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Will Vale

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  1. Will Vale
    I've had a go at the interiors, inspired by this picture...
     
    http://ukrailrolling.../p57256754.html
     
    ...and it came out OK I think. It's quite hard to capture the almost salmon shade (rust plus dust/dried mud?) of the prototype picture but provided it looks believable I'm not too worried if it doesn't look identical
     

     
    I've started another two and taken some pictures to accompany the process.
     
    Step 1) I stippled on artist's acrylic (the stuff in tubes - the one I use is called Pebeo) with a stiff round brush, mixing the paint while I was stippling. I used raw umber and burnt sienna, with a bit of white as well since the insides and would have added white but I couldn't find it. I bought these paints mainly for scenic work but I was keen to try them for weathering since they're lovely to work with. The stippling is murder on brushes and you need to watch out for them losing bristles since they'll get stuck to the paint.
     

     
    The second one is more blotchy because the paint was starting to dry:
     

     
    You can get a really nice (so probably overscale) texture doing this:
     

     
    Step 2) Apply powders (mostly Mig Industrial City Dirt + Rubble Dust plus some white chalk I pinched off my daughter) to lighten and dull the colour, vaguely represent the mud, and also level out the paint texture a bit. The powders stick really well to the rough paint. I brought them up the sides a bit to give an impression of a tide-mark from the load:
     

     
    The second one has a bit of rust powder worked around the ribs, which seem to be rusty in some pictures (but not all). I tried doing this with a thin paint wash but it was uncontrollable (it ran into the powders and spread very fast) so I had to let it dry and cover it up again.
     

     
    These have since had some minor colour variation added with coloured pencils (I thought the darker patches looked a bit too smooth and camouflage-ey) and the powders have been fixed. I'm expecting to have to do a little touch-up when that all dries.
     
    Since I only have 4 MTAs, I'm on the home stretch now: the main job is to finish the outside of the fourth wagon, plus I want to psyche myself and do a "wet mud + ballast in the corners" interior for the wagon with the really muddy exterior, but I need to think through how that might work a bit still.
  2. Will Vale

    Modified Peco track

    By Will Vale,

    I've removed some of the diagonal sleepers on my crossing - which involves a slip so I can't remove the other diagonal sleepers since the slip has it's timbers at an angle halfway between the two routes.
     

     
    Unfortunately I didn't manage to join the ends up neatly and there are three with joggles. I'm going to put something over those and run a duct through in the hope that the eye will follow that instead?� One thing I noticed was that all of this would have been really easy on the workbench, but is a fiddle on the layout since the soft cork tends to deform under the pressure of the knife and take the track with it. This isn't fatal, but it all needs a lot more care than it would on the bench.
     
     
    One thing I didn't take a picture of was that I've filled in all the notches left by removing the Peco springs and associated bits with Miliput, and they have disappeared nicely under the paint. Now I need to tone down the sleepers and get some ballast on there, but before that there are some ducts and other hardware to fit. Progress at last!
  4. Will Vale
    Smoothing the hills by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    The next step after the foam carving and sticking is filling in all the rubbish bits. I tend to stuff the cracks with offcuts to save on filler, and then spread a coat of "lightweight spackle" over the landforms. I think this is made with tiny glass bubbles in an acrylic carrier. It's really really light, flexible, and clean to use - if you drop some on finished scenery it won't stick - you have to spread it onto surfaces before it grips. And this feature also works on carpet The tub warns not to use it on plastic, but I haven't had problems with it eating the foam.
     
    It looks a bit ghastly to start with:
     

     
     
    but if you wait for an hour or two for it to start to skin over you can stipple it with an old brush to knock down the ridges left by the knife. This also gives a bit of basic texture and helps bed the filler in around rocks and such. It needs a gentle touch if the filler's been applied thickly, since it won't be solid under the surface.
     
     

     
    With that out of the way I thought I'd have a go at carving the rocks above the Falkenstein tunnel. It's starting to look OK although I think it should really be set back a little more than it is from the tunnel mouth. I'm not sure I think that so strongly that I'm going to slice it all off and start again though
     
     

     
    The toothpicks are holding some added-on bits of foam in place to fill in some gaps in the rock face. I'm not sure if I'm going to end up adding more surface detail here (apart from a bit of sand in gesso as a sealing coat) although I'm wondering if filler and crumpled tinfoil would break up some of the larger facets without changing the shape too much?
     
    (Sorry the pics are a bit crunchy - it's difficult to photograph white surface detail, I ended up boosting the local contrast to make up for my lack of lighting foresight...)
  5. Will Vale

    More tunnel portals

    By Will Vale,

    Unteren Hirschsprung Tunnel (West) by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I dunno, you wait ages for a blog entry, then two come along at once! With two months to go until the exhibition, my progress really needs to make the leap from "glacial" to "avalanche".
     
    My current focus is the track bed (see previous entry) and civil engineering - once those jobs are out of the way I can finish the basic landforms and get the profile boards on. The main things required are four tunnel portals, some retaining walls, and a bridge. I've already made a start on one tunnel portal, so I made some blanks for two more in front of the television last Sunday night, and then took them with me to a local club meeting where I sat and sliced off 1.5 x 3mm 'stones' from an Evergreen section and stuck them around the arches:
     

     
    When I got home, I looked at my reference again and realised that what I thought was a common constructional style encompassed a lot more variety than anticipated. In particular, the two new portals both had larger stones, and one (the Oberer Hirschsprung Tunnel Westportal) had a mixture of stone types, an interesting coping, and was made of blockwork rather than random stone. I filled the gaps between the lower arch stones with Tamiya putty and re-carved them, and added a suggestion of the coping with Evergreen rod.
     

     
    The reason the ink lines are so messy is twofold - I picked up an unsuitable pen from my desk to mark the approximate line of the wall, and I'd already scuffed the surface in preparation for the clay layer. The ink went wandering off down the scratches giving the whole thing a rather spidery, gothic appearance
     
    Once the arch details were more-or-less there, I smeared neat PVA over the surface and pressed small pieces of DAS clay into it to make a fairly even layer. As you can see it ends up being very thin, but it hasn't shown any signs of flaking away or causing trouble despite being well under 0.5mm thick in places:
     

     
    Once dried (overnight) and sanded back slightly I carved the random stone and less random blockwork with a small screwdriver. There are likely better tools but it does the job!
     

     
    It would make a lot of sense to do this in the flat rather than after building the tunnel liner and supporting framework. It's not a problem for the random stone at all, but it makes holding a ruler across to carve the regular blocks a bit of a pain. They are somewhat wonky as a result, but I don't think that's too obvious.
     
    For finishing, I undercoated everything fairly heavily with Citadel black acrylic and let it dry. The stone colours were built up with drybrushing rather than brush painting, using various browns. I then touched in individual stones with darker and lighter tones and highlighted various edges.
     

     
    I'm not delighted with the gappy arch on this one, I think I'll have to fill the gaps and retouch it since there's not so much greenery I can use to hide them. I am quite pleased with the stone colour which seems pretty close to the prototype pic. It's not shown in the correct place on the layout either - it goes at the far right - but there was too much junk in the way
     
    For the random stone tunnel in the header pic, the mortar was created by washing the surface with MIG concrete pigment dissolved in their pigment fixer. A bit scary since it goes green! I wiped it off the raised part fairly quickly, and waited nervously for it to dry. The effect isn't bad I think, and it had the side effect of tying together the rather speckly stonework into something more coherent. I need to spend a little while running a dark wash into some of the joins, because they don't all have obvious mortar, and redo some of the detail painting of stains, bloom, etc. which the wash has masked.
     
    More soon hopefully - various capping stones to make, and I need to box in the tunnel interiors with foamcard so scenery can go over the top.
  6. Will Vale

    Walkway

    By Will Vale,

    Sounds a bit more glamorous than "I made a path" doesn't it?
     

     
    Rest assured, it isn't.
     
    After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I decided to stick with the 3mm high path edges, since they match the height of the fittings such as the lamp bases, and the idea is to infill with ballast leaving just 0.5mm-1mm showing at the top. I have some very fine ballast somewhere which will do for the gravel of the path itself - the colour isn't an exact match, but it's in the right sort of area.
     
    Having fiddled around building the first part of the path on the workbench, I cut some 1mm styrene sheet into 8mm strips and laid the rest straight onto the layout with PVA. This is only really to provide a square edge to fit the planks to - the base will be buried in gravel. The plank edging was than attached in-situ with solvent, and some short bits of strip added here and there for supports. They aren't on the prototype that I can see (shh!) but I think they look pretty suitable. I fitted these overlength so I could hold onto them, and then trimmed them back with side-cutters when they'd dried somewhat.
     
    Painting is rather rough and ready - a base coat of GW Adeptus Battlegrey at lunchtime to hide the plastic, then a brisk drybrush with Dheneb Stone, Tallarn Flesh, and a touch of white at tea-time. Given how little of this is going to be visible that's probably enough for now, but I'm expecting to go back and tweak the colours once the ballast and gravel are done. This should also help it blend together a bit better.
     
    Speaking of ballast, most of this board is now ballasted apart from the last 6 inches where the tracks cross the joint - I want to do the last bit on both boards in one session so there's no chance of a change in the blend mucking up the colours. I've also fitted a few bits of (finer) orange pipe - this is also insulation but from a smaller gauge wire, again with the conductors pulled out and some black monofilament (2 Dollar Shop find) threaded through for the cables. The loose cables at the bottom were intended to run into the open end of the trough, but I looked at pictures again and the Whitemoor troughs terminate at big plastic junction boxes - these are (I would guess) two-foot diameter plastic bins buried in the ballast level with the tops of the troughs. I haven't decided if I'm going to model those yet, but the option is there for the moment.
     

     
     
    As you can see from the pictures, there are a few gaps which need filling in around the sleeper ends, they were waiting for the path so I could do it all at once. One problem with the Klear not changing the ballast colour significantly is that it's really hard to see which bits you've been over when fixing it in place! You can also see the glossy spots on the sleepers - I try and dab it off if it goes in the wrong place, but these should go when the track gets washed/powdered/drybrushed at some future point.
     
    In other news, I really need to get started on ballasting board 2, and building the fiddle yard, since I've accepted an invitation to take the layout to Railex 2010 in Wellington in November. At least it'll give me a bit more focus, and it fits in so well with the 2010 challenge deadline that it's tempting to try and complete it for that. Is it bad form to work on something for a while before declaring for the challenge?
  7. Will Vale

    Crossing timbers

    By Will Vale,

    Having received some help from other members about siting point machines (thanks guys!) I've been extending my crossing timbers in readiness.
     

     
    I cut up some spare sleepers left behind by track laying, shaving off one chair and trimming short of the other. These are glued in line with the crossing timbers - they look long to me, but with the point machine they seem about right - and the length is based on pictures of Whitemoor, so it ought to be legit. I've had a first pass at puttying to blend them into the Peco moulding, with limited success - applying the putty is tricky since everything moves around on the cork. Still, some of them look reasonable, and with a coat of paint it's a lot easier to see where to focus my efforts on tidying up. I'm going to go back this evening with Tamiya putty which is very soft, unlike the Miliput I used last night.
     
     

     
    Finally I posed one of the point machines for the fun of it - the blending on this pair is particularly awful though
     
     

     
    Annoyingly the Peco single slip (not shown) has very short switch rails so that if the point machine is installed correctly, the detection rods will be past the ends. I'm hoping that I can make this look OK somehow.
  8. Will Vale
    I did a lot of experiments with magnetic tension locks and while they were cheap, fun, and pretty effective, I ended up getting annoyed at how big and bulky they were. I ordered some 3mm scale Sprat and Winkle etches from MSE to give them a try, and I liked them even more - especially since one 3mm diameter Neodymium magnet is enough to operate a pair of couplings, albeit without much margin for positional error.
     

     
    Teeny weeny! I drilled suitable holes and the magnets fit in. They're recessed just enough that a few grains of ballast will fit over the top. Thankfully this means no removal of sleepers and making good after, apart from one siding where I experimented with several different magnets and have a big slot to fill in.
     
    The intent is to fit Sprat & Winkles to the ends of wagon rakes, and use 3 links (Smith's Instanters at the moment) between wagons in the rake. A few wagons (e.g. a couple of vans, and an OCAs or two) will get S&Ws both ends so they can be shunted into other trains. I've seen a couple of pictures of Railfreight red OCAs on the back of autoballaster sets, for example, which should make for a nice contrast.
     
    It feels great to have finally got my act together and made a decision about the couplings - hopefully I can maintain the momentum!
  9. Will Vale
    I spent the afternoon fiddling with couplings and have a bit more to report then last time. See here for the basic idea and where it came from. I wanted to try the delayed action couplings at both ends of vehicles, i.e. the normal tension lock setup with a hook at both ends, as opposed to Christopher Payne's version which only mounts the hook at one end. Apart from flexiblity, this would mean locos wouldn't have to mount hooks at all, and could just have a neat wire loop and full buffer beam fittings.
     
    I made up a new set of hooks with the magnetic tails and delay latches soldered to the outside, since it seemed likely they would interfere if they were on the insides of the hooks. The critical dimension is that the there should be a 3mm gap between the start of the hook and the delay latch. To speed things up, and since I wanted to do some shunting with a two or three rakes of wagons to give the couplings a proper test, I did a few at a time, with a "jig" consisting of two pen lines and some masking tape - classy!
     

     
    Removing the completed assembly needed a bit of care, but separating the couplers and trimming/forming the latches was really easy. The latch needs to slip over the other coupling's loop easily, and the end can be trimmed off almost in line with the slope of the hook, it's only there to give space to withdraw the coupling loop after propelling a wagon into position before the hook drops. So they end up fairly small.
     

     
    I did some hands-on and hands-off testing with an 08 and a mixture of PNAs, Seacows and TEA tanks, to try and cover a range of vehicles with both body and bogie mounts. This is much more of a test than I did last time.
     
    Observations:

    Propelling after uncoupling is pretty robust most of the time, but on curves the latches can sometimes slip off the loops and cause the wagons to recouple. I tweaked them in a little bit which helped. Coupling up is reliable, the latches don't seem to hinder this at all. Having hooks at both ends helps when coupling heights don't match perfectly - one hook will usually engage even if the other doesn't. Some tweaking might be required to balance ease of uncoupling with accidental train breaks. The Seacows seemed to need more tweaking than the PNAs and TEAs - maybe because the mounts are quite low and droopy on mine. Even with my cack-handed soldering they seem robust enough. I did break a couple of latches, but they were easy to fix. If I was exhibiting with these I'd make up half a dozen extra and just clip a new one in if there were problems. Uncoupling requires a bit more care - like Kadees. You have to watch the couplings closely, or listen for the click of the hook lifting. With two hooks you need to be in just the right place. I suspect that with Brian Kirby's larger ceramic magnets this might be easier.
    The two biggies:
    If anything goes wrong (involuntary recouple, or a partial couple with one hook latched up and the other down) you can fix it without touching the stock. With a bit of practice I was getting about 80-90% success rate shunting rakes of wagons in and out of sidings using only the direction button (and a bit of momentum) on the Powercab. Very satisfying.
    Even more than before, I think this is worth pursuing. It would be better with an etched hook, since everything would be happening in the plane of the hook rather than outside it - it seems like it would avoid the recoupling on curves. Plus it'd save my blushes in that I would'nt have to show something I'd touched with an iron to the world at large I might see if I can draw up some artwork since I have a modelling friend here who sells etched brass kits. Either that or I need some flux and a better jig.
  10. Will Vale

    A tree for Tanis

    By Will Vale,

    So back at the tail end of last year I built this A3 layout in three weeks. I was quite pleased with it, and thought I could take it to the 2010 Convention in NZ and enter it in the A3 competition at Easter. I had a long list of things to finish/fix/improve and plenty of time to get them done in the interim.
     
    Fast forward a few months and we're flying down to Christchurch for the convention next Thursday, and Tanis hasn't had any of the attention I wanted to give it until last Friday night. Oh well. I have at least cleaned the track and run some trains a train the train. I've also started working on a better Acacia tree to replace my previous effort, which was a suitable piece of the Woodland Scenics pre-flocked sea foam stuck in the ground and given some extra thorny foliage with spraymount and static grass. I've never made a tree before, so this is all a bit of an adventure. Since I didn't really know what Acacia trees look like, I found a picture on Flickr:
     
    http://www.flickr.co...r_a/3967834130/
     
    and this is what it's going to be replacing. I'd forgotten how much I liked this picture (because you can't see the cut-off top of the sea foam here) so I hope it manages to live up to it. Sadly the original tree is u/s following a botched removal, no going back now.
     

     
    I started by dismantling about 8" each of twin-core stranded mains cable, and solid core Cat-5 Ethernet cable, plus dug up a few inches of heavy gauge copper wire for the core and to make a peg for planting. I had a go at forming the tree from just the stranded cable, but it was too fine to work with easily so the armature is mostly from the Cat 5. I did weave a couple of inches of the stranded stuff in at the ends of branches to get some finer twigs.
     

     
    You can see in the picture that I decided to add some more of the solid core partway though - I wouldn't recommend this since you pretty much have to loop it around the existing trunk and branches and it won't be as neat and tidy as the stuff which was twisted in the initial bunch. Still, learning experience...
     
    I then messily soldered various junctions so that I would feel I was creating a well-engineered tree (a proper job, if you like) and wrapped the thicker branches in tape:
     

     
    I should have taken more care in making sure the tape laid flat everywhere - there are a few flaps of tape visible which I'm going to have to trim back after the next stage dries. Speaking of which, the next stage
     

     
    involved brushing a mix of gesso, raw umber, and burnt siena acrylics onto the branches. This is more for texture than anything else, and I'm probably going to spray it black afterwards since the acrylics are unlikely to bond that well to the bare wire areas. But they do help me get a feel for the bark colour and ensure that any chips won't be stark white. A tip from this job was that brushing from the roots to the twigs is probably good - I found it was easy to leave blobs of gesso around the tree, and at least if they're on the twigs it's easy to spot and remove them.
     
    Next job is to see what it looks like when dry, and clean it up and fix the various problems you can see in the photos, most of which are because it's a bit of a rush job. I'm not sure what to use for foliage yet - possibly teased out Woodland Scenics poly fibre with more static grass needles for leaves? Real Acacias have a fairly regular leaf structure but there's not much hope of replicating that since they're quite small leaves.
  11. Will Vale

    Noisy gronk pictures

    By Will Vale,

    Some pictures of the speaker install I talked about here. Sorry for the nasty digicam quality, it was too much work to go and find the tripod and the SLR. While I had the body off I took the opportunity to make a styrene bottom plate for the sound box to replace the blob of Blu-Tak which was filling that role in the Mk.1 version. It's still not a classy install, but it works and apart from cutting the hole is still reversible for when I find a better way.
     
    Here are the main components. I've already removed the grille cover with the tip of a no. 11 blade here. If I was doing it again I'd be very careful to only exert pressure near the corners, since it's possible to create hairline cracks if you do it in the middle, and it might also give more chance of getting all the pips out rather than snapping them - I had two break. Not a big deal though.
     

     
    Here's the grille drilled out, prior to cleaning up with a file. Take care and go slowly - lots of detail to spoil, as you can see from my errant knife blade leaving a mark towards the top of the bonnet.
     

     
    I spliced the decoder and pickup wires together with soldered joints and tape. The motor terminals were easy to get to so I soldered directly to those. The rest of the decoder wires are bundled up in case I want to run lights later.
     

     
    The speaker is mounted to the interior of the body using a shell with a thin skool sossage (chiz chiz chiz) of Blu-Tak. This needs to make a seal all the way around.
     

     
    And finally here's the sound box with ugly Blu-Tak fillet to hopefully seal the enclosure. The back and bottom are made from 1mm styrene, with a groove in the back to clear the motor shaft. I cut the plates roughly to shape and then worked on them with sandpaper and files to get something close to the body shell's shape - the last 0.5mm gap is taken up with the Blu-Tak. Don't forget to plug the exhaust (I assume) outlet! I haven't sealed around the bottom plate yet in this picture.
     

     
    I hope this is useful to anyone thinking about doing one of these. It wasn't that hard, it probably took a couple of hours, and I've only installed a couple of hard-wired motor-only decoders before. Admittedly one of those was in a Bachmann On30 Porter, which is not particularly easy. All that said, look to the more experienced folk (e.g. the DCC fitting guides in the forums) for how to do a proper job rather than my less professional version
     
    The end result is fun, it's not super loud and there's some hiss from both the ESU mixer (I think) and some of the sound samples, but it compares well to some factory-fitted models I've tried. Howes should be congratulated on the driving qualities - the rev up, run, coast and stop all feel excellent. Now I want to do my EWS one
  12. Will Vale

    Couplings and magnets

    By Will Vale,

    I'm afraid things have been a bit stagnant on Whitemarsh, although I did build an unusual micro layout for exhibition at the end of last year so I haven't been completely idle. The problem which is stalling progress on the UK stuff is that I need to decide on a coupling system, or more crucially an uncoupling system, before I ballast the track. I think what I want is the Kirby coupling, but I have track laid on cork already and don't want to dig it out. I'm thinking about getting some Neodymium magnets to fit between the sleepers - I have a styrofoam board so putting them under the trackbed isn't an option. Once that's done, hopefully work can continue.
     
    I must admit I'm also musing about ordering a teddy bear from Hattons, since a preserved example was the first pilot at Whitemoor during the earlier stages of the reconstruction. I received its replacement (a Cotswold 08) for Christmas, but I like the idea of having the green diesel to upset people with when it's parked next to a class 66: "Silly fool, you've gone and mixed your eras!"
  13. Will Vale

    MTA weathering

    By Will Vale,

    Hi Folks,
     
    I've been a bit busy with work and a new layout project (more later) but finally found time to start transferring my bits and bobs from the old RMWeb. Here's a synopsis of my wagon weathering thread: original page on Old RMweb
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? Originally posted on Sun Aug 23, 2009 4:13 am
     
    I was inspired by Northern Maiden's thread (among others) to take the plunge and have a go at weathering a wagon. I've done a few buildings before with wash + drybrush, but never any rolling stock. I started with a Bachmann MTA (reasoning that since I have 4, it wouldn't matter too much if I made a botch of it) and this picture from Martyn Read's fabulous Fotopic site:
     
    http://ukrailrolling.../p55847138.html
     
    and three hours or so later, here's the result:
     

     
    The little patch of paint in the photo is a lot more saturated, but I quite like the paler version. I also haven't managed to get the top angle of the bodysides the right colour, but I'll probably give that some more attention when I get around to making a load for it. The other side I'm a bit less happy with. I think it needs a bit more of the brown since the shading of the panel edges seems to be too strong. The touched up panel is to disguise a mistake - I was a bit aggressive wiping down one of the washes and took it back to the factory finish. I didn't fancy trying to re-weather one panel to match the others, so filled it in with the pink paint I used on the (prototypical) patch on the other side...
     

     
    A big confidence boost was realising that lots of people don't use airbrushes for applying a uniform coat of underframe grime - I'd always imagined this would be necessary and I'm really glad it isn't. The materials I used were Tamiya acrylics, a couple of generic black + brown washes from Games Workshop, coloured pencils and MIG powders to tie it together. I have yet to apply a varnish coat, and would appreciate any advice people can offer - I have some Testor's Dullcote sprays (the old formula) but I'm not sure if they're compatible with the acrylics and powders.
     
    If like me you were thinking about taking the weathering plunge, I'd say go for it - lots of fun to be had both browsing photos to choose a good example to work from, and in the actual doing. And unlike locos it's not too expensive to make a mistake
  14. Will Vale

    DCC breaker

    By Will Vale,

    I haven't had much to report for a while, although I've been busy with my wagons in the meantime. The main obstacle to progress has been that New Zealand appears to have run out of Peco code 75 flexi. I ended up ordering some from Hattons which arrived last week - amazingly a Sprinter fell into the box as it went past, or at least that's my story...

     
    So with track in hand I can get on and lay the last two sidings, but first I decided to tackle a task that I really hate - cutting and installing spare sleepers to go under the gaps at rail joints. Fiddly and tedious, but it' mostly done now.
     
     
    I also cut down most of the excess plastic around the mechanism on the Peco points - I'd already removed the springs and keeper plates to install the Tortoise motors, so this was just for looks. I think it makes a difference although I wouldn't try and claim I made a neat job of it. It would have been much easier to do this on the workbench (kitchen table) owing to the give in the cork underlay making everything flex uncomfortably when I applied knife to plastic. Luckily nothing broke. I cut some more spare sleepers short to replace the gaps left by the plastic baseplates, and at some point I'll need to fill in the gaps in the remaining sleeper tops where the spring goes.
     

     
    Finally I ordered and installed a DCC circuit breaker (PSX-1 from DCC Specialities - the only one I could find with a low enough trip current setting) in the track bus, since my Powercab didn't seem to handle shorts very well (unpleasant buzzing and display flicker - apparently it shouldn't do that?). I'd already put switches in the track and accessory bus wires, but that required manual intervention. The breaker is a really useful addition - when you drive a loco into the frog end of points set against you, the breaker turns off the track power while the accessory power is still live, so you can change the points, at which point everything carries on. Obviously sound is interrupted, but setting the "don't restart from cold" bit on the decoders means that at least it carries on where it left off.
     

     
    It also affords some peace of mind that hopefully nothing horrible is going to happen to my Powercab...
  15. Will Vale
    So now thoughts turn to scenery and track plan justification, so I've drawn up (roughly) what I've done so far.

     
    This isn't totally accurate, but it has the right components in the right relationships. It's a bit more flowing in the flesh I think, although I may need to tweak the right hand side since it has too many board-edge parallels (they aren't completely parallel, but that's maybe not obvious enough).
     
    Download XTC file
    I have a reasonable idea of what I want to do, but I would really welcome any tips and suggestions to justify it, pick a prototype, and make tweaks if they aren't too destructive. Apologies for the following ramble, since it's quite long
     
    Synopsis:
     
    1) Inglenook for Dutch/Modern UK set in East Anglia on LH board.
    2) Join to RH board to make a junction plus yard of some kind.
    3) Yard could be permanent way depot and/or ultra-small fuelling/maintenance point.
    4) Looking for prototypes, justification for interesting traffic, etc.
    5) Interested in modern era (for which I have mainly EWS stock) plus possible backdating to blue diesels/Railfreight (for which I don't).
     
    The idea is that the left hand board can be used standalone, or with a clip-on fiddle yard/headshunt on the right hand side to give an Inglenook micro. Scenery for this should be based on the Fens, and ideally I'd like it if UK distinctive elements could be kept to a minimum so I can use it for Dutch-outline stock as well - there are plenty of bits of the Netherlands which look moderately like the Fens around Ely where I grew up. If it comes down to hard choices, the UK is going to win though since I only have one Dutch engine.
     
    The right hand board adds to this to make a simple junction (the two routes leaving on the left) and would be used with a fiddle yard on the left side. I suppose there's also the option of having a fiddle yard on the right (or even a complete oval) for through running but I don't have room to do this at home. The right hand board is intended to be UK only.
     
    I thought for theme that the complete layout could represent a small permanent way yard, or the first part of a larger one. I know this is getting very close to TMD territory - and I like many of the TMD layouts I've seen - but still trying to make it a little different. I thought the two sidings on the right could be the usual fuelling point and inspection pit, or possibly just storage for ballast wagons? They're maybe too short for wagons, and the fuelling point would be maybe more interesting to operate.
     
    One prototype which looks promising is Whitemoor Yard at March. This has (or had while under construction) a nice combination of the dereliction of the old Whitemoor yard contrasted with the clean ballast, new track and construction detritus from the new one. The yard itself is massive, but the throat could work and there's scope for the road bridge over the wye junction at the left end of the layout. Not many prototypes for road overbridges in the area, which is what led me to it in the first place
     
    Old pictures of Whitemoor: http://www.flickr.co...ott/1817364611/
    New pictures of Whitemoor: http://www.flickr.co...N03/1859049901/
    Google map
     
    (Thanks to the photographers!)
     
    Scenery would be a bit different to Whitemoor though - I really want a small drain (ditch) on the left board bracketing a piece of arable land at the front with a beet clamp on it. Childhood memories, you see. The NIMBY banks/walls would fit behind the line though, and these are also very appropriate for modern housing developments near Dutch railway lines - you see them all the time.
     
    One problem with Whitemoor is that since both sides of the junction lead back to the main line, you couldn't bring interesting 'through traffic' onto the layout that way. I did wonder about a staff halt as a DMU excuse, but they aren't exactly commonplace.
     
    Sorry for the ramble, and many thanks if you made it this far Any criticism or suggestions would be very welcome.
  16. Will Vale

    Point motors

    By Will Vale,

    I just heard from the local model shop that my last Tortoise has arrived, so I thought I'd better get the other two ready so I can finish up the second board. Because the depth below board surface is only about 70mm (50mm Styrofoam plus 1x1 PAR timber) there isn't space to mount the Tortoise motors vertically. I saw an article in RM or CM a few years ago about mounting them horizontally using a metal bracket and a nut/bolt as a pivot/retention mechanism. My version is much less glamorous and uses a few bits of wire and some cheap modern Meccano:
     

     
    The modern Meccano seems a lot more fragile than the stuff I remember when I was a kid - you have to be very careful when cranking the bracket not to snap it like a dry twig. The brackets go on the flat ends of the motor, with the aim to get the edge of the nut (and thence the vertical arm) near the centreline. Not that it matters too much - everything is bendy and the Tortoise fulcrum allows a fair bit of adjustment.
     

     
    The pivot arm is soldered to the nut, and it can then be spun onto the bolt - only a couple of turns are required - the thread will keep it in place since it can't rotate. The end of the original Tortoise arm is then bend into a hook which slips over the new pivot. Because it's flexible it's easy to remove it and take the arm off - e.g. to trim it to length after test fitting.
     


     
    The whole thing doesn't involve opening the Tortoise casing, so I doubt it voids the warranty - after all, they're happy for people to tape/glue them to boards since that's one of the methods in the instruction leaflet. I'm really happy with them - I used Peco solenoids on another project and while I like the satisfying clunk, I found they were tricky to adjust. The Tortoise motors are expensive but when you add the price of a solenoid motor and the accessory switch and maybe a mounting plate, it's not that much more. I intended at some point to try the SEEP or Fulgurex motors but I haven't found them for sale in NZ.
     
    Hopefully I can get the second board up and running this week, then taking the German layout to a show at the weekend, then a big work deadline next week which is going to get in the way of fun stuff...
  17. Will Vale

    Wiring

    By Will Vale,

    I did a bit more wiring yesterday and today, and took some slightly less awful pictures. Only slightly, mind you...
     
    Here are the two modules:
     

     

     
    and here's the wiring. I spent an hour or so on Sunday making up the umbilical plug and socket (if this hobby offers any job more glorious than wiring multi-pin plugs I don't want to know about it) and mounting another tag board. I did a bit more in my lunch hour today (the benefits of working from home) and wired the umbilical to the tag board on the second module. I didn't recess this one since I might want to cut some of the board away above it and I'm not sure how much yet.
     

     

     
    Part of the reason there's so much wire under there is that the accessory decoder I'm using has eight outputs, so rather than mount one on each board there's an umbilical cable carrying four sets of motor driver outputs plus the accessory bus. All the complexity of DCC and all the fun of analogue wiring in one project The decoder (an NCE Switch-8) is great though - cheap, screw terminals all round, and fairly compact.
     
    Next task is to prepare the point motors (they're mounted horizontally so they need an extra lever and pivot) and get them fitted. Not a big job, but I need to find a specific piece of piano wire for the levers and I can't remember where I put it.
  18. Will Vale
    This is a mixture of chipping at the dry mud, then streaking it as per Martin's suggestion:
     

     
    and the other side (there's only one muddy wagon at the moment). Looking at these, It might be worth doing a little more to get the vertical stripes of thin mud (presumably waterborne) around the thick streaks.
     

     
    I also fixed some underframe damage to one of the wagons and took a couple of new pictures of the first two since there was a bit of sun this lunchtime. You can see the effect of drybrushing the underframes, which wasn't really visible on the earlier pictures - I think it was worth doing.
     


     
    All in all I'm fairly happy - in the sun, they seem to match up reasonably well to the pictures (also mostly sunlit) which inspired them. I also had a go at an interior last night (not finished yet) using a mixture of stippled tube acrylics and Mig powders. It looks promising (the tube acrylics allow a fantastic rust texture, which then acts as a strong anchor for the powders) but needs some more work before it's ready. More soon hopefully.
  19. Will Vale
    I spent a fair while yesterday working on the MTA underframes with powders, plus painting a few details and doing a little drybrushing and black wash for fake shadows and highlights. I think the drybrushing may have helped to lessen the overly soft finish, since it sharpens up the edges and also puts a bit of fine flecked detail on the panels. I've also cleaned up the data panels/overhead flashes a bit more, painted the shiny grab handles, touched in the buffers again, and rusted the steps and grabs lightly. See what you think:
     

     

     
    On the really dirty one I took the 'camouflage' (it was Tamiya DaK dark yellow, so a very apt description!) back to clean paint and re-did the mud splatters with a thick mixture of pigment and white spirit to get some texture. I then picked away at any blobs with a cocktail stick to try and get the runs vertical - looking at the pictures this might need another 5 minutes attention.
     

     
    The mud is also carried onto protruding parts of the underframe (as per the prototype picture) under the heaviest spills.
     

     
    I'm pretty happy with these now (although not with the photos - too much bloom from the backdrop - if I get some decent outdoor light I'll try and take some better ones) so I don't think I'll do more to the outsides for a while unless anyone has any bright ideas. The insides need tackling still - I want to try Pugsley's method since the results look amazing.
  20. Will Vale

    More MTA weathering

    By Will Vale,

    I've added some more underframe dirt, but it's not quite right - I bought a pot of buff coloured powder to see if that makes a difference, and at some point I want to gently drybrush the underframe but I'm wary of overdoing it. It did help a great deal to realise that the triangular gussets below the ribs don't appear to be in body colour in any of the pictures, although it looks like I haven't fixed this on the first wagon - it's right on the others though. Still haven't really touched the steps or the handrail.
     

     
    I've also made a start on two more, this one is supposed to be a little dirtier than the first, with dents/scratches from digger unloading added with a pencil. Looking at the pictures I think I messed up the buff-coloured washes - in my eagerness to stop them collecting by the ribs (which doesn't happen much in real life) I've managed to wick some of the wash off the panel itself and left gaps - oh well. I can probably fill it in again...
     

     
    The second is based on this prototype picture: http://ukrailrolling.../p14425124.html
     
    of a really filthy one with lots of fresh mud (?) on it. I think I've overdone this a bit but I'm not sure yet - see what you think. Possibly I should take one of the panels back to factory paint and re-do it with much less mud so that the muddy ones look more intentional?
     

     
    These two both need more work on their underframe, especially the second which has mud spills and things to add.
     
    Finally there's one left in unmodified state. Not sure what to do with it yet. I've also picked up a Railtrack PNA and from what I can see they are usually in horrible condition with peeling paint, rust galore, etc.
     

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