MatP

'Afternoon all!

The warehouse now has its guttering and is in the paint shop (that's the same disreputable board as in the above photos, just the other way up). I've also been trying to flatten and re-glue the card surface of the goods yard. A segment of it is currently being squashed under a big jar with about a fiver's worth of 1p and 2p coins in it.

On the layout, meanwhile, here's a shot of 26038, fetching out a Poole-Farish long wheelbase chassis for conversion into an OTA timber wagon. I'm going to attempt to scratch-build one or more examples of the 2+5+2 stanchion type that were originally painted blue and white and worked from places like Arrochar to Workington.

You will be forgiven for thinking that the general concept of this depot resembles Buxton more than anywhere in the Highlands... 

Anyway, 26038 is a standard Dapol loco which I bought about ten years ago. Unlike a blue 26 which I bought at about the same time, and which has never put a foot wrong, 26038 has never been a very reliable runner. Recently it started smoking and refusing to move (reminds me of when I was a teacher). In a fit of bravado, I stripped the loco down, and after about half an hour I came up with this:

The problem was the tiny white component, circled in red. I'm guessing it's a capacitor providing RF-interference suppression. [EDIT - it's a combination diode that forms part of the lighting system - see Steven B's post below. That explains why the lights no longer work on that end of the loco]. That was the cause of the smoke (and perhaps the main cause of the loco's general unreliability across the years). Having unscrewed the PCB and spread things out, I connected power to the loco to see if the smoke was in fact coming from the capacitor. But having exposed the capacitor, there was now enough oxygen around it for it to burn out completely (and fairly spectacularly).

Since these things are usually in parallel with the motor, I hoped that the loco would still run, and it did - in fact it now runs better than it has ever done. The burn-out was therefore very good news. All I had to do was to reinsulate some wires that had melted insulation due to having been in contact with the capacitor. I did this by thinning down some Humbrol model filler with Liquid Poly to produce a thick paint.

After another half an hour's fiddly reassembly, the loco now runs fine - though for some reason, even though I detached and reattached the lighting plug-socket very carefully, the lights on that end of the loco now don't work... Sigh!

Best Wishes,

Mat

Och, here's another update from my little Scottish Utopia....

In some of the previous photos in this thread, there's a mysterious white building in the background. This is the one-piece moulded shell from the old pre-Bachmann Farish engine/goods shed kit. I picked it up at the very first Leamington Spa N gauge show for a couple of quid. This being the 80's, the goods yard is mainly now used as a distribution hub by MacArcady Construction and they needed some more storage space. I decided to use the Farish shell to scratchbuild a small warehouse.

The shell is moulded in translucent plastic, which I was able to use to my advantage by including some skylights. Basically all I've done is to clad the shell in 2mm-spaced planked plasticard, to represent a modern steel-clad industrial building. I found some roller doors and a plain steel door for human ingress in the spares box (from a Walther's factory kit). These are let into slots cut into the Farish shell, to give them some depth.

I also found a couple of spare Pikestuff window frames, for the skylights. The window frames on the back of the building are scratchbuilt from microstrip to resemble the Pikestuff ones.

It still needs some guttering and of course painting. I'd show you pictures of the building on the layout but my attempt yesterday to paint-weather the card "concrete" surface of the goods yard went a bit wrong, and all the edges (which I thought I'd stuck down hard) have curled up in a most immoral manner. Bah.

I have been doing so much modelling since the lockdown started that I now have a permanently sore neck, from spending hours craning over my modelling desk. I hope that nobody else is suffering from similar symptoms, or from excessive exposure to Liquid Poly fumes, or indeed, spending too much time in online modelling Fora.

Regards,

Mat

Hi again,

Here are the final photos - the first shows hoses added from different diameters of wire. Actually, I didn't have any thin black-coated wire so had to paint some... The hoses sit on tiny brackets on the structure, made from 1mm x 2mm pieces of 10 thou plasticard. (Also in this shot is an experimental piece of decorative chapel walling for my other layout, which is 1950's Welsh Valleys - it's Auhagen factory walling with chunks cut out, and sections from the top half of Ratio GWR railings glued in).

The second photo shows the completed installation in situ. The locomotive is, appropriately, 37425 "Concrete Bob" (like a lot of my locos, it desperately needs snowploughs). The bridge and surrounding scenery in the background are also of fairly recent construction.

The last is a close-up which, if you squint, shows the pipework going up into the hoppers. I guess I should paint the hoppers grey but they are quite expensive nowadays (not when I bought them!) and at the moment I feel I'd rather keep them in mint condition.

Bestest Wishes,

Mat

Hi,

(I thought I'd send the photos of the cement unloader one or two at a time).

At Bletchley, the compressed air comes from some way away. For my model, I thought I'd build a little compressor house. This is made from Expo brick plasticard, which appears to be vacuum-formed. The good news is that the material is thin and easy to cut. Less good news is that it doesn't take paint particularly well, I have found.

The louvred doors and panels were actually cut out of an old plastic kit for a GWR 'pagoda' waiting room... The doors have 10 thou x 40 thou frames, which look not half bad I hope but will be almost impossible to see when the building's on the layout.

Best Wishes,

Mat

Hi modellers,

I've been doing some work at the other end of this N Gauge layout, including a cement terminal (for unloading PCA powder wagons). This isn't exactly a common Highland feature (Inverness notwithstanding) and to be honest was inspired by some photos of the small facility at Barnstaple. But a rapidly-growing new town might need a lot of cement....

What I wanted was to add a full set of plumbing to a pair of Hornby "Lyddle End" cement hoppers. As I said on another forum, you don't seem to see this modelled very often, and indeed detailed pictures of cement unloading facilities are difficult to find. As far as I can tell, a lot of cement storage silos had loose pipes that dangled down from the structure - Syston, for instance. 

I wanted something a bit more permanent-looking. I found a few pictures of the cement terminal at Bletchley (next to the Bedford branch platform), enough to proceed. These installations aren't particularly complicated, all they need is an air pipe to force the cement powder out of the wagons and a second pipe to carry the air-blown cement powder to storage.

Anyway, here's a photo of the pipework under construction. The two pipes are 2.5mm and 1mm diameter. The bottom pipe is actually just a strut (but made from round rod because at the time the only photos I had made it look like there were two air pipes...).  The take-offs for various things are made from bent bits of rod; the flanges on the 1mm pipe are made from the 2.5mm pipe, and the flanges on the larger pipe are made from wrapping 1mm wide strips of self-adhesive paper round and round and round...

On the right hand side are two upward-pointing pipes, which hook underneath the Hornby hoppers.

Best Wishes,

Mat

Hi Nick,

Thanks for your comments. It's a little bit of a reach to the fiddle yard, but the whole layout is only 2'2" wide and about 3'3" off the floor (I'm 6'), so it's possible. I don't do a lot of rearrangement of stock in the fiddle yards either, just loco swaps and run rounds. There are three separate fiddle yard areas (representing Glasgow Queen Street station, Glasgow Mossend freight yard, and Inverness. I generally use the front track in each as a reception road - a train will enter this and be uncoupled. Then another loco will remove the stock. 

One thing I certainly can't have, given that the layout is up against a wall and under a sloping ceiling, is any kind of backscene. Instead I've just made a firm line with the scenery to try to emphasise what is model and what is 'backstage'.

Regards,

Mat

Thanks once again for all your replies to my initial request. I've started a thread on my N gauge Scottish layout (1980's large logo era) in the layouts area of the Forum. It's called "Jardine Junction." This features my little oil depot, which combines elements of the ones at Fort William and (thanks to your replies above) Lochavullin.

Best Wishes,

Mat

Hi All,

I thought I might start a thread on my Scottish terminus layout, in case anyone is interested and after receiving some very useful help on a Scottish prototype location in another area of this Forum.

Briefly, my layout is a terminus serving an imaginary town on the proposed but never-built line from Tulloch (West Highland) to Kingussie (Highland main line to Inverness). Because it was supposedly built with the North British working from the West and the Highland Railway working from the East, and those companies more or less hated each other, the two companies ran into opposite sides of a joint-owned terminus: there never was a through route. The line was justified and kept open mainly by the construction in the 1920's of a huge, hydro-electrically powered Pretext Factory near the town. The town itself is called Jardine Junction (named after my wife's Scottish, admittedly lowland, clan) but because of damage sustained to the original town station in the Cyberman invasion of 1968, a new station was built in the early 70's on part of the Junction yard.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures to see if people are interested. The oil depot on the right is a mixture of some parts of a Kibri German N gauge kit, a scratch-built hut and a lot of 1mm rod. The railings round the top of the tank are Kestrel fencing, trimmed and bent after softening in very hot water. The piping is based mainly on Google Street View images of the oil sidings at Fort William. I painted the pipes red because it seemed like a good idea at the time - I now know it wasn't, but there's no way to do a repaint because the model is too delicate. The red railings are, however, prototypical (as in the oil depot at Lochavullin in Oban - thanks to members of this Forum for directing me to photos of this mysterious location). The depot still needs a chain-link fence, I am waiting for them to come back into stock at Scale Model Scenery, who in my very humble opinion do the best kits for these.

I used Woodland Scenics iron ore ballast. In retrospect it's far too red as well - I'm still trying to find low-tech ways to tone it down. I wanted the station building to be modern and pre-fab in appearance but didn't want to do a direct model of Fort William. This building is bashed out of a pair of Outland Models 1:160 scale convenience store kits (so as to have big windows front and back) and has a fully-detailed interior, including cash registers in the ticket office. Outland Models are a Chinese firm that sells direct via eBay.

As you might be able to see in the general view, I'm currently working on the right-hand end of the layout. My main project at the moment is to produce another array of pipework to attach to a pair of Hornby cement hoppers. You see plenty of cement unloading depots on model layouts but (if I may be so bold) very rarely do you see the pipework that takes the cement from the wagons to the hoppers.

I'd also like to add that the collection of models on the layout was built up slowly over more than 30 years - a lot of the rolling stock was bought second hand. Even the expensive-looking 37418 in the background is a spare bodyshell from BR Lines / Farish Spares on a ten-year old chassis. 

Regards,

Mat

1 hour ago, Stuey said:

 

Wasn't 89031 renumbered to 89131 when it's ETH was isolated, and it was repainted into Railfreight General livery? 

Yep, good point - I think that was at the same time as they isolated its TDM system, meaning it could no longer work with the cab-end-like-an-89 driving van trailers (designated Mk3-BS).

Slightly more seriously speaking, the Class 89 appeals to me (a) as an underdog and (b) because it was the basis of an idea to make WCML trains longer and (hopefully) cheaper rather than any faster.

Mat 

Brilliant news - I remember seeing this loco at Crewe and Stafford in the 80's, though never at my 'home' station, Lichfield TV. I've expressed an interest in the 'original' liveried version.

I hope somebody with deep pockets (i.e. not me) and sufficient courage to renumber a RevolutioN 89 builds a layout set on the WCML (or ECML) c.1990 or later, set in an alternative universe where the Class 89 had been approved and a whole fleet of them built. 

89022 with a 12-coach Up train would pass 89017 in the loop at LTV with the morning direct service to London (picking up a mutinous-looking party from Lichfield Cathedral School), and then, shortly afterwards, 89031 would be seen heading north with a Speedlink trunk freight...

Time to take out a second mortgage on the cat?

Mat P

Brilliant, thanks! Every one of those photos deserves to have a model made of it.

Mat

Dear All,

Could any of you kindly please point me towards some photographs of the above location? I found a few on that very interesting website, railscot.co.uk, but would like to know more.

It's the yard at the end of the line from Oban Goods Jn, completely separate from the main station. It's still marked on the track diagrams on the Railcam website but I was under the impression that it has now been built over? My apologies if there's already a discussion on this topic, I couldn't find one.

I am very interested in small oil terminals, such as this yard towards the end of the last century. I am currently building an N gauge layout set in c.1987, based around a highly fictional location on the never-built Tulloch-Kingussie line. I'm currently converting a siding into an oil depot, using some parts from the Kibri oil tanks kit and a lot of 1mm rod...

Best Wishes,

Mat