8. C126

    48. Working Time Tables, part 2.

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    The garage being too cold for modelling work, I had a burst of ‘compositing inspiration’ to accompany the cough/cold over the Christmas holiday, and made three sets of imaginary Working Time Tables for Atherington Victoria.  The exercising of the “little grey cells” made it an enjoyable distraction.  One must decide the routes’ lengths and imaginary station positions after poring over O.S. maps (and ignoring the geography), comparative train speeds, and head-codes and reporting numbers.  Write all this information on many lists, measure bits of string, wrestle with your conscience as to how far you wish to adhere to ‘reality’, and voila :
     

     

     

     

     

     

     
    The first image, page “F218”, is in a ‘hand set’ compositing style used up to the mid-1970’s (I think).  The filled columns are left-justified, and at this time trains were timed to the half-minute.  I look on bemusedly these days as my fellow commuters and I push onto our too-short train through too few doors, comparing it to the days of the slam-door 4VEPs, when, at some stations, just twenty seconds were timed for a station stop.
     
    But I digress.  The remaining five pages’ columns are centre-justified (and look neater).  My services are:
     
    - F218 and F241 : a 1970’s style passenger service;
    - N66 and N76 : a 1974 wagon-load service;
    - WK109 and WK111 : a mid-1980’s Speedlink (“ABS” and later “SLK” in Southern Region Freight W.T.T.s) and block-train (“COY”) service.
     
    I included a late-’80’s ‘Q’ (‘runs as required’) service to/from Stratford Yard to serve intermittent deliveries of fruit from overseas to Tilling Port, that place being my replacement combination of Eastbourne town and Newhaven.  I am pleased how well ‘Word’ can imitate such a document, and find the results rather pretty, but then documents are my trade.
     
    I messed up the distances between Sanderstead and Farleigh, so replaced the latter with the foolish temporary homage to a much-loved film “Marienbad”, and there are still some minor corrections needed to a few of the fonts.  I am not sure about some of the connections, lay-overs, and turn-around times, — ultimately it is all futile phantasy — but it kept me amused over cups of tea and glasses of port as there was little worth watching on the television.
     
    Thanks to all contributors of comments to previous posts over the years who prompted the idea.  I hope this is of interest, and might help others who “want to make a time table” for their layouts.
  9. C126

    15. Scenery to be added later...

    By C126,


    B.R. blue goods yard.
    Spent a couple of hours playing around with my partner's camera to get a shot of a 'Handsome Hymek' on the layout, and a lovely '73'.  Anything to put off cleaning and testing the track and point-work...
     

     
     
     

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