magmouse

I think just having the cross-overs (without the scissors) is a fair compromise - you can demonstrate the principle of the two-train platform, and create the wonderful sense of busyness described in the text you quoted, without getting bogged down in hand-made track. Given discussions about track removal - perhaps plan for a future upgrade if the fancy takes you? Make that section of track a removable module? Nick.

Mikkel, I am smitten by the header image - the carriage, driver and two lady passengers creating a tableau with the building frontage. A perfect composition! The gable ends are magnificent, and the whole thing is already tremendously evocative. Looking forward to the next instalments you have teased us about… Nick.

Thanks for sharing these, Annie - lovely to see Tristyn again, and seasonally appropriate too, at least for those of us in the north of the Northern Hemisphere! Nick.

I like the idea, and I'm happy to contribute where I can. It would be good to link to relevant threads on the forum as well - a 'clearing house', if you will, of useful info. I wonder if the blog format might help organise what could over time become a substantial amount of info? It still allows discussion of each topic in the comments. Nick.

Thanks, Mike - that's very helpful. The D84 ones look deeper (as in top-to-bottom height), but could well be the same principle: a roughly J-shaped hook attached to the underside of the curb rail. Nick.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am working on an ABS kit in 7mm scale for the LNWR D84 4-plank open. As I will be modelling the wagon with a sheet, I need to represent the tie-off points for ropes and sheets. I have been looking at photos of this wagon on the LNWR Society's zenfolio site, here: https://lnwrs.zenfolio.com/p148651598 The way the site works I can't give a URL to a specific photo, but the following clip is from the picture of the D84 loaded with sacks, partly sheeted. Homing in on the solebar and lightening the picture to see the detail more clearly, we have: There are five points where there is a vertical 'something' projecting down below the curb rail, some of which are in use to tie off the ropes and sheet ties. My question is - does anyone know in more detail exactly what form these tie-off points take? There is a bit of a clue in another picture, of a wagon loaded with casks in a goods shed, where we can see: Next to the buffer there is a cleat, with the remains of a cut-off cord or rope. Below the curb rail, there is - what? Perhaps a vertical bar with a cleat attached to the front of it? Any thoughts, or better yet, clearer photos or drawings, gratefully received. Nick.

I do like the ‘Marks & Spencer’ lettering - it so reminds me of the old M&S look. Nick.

Thanks - and yes, I have thought about an RSU. Probably the main disincentive at the moment is my impossibly overcrowded work bench - maybe I just need to bite the bullet and tackle that, with the prospect of an RSU as an incentive... Nick.

That’s not funny! It’s not funny, because you are quite right. Actually, I’ve been thinking the way forward might be battery power, with DCC control. Run the coaches in rakes, putting all the electronics in a luggage compartment, hidden under piles of luggage, or a toilet compartment, then link to the rest of the rake via the steam and vac pipes. It solves the space problem, and reduces the number of pickups required. Some experimentation needed…. Nick.

Thanks, that’s very helpful. I think I may have some of those buffers and axle boxes. Time for a rummage in the bits box. Nick.

I am currently building an ABS white metal kit for the LNWR D84 4-plank open. It comes with the following buffers And axle boxes: In short, my question is - are these appropriate for a wagon built before 1908, my chosen modelling period? According the information from the LNWR Society website (no longer on their new website, but available at https://web.archive.org/web/20081120190441/http://www.lnwrs.org.uk/Wagons/open/Diag084.php), some early examples may have had grease boxes, but "these were soon succeeded by the flat-fronted oil boxes". Is that what I have here? The same source shows a photo of a wagon in 1920s condition, where "the axleboxes are the third, bulbous, design and the buffers are the 4-bolt square base single rib style" - I suspect I have those axle boxes, but my buffers are not square based, they are rectangular. When did this third design of axle box come in? I am hoping some forum members more knowledgable about LNWR wagons than me can help me navigate these subtleties and make a fair representation of a D84 in 1908 condition - any guidance gratefully received! Nick.

Guilty as charged... 12 years as a lighting designer and technician, followed by 27 years and counting in related higher education, teaching and researching lighting design and technical production for theatre and live events. That sounds like a good idea. If you decide to reduce the horizontal scale of the screens, here is a method for setting them out. Draw the 'taper' of the top and bottom edges, tall at the front and short at the back: Draw in the diagonals: Where the diagonals meet is your half-way line, in perspective. You can subdivide these halves, to make quarters, and so on: (credit to those Renaissance Italians again) Yes, indeed. The full perspective effect not only requires the correct viewing angle, but the correct distance as well - a view point, in other words. I think you are right not to attempt a full false-perspective effect, not only because you can't scale down the trains towards the back, but also because you would be restricted to a single viewpoint. The trick will be a design that works for a range of viewpoints and viewing angles, which will require some 'cheating' - it's a matter of finding the acceptable cheats. I think the model will really help with that - you full-size mock up has given a sense of the practicalities (access) and overall scale, and a smaller model will enable the nuances to be worked out. This will take the idea of the 'photo plank' to a new level! Nick.

In this post I describe the roof and lighting for my diagram N4 GWR horsebox, following previous posts detailing the build process for the underframe and body. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the construction, I want to say a few things about why I chose to light the interior of the horsebox. My plan is to be able to run Netherport, when it is finally built, in night mode - or, more accurately, dusk mode: the last light in the sky, lamps starting to be lit in buildings, and of course in passenger trains. I have ambitious plans for a theatre-like cyclorama sky, on which sunset can take place. Partly this is inspired by my earlier career as a theatre lighting designer, but even before that, memories of visiting Pendon as a boy in the 1970s, and seeing the Dartmoor scene in its night state, with the lit train crossing the silhouetted viaduct. The horsebox seemed like a good starting point for experimenting with coach lighting - only one compartment to be lit, and planty of space for whatever electronic gubbins is required. Most people use LEDs for this purpose, and it's easy to understand why - they are small, cheap, have a very long life, and use very little power. However, they have one big drawback - colour. Nominally, you can get LEDs in a variety of shades of white, from warm whites (yellow/orangish) to cool (bluish), but the issue is that the spectral output is not that of a naked flame or heated lamp filament. I won't get too technical here, but the upshot is that warm white LEDs are almost always a bit pink or a bit acid yellow/green, not a true warm white. There are two disadvantages to this - firstly, the colour of the light looks wrong, and secondly, there is a risk that colours are not rendered properly. Due, I suspect, to my professional background, I am particularly fussy about light colour, and I am sure many people find LEDs perfectly acceptable. I also think it may be possible to find LEDs that would meet my needs, but I haven't managed to yet. I did some experimenting with small filament lamps, and found that a 12V, 60mA lamp run at half voltage gives both a good colour for the naked flame of an oil lamp (which these horseboxes were equipped with), and the right brightness to light the compartment in subdued room lighting: As an aside, please don't judge the colour of light in these photographs - or, probably, any photograph. There are many steps going from the light in my room to the light that enters your eyes when you look at your screen, and there is no overall control of that process to ensure consistency and accuracy. Having established a light source that would get me the effect I wanted, the next question was control. After a bit of research, I chose the ESU Lokpilot 5 FX as a DCC decoder - the FX version does not include motor control, it just provides control for accessories. A key advantage of this decoder is that you can set it to provide a slight fade in and fade out on the lighting outputs, rather than a snap on and off. This seems better for an oil lamp. Here is the decoder being tested with the lamp and a 100R resistor wired in series to drop the voltage to the required 6V: The test rig has a small circuit board with an 8-pin DCC socket to plug the decoder into, wired into 'choc-block' connectors. The circuit board was a cheap eBay purchase, and very handy. I also used one in the finished horsebox so the decoder can be easily removed if necessary. I added a 'keep alive' to the circuit, using the design given in the ESU documentation, although this seems to make very little if any difference: With the plan for the electronics sorted, I moved on to the roof. The kit includes a brass roof, ready formed to the required profile - though it did need some tweaking. I felt it was important the three sub-assemblies (chassis, body, roof) remained separable, for access to the interior of the grooms compartment in case of dust or parts becoming detached, and to the electronics. I arranged for a length of studding to go vertically in the centre of the horsebox through a hole in the chassis floor, to a nut soldered to the centre of the roof. I soldered a nut to the bottom end of the studding and cut a slot in it to take a screwdriver. tightening the studding clamps the roof down onto the body, and the body onto the chassis, holding everything together. I made the roof with slightly too much curvature, so the sides of the roof are clamped down onto the body first, so avoiding any gaps. To ensure the roof didn't bend in the middle, I soldered a piece of brass channel along the centreline, stiffening the roof lengthways. The nut was soldered into the channel: In the above picture you can see the roof has been sprayed white - this was after covering the top side with model aircraft tissue, glued on with the relevant dope. This gives a nice, subtle texture, which worked well with the weathering later on. The lamp was attached to two lengths of copper wire - stripped out from a bit of 'twin and earth' electrical cable. The idea is these help draw the heat away from the lamp - the lamp runs at about 50mA when at 6V, and that current also flows through the dropper resistor, so that's 0.05A x 12V = 0.6W of power being dissipated. Not huge, but it's a confined space and I would rather get it away from the delicate compartment interior as quickly as possible. And with the copper wire trimmed: At the other end of the roof (the 'kicking' end) I added a small PCB connector on a piece of stripboard, so the roof could be disconnected when required: The final detailing of the roof involved adding rain strips from plastic strip, the oil lamp top and the ventilator. The kit includes a nice cast 'trumpet' ventilator, but by my 1908 period these had been replaced by gas lamp tops. There is no lighting in the horse compartment - the gas lamp tops were used purely as vents. The oil lamp top was a nice casting, with dimples where the holes should be, but the appearance can be improved by drilling these out with a 0.5mm drill. I realised it would be possible to drill up through the centre with a larger drill, and have the small holes meet in the middle. The lamp top of course has the actual lamp directly below, so a little light comes out of the vent holes, which you can just see when it is dark. In reality, this almost certainly wouldn't happen - there are too many baffles controlling the air flow for light to come out - but I couldn't resist this little piece of theatre. The final element of the lighting system is the pickups. These were made with phosphor bronze wire, rubbing on the edge of the flange. For each of the four pickups, I soldered a short length of fine brass tube to a piece of stripboard, and also soldered on a length of flexible electrical wire. These units were glued under the axles, with a piece of plasticard to pack them up so the pickups would clear various obstructions: The phosphor bronze wire was then added, bent into a right angle and fed into the brass tube. A dab of solder fixed the wire to the tube. Doing it this way allowed me to adjust the tension of the pickup wire against the wheel at the moment of soldering. The four wires were routed above the chassis floor, held in place with some plasticard 'cable guides': I tested the pickups with a temporary setup comprising two of the 12V lamps in series, driven by the DCC power, without the decoder. This showed that the pickups work OK as long as the wheels and track are scrupulously clean, though with some occasional and very slight flicker, especially when changing direction. The keep-alive circuit doesn't seem to help much with this - once in use, I will have to see if it is acceptable or not. Plan B would probably be some kind of battery or super-capacitor set-up, constantly topped up by the DCC power. I added another connector, so the chassis can be disconnected from the rest of the electronics: The keep-alive circuit and the PCB with the DCC 8-pin socket were glued to a plasticard construction to stop them falling about inside the body, with the risk of a short circuit. You can't see if very easily here because of all the wires, but hopefully you get a sense of it: A final addition was this plasticard item - a block with a conical hole to guide the length of studding into the nut when putting it all together, glued to the roof: And all this work is so our groom can read his paper after dark: In the gathering gloom, the train slowly makes its way, taking groom and horses towards their destination... Nick.

Yes, the Teatro Olimpico is extraordinary. You will see from the ground plan that the building had to be extended at the back of the stage to accommodate the central perspective ‘street’. Earlier in history, theatres were temporary constructions within existing halls, so the entire stage (raked to help the perspective illusion) scenery and seating areas were built of wood whenever the Duke or Prince decided they wanted to see a show. See here for an introduction to perspective in theatre, and links to other resources about theatre design and technology, for anyone short of a rabbit hole to go down this wet weekend: https://canonbase.eu/wiki/Item:Q30683 And now, back to our scheduled programming… Nick

Thinking about your approach to the perspective effect raises a few questions in my mind: are you going to reduce the width at the back, so the ends of the roof are angled inwards? if so, are you reducing the scale at the back, or just reducing the height? I see from your drawing of the screen that the arches and windows don't get narrower towards the back - should they? I suppose all these are different ways of exploring how you resolve the varying scale of the roof and the fixed scale of the trains. If you wanted to go for full forced/accelerated perspective, there are ways of setting this out geometrically, with pencil and ruler*. But I am not saying that is what you should do - I think it very much depends on what feels right to you, and you will be better placed than any of us to judge that, because you are seeing the mock-up in real 3D life, and we are looking at 2D photos. Nick. * invented by the stage designers for the court theatres of the Italian Renaissance, as it happens.

Yes, definitely red or grey. Nick.

The other factor will be how the colours change with age. The varnish will prevent the wood going grey, but it will still darken in colour. The varnish too will tend to yellow, so older varnished wood is likely to be more orange/brown and darker than new. Many choices can be justified! Perhaps focus on what feels right, and creating the overall palette you want for wagons-on-layout. Nick.

I’m planning to build a diagram N1 horsebox at some stage, so you never know! Nick.

Yes - having things you need to look between or round really helps add visual interest. Make the viewers do some work to experience the treat this will be. Nick.

Well, the chain reveals the twisted wire for the cludge it is, but the wire shows the chain as over-scale, fine as it is. Thanks for the clear comparison. Nick.

Not so much the downside of 7mm scale as such, but the downside of deciding to light the interiors - as I will show in part 3! Hopefully, you will consider the upside worth the trouble... Nick.

Ah - you are not the first person to suggest this (though the first on RMweb). My cover-story is that the groom has picked up a copy of the Times, discarded by the horse's owner, therefore being an early adopter of the practice of reading the news for free on trains. The long term plan is for a train with a couple of horse boxes, a carriage on an open carriage truck, and a GWR private saloon coach, showing a wealthy family on its travels. In this context, there is no reason the groom should have an interest in horse racing. That's my excuse, anyway. Nick.

Continuing from my previous post, this time I describe building the body of the horsebox, including the groom's compartment interior. The main etches for the body are in two parts, each with a side and an end, to be folded up to make two 'L' shape pieces. There are overlays for the sides of the compartment and the ends, to create the different layers of panelling. The first stage was to put on the overlays, and then add all the details such as hinges, door strapping, and so on: The overlays required the use of the mini gas torch, as even my 100W soldering iron couldn't put enough heat into the amount of brass involved. This was a learning curve for me, trying to avoid over-heating and distorting the parts due to differential expansion of the metal. Before assembling the two body parts, I did some work on the interior, which was all done in plasticard. The plasticard compartment sides are quite complex, as they have to accommodate the windows and droplights, which are in different planes. I used different thicknesses of plasticard in different places to allow for this. The first stage was a 'core' layer, fitted to the brass sides, on which the visible interior was built: The various panels of the interior were built up in sections, each with the planking scribed with an Olfa cutter. I didn't have details of the interior of the diagram N4 horseboxes, but there is a detailed cross-section of the slightly earlier diagram N3 in Janet Russell's Great Western Horsepower, which was my main point of reference. My plan was to use the etched droplights on the outside of the window, and make plasticard ones for the inside of the droplight. Here, the brass part is held in place with sellotape, while the plastic part is cut to match: In the end, I managed to lose the brass droplights while working on other parts of the build, and had to replace them with more plastic. One of them has since turned up, and I am confident the other will appear when we move house. The ventilation grills over the door were marked out by punching two lines of holes in plasticard using the rivet press: These could then be cut through to make the slots with rounded ends. Once fitted, the side panelling was complete: With that done, the body could be assembled: I then made the rest of the interior - floor, partition and end wall: I knew I would need to paint the brass body and interior parts before fitting the interior. The flanges on the top of the brass sides prevent the interior dropping in as a single assembly, so I designed the end panel, partition and floor to sit tightly between the interior sides, so the sides would be held tightly against the inside of the brass body at both ends and along the bottom once assembled. The use of various layers to make the sides meant there was some distortion as the solvent dried, but they are flattened out because the end, partition and floor wedge between them. Next was the seat, the back of which also forms the partition with the thin compartment used for storing bales (partitions that go between the horses): Opposite the seat is a low box, that covers the spring mechanism that counterbalances the weight of the drop down doors to the horse compartment. Above, there are three hatches, in line with the heads of the three horses the box xan accommodate, which allow the groom to check on the horses. The hatches are each on structures with tapered sides and bottom, projecting into the groom's compartment. I made these up with layered plasticard, cut and filed to size: The drawing shows the seat as upholstered, but not the back. I used a 3D print from CPL, filed down to make it a bit thinner: The drawing is difficult to interpret, but seems to indicate an armrest on the centre line, so I made one from plastic strip, and cut the cushion in half to fit round it: Back with the brass body, final details were added - end handrails, door bolts, and so on: The grab handles were bent up from brass wire, filed to make the flat front face: Looking at the prototype photos, the drop down doors to the horse compartment have rounded strips where the door lands on the platform, and at the bottom of the door. I used some plastic rod, scraping it with a scalpel to make a half-round section: That completed the detailing, with the exception of the door handles for the groom's compartment and the bale compartment, which stick out and are vulnerable to damage. I left these off until the very end of the build: The brass body was painted first with U-Pol #8 etch primer, and then Precision GWR coach brown in an aerosol. Once hard, the paint was rubbed down and buffed using Giles's technique, described here: Weathering was with water soluble artist's oil paints, mainly raw umber, which is very similar to the GWR chocolate, but which gives the impression of dirt accumulating around the edges of the panelling, and so on. The process is to brush on plenty of paint all over: This is then wiped off with paper towel, leaving it in the nooks and crannies. The paint dries very slowly (days) so you can keep working it until you are happy. The interior was painted with Vallejo acrylics. Once painted, it could be finally assembled into the body, but before that, I set up the scene with the groom figure - an S&D whitemetal casting - and photographed it for the record: And then installed in the body: At this stage, the chains for the door securing pins were added from twisted 5 amp fuse wire: Transfers are HMRS pressfix, and the door handles are lost wax brass castings from the Broad Gauge Society; they completed the build of the body: In the final instalment, I will describe the roof, and the interior lighting. Nick.

That's not lining, that's a tattoo. Nick.

Thanks, Chris - next instalment should be either tomorrow or Friday. Nick.