Burkitt

After much cutting and gluing of foamboard, the first baseboard is complete. It's very light but also pretty strong, so should be easily transportable. The indent along the top is for wire-in-tube point controls and any other buttons and switches I need. I now need to buy some more UHU and foamboard so that I can make the second board.

Loctite super glue (cyanoacrylate) as recommended by the kit's instructions.

Last night I assembled another wagon kit for Claverton Engineering - a Smallbrook Studios Glyn Valley Tramway box van which I bought at Shepton Mallet in February. Here's what you get with the kit. The sides, ends, base and false roof are cast in resin, with a small piece of styrene for the top layer of the roof. The chassis is a standard Dapol wagon chassis, sold separately by Smallbrook . All the resin parts appear very well cast, with almost no flash and lots of sharp, well defined fine details. And here's the completed wagon. Putting it together was fairly simple until I got to adding the roof, at which point I realised that despite the bottom of the wagon being square and level, the roofline at the ends was a few millimetres above the sides at diagonally opposite corners. The ends had to be carefully sanded down until they were level, trying not spoil the curved shape or remove the detail along the top edge. The piece of styrene for the roof then turned out to be fractionally too small, leaving the sides protruding from beneath it, so I had to make a replacement from my stock of plastic sheet. Difficulties aside, I think the finished wagon looks rather nice. It will now join queue for the paint shop until I have a few more things to do together and get around to buying a can of primer.

Work done so far on Claverton Engineering has focused mainly on building rolling stock, and acquiring a collection of materials and bits to use in the layout. Here is the complete roster of partially complete rolling stock - one loco and three wagons. The loco is based on that used at Hellingly Hospital, modified to suit narrow gauge. This photo was first published in 1906 and the copyright is now expired The real Hellingly Hospital loco The narrow body on wide frames of the real loco suggest to me that the real thing could have been based on a narrow gauge design. It may have been imported from Germany and modified from an off-the-shelf narrow gauge loco design. My model is built from plasticard, with a Black Beetle motor bogie providing power. There is a lot of detailing still to do, including window frames, steps, handrails, interior, and some representation of the rivets. Instead of the prototypical trolleypole, I plan to fit it with a bow collector, which should be more practical for shunting. My three wagons. The first is a wooden kit from Victor's Models - I can't remember the manufacturer. The metal strapping was originally represented by paper strip, which I have replaced with kitchen foil embossed with representations of rivets. The second wagon is a resin and whitemetal kit from Mercian models, and the last a Peco plastic kit. My collection of bits includes code 83 rail, RCL point making parts, several old wagons for their chassis, a Smallbrook Studios van kit, some Gnomy trams, and a pile of foamboard for the baseboards. Hopefully, they will all come together into a layout into the near future...

A power station could be interesting - Greenwich had a rather nice electrified narrow gauge railway, for example. They have a rather limited variety of traffic though - coal, coal and more coal - which I think would reduce the operation and visual interest of the model a bit. Using a "battery" loco would be simpler, but I really like the idea of overhead wires, even if they are somewhat complicated.

It looks a lot better than the plastic 00 scale ones!

Virtual concept model of the design, created in Sketchup Claverton Engineering is my planned 0-16.5 narrow gauge micro layout. My slow progress to date has been covered in various parts of old RMweb, but I thought I'd do a recap at the beginning of this blog which will hopefully feature more rapid developments in the near future. It will depict a small corner of a heavy mechanical engineering works, partly inspired by the Bruce Peebles & Co. Ltd. works in Edinburgh, which built the never used electric locos for the unbuilt Portmadoc, Beddgelert and South Snowdon Railway and had its own electrified internal railway system. Inspiration also comes from the Hellingly Hospital Railway, with the loco currently under construction based on a narrow gauge version of the one used in that line. The name comes from Claverton Down, on which the University of Bath where I am currently studying is built. Track plan using RCL templates. Only Y points are used to fit the plan in the smallest possible space Track plan with rolling stock to check clearances and siding lengths. They appear a bit generous here, but turned out much tighter in reality The layout is based on the classic Timesaver shunting puzzle, and fits on two A3 sized boards to make it easily transportable. At each end the tracks will run to the board edge, to permit use of a cassette-type fiddle yard or future extensions. Track geometry is based on the Roy C Link 14mm gauge sectional trackwork, scaled up to 16.5mm gauge. Tram-style overhead wires will be fitted, although I am undecided as to whether they should be operational or cosmetic.