Etched Pixels

You can't buck the market and market forces have removed much that was available to us modellers of years ago. The box of chimneys, domes, whistles, safety valves, Tender domes and water fillers, axleboxes etc, that had accumilated over a lifetime of building was thrown out a few years ago during a tidy-out. George Mellor at GEM told me he could supply any casting I needed when I was building LNWR locos in the late 1960s and this was a real boon. Could I source such fitting today I wonder?

 

There has been no indication on this thread of how many RMwebbers are actually building a pre-group layout with locos and rolling stock etc., and the one thing that puzzles me is, how do they tackle the ornate pre-group liveries? Painting was always a problem for people hence the populaity of the 1930's GWR for so many decades where modellers got away with plain green locos and choc & cream coaches devoid of lining.

I think you could source any such part you wanted. We've been through a period it has been very hard because the entire engineering universe is optimised for "how many thousand do you need" to one where technology and the "maker" movement are turning it back the other way with things like home CNC and 3D print. Five years ago it was actually a real challenge to figure out how to replicate some of the older Ultima bits, now many of them are trivial. In fact it's really only the screenprinted sides which are hard, and those could be re-done at home given a lockup and time to master the art. Wheels are perhaps the other hard one, at least at a sane price.

For lining I use a mix of things including not looking too hard 8) as well as very fine pigma micron pens to trace around the edge of etched panels which for 2mm gives an acceptable result except at 'snorting the ballast' distance, decals and sometimes pre-printed sides (especially when doing really horrendous liveries like early GWR in N). For things like teak in N you can als do the panel lining just by being careful with the paint and  drybrushing so that the edges get picked out and look as if they are lined.

(pardon the wander into 1926 or so) is not lined for example, just brushed so that the paint tends to pick up the panels

while this one is pre-printed although it might be hard to get away with that in a bigger scale than N

(then again in OO you could perhaps make the side two etches, aligned with marker holes, painted and then glued together with a flexible glue and curved before being trimmed from the frame). While that example doesn't show it a pre-printed side with sticky out doorhandles does seem to convince the eye quite nicely in small scale.

Alan

For the N gauge ones I built I made up a sheet of pre-weathered printable tarps. Those are for the more usual 'flat' top not the late 'hood' style. Drop me a PM if you want a copy of the printable sheet.

Most of my brass stuff is glued except for some corners where you need strong joins on butt joints. Even then they could be glued. I've seen some beautifully built N gauge brass pre-group stock that was assembled with a hot glue gun! Soldering is for most things now optional, at least at smaller scales.

Lining I tend to do with decals. As there are people who will do reasonably good decals to your own design at prices that are not too horrific I've continued to skip the black arts of bow pens.

Technology in schools nowdays includes teaching 3D printing and some (basic) CAD work so while we may be short on people who can turn buffers from nails using an old hand drill and a file in the next 20 years we should have plenty of modellers for whom 3D CAD and 3D print is just another school subject.

Alan

Fewer work and more leisure hours

This is no longer the case and has not been for many years especially when you factor in all the unpaid hours worked and time spent effectively working from home fielding emails and other crap. Actual worked hours in many professions are now nearer 60 hours/week and commute time is way higher than it was before WW2. In other words we are back to the mid 1800s by that measure.

Remember the 40 hour week came from the 1890s experimentation where it was discovered that 8 hour workers actually produced more output than 10 hour workers did despite the latter working 2 hours longer. Henry Ford (hardly a bastion of socialism) cut his workers to 8 hour shifts in 1914. Prior to WW2 the fact that working long hours was pointless was well established and employers operated accordingly including trying to avoid making overtime routine, but in the UK (and not most of the rest of Europe) forgot the lesson in the 1980s, which is probably one reason why they are so much more productive *and* have bigger trainsets...

Clearly lots of other things are vastly better, but assuming people do RTR because they are lazy is wrong - on average they have far less free time than their  great grandparents.

Alan

The fact that BR adopted so many pre-gouping symbols is surely a sign that many of the railways most innovative people had decamped to the motor and aeronautical industries by the lat 40s early fifties.

Or that a lot of them were simply "good enough" already and seen as solved problems.

Meanwhile, testing a GWR shunters truck on Aeonian Hills prior to painting (and yes they are pre-grouping!)

Time flies by when you're the driver of a train

Steaming into Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine...

It should be fine strengthwise in WSF. Trade off is 1mm (3" in OO) spokes and a bit of hand polishing. Bonus is its a lot cheaper than FUD and a lot more stable.

WSF is Nylon so you can even print gears in it (albeit not particularly fine ones do to the print resolution)

Dazzler: I did render it with 1mm spokes based on the Bridgenorth one (I got amused by the problem and spent 10 minutes writing a generic OpenSCAD tool for producing sheaves with that kind of "bicycle" spoke pattern). It looks fine, and the prototype looks as if they spokes could easily be 3" or so. That one will print in WSF which also means it comes out very cheaply.

Alan

SpoorObjecten: for quite a few things yes. Most of what I do is going to arrive from Shapeways and get a good coating of primer. The 'transparent' is not very transparent anyway so it's not a useful property for me at least.

Also if it arrived white it would be much easier to photograph when it arrived !

SpoorObjecten: Sure it's not 'Fragile' ;-)

Dazzler: Thats a lovely looking bit of work. Presumably it would also print in the new lost wax/brass process ?

There's a open source parametric tool for doing just about any wheel in OpenSCAD. There a couple of things you didn't mention - size of centre boss, spoke diameter, spacing between the two rope grooves.

The tool is documented at http://www.thefrankes.com/wp/?p=2674 which gives a flavour of the parameters it can take.

For Shapeways type stuff the constraint is about 0.8mm diameter or smaller. Which also means if your boss is 3mm hole then 4.6mm minimum diameter (or you could use a smaller motor - 1mm isn't too hard to get).

Give me the numbers and I'll type them into the script and press go. Assuming it works right it'll take me about 2 minutes to render and bung onto shapeways as an orderable object.

Alan

Probably ok printed in brass providing they are big enough to survive the process - would need to be about 6" dia in the real world for that

The Peckett isn't exactly scale either although mechanically it's a delight - for some reason that little four wheel Arnold chassis runs beautifully compared to many much bigger locos.

No recommendations on fitting - I tend to do my own for most stuff. Youchoos do lots of CT stuff so maybe they would be worth asking ?

The fitting is basically

top of motor

insulating tape

tiny decoder

insulating tape

roof

with not a vast amount of air space

These two- sadly there isn't anywhere to put decoders in either of the 0-4-0s.    A pair of WD saddletanks from DJ Models will fill the colliery roster.  These will be able to shunt the screens without a runner wagon to convert the couplers.

What chassis. If its the little Arnold chassis of old then you can get DCC in them if you use the really tiny decoders you can now get. I've got an 0-4-0 Peco Peckett here fitted with DCC squashed in between motor and cab roof using a tiny CT decoder.

I've started putting the extra lining on mine. Modelmaster BR mixed traffic matches fairly well. Much left to do beyond that - did all these locos have boiler bands ? Will then etch some name and number plates, paint the whistle in brass, fit pipes and fix the wire etc

Been through my archive and agree it appears only on some departmental cases, so its basically wrong for almost all models. If it was fitted and trivial to pull off that might even be better than in a bag though - less scary for folks and harder to lose.

Thanks for the Propane Gas info - I was assuming it was a stones box.

Alan

On point 1. Yes they have - repeatedly, and it also sometimes seems to be depend on the operator so something will randomly get printed or rejected. They've changed the WSF rules a bit of late too.

Bernard - I know that - I commented on exactly that earlier!

Bernard; you can just put the right sized wheels on. If you check the drawings for the bogies in question and you work out where the bits fall then it fits and with 7mm wheels and a bit of clearance behind the solebars. I know this - been there, built that.

Prism: NMRA N gauge wheels are 2mm or wider and at 7.62mm so yes 11.62mm. For various reasons the wheels are usually 2.2mm (to be compatible with the clunky European NEM standard too). So call it 12mm. That's fine. Even if the front of the wheel fouls the solebar (which it shouldn't as its scale size!) you'd have 1mm clearance at 9mm from the centres with a moulded solebar, in fact as the flange is the only bit that fouls you've got 3mm from 9mm at the centres or about 20°

So cornering is not a problem here. You can do *just about* do  this right in 3D printed WSF for a 57ft coach so it ought to be easier in plastic. Undersized wheels would IMHO be in the "botch job" category and N has moved beyond that except for a few hard cases (Some steam loco front wheels for example - and even then vendors are increasingly offering a choice of two fittings)

Alan

Transport for London are generally very helpful. They also fall under the "freedom of information" act so they've put a lot of basic material up as one easy answer to an FoI request is "it's already public, go away" 8)

Alan

Prism: Most of the current Bachmann stuff has the wheel size right. Dapol do seem to go for undersized wheels on a few vehicles. Unfortunately in the GWR case that's a bad idea as it *really* shows. The bogie in the CAD is just a disaster though, its not indicative of N scale at least not since cheap brands of the mid 1970s 8)

In the N the flanges are overscale as with anything but P4. Much of the time as with OO the wheel thickness can be the bigger problem. For flanges you can usually provide extra clearance between the solebars under the floor where nobody can see anyway.

Alan

Happy to look at any of the other bits further as you get the CAD if it helps

A sprue of those in 1:148 N would be quite tasty if it rescales.

Alan

I wondered where the chaps who did N gauge bogies for Lima went, now we know ;-). It actually looks far more Lima than your comments - the body also appear to be on stilts over the bogies and the wheels look too small - there should be measurably more showing below the bottom of the axle boxes (and they appear not to turn in the axleboxes but somewhere higher up - which must be part of the mess)

Looking at the underframe I am wondering about the regulator box somewhat. Almost all of the photos I have show no regulator box present, and some periods have gas cylinders in the centre section.

The top of the battery box is also wrong - it hangs from the body rather than being blobbed onto it as the model is. It's hard to tell from that view but is the top of the battery box proper right, it seems to be narrower and blank not just over the area that should be see through but further on.

Roof is also still missing the destination board clips, that seems an easy fix and they were present into BR days.

Has the generator gone walkies or has it been hidden by the Lima bogie ?

What else.. rivets on the solebar - you've got a funny looking token little group of 6 each end, but the real solebar looks like it was attacked by a nutter with a rivet gun and has a lot more than the random sample someone picked to pretend its got detail. Also note the rivets if added are not quite symmetrical. The main sets of them are but the V hangar and steps are vary the pattern a bit.

Footboards are also wrong for the earlier liveries.

Overall its looking not too bad other than the bogie, wheels and jacked up effect. The gas cylinders for older periods are not a big deal to add if someone cares but the stones box bothers me - and would be hard to fix by the look of it. The battery boxes could really do with the nasty blobbiness improving if possible - Bachmann do this by making them a fitting and the recent models capture battery box hanging beautifully - eg the 4CEP.

Alan

There are a couple of versions of the CDA, and the brake arrangements differ between them. In addition you've got clasp brakes on two corners and disc on the other two (ie each axle has one of each type of brake). The wheels should be 7mm diameter.

Not sure any of the wagon etches will help you.

We did have units in general many years earlier - on the southern 8)

I think it's a fair bet that but for WW2 we'd have had DMU stuff in traffic in the 40s. All the major players were experimenting. The GWR had the railcars in production and working well. The LMS had trialled various railmotors in the UK and Ireland, a diesel electric railcar, some of the tyred units and also built a truly beautiful diesel hydraulic 3 car DMU whose styling has probably not been equalled and the Southern had long ago figured out commuter electrification even if in hindsight they goofed on going 3rd rail not overhead as had the LNER.

What does surprise me is the GWR went with mechanical transmission given they'd run a petrol-electric prototype long before.

Railways like the WCPR had by then shown that petrol/diesel railcars could make the difference between commercial viability and failure.

The LMS tyred ones..

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/french-streamlined-rail-car-news-in-a-nutshell/query/LMS

The early LMS experimental (quite literally) railbus

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aceanorak/8163853908/

The Leyland railbusses

http://www.ribblevalleyrail.co.uk/Leyland%20Bus.htm

and pure style..