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Will Vale

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Blog Entries posted by Will Vale

  1. Will Vale
    Hirschsprung retaining wall by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I think it's salt deposits from water running down the face of the retaining wall. If it was a bird it must have been a legendary beast.
     
    As you can see the retaining wall is painted up now - I used a similar method to the tunnel in the last post, although without the pink tones. After doing the basic drybrushing I added a 'mortar' mix of MIG Concrete with a little Industrial City Dirt, made into a heavy wash with their pigment fixer. After waiting a few minutes I wiped much it off again, but because I hadn't let the underlying paint harden properly I took off some of the drybrushing in the process. C'est la vie...
     
    It did dry up nicely in the recesses though, and because it's pigment powder the finish is nice and flat and dusty-looking. After a few hours I re-did the drybrushing (brown, light grey, concrete colour) and touched in a few stones with dark brown where I thought there was too much pale pigment on the surface.
     
    Then the fun began - with a small brush I painted in the water damage with thinned concrete colour, neat and thinned white, and a little Games Workshop Flesh Wash, which is a sort of chestnut-brown translucent inky thing. After looking at a close up picture I thought it was a bit brush-strokey so I went back with a very fine brush and added the narrowest streaks I could.
     
    It's not exactly like the prototype (I should have more of a gap on the right, for one thing) but it's close enough to be suggestive of it, so I'm pretty pleased.
     
     

     
    When it's all *very* dry I'm intending to reduce the contrast somewhat with either a thin brown wash, dry pigments, or both. I'd also like to add some of the old wide streaking with pigments or drybrushing, and maybe paint out some of the existing streaking where I got carried away if it still looks excessive.
     
    All in all this has been a very entertaining sub-project - it's always interesting when the tiny brushes come out! I will try and make sure my next post has no tunnels in it though
  2. Will Vale
    I've been thinking about making something in 1:35 for a while, since like Tanis's 1:48 this allows a wide range of good quality cheap figures, vehicles etc. from the military modelling community. A representation of 60cm gauge using OO/HO track and mechanisms isn't that far out of scale so it's relatively practical from the railway side too. So I went looking for modern narrow gauge industrial stock to build and found Schoema, a German manufacturer. I knew about their Feldbahn locos, but didn't realise they now mainly concentrate on locos for mining and tunnelling projects. (Incidentally does anyone know a way to post o-umlaut on here? ALT-0246 and ö both didn't work...)
     

     
    Their stock has a fantastic functional aesthetic which is also quite friendly to modelling - no tricky curved bits to worry about! After a lot of searching I found this one, which is pretty small but has all the right features:
     

     
    Image from de.wikipedia by Reinhard Dietrich. Public domain.
     
    I've made a drawing (from perspective photos, so it's likely not that accurate) and that scales out nicely to match the Bachmann On30 trolley wheelbase at 1:35. This means I get to make a relatively accurate model as opposed to a might-have-been. The gauge will be a bit narrow, but they produce them down to 750mm gauge (and the gearboxes are narrower than that, so they could probably make a 600mm version if they really had to )
     
    So far, all I've done is cut out a few frame parts from 2mm styrene, and have yet to pluck up courage to do all the shaping. Once I have something more than a small collection of rectangles I'll try and post some pictures.
  3. Will Vale
    I did a lot more planning and tweaking and deciding, and was finally able to get some MDF cut for the sides of the board, and the track bed.
     

     
    After more tests I went with keeping things simple and not having any elevation changes on the track. I think the deciding factor was listening to the Z locos struggle on a 2% gradient - the Märklin Doppelstockwagen driving trailers have power pickups which add quite a lot of drag, and the hard-working motors are amplified by the lightweight board. I'm a bit sad about this since the prototype is heavily graded, but it's supposed to be an exhibition layout and reliability is more important than authenticity! At least for my sanity
     
    Given that decision, it made sense to use the flat surface I'd built for the track datum, which meant cutting down the front for the valley. This was a bit nerve-wracking, since it involved partially un-making my nice square rigid board. It took revenge by stabbing me in the finger, naturally, but I prevailed in removing 50mm from the front rail, ends and interior bracing.
     
    I've since built up the valley floor again, with the roadway:
     

     
    which is starting to look about right. Re-covering the top has restored most of the strength, and the MDF profile boards should finish that job.
     

     
    The MDF for the road and trackbed hasn't been fixed down yet - I want to cut some more out out the track bed to reduce the weight first. When your basic materials are so light even a small piece of 3mm MDF makes a big difference.
     
    It seems like slow progress, but a lot of work has gone into this, most of it in my head, looking at pictures and watching videos to try and see what the terrain does in real life. The leading photo' of the bridge is to check that an angle from some pictures I saw on Panoramio works on the model. I probably should have an extra 10mm under the bridge to give some leeway, but I didn't want to reduce the longitudinal rail any further, so 50mm it is. I've already had to piece together a stream bed below the 50mm mark - you can just make out in the pictures where the pieces fit among the diagonal bracing.
     
    The Spitfire once again proved its worth as a maid of all work - the largest piece in there is 1900x500mm - not small!
     

     
    The last piece of good news is that an eBay parcel which was lost in the post arrived this morning after a month in transit :D
  4. Will Vale
    What number am I thinking of? by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    "Sixty-nine, dudes!"
     
    These are the profile boards for the ends of the layout. Over an hour's sweaty work to measure and cut out with a Stanley knife, no new scratches on the kitchen table though! The cut-outs are hand-holds for lifting rather than tunnel access - it's easier to reach in from behind the layout since the openings are bigger. The sticky-out top bits are a possible lighting pelmet mounting strategy, if it doesn't work out I can always cut them off.
     
    When I came to attach these (after levelliing the ends mildy with a surform) I got a bit of a surprise. I know how long the layout is, but I didn't really appreciate that length until I had to stand on a chair to apply glue to the top surface!
     

     
    It's setting up now, slowly since it's been damp out.
     
    Other progress over the past few days - the road has pavements, which were a lot of work to cut from styrene, and a retaining wall from Heki foam. This is a bit fragile and frankly could be better, but I don't see another solution for now. I'll add a capping strip later and repaint it.
     
    I've also done a lot of carving on the Hirschsprung, which is starting to look more like the real one. I'll try and take some better pictures when the board's horizontal again!
  5. Will Vale
    I was unhappy with what I'd managed last time, so I thought I'd have another go.
     

     
    The H&S poster is from a photo, printed on the computer - the paper is a bit thick, but the real thing appears to be a metal or plastic plate rather than a sticker, so some relief is OK. I should have used a low pass filter to remove the ambient light before resizing though! I've also painted the armrests and the knobs on the handles black as well as a couple of other details, and dusted some grot around the floor and bulkhead. I decided that the vest was a bit big so I repainted it into a vest and overcoat, sort of like this picture by Carl Davis.
     
    The driver is a second attempt as well, still not too happy but he looks a bit better than last time. This is by way of a practice since I'd ultimately prefer to have a 4mm scale figure in here rather than 1:87 - he looks tiny next to Inspecting Man
     
    I really should stop messing around with this and and get on with the layout - I'm not really following the Principle of Greatest Suck * here...
     
     
     
    * Work on the worst (suckiest) bit until it is no longer the worst bit. Then work on the new worst bit.
  6. Will Vale
    I thought I should take the plunge and get a test item of motive power finished up ready for Rail-ex in November. I like 60s, so it's going to be 60014, which I bought locally a year or so ago but hasn't been out of the box much in the meantime apart from the occasional ogling session
     
    First step was to fit a sound chip and speaker - this is using the Howes class 60 chip with a DCC supplies bass reflex speaker fitted above the twin grilles in place of the "doughnuts". Since my chassis is an 8-pin version, there wasn't initially room for the speaker at this end, and it doesn't really work at the other end either because the cutout for the cooler intrudes too far into the body. My solution, which may not be the best one, was to cut off the PCB mounting pins from the chassis casting and move the whole thing up a bit. I remounted the PCB on narrow strips of foam tape.
     
    It's still a tight fit, but it's possible to get everything in this way. I did cut a roughly 2mm bevel into the body shell on the edge of the cooler cutout, this doesn't go through to the outside but gives just enough space to clear the PCB at that end. I put the decoder underneath that area as well. At least there's plenty of room for the wires The speaker wires were cut short (why do they fit this hefty wire?) and soldered end-to-end with the decoder speaker wires, a bit clunky but it's wrapped in heatshrink and then tape to keep it all together.
     

     
    With the body off, I removed the jelly-like glue on the cab bulkheads and took them out so I could fit a driver. I also painted the small marker light lenses a warm yellow since they seem to be orangey-yellow rather than white on the real thing, and re-fitted the fire extinguisher which has been rattling around in one of the cabs for ages. The driver is from a cheap box of random Atlas figures, so he's a bit small. I'm almost embarrassed to show the close-up, since I haven't painted any 4mm figures before and this is painfully obvious. But better to be honest about these things I suppose... His shirt and tie colours are copied from a picture of 60014, and his jacket and trou are mixed up from a Vallejo dark blue and black. Unfortunately the blue was terribly glossy, so I gave him a coat of Humbrol Matt Cote which has helped a little. There's a little bit of "theatre makeup" shadow and highlight on the face to help it read better through the cab windows.
     

     
    I made two other small changes to the cabs - one was to touch in the door frame in silver paint, since you can see this glinting in pictures of 60014 when seen end on. The other was to add a hi-vis jacket hung up behind the second seat, again based on pictures. This is just a bit of paper painted orange, with the reflective stripes added with white paint and finished in silver.
     
    Through the cab window it all looks a lot more restrained, thankfully!
     

     
    Next job is to fit the bufferbeam details and install wire loops for the Sprat and Winkle couplings. The intent is to lightly weather the loco (gulp!) to represent its condition around 2005-2006, before the beastie stickers got torn.
     
     
     
     
     
  7. Will Vale
    I thought I'd share a picture of my workspace on Saturday morning before the exhibition - I like working on the kitchen table, but I'm beginning to see why Mrs. V. might not be so keen.
     

     
    There is yet more mess out of shot.
     
    To be fair, after working until 2am two nights in a row to finish the layout and rolling stock, I did come home from day one of Railex and spend my evening tidying up. Perhaps that's why I'm not sleeping on the sofa?
     
     
  8. 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.
  9. 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?
  10. Will Vale
    I finished painting the last two limpets (the ones with the finer springs) today. First, here's another Dutch one:
     

     
     
    based on this picture of 390317 by Andy Jupe: http://gingespotting.../p32727072.html
     
    I really liked the detail of the TOPS panel covering an entire bodyside panel, and done recently enough that the black paint and axleboxes were relatively clean. Unfortunately I assumed that because I could paint out the dashed outline successfully, I could also join up the dots neatly. Not so! As you can see it's a bit freehand looking, I think the best fix is probably to paint out the white box entirely and leave the printed numbers and recoded M as-is. That should let the machine-printed horizontal number be the strongest feature again, and hide the fact that the M is hand painted.
     
    I also have a single example in Loadhaul colours which is supposed to be following the picture in Nigel Burkin's book, but got a bit busier than I wanted it to.
     

     
     
    I found fading the black difficult to do without getting blotches or tide marks visible - possibly because acrylics don't give much working time. I also found that one the printed panels came apart almost instantly the acrylic thinner hit it, hence the spot of patch painting on the right hand side. It's odd, the others were perfectly robust, but this one came off on both sides of the wagon. To hide the blotchy wash I made the spots and runs a bit stronger than the picture. I also had trouble with paint being knocked off the ribs leaving very strong black vertical lines - I've partly touched these in, but it looks like I might have to go back and redo this area now that I can see the pictures - far too much contrast.
     
    The other side is similar, plus a bit of patch painting to cover up a bad job of a graffito from a picture of a another Loadhaul wagon. I made it too big, and blotched the lines, so it had to go. The replacement was a lot easier
     

     
     
    I haven't recoded this one as an MKA since the prototype was still coded ZKA when the picture was taken (2004 IIRC) which is in-period for Whitemarsh.
     
    That's about it for limpets at the moment, I do have a couple more but I think I need to see something else for a while having done five without much of a break! They do make a nice rake though, they're surprisingly massy and satisfying for four-wheelers. Next might be a Loadhaul shark, which I want to run with these to relieve the "odd one out" effect of the single orange and black limpet.
  11. 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!"
  12. 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...)
  13. Will Vale
    Train to Freiburg by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    I thought I'd take all the junk (well, most of it) off the layout so I could see how things were going. The ballast has worked out well, the tunnels are boxed in at long last, and I like the sweep of the track at the left hand end. Still no bridge though, as you can see:
     

     
    The problem I've come across is that with the tunnel through the Hirschsprung in place, and the Oberen Hirschsrpung Tunnel which hides the exit to the fiddle yard, there isn't really enough room in between to capture the necessary features. There should be a rock shed, which is at least half a full-length coach, maybe a bit more, then various retaining walls and space to see a decent length of train before the next tunnel swallows it up again.
     
    On the model there's rather less space:
     

     
    Compare this with the real location:
     
    http://maps.google.de/?ll=47.937428,8.021425&spn=0.00173,0.004128&t=k&z=19&vpsrc=6
     
    It's frustrating, since the real thing isn't impossibly long, it's just more room than I've left space for. I was so keen to get the scale of the bridge at the left hand end exact, and retain the sweep of the track up to the middle tunnel, that the interesting right-hand side has got rather marginalised. The bridge isn't even there in reality, it's just out of scene to the left before the Falkenstein Tunnel
     
    I suspect there isn't much I can do about this at this point - shifting the whole RHS left a bit is possible but I don't think I have the time - only about 7 weeks to finish the layout now. A less dramatic option would be to push the final tunnel mouth back around the return curve, but the scale length coaches look pretty silly on 145mm radius, the fine scale track stops just inside the tunnel, and I'd probably have to make a considerably wider-than-scale portal to avoid scraping paint off the coach sides.
     
    I may end up compressing the rock shed and walled section behind the portal (the tunnel was partially destroyed by Wehrmacht forces near the end of WW2, and rebuilt with some fairly serious walls where once was bare rock - see the Tunnel Portale site for more details).
  15. 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.
  16. Will Vale
    Retaining wall and tunnel by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    For the Flying Kipper, obviously
     
    Not much to report last week - I slowly layered up some more foam for carving the Hirschsprung itself, but didn't get much more done than that until Sunday, when i had a blitz on the remaining structural engineering works. I built the retaining wall and east tunnel portal for the Unterer Hirschsprung Tunnel, as seen above. Then I knocked together some 2mm section to make the rock shed which was added rather more recently.
     
     

     
    As you can see from the prototype photo, this butts up against the original portal and extends the length protected from falling debris - the cliff is past vertical at this point.
     
    The other big thing I've been putting off and really needed to get around to was building the bridge over the Engenbachdobel. This is a 56m span deck girder bridge, and is scale length on the layout - quite a treat. I counted the bays on the girders to get the pitch, and found the nearest size of Evergreen strip and U-channel (with the strip such that it fits into the U). One packet of each was assembled in A-B-A-B fashion with the strip spacing the U channel out. I glued it all edge on to make a sort of ribbed sheet, and strips of this were cut out and fixed to a hefty styrene core. This is a perhaps pretty odd way of going about it - I was worried about getting the ribs vertical, and thought that working with long lengths first would make this easier than trying to line up lots of short lengths accurately.
     
     

     
    It worked, but my home-made ribbed sheet tended to roll up which made it rather tricky to handle. I cut the pieces over-length and after leaving it all under two feet of books overnight, it was possible to trim and file the edges flush with the core. I then filed away certain ribs and replaced them with splice plates. On the prototype these aren't completely evenly spaced, but I had 38 bays per girder rather than 32 (owing to rounding to a slightly thinner strip/channel size) so I went for a regular 8-2-8-2-8-2-8 spacing, with the splice plates over the pairs of bays.
     
    Finally some 0.5mm strip capped off the top and bottom. It all looks amazingly (to me at least) regular considering what a massive botch job the construction really was. Hooray for files and sandpaper!
     
    I did one other smaller job too - the tunnel at the RH end of the layout needed a bit of retaining wall/rock shed which was revealed in a photo angle I hadn't previously found. I added a second wall to it which has been covered with clay. Carving time tomorrow...
     
     

     
    I've started running into an interesting problem - this blog and my Flickr photos are coming up increasingly when I search for place names in the layout area. It's making research a bit circular, although looking for German-language results helps a bit!
  17. 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.
     

  18. Will Vale

    Warming up cold ballast

    By Will Vale,

    Tinted ballast comparison by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    Cold as in colour temperature. The finer ballast I'm using (as seen on the right in the above picture) is a bit too blue-grey and not buff enough, so it needs to be coloured.
     
    I poured some onto a bit of MDF and set it as I had on the layout, using alcohol and Klear (stay off the floor polish!) Once that was dry I tried various colouring options:
     
     

     
    From left to right, MIG Ashes White, lightly then heavily applied. MIG Beach Sand, and their neutral and dark washes. Then GW Tallarn flesh acrylic drybrushed over the ballast, and MIG Gulf War Sand. The pigments were applied by mixing with fixer and flooding the surface. I think they're all too yellow, and the other colours that I have are darker rather than lighter than the current ballast.
     
    My favourite, unexpectedly, was the pink drybrushed paint. I did a test section of track as seen above, using Tallarn Flesh, then Dheneb Stone (a sort of concretey colour) and finally a very light tough of pure white. It's not quite right still, but much better than before. I'm hoping that dry powders and a brown wash around the rails will finish it off.
     
    Here's an extreme close-up - the conduit in the foreground is 1mm Evergreen section scored at ~3mm intervals and painted the same way as the concrete on Whitemarsh. I ran some MIG dark wash into the grooves since they weren't showing up in pictures.
     
     

     
    Is it me or do the sleepers look like Mars Bars? I might have to do something about that when I touch in the rails and chairs, as well as knock the stray ballast grains off.
  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
    Bricks scribed by Will Vale, on Flickr
     
    Yet another tunnel portal post I'm afraid, but this is nearly the last one! I've carved the retaining wall and attached portal, as seen above. It wasn't entirely straightforward owing to the shape, so I thought given that and the different course heights on the different sections of stonework I'd better draw some guides before starting. I used a propelling pencil and a small styrene square as a ruler, tipping it carefully over the angle between the walls. It was easy to get wrong because the side wall of the portal is at a steep-but-not-vertical angle, and the lines kept wanting to meet it at right-angles. Thinking about it after the fact it would have been better to measure up from the baseline on both edges and the angle, then mark and join the dots?
     
     

     
    With that done I marked the edge every 2mm (walls) and 1/16" (portal) and scribed the courses. Because I couldn't put the wall down flat anywhere I didn't quite manage to follow the lines, and there are some overly-thin courses as a result. Since it's stonework I think that might not look too bad - although the prototype is quite even here, it's less than even elsewhere so it shouldn't be totally out of place.
     
    Having done all that I then realised the angle between the retaining wall sections was much too shallow :cries: So I had to cut it in half and reassemble the pieces. If nothing else this was a pretty good demonstration that clay bonded to styrene with PVA is a robust building material - no damage while trimming and flexing the parts.
     

     
     
    I reassembled them at a steeper angle and filled the gap with styrene strip and more clay.
     
    Once that was more-or-less dry I rejoined the courses across the angle, then carved the verticals as seen in the header image. I defaced some of the stones and rounded edges on several courses using a flat-headed screwdriver blade. It's very satisfying blowing the dust off and seeing the relief appear as if by magic. The enlargements are a bit cruel - there are plenty of visible marks from slipped tools, but I think it'll be quite acceptable once painted.
     
     
     

     
    Finally I sealed the surface with 1:1 diluted PVA - this contains the dust, and hopefully makes the sheet more plasticky and resilient. After it dried I went back and filled in a few low spots and a missing brick with more clay, and rounded off the copings on the portal. The copings received some grooves cut with the edge of a small file, to give the impression of individual stones.
     
     

     
    In other thrilling tunnel portal news, the last portal on the layout has had its gappy arch filled with clay (despite having painted it I knew I had to do this - it was annoying me in photos). I also cut copings from plastic strip, grooved with an ultra-fine saw since I wasn't able to line up file cuts reliably around the corners. The new copings are pleasingly chunky and seem like a good match for the prototype.
     
     

     
    Paint next, then these pieces can be fixed to the layout ready for the final bits of rockwork around the track!
     
    NB: The photos have an odd mix of halogen and daylight illumination because I was working at various odd moments of day and night. The really odd ones have the halogen light plus daylight in an attempt to highlight the relief. Maybe I should get a daylight bulb...
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