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Dagworth

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Posts posted by Dagworth

    best material for run down sidings ballast

    in Scenery, Structures & Transport

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

    I have mostly ballasted my 4mm OO mainlines with nice, clean granite chip ballast. All fixed with pva.

    But now i need to ballast sidings which in reality were ballasted with ash or, if normal ballast had been used, is now severly contaminated.

    Today i tried using wood ash out of the log burner, but as soon as i tried to fix it down, it just floated around and looks horrible.

    So i am wondering what to use instead. I have seen mention of using das clay (or similar) but im not sure i like the idea of that? I have quite a lot to do.

    I have also had the idea of mixing my granite chips 1:1 with something like dry powder tile grout. Brush it all in place then just finely spray with water/pva mix to fix down. I think that might give a contaminated look.

    Any other suggestions?

     

    I have exactly this with Ipswich, my best result so far is to use soil from the garden, dried, sieved to remove any vegetable matter, and any lumps in the soil crushed so it is pretty much dust. This can then be used as ballast as is or dropped over normally ballasted track where the soil is so fine it fills the gaps between the ballast granules. Best bit of using soil is that it's free.

     

    Andi

    • Like 1
    • Informative/Useful 1

    When spotting which trains made you think “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

    in UK Prototype Discussions (not questions!)

    Posted · Edited by Dagworth

    I grew up in East Anglia though my family originated on the southern end of the West Coast Main Line. My first real memories of trains are probably being with my cousins in the park at Berkhamsted and at my Great Nan's house that was alongside the line at North Wembley where we could stand at the end of the back garden and watch the trains. So my earliest memories of "real" trains were ones with pantographs, and a constant procession of them. The first loco name I ever remember seeing was 86206 City Of Stoke On Trent. My dad was an enthusiast too and took me to various museums and preserved lines from a very early age but they weren't the same as express trains on the big railway.

     

    I didn't know about train spotting until I joined the scouts in Stowmarket and met some other boys there that were train spotters, mainly on a walk into town one evening alongside the railway when they were talking about a 'foreign' 47 and I didn't understand what they meant (a non-Stratford one it turned out). From then on I was hooked on numbers and learning what all these locos were, discovering in the process that my Diesel was in fact a Triang Hornby Class 31. From then on my evenings and weekends found me a very regular visitor to Stowmarket station, then joining the local railway club too. 

     

    My Grandma lived in London and I was allowed to go to London to see her without Mum so that was the first outings to the big termini on my own, watching the overhead wires into Liverpool St, discovering that I only needed the last three numbers of any Eastern EMU, then Euston was heaven, my beloved electrics! I cleared all the ACs for sight long before any diesel class... Paddington was strange long things with flat fronts, but thankfully all the right way up now! As for Clapham Junction... so many trains, where do you look, at what on earth was that strange shaped thing in the sidings next to the shed? (the PEP unit) and Cromptons and EDs, very odd to my Anglian eyes, used to 31s, 37s and 47s. 

     

    Getting into the Midlands via Peterborough where we found Deltics then further north and west to Sheffield, 20s, 40s, PEAKS, things I'd only ever seen in photos, that couldn't describe the whistle or thrum of the EE beasts. Further afield once I joined BR in 1985 and had free travel, now Scotland beckoned, 47/7s, 26s, 27s, that was where I really felt a foreigner railwaywise. Meanwhile my electric locos now came to me with the electrification of the GE mainline to Norwich

     

    I moved to Charing Cross in 1988 and became a driver, by now I was not so much into number collecting, having graduated to haulage instead, but gradually lost a lot of interest by the mid 90s as it settled into being a job instead of a hobby. I have never stopped looking at loco numbers but I very rarely write anything down now. I left the railway in 97 and moved to Cheltenham. I don't think I did anything railway related for 2 or three years, then finally made my way into Cheltenham Model Centre and it all started again. Dagworth was reborn, a reincarnation of a layout I'd had in a caravan in my Mum's garden, and I joined DEMU and then a very young RMweb in its first days of existence. The rest is history and while I still look at trains and will normally point the phone camera at anything that isn't a unit my main interest now is recreating those glory years in my mind of the West Coast Main Line with Ravensclyffe and my early years on the railway with Ipswich.

     

    Andi

     

     

     

    • Like 3

    When does a trainset become a model railway - what's your criteria?

    in Modelling musings & miscellany

    Posted

    11 minutes ago, DCB said:

    That said the London Underground is like a working Museum of Victorian deprivation with genuine 1890s brickwork, probably even paint work in places and centuries of brake dust grime billows through the detritus encrusted labyrinth encrusting the proletariat in toxic filth as they scurry around  far from the warm glow of daylight like something out of a JK Tolkin novel   and squeeze willingly into spaces the average Battery Chicken would not tolerate in the search for Net Zero while the even as they endeavour to put off the awful moment when Old Father Thames reclaims the labyrinth as his tides climb ever higher so the environmental activist elite fly over the deserted car free streets as they travel between their various summer winter and autumn mansions in  their Helicopters.  

    This should win an award as the longest sentence ever posted on RMweb!

     

    Andi

    • Like 1
    • Agree 1
    • Funny 3

    When does a trainset become a model railway - what's your criteria?

    in Modelling musings & miscellany

    Posted

    5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

    All right then. 

    How many are going to admit to wanting to be a train driver when they grow up?

     

    Not counting those whose day job is already driving trains!

     

    3 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

     

    Not really, as it was all stinky diesels and boring electrics to me when I was a child!

     

    Wanted to be a fighter pilot until I was about eleven then a Rock Star! Partially managed the latter, albeit not exactly a "star"....

     

    There also wasn't that many jobs as spacemen going unfortunately.

     

    Did end up driving trains in preservation as a volunteer though. If I could afford the big ones then I probably wouldn't be buying the small ones!

     

     

    Jason

    I kind of did both, I was a train driver for several years before I went to work in the entertainment industry as a lighting engineer so while not a rock star I do now make my living from concerts.

     

    Andi

    • Like 4
    • Friendly/supportive 1

    Draft bill, the Integrated Rail Body

    in UK Prototype Discussions (not questions!)

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Graham_Muz said:

    Great British Railways (GBR) is not to happen anymore It's now the Integrated Rail Body a version of Network Rail in control. The draft rail reform bill is here...

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-rail-reform-bill

    Little chance of it progressing to law now with the election due this year

     

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/20/governments-draft-rail-reform-bill-published-fittingly-late-labour-says

     

     

    • Agree 3

    Abbotswood and Norton Junctions - layout build

    in Layout topics

    Posted

    20 minutes ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

     

    My solution to that little problem when I first got Wibdenshaw was to make full size cloaking panels to fully enclose the boards in a sort of coffin wise scenario, it also prevents things falling into the boards and doing damage.

     

    Mike.

    That's my plan with the Ipswich boards too, a "skateboard" with castors to take a pair of boards, a top to match to keep them apart and sides to prevent anything getting in and destroying the overhead. Ravensclyffe has individual flightcases for each board that have the castors built in and fully enclose the boards.

     

    Andi

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