mike knowles

I mentioned on Dave Siddall’s excellent thread “O Gauge - First Tentative Steps†that we at Hessle MRG were about to embark on our first venture in the “Senior Scaleâ€. Rather than keep hijacking Dave’s thread with reports on our progress I said I would start a separate thread once we had got something worthwhile to show – so here goes.
At the moment we are still at initial track planning stage and following discussions at the club we have decided to do something based on a Scottish coastal terminus set in the 1970’s - inspired by Kyle of Lochalsh without necessarily being based on it. No name yet but one suggestion is Kyle of Loch Ness-Bit with Rab C as stationmaster – we’ll have to see!
Space available is approximately 6m (max) length by up to 0.9m wide (so we can still reach the stock for uncoupling etc). Trackwork following on from our previous OO layout Battersby North End will be handbuilt using C&L and Exactoscale rail and chairs on home produced ply sleepers laid on C&L templates. As with Battersby we will standardise on B6 turnouts.
So far we have purchased the C&L templates (boy do they look big compared to the OO counterparts – the sheer size of things is going to take some getting used to). Quarter scale copies of these were then made (including a quarter scale loco, 2 coaches and a van) so that we could initially play around with them within a reasonable space (i.e. a table top), mainly to determine whether we could fit what we wanted into the available space but also it gave us an idea of where to position turnouts to avoid board joints.
After some shuffling about, lots of coffee etc we came up with this;







This at least showed we had the space to achieve our aims, the next step is to lay out the board tops and place the full size templates on them to double check all is OK. I’ll update on this presently but please note this layout, being a club layout will only get worked on at club meetings, i.e. 1 night a week for 3 hours (less chatting and coffee drinking time) so progress will be slow – it took us 18 months to build and lay the track on Battersby!

They certainly are Mick and that looks like my old colleague Les exchanging the token.....

 

Happy days.

 

Cheers.

 

Sean.

Not you then!

They are preformed:

 

http://www.7mmlocomo...p?g2_itemId=412

 

If you flick through the rest you can find what you get in the box and step by step how they go together.

Many thanks Boris, that website will be a great help. Looks like building it is going to be a real challenge (sorry FUN!).

Hello Brian.

Scanning back through this thread (well it's so full of useful information) I came across some pictures of the MMP Class A & B tank wagons you had built. Now I had been considering getting one of these and whilst the soldering aspect wasn't a concern me and aware that it would take some considerable time to build, the one thing that was bothering me was whether you had to roll the tank barrel yourself. Can you recall whether it came pre-rolled, if not how did you roll it, do you need proper rolling bars?

The bogie side frames on the BD look excellent. I've always thought the ones on the Bachmann 20 were rather poor.

So, will the 20 body fit the BD chassis?

After looking at the model on display at Warley I was thinking of getting one, chopping the body up and inserting various additions, changing the bogies and converting it to a Class 37!

Good to see some info on how you are creating a superb layout, I live about 4 miles from the location modelled.

I assume the initial mid grey colour was applied by brush to the ballast only, avoiding the sleepers. I used a similar method to colour some stone on the river bank on my layout Boston Frodsham. The stone as laid was a pure white colour (what was the colour of the ballast you used by the way?) Onto this I brushed a thin wash of black/grey/brown water colour which as you describe tints the stone without making it look painted, very effective. A couple of photos below which I hope gives some idea of the created effect.

Your method also highlights another advantage of hand built trackwork, i.e. you lay the sleepers, then ballast before laying the rails. So much easier to do than ballasting RTR trackwork.

I'll continue to follow the thread with keen interest.

Nice finish, nice and shiney, but remember those plastic kits from not many years ago ?

mr B

As mentioned previously the tanks are metal (copper I believe) not plastic.

You can get Tiger transfers from Scalemodel transfers

http://www.scalemodeltransfers.co.uk/

Many thanks for the info

I too was stunned by the layout at DEMU.

One question, at the show you were running a couple of clay tiger wagons built from the S Kits kits. I asked at the time where you got the transfers for the logo and the blue flash from but unfortunatly the builder of the wagons had wandered off. As I have one of these kits just awaiting transfers to finish it off could you please let me know the source?

Apologies if this has already been mentioned in this thread but I haven't got time to look through all the previous posts to check.

Anyway I've made a start on fitting the etched walkways from Pete Harvey (once again a masterpiece in etching) but my jaw dropped when I read instruction number 5 viz, "SOLDER walkway feet to the tank". Don't be daft I thought, the tank's plastic it'll melt, then it dawned on me that it was in fact metal!

Two points of interest from this;

1 The instructions state that if using an unweathered model, scrape the chrome plate away from the points of contact with the walkway and tin prior to soldering, from this I guess the (production) weathered ones were painted onto non-chromed tanks.

2 The more I looked at the tank the more I wondered hao on earth Dapol managed to make it from metal, after all it's not just a straight cylindrical shape that could be rolled. Perhaps in the course of interest Dapol Dave could give us some insight into how it was done.

For those who may be interested I'm taking photos as I go along and will post these in due course along with some other mods I have in mind.

Modelfair have got the Silver Bullets in stock today, still showing as available at a very reasonable £22.95:

 

http://www.modelfair.com/acatalog/Dapol_New_Wagons.html

Just rung and ordered four of them - thanks for the info.

I recently fitted sound to a Hornby Class 56. Initially it was installed with just the standard 23mm round speaker and did not impress much. Changing to a base reflex speaker produced a significant improvement, but then adding back the 23mm round speaker wired in parallel (with volume reduced accordingly) mounted in a home made sound box ala Pete Harvey really transformed it. The horns in particular really coming on song.

Whilst I too am really impressed with the SWD Mk4 Class 37 chip with 2x23mm speakers in the fual tanks I may now try a combination of 23mm and base reflex together.

As other posters have said Hi Fi installations use speakers of differing sizes to cover all the required frequency ranges so although we aren't up to Hi Fi standard sounds in our locos I think it is still worth some experimentation.

I echo the view that this is a good thread.