Barry Ten

Found some Preiser horses in a clear-out of the scrap box, and thought they'd be good on the Spring module. Looks like the local amateur artist (chap in hat) agrees. The mother and foal don't seem that bothered by the passage of the local goods, either.

If I'm put on the spot, Churchward moguls (and 93xxs) are my favorite tender locos; just beautifully balanced, looking good whatever direction they run. Small enough to look OK on a compact layout, big enough to count as a proper chuffer!

Cheers, Mark. The 93xx was one of the first models I bought on returning to the hobby, second hand from Wheels of Steel in 1996. It had been converted to Zero-1, then back-converted - leaving a whopping great hole in the backhead - and now I've re-converted it to run on DCC. It's still a favorite model of mine.

The summer module is getting on for four feet deep in one corner, so I need to have completed any fiddly work at the back before working forward to the front. In fact, part of the layout is still be bolted into place and once that's in, it will be hard to get to the back right corner at all. With that in mind, now has been the time to take care of the backscene. I used a photographic backscene on the spring module, but the two I've done since then have both been painted directly onto a rigid surface using acrylic paints. Partly this is down to the fact that, while they can look amazingly good, I personally find photographic backscenes a little hard to work with; it's difficult to apply them without getting smudges and wrinkles in awkward places, and for the Spring module I felt that I needed to do so much work with an airbrush to tone the backscene down, that it wouldn't have been much harder to do it all by hand in the first place. I've also found photographic backscenes to be quite vulnerable to accidental damage. The Spring module, for instance, has ended up with a few splatters incurred while working on other scenic elements, and these have needed to be covered by painted trees. A painted backscene, provided it's on a rigid backing, such as MDF or plastic, can be reworked and corrected as many times as you like - you can even sand it back down to the start and begin again if it all goes totally wrong. The other reason for not using photographic backscenes, though - and to be honest the main one - is purely an aesthetic preference. I sort of like the fact that it doesn't look like a photograph, if that makes any sense at all. And I've seen some cracking painted backscenes over the years, ranging from the brilliant work on the Totnes and Ashburton layouts, to the amazing work on Fencehouses, as seen in the current MRJ. The key, it seems, is to keep the colours nice and de-saturated and get a convincing transition between the backscene and the real 3-d scenic work. I've used acrylics and oils for backscene work but generally, acrylics are the easier option since they dry fairly quickly, but not so quickly that you can't blend them. Using a rigid backscene means you can keep the paint nice and wet with no fear of cockling. I painted the sky with a mixture of cerulean blue and titanium white, using a dabbing motion with a stiff brush to create the clouds. I added a touch of yellow to the clouds, strengthening the effect to the right of the backscene (no photos of that bit as yet). My first attempt foreground scenery wasn't very acceptable, but the beauty of acrylics is that you can over-paint very easily. To create the hills and distant tree lines, I mixed up some pale blue-green hues, while deepening the colour intensity for the elements closer to the foreground. I added some umber into the green for the closest elements, so that the hue looked similar to the drab medium green of Woodland Scenics foliage clumps. Here's the work in progress:

Lovely, I'd be more than happy with that lining.

Nice job, Nick. I'm very fond of these castings, they respond well to a bit of careful painting and I think they've got the poses spot on.

I must get it out of the shed and give it a dust-off and test-run one of these days. I'd love to have room to set it up permanently but it needs 11 feet along one wall, and I haven't got that. Not to "big up" my own tracklaying and ballasting, but the Code 100 stuff did come out better than I'd hoped, and there's a lot to be said for it in terms of reliability.

Yep, always worth a nose in the window or popping upstairs.

And they say customer service is a dying art...

I did visit the old shop in the arcade, even remember old one-armed Bud himself. I remember buying a Graham Farish 00 private owner wagon which I still have, an early Christmas present one year - 74 or 75 ish, I'd imagine. Later I went there with my grandmother from Barry a few times. Don't remember that one... but visits to Cardiff were not all that frequent when I was small, not when we had the emporium of delights that was Dan Evans department store in Barry on our doorsteps.

Antics have relocated - after years of being at the top of St Mary's Street, usefully near Crane's music for those of us with a liking for other, shinier toys - they are now opposite Cardiff Central railway station. I popped in just before the old place closed, while they were packing stock, and visited the new place on saturday - this time as they were unpacking. Looks as if they still have to sort out the railway section properly as the display was a bit haphazard, but I'm sure they'll get there. The new shop is larger than either floor of the old, but now all on one level rather than an upstairs and a downstairs. Be interesting to see whether they still retain any connection to Bud Morgan, as there was still that lineage in the old place in St Mary's Street. Aside from Lord and Butler and Lendons of Llanishen, both a bit out from the center, there are three fairly well equipped shops with decent model train sections in the center of Cardiff - Antics, Ian Allan and ModelZone - all within 5 minutes walk of each other. Hopefully they can all continue to do business as I have found them all to be friendly and worth supporting.

Dave, that squares with my observations on the 4mm one. When I came to replace my original scratchbuilt doors, I substituted Peco ones but found that on the main building, there was a heck of a gap at the top. I filled this with a toplight sort of arrangement but my guess, as per Mickey, is that the doors on the real thing really were tall. The doors on the toilet block are much more normal size.

I spoke to Ray at the Minehead show and went and ordered the Dawn Chorus CD - it's well worth it.

In case this is useful ... my layout is built on 2 inch extruded foam sheets, over a layer of chipboard. I drilled a hole into the foam wide enough to take the signal housing (minus the plastic nut that is supplied with it) and ran the wires through a smaller hole in the chipboard. I routed the wires through a piece of plastic tubing to get them to slip through the hole, then removed the tubing for re-use on the next signal. The base of the signal sits nicely flush with the top of the foam. Rather than a momentary contact switch, I wired in a non-latching push-to-make switch. A brief tap on this is sufficient to activate the signal. I've wired the signal using choc-block type screw connectors but will be looking to swap to a small 4-way plug or similar so that the entire unit can be easily swapped from one signal type to another. I was a bit surprised not to see a wiring diagram with the instructions but once I'd got my head around things installation was very simple. For a ham-fisted sort like myself, who has tried and failed to automate many Ratio signals, these are a very nice product.

I think you could easily get away with that "dodge", Dave.

Looking very crisp, Dave. I agree with you about plastikard, if I was doing mine now that would be the preferred medium. My old edition of the Karau book - not the combined volume - has the plans to 4mm scale on fold-out sheets, very useful. Flicking through it the other night it occurred to me that it would be fantastic to have an entire book of such plans, of all sorts of structures.

Things have moved quite quickly in the last couple of weeks. This tends to be the way it goes, I find - slow progress from baseboards, track laying, wiring, backscene construction, and so on, then basic landforms go in and everything speeds up (before slowing down again with the slow process of fine detailing, which can take months or years as required). Maybe it's because scenic work is very much my comfort zone as a modeller, but I tend to just dive in and get on with it, coupled with having a big cardboard box full of scenic materials which means I don't need to keep nipping down to the model shop every few minutes. Unlike messing around with rolling stock, there's very little damage you can do in scenery that can't be reversed or undone, so there's no fear factor there for me, just sheer creative enjoyment. I've continued adding landforms, with card, foam, plaster and hanging basket liner, followed this week by an application of static grass of various shades, hoping to give the necessary texture and summery look. Once again I'm thinking back to the brilliant work by John (Re6/6) visible on the member's day in Taunton, as well as the fine scenic work on Ray Norwood's yard shunter. Yes, I know we shouldn't "model models", but if we can't take inspiration from such things, the hobby would be sadder for it, I feel. Anyway, as per the summer theme, I'm going for stronger greens than in the spring module, where muted tones were the order of the day. I really want this module to scream "summer" - blue skies, strong colours ... shading gradually into a more autumnal palette on the right side. Pretentious, moi? Going back to the railway infrastructure I've begun surfacing the first of the removable platforms using Wills sheets. Easy to work with, stable, rigid, and they can be cut neatly and joined fairly cleanly using plastic filler. Mindful of a comment by Captain Kernow about the possibility of warping, I've cut a hatch in the end of the platform which would allow it to be screwed to a sub-base if necessary. There'll be a similar hatch at the other end. This isn't too conspicuous in reality but if it shows up too much after the platform has been painted and weathered, it could always be disguised with a lamp hut or a collection of milk churns or some such. I think the tendency will be for the ends to bow up, rather than the middle, but if that's not the case a similar dodge can always be contrived in the station building area. Incidentally about 15 years ago my wife scavenged a huge number of surplus office calendars from our place of work. These huge sheets of quality card are glossy on both sides and have served me well through many, many modelled projects. Being calendars they are even "gridded" on one side which makes cutting out even simpler since there are ready-made parallels to follow. Sadly, I am now down to my last few sheets of this brilliant medium. Meanwhile, Abbotsbury station (we're going GWR with this set of removable platforms, but the S&D ones will follow) has been fitted into an aperture in the Wills paving so that it beds down nicely. This approach means that each set of platforms will be tied to a specific building but I prefer it to having a dark line around the base of the building. Spear fencing will follow. For a change from the usual light stone, I'm thinking of going black, which was by no means unusual at GWR stations during the company's reign. Finally, I've added detachable scenery beyond the limit of the module itself, so that there's a view through the underbridge. I made it detachable because there are some nice possibilities for photographic angles shooting through into the module, which I didn't want to lose. It's all very rudimentary but it does the job. This all sounds like a lot of work but it's surprisingly how few hours have been involved - just steady work and not too many setbacks, the way I like it. Cheers again...

Cheers! Looking at the pics, I really must do a bit more to conceal that join between the two canopy sections. It's not as obvious to my eye in real life but really stands out in the photos. Tonight I have been cladding the platforms and making a recess for the building to fit into, so there's no black line around the base. So, having passed the point of no return, the first set of platforms and structures for the layout will be in GWR mode, which suits me fine.

Both locos will probably get an outing on Albion during Model Rail Live next month.