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Solo

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  • Location
    West Yorkshire
  • Interests
    1970s BR Blue diesels, 1st Gen DMUs, West Highlands & Far North of Scotland. Now modelling in O gauge.

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  1. I get the impression Accurascale (and Heljan) are now being a little more conservative (ie realistic) with delivery dates due to over-optimism on almost every new model to date. These things take time to get right, and distance doesn't help. Dapol doesn't seem to have caught on to this yet: N gauge 87s are slated for Q1 2024, but no decorated samples yet – so that's unlikely. I'd be very surprised to see the '66' next year.
  2. You could always just buy the SLW sound bundle for your '25'. It adds cost, I know, but SLW sound locos are sublime. The clarity and playability of the file/speaker setup are streets ahead of anything else on the market, so even if your other locos aren't sound-fitted, you'd have a lot of fun. I've had two sound-fitted '24s' for some years, and they've never missed a beat.
  3. My latest little O gauge experiment (and very much still a work in progress) measures only 90cm ✕ 22.5cm on an old shelf I found; it's a through line with exchange siding and movable fiddle sticks on each end. 29.4cm sounds luxurious by comparison. I think working in small spaces is all about asking what you can leave out (ie pretty much everything) and still have a viable scene. This also keeps the cost down. Granted, a 'Deltic' would look ridiculous in something like this, but an 08 plus some wagons with good sound and a bit of grot is a very different story.
  4. Fantastic news – one of vital the missing links. Looks like it will be to the same standard as the recent 26/27, so promises to be an excellent model.
  5. That's incredible – I was wondering where they'd got to, as I too had my eye on one. Congratulations!
  6. I really hope so; I bought quite a bit of their ballast and 'road stone' a few years back, as it's far more suitable for model railway ballast than the usual products. But my supply is dwindling!
  7. Hattons have D5389 for £398 at the moment and had an unnumbered green with FYE for the same price a few months back. I'm very tempted by the unnumbered blue one for £442, but my finances are taking a bit of a pummelling with other things right now...
  8. It's the 'mucky corner' that concerns me most about this dream...
  9. There is indeed a height difference between the two – about 0.7mm if I remember correctly. So you'll have to shim up the SMP track if connecting to PECO. I've used both and prefer the appearance of SMP (assuming it hasn't changed in the last few years). The sleeper grain is less pronounced, and the thinner sleepers make for easier ballasting – particularly for a branch-line look, where you'll be using very fine ballast. That said, the PECO stuff is still a great product, is a bit more robust and is readily available from model shops.
  10. I'd echo the cautionary notes on Copydex above. One of the advantages of PVA is that you get a bit of working time for fine adjustments as it dries. With the latex-based Copydex, if you need to reposition anything after even a few minutes, you'll end up with a horrible stringy mess. I've seen myself having to lift entire track sections for this reason. There's no sound-deadening advantage with Copydex (at least not if you're ballasting), so I'd stick to a high-tack PVA – which will also be cheaper.
  11. Thanks – yeah, thinking too big (or even medium-sized) can often lead to discouragement when those plans either take forever to realise or start to go wrong. Small layouts always seem more authentic to me; in the 'big' world, you're generally only looking at a small slice of railway real estate at any one time and watching a train pass through or potter. The other advantage, of course, is being able to finish a project and move on to one of the other dozen or so settings that I'd love to model.
  12. The halt platform was done on a whim. I had a spare bit of very thin ply (0.8mm, I think) and an offcut of one of the 10mm polystyrene tiles; so as I wanted an excuse for some trains to stop while traversing the diorama, I got to work with a scalpel and glue. I've just scored a piece of the thin ply vertically to represent individual planks of wood along the platform face; when weathered, I think this passes muster.
  13. I often take panoramic photos of just the sky when I'm out and about, with modelling in mind. A while ago, I had a few of these printed onto 1mm foamex; this is the only thickness I've been able to successfully bend around tight radii. I want this little scene to have a very minimalist appearance, so I chose one of my sky pieces with scant cloud detail and cut it to shape. I then shaded on the outline of distant hills using the Mig 'oilbrusher' paint pens that I normally use for weathering. I want the setting to be somewhat flexible but ostensibly in the Borders area of northern England. I've been rather taken with pictures and stories of the old Border Counties Railway recently and am imagining that this soldiered on – for freight, at least – into the 1970s and early '80s.
  14. I bought a large sheet of 5mm foamboard from Hobbycraft and glued this to the back support; this will support the backscene, which I want to be quite high to give a sense of space and a small railway in a large landscape. I like ballasting, but most model railway products sold as ballast are far too coarse, especially for branch lines. I'm using a mix of Attwood Aggregates 'road stone' and a little Woodland Scenics 'fine' ballast here; at the same time, I'm using Tamiya pigments to weather the sleepers in an attempt to disguise the hideous 'wood grain' that track manufacturers seem to think we all want. You simply wouldn't see this from a scale 100ft away, and the fact that it is depicted using raised ridges is all the more grating. I'll aim to use actual wooden sleepers for future projects. I ballasted half of the scene in the morning and the other half in the evening – one of the joys of making very small layouts! I wasn't originally going to bother with lighting for this project – it being very much a test piece – but I'm enjoying its progress, and having found some spare bits of angle in my junk box, I cut these to shape and attached them to the ends. The fascia strip is a spare piece of 3mm foamex; I'll remove the green protective film when I'm ready to paint it.
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