Will Vale

I really like the slightly patchy whitewash, although perhaps it needs a bit of darkening at the base of the walls - the contrast with the deck there is quite strong. That aside, the colour tones on all the parts are gorgeous - really rich without being garish or Kodachrome-like.

it may be worth putting a temporary roof over it before deciding what to do with it though - it might end up looking quite different with some shadowing?

I refuse to believe anything about this is less than exquisite, I think it looks amazing. The articulation shot is very impressive, I hadn't realised just how much travel you'd built into the bogie - usually those kinds of shots are reserved for offroad RC buggies etc.

You might be able to do something like the RC cars for braking - you could use a relay or solid-state switch to connect the motors to a resistance (with heat sink!) when track power is turned off or below some threshold, and to track power when it's available. But that might be a bit too much like making the innards of an electric loco and not a diesel...

I'm slightly disturbed to admit that I had a dream about chain shunting on Brewhouse Quay last night - it was actually a lot like this, except there was a small dog helping!

This is a huge improvement on the pictures you posted before, you can see all the detail in the brickwork which was lost in the JPG compression in the earlier ones.

Assuming the roof is grey, the white balance reads about right to me. If you want to double-check many cameras allow you to photograph a grey card and use that to take a manual white balance setting, or you can use it afterwards in Photoshop etc. to do the same thing.

The fringing on the chimney pots may not be easily avoidable - it looks like chromatic aberration on the high contrast edges. Some tips here which look useful.

Very nice, I like the shot of the 66 on the superelevated curve.

I agree whole-heartedly with the good wishes, and would suggest either the 009 or O-16.5 projects to start with. Apart from a selfish wish to see more narrow gauge on RMWeb, having something small get done quickly is motivating. Also with the roundy-roundy you can leave the train running in the background while you get on with some modelling - very comforting somehow.

Thanks chaps. I suspect the best plan is to carry on as pictured - Jon you're right that the other compromises are maybe worse. The running on the sharp curves is actually pretty good, it's just the extreme silliness it engenders as the train folds up into a half-a-hexagon or near enough to that

The saving grace for the right hand end *might* be that it'll be possible to photograph one or other tunnel mouth on the short section without it being obvious that the other is just out of shot.

Anyway, it's ballasted now, so that's a job ticked off, and I've boxed the left hand tunnel in and started on the missing landforms. Photos to follow. I hope whoever 'rated' this entry 1 star doesn't mind too much about the slow progress.

Good advice, thanks. These have been touched in with various colours, but when drybrushing the ballast the lighter tones over those sleepers which still have a brown hue do look very chocolatey

The real sleepers on this stretch are also interesting since it's laid partially with metal Y-sleepers. I chickened out of trying to represent those, but they have quite a nice rusty tone which spreads into the ballast.

Ah, but then you stopped to photograph the work and blog about it Great progress for such a short time, and that lorry looks very fine for a die-cast.

Huzzah! Glad to see you've bitten the bullet and got back to it, and that the modelstrip worked so well. The in-primer shot shows an excellent finish and all the detail is still there.

The use of elastic for sandpipes is intriguing. I've fallen foul of the class 60 ones a couple of times (they're a springy engineering plastic and are so close to the wheel treads that if the bogies have any sag they clip pointwork) and have ended up trimming them back. Maybe I can look at replacing them. Presumably the elastic just deflects if it encounters an obstacle?

Pictures look good to me - thanks for posting them! My favourites are shots 2 and 3 of Hedges Hill Cutting, and both Batty Moor pictures. As you say, excellent layouts and all new to me.

Judging from the movement of trains in some of the images, you must have a very steady hand!

I thought I'd already replied but maybe it didn't stick, sorry for the delay.

What you see in the Skalescenics picture above is already sieved, I found there wasn't much material which didn't go through the holes in one tea strainer, and nothing which went through the holes in the other It does seem fairly evenly-sized. I could probably do with finding an in-the-middle mesh for the future!

I've had a go at changing the colour a bit today - see the next entry for more.

I realised I never replied to your Paxton Road Mk. 2 idea. I think it's a good plan - somewhere between a photo plank and a shunting plank. I'd be tempted to get a turnout on there, wiring isn't *that* bad, but maybe that's just the kind of over-complication which gets in the way of finishing. Mind you, if you can handle a traverser, points should be easy

The biggest difficulty seems to me to be what to do at the ends. Unless you're prepared to only photograph side-on, you'll want something to mask the exit from the modelled scene. Maybe mirrors a la Hendre Lane would be a good fit here?

The answer is always going to be "it varies" - it depends on the stock, the loco, and your preferences really. Why not lay out some different radii with a couple of yards of flexible track and see where the sweet spot is?

For marking out the curves, use a string compass, or make a simple beam compass with a bit of wood. Nail in one end, holes in the other for a pencil at different radii.

Which of those ingredients is the unstable proto-matter?

Also when using glass matting like that, where it's exposed underneath, do you get problems with loose fibres or bits scratching your hands?

I was really hoping you'd get back to this eventually, selfishly I hope you continue because I'm sure it'll be something to see. Unselfishly, you should do whatever makes you happiest!

I reckon what you have in the picture is a good start and shows just how much more you can do over and above the (quite nice) Bachmann model. There's a lot of industrial-looking detail to capture and that seems to be going well.

Great - I like that you've captured the little tuft on top of the original

Do you think teasing out the ends of the twigs would work? That's the only real area of difference I can see between the model and the photo.

That's galling, so sorry that it's gone wrong - this kind of thing is why painting is my least favourite job

The yellow on the ends looks perfect so I'm sure you can get a better finish - maybe solicit a few more opinions and tips before continuing, take a deep breath, and go for it. As James says, you've got that fantastic chassis still in perfect condition, it'd be a shame not to put the body on it. And if bits do fall off while stripping the paint, fitting them back on isn't going to be half as much work as all the filing and sanding and testing was the first time around.

When I obliterated the detail on a scratchbuilt loco with aerosol primer (and then dropped it!) I ended up taking it off with lacquer thinner and cotton buds. It took a long time but didn't damage anything. I don't know if it's an appropriate option if you don't want to cut through the primer though. It does have the advantage that you can try a corner and see how it goes before committing.

I'd like to add my thanks for your blog too - it's really inspirational and you do a lot of stuff which looks pretty much unbelievable in terms of the fiddliness and quality of workmanship. Keep it up!

And a weekend car is a fun hobby in itself. The scenic space is liberating but difficult - it's very hard to get the prototype heights and angles right working from a limited set of views, and dealing with compression as well.

Amazingly the scenic width is only about 5cm more than Whitemarsh - small scale wins handily here

Did you have any trouble buying it in that quantity? Over here it was under threat of mild sales restrictions owing to people making "interesting" tea out ot it...

The thinner foliage and twigs look very nice indeed, although I think the second one with the split trunk might look better if the big branches above the split were thinner?

A rule of thumb which might help is that that the sum of the cross-sectional areas of the branches after the split should be about the same as the CSA before the split. So if you split the trunk into two branches the same size, the diameter of each one should be about 70% that of the trunk.

If you start all your wires at the root this works out automatically (provided you don't put too much bark on the upper branches). I got caught out by this when I tried tree-making because I wired extra bundles into the split branches to make twigs, and the tree came out rather top-heavy

You have a great eye for the overall composition of a scene. I love the flow of track and buildings, and the way they lead my attention around the layout.

Is this taken with the layout's lighting rig? I was trying to figure out why the chimney casts a soft shadow with a hard top, and then thought it might be from a line source like a fluorescent tube?

I find a tripod plus self timer and natural daylight are the best recipe. But you're right, it does seem like a hassle for progress shots.

There are a couple of easy things you could do to improve the above pic though:

1) Increase the exposure a bit, either with the camera or afterwards using Photoshop or Picasa or whatever you're using to crop the images.

2) (more important) Turn up the JPG quality, both in your camera (usually best to set it as high as possible) and in your computer program. When you zoom in on your image, you can see all the detail of the brickwork is lost in the JPG blocking. It also messes with the colours a bit. If your program has a percentage setting for "JPG quality", try something between 60% and 80%.

Hope this is useful!

That looks excellent! I read the link in your last post and I like the approach - but how long did it take to make?

Very nice - I really like the reflector and curve of the neck.

It looks like you could (if desired) get a mk 2. to light up if you had a core of thin brass tube (-) with a wire up it (+). You could maybe use beads for the detail below the neck in that case?