RobAllen

13 hours ago, Porfuera said:

For a scenic break maybe you could extend your trees to the other side of the tracks and make it look like the railway is emerging from an area of woodland - it would be a nice alternative to a road bridge.

I like this idea. Thanks.

Spent some time this weekend on my railway. Very much fits and spurts in terms of the time that I spend modelling. 

I've finished the static grass which now looks a bit same-y, so I think I need to do more there. Not sure what though.

I've also added tufts of foliage around the fence posts, though maybe too much and I now have some trees in the corner.


The trees needed foliage underneath them I think, so I've added that. 

Here's a photo with a Jinty in frame and I think it looks okay for my level of abilities at this stage in my modelling journey.

It's becoming quite clear that I really should have thought more about the end of the line that goes onto the rest of the railway network and I can see why people use a bridge! Maybe I'll rethink this entire section at some point…

Finally in this session, I've added some foliage behind the buffers to make that end look like a little better:

Of course, the shallow depth of field helps make it look better than it maybe actually is :-)

The next areas that I want to tackle is the yard and to add some more railway paraphernalia around the trackbed. So far, so good though.
 

Long time no work.  A week after my last post I caught covid and I'm still not recovered. This weekend though I'm feeling well enough to do some railway modelling!

I was looking at the buffers & decided that there really should be some grass under them. I have a cheap static grass applicator and some 4mm grass from WWScenics, so tacked this project.

After some work, it now looks like this:

Possibly overdone it, but overall I think it's much better than before!

On 25/03/2019 at 18:41, Llion said:

Hi, these are some photos is took when I removed the cab for the same reason! 

1. Prise apart the lugs shown here with a screw driver, be very gentle as they are fragile. I put some old card down the sides to keep them apart! 

 

2. Slide the cab upwards and off it comes. SIMPLE! 

  

 

Thanks! I was struggling with the same problem and this was super-useful!

Does anyone know which locos were used as bankers from Bath in the 1920/30s. My library on S&D books isn't very large and my google-fu is failing me.

Thanks.

I took a photo of the buffers with my few bits of rolling stock to see how they looked:

Not too bad, Though I imagine that I'll get better with practice!

However, my eye was drawn to the RTR wagon - far too clean, so I did the world's simplest amount of weathering on it.

Firstly I scuffed up the lettering a bit:

and then I got out a black wash and painted it on:

I then painted a brown/reddish wash on the black under frame and that's it.
 

 
Looks much better!

I'm procrastinating on the fence and static grass steps…

Trying to get my head around weathering buffers. I think I need more red for the rusty rails and grey for the wooden beam. 

 

I added a Scale Model Scenery wall and iron fence today!  I need lots more practice at SMS kits though, as they are harder than they look. Or maybe I mean more fiddly. My fingers are a bit big and I don’t have the experience of using tweezers or other tools to make it easier.

The capstones on the gate pillars need to be re-done, but so far so good; the yard section is coming together.

So it turns out that getting a backscene that looks right is hard!

I’m struggling with what’s behind the factory. Trees look wrong. 
 

I’m either going to end up with just sky or taking & getting printed my own panoramic at this rate. 

I did some scenic work over a couple of evenings and the weekend.

Firstly, using DAS clay, I created a yard area. Here’s where I should do some actual research as I have no clue what the typical road surface would have been between the wars. I’m guessing some sort of asphalt though.

Once down, I then used a paint bush to mottle the surface a bit in order to make it look less “spread on”.

I then darkened the ballast with a brown and black wash, but I think I went a bit too far. Ah well. 

I also put on a green scatter in the areas that will be countryside. Again, not really having a clue, I got a light green and a dark green and mixed them up and piled it on top of PVA.

Once it dried, I used the sock-in-the-hoover trick to save the excess and reuse it.

I think it'll do as a base for the static grass that's currently in the post. I also have some fencing on the way.

On the other side, I'm thinking of copying Midford goods yard and placing a crane on the head shunt for the yard area. I then decided to try a raised area after the yard into the corner. There's no elevation at all yet, so this is my first modest attempt to do something.

I went with polystyrene with polyfiller over the top:

 
I painted it brown and then covered with scatter that had some brown added to it and painted up the rest of the yard. I also built a 2 level ground frame.

This leaves it in this state:



I need to do something about a base for the ground frame and presumably need some rodding too. Hopefully adding the static grass will help it look a little less uniform too. 

All in all, not a bad weekend's work, I think.

Another little job I did over the weekend was to tidy up the cabling to the controller from the layout. I have the Gaugemaster Combi and just had 4 wires running to connectors.

Other than the look of the 4 loose cables, it also meant that the controller was always attached to the layout. Hence, I bought a 6-way DIN plug and socket and some cable to sort it out.

Firstly, a socket on the baseboard:

and then a cable on the controller:

Makes it all a bit neater too! 

On 04/07/2021 at 13:04, TechnicArrow said:

If it's not too fixed yet, can I suggest you swap the "front" and "back" sections around, so the platform is adjacent to the track again? I feel it's worth noting that the building doesn't need to be flush against the backscene - setting it at a slight angle, with some plain card for the small amount of roof that'll be needed, can give a surprising amount of depth to the scene.

It's too fixed to swap the order of the section, however, your reply inspired me to try an attempt to set it at an angle by even more cutting up of the kit. I figured that the worst that could happen is that I failed and just put it flat.

The tricky bit was measuring correctly and overall, I'm happy with what I've come up with

All in all, a good weekend's modelling!

18 minutes ago, lapford34102 said:

Curious about the name of your layout...?

 

The idea for the setting comes from Twerton Siding on the Somerset and Dorset Railway. This siding was 3/4-mile from Bath junction and it was served by the Bath banking engine pushing the wagons into the siding. Twerton Siding served the coal depot & bakery of the Twerton Co-opertive Society, but I wanted more than one siding and for a first layout, trying to model an actual historical building seems beyond my skillset.

However, the bakery is on Melcome Road, so I've fictionalised an idea that rather than just a single siding, more sidings were added to support more industry that built up and it was renamed appropriately. Though I totally understand that in the real world, once a name sticks, it's really hard to change!

The settings appeals as a good excuse to avoid having a run-round loop and there was a fair amount of variety of banking engines from Bath, so it doesn't have to just be an 0-6-0 shunting.
 

4 minutes ago, lapford34102 said:

Looks good, a lot neater than my efforts. A darker grey/brown wash would tone it down, brush it on or if you have an airbrush even better. 

Thanks. A quick google tells me that a wash is a thin paint. Can I use standard Humbrol and then thin it with standard CarPlan thinner that I can find on Amazon?  Or do I need something special?

I've also been turning my thoughts towards the setting. As I'm very new and have no clue what I'm doing, I decided on getting the Metcalfe small factory. It turns out that I have no clue about dimensions and there's really barely any space behind the sidings before the backboard! As such, I decided to see if I could modify the kit to make it very low relief!

Flushed with the success of managing to glue card together according to the instructions, I then got ahead of myself and realised that I could use the other side of the factory to extend it.

However, I subsequently realised that the north light windows were going the wrong way, so I converted it to a flat roof and put one gabled face of the larger building next to it.

The end result is this:



Not up to the standards that I see in this forum, but for my first attempt at a building, I'm happy. Again, it's far too clean, so I need to make it dirtier next. I also need to decide if I want a back scene or not.

Slowly but surely making progress though!

Ballasting has taken much longer than I expected. A mixture of more work coming my way and being very slow! I'm reasonably happy with what I've done though.

It looks a bit "new", so I think I need to learn how to make it look dirtier and "old". 

9 minutes ago, Rivercider said:

Choosing fine ballast for sidings is a good idea.

Thanks. I'll try it and see. 

This week, I've painted the sides of the rails. The photo is from the first coat and then I did a second coat today.

I'm going to ballast next. I have Woodland Scenics fine grey ballast, but it looks a bit clean and new to me. Should I get some dark coloured ballast too and mix the two, or can I darken the ballast I have?

This weekend I dealt with the electrics and wired the DC for the track along with the two points with electrofrogs.

I have wire in 6 colours and really could have done with 7. I suspect that it’s always the case that “one extra” would be better, regardless of subject!

I picked red and black for the power to the track and then blue, green, yellow and white for the points. Blue for the common return, yellow and white for each direction of the throw of the point to the toggle switch (auto-return to centre-off) and green for the power to the switch. I also reused green for the common to the frog. 

Hopefully I’ve fixed it well enough that it won’t move and is tidy enough that I can follow what I’ve done in the future.

I’ve tested it and it all works, so ballasting is next, so I’ll be searching RMweb to find out how it’s done.

I'm very new to modelling, though have been interested in railways all my life as my dad is a modeller, so I've been around his railways (00 and now 0) all my life. As such I have no clue what I'm doing and am learning by reading RMWeb!

So, the plan is to build a small OO gauge layout that will fit on the shelf in my office. I've bought Scale Model Scenery's BB017 baseboard as the length matches my shelf pretty well. After reading many of the lovely posts on here I've decided to to go with a set of sidings that appears to be called an Inglenook. Should allow me to learn a lot, though I doubt it'll be up to the general standard of excellence that I see here.

To start off, I have build the baseboards and laid track. I've already soldered dropper wire to the track and poked it through the baseboard, so the next step is to wire it all up.
 

Thank you!

Does anyone know where I can find pictures of Twerton siding?
 

Also, where exactly was it? Is there a map that shows it as I can’t find it on the NLS maps.