Highgale station

was going to do this to my Hornby 73. thanks for sharing as it will help with mine

Hello again, Its been a while.

I have done quite a lot of work to this layout since the last post.

1. i have 3d printed half of my loco shed 

2. i have ballasted 

3.I started to place scatter

Since this photo i have Started to do the static grass and place bushes onto the layout. The Bushes are made up of two methods 1. steel wool with flock added to the top and 2. clump foliage. I also placed down a few flowers and different coloured flock onto the grass to make the grass more interesting and more lifelike. Another thing done to the layout was the weathering of the track, i dry brushed the track with Humrol weathering powders which created a nice mix of oil spills and general track dirt. I especially dirtied up the oil transfer pipe as that would be a main place for oil build up and dirt.

The bridge was a main point of work recently as the rest of the layout looks decent but the bridge was letting down the right hand side of the layout.

I started by printing some brick papers which i had bought a while ago. I then cut and glued on the papers and gave a bit a weather over the top of the bridge entrances.

I am happy with bridge for the moment but i will eventually redo the bridge with embossed plastic sheet as i believe it looks better.

Lastly for this update i started to paint the concrete hard standing using standard cheap poster paint. This was applied with a sponge as it gives a nice stippled effect rather than a false brush effect. This photo is also a nice opportunity to see an overview of the layout, as you could probably tell by now the layout is really small but i am happy with what i am achieving  in the small space. There are always room for improvement so if you have any advice or comments for me please feel free to let me know. Thanks for reading .

ps: sorry for the general clutter in some of the pics i am a messy worker lol.

Hi guys, Been a while sorry about that.

Anyways i have been doing some work on my stock.

Hope you like them:

1st on the list is my HNRC class 20s. These have been completed for a couple of months now. Since the last update i have painted them in orange which was watered down heavily which caused the need to do about 6-7 coats of orange paint on each loco .  When i started these models i knew that the lima 20 buffers needed replacing but in the end both have been replaced with white metal buffers (http://www.lanarkshiremodels.com/lanarkshiremodelsandsupplieswebsite_137.htm). I then painted each grille and the roof in black, Followed by painting the yellow ends, transfers and some light weathering and i was done. Still needs a touch up from the picture i have posted bellow (have now been fixed). Overall i am very pleased with how these have turned out considering this was my 1st proper rebuild and repaint. ps: sorry for the bad picture i will post better ones in a later post.

My next project was to build myself a few MXA (lobster) wagons.

I achieved this by buying 5 Cambrian C26 wagon kits, i then got the measurements of the MXA box and scaled them down to 1/76 (oo gauge) and made a cad model of one. This was then printed on my 3d printer using PLA.

I then glued the two together and sprayed them using a red plasticote spray. Decals from Railtec were then applied and some weathering was done. For now i am very pleased with my attempt at this wagon, Its by no means the best ever attempt but good enough for me.

I have now completed all 5 of my MXA wagons but have no decent photos to hand. 

I have also been detailing my 66s 

1st job was to put on all of the valences this was easy on both Bachmann and Hornby models although the Hornby models took a bit of hacking around. On my Hornby 66s i had to cut off the valences bogie mounts so i could permanently glue them to the underside of the loco like in real life. I also fitted the false coupling and the pipes.

However on my other Hornby 66 i had to make a valence from scratch as i had lost one somewhere, so i cut out a piece of plasticard and fixed it to the model and gave it some black paint.

I have started some more projects since my last post but i would prefer to document them all at once done.

Thanks for reading, any feedback is much appreciated.

On 09/02/2021 at 13:05, Zomboid said:

There's a strange shed structure over the track just west of Blake Hall on the Epping Ongar railway. What purpose it serves I have no idea.

 

Again not what you're looking for...

Only just seen this thread... I also volunteer at the EOR and personally cant wait to get back down there ASAP.

 There are 2 sheds down at Blake hall which look very similar to the one at north weald.  The one closest to the railway has got the owners busses in but i heard that maybe it will soon be used as dry storage for some of the rolling stock. And I think the 2nd shed down in the valley is going to be were the busses will be re-homed. As I said I'm not 100% sure if this is correct hope this helps?

Hi all, 

I'm going to start the update with my class 47 repaint.

If you couldnt guess from the last images in the thread the livery the 47 will be in is ROG blue.

My next job on the 47 was to cut out the decals and to make sure they fit on the model:

Now that  i knew the decals fitted the model properly i decided to apply them to the model and give them a spray of varnish after applying them:

Then i had to fit the chassis back onto the model and glue the nameplates onto the side of the loco:

Then all that was left for me to do was to make a wire loop coupling, paint the half yellow ends, paint handrails white, and fit the flush glazing (on order).

I Will post a picture of the model once it is 100% finished later on in the thread.

A few months back i started working on an old 20 which I had. I have wanted a pair of20/3 s for a while now but once ii saw the Bachmann price for one I knew I could not afford it as I do not work yet. so I decided to adapt my old Bachmann 20 and I bought an old lima 20 for £20. I First started with the obvious difference of the 20/3 which was the extra fuel tanks on the running boards of the loco. These were constructed from  plasticard. I then cut off the headcode box at the front of the model and filled in any holes on the front, This was done to achieve the flat nose of the 20/3. I also built the Ariel mount on top of the cab out of 1mm plasticard. and I also made the window frames more square by scraping the windows with a scalpol until it went square and then i cut some strips of plasticard to make the window frame:

I will post another update on the 20s tomorrow as i have now finished 1 but i dont want to make these updates too long.

Thanks for reading, any feedback is welcome.

Hi all, Happy new year.

I haven't posted on here for a while but i have made a lot of progress on my main layout and a few pieces of rolling stock.

A project I started a while ago was  to make a caged OAA wagon:

#

The base model i started with was the infamous Hornby OAA which has been in its range for an extremely long time meaning i could get a lengthy rake of  wagons for cheap.

I managed to get these three wagons for around £15. 

At first glance these wagons don't look great but with some painting and weathering they should come out pretty nice.

First thing i had to so was to cut up the wagons sides:

I then glued the ends directly onto the wagon so i could construct the mesh sides around them.

Next up was to fit a false floor to the base of the wagon using plasticard:

Now i had to cut the mesh sheets into strips and make plasticard uprights to make the separate cage doors

Another project i have been working on for a little while is a Hornby class 47.

Now, i know  Hornby 47s are not known for their detail or their great 'ringfield' motors but im hopefully going to sort that out at a later date.

I started by stripping the paint off of my northern belle class 47:

In the picture above the paint still looks pretty bad but i cleaned up the body until it was all  just the soli red colour.

Next i brush painted on a a really thinned down Tamiya blue, which took along time due to the amount of coats it needed.

Im going to leave this update here as its getting a bit long, but i have lots more pictures and projects which i have done over the past few months which i will hopefully post in the coming days. 

Can anyone guess what livery and loco i am making  above?

Thanks for reading all feedback is welcome.

Hi all, over the past two days I have been doing more on the layout.

As  forgot to mention in the last update I have also fitted a surface mounted point motor which is going to be hidden by a bridge.

1st of all I started with the bridge to cover the exit of the layout which leads to the fiddle yard. So far I have only made the bare shell of the bridge with no paint or brick sheet. 

The bridge has been made out 5mm foamboard which is a good material as it is light (so it wont add too much weight to the layout and is cheap. The bridge was made at an angle so the fiddle yard would be less visible from different angles. 

Next up I decided that to continue in the layouts build I would have to make the backscenes up, so I did. I made the backscenes out of 5mm foamboard. These were all cut at a 16cm height. This was then all glued to the baseboards using hot glue.

I then test fitted the bridge in place which fitted really good. Its certainly not my finest pieces of work but in the end it will look good.(I hope)

I added a printable backscene from railwaymodellers.com.

This did not come out that great in my opinion but with some blending of scenery and weathering I hope it will come out reasonably well.

An example of me starting to blend in the backscene is by putting a fence against it to make it look like the depot has ended. And I also started on the layouts 1st scenic bits.

The image above is just after I re-flocked some trees so the glue is still drying which makes them look pretty bad but in the flesh they look nice.

Thanks for reading this update and any feedback is very welcome.

On 09/10/2020 at 15:00, 47137 said:

 

I have used LED tapes for my last three layouts and they all worked out well. I suggest you put in three parallel tapes: two cool white and one warm white. Put the tapes as far forward as you can, ideally three or four inches in front of the modelled area, to make the lighting effects look natural. Buy a couple of drill speed controller modules to use as dimmers. Connect one controller to the two cool white tapes, and the second controller to the warm white tape. This will be functionally much the same as I have done for my present layout project, but reduced from four sets of LEDs to three for the smaller size of a micro. The LEDs will give you an excellent spread of light - there are numerous light sources, and so buildings and trees near the backscene won't cast peculiar shadows. Hope this helps.

 

-Richard.

 

Hi Richard,

Thank you so much! this is very helpful to know, I will have to put in an order for the leds and dimmers soon.

Many thanks Joe

Hi, today I started work on track laying. I used a mixture of Hornby and peco code 100 as it is what I had lying around. I picked up a peco streamline small point for £7.50 off ebay. 

I layed the track on top of some cork which I had bought a while back for £2. The cork was cut at 3.5mm wide strips which was just the right size to sit under the track to give the track bed a shoulder.

I currently have the baseboards underneath my main 'roundy' layout which is why the pictures are a bit dark in some places. This will soon be fixed once I have got some wood or foamboard for a fascia and some backscenes, then I can add lights for the layout. Does anyone have any suggestions for lighting options for the layout? I was thinking of led stips but I don't know if they will work , any help will be appreciated. 

Today I also started a few of the details for the layout.

So I have 3d printed some rawie style buffer stops:

I think these printed rather well so I decided to paint them as obvioudly blue is not the correct colour.

so I started the painting process by painting the buffers with a Tamiya red acrylic. These required 3 coats of paint to make them look good.

Next I painted the buffers with its white stripe by masking off a line abd painting it with white humbrol acrylic paint.

This is the final result and I think they came out really good. not as good as accurascales offerings but good enough.

Finally I started some work on a diesel storage tank.

This was made out of an old round container and some sprue of of an old airfix kit. This was all dpray painted a matte black.

I then made the well for the tank to sit in. This was made out of some scrap foam board which was cut to make a base and the I glue 1cm strips to make walls to surround the tanks. 

Now I got some off cut/ scrap brick sheeting which I cut to cover the 1cm tall walls.

then I gave the inside a paint and placed the tank inside.

The tank is not quite finished yet but I think its a good start.

Hello, This page is going to hopefully keep an update of a layout I am about to start building soon. The layout will be made up of 2 small baseboards,  one being a 4ftx1ft scenic section and the other a 1ftx1ft fiddle yard.

The budget of the layout will be around £100 (not including rolling stock). I have already cheated a little by re-using old baseboards I already had from a previous layout. The concept of the depot is to have a single road servicing shed in the background and to have 2 overgrown stabling sidings for locos to sit on. I hope this thread has some use to a few people or even interests someone and I look forward to starting the layout very soon.

Hello, I decided to start a thread on here to keep a  log of things I have done and also to gain some feedback from other fellow modellers.

This will be updated with models and projects I embark on over time.