Middlepeak

If it's not too late, can I suggest some additional foliage painted on the backscene to give the illusion of more depth? Looking great otherwise. Geraint

Paul, Thanks for the explanation - it's come out wery well! Geraint

Hi, Could you expand a little on the textures and colours used in the road through the goods yard? I picked up on a previous post that you were concerned that you hadn't got it right, but the last couple of posts confirm that you most definitely have! Very inspiring - just my kind of "less is more" railway, where you can spend lots of time on the detail. Regards, Geraint

John, Very helpful - thank you! Geraint

Geoff, I'm contemplating a pair of scenic fiddle yards for my new home layout in P4. I would ideally need a removable section of track so that trains can be swapped over. Have you included this feature, and if so, how easy was it to 'hide the joins' within the scenery? Keep up the good work - I've been inspired by the composition and quality of your layouts for some time! Regards, Geraint

Hello All, I'm playing around with a C&L layout design for a friend, using Templot. What I'm after is the general dimensions and spacing for plain track sleepers and turnout timbers. Can anyone help or point me to a suitable source of this information on line? Thanks in anticipation. Geraint Hughes

Time for a short update in advance of our next exhibition appearance - at the Solent MRG's Eurotrack show on 24-25 February. For family reasons, it's been nearly 18 months since the layout was last brought out of storage, so we completed a thorough test of layout and stock yesterday, and I'm pleased to report that everything went well. As usual, I've managed to finish a few new items in time for the show. Pictures are attached. First off is a foreign visitor, in the form of a Carro F covered wagon all the way from Italy. I'm told that these wagons were often to be seen in Denmark, carrying new potatoes and other spring vegetables from the 'deep south'. The model is a kit from Italeri, which has had my normal suspension parts added, along with new brass solebars and steps. I tried to follow some photos of a well weathered wagon that had undergone a degree of partial repainting over the years. The airbrush was used to good effect, along with several yards of masking tape as the various layers of colour were built up. Overall, I'm quite pleased with its final appearance. The second wagon is a long time favourite that has been sitting in the cupboard for many years, and I've finally got round to making a proper job of it. The subject really took my fancy - an ice cream wagon for the Premier Is company in Esbjerg. They owned a small fleet of wagons of different origins, which were presumably used to ferry the product around to their various retail outlets across the country. When I found a photo of one of their shops in Ribe, I just had to have the model. It's originally a Roco product, but in essence they have just taken a standard German van and applied the livery. In order to produce a more accurate model of this particular vehicle, I had to strip the chassis down, remove the brake gear in favour of 'one side only' brake gear and add the body end steps and handrails that are such a feature of the prototype. The photo I have of the wagon shows it in a somewhat dilapidated state in 1960, so the weathering (using acrylics) is done to suit. Thirdly, we have a new Litra CU 4-wheel coach for the mail train. This is a Hobbytrade product, with the passenger compartment next to the toilet converted into a guard's office, to make it into a 'togforervogn'. It's also had a complete repaint inside and some weight added, before weathering. The last item is a total indulgence. On our Danish visit with the layout in 2014, I bought an Epoke Modelle kit for a Bedford O series lorry, of which there were numerous examples in Denmark in the 50s and 60s. It's a nice little kit, but it needed some additional work on the chassis and a completely new tipper body in plasticard, based on the 7mm version modelled by Roy Link in a past issue of MRJ. The livery of the vehicle is entirely fictional, but is my little tribute to a very dear friend of some 25 years who died last October. For those in need of a translation, 'Landbrugsmaskiner' is farm machinery, and we're now looking for a suitable piece of equipment for it to deliver from the yard at Obbekaer. So that's progress to date - more on the Skibbroen project once the show's over, but in the mean time we look forward to seeing some of you at Eurotrack. Please drop by to say hello. Geraint

Bill, I have also found Felderbanen in Bramdrupdam (near Kolding) a useful source. They have a comprehensive website and they have sent items to me in the post previously. www.felderbanen.dk should find them. Regards, Geraint

You beat me to it Jol. That was what I used for my water tenders on Middlepeak. This is an unusal shot though, as this tender has obviously been recently renovated in the works and has a new coat of paint. Interesting also that the centre wheels are retained, which would limit its use to the short section between High Peak Junction and Cromford Wharf. Most tenders had their centre axle removed so that they could operate over the incline tops at Sheep Pasture and Middleton. The HMRS published an article about the tenders in their magazine many years ago, written by Harry Jack if I recall correctly. I'll try to dig it out and PM you a copy Justin. Regards, Geraint

John, I sympathise totally with your caution over this. One of the problems I have, despite having a viewing length only a fraction of that on Balcome (2.8m in total), is that there are two different points along that length where the illusion has to make sense - from roughly the centre of the layout, and from the left hand end where the view is along the main street, over the level crossing, with the cathedral at the end. I'm still not sure that either view will look 100% right, but the trick is probably to compromise slightly on both, rather than have one right and the other wrong. Hope that makes sense. As I said before, the theory will be proved or disproved by the model of a model, before any wood is cut! Regards, Geraint

I guess we've all been to exhibitions and other events such as Scaleforum and Expo EM over the years and marvelled at the skills of those who present demonstrations on different parts of the hobby. I've tried it myself, and it's one thing to have a particular modelling skill, but it's an entirely different matter to be able to communicate it in a captivating way to the audience. Very often there's only a short amount of time for you to get a particular point across, either because the visitor is not sure that they want to get involved in a conversation, or because there's a queue of folks ready to talk and the poor person in the visitor's seat feels pressured to move on. I therefore wanted to recount a very positive experience at this year's Scaleforum. Yes, I know that was over two months ago, but to be honest this relatively short 15 minute conversation inspired me so much that I've spent all this time thinking about it and have only just put my thoughts into some sort of order. So here goes! One of my acquisitions last year was Paul Bambrick's book on creating a backscene for your layout. I was aware of his excellent work on that 7mm masterpiece Bucks Hill through his articles in MRJ, and hopefully the book would give me some pointers towards a half-decent backscene for the Skibbroen project. I say hopefully, because my only effort to date, on Obbekaer, had been something of an afterthought, and done with little panache or artistic flair, but it seemed to help create the illusion I was after. At the back of my mind though was the need to portray a convincing rendition of Ribe Cathedral and the intervening roofscape on a painted backscene. I must admit that early attempts to read the book, whilst totally captivating, were somewhat frustrating, but the more I read it, the more I believed that there was something in the concept of a 3D backscene. However, would my project be suitable? Having spotted that Paul would be a demonstrator at Scaleforum, I sent him a tentative mail with some background to the project and a couple of pictures. This received an encouraging reply, and an offer to discuss further at the event, so off I went to Aylesbury with a file of photos and plans and an embarrassingly long list of questions, some of which felt extremely naive! So then came the 15 minute chat that changed my outlook on the project quite radically. In that short space of time, Paul persuaded me that it would be quite feasible to model the whole of the roofscape behind the front row of buildings in diminishing scale and with compressed dimensions front to back to create an illusion of space in a short distance. And to top it all, the 1200 year old cathedral could be built as the final layer in front of the backscene - almost flat, but with just about enough relief to make it convincing. Of course, this couldn't all be done on the initial size of baseboard that I had designed, but you will recall that for other reasons I had already committed myself to building parts of the layout on various jigsaw pieces that could eventually be brought together on a subframe. This would allow much of the compressed 3D backscene to be on separate jigsaw pieces, and the final size and shape of the subframe determined later. Probably the soundest piece of advice offered by Paul was to start things off with a 'model of a model', to check that the right kind of illusion was being created from different viewing angles. So over the coming months, any work on trackwork and full scale buildings will hopefully be paralleled by work on the small scale model, and some impression of the final size of the layout will result. Of course, I seem to have committed myself to a lot more work here, and because of that the completion date for this project is receding even further into the distance, but my view is that I will only have one stab at this, so it had better be convincing, and a 3D backscene will help to create the best effect. A couple of bits of 'evidence' are attached - the first shows the sort of view that I hope to create for an average sized viewer standing in front of the layout. The impact of the cathedral and the roofscape is obvious, and some of the layers to the illusion are identified. I still have to create the right angle of photo to get the scene right, and calculations have been done to translate viewing heights and distances for the model to the full-size equivalent. Conclusion - find someone in Ribe with a drone-mounted camera who can fly it accurately over the grass in the foreground! The plan shows the initial layout plan superimposed on a 1960s map of the street layout, which shows just how much of a roofscape has to be compressed into a short distance. Without the diminishing scale and compression, the layout back to the cathedral would be around 2.5 metres deep! Well that's my major news. A wonderfully inspiring piece of consultancy, enthusiastically and freely given, which in my view is what exhibition demonstrations should be about. I just wonder now whether I can live up to Paul's expectations!!! Layout on street plan.pdf

Thank you John. That's a great relief. I look forward to seeing reports and photos of the show, and hopefully Obbekaer can be there at some time in the future. Have a great weekend. Geraint

I'm afraid Unklian's post of yesterday ended up being a little premature. In view of my wife's continuing ill health, and something of a downturn in the last couple of days, I have very reluctantly had to withdraw from the Manchester show this year. This was a considerable disappointment. As a Manchester lad, the Christmas outings with my Dad to the MMRS show at the Corn Exchange were a highlight of the year, and a major influence in my taking up this hobby in the first place. When the time came for me to be involved in setting up a small annual exhibition at my secondary school, MMRS stalwarts Norman Whitnall and Sid Stubbs, both of whom had connections with the school, were generous with their advice and assistance. Over the course of the last 40 years or so, three of my layouts have been exhibited there, culminating in Middlepeak's farewell appearance in 2003. I was therefore really looking forward to going back with Obbekaer. Still, one look at the line-up reveals that it will be a great event, and well worth seeing. Hopefully we will be there another year. My thanks to show organiser Philip Sweet for being so gracious in accepting the situation. It is very difficult for exhibition managers when they are presented with withdrawl like this at the last minute. I will post some further news on the development of Obbekaer and the Ribe Skibbroen project in due course. Regards, Geraint

Dave, A nice simple idea. I have something similar fitted to my set-up track for AJ's. In my case the magnet runs in a section of brass tube through the baseboard and is raised by a brass paddle pivoted around 20mm away. The paddle holds the magnet in the raised position for as long as the lever is depressed. Releasing the lever allows the magnet to drop by gravity, falling against the paddle at its lowest point. I'm sure you could rig this up with a longer operating rod to the front of your baseboard. Not sure whether I can post pictures with this comment, but I'll hopefully send you a PM with the pics attached. As you say - simple and cheap, and with 32 to build, a lot easier than winding and wiring all those coils. However, given the delaying uncoupling potential of AJs, I do wonder why you need so many for your layout? Regards, Geraint

Hi Railroad Bill Thanks for your kind comments. Progress on the project thus far has made quite a lot of use of the laser cutter as a convenient way of cutting complex shapes accurately. In my case I have access to the machine at the local MakerSpace facility, courtesy of a good friend and modelling colleague. These places are springing up all over the country, and a Google search will I'm sure reveal the nearest one to you. Most will offer training on the machines, essential if you have no experience and no-one to assist. In many ways the trick is in the design, and it pays to have a solid understanding of a suitable CAD package before you start. I had been using TurboCAD for many years before I used laser cutting. There are however a number of companies who will offer you a design and cut facility, which is very useful for model buildings, and I noticed the other day that my usual source of ply (SLEC in Watton, Norfolk) is now offering a laser cutting service. Thanks for the picture of Mariager. There was no such facility when I visited some years ago, but one of the highlights of the visit was being asked to help push the table at Handest! The fact that several of the preserved lines in Denmark are reconstructing their own turntables and documenting progress pictorially on the internet is a great help for us modellers! Regards Geraint

Attention has now turned to the pit above the baseboard, and in particular to the ring rail which will support the table and provide the power supply to the track on the table itself. The advantage of building the whole table, pit and all, on top of the baseboard, is that the drive spindle can be used to determine the centre of everything. The first stage was to draw out the concrete plinth on which the pit rail is laid. This was laser cut from 3mm white perspex. The design included four webs and a central boss to fit over the drive spindle, which would be used to accurately position the plinth in a concentric location, and then would be removed once the plinth was stuck down. The second stage was to determine how to attach the pit rail. Conscious of the forces at play when flat-bottom rail is curved through a sharp radius, I decided that soldering the rails to plates made from 0.5mm thick PCB was the answer. The plates are located at 10 degree intervals around the circle, with double plates attached at the 90 and 270 degree positions where the rail breaks need to be. A trial on a spare piece of perspex confirmed that the plates could be attached with the gel type of superglue and still remain firm when the soldering iron was applied to attach the rail. The rails themselves are PECO Code 60 FB, the new standard for the layout. Although slightly higher than the code 55 used previously, the foot is narrower, and overall the profile looks more convincing. The rail was eased into a half circle using fingers and thumbs, checking the alignment and smoothness of the curve against the template. In order to get the curved rails concentric with the plinth, a simple jig was made up from bits of brass that pivoted around the central spindle, with a notch to hold the rail at the correct position. In the end, it was quite an easy and satisfying task, occupying a pleasant hour or so at the workbench. The attached photos will hopefully illustrate the process. The next stage will be to add the retaining bolts to the railplates and to paint the plinth and rails before installation on the baseboard. Regards, Geraint

It's been a bit of a topsy-turvy year so far. My modelling activities usually peak over the winter and the summer is by comparison a rather fallow period but a good one for thinking and researching. However, my wife's lengthy period in hospital effectively killed off any modelling for a protracted period at the start of the year, and now as the sun begins to shine the modelling impetus is gaining momentum again - strange! At the end of the main series of posts in 2016, I had just completed the jigsaw boards for the trackwork on Ribe Skibbroen, and was looking forward to getting some track down and having somewhere to run trains. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that one of the main determinants of track geometry in the station was the turntable, and in that respect it would probably pay to concentrate on that first. What I am trying to produce is a 15m table, known in Denmark as a 'drejeskive med kongestol'. I had access to a drawing of a similar 20m table, so this gave me a reasonable start in terms of the shape of the girders and the depth of the pit. From this I determined that rather than cutting a hole in the baseboard to form the pit, by using a 15mm thick layer of cork as a track underlay (in itself an interesting experiment in sound deadening on a light plywood board), I could build the turntable on top of the baseboard and then align the tracks to it. This felt as though it would be more geometrically sound! So, how would it be powered? An informative chat with John Redrup at London Road Models produced a combined motor and gearbox that he had sourced for his turntable kits, so one was purchased, along with a set of well-engineered 2:1 bevel gears from Ebay. The basic mechanism was designed on the CAD package and was laser cut in 3mm Perspex to give a base, a motor mounting plate and a 150mm diameter index disc. The latter has four indentations laser cut into the edge, which allows a roller from a microswitch to drop into the slot. The roller arm is soldered to the gainstroke arm of a 12v DC relay. As it drops into the indentation, it cuts off power to the drive mechanism. Applying power to the relay lifts the roller out of the slot and the turntable starts to rotate again. A double pole changeover switch can reverse the direction of travel, a push to make push button supplies power to the relay, and a simple potentiometer circuit adjusts the voltage supplied to the motor and therefore the speed of rotation of the table. For moment, without the deck in place, the mechanism requires about 2.8v to turn at the required speed for what in real life would be a hand operated turntable, but there is scope to increase this to cope with the weight of the deck and loco in due course. The critical element of the design is the diameter of the index disc (the larger the better) and the accuracy of cut of the indentations. The first attempt had them too deep, which resulted in a slight overrun and slack in the movement when the table was at rest. This could have played havoc with the alignment of tracks in due course. The second attempt reduced the depth of indentation, but kept the same curved profile, which seems to have done the trick. Hopefully the pictures will tell the story better than these words. The only thing that shows above the baseboard at the moment is the top of the drive spindle and a Perspex drive bar. The intention is that the table will not be attached rigidly to the drive spindle, as any offset in the latter away from the vertical could result in the table deck not being horizontal. The deck is therefore designed to run on the flangeless wheels that bear on the circular pit rail, and the turning force is transmitted by the Perspex drive bar bearing on the inside of the deck girders - out of sight! Hopefully this will become clearer in future installments as the construction progresses, but the theory is well described in the Scalefour Society's publication from the South London Area Group on the construction of their layout 'St Merryn' (ISBN 978-0-9561273-1-0). Meanwhile, a search on Google.dk for 'drejeskive' led to an excellent series of photos from the South Funen preservation group, who have constructed a new turntable at Korinth station. http://old.sfvj.dk/projekter/drejeskive/drejeskive.htm A bit like following photographic instructions for constructing a kit - now I just have to design it and follow their lead! Regards, Geraint

Hi Rob, Nice smooth curves, which I'm sure will help to give excellent running. Having just read Steve Hall's thought provoking article in Snooze 202, I wonder whether introducing cant on the curves would make things even better? Any thoughts? Geraint

Yes they are and they were used in the 1960s after the line was severed at Middleton Incline and water was brought in from Buxton each day. With no inclines to tackle, the centre axle did not need to be removed, although they must have created quite a squeal going round the curve at Gotham! Regards Geraint

Al, Presumably you're referring to the water tenders? Yes, I have 3 in all. The first is a McConnell 4 wheel tender, which was scratchbuilt in plasticard. The other two are Webb three axle tenders with the centre axle removed. One is scratchbuilt and the other is a London Road models kit with details such as the coal rails removed. Some years ago the HMRS published an article in their Journal with photos and drawings of the different variants. I have a copy somewhere, but if you're a member you may find it on their lists. Alternatively they should have a copy at the HMRS Library at the Midland Railway Centre - not too far away from you! Regards, Geraint

Al, Best remedy for the rivets - Archer's transfers. A bit expensive but a real doddle to apply to a primed surface before the final topcoat and varnish. Geraint

Al / Joseph, I have a Sectional Appendix to the WTT for 1960 which confirms that all of the High Peak from High Peak Junction to Hopton Top could be worked without a brake van in the rear. In practice the section west of Middleton Top was worked with a brake van, but I've yet to see evidence of one in use on the two lower sections. Hope this helps, Geraint

Al Have now found a floor plan and one elevation of the workshops. Will PM them to you when I get the chance - after the weekend as we're away at the moment. Regards, Geraint

Al Very interesting to hear about the John Evans book. I have a number of his colour photos in my collection and they are really excellent. Looking forward to seeing this. Who's the publisher? I tried to post the other night but it failed. I noticed that because you've just taken a portion of the original track plan, you've lost the run round loop. Just wondering how you will be able to shunt the sidings at the left hand end with one engine in steam? Regards Geraint

Neil asked for some photos of Middlepeak. Here's a couple of shots of the bottom of the incline. If you want the full layout description, I'll refer you to MRJ110 from some time in the early 'noughties'. The layout was on the circuit from around 1994 in the original "Middlepeak Wharf" incarnation, extended in 1996 and saw its final exhibition appearance at the Manchester Show in October 2003. It was dismantled around 2 years ago, after a couple of failed efforts to turn the top section into a workable representation of Middleton Top for home use. Looking at Al's baseboard designs, there does seem to be a lot of wood under there! Certainly the hillside section above the wharf trackage is a good candidate for the type of foam baseboards now being advocated by people such as Gordon Gravett and Iain Rice - a lot lighter too! I'm currently working with lightweight laser cut ply baseboards for my latest effort in p87, and for anyone with a friendly CAD package to work with, these are dead easy to design and assemble. Have a look at http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/51216-obbekaer-p87/page-4 starting at post #86. And just to prove that I haven't deserted the High Peak altogether, I have designed a version of Friden yard for home use, which will make for interesting shunting, as well as allowing a nice mixture of High Peak and Buxton main line locos. Trouble is I'm not as fast as Al in turning ideas into reality! Regards, Geraint Friden V3.pdf