Adam FW

Heres a closer look at the engine house and loco shed that Pat built for the layout, firstly the loco shed, this is a scratch built building, the walls are foam board skimmed with a layer of DAS clay with a brick/stone pattern scribed on (various walls on the layout are built similarly). The roof, windows, doors and guttering are plastic. The engine house meanwhile is a bit of a kit bash with parts from a Wills water tank and some other kits incorporated into a foam board building again skimmed with clay. The beam engine is scratch built whilst the chimney is moulded plastic along with the roofs These 2 buildings will remain intact and will be painted up when I feel confident in my abilities to paint them as well as they have been built. The colliery screens meanwhile were only space claim items made from some small plastic garages glued together so will be replaced. The pit head seems to have gone through many changes, the one which came with the layout being a Hornby Scaledale item, but it's footprint is too large so will also be replaced Pat also built some large oak trees to cover creases in the water colour painted back scene. These trees have remained with his family so I need to look into getting/making some new ones

Many on this forum may know of Pat James, he was a very skilled modeller who competed in some of the past cake box challenges, he was also a prolific creator of small layouts. Sadly Pat passed away last year with some of his work left unfinished. I was fortunate enough to get a hold of his part built Bann Killigan colliery layout and I plan to develop it into something of my own, hence it will be reborn but with a lot of the foundations left by Pat intact. This is the layout as he left it: Pat wanted to represent a fictitious Irish colliery in the 1960s. In the foreground is a small canal, the middle section is OOn3 (12mm) track representing a 3ft gauge railway running under the colliery screens, on the top level is the colliery itself; a pit head, engine house and a OO9 narrow gauge railway with loco shed. There's a lot more detail of the build of the layout in @Corbs tribute to Pat James on the Railwaymania website along with some of Pat's other work https://www.railwaymania.net/pat-james-a-tribute In the next post I'll probably cover the buildings on the layout and detail some of my plans for it going forwards.

I printed off the detail parts for dubsy yesterday along with a spare crane, most of the bits came out very well just a couple to redo with slightly altered supports I may also do some slightly chunkier version 2 gears. These ones look good but are very fragile having already chipped one. Hopefully it’s just those updated gears and the crane hook to design having so far failed to find a suitable metal one to use

It's been a long time coming but I've done some more work on my 3D printed dubsy Dubsy has an improved running board, cab and side tanks and now has the main crane structure mounted for the first time. It all fits onto the un-modified Dapol B4 chassis but fitting a DCC decoder and keeping the standard PCB may be a tall order Everything is currently held together with blutack including the crane which is in 2 pieces but once the weather dries up I'll paint these bits in primer to look for defects and get on with printing the remaining parts and gluing it all together

After the house move I got my 3D printer up and running sooner than expected and decided to do a quick test print of the key parts of Dubsy to make sure they fit the chassis and see how they printed. I’m happy with the boiler parts and the crane base but I need to go back and add more support material to the cab and running board to remove the sawtooth effect (most visible on the left side of the running board in the 3rd image) and alter the orientation of the side tank to reduce layer lines. I'm happy with the detail, especially the little safety valves but the cab definitely needs some stiffening. I've designed in some holes for wire to thread inside the backsheet and strengthen it but one is clogged with resin so I need to drill that out very carefully, at least with this cab I can experiment without the worry of damaging a good part. As far as fitting the Dapol B4 chassis goes, it's a bit tight at the front so I'm adding some more clearance behind the buffer beam but I think I've ended up with just enough space to keep the PCB in the boiler, it will be tight especially with a decoder but if I can manage it it simplifies things nicely

This is the complete 3D model for Dubsy, it took a ages to get all the rivets done but the pattern along curve tool made it a lot quicker and easier than trying to do it manually. There's had to be a bit of creative license in some areas as I've never seen a top view of the crane for instance but I'm pretty satisfied with it. I'm not looking forwards to printing the crane jib though, that could be a massive headache to sort out the best orientation and support, it may be best split into multiple pieces like the body. Exactly when I'll be able to start printing it is a bit up in the air at the moment but hopefully within 2 or 3 weeks I may have the time to work on it again

Stepping back from modelling Dubsy and the recent Hudswell Clarke diesel kits I’ve got some good news about my other railway mania kit, the Avonside B4. Its been featured in another magazine! Back in September the round tank version of the kit appeared in a BRM article which I was thrilled about. Now the last 3 pages of the Modelling Industrial Railways supplement in the May edition of Railway Modeller covers Callum Willcox’s build of the St Dunstan kit. We might not be fortunate enough to be a cover star just yet but the model does appear on the back packaging and looks fabulous IMO. It really makes me want to build a st Dunstan or st Martin to go along with my st Thomas but I've got too much other new stuff on the go for the time being, maybe someday when I have the patience to do the wasp stripes again or try decals instead of paint.

So the Hudswell Diesels have been a lot more popular than we were expecting and the first batch on the Railway Mania shop has already sold out, I'm in the process of moving house but we'll be restocking them in the near future. In the meantime I've been working on another personal project and trying to expand my fleet of Foxfield Railway locomotives, after Bellerophon and Florence this time it's the turn of the Dubs crane tank, Dubsy. The model is designed to fit onto the Dapol B4 chassis, with the PCB removed and a DCC decoder hardwired in. Sadly the B4 is still on the large side so Dubsy will be more like Chubsy and has had to be scaled up a bit to fit. I've been working off photographs I took at a gala along with some drawings of older, smaller dubs crane tanks and the limited dimensional details on Dubsy that I could find and these are some of the early images of the work in progress 3D modelling On a separate note if anyone has any drawings or dimensions for other Foxfield locos they'd be willing to share so I can try modelling them or even making a kit let me know, I'm most interested in the Kerr Stuart Witch class 0-4-0ST (4388, 1926) and the 6wDM Kerr Stuart Diesel (4421, 1929) but any of their locos would be of interest to me

You are indeed correct, the livery I used was based off Carroll a Hudswell 0-4-0 diesel. I've got no idea how long Carroll wore this livery as that's the only image I could find of it so the back of the cab was a guess based on a blue livery it ran with at some point. On a separate I don't suppose anyone knows what the little orange loco behind Carroll is? I think it's a Fowler but I'm not sure

I had to google exported English Electric locos and you're right some of the liveries are very similar to my 0-6-0, that's not what my livery was based on but it's surprisingly similar. Thanks for you interest in the kit, rather than a dedicated running board without the cut outs, we're considering an updated detail pack that includes filler pieces that can be glued in and the seam hidden with a bit of filler no ideal but we think it's the best route forwards (we just need to prove it works) Although modelling an alternative running board would take moments the issue comes afterwards, I'd have to re-do all of the support material, ensure the print is reliable, then stock both varieties and complicate the ordering and packaging process to cover both options, not much of a problem with only 1 running board but we already have 2 varieties for the Hudswell alone with more planned. I have tried having a 'snap off' cover piece but it was unreliable. I'm open to alternative idea though.

I can see where you're coming from but afraid not, the livery is based off a diesel loco

It's been a pretty whirlwind week, last weekend the Hudwell Clarke 0-6-0DM kit I designed went on sale through Railwaymania and we've nearly sold all of the first batch already and some very keen builders have already got their models underway and they look great so far. Anyone following the railwaymania thread or social media pages may have already seen an image or 2 of my build of the Industrial version But here's a few more images of it including the working LED headlight The paint work isn't my finest and the livery has been described as looking Indian, Cuban, Javan etc and I can't help seeing the German flag but it is based on a British loco, just not an 0-6-0 Hudswell, bonus internet points if you can figure out which one.

This will be the last post on building my test print of the Railwaymania Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0 diesel kit the BR D2/7. With all the main parts painted and sub assembled I test fit all the main parts together and removed paint from the joining faces to get a good bond, with confidence it would all go together nicely I carefully applied a small amount of superglue to the joining faces, enough to have a strong bond but not too much that excess is squeezed out and becomes visible. Once the glue had dried I cut out the braces on the bonnet and cab. I did this with a small set of flush cutters, but it could be done with a razer saw for a neater edge. This step could have been done on the sub-assemblies which would allow the running board to be screwed down onto the chassis to keep it flat without having to hold it and then the bonnet and cab to be glued on top but you risk excess glue getting onto the chassis and sticking the body to the chassis. The final assembly step is to glue on the air tanks to the slots on the underside of the running board. I don't have any BR decals sadly so I jumped straight to clear coating the body with clear satin varnish to reduce the glossiness and protect the paint. Then for the windows I used glue and glaze, leaving one empty so that it looks open for a bit of variety The body can then be screwed onto the chassis And that's it all done, for now at least

Part 2 of the Hudswell build After painting the body and detail parts I bent, assembled and painted the handrails, Hudswell used simple round bar style handrail knobs rather than the more typical ball type, so the kit has WD style knobs to represent these, I re-drilled the handrail holes to remove any paint and then superglued them into place using masking tape to hold them whilst the glue dried the grille was painted using a few coats of thinned black paint, this ran into the recesses nicely. I used acrylic paint so that I could gently clean the excess off after it dried and not damage the tougher spray paint the Hudswell plate was painted similarly using several coats of thinned red paint and a detail brush, after it dried I carefully coloured the raised brass bits using a metallic Sharpie with that done I started assembling the running board with it's buffers, coupling hooks, toolboxes and the nuts for securing it to the chassis, to help align the nuts I thread the bolts in a bit, this also keeps the thread clear of glue if excess is used. Additionally I glued in the motor cover/cab interior into the cab and the chimney (or should it be exhaust pipe?) onto the bonnet everything is now ready for final assembly

This is my first post of a short build log for my upcoming Hudswell Clarke kit I'm doing with Railway Mania, I've already shown off the finished model but thought this might help people understand what's needed to build the loco. I've tried to make it as easy as possible. Firstly the chassis, this kit uses the Bachmann class 03 chassis, importantly the newer DCC ready version, the old split chassis ex mainline version will not fit. The Bachmann loco has cab lighting, usefully the terminals for this are on little PCB above the decoder so an LED for CAB lighting or a headlight cab be soldered on really easily, I don't use it on the BR loco but it will be on my industrial version. Next up I designed the kit to be in 5 main pieces; the bonnet, the cab, the running board, the motor cover (primarily this is to cover the back end of the Bachmann motor but can be painted up to represent the dashboard/cab interior) and a raft of smaller detail pieces. I find this makes painting and finishing much easier than single piece bodies. Not photographed but included are the nuts and bolts, handrail wire and handrail knobs. Unlike my Avonside kit the big flat sides of the Hudswell tended to splay apart so the print has some braces along the bottom of the bonnet and one each on the cab and motor cover to stop this. These can be cut out at any time but I did it after painting and assembly, they come off very easily with snips and taper at the ends to make this easier. The detail pieces can be cut off the raft with snips then all the parts can be cleaned up, I tend to just use a craft knife to remove the left over support material along with files, sand paper and emery boards to tidy them up. Everything was then primed. After it dried I cleaned up any remaining print lines with an emery board and primed it again but this was a quick build so I didn't put much effort in. As I brought up in my previous post, this loco was originally going to be black, which didn't photograph well at all, so I repainted it all green instead, it was the right decision IMO as you can actually see the print details.

I finally finished painting and assembling the BR D2/7 version of the upcoming Railway Mania Hudswell Clarke diesel kit I designed, some of you may have already seen it as it's been doing the rounds on the Railway Mania social media channels. My original plan was to knock this out quickly in plain black just to prove that the printed kit went together well and was ready for production but it didn’t photograph well in black so I had to redo it in BR green, which looking at it now, really suits it. Sadly I don’t have any BR decals for it, though I may get hold of some to finish it off properly. When I started on this project I was concerned that the decoder socket on the Bachmann chassis this kit was designed around would be problematic as it sits behind the grille pointing under the low gear box cover but the new Gaugemaster Ruby DCC93 decoder fits perfectly, though anything bigger may have to be remote mounted. I'll likely post a bit of a build log of the kit in the coming days as I photographed most of my screw ups as I went along, then I'll show off the industrial version I've been working on with its more eye catching freelance livery. Overall I'm very happy with how this one turned out, my painting of the silver window frames leaves a lot to be desired (especially in unforgiving photographs) but the rest of it's come out pretty well if I do say so myself

With work on Sirapite paused this is some of what I've been up to for railwaymania.net Firstly I updated an NCB Lambton Colliery style cab for a Hunslet 0-6-0ST Austerity/J94 loco. This cab was originally designed by Paul Metcalfe to fit the Hornby/Dapol chassis. It now more accurately represents the loco's in service with more detail, I also created a new version to fit the DJM/EFE J94 and designed some suitable injectors with pipework made from bent 0.7mm wire. Both versions simply replace the cab on the RTR loco and using captive nuts glued into recesses in the cab are bolted onto the running board. Meanwhile over Christmas I decided to make use of a Bachmann class 03 chassis I had lying around and designed my first diesel loco, a Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0, some of which were used by British Rail as the BR D2/7 others were widely used in industry. Here's some images of the 3D models for the 2 loco variants, the green one represents a BR D2/7 with the unusual false bunker on the back of the cab and the red one an industrial version with the pointed roof and 'cyclops' headlight. The blue 'tank tracks' are just my crude representation of the swept area of the connecting rods After some discussions with @Corbs we've decided that these will jump the queue and become the next Railwaymania loco kits to follow on from the Avonside B4, he's already teased the sample prints on Social Media and here's that photo repeated here, I'm particularly happy with how the grille and Hudswell plate turned out I'm just finishing up another test build after my first one needed some improvements under the skin and we're getting the instructions up together.

Sirapite has been put to one side for a while now and it will remain working but unfinished until I wrap up some other projects but this is it as it stands It does run ok but the pickups need improving as they cause too much drag on the back wheels to rotate freely, as a future upgrade I'm considering wiring up one of the match trucks from a Hornby Ruston but since I would like to keep mine usable with the Ruston I'm going to have to figure out what plug Hornby used or try to get hold of a second truck. Other than the pickups I've just got to glue on the sandboxes and couplings then make up some more accurate wheel centres. I've decided to leave off the side covers for the valve gear as I quite like it being on show Scale is always hard to judge in photos but to show just how small Sirapite is, here it is in front of my Austerity, Wilbert

thanks I don't currently have any plans to release this one for sale unless I do it through shapeways or a similar service as it was a nightmare to print, after I had a successful set up for the main body piece (good support and no print defects) from memory it took 6 attempts to separate it from the support material without something breaking as it all had to be so thin to give enough space for the internals. Being a project for myself it was never designed with P4 gauge in mind, the distance between the inside faces of the splashers is 21.5mm which after a quick google I believe is too tight for P4 anyway

A very belated update on sirapite as I’ve been busy with some railway mania projects, one of which is a new loco kit that I’m very excited to show in the near future Sirapite’s body is now finished, it’s gained handrails, steps and some more pipework all made from brass wire with a cut down BR whistle on top of the cylinder block its hard to see but there’s also some real coal in the back of the cab to help hide the body mount, beside the cab the handbrake has also been fitted along with a small etched hand wheel behind the flywheel finally I glazed the windows using glue and glaze At this point everything was finished but I wasn’t happy with the red wheel braces on the chassis as they were flimsy and had warped out of shape so I designed and printed a new set with a channel running along its length to pass a stiffening rod through the red brace is one of my originals, the grey ones are the unpainted new versions with the rod passing through them before being glued in place and cut to length

There’s also Famous Trains in Derby, shut due to Covid at the moment according to their website http://www.famoustrains.org.uk

I completely forgot those toy story locos existed, I like your model, it's like a cross between a camelback loco and a double fairlie with quad chimneys (or dual double chimneys maybe?), its certainly original but I think you can take the weirdness a step further, remove the coupling rods and add cylinders to each end to get a duplex drive loco, then you just need to find a confused looking loco crew for it

Well someone's opened a can of worms here with whether or not 3D printing is modelling so I'll throw some more fuel on the fire as someone who designs models from scratch for 3D printing. I'm not normally one for definitive YES or NO statements but here we go regardless, if you don't agree that's fine, it's purely my opinion: Is 3D printing modelling? - NO -the printer does the heavy lifting here, it would be like claiming your CD player is creating music, the skill comes in the creation of the model for 3D printing just like with music the skill is with writing, performing and recording it, and not with just hitting play. However maintaining a printer, setting it up for good prints and processing those prints does take skill and effort and the importance of that shouldn't be understated Is creating a CAD model for 3D printing modelling? - YES -this is where the real work of creating a 3D print is done. I work off drawings, photographs and measurements of both the item I want to model but also the components I want to include be that an RTR chassis, Alan Gibson wheels, gearsets, motors, whatever. This process can take an age, for the Railway Mania Portbury kit it took over 2 months from the first agreement to go for it, to being at a point that me and @Corbs were happy to show anything off and I used to have a drawer full of early prints that had either failed or been superseded by better designs. It is very rare that my first attempt is 100% right, and here is the key difference between 3D printing and more traditional methods, if I make a mistake I can go back to the CAD model, modify it and print a new part. With more traditional methods I'd have to fix what I'd already done or start again. This also leads to another big benefit is that once I have got a model printing well, I can make numerous copies Is building a 3D printed model, modeling? - YES -it's most akin to kit building but a 3D printed part needs finishing, be that sanding, painting, detailing or assembling. I try to make my kits as easy to build as possible but you also come across some on Shapeways and elsewhere which are more like an aid to scratch building where you get a basic body shape but you need to design a chassis, create a drivetrain and add rivets, pipework and other details etc, and that's a lot of work Can a 3D print be considered a 'bash'? - YES -just like an RTR body or a kit the 3D printed parts can be modified to suit, corbs has a couple of examples where he's cobbled together some nice models from random test prints I sent him. Alternatively as with my Manning Wardle and Kitson Pannier tanks, the RTR chassis has been cut up to better suit my needs. I've even bashed locos together on CAD, my Florence model if you peel the layers back far enough is based on my Bellerophon model, they use the same electrotren chassis so it made complete sense to base one off the other Is it modelling if I just print someone else's design? - IT DEPENDS -if you've got the CAD files from another modeler and you're just printing them, I see that as printing not modelling, but if you've modified them for a new purpose or to improve them then to me you've added something and that's modelling in my opinion regardless of whether it's virtual or not. Is 3D printing the future of modelling? - MAYBE -currently 3D printing can't do everything, there's a limit of how big or small I can make something and the current resin prints will not be as strong as a solid whitemetal lump or be as thin as brass sheet. But I think it is the future of affordable small volume production and the printers are only getting better. Hero Forge are showing off their full colour 3D printing of miniature figures which looks amazing even if the colours are a little muted and I'm sure we'll be seeing fully lined loco's being made in a similar way soon. That being said there will always be a place for taking a razer saw and some plastikard to a cheap second hand model to make it your own and the pugbash thread should continue to celebrate any modelling that in someway involves an RTR loco, I'm personally looking forward to someone making a paper-mache loco on a smokey joe chassis, I haven't come across one of those in the thread yet. WHAT IS MODELLING? - THAT'S THE REAL QUESTION

thanks Steve, I’m certainly very proud of this model and it was a major step forwards for my modelling both virtually on CAD and in the more traditional cutting, sanding, painting sense I treat this a bash as opposed to one of my body kits as it isn’t accurate to anything and was never meant to be. It may look like a manning wardle but really it’s a combination of different manning wardle features that never necessarily went together that have been stretched and squashed to fit on a modified RTR chassis I too am amazed by some of the skills that people have to make craft their own bashes. Personally I’ve never been very good at hand making anything, give me a ruler and a craft knife and I’ll cut a wonky line, but I can do 3d modelling and printing which I see as just a different way to get to the same end result, ultimately we all work with the skills and tools that we have and this thread is a great place to see all those different techniques in use looking back at my post from 6 months ago I never did provide an update on the model. Well here is the nearly finished ‘Corsair’, I just need to find a nice Edwardian style loco crew to finish it off

a boxed train set with a Hornby or triang 0-4-0, ideally I think it should contain at least one 4 wheel coach, the first introduction to the hobby for a lot of us I'm sure