Barry Ten

3 hours ago, Mikkel said:

The transformation is quite amazing. I quite like this version, especially the area around the station building. In some respects it's even more convincing than King's Hintock!

It's certainly more spacious and by luck more than anything else, it's ended up being a bit better balanced. I'm just hoping that by the time I switch back to King's Hintock, it'll feel fresh again!

29 minutes ago, down the sdjr said:

I have never seen a photo of Shillingstone shed.Blandford and Sturminster Newton were brick so i thought it might be the same. I thought Bachmann might have based this model on the shed at Midsomer Norton.

The layout is looking great, any 4Fs and 7Fs to see?

It does indeed look similar to the Midsomer one. One would almost expect it to be brick given the construction of the station building.

If you back a bit earlier in the topic there's a pic of 44422 and a 7F. I'll take some more in due course.

1 hour ago, Brassey said:

 

Good to hear you sorted it.  Which motor did you have.  As a naive newby when I returned to the hobby, the guy from Comet, alas no longer with us, sold me a Mashima 1015 with the DG chassis! 

 

A Mashima 1015 initially, as recommended by Comet, but despite trying several of them, I could never get it to develop enough torque to run well at slow speeds. When I put in a 1024, it was a big improvement.

I hope you get it sorted. Mine uses a rigid Comet chassis and their own gearbox and Mashima motor, with Markits wheels. I had a real struggle getting it to run well until I went up one motor size compared to what was recommended (there was just enough room under the Airfix body), and now it's easily one of my favorite runners, smooth, silent, stall-proof and able to shift a 30 wagon train without slipping. But it was a trial to get there and for most of the time it lived in the tupperware box of doom.

Looks good to me. In what respect is not a good runner?

I think a non-working trap point would be more than enough to give the right impression from the usual viewing position, as well as giving less to go wrong. After all the main intention was just to improve on the original view, not to create another section to the same standard as the rest of the layout. Even simpler just bung a big shrub in the sightline between the two converging tracks, or a couple of portly gangers!

Excellent work, in any case.

I had to cut floor recesses on mine as well, using white metal bogies.

5 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Also really good photography Al. The first one is magazine cover material. Very impressive.

Thanks, Mikkel! I was tempted to put it on one of the "how realistic" threads but I think I'll wait until I've got some LSWR station seats and take a similar one.

11 hours ago, wenlock said:

Those 7fs are purposeful looking beasts, definitely one of my favourite S & D locos  Station forecourts make lovely models, but then I think I would miss modelling all the platform side paraphernalia!  I guess with two platforms you can have the best of both worlds

Exactly, and I think we'd agree that if you have a William Clarke building,, the platform face is much more interesting to look at -= in fact my own model isn't really finished on the back at all. However I think the Shillingstone building looks pretty nice from the back, and will look even better with a little more forecourt detailing such as posters,flower boxes etc.

9 hours ago, Captain Kernow said:

All very good and highly plausible, Al.

 

How frequently do you propose to change over to a different region?

 

Hi Tim - if it passes muster with you, then I consider myself very pleased. Your S&D layouts were a great inspiration even before I had the pleasure of knowing you, and i still consider them masterpieces of modelling and atmosphere.

I envisage doing the swap no one more than once or twice a year at the most. It's not the swap that takes the time - changing the scenic elements probably only needs about 20 minutes. But changing the stock is far more time-consuming, as I've found when switching eras even when it's within the GWR/WR theme. Getting all the trains off layout, into stock boxes, and arranging new ones, usually gets spread over a few evenings. So not something I'd rush to do. As an example. the layout has spent 6 - 7 months of this year in BR blue mode because it was too much of a faff to change.

9 hours ago, down the sdjr said:

Nice to see the S&D taking over a Western line for a change. Glad you made the switch, looking forward to seeing some more.

When i was a lad growing up in Blandford we use to call it Stour pain. I love the southern section of the S&D, the line between Sturminster Newton and Blandford are almost perfect branchline model railway stuff and still a lot to be seen today. My favourite spot is this three arch bridge in the middle of nowhere just outside the Blandford bypass.

 

Terrific!

If you have a copy of Alan Hammond's Reminiscences of the S&D, my great grandfather (Charles Preston) is mentioned in one of the biographical write-ups by former S&D staff. Fittingly my middle name is also Preston. The Payne spelling is a nod to another branch of the tree, reflected in my earlier layout Paynestown, and the Paynesville, GA on my American layout. Keep it in the family!

It'll be a long wait before you see much Prussian Blue, alas! I do have some coach kits in the pile, but for the time  being the idea is to run the S&D layout in pure 1950s mode with 4Fs, 7Fs, Bulleid pacifics, and BR standard classes - and a suitably motley assortment of inter-regional coaches!

Couple more thoughts  addressed to all; there's a model of the Shillingstone signal box to replace the GWR one (I made sure both that and an LSWR one would fit the space) and the platform lamps and seats will be changed. The boxes are both Bachmann scenecast products, with the LSWR one being the Kernow special edition. Both are quite nice models for what they are. While I find resin models look a bit lumpy in general, with over-thick components, they're fine for the broad-brush intention here. The Shillingstone building is I think best viewed from the rear, where the detail and coloration is very well done, rather than the side with the canopy, which is a bit over-heavy.

The pagoda and lamp huts will be swappable. I've seen pagodas on Southern platforms but they're not really typical. The platform will look a bit bare without something to replace them, so I'm wondering about some options, such as wooden or corrugated iron lock-ups, a concrete shed, even perhaps a greenhouse and cold frames? Midsomer Norton seems to have a greenhouse, albeit tucked behind the fence. Does people think it would be plausible to have a greenhouse on the passenger-side of the platform, in front of the fence, perhaps surrounded by ornamental flower beds, or would that look a little unbelievable? Perhaps too tempting a target for the local scalliwags with lumps of coal?

Having gone this far, incidentally, the intention is then to be able to go a step further by swapping the station building, signal box and footbridge, to give a mainline LSWR or SE&CR feel, for a bit of extra variety. There are some nice plans in the Southern Country Stations volumes by Ian Allan, which look as if they could be adapted to fit the available footprint quite well. The smaller Ratio GWR signal box suits the SE&CR nicely, too, since they used the same design. Plenty of  options, anyway.

Definitely the product of a sleepless night, that one!

i should have added that the whole point of this is to be able to revert to King's Hintock at any time, so none of the changes should be irreversible.

Good to see you back blogging here, Ian.

I'll always be grateful for your kindness in showing me around the Twin Cities on that snowy afternoon quite some while ago.. It

may have been cold but it certainly resulted in some atmospheric photos.

Hope the running is still going well? I am quite involved in Parkrun now, although of course it's suspended for the duration.

Thanks, Neil - very helpful link.

i must admit I  go on the view that if it looks right, it is right. Especially when the RTR manufacturers can't get close to a consistent interpretation of  a shade, even with their own ranges,

Hornby's malachite looks about right as applied to their locos, but terrible on their rolling stock. It's either too blue, as on the Bulleid-liveried CCT, or indistinguishable from BR(S) green, as on their Bulleid coaches. It's not even close to the right shade. I've read that the varnishing treatment applied to the coaches may have resulted in a different hue to the locomotives, but that's not enough to account for Hornby's interpretations being so varied.

Bachman's shade as used on the Birdcage stock looks good in photos, but I've not seem them in the flesh.

Incidentally a more recent tinlet of Humbrol 101 has a matte lid rather than the gloss one I used earlier, but I'm not sure if the finish is any different

5 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Wow, you do work fast Al. And on top of that you find time  to model all sorts of other things on land, at sea, in the sky and way out in the galaxy!

 

 

If consistency is a criterium for posting, I wouldn't have anything to post 

The hobgoblin of small railway modellers as Dr Johnson may have said!

12 hours ago, Jack P said:

 

Oooooh, now that's a handy tip. I always find the lids of Humbrol tins to be deceiving. I'll have to give this a go!

 

Coaches look excellent by the way!

Thanks, Jack - yes, I agree, the lids are very dubious! I just happened to have used this shade a lot on scenic features

such as greenhouse frames and had a feeling it was not a million miles off malachite. Thanks for the kind words.

As an addendum, there was a bit of discussion over on Wright Writes about what would be a good paint for malachite for those modellers outside the UK unable to access the specialist ranges. My hunch was that Humbrol 101 ought not to be terrible, so I tried a comparison:

I suspect Dave would have got a bit more of a rush on with the Clerestory if there were any layout bookings in the immediate future! Now he's free to fritter away his valuable modelling time on such vanity projects as military vehicles.

I personally will have no truck with such distractions.

Beautiful bit of modelling

If you click on your user name at the top right of the page, a drop down menu will appear. Click on "profile" and this will open a page with a link to your blog. A bit long-winded but it's how I do it.

For the sake of clarity, I think it's the bogie retaining pin which the spring sits over that's the problem - it's a tiny bit too long (or hasn't been trimmed off properly) so that it juts above the frames and contacts the bottom of the footplate. There was a fair bit of discussion on Rmweb when the T9 came out, and it seemed very dependent on the batch of models, rather than being  a design flaw across all of them. If your colleague has taken the chassis off a T9, the problem/solution should be pretty evident.

Slightly tangential, but the T9s will pull quite nicely if they're properly adjusted. Some of them had a problem where the bogie spring was bearing against the footplate and lifting some of the weight off the main drivers. The cure was to remove the bogie and cut/file a small rebate into the underside of the footplate. I had to do this on one of mine to get it to haul anything, whereas the other two were OK.

11 hours ago, brossard said:

Well this is nice to see.  I built a 5 coach rake of LSWR non corridor stock several years a go for a friend.  I did them in, IIRC, 1912 chocolate and salmon livery.  A challenging project but they got done...eventually:

 

 

I mixed the salmon myself and made the lining transfers - aaarghhh!

 

Just one example.  All I can say is "I'm glad to see the back of them."

 

BTW, using CA to attach fiddly details is not a crime in my book.

 

John

That looks very good to me, John. I was in two minds about going all the way back to the salmon and chocolate livery, very tempting but they'd have been a bit out of period (even by my standards). Did you draw and print the lining transfers yourself?