Will Vale

Sorry I haven't been around as much as I should, I missed heaps of stuff on your blog but this is lovely as ever. You've done so much in a year in effectively a whole new medium. I think the railbus shot is amazingly real, and I like the last one for the way it shows the line weathered-in to the surroundings so effectively.

Lovely work Jon - very tidy finish and your colour choices are excellent.

Clearly I'm not very good at this Flickr link thing. I think (hope, pray) I've fixed the first one now too.

Looks like it would be a lot of fun to operate, and the intersecting curves on the harbour approach are really attractive. There are a couple of spots (around the roundhouse, along the top right) where you have vertical separation and quite a bit of track, do you think there's enough room for the retaining walls, banks, etc.?

Love the logos and weathering on those hoppers.

Thanks Mikkel, I'm pleased it came out well since it really was a "30 minutes the night before" kind of job. The MIG pigments are very good - they dry extremely matt and the way they clump and streak is just right.

OK, I think I've fixed all the photos now.

That crane is a work of art.

Thanks folks! I don't think I did actually - I was rushing towards the show deadline and didn't do as many updates as I should have. It's a bundle of wires twisted together for the branches, then painted with matte medium and dipped in/sprinkled a mixture of static grass and shreds cut off a plastic Christmas wreath. (They're flat matt green plastic strips supposed to look like pine needles, and have a bit more of a leafy texture than scatter). For the flower heads I left the last bit of wire without foliage, and when the green bit was dry glued and dipped that in purple flock. From what I recall the only really tricky bit was handling the plastic "leaf" shreds - they were ridiculously static and jumped like fleas. Thanks for the pointer James - I'm guessing that might be John Robinson? I've seen some of his rolling stock but not the layout. Was brave of them to try and take a photo longways - I've tended to chicken out although I'm going to have another go with stacked focus soon. I think it's because I updated a couple of them - the one that didn't link for me was the tractor at the bottom which should now be fixed. Let me know if you still have any problems.

(click pictures for big versions) I spent time on Whitemarsh last week so that I could enter in the NZAMRC 2012 Convention competition. I opted to just take the bridge end - nothing's been done to the other module which is definitely lagging behind now My main aim was to try and fill in various unfinished or messy-looking areas. The worst offenders were the last-minute patches of grass I added before Railex in 2010 which were applied straight over the ballast, and didn't have any "reinforcement" from earth or weeds. They looked a bit odd as a result, so I've been sprinkling on various mixtures of scenic fluff to fill in around the grass, and tamping it down with a dry brush before wetting and applying matt medium. I also pulled up some of the grass and thinned it out near the bridge. You can see the results around the buffer stop and ballast/grass edges which I think look a bit more "faired in" than they did. I also replaced the (prototypical, but odd-looking) single Rosebay Willowherb between the two lines with some more subtle weeds: Another job was finishing off painting the concrete trunking. Once that was done I added some shadows on the ballast with a dark wash (not everywhere, but patchily) to define this a bit better. Also on the concrete front, I nicked the four lamps I made for the other end of the layout and added some new pads for them to sit on. They aren't wired up yet, and I need to get some more brass tube to make proper sockets for them, but they look nice and help reinforce the connection between layout and prototype. I noticed (only after a while...) that the neat alcohol I use for wetting the fine textures had faded the paint on the bridge girder, which was a bit annoying. Luckily it wasn't hard to recover it by drybrushing with the original colour, keeping a little bit of the faded paint in places for variety. On the other side of the girder I've painted some details on the footpath and weathered the road. Lastly I filled in the empty spot with a rusted Little Grey Fergie (TE20) since we used to see them around when I was growing up in the fens. The weathering job is very simple and comprised three steps - Dullcote, MIG washes, and MIG pigments. It's not subtle but I think it does the job OK. I also removed the overscale steering wheel. I'm afraid these pictures look rather strong and punchy, and the white balance is off in a couple. I think that my colour calibration isn't set up properly somewhere since they look more subtle in Lightroom. I'll try and sort that out before doing too much more. I've also done some quickie experiments with focus stacking, which is cool but tricky to get right, so I don't have anything to show yet.

That's a good point about the low forces involved. I'll have a try with 0.3mm brass wire and see if that works. The problem is that as well as the contact wire I'll then need to solder up catenery spans... It probably won't be for a while, but I'll post here if I get something working. Thanks again!

Looks really nice. I love the oily sheen and the contrast between the plain rail and pointwork.

Thanks again guys. @Mikkel, I'm glad you liked the seatbelts, it was my first experience with them and they are pretty fiddly. I've found Tamiya's gel superglue to be really useful, I don't think I could have done it with any of the others I've used. The nice thing is that once together, it takes very little effort to weather them since the printing is a good base. I'm sure you're right about the cross-fertilisation, and sometimes it's just that a break or a variation in what you do is good at keeping the motivation levels up. I admire your single-mindedness vis-a-vis Farthing though. I think my favourite of the "ZOMG small!" pictures is still this one though:

Thanks James, it was nice to get it out agan, not so nice cleaning the track but the scenery seems fine The galvanised look is similar to what I did on the lamp posts, although those had bigger "flakes" (I ended up reading about how it works in reality last time - it's pretty interesting); The boxes and base were sprayed with grey primer (Plastikote lacquer) and then I sort of scrubbed Tamiya flat aluminium into the surface with a stiff brush and cotton bud, using the goopy stuff from the bottom of the jar. Once that had dried I went over it with blotches of Citadel Boltgun Metal and a drybrush of neat white. The wash is an enamel from MIG, as recommended by Invercloy. It's great stuff.

Relay boxes by Will Vale, on Flickr ...have been greatly exaggerated. I have been modelling in my spare time, just not railway modelling, so I'm doing better than last year at least... But I have done something train-related today - I dug Whitemarsh out of the cupboard and finished painting all the cable trunking which had only had a base coat of cream paint until now. I'm trying to get the bridge end of the layout ready to take to the NZAMRC convention at the end of the week, so of course I left it until Tuesday to start. D'oh. As you can see above, I made up a couple of Wills (my!) relay boxes and set them on a styrene plinth which has been painted to look like concrete. The paint job on the boxes was an experiment which I think sort of worked - they look nicely galvanised, but the paint looks gritty and coarse which isn't really in scale. I also added a pin wash around the details which looks quite stark in close-up but helps them "read" properly from a distance. These are going to be planted at the back of the layout tomorrow to fill in a little gap which has been bothering me. I've cut a space but I need to fill in around them still. I'm quite pleased with the padlock, which is seriously small (under 1mm square, 0.6mm deep, with 0.3mm wire for the shackle) but annoyed that I got a glue blob on the surface while sticking it on!

This forum mangles the Umlauts, sorry!

Thanks! I am intending to make the Oberleitung - if you look in some of the pictures you can see the concrete bases for the masts - but I ran out of time. I was planning to use the Märklin masts, which are close to the right pattern, but the Z-scale contact wire sections are very heavy - it might be better with just masts and no contact wire? I've seen your project before when I was looking for reference for mine, it looks fantastic, you made a wonderful job of the Ravennabrücke.

All you need is a squashed fishplate Nigel, then you can solder the 2fs track on top for a smooth join

Looks like you're off to a good start Jon. FWIW I reckon four roads are a bit busy in the space you have available, for a couple of reasons: In real life I think having a bit of space on each side of the shed road on the apron would be important for working on the locos. And in the model I reckon a bit of vertical scenery (fence, lamp hut, low wall, maintenance catwalk, etc. etc.) would be good in the background, especially with the main lines behind it. If it were me I'd keep the front 3 in the positions you have them and delete the back one, or (maybe) have it peek out from behind the shed and then stop about halfway into the scene. That'd net you a nice buffer stop which adds a bit of interest as well, and allow a wagon or part of a loco to show behind the shed which I reckon would look good. Just my 2p.

On the modelling side, many solvent glues intended for working with 'styrene (like Tamiya, Revell, Humbrol "liquid poly") won't work on the engineering plastics used in Peco's track, and possibly in the AWS ramps too? I can't be sure but some Peco detail mouldings are in normal 'styrene, and some aren't. Basically if your glue doesn't work, something hotter like Plastic Weld might work, or you could use superglue or even PVA.

Your figure-work is, as ever, inspirational. Mr. Bull in particular has a very characterful overbearing look.

I think satin black is a good choice for fascias: The contrast with the modelled scene tends to make the layout look more vivid and directs the eye to the bit you've put your effort into. I think having an edge is just something we have to accept when not building railways in real life That said, it can be a pain with photography unless you are prepared to frame your shots differently or extend the foreground in Photoshop. But I like the idea of trying finishes first with coloured paper, that could save a lot of work.

I really like the wide shot, that's a very well-composed scene.

Very neat. You might be able to avoid the polarity issue by gluing the magnets sideways to the end of the elastic, with half the length of elastic at each end of the vehicle. Then when they get close enough together (I assume they're Neodymium?) they'll sort out the polarity themselves. The Lego magnetic couplings also do something interesting, where the magnets are mounted in swivelling frames so they can turn themselves around to present the right polarity, but that might be overkill (and difficult to do in such a small scale). Do you have any problems with the vehicles lifting off the track when uncoupling, or is their weight enough to keep them in place?

Oops, missed reply. I just rub graphite onto a short stretch of rail (by drawing on it with a carpenter's pencil or a stick of artist's graphite) then run a train around to distribute it.