RBTKraisee

To quote one of the late, great Ian Richardson's most memorable characters: "You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment" While I have my home layout, I'm laying the groundwork for a really large layout down the road - or should that be down the track? It's intended to be mainly prototypical layout, based on the ECML from King's Cross to Edinburgh via Peterborough, a dog-leg out to Nottingham, then Doncaster, York and Newcastle, and continuing farther North to the West Highland Railway via Glasgow, Fort William and all the way up to Mallaig, where the Ferry will head for Skye. That's the core route. I'm attaching a map below (rotated to get a landscape view, so more city names would appear!) and I'm primarily modelling the white line up the whole country. My current working title for this is the "Magical Mystery Train Tour" and it will have the underlying theme of one of my other passions: "British Film & Television". Under that massively broad heading I can happily justify including references to any films that had part of their production done anywhere in the UK (that would allow me to include things from such diverse sources as 2001, any James Bond, Mr. Bean, Dr. Who, the Beatles, Outlander and Pirates of the Caribbean if I wanted!). I love this theme because it really removes the limits of the imagination for me, while still allowing me to do it in a mostly-prototypical style. I want to accurately model a lot of real trains from all eras, like the various Flying Scotsman's, The Jacobite all the way to modern HST's, Pendolino's and Eurostar. By modelling York and the Railway Museum, I'll be able to include just about everything from the Rocket to the APT too. My plan is to pepper the background landscape with a whole host of fun things from the silver screen, to entertain the kids. Yeah, okay, that was a fib... Yes, Its really to entertain *ME*, but kids will get a kick out of it too! A certain fictional castle might make an appearance in there too, just for those who can penetrate the enchantments. It just so happens to be about 4ft tall when 3d printed in N gauge! If you're a muggle, don't ask me how I know that. And I might have the odd Shinkansen do a brief appearance, or perhaps the Polar Express, just for a bit of whimzy! 'Ahm just gonna have me some fun! I figure I can get the first major elements up and running within 18 months (Kings Cross, Edinburgh, Glenfinnian and a certain station with a castle in the background). But it's going to take at least 5 years to get it to a properly functional state with a handful of the major stations along the route, and even longer to add everything I want. Initially it's going to be hosted at my office, where I have a lot of space available (and at over 5,000 pieces of track for the full setup this will need a *lot* of space). While this is going to be a totally private layout, not open to visitors due to the licensing issues involved, the thought has already occurred to me that Orlando is just down the road from me - arguably the hottest tourist destination of them all - and if I could find a way to get all the licensing sorted out without killing the budget (yeah, right!) this could make for a real interesting tourist exhibit one day. Once I've got the basic layout up and running next year, I'm toying with the notion of contacting the National Model Railway Museum in Hamburg to see if it might be worthwhile partnering to build an Orlando-based museum. So there, you found me out! Ross.

Gary, this is truly amazing work. I *really* want one of these to go next door to the King's Cross station I'm designing, but I have to say everything at St. Pancras is so much more ornate, so while I think my project is pretty cool, what you are creating there is a genuine wonder! My hat off to you sir! I do wish you were still doing the buildings for 3D printing though - that way I might have had a chance at persuading you to swap files with me and we'd have no trouble re-scaling each others work between N and 2mm or even 4mm and OO! C'est la vie! Some day, maybe when I next visit Blighty, I'd like to buy you a pint and compare notes! Really looking forward to watching your progress. Ross.

Dave, I wish you luck with Templot and I'll look out for it whenever you make a page. In the meantime, your work on Sandy is really impressive. I must say that I don't have the patience for the brass kits any more. I "served my time" with brass nearly 20 years ago, when I made a hyper-detailed 1:144 scale kit for the Saturn-V launch tower that sent Apollo missions to the Moon. My kits had 39 full A4 sheets of brass etchings, a stack of laser cut acrylic, dozens of styrene and cast parts, a mahogany base and they even had a lunar plaque with unique serial number! The whole lot weighed over 15 kg! So if I never see another brass kit, I'll die quite happy :) Not exactly model railway related, but as I'm reminiscing (LOL, blast from the past!), here is a pic of the kit's brass etching pack, and a shot of one of the 9 service arms from that tower, for anyone who might be interested: Back to railways :) As I couldn't sleep tonight, I decided to do a little more work on the Gresleys! I think I've fixed the problems on the last print, and I also added the stepboards - yeah, I'd forgotten those, doh! I've also designed a fitting to prevent the bogies turning excessively (currently allows a sweep of 25°) - and through that piece, I now have a hole that should allow me to pass a pair of thin lighting wires up into the body of the coach, so it's a two-for! :) Question for readers: What lighting kits would you recommend me to support? I can design any fittings in at this stage, but I'm not sure who's kits are popular in the community - I could do with some feedback from y'all! Test printing again and this time I'm particularly interested in checking the clearance around the wheels. The CAD suggests there are going to be some issues that will need to be resolved. Ross.

First test print of the underframes (now including the interiors on the same part). I think it came out fairly well, although there are a few issues like the lamps on the tables are too thin and some broke off while removing the print supports, something went wrong with one of the buffers and one of the headstocks and they didn't print correctly - but its nothing I can't fix and I'm quite chuffed with this as a first attempt. I'm away for the rest of the day making a presentation to NASA, so I'm not likely to have any more updates 'til at least tomorrow. Chris/Dave: Thanks for the appreciation. Do you have a thread for your Templot plan? My KX work has slowed a little to get these Gresley's done, but next week I think I can get back into it a bit more intensively. Hopefully I'll get to show more progress on that front soon. I'm currently just modelling the KX passenger station circa 1990-2000 ish (which is going to be about 10-11 feet long) but the larger station of old is on my long-term radar. There are a few other higher priority projects ahead of it though, such as Doncaster, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh - and I really want to try building my own APT-P, but it's on there :) Ross.

Forgot to show the underside of the Underframe yesterday. Remember this is in N gauge Got two of them (1st and 3rd) printing over night Hopefully they'll come out nicely and I'll be able to show them off tomorrow! Ross.

4:45am and I really need to go get some kip, but I really wanted to get the underframes done for the restaurant cars I think they're looking great! Also added some plates, cups, wine glasses and lights to the interiors Ross.

Thanks for the insight. I'll go ahead and order a Cranmore for myself Ross.

I've completed the design for the 1st class coach body now too :) 3rd class coach on the left, new 1st coach on the right. Kitchen car and all the underframes are still to finish off, together with figuring out what lighting support to include and the coupling design. Ross.

Not much new stuff recently because work has been keeping me very busy, but I've done a lot of work on the underframe and finally tried printing my first structure last night. Unfortunately it snapped into multiple parts while trying to remove it from the print plate, so that design clearly needs more attention. I think I may merge it into the interior piece and print that seats towards the print plate - because the small support marks won't show very clearly once painted and visible only through the windows. One thing I have managed to do is assemble the various parts together in CAD, to check the coach spacing when using the double bogie. A bit of refinement work and I think I've got it working well even on 1st radius 9" / 228mm curves. The attachment will be with a simple M3 computer-style flat top screw, for simplicity. Something else I have in mind is trying some of the Bachmann concertina corridor connectors on this. The door size to and from the kitchen car is quite a bit narrower than a regular gangway, and it's offset from the center-line, but I think it should work fairly well. Ross.

Every shop I've tried is out of stock I'd prefer to find a new set, but used would be okay as long as it's been run-in properly and treated well. Don't mind if these are just 2-loco bookends, 4-pack or more - I want to build a full 10 car (inc. loco's) rake. Thanks, Ross.

LOL I'm planning a complete repaint job on this one, so wheel colour isn't a deal breaker, but I really want to know if the slight increase in cost is worth it or not. If there's a better motor, or mechanism, or if there are improved detailing, then it will definitely be worthwhile. Otherwise I'll just save some sheckles. Ross.

Does anyone know, aside from the liveries, are there any tangible differences or improvements made between the current Dapol N gauge Hall loco's (Moreton, Pitchford, Woolerton & Sketty) and the previous batch (Laneley, Pendeford, Cranmore & ??)? Ross.

Now that my slicing issues seem to be behind me (woo hoo!) I've made some progress on a couple of fronts. First, I've been experimenting with painting the teak walls. Here are a few of my test pieces, all based on Mike Trice's great teaking technique. In the background are four pieces with progressively darker coats of Burned Umber/Liquin top coat over a light yellow base coat, which turned out to be too light and without sufficient red in it. In the foreground is a pure pumpkin basecoat with some patches of pumpkin with a little red mixed in to darken it. An equal mix top coat covers it all, and I think this makes for a great final effect. Doing it this way allows me to very carefully apply the darker layers to specific panels of the teak to get the right degree of variance across the whole coach. I think I'm finally happy with this for final effect. The DCC++ box is finished. I redesigned it with more venting, slightly repositioned the hole for the motor shield power lines and now have a press button on the top of the case that correctly presses the reset button on the motor shield. What colour(s) do you think I should paint it? While I continue to work on the underframe for the Gresley, I hand painted the bogies, just to get some better pictures of them. I increased the size of the bolts and the ID plate in the print, just so they show up more clearly. Again, I'm pretty happy with these results and consider these 'ready to go'. Here are a couple of piccies That's it for this morning. This afternoon I'm going to be experimenting with masking some of the teaked parts to try painting the roof and the gangways - I want to test a couple of different tapes to see which ones pull paint and which ones don't. I'm also doing a run to Walmart to get supplies, and while I'm there I want to get some brighter lights for my light box. Ross.

Oh yes! Monkeysarefun - a massive thank you! Your point about the reverse face was exactly the issue. It appears that the section of roof gutter attached where the roof curves down at the vestibule end was not merged. That was fine on the side where I created the part, but when it was mirrored it was became a completely separate entity. The slicer interpreted decided it was essentially just "hanging there" (even though it does actually touch the roof part) and decided it needed a support structure - and just put one in. I'll talk with Anycubic about my existing bug report and share the discovery. The simplest fix would be to warn the user that the slicer wants to add some material, show it to the user and give the user the option to override such behaviour. Yay! This means that even if I don't get anything else done on my set today I'm still making great progress today! Ross.

Hi guys, Thanks for the suggestions. Just looked up the file validator, tried it a little and it looks like a useful utility to have, I think it will help, cheers. Chitubox issued a Beta version (1.6.4.3) that seems to fix the membrane (and anti-membrane too) issue. Its on their website. What are your resolution settings? My overscale issue is likely user error I'm currently using: Res X: 1440px, Y: 2560px Lock Ratio: Off Size X: 65mm, Y: 115mm, Z: 155mm Build Area Offset: Off Machine Type: AnyCubic Photon Mirror: LCD_mirror Layer Height: 0.020mm to 0.050mm - occurs with any setting Bottom Layer Count: 8 Exposure Time: 15s Bottom Exposure Time: 60s Light-off Delay: 1s Bottom Light-off Delay: 1s Bottom Lift Distance: 5mm Lifting Distance: 5mm Bottom Lift Speed: 120mm/min Lifting Speed: 180mm/min Retract Speed: 180mm/min Anti-Aliasing Level: 8 Reversed faces might be a cause for the extra material - I've designed one side of (most of) the coach and then mirrored it before adding a few extra parts that can't be mirrored. In SolidWorks when you make items you can sometime make them all merge them together into a single component, but for this model a few features prevented that, so mirroring without merging might be part of the issue. I'll have to do some experiments on that, but thanks for raising the issue as a possible root cause. I've started looking for a SolidWorks addon checker specifically for 3D printer checking. Haven't found one yet, but will continue to look. DCC++ case is ordinary Anycubic clear right now. My latest itteration uses four semi-circular clips, with the cutout exactly 1mm diameter and the lug 0.9mm. 0.5mm clearance either end of the lug too. Seems to work pretty well for what I need, but I'm sure there's room for further refinement. Only thing I would say, is don't print such things 'face down' on the build plate - they're a *&%%$ to remove and you risk damaging the build plate with the force needed. I shattered my last "top" piece of the box before it would release. Definitely raise and support them from the connection edge! Hopefully I'll get some more stuff done to show tonight Ross.

Rather than take up a load of space here duplicating my post from my workbench, here's a link to it, describing some of my recent slicer issues with AnyCubic's Photon Workshop package and Chitubox. In brief; when it slices something, Workshop sometimes puts unexpected extra material in to support elements it deems are not supported, even when they definitely are! And Chitubox can randomly add membrane layers (and actually completely blank layers too!) when any tube structure opens or closes - like when a window starts on the next layer. And my version of Chitubox is also printing everything ~5% too large. Oh what fun it is to be learning to 3D print stuff! Ross.

Not much in the way of pictures to show again today, only an update to the DCC++/Arduino 3D printed box below. I spent a day working bug reports with both of the companies who do the slicing software for my 3D printer; Anycubic and Chitubox. Below I'll go a bit techie-speak, mainly for those who already grok 3D printing, but it might be useful for others experiencing similar issues. The Anycubic Photon Workshop package is putting extra material into my prints that aren't in my designs. Apparently if the software detects a structure that it thinks might not be supported in the way it expects, it just adds its own supports and doesn't let the user override So even though all my structures are well supported (and they're actually just mirror of the other side - so why aren't both sides being flagged?) this piece of material ends up covering up all the details around one of my doors and even fills-in the window! Argh! I have no resolution to that issue yet, but Anycubic have the source files and instructions to allow them to repeatably create the problem themselves so I'm hopeful they can trace the problem. As for Chitubox, there are actually two different issues, the first of which we seem to have resolved today. Firstly Chitubox seemed to sometimes add a whole "membrane" layer of material when any form of tube of some sorts was either opening or closing - for example where the body of the coach is completely surrounded by material on one layer, and the layer above has an opening for a window. I could get the membrane to move to different opening transitions throughout the height of the coach The problem for me is that this membrane appeared right near the top of my windows, where the tiny little row of window details is also located - and the extra material in that specific location proceeded to screw all those details up! Again, Argh! Chitubox has however issued a new Beta version that appears to fix the issue. I'll be testing it some time tomorrow, but I'm going to be out for a lot of the day so I'm not sure how much testing I can get done. The second Chitubox issue is just weird. All the parts it makes appear to be about 5% too large (actually 5.272%). I'm hoping it's just some sort of setting that I've screwed up somewhere, but I've posted the problem on their own community forum and look forward to a resolution that is better than "just re-scale all the parts down to 95%" - but that's a viable work-around in the short-term. Aside from 3D printing issues I've been figuring different potential strategies to enable lighting these Gresley coaches - things like where to place holes for wiring, where caps might be hidden, who's lighting strips to provide a mounting for etc. That and working out how to fit couplers that allow for a fair bit of movement is likely to be an ongoing challenge for a while. I'm also giving serious thoughts regarding potentially making this Gresley triplet into a kit, either Shapeways or eBay special - and with my design approach it isn't very difficult for me to produce HO/OO scale versions too, if there's interest. So as you see it developing, if you'd like a set, please don't be shy to say so here on the thread or by PM. So that's it for today. I'll leave you with the latest DCC++ box in pre-painted condition. Ross.

Extremely kind of you to say! :) I really enjoy tinkering around with all these things. I'm learning a ton of things too, and that's always fun! Now, all I've got to do is lay down a bit of track and actually start running something! Ross.

Crikey, these brass bearings are unbelievably tiny! They are going to be most interesting to handle. Thanks for the suggestion though. Looking it up, I note some folk say the Dundas/Peco (I assume they're related to Dundas Models) bearings have a strange inner shape which can cause running issues, so the 2mm Scale Association or NBrass ones perform better. I'll buy a pack from somewhere and compare the running characteristics both with and without these bearings and I'll report my results here - just they'll take a while to get to me here in Florida so it may be a month or so. Ross.

So, just a quick update this morning. Last nights print included these: I'll prime them when I get a chance later today and they'll be a lot easier to see, but very nice so far Ross.

Brief update today. Done lots of work, but most of it is only partially complete, so can't really show it off. New print of the triplet coach body, this time with a *much* smoother roofline and I've also managed to get rid of most of the pixel lines. Very happy with the results now, so this is going onto the "finished" list. Just need the underframe and bogies, both of which are coming along, and then I can use all the lessons learned here to complete the other two coaches fairly swiftly. With thanks to Mike for some great reference material, here is my initial design of Gresley bogie, ready to fit either 7mm or 6.2mm diameter wheels. I'm going to try printing over night, along with the final parts of my updated DCC++ Arduino box that corrects some early mistakes, improves the force of the clips holding it together and adds an external button for resetting the boards. Received my first coach for my Jacobite rake today too, thanks to John Upton! Now all I need are four more and a loco to pull 'em. All coming, just as soon as the order ships from Blighty to the New World. That's it for tonight. Ross.

[SNIP] Bordon? Not far from my old stomping grounds in Fareham Not sure if they have one for the UK, but Anycubic has a direct sales shop here in the US (anycubic.com) and with 10% off coupon codes I just bought 1 liter of Clear for $37.50 shipped - about £30.15 in real money Received it 3 days later, which is a heckuva lot faster than Amazon's delayed service right now. In addition to Grey I can recommend their Clear, Black, Aqua Blue, Orange and Pink, all down to at least 0.025mm layer thickness. I've been experimenting with 0.022mm and 0.020mm layers recently, but only with the Clear. So far so good. I also tried a brand of Clear from "iFun". Not easy to find, but works great - final parts are substantially clearer than Anycubic's, mainly because the isopropyl cleaning process causes my Anycubic Clear to go a bit milky. I haven't tried any of their plant based resins yet, but I'd imagine they're just as good. Here is my latest clear print of my first Gresley Triplet LNER 3rd class restaurant car (N 1:148 scale), with a previous grey print that I used to test Mike Trice's teaking technique out on. A dumb question I have for the group here: If I print my own bogies for these, is there a particular design approach to creating the wheel mount points that I need to use, or should it just be a simple hole that the pointy bits of the axle's loosely stick into? Ross.

First two (of three) parts of my screwless DCC++ Arduino box are now built Also decided to give the Tam Valley Octopus III a go, to control a bunch of servo's for motorizing my turnouts. One is on order together with their DCC decoder addon. Decided to skip the auto-aligner - for now. Ross.

And just for S&G's, I used the first failed coach print from above, the one with the sagging roof, as a test piece for trying-out Mike Trice's teak painting technique. As my very first attempt, I don't think this is too bad! Ross.

Oh, I forgot! I also made a start on the underframe for the triplet car too :) And I ordered a pack of correct scale 7mm wheels from Dundas Models, ready for when I do the bogies. Ross.