TechnicArrow

@simonmcp by "brightness" I do indeed mean "saturation", and by "program" I mean "MS Word"! @Kevin Johnson Thanks, I always enjoy working with card and paper more than embossed plasticard - it doesn't need painting for a start! Modelling this week has been pretty slow, due to both mild illness and university work. But with those out of the way, I finally got back to tidy up these buildings. That includes replacing the arches with better bricks and the concrete lintel with a strip of card, adding windows (sharpie'd frames), and painting the doors white inside and chocolate brown outside. There's now also a small platform inside the warehouse. The bollards also got painted black, as well as the recently added point levers. Finally, we're getting somewhere! The paint doesn't appear to have hindered the chain shunting; I did have to think carefully about where to put the point levers though!

All that happened today was I added doors to the end warehouse. These are sandwiches of card scored to represent planking, with a reinforcing framework added to the inside. Now they just need painting. The insides will be a grubby white, but colour do you think the outside should be?

Thank you all! I can't say the push-pin bollards are my idea, but I have no idea where I saw it done first. I don't have any colours other than red, yellow and green, so I'm hoping a bit of gloss black will keep them smooth and not wear away too quickly. Maybe some smooth varnish will help. Operationally, I'm already very happy with everything. Hooking and unhooking isn't much different to dealing with tension locks once you've got the hang of using the tool, and it makes you think a lot more about the role of "shunter", walking around moving chains and throwing points. Scenically, the use of the chain means I have a usable kickback siding the full length of the scenic area, despite a short headshunt and no run-round loop. Anyway, back to buildings! This morning I printed off this sheet: And started working on the buildings, right to left along the layout. First, I applied the brick covering to the end warehouse, cutting out the door and window openings to match it. To be honest, I'm not that happy with it; the printer has washed everything out a bit despite turning the brightness up before printing, so details such as the concrete lintels and brick arches over the windows are a bit lost. It clearly still needs windows, doors and flat-roof detail too. Next, the rear warehouse got it's brick end wall, corner capping and brick window arches and door lintels. Third along is the half-office, which unsurprisingly went together in about half the time of the full version! The window frames were drawn with a felt tip and cut from the paper with a sharp knife: Then I focused on the last area, the entrance gate. I built the gate from scored card, and framed it with some scale 6ft high brick walls. This are has to be flat against the backscene, since it buts up to the front of the overbridge when the box is closed up. Said backscene is a simple rural scene, another old Model Rail freebie still knocking around my collection. All together, I'm pretty happy with how things are looking!

Not a fantastic amount of progress, but I've been posting nearly every evening so I feel I should keep it up! I started by building an office building kit. This kit came with "Railway Modelling Explored", a 10-part free guide Railway Modeller did ages ago that's found it's way into my collection. It's meant to be used as weighbridge office, but the supplied plate is a bit small. Following that, I've started on the rear building. This uses a similar stone cladding to the existing warehouse, but will feature brick window arches and end wall. The winch pulley is a spare from the Kibri crane I mechanised, and will be painted at some point. Overall I'm very happy how this building is shaping up. Looking back at the scene, I think the office is a bit too large - there isn't enough space for lorries to pass from the yard entrance on the left to the quayside on the right. I think I will print off a half-relief version of it; I scanned the kit before I built it, which was suggested in the instructions. Finally, I've finished the digital skin for the end warehouse - hopefully I can print that tomorrow too.

Excellent! I haven't come across this layout before, but it's exactly what I like building myself! I think the pictures are fine - I quite like that it doesn't have a "viewing side", since there's no awkward baseboard edge where the world stops, and you're forced to look into the scene as if from a road bridge or similar. The only thing I think the layout needs a little more of is life - both plants (weeds) and people. I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this!

It looks pretty fine as it is, I'd say! I'm looking forward to seeing it painted up, it's an excellent little shed.

As a student, I am familiar with the art of procrastination... Rather than start the buildings, this morning I tidied up the quayside. I took the excess card off and flattened the fronts, before adding a facing strip of thick card. This was overlaid with brick paper, and spare metcalfe kit ridge tiles for the coping stones. It still needs mooring bollards or rings, but it looks pretty tidy. The awkward step is where the boxes join, since the quays weren't quite flush. But real canal faces are rarely perfect, so I'm not bothered by it. This afternoon I did start the buildings, replacing the mock ups with some stronger card shells. I altered the design of the rear building to incorporate a pitched roof and winch beam, and will add an extra office building to the left of it (the one that's there now is a placeholder; it looks too modern). The final addition today was a simple wire tool, that makes it so much easier to hook and unhook the chain! Work has now started on designing the brick/stone paper cover layer on the computer; once they're finished, I'll print them off and get building!

Thank you @Kevin Johnson! Today, the warehouse extension was completed. The end from the kit the other stonework came from was used for this purpose, cut down by a third to fit the space. The windows are very thin strips of white card with clear plastic behind. The right-hand end wall and corner capping are part of the second box, to keep some structure and hide the join. The roof is far from perfect, but it's removable so I'll come back to it at some point. The platform was cut square and tidied with a wall and edging, and a set of steps addd. The tarmac area has had kerbs added, again thin strips of card scored every 12mm to represent standard 915mm kerbs. Finally, I touched up the ground cover and added grassy weeds to hide gaps and fill corners. I'm already loving the photos I can get in this small scene, and it's only half built! These photos aren't in the proper order of operations for chain shunting, but they give an idea. Tomorrow, it's probably time to make a proper start on the end warehouse. Let's see what I can do!

The ground cover's nearly there! After a day of experimenting with grey paints, I got a patchwork of colours I was happy with. A small amount of sand was mixed into the paint to give it texture, and black paint lightly brushed over to give a little weathering. The road entrance area was painted as tarmac rather than concrete. Finally, I've started the ballasting, using dried fine garden soil; it's an interesting material to work with, but I think it works well. It just needs a lot of tidying up! I've also managed to remove the "tower" structure from the existing warehouse, ready for the extension. Small weeds will be added around the layout, most likely once the buildings are ready to be "planted".

Thanks! I'm glad you like it, and hopefully there's still plenty to come! The majority of today was very enjoyably spent cutting up card and placing it around the track. I started with the front-left siding, and then extended along the front. Then progressed backwards accross the two warehouse sidings... ... And finally completed the road entrance area. I extended this around the corner onto the original box to meet the existing platform, such that road vehicles will be able to end-load onto it. I also pushed the pin-bollards through the enormous card sandwich (5 layers and counting), and put the building mock-up back in their place. At the left-hand end, I salvaged bits of stonework from the girder bridge supports to replace the angled wing wall with a vertical retaining wall. The bufferstop is the one initially used on Arrow Paints! All in all, I'm rather pleased with it. Most locos and rolling stock still seem able to negotiate the yard, surprisingly well in some areas but with a few judders in others. The layers of card mean the surface is high enough from the table to form a reasonable canal bank; I'll have to make do with a sheet of paper suitably decorated for the water itself. Tomorrow I hope to finish off the ground cover; paint the hard standing, ballast the plain track etc. But then it will be time to start the buildings!

Thank you! I think I first saw it done in model form on Chris Nevard's Brewhouse Quay, search YouTube for it. Meanwhile, the track still seems to be in the right position! This morning, I started mocking up buildings. The two inner box walls were cut back, as well as the old road bridge supports. The existing warehouse will gain an extra bay in place of the tower structure, with the new right-hand wall part of the second box to hide the joint. Then a gate against the backscene will provide road access to the yard and wharf, followed by a low relief warehouse with large loading doors. This adjoins the end warehouse that spans the tracks. The end warehouse will probably be brick, with doors across the tracks below. This building will help to hide the holes in the end wall, required to fit two wagons on each siding. I also hope to add an automated winch outside the large doors of the low relief building at the back. The narrowboat is a placeholder; I built it at uni last year and coloured it with whiteboard markers! The next step should probably be in-laying the track, there's plenty to do!

The pin is very smooth, there's no jerk as the chain passes it. However, on uneven track, the wagon sometimes gains momentum and rolls forward then stops until the chain tensions again. Hopefully now the track is glued that won't happen, but I'm thinking about adding friction to the wagon wheels if it doesn't. I'm definitely going to film a demonstration video at some point, but the upload speed at home is pretty bad so I don't know when you'll get to see it!

This afternoon featured about an hour of frustrating soldering, but I can now say that the track all works, as proven by the pannier happily trundling about. The variety of extra wires ensure all rails are always powered from the single headhunt feed, to eliminate any problems from the terrible point blades and contacts. Then I couldn't resist experimenting with chain shunting! The chains themselves, a long one and a short one, are spares from the Hornby PWay crane I've detailed up with proper cables. I added a bent staple to each end of the chains to make a larger, squarish link that's easy to slip over the chunky hooks on the rolling stock. The bollards are plastic drawing pins, whose smooth curved shoulders guide the chain perfectly. I'm still playing with positions to see what works best, there's already pinholes all over the layout! So far, I'm very happy with their operation, which will be even easier once the track is inlaid so the chain can't get caught up on it. After all this, the track has been glued up and weighted down. We'll see if it's still in the right position tomorrow!

A canal wharf Inspired by the new Scalescenes boxfile layout? No, surely not...! Technically the truth; I was thinking about a canalside layout about a year ago, but the idea eventually turned in to "Arrow Paints" with no canals in sight. But it superseded my first shoebox layout "Green Lane Wagon Works", so I wanted to see if I could do something with those boxes and track. And it looks like the 3rd box of Green Lane has a lid with sides as deep as the box itself, effectively forming another box... So what if I took that third box and it's lid, and built a self-contained layout in it? I think this is going somewhere... The plan, in bullet points: > The front siding will be laid into a quay, with any canal and boats tacked onto the front > A building similar to the scalescenes over-the-track warehouse will cover the right hand end > The buildings will be fixed, but arranged to fit around eachother when the layout is "closed" into one box > Chain/rope shunting will be required to reach the left hand end of the front siding, which probably won't look like it does at the moment > A fiddle-stick under the bridge will provide power and make the headshunt a useable length > The layout can be fairly era-less without looking odd, so both GWR and BR stock can be run The result: a layout that can (hopefully) be packed down into one shoebox! If you don't count the rolling stock, controllers, tools...

Your work on the station area looks awesome out in the sunshine, well done!

It looks like a pretty good layout plan to me! The only thing I think make it look train-set like are the s-curves at the end of the platform. Also, what's the short spur for in the top-left? Other than that, the scheme looks interesting but with plenty of open yard space in it too. I look forward to seeing it develop!

Whilst not a precise scale model, Enwin of Shapeways has produced a 3D print which fits over the standard Hornby 0-4-0 smokey joe chassis & running plate: https://www.shapeways.com/product/5BP5NQ2EP/avonside-0-4-0-t?optionId=146590925&li=marketplace I've been looking at this model quite a bit, since I'm interested in building a GWR 1101 yet with my shoestring student budget. It's taken me just over a month of experimenting with motors and gears to come to the obvious conclusion that a Hornby 0-4-0 really isn't a good starting point for a shunting engine!

Looks like some satisfying modelling! The scene is simple, but still with plenty of atmosphere; if anything, the lack of locos and people adds to the feel. Are you planning to add a backscene? I'd also suggest adding some puddles and detritus amongst the ground cover, when it comes to it.

Certainly an unusual method of model building! It seems pretty speedy, and makes adding the masonry detailing easy. The boat looks tidily messy (if that makes sense); I think a few pillars with a beam down the middle to support a tarpauline would finish it off. I'm going to enjoy watching this build progress!

As someone well-versed with "Building Regs M", that ramp is definitely too steep! But it looks the part, filling that corner and providing access. I'm still watching this simple layout with interest!

I'm terrible at this posting business. I was meant to update this thread with photos as the sector plate build progresses, but here I am posting them all at once when it's finished. The board itself has had the front track glued, wires soldered to power the sector plate, a coffee-stirrer within the cardboard layers to operate it from the front, and lollipops to locate the board on the end of Box 2. A simple folding truss has been made for it to sit on. Then work on the warehouse building started; the usual simple layers of cereal box card, overlaid with brick-embossed plasticard. Then we skip forwards a bit, and it's nearly there. A platform with end-loading dock was built of card, brick plasticard and topped with metcalfe-printed tarmac and edging. The warehouse windows, doors and signage are either from downloaded kits or created digitally, all printed and glued in place. This time I went straight to the greyish mortar wash rather than a brick colour first, to give a lighter colour than the Box 2 building. And that's pretty much the new board complete. Elsewhere cosmetic point levers have been added, supported just far enough from passing wagons by extensions of the sleepers. And just to prove it fits, I put it all away! All of these bits of buildings can be removed from the layout, including the sector plate board folding-truss support top-left: With a bit of juggling, they are all packed into Box 2 along with the controller and transformer, whilst avoiding damaging the point levers. I'm not sure about rolling stock, but there should be enough space within the majority of Box 1 and the storage trays built under Box 2. There's still a variety of small tasks to complete, such as painting the warehouse roof, adding weeds everywhere, finding a suitable backscene and re-instating the lighting. I'd also like to design a proper shunting puzzle system to go with the layout, rather than pushing wagons about at will. But I do feel I can now say the layout is complete; I've built a shoebox-based layout with the same overall footprint and scenic area as it's predecessor "Green Lane Wagon Works", but with twice the scenic height, far more operational interest (a better track layout and a working crane), and packed away into 2/3 the space. I'm quite pleased with that! To finish off, I thought I'd throw some details and figures back on the layout, and share some photos. First off, a tractor is loaded onto a conflat outside the run-down looking Murley Plant Engineers Ltd. Note the plank bridge laid across the wagon's buffers. D2280 is watched from above as it shunts Arrow Paint's sidings. The Fuchs 301 crane is still in regular use, transferring pallets of sacks outside. And Fred is still engrossed in his 'paper, as D2280 forms up a train behind him. Some people, eh? That train has reached journeys' end already; literally behind the scenes, the sector plate can just about hold the 04 and 3 wagons. If the pannier tank or larger wagons are used, since the layout is operated from the front care is needed not to run off the end! Thank you those who helped in the design of the sector plate, it's simple and has proved reliable so far. And thanks to everyone else for reading, it's nice to be able to share my models. I should probably make a proper video of it all soon. Maybe when it's done!

It's certainly looking the part; the backscene with the road dissappearing around the corner is spot on, and the trackwork looks very tidy. I can only suggest that the road should be a bit steeper, having cycled up and down it many times!

As others have said it's all looking good; the layout has a nice balance of railway and non-railway scenic space, and the goods yard and cottage are very tidy. Perhaps that large, flat stone wall needs some buttresses and ivy growing up it, to hide the joins and make it a little more interesting?

Thanks for the tip - it's a shame I read it after I'd glued the track down! I started yesterday by making another "board", my usual technique of PVAing two pieces of corrugated card with the corrugations perpendicular to eachother, and a layer or cereal box card on top. I haven't used a box here as the settrack is too long to fit in a standard shoebox, and I'd need to cut out so many of the walls there's no point. Instead I'm aiming for a board that can be folded flat, with any scenic items removed and stored in the other boxes. Playing around with geometry, I discovered that pivoting the setrack at the pinhole at the far end appears to match up neatly with the angle from a small curve piece (below the bridge), which saves mucking about with bending flextrack (something I'm not that good at). All track was cut to length with a hacksaw, and positioned as below: Then I started to position a few scenic items. The whole layout is now a decent size. The factory is clearly just the top part of the existing one, and I might put a warehouse-style building in that space instead. At least part of it needs to be a plain wall, since the middle track is obviously right behind it and a paper-thin building doesn't make sense. But there should be enough space to get the original water tower back on the layout, which would be nice.

Will be following closely, very closely... Until the current news dragged me back to my parent's house, I'd been living and working in Keynsham since August and have had a poke around the area quite a lot. Since the factory has been redeveloped into office/housing space and the station car park has been built the old crossing has all but disappeared, although the route into the factory is still a footpath. The sentinel also looks the part, having been close to the real thing as a volunteer on the Avon Valley Railway where it's been restored recently. I'm looking forward to what you make of this!