Will Vale

I think those work really well, and the reminder that there are other styles out there is a good one. Have you considered doing some long exposure shots? I have some 1920s Canadian railway books and I love the images where the train is clearly posed on a bridge, but the water and steam are motion blurred.

I'd probably take that deal I like doing stock but I have a lot more fear factor around it - you know, the risk of spoiling something nice that you bought. I'm hoping to get two (or three?) locos and another rake or two of wagons up to a passable standard between the end of October and the exhibition. The ballast is weathered following ElDavo's method on Waton - very thin acrylic washes. I used about 60:40 water/alcohol in a shotglass, with a blob of paint. I started with ultra-thin raw umber, then went to Vallejo Brown Leather to match the sleeper weathering. Applied with a broad brush, then again turned sideways and dragged down each rail. I might come back to it with one more wash of GW Calthan Brown, which is the slightly rustier colour on the rails in the near siding. The advantage, as Dave suggested, is that it's very controllable. The two minor disadvantages I've found are that 1) I often forget that it's thicker as you use it up, and get blotches which need to be dealt with. 2) You can get a relatively hard edge which is difficult to disguise. Both of these can be addressed if you spot them when it's still wet by stippling the edge or the heavy patch with more alcohol or water and possibly blotting it a bit.

I know this is an old solved issue for Waton now, but I've been pouring water and had some cloudiness so I went to look up some stuff on the media (Liquitex) I'm using. Two things stood out as important - one is the humidity you're working in - apparently high humidity can cause a layer to take a week or so to dry! The other was a note about varnishing - that it was bad to go over partially-dry varnish with new since the resin layers could interact and cloud. I think it's something to do with damp being trapped between layers - maybe if the acrylic has started to go off the damp doesn't get integrated into it properly? Will

Thanks again for the kind words. I just wish I had more stock to show - I can do MTAs or MKAs, that's it in terms of stuff that's had attention paid to it

Thanks! The main problem at the moment is keeping the big picture in mind since there's an awful lot to do at the depot end yet, but these little dalliances are good for my sanity. Plus they finally mean I can get some half-decent photos

On the scratchbuilding front, a more varied or aged engineering blue brick would be a nice addition, but it would be rather a luxury since it's possible for the modeller to age and add variety too Cheers, Will

I've been looking forward to this for ages - the little yellow blobs have been sitting on one board or another for quite some time awaiting my largesse. Today they got it: Having got the left end of the layout to the right kind of state at the weekend, involving lots of sensible risk-addressing (doing the most sucky and/or risky things first) I thought this would make a suitable treat I stripped some fine wire and pushed/pulled the conductors out of it so that the insulation would fit over the tiger-tail peg I'd left on the lubricators. Feeling adventurous, I used a single strand of pre-tinned conductor as the hose clip, twisted around with tweezers and secured with superglue. Installing the lubricators was pretty easy - the Klear-fixed ballast isn't hard to shift if you need to and I made a couple of divots, added two drops of superglue and held them in place for 10 seconds. After that had gone off I brushed the loose ballast back around them to bed them in and set it with more (thin) superglue. Then the fun bit - detail painting! I'd already painted the bodies with GW Iyanden Darksun and Sunburst Yellow. Then they got a wash of Devlan Mud, most of which I wiped off since the ones at Whitemoor are pretty clean. I drybrushed some false highlights with a bit of off-white, and touched in the nipple and nuts (oo-er ) with Tamiya Flat Aluminium. I tried to keep the weathering pretty restrained - the examples at Whitemoor don't seem to get as foul as the one at Water Orton which Pete Harvey and Eldavo were kind enough to provide some close-up pics of - it was quite unpleasant, with white goop everywhere. I contented myself with some more Devlan Mud along the rail side, Flat Aluminium for the grease blades and pump gubbins, and then drybrushed the latter with Vallejo Brown Leather, which is my "track dirt" colour, to blend it in. The only remaining job was to paint in the sleeper numbers and arrows following a handy Geoff Tibble prototype picture (click Full Size to see them). Thankfully these are only on one of the lubricators at the entrance to the yard, as far as I can tell. These were done with thinned GW Skull White and a size 000 brush, then drybrushed over with more of the brown leather to tone them down. They aren't super-neat, but the white paint is more hardwearing than the white gel pen I have, so it seemed like a better bet here. Quite a quick project, at least in terms of work hours rather than elapsed time, but very satisfying

Incredible work, and fantastic colour match between foreground and background on the roadway and pavements.

It's not just a case of having straight track to fit the magnets, it's more that the couplers need to be dead straight aligned to uncouple reliably - I think you're supposed to have a wagon length of straight either side of the coupler. I only mention it because I've been bitten by this before, although it was with the Bachmann Kadee-clones - maybe the originals are less fussy? The track I had trouble with was this: with magnets sited between the facing points, at the start of the short siding, and in the straight side of the loop. I failed to get anything like reliable uncoupling with the 4w Bachmann skips and ended up filing a little off the inside of the knuckle to loosen them up a bit.

It's definitely worth a try, but there seems to be an element of skill (luck?) involved so practice is probably a good idea. I've had some areas come out really well, others not so well. The most important thing is probably to roll a big 'cigar' - I started off with rather a weedy one as a test, and it was harder to hold. It may also be better to roll a new cigar rather than try and use the second half after you split it in two, since passing it from hand to hand tends to mess it up a bit. Unless you're ambidextrous! 3M Super 77 works really well, if there's a brushable equivalent (very high tack glue) it would be good for small areas, but masking helps for that as well.

Cheers Rich, might try that although the short fibres I have (Woodland Scenics) are rather too glossy - the Noch ones are the business.

Fast work again - I assume at this rate you'll be finished in time to put it in for the 2010 challenge? The plan looks interesting, I like the flow and the curviness of everything. The one issue I can think of there is If you're using Kadees, will you have problems with the lack of straight track siting the magnets? I was going to suggest turning the two sidings in the foreground of the last pic into one to get more siding length, but then I realised that with the headshunt this way does get more length - just side by side. Clever stuff

I've been working on the assumption that I'd be able to use static grass with my electric tea-strainer and get through the scenery on Whitemarsh quite quickly. So I did some tests and ended up doing something almost completely different with the same materials. Possibly because this is 4mm scale using 6mm Noch grass fibres, the electric tea-strainer didn't do too well - see the right-hand patch here: I needed to use neat PVA to get the fibres to stick, and they weren't all that static or standy-uppy. When I used it a couple of years ago with 2mm Woodland Scenics fibres it was much better. So I was a bit disappointed and worried that I didn't have a back-up plan. Then I remembered this awesome video from Rick Reimer I'd seen a couple of weeks ago on another forum: I have a can of Super 77, so I sprayed a test patch and had a go. It's the left-hand one in the image above. Much more standy-uppy, but less coverage, more like tussocks and weeds than tall grass. But for Whitemoor/Whitemarsh this might be OK, there isn't really lush grass. It's easy (especially with the small scale short grass) to end up crushing the bits you've just stuck down, and you also need some sprinkly stuff to scatter over any remaining glue. It looks really good in profile, it's just that you can see the bald patches from above. I had another go which went even better (ignore the bright green tussock which is from a Mininatur sheet) What I didn't think it'd work for is the drain banks, which need to be ultra-lush, so I thought I'd try combining this at the top, with use of grass mats (Noch again) at the bottom, torn up into little bits as seen in a CM article on Vinkeveen, one of my all time favourite layouts. This is what you can see below, and in the header image. I started with a layer of PVA glue and some fine sieved crushed earth, gravel, and some Woodland Scenics ground foam. Then spray glue and hairy cigars at the top, and a jigsaw of the Noch grass mats at the bottom. It's not perfect - I think cutting the mats with scissors would make it look less tussocky, and you can see rather too much where the different materials start and finish, but I think it's going in the right direction. I'm now doing a larger patch of grass at the rear-right of the layout in the same way to see how that comes out. I'm going to try using PVA for the mats on that one as well - here they're stuck with the same Super 77 which doesn't really give enough working time.

Cheers chaps - I'm glad I'm not the only subtractive one out there! You're right on both counts James - it all needs weathering/colouring and the girder is too short I thought I'd be better off weathering the markings in place because the just-primered surface is a lot more stable and grippy than something which has had powders etc. on it. The cunning plan for masking the curb is to do what I did just now when painting the second row of white stripes and the give way sign on the cycle path - fold a strip of tape under, so that the bit over the stripe is not sticky, then put another strip over the top - there's about 2mm between the stripe and the curb which gives me a little room to work. Although I might end up just brush painting the edge and crossing my fingers I'm not sure what to do about the girder height in the longer term - on Google it looks like it comes to just below shoulder height on the couple crossing with their shopping, so it's not too far out - and maybe they're not as tall as heroically-statured Inspecting Man... [edit: Fixed link - so excited because Street View embedded in the editor, but it doesn't in the published article, ah well.]

Just a quick entry since an experiment came out well and I wanted to share the results. I wasn't sure how to do the road markings - certainly I was pretty sure I couldn't brush-paint them. Given that the road surface is styrene and has a decent coat of primer I thought masking might be a good option - with acrylics I can always clean them off if it goes badly wrong. I laid the stripes out freehand with Tamiya tape, using existing rows of tape, the pavement edge, etc. as guides. Then stippled over 3 or 4 times with GW Skull White (a fairly thick acrylic white) as though using a stencil. There are a couple of rough edges between the cycle path give way stripes, but I think I can cure those with a tooth pick. There's also a nice element of relief from the thick paint. It remains to be seen how hard-wearing they are here at the edge of the layout, but I'm happy so far. It's interesting, it's often easier for me to paint something subtractively (take away space with the masking tape, or make graffiti strokes thinner by painting the base colour alongside) than it is to paint it additively. Does anyone else find that?

The greenification is achingly close now - hopefully have something to show after the weekend. I'm currently at the snow/slush phase (brown paint, gesso, lightweight filler)

Looks very smart, although I see what you mean about dulling the roof down - go carefully as the powders are a demon to get out of something with texture if you get too much on What're the MIG washes like? I've used the powders and I like them a lot, but have no idea about the washes.

There were some other finish issues too - the gloss itself was oddly patchy (with gloss and flat areas) and I had a few brushmarks I did wonder about Dullcote but I was concerned that I'd be sealing in a bad job which would flake off or otherwise go wrong later on. I must confess painting things is often where it goes wrong for me - I do OK with the Tamiya cans and I'm getting better at primer, but it still makes me nervous, particularly with scratchbuilds. So many thanks for the tip - any painting advice is always gratefully appreciated and it's clearly something you know a fair bit about - love the finish on the dump truck and the container you posted recently!

The deadline is looking very very loomy at the moment. I hope that the (accidentally?) revised date sticks, since I have a week off before that, but I'm making progress nonetheless. I finally got the bridge installed - well mostly, I haven't stuck the girder down yet since I want to paint the pavement first, and I'm a bit worried about damage too since it's the first bit not protected by the profile boards. This involved lots of layers - there are balsa blocks atop the abutments to raise the interior of the deck by about 5mm, to make room for this freelance indication of some cross beams and things: The idea is mainly to have something a bit more interesting if I want to take photographs through the bridge arch - I don't have any shots of the underneath of the real bridge to work on so this is based on guesswork and pictures of other plate girder bridges in the UK. The under-deck is 2mm styrene sheet, laid level across the balsa blocks, with a balsa former above that and a sheet of 3mm foamboard cut oversize to bow up between the profile boards and make the curve of the roadway. Plus: I managed to make the cycle path and the road out of one piece so I'd get smooth transitions. Minus: In retrospect the curvature of the road should be more continuous rather than flattening out at each end. On top of this is a layer of 0.5mm styrene to make the road surface and cycle path, with 1mm styrene for the footpath. This was also fixed with PVA, scuffing up the underside first and applying a very thin coat to both parts in the manner of a contact adhesive. I went around the edges afterwards with 5 minute epoxy as a filler and for security. I then realised that I'd done it in the wrong order since the footpath was above the cycle path, so sanded a ramp from more 1mm sheet to make the transition. Three applications of putty and sandpaper later, it's had a light coat of grey primer for texture and as a starting point for the tarmac finish. Oh yes: The girder itself was painted Tamiya IJN green with a brush, but something went wrong and it dried glossy rather than flat after the first coat - not sure why, possibly I didn't wait long enough between coats - I tend to forget that Tamiya "acrylics" are actually something else and need to be treated carefully. I ended up stripping the paint (IPA and a toothbrush) and spraying it with a Tamiya rattle can of the same colour. This had a sheen too (it was an AS paint not a TS paint) but not too bad. I worked some powder into the girder and painted/masked various patches where graffiti had been following Google Street View. Finally I drybrushed it fairly vigorously with GW Orkhide Shade, which did a good job of controlling the powders and moving them out of the shadows a bit. Since the real thing appears to be in reasonable nick despite the weak bridge warning, I've only added a couple of rust spots. I'll probably revisit it later on though. So this board is about ready for some brown goop, as is the other in fact since it doesn't really have any elevation - I just need to trim the profile boards down on that one.

Fast work John! I like the flow of track on the left side a lot, but maybe it needs something different on the right so there's a bit more operational variety at the two ends?

Possibly a stupid question since I'm not an electronics whizz, but have you wired the crossover in series or parallel? I could imagine that one (or t'other) might give you a situation where one motor stalls first (and draws more than its fair share of current) thus depriving the other of the juice it needs to finish the throw. Looking back maybe that's not right (because neither is completing the throw) but maybe it'll suggest something. I fully expect to get shot down by someone who does know about this stuff Will

Looks very nice, especially considering the vintage - plus points for using cast-iron kitchenware

That sounds like a good idea too - I saw somewhere (here?) recently that Micro Mark do a magnetic clamping tray which looks good for smaller parts.