Will Vale

Those look great, I might have to copy that idea as well! I made some flyers the first time we exhibited Igelfeld, which were popular but there was sometimes a reluctance for people to pick them up and read - signs/panels as you've done would solve that. Also they'd use less ink

That's a good point about the bulky tools, I hadn't really thought about that side of it. I was surprised by how much modelling I could do on holiday with (lots of) plastic plus glue, one knife, one file, one saw, scraps of sandpaper, a hardback book, and a cutting mat.

I failed to click on the blog link when you posted it - silly me. I really like the second image, the 08 plus two long vans makes for an oddly satisfying train with a good sense of bulk. I know you mentioned you'd been putting off the overbridge for a while, but what's there so far looks good - like the brick retaining wall plus earth bank combination. I suspect you might need to raise the bank a bit so it comes up to the road level? Or is it a footbridge? [posted here since I couldn't get Blogger to accept my comment]

For some reason the video won't play for me (Opera problem?) but the pictures look marvellous - I want one! [edit: working now - not sure what went wrong there]

I still think you need a garage full of machine tools to be a real modeller - I would class myself a kitchen table bodger, and I'm quite happy with that The Lego is definitely a good half-way house though - ubiquitous, cheap, and astonishingly well-made for what it is. Since we have quite a bit of it around I'm often finding unexpected things to do with it - for example, the corrugated iron on this loco shed: was made by pressing small pieces of a foil oven tray between stacks of Lego 2x1 "grille" bricks. It was quite hard work - I wouldn't want to make a bigger building like that - but it did do the job.

Good advice from the trenches, cheers! Are there any good ways to brace such that it doesn't look wrong through the windows? I was thinking about having the left side fairly open, with office bits in it, although the right doesn't need to be so much.

I made a start on this on holiday, making the walls and adding all the framing, but didn't get as far as the windows. Remedied that this afternoon, via some experiments. The windows here have a smaller section on the left which (probably?) slides or opens, certainly it's in a frame which sits proud of the main pane of glass. I had a go at making glazing bars with strips of sticky label, but gave up since I didn't get them to adhere well enough. More interestingly, I tried masking off the rear and middle of the pane and spraying the glazing (clear 0.5mm PVC sheet) with Games Workshop white primer. This worked really well - the bars were well-defined and fairly robust, plus I didn't get any bleed under the label I used for masking. I eventually decided there wasn't enough relief though, and went for the tedious pieces-of-microstrip approach. The aim is to fit pieces of PVC behind the large windows against the inside of the wall and cut a small piece to fit flush in the separate small windows. Provided I don't have too much overlap on the inside I don't think this'll be too obviously wrong when looking through the windows. With that done I went ahead and put the walls + floor together, using some helpful Lego bricks as a jig. These are very accurately made and make good formers for square corners - being ABS they aren't affected (much) by solvents intended solely for polystyrene - stay away from Plastic Weld though! This is the sort of thing that real modellers use engineers squares or machined metal blocks for, but I'm not a real modeller and don't have these kinds of things - one day, perhaps In case you don't recognise the building (it isn't from Whitemoor) perhaps this will give you a clue, although you'll have to imagine the LH container is a Portakabin: It was somewhat of a pain to draw up since it almost always has locos in front of it (clue #2) so I make no assertions as to its accuracy! In particular, the window in the rear wall is (probably) a fiction.

Only temporarily! I've since cut a slice out of the balsa deck behind the girder so it can sit further back. It's a good point though - I can't figure out what the girder/abutment interface is - it's about 1 pixel in the picture, and appears to be the same buff as the concrete/mortar used to finish the domed area on the central pillar. I certainly can't see any sign of expansion rollers or other hardware.

Thanks for all the kind comments! I'm really glad I built it - a good return on the 4-6 hours spent so far. It was made a lot easier by knowing that I didn't have to make a second identical one The problem with adding rivets now is that they have to fit onto 0.75mm wide strips - I'm not sure I could manage this with slices of rod, although the transfers might be a possibility. The site suggests they would fit, although it has the feel of a fiddly job. One option would be to add them to the road side where I have good photographic evidence (Google Street View) and they'd be easy to get to, although I imagine they'd be on the other side as well. I strongly suspect I'll just chicken out and leave it though - the deadline looms, and all that

James Hilton suggested a while ago that I'd not really be able to avoid scratchbuilding the bridge if I wanted it to look like Whitemoor - and he's right. Given that I'd done the abutments I thought I'd have a go at the girder. The above picture is just a quick test - I need to remove some material from the deck so it can sit further back, and there's a fair bit of cleaning up to do as well. Unfortunately I didn't take many work-in-progress pictures this time, although here's one of attaching the framing (should be riveted) to the bottom row of panels: The basic shape is cut from 1mm styrene sheet. The real bridge has what appears to be a 'stepped' plate girder with two different kinds of gusset on the upper section. It also has a slight curve, although I chickened out and used three straight lines rather than a complete curve - I think this is fair enough since that's what I thought was going on the first few times I looked at the picture I cut the blank along the dividing line and put it back together with a 2mm step, fitted a 3mm strip to this for the horizontal web, then added *lots* of gussets from 0.5mm Evergreen sheet and strip. So far so good. I also found some pictures of similar bridges, and the road side of Norwood Road bridge, which suggested that each panel has rivetted strips around the inside. I didn't think I was up to doing rivets (how?) but the strips were a possibility. Lots and lots of 0.75x0.25mm strip later, it was possible to clean up and fit the top and bottom webs, cut from sheet styrene for a change. The back (road) side is similar but simpler: It's a bit messy still - the framing was all measured in-place, and some of the gussets are a bit shallow - this cruel close-up shows some gaps which need filling: But on the whole I think the captures the look pretty well - I'm very happy with the results I was worried that reducing the length would make the proportions look off, but I tweaked the height a bit as well and I think it sits OK with the span and the abutments. Civil engineers may of course beg to differ! Piece count so far: 60 for the basic bridge, plus another 108 for the framing around the panels!

Looks most impressive - quite exciting to be doing the "worky bits" from scratch. I saw earlier you're intending to paint the gears - does it stick OK? I wondered if instead you could make a shield from very thin brass or plastic and fit that outboard of the idler, but it doesn't look like there's much room to move.

I've enjoyed reading these too - please keep posting progress. 2FS seems to be a combination of at least two scary things - brass and tininess - so seeing how it can be done is both instructive and inspirational.

Cheers chaps, much appreciated. It's always a bit of a balance between posting nice finished pictures, and the steps along the way - how many are too many? I also tend to forget to take pictures when things are progressing well! I'd certainly recommend giving the card a try - I'm not sure it's for me exactly, but it's pleasant work and for things like this it seems a decent choice. On the issue of relief, I don't think it's a problem in 4mm or under, rather the difficulty is that you can't have different specular (shininess) levels on the bricks and mortar, which you could do with plastic sheet. Bricks often have a sheen to them, whereas mortar is very diffuse and doesn't catch the light. Probably not an issue in my case, unless the camera is right under the bridge with a low light. One thing to experiment with would be using crisp styrene carcasses faced in brick paper - that way your corners will be sharp, and the Avery labels I'm using stuck better to the styrene than the mount board on the central pillar. I'm currently making a rough blank for the girder, and wishing I had room for the wing wall and column on the far side of the bridge. Because I wanted the start of the cycle path on the layout, I fear this has been squeezed out

Not much happening for the last three weeks since we've been away, but the jet-lag had receded sufficient by Sunday that it was possible to do some modelling without falling asleep. These are the abutments and central pillar for my attenuated Norwood Road bridge. It's been kind of a pain, since the only reference pics I found are about 400 pixels wide, but I've been able to find a few details captured in other pictures taken by heroic folk leaning over the bridge to spot some choice loco or other. As far as I can tell, the structure is made from blue engineering brick, so I started off with the Scalescenes dark blue brick sheet - it's not really the right colour, too pristine, but I thought it'd probably easier to weather that than re-colour their dark brown brick. The abutments and pillar have 1mm mount board carcasses build to slip neatly over the existing foamcard abutments seen in this earlier entry. Following tips from Ben A and John Teal (and after a false start using thin card and Pritt-stick) I printed the Scalescenes sheet onto an A4 sticky label. This was fun, easy to wrap around the carcasses, and seems to have stuck really well. I had to take one sheet off after I realised I had the height wrong, and it didn't really want to go As a result I'm fairly confident they'll stay put in the longer term. All the edges are tucked under so they'll be prevented from peeling loose when the carcasses are stuck to the foamcard structures. The central pillar was a bit more complicated and needed a curved shape. I formed some 0.5mm styrene sheet around a wooden spoon with hot water to get a partial curve, and attached it with some very potent double-sided adhesive film. This is like a big sheet of double-sided tape which you can cut to size - I got it on recommendation from the local art shop, seems pretty good so far. Naturally I got the wrapper slightly mis-aligned, but when I tried to reposition it the mount board started to delaminate instead, so I gave up and trimmed it to fit. Any remaining bad bits will be hidden by the bridge girder and deck, I think. I also made the mistake of setting the "step" height a bit low, so the brick paper is cut ~3mm taller than the styrene, and is reinforced with a slip of 0.25mm styrene inserted from the inside - fiddly stuff. The rounded capstone (or whatever it is) I carved from balsa wood, then sealed with thin superglue and sanded smooth. Very satisfying job, that was.It sort of sits just inside the brick paper wrapper, with a bit of gesso needed to fill in the joint at the back. Could be neater, but the shape looks about right. Here's a picture of the bits in place temporarily (before I'd painted the capstone). I recoloured the papers quite thoroughly with MIG "Dark Mud" and "Industrial City Dirt", plus washes of dark brown paint, pale grey for blooms, and coloured pencils to add some variation in hue. It looks a might redder in the pictures than I think it is in real life, but hopefully you get the idea. It still needs a coat of varnish to seal it, since it's prone to rubbing. The graffiti on the left side (visible in the header image) is a truncated version of the squared "OK" seen on the prototype - I don't have enough depth in the bridge for all of it. The graffiti on the right is my little tribute to a famous piece of local graffiti which was more-or-less a shrine to Ian Curtis and remained in Wellington for nearly thirty years before the council saw fit to paint it out last year. It has since been restored and the council are apparently going to leave it alone I don't like graffiti generally - too much like cats peeing in corners - but I think this graffito is slightly different and deserves a bit of respect. All in all it was an interesting learning exercise - I haven't done any card buildings since failing to build some Superquick houses as a teenager. I like the Scalescenes sheets, but I'm not sure if I'm a convert yet. It's fun and quick to put things together, but it's also easy to stuff things up, and there's no facility to cut back/fill/sand for shape, or strip paint and start again, which you do have with plastic and metal. We'll see how the depot end of the layout (which is a work-in-progress in styrene) comes out so I can compare and contrast.

I like the wood colour you've got - it looks urban/industrial rather than countryside. Presumably there'd be coal dust billowing around the drops in use, so the wood wouldn't go as light as it would normally?

Not wishing to derail Dave's thread, but thanks so much for this tip - following this and a mention from John Teal of printing on labels I got some for a try. It makes what was a chore quite fun, rather like making those Grafar foam + sticker buildings from the '80s Dave, the buildings look really good - great mix of physical and trompe-l'oeil relief. I also like the balance of the building and scenery colours, which must have been difficult to arrange given that they come from totally different sources. I agree with Pete that the bushes do a good job of disguising the steepness road and make it make more sense, I suspect a more drastic fix is now unnecessary? Cheers, Will

No worries, glad it helped. Do you just run the labels through the printer normally? I've never tried printing on anything but copier paper, but this seems like a really useful technique.

Looks very smart John - I'm still rather in awe of how fast you can make these. On the logo, it reads in the photo's like the left side is slightly longer than the right - I don't know if it is in real life (model or logo) but it might be worth checking out in detail?

I've had a chance to visit some of the NL shops mentioned above: Schaal Treinen Huis (Amsterdam) - brisk 45 minute walk from Centraal Station. Fair bit of second hand DC stuff, some quite old/ropey and to my mind a bit overpriced. Great selection of scratchbuilding materials. Huider (Heerhugowaard) - right next to the station, glossy, wide range of new H0 and N DC and H0 AC stuff mostly RRP with some decent discounts. Good with kids/family. Lots of RAIL back numbers Kuijpers Hobbyhuis (Utrecht) - MinrebroederStraat. I forgot the way but someone helped me out - right in the centre of town. Good range of new H0 and N DC, some good discounts on wagons particularly. Lots of kits and sundries, and it was the one place which stocked KleiNSpoor decals. Across the street they also have a branded Maerklin Store with lots of shiny expensive Trix and Maerklin bits. Happy to swap wheels on wagons. Afraid I didn't see any French N, but it's not my area of expertise so I might not have known it had I seen it I'll probably go back to Huider now I've done a bit of research and know more what I want. Cheers, Will