GWMark

Well spotted! When I posed the model for the picture I put the tender on it's chassis the wrong way around - I had not of course spotted this myself. As for progress, yes there has been some. It is not waiting for me to fit the cranks and get it running. I then need to look into the thorny issue of getting the balance right. I'll post an update on here some time soon.

Hi, I have been bad about updates on here, but I have just done a first pass at weathering GT3 and posted a picture of this today. I have the feeling this is a project I will never finish, since I ma now thinking of a chassis swap. After Tim Shackleton saw my GT3 some time ago and got interested in doing one of his own, soon to appear in print I believe, we did some work on transfers with John Isherwood at Cambridge Custom Transfer and Chris Gibbon at High Level has been persuaded to do a chassis for it. It will hopefully be available shortly as part of Chris's "Platform" range.

I see it has been a while since I posted here, this doesn't mean I have done nothing, just not written about it. I even failed to do my post-Missenden entry that I normally do - more on those projects in another post. This week I have been doing some weathering, mostly of Daniel's RTR stock that will be appearing on Hinton Parva when it goes to Quainton for the May Bank Holiday Steam Gala. However I also thought I would have a go at my GT3 since it now has the transfers on the tender, from Cambridge Custom Transfers. So here it is with a first attempt at weathering it - looking at the picture I think I will add a few more touches to it. However I am thinking of changing the chassis for the HighLevel one when it comes out, so maybe some of it will wait until after that. My GT3 will also be on Hinton Parva when it goes to the Quainton event.

The project I undertook as a quick diversion ended up, like all the rest of my projects, languishing in an unfinished state for quite some time. However, spurred on by the desire to take a couple of locos to the weather course at Pendon the other weekend I actually made a push to finish it off. All it needed was plates, transfers and some bits that had been painted separately to be attached. I also needed to do something about the bright brake gear I had added, it was still raw nickel silver, so that was chemically blackened at the same time, along with the coupling rods. As you can see it probably still needs a second application and the transfers have not sat down well on the paint finish. In the end I did not get around to weathering it, so I can still take some time to do the last few bits of finishing. It was painted with LifeColour acrylics, with the transfer applied straight to the paint finish. In retrospect I should probably have given it a high gloss finish for the transfers to adhere to and them sprayed it with Dullcote afterwards. Given that I think the transfer look too low, I may replace them and redo it, so maybe that will be my chance to get it right - transfers always end up looking wrong to me. It also now has a DCC decoder fitted, which coupled with the weight of the white metal loco, a good motor and gearbox arrangement and a reasonably square chassis, has resulted in a very nice, slow running loco. I have yet to decide on coupling arrangements, I have been playing with Dingham couplings for my shunting puzzle and may outfit this local for those. The other options are Sprat & Winkles or tension lock bars. I need to think about it as I now have stock with all three type of coupling - I can see some barrier wagons in the offing so that I can convert between the different couplings.

Continuing in my catch up of things I have done in the last 12 months… I am a bit of a sucker for gadgets, so when I came across a chip that offered simple and cheap WiFi I started to think about using it for model railway purposes. I found on ebay a little board that had the WiFi chip on it, along with all the circuitry needed to make the thing work, the ESP-01 board. It was available for about £4 from the UK or about £1 direct from China - I had to have a play. The chip in question, an ESP8266, is not just a WiFi chip but also an embedded microprocessor, with input/output pins and all the usual features of such a processor. So I came up with the idea of adding a rotation sensor to a wagon wheel and programming this chip so that it counted the wheel rotations, did a simple bit of maths to work out the speed and offered a website that gave the current speed, average speed and distance travelled. Almost everything I needed was already on the little board I could buy from ebay, all I needed to do was to interface a rotation sensor and write some software to download into the processor. Since I wanted to make this battery powered rather than rail powered - because I wanted to use it on both DC and DCC and wanted the peer to stay on when the train as stationery - I went for a rather large wagon to house the circuitry and battery, a Parkside Dundas kit of a GWR Mink G. The wheel sensor consists of an LED and phototransistor built in to a single unit, known as a photo-interrupter. I small brass strip was soldered to a 2mm wheel bearing and inserted on the axle of the wagon. A slot was cut in the bottom of the wagon, above the axle, for the sensor to poke through and the sensor built onto a small piece of stripboard with a socket for the ESP01 board. Every half revolution of the wheel the light beam is interrupted. So using simple maths, pi * d is the circumference of the wheel, the time between the beam being interrupted is measured in microseconds and hence the distance covered in the time can be worked out and the speed, allowing for the scale, can be determined. Remembering of course to divide the distance by 2 since the beam is interrupted twice per revolution. It was fairly easy to write the code that was to be downloaded into the little ESP-01 board, this basically allowed the board to connect to my household WiFi whilst at the same time being a WiFi hotspot of its own. This meant I could connect a laptop, phone or tablet to the WiFi hotspot housed in the wagon and use the wagon anywhere I liked. As well as being a hotspot the software was also a web server, so I standard web browser, such as the one you are reading this with, could connect to the wagon and display a page with all the data about the wagons speed and distance traveled. I still have things I want to do to this; the switch will be changed and made accessible without having to remove the roof, which is currently held on with a magnet. I want to replace the battery with a possibly smaller rechargeable one and have it charged via the track power - when it is available. I also want to add more to the software so that it not only has the current speed and distance, the speed and distance for the current trip but also for the lifetime of the wagon. The definition of "trip" is based on a configurable period of non-movement - i.e. if the wagon doesn't move for a given time, default 1 minute, a new trip is started. I also want to improve the configuration interface via the website it offers. The other thing I am thinking about would be to provide an application on my laptop that gathers the data every few seconds and draws graphs of speed, acceleration etc, just to see how comfortable we make trips for little passengers! Clearly this is just a bit of fun, but I can see a lot of other possible uses for this sort of cheap WiFi technology, especially for the likes of garden railways to setups in which lots of control wiring is difficult. These things are really a spinoff form the current buzz around the "Internet of Things", but I think us modellers can take advantage of this trend.

I noticed it had been a very long time since I wrote anything here, March of last year. I didn't even do my customary write-up following the Missenden Abbey weekends last Autumn and this Spring. This does not mean nothing has been happening, just that I have written nothing about it. Both Daniel and i went to Missenden in October and then again this March, in fact the March weekend may be the last for a while with both of us going as Daniel is about to depart for University life - although there may be an outside chance he will come back for the Missenden weekends. My little Black Hawthorn is now nearing completion, the motor and gearbox are fitted, the coupling rods, piston rods, steam glands are all in place. Pickups have been added and the frames treated with metal blue. It runs nicely, very slow with little hint of rocking. The addition of the buffer beams has added some weight to it as well to help with pickup and traction. I even had it pushing a rake of 15 wagons, which is pretty good for something so small and fairly light. The brake gear is made and just needs fitting. I need to add pipe runs, safety valves, handrails and sandboxes. There is also a back head to be detailed and fitted. In all not far to go with this one now. The fuse wire you can see coming from the front of the cab is a pipe run that needs to be trimmed and attached still. As for Daniel's project, the Hawthorn Leslie, that is also taking shape. He too now has a running locomotives, although it is lacking piston rods, cylinders and some other vital parts. As always the close-up picture reveals something to be improved, Daniel is not pleased with the Sandbox and intends to remove and reposition it so that it sits down flatter. The smokebox front also needs a little bit of cleaning up after he discovered a misplaced overlays which he moved during the last Missenden session. In general he too is pleased with his progress and the way his model runs. Hopefully I will finish mine soon, probably the next time I will go to Missenden I will start another project. We are not sure with Daniel, maybe once exams are over he will do some work on it over the summer holidays.

Sorry, only just seen your comment. Sadly it has progressed a little, but not finished yet. I am still working on making it move, although having redone the bogie attachment and pickups I have now at least solved the shorting aspects and can make it do a circuit of the test track without the body. With the body it wheel spins, but it has no rods at the moment, so only the rear wheels are driven. I will do a full update on progress with this and my other projects this week, as always I have been side tracked in different directions!

Tony, thank you for a great day, it was a privilege to get to play on Little Bytham and to run your stock. Hugely enjoyable. I can only comment on the 72xx, a PDK kit that I built over many visits to Missenden Abbey, some under your tutelage. Once again thank you for hosting us at Little Bytham, it was a testament to how enjoyable the day was that the time seemed to go by so quickly. Mark

The Missenden Modellers sprint weekend is over for another year, once again the weekend went really well, with both Daniel and I making significant progress on our projects. My High Level Black Hawthorn has seen some significant progress with the super structure, with a few steps back along the way. I used my newest toy, the RSU for some items, to great effect, but was a little cautious of some things, so used the standard iron and regretted the mess I made with it compared to the neat soldering I achieved with the RSU. I still need to put in lots of practice with the different ways of making use of the RSU. It proved a great way of adding the cylinder wrappers and the riveted end plates, both of which has been very neatly added. Daniel on the other hand corrected his issue with the misplaced frame spacer on the Friday evening and moved on to the footplate and cab. He made great use of the RSU to solder the overlays on his cab and the detail parts to his saddle tank. His saddle tank is not yet attached, it is merely laid in place on the footplate. Hopefully we will both get a chance to progress these models before the next Missenden outing, it would be embarrassing to go back again with no progress between weekends. As for my setback, I managed to touch the barrel of the soldering iron on to one of the white metal springs, which is now partially melted. I also noted that the cab has sprung out when soldering the rivet strips to it, so that will need to be redone to make the back and front parallel. Both should be fixable however. None of the problems we have had is a fault in the kit to be honest, it is things we have bought upon ourselves.

Following our last visit to the Autumn weekend at Missenden I was sold on the idea of an RSU, fortunately I had a "significant" birthday a few weeks again and my wife bought (let me buy) an RSU as a birthday present. With about 3 weeks to go before the next Missenden weekend I as keen to try out my new toy. I did not want to go straight into attacking my High Level Black Hawthorn that I had worked on last time, so I looked around for an alternative. Fortunately I found a wagon kit I picked up a while back on a second hand stall, a Sprat & Winkle kit of an LSWR 8ton Cattle Wagon. It was a bit of a sorry old set of etches, badly tarnished and a little thin. So I decided it would be a good trial project to see how I got on with the RSU - expecting with all new tools that my first efforts would be pitiful and I would go through that period of thinking "why did I buy this" - but how wrong could I be. The technique I settled on was to first tin the small parts with a conventional iron and then use the RSU to attach them to the main etch. I had a sheet of mild steel and a few rare earth magnets, so I tinned the strapping and set to with the RSU. The results were way better than I could have hoped for on a first attempt, lovely clean, strong joints. No excess solder to cleanup and parts in just the place I wanted them. No more small bits getting swamped with solder or begin left attached to the iron when I took it away. The picture below is the result of two evenings of about 2 hours each, much of that time was actually taken up in cleaning the etches before tinning and removing/cleaning up the tags. I have done no work to remove any excess solder, this has only been washed to remove the carbon deposits from the RSU probe. I was pretty impressed with the results, more done to the quality of the tool than the workmanship, but it is exactly what I had hoped for. Best of all that job I hate most is now rendered less frequent, cleaning up surface solder. I still have a long way to go, and lots of experiments to try, but so far this is looking like a good purchase.

Following a good weekend at Missenden Abbey with my new High Level kit I didn't want to just ditch the Duke in favour of the new kit. I had decided not to take it to Missenden this Autumn as there was little new to do on it and also the Black Hawthorn would fit better on my little shunting puzzle. It seemed sensible to make the most of the time with expert advice on hand to start something very different from my previous modelling attempts. So this weekend it was the turn of the Duke again. On Saturday evening I dusted off the Duke and set up my workbench on the kitchen table. Following a few hours last night and a few more on this wet Sunday afternoon I had managed to move the Duke forward a little. I built the four spring units and installed them above the driving wheels. The springs were a bit of a challenge to make, with the main body being a white metal casting, some little etched brackets for the ends and then wires to hang the springs on. The instructions call for the brackets to be bent into a U shape, wires to be soldered to the base of the U and the the white metal casting to be trapped in the top of the U. It was very fiddly and I soon dropped the idea of the plain wire in favour of some brass lace pins. The heads gave me a better area to solder to and made the whole thing a little more resilient. Getting the spacing of the pins right, and getting them parallel with each other and the dropper from the base of the casting was also an issue, so I made a simple jig to hold it all in place - having three hands would make this loco building business so much easier! Especially if they could be heat resistant. I also added the etched cab beading, handrails, treads on the steps and installed the chimney. I decided to not go with the solid white metal chimney in the kit, but rather choose a nice hollow brass one I had. There were two reasons for this; one it looked nicer and two is was lighter - given the balance issues of this 4-4-0 that was an important consideration. I am looking for an alternative to the big white metal dome next, anything to help balance this thing. I also turned my attention to the back head and cab detail. It turns out that my second hand Mallard kit has a few casting missing, so I had to build the back head detail of a scrap brass, handrail knobs and an etched regulator handle I found in my bits and pieces box. It now has a regulator handle that moves - just got to work out how to make it move as I open the controller up - or maybe not! Installed the springs was a little bit tricky, since the holes did not line up, the one in the photo on the front driver has a bit of an outward lean to it, I think I will need to take it off again and reposition it to stop this. It is really beginning to get there however, and does look the part. There is a lot of detail to add to the loco and the tender needs the rest of it's steps, toolboxes etc. I also have to sort out the tender ride height, fit the springs now that I have some new castings (there were only 4 in the box for six wheels) and arrange the coupling to the loco. I want to see how the balance of the loco goes before I attempt to couple the tender - there is room for some lead in the firebox, which may bring the back down enough that I don't have to hang the tender off the rear to make it balance - we shall have to see. These etches have been sitting in a box for a long time - they are dated 1975 I believe, it looks like they may become a complete locomotive before they reach their 40th birthday!

Thanks Paul, I will pass that on to Daniel - he is building the 0-6-0, I am building the 0-4-0 Mark UPDATE... Just looked at his instructions and I can see the issue, the particular spacer appears in two different locations depending which figure you look at. Figure one has it in the position into which it currently is. Later figures show it further back - looks like he has a bit of a task to move the spacer, he will be so happy when he gets home from school!

Today saw the end of the Autumn Railway Modellers Weekend at Missenden Abbey. as is now the custom I attended with my son, now 17, for a few days of locomotive kit construction. This year the numbers of kit constructors was down, with people being seduced by the laser cutting, scenery, weathering and electronics side of the hobby. This meant there were two small rooms of us loco builders, we were placed under the care of new boy Tony Gee in a room with 5 other 4mm modellers, whilst next door Kevin Wilson presided other a collection of 3mm, 4mm and 7mm modellers. This year was a first of us, we both had kits from the same manufacturer, High Level. I had a little Black Hawthorn 0-4-0 industrial tank to put together and Daniel had his Hawthorn Leslie 0-6-0, he had made an aborted start on a year ago on this but stopped due to lack of the correct size wheels. Both of these kits proved to be superb pieces of design that went together with no modification. Extremely well thought out kits with a great level of design. Daniel progressed well with his 0-6-0 frames, adding large amounts of dummy inside motion detail and brake hangers. HIs soldering has always been a little heavy handed, but is improving no end, with help from Tony and others, not to mention the benefits of more practice. Having a good kit to work on has help boost both his skills and confidence. I on the other hand took by frames to the point at which I really needed to paint behind the wheels so that they could be fitted before the remaining detail. The frames themselves are rather substantial Nickel Silver etches with some very nice brass overlays that fit beautifully around the axle bushes. The inside motion on this little 0-4-0 was somewhat simpler and because I was building it in OO I am unable to fir the firebox. So having taken the frames as far as I wanted by Saturday evening I turn my attention to the superstructure and build the smokebox and firebox areas. Very pleasing curves and some lovely little details around the bunkers. These two kits have proved to both of us the value of working on something that has been so well designed, it is very tempting to buy some cheap, secondhand kit from the 70's to get started with. However this might well prove to be a false economy as it is hard to tell if the poor results are due to poor kit design or lack of ability. I would not say that the High Level kits are easy beginner kits, but they certainly remove one variable from the equation. Away from these two models we also had an interesting time dropping in on the laser cutting and observing first hand the results one of the other modellers in our room could obtain with his brand new resistance soldering unit. It was the first use he had made of it and he achieved some really stunning results on some siphon sides, building up, multiple layers of overlays. I even managed to have a go with it myself, which was a dangerous thing for my pocket I think - I new have one of these on my modelling wish list! As for Tony he proved to be a knowledgeable, entertaining and extremely helpful tutor, he even brought along some really nice locos that Peter Denny scratch built in EM before I was born. Some amazing techniques when you consider the age of them. It goes to show how inventive good modellers can be when the materials are not available and how spoilt we are these days. Also thanks to Tony for bringing along a ready built Black Hawthorn for me to look at. I hope we see more of him at these weekends. Now we have to wait for the spring for the next Missenden weekend, hopefully we can find a time for a family modelling day or two between now and then so that we can make some progress of these fantastic little locomotives. Thanks to Chris Langdon and all the others that organise these weekends and to the various tutors that impart wisdom and bad jokes!

The autumn weekend of railway modelling at Missenden Abbey is almost here again, once again Daniel and I will be attending. This time I am going to start a new project, the Duke is to a stage now that I think I can probably finish it at home, plus I am keen to start a project that will run on my little shunting puzzle. Therefore my plan for the weekend is to make a start on a High Level kit of a Black Hawthorn 0-4- ST. As part of my preparation I have started (several times) to read the very extensive instructions and examined the lovely looking etches. I had to take a picture of the etches before starting, and probably making a bit of a mess of them, since they do look so good. Chris really does do a good job of both the etches and the instructions. Daniel will be working on a High Level kit as well, having finished the 14xx chassis, his is a the Hawthorn Leslie, a kit that has been to Missenden twice before, both times work was stopped due to incorrect wheels being purchased. Doing it once is an accident, twice is carelessness - or so I tell him. Still his comeback is that his project has more wheels than mine this time. Anyway, looking forward to 2 days of uninterrupted, well almost, modelling.

My "quick diversion" ended up like all my other projects, victim to my lack of time, or is the a lack of commitment leading to excuses why I don't have the time. Either way it took longer to get to this stage than I had planned, but now I have the little saddle tank running and pretty much finished, it just needs some lamp irons on the front and the brake gear. I am holding off on the brake gear until I have resolved a clicking sound, which I think is a pickup catching on a spoke, but so far I have not found the cause. When I run it upside down the noise goes away, so it is proving difficult to see the cause. The lamp irons are another issue, the sand boxes are so close to the buffer bean there is no space to mount them conventionally on the footplate. I need to try to see how they should be mounted, either attached to the buffer beam or the front of the sand boxes seems to be the two options. Sorry about the quality of the images, I think I need to get a better lighting setup. The roof and toolboxes are not attached, they will be painted seperately and then attached. Also the whistles will be added after the roof has been painted. A little green putty was needed to fill a few gaps, this still needs to be sanded back when it has dried fully. It will never be described as a fine scale model, but it has a certain charm to it.

Looking again I did something stupid when I checked in my copy of Russell and associated the wrong caption with the drawing, whoops. So I have ended up causing some confusion for nothing. Sorry about that. Mark

Partly from frustration and partly because I like to see things move I decided I wanted to do a little project that was going to be reasonably quick to get to a stage were I could run a loco. About 2 weeks ago, at Expo EM I purchased an unbuilt Wills Finecast kit of an 1804 GWR Saddle tank, last week at Railex I also obtained the etched nickel silver chassis from SE Finecast and some Gibson wheels for it. So on Friday evening I decided to make the chassis. These Finecast etched chassis go together really quickly and using my Avonside jig made a nice square chassis in no time at all, a Comet GB1 50:1 gearbox and a Mashima 1620 mated to t made up the power plant. So on Saturday morning I sprayed the chassis with etch primer and left for 24 hours. Meanwhile Saturday evening gave me a chance to start on the body. So far all was going I might have my running chassis in time to test run it at our club evening on Wednesday. Sadly Sunday did not go to plan and I had no time until the evening to touch it again. Still I managed to paint the chassis at least and solder a few more bits on the body. I like to only fit Gibson wheels once if I can, so wanted to paint the chassis before fitting the wheels for the first time. Monday evening was spent adding the wheels, making the motor fit and working on reaming the rods out to take the Gibson crank pins. Only a few hours, so it has motor and wheels fitted, rods on one side ready but not finished on the other. Maybe I will get time tomorrow to do the rods on the other side and add the pickups, if not then the test run will have to wait another week. Still I did cheat and have run it with a 9volt PP9 battery and the rods loosely fitted, it seems to run acceptably, but the proof will not be known until the chassis is finished. I am a little nervous about the crankpins since I had to drill the wheels as the holes for the pins were missing. It would be easy to have one of the crank pins out of alignment and end up with a binding chassis. The other interesting thing is what the prototype really is. It is not an 1804 Class saddle tank as it says on the box, nor is it really an 1854 which is what it was latter renamed to be. From looking at my copy of J H Russell I suspect it is really a variant of the 1701 class - maybe somebody out there knows for sure? As a quickie project, for some nearly instant gratification, it is not looking too bad - of course finishing it is another matter

The weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of March saw the running of the Missenden Spring Weekend, the 31st year of the Missenden weekends. Daniel and I were lucky enough to have once again received the weekend as a Christmas present from my wife - I suspect this is partially so that she can get rid of us for the weekend and partially because she knows we both enjoy the weekend and it is a present that does bring "more junk" into the house! Normally we are unique amongst the modellers that attend, being the only father and son combination, this year we were joined n the Abbey Barn by another father and son duo also doing the "smaller scale" loco construction under the tutorship of Tim Watson. Although both of them clearly had more experience than both Daniel and I put together. My decision on which project to work on this time was once again the Mallard Duke. One of the things I had discovered was that the gearbox I built last time, to replace the first one that fouled the backhead, was preventing the body sitting down on the frames. I had therefore sourced a third gearbox, a High Level Kits Roadrunner+, this had the advantage of a very small final drive, allowing it to fit under the cab floor. Therefore Friday evening consisted of building this new gearbox, followed on the Saturday morning by fitting pickups, refitting the body and watching it run. Or rather spin its wheels mostly. Although fairly well balanced there is not enough weight over the rear driven wheels to allow that pair to drive the loco. The good news however is that the 1020 motor leaves space at the rear of the firebox into which extra weight can be added almost over the driving wheels. Adding the coupling rods will of course help as well. The rest of the weekend was taken up with adding detail to the tender, the beading strips, valances, tender side extensions, water filler, brake gear and water scoop. Perhaps not a very long list, but there were other distractions, such as great demonstration on painting from the master himself, Ian Rathbone, looking at other modellers projects, the coffee breaks, food and not to mention talking and drinking the real ale! The loco body now sits down correctly on the chassis, and the motor disappears nicely into the firebox. Pickups have been fitted to the top surface of the chassis for the front driving wheels and another set in the dragbox for the rear drivers. Everything is nicely hidden, with just a small slither of the gearbox visible if you look from a low enough view. Once again this weekend Daniel had planed to work on his High Level Hunslet, however not for the first time, we had the wrong wheels. He therefore switched back to the project he started at the last weekend in the Autumn of 2012, a High Level 14xx chassis. This still needed a good deal of construction, he had added the dummy inside motion last time, but still needed to complete the non-driven wheel arrangement, build the brake gear, add yet more detail and build the gearbox. All this he achieved, plus he built the gearbox for his Hunslet. He left on the Sunday afternoon with a complex chassis fully built, just in need of paint, final reassembly and attachment of pickups, something he could be proud of, even if most people will not actually see all that detail once it is placed under a 14xx body. So now another Missenden weekend is over for us, these weekends are something we both enjoy and is unusual in that it gives us an environment to do something we both enjoy without any distractions or family disagreements. It also gives us a chance to catch up with all those habitual attendees that we now call friends, plus meet those that come along for the first time. Hopefully we will be allowed to attend the October weekend and we will continue our association with the Missenden Modellers, if nothing else these weekends give our projects an enormous boost.

Partly because of lack of time and partly because I have allowed myself to be sidetracked onto other things progress has been a little slow on GT3 since my little burst at Christmas. I did manage to repaint the grills, giving them a wash of aluminium and then dry brushing the green over the top in an attempt to make the discs behind the grill show up better. I think I have got the effect I want, but it does need toning down a little, by the whole thing will need that at the end. So grills and steps in place, it was time to try my hand at the lining, a new experience for me as everything else I have done to date has been unlined. I thought about using a pen, but in the end went for Fox transfers. The effect is not perfect but it will stand scrutiny from normal viewing distances. The camera is always a little harsh, and it is only when you take these closeups that you stop things. I have yet to do the lower line and the cab roof. The cab fit is not great and will need a little work, so I was leaving that until I had finished all the handling of that area. I need to paint the panels at the front in order to use the labels I got from Ian (macgeordie), as the letters themselves clear, I also need to tackle putting a white background on for the tender emblem - not something I am confident about. Mark

Sorry, my entry was a little confusing, I have track circuiting on all the blocks and the RFID on just one block. The track circuits are also connected to the CBus, so JMRI can use both to track the occupancy and identity of the trains. Sorry for the confusion Mark

It has been a while since I managed to do much (anything) to the little shunting puzzle, my problem has been that the layout had to go up into the loft in order to free the spare room for a visitor and has not made it down since. The problem being it is a big hassle to get it out of the loft to spend an hour working on it and then put it away again. Given the current weather conditions, and the amount of juke currently residing in the loft, the prospect of venturing upwards and doing work in the loft is also not very appealing. I was having the discussion yesterday when I said "I can tell you how long it is, I will look at my blog". It was then that I realised I had failed to document the last bit of progress I made, so in an effort to reawaken the enthusiasm I thought I would "back fill" the story. Soem years ago I started dabbling with RFID for train detection, this result in the production of a MERG RFID reader kit and has found use on a club layout. I wanted to also employ RFID on my little shunting puzzle, mostly because I wanted to use this layout as a testbed for ideas, but also because I thought it would be fun. The big question was how to link it into the control system, I didn't want something that just triggered slide displays like I had done before, I wanted to have it integrated. This layout uses the MERG CBus system for control, all the accessories, the DCC command station and the throttles are connected to the single CBus, so it seemed logical to connect the RFID to this as well. So the first task was to build an interface between the RFID reader and the CBus - those members of MERG that are interested can see how this was doen in the MERG Winter 2012 Journal. This gave me the ability to send a message to every device on the layout whenever a train passed over the reader, know the question was what to do with it. The layout currently has no dedicated control panel, instead it uses JMRI running on a laptop display a mimic diagram and control the points. The laptop has a connection to the CBus in order to allow this, so therefore the laptop and JMRI is able to receive the messages from the RFID reader. So my next step was to add functionality to JMRI so that it could understand the messages received from the RFID. Fortunately JMRI has the ability to have something called "Reporters", these are devices that report back train information to the software, they are designed for system like Railcom in DCC that can send train identification from block occupancy detectors. So I created a new one of these reporters to understand my new CBus message for an RFID tag read. The reporter allows a message to be placed on the control panel window when a report is received, this message can be tailored to contain any text you require for a given train identity. Since the layout also has block detection, once a train is detected using the Reporting, as the train moves from block to block, the report can follow it around the layout. The upshot of all this is that I now have an RFID reader on the single line that feeds into the sidings of the layout, as a train passes the reader a string is displayed that identifies the train. When it moves into the adjacent block the message on the screen will move with it, and stay with it as long as it is detected within any monitored block on the layout. When a second train enters it is also read and can be tracked in the same way. As long as both trains are not is the same block they will be tracked independently of each other. So I now have a mimic diagram that shows me not just what block are occupied but also the identity of the train in that block - just like the real railway does these days.

I wanted a little project to do during that time between Christmas and the New Year, it had to be a small project as time would be an issue - it isn't fair to lock yourself away from the family for too long at this time of the year after all! But I wanted something I could look back on in these depressing first days back at work and think - 'I actually did achieve something during the holidays'. I decided my long mothballed GT3 project would fit the bill, no major jobs, just lots of finishing touches to do, or so I thought. The tender had been painted already, and glazed, it just needed the round grill painting and the pickups adding - this ought to be a nice little job to get me started. So day one of the project saw the pickups added to the outer axles of the tender and the drawbar coupling arrange sorted to allow current to be feed to the loco using the original Hornby drawbar and a custom built arrangement on the tender. Also the buffers were added to the tender, round sprung buffers have been used, GT3 had round buffers on the tender and oval on the loco. The next day, and several days after that, were spent on the loco itself. The paint surface was still not right, so a little more time with fine wet and dry and a fibre glass brush was followed by a good wash and dry. In a break form the winter rain time was found to spray the loco body with the Halfords Rover Russet colour (probably not the right choice in hindsight). Once dry, the next day, Humbrol Metal Cote Silver was used to paint the window frames and the handrails. The interior of the cab was painted with a white acrylic, just to brighten it up before adding detail. the top grills got a coat of Chaos `black as did the steps on the front buffer beam. The brake gear was laminated, from Ian MacDonalds etch, and the front bogie guards bent up and soldered. I also added a section across the from of the bogie frames to fill in the gap between the resin fake frames. These brass and plasticard parts where then primed and painted with a Matt black Halfords spray can. The headcode discs similarly primed but painted with the same white acrylic used for the cab interior. Them came the job of assembling these parts, added the front buffer beam assembly, the oval sprung buffers at the front, inserting the front grill and starting to build up the loco. It is not finished yet, I still need to add the side grills, however I am not happy with the paint job of these, and it is easier to paint them before attaching to the loco. Also cab detailing and glazing is needed, transfers, lining and some more painting. Also, looking at these photos it is clear that a lot of the paint on the handrails has come off with handling and there is a bit of a droop in the front buffer beam area that needs to be sorted. I also have some fibre optics to add to illuminate the headcode disks. My quick little project for Christmas, with the satisfaction of "finishing" something before going back to work has not really succeeded, but I have a least made some noticeable progress. Maybe it will not take me another 18 months before I get GT3 out again to work on. In fact I will probably take it up to our clubroom tomorrow to give it an outing on the test track - the clearance between the tender and cab is a little tight, so I want to see if it will go around curves and negotiate pointwork, I may need to readdress the loco/tender coupling arrangement.

Despite having a long list of other things that I really should have been doing I stole a little time this afternoon and evening to work on the Duke - at least this time I know I will have done something on it between Missenden weekends! Not much has been done to the locomotive itself, I have added two overlays below the footplate that run the length of the valances and provides a row of rivets. Also some back-head detail has been done. The next major job is to do the springs, but I didn't fancy that, so I made a start on the tender. Th main structure has been completed, it needs the wrapper and details to be added and the rather daunting - since it will be a first for me, flare on the tender to be done. A wash with "Shinny Sinks" and it is back in the box until I can steel some more time to work on it. I can also use the excuse that I want to get some nice brass casting for the boiler fittings and also that I need some tender springs, there are only 4 in the box.

Having just returned from another weekend of modelling at Missenden Abbey I intended to write up my progress on my workbench thread, then, last night I looked at it and realised I have not made an entry since the last time I was at Missenden, back in the Spring. This got me thinking, my plan had been to show off the progress with the model I had taken and talk about the events of the weekend, but I soon began to think that this gap in my workbench was more indicative of something else, at was at that point that domestic duties overtook me and the updated was curtailed. It is not true to say that I have not done any railway modelling since the spring, I have a layout thread that proves otherwise, baseboard building, track building and laying, electronics construction etc. It is true that since the summer started all I have managed is to build an RFID CBus interface and do a new point control board for the panel of Fisherton Sarum, so not a lot and not what many people would recognise as modelling. This this made me think, is the reason I enjoy these Missenden weekends the fact that I get almost an entire weekend of nothing but time to build my models or do I get more from it? It is certainly true that if I would try to sit down on Friday evening at home, spread all my tools around the kitchen table that I use as a workbench, and concentrate on nothing but my models until Sunday afternoon, only stopping for meals and to sleep, I would very soon find that I was either deeply unpopular or worst within the house - in reality it would never happen. Also I would feel guilty about it and stop, clear-up and generally not concentrate on the modelling tasks. So from that point of view Missenden offers me something I could not get at home. But is this the only thing that makes me go back again and again? In the feedback session at the end of the weekend Chris Langdon came up with a quote that is rather apt, "Missenden is like a country club" - it is true that the surroundings in the Buckinghamshire countryside are rather nice - the Sunday morning coffee break on the lawn watching the red kites soar around in the crisp autumn sun was rather pleasant. There is also the fact, that as a serial attendee it is a time to renew friendships with others that you see maybe twice a year. The other thing about Missenden, and perhaps the one that is most obvious, is that you have experts tutors on-hand to take your problems to or ask questions of. This year was no exception, but saw a slight change around and was perhaps all the better for it. I always do the same thing at Missenden, and have done for a number of years now, 4mm locomotive construction. When I first went, it was Tony Wright that was the tutor for this session, after the well known and sad events in his private life. He was followed by Tim Shackleton for the last few years, this bought a new perspective on some aspects and was an interesting change. This Autumn, the 4mm and the 7mm locomotive construction took place in one large room, this meant we had two tutors on hand instead of the usual one per subject. The 7mm group was nominally tutored by Kevin Wilson and the 4mm by Barry Norman - in reality these two where shared between the two groups. Kevin was a new name to me, and I had to say was excellent at what he did and showed a lot of patience with Daniel, my now 16 year old son, who is also a serial Missenden attendee. Barry was better known to me for his scenic work, but this weekend proved to me that there is a lot more the Barry than the scenery side of things - his skill and advice proved to be my saviour when I discovered that the cab I has attached to my Duke back in the Spring was not square. When I reached one of those despair moments at the thought of having to dismantle the whole thing Barry stepped in with some help and advice and we managed to square it up without having to restore to major deconstruction work. The result is pleasing and allowed me to progress a little more with the Duke. I also replaced the gearbox with one that would not intrude into the cab of the loco, this also turned out to be a little harder than expected and took the entire Friday evening and spread into the Saturday morning. Progress on the Duke may not look spectacular, but I turned a bit of a corner with it, and can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. The other aspect of the weekend, and one that I hinted to above, was the attendance of my son Daniel. Although we share the hobby, and go to exhibitions and clubnights together it is rare that we sit down next to each other for an entire weekend and work side by side and talk without the usual teenage issues - I know he will hate me for saying that! He also progressed on a new project, a High Level 14xx chassis kit. He made of lot of use of Kevin time, so much so that he became known within the group as "Kevin's shadow' by the Sunday morning. I think that for a still relatively novice modeller he did a pretty good job of what is a complex kit to build, I will leave that to others to decide however since I am probably slightly bias. So what are the most precious things from the weekend that I refer to in the title of this post? Probably not the part complete model I walked away with, although that is important, but more the time away from all the pressures of "normal" life, the "quality" time spent with my son, the friendships of Missenden and the ability to call on some quite extraordinary talent and experience within the hobby. I really enjoy my weekends at Missenden and hope they can continue for years to come - I realise of course that a time will come when these are solitary outings for me, but I want to make the most of sharing these experiences with my son while I can. A big thank you to those that organise the event, I would encourage any of you who are maybe thinking about taking part in this or similar weekends to take the plunge - I know I was unsure at the first one, but now look forward to the next one every time.

Finally, after yet more distractions and life in general getting in the way I have got the major part of the wiring of the layout done. Last night saw the first train movements across all lines and points on this rather small layout (5ft x 2ft). There is still work to be done, the uncoupling magnets are not wired up, the wiring needs to be tied back and labelled and I need to build a control panel. Although this is a small layout I wanted to use it to try out a number of ideas, so there is rather a lot of electronics in a small space. The control system is MERG CBus and the trains are driven by DCC. There is block occupancy detection, with 6 blocks, one for the point ladder and one each for the 3 sidings, the headshunt and the feeder line. The picture below shows a general view of the underside of the layout and the "spaghetti" that I have just finished installing. The grey box in front houses the transformer and thermal cutouts that provide two 16V AC feeds to the layout via the thick black wire that plugs into the lefthand side of the board. These two 16V AC circuits feed out from the power socket onto some tag strip from which the 16v circuits go out to the general boards around the layout. Both the grey box and the tag strip have indicator LEDs for each 16V AC circuit, so that I can tell if there is an AC fault in the transformer box or the feeder cable. Also on the shelf with the power socket is a board that produces 5Volt and 12Volt supplies, each at one amp, again each of these supplies also has an indicator LED. From here the 12Volt and 5Volt supplies go to a number of supply distribution boards, again with LEDs. It is to these distribution boards that each circuit board is connected. The idea being that the supply can be checked at various points and that each board has its own connector on the block it get its power from. In the lefthand section there is also a track occupancy detector, a couple of electro-magnets, a servo for the point in this section and a DCC distribution board. Colour coding of the wiring is important in my scheme, any pair of wires that are made up of red and black wires are always DCC bus or dropper wires. A single green wire is connected to a frog. Blue and green twisted pairs are the CBus, Orange and Grey pairs are 5Volt supplies, White and Violet pairs - 12 volt supply wires. Green and yellow pairs are for occupancy detectors. A pair of red wires indicates a 16V AC feed. Servos are always connected by 3 wire cables, unfortunately the extension servo cables I have are a different colour coding to the cables attached to the servos, but the servo cables are very obvious. The middle section of the board is the really busy one, this contains the shelf with all the CBUS boards on it, including the DCC command station, the USB computer interface, the board that will control the electro-magnets (when I finally wire them up), the board that connects the occupancy sensors to the CBus and the servo control board. The picture below shows a closer view of this section. As well as the shelf with the CBus boards on it, there are also a number of boards mounted on blocks of wood that I have glued to the underside of the 4mm ply baseboard. Immediately below the CBus shelf are a pair of power distribution boards, a 5 volt and a 12 volt. It is possible to see that the LEDs are lit on both, so we know power is getting this far up the baseboard. There are three MERG occupancy detectors (DTC8s) that detect the DCC current flowing by using small transformers. This means there is no voltage drop in the detector circuit and yo get very sensitive detection for no lose of traction power. One of these detectors has a small stripboard next to it that is used to join the stock rails on each of the points. The point ladder acts as a single section, but detectors are fitted to each stock rail. This means that a single conducting wheel on any part of the points should trigger the detector, but it also means that the frog is not used for detection. This is important as the frog are switched using frog juicers, so current detection would not work currently across the frog juicer. The other boards that can be seen, one of them attached to the side beam, are frog juicers - a dual juicer and a mono juicer. A lot of dropper wires also come through the baseboard in this section, and each pair is feed through a cable tie base to act as strain relief and hopefully prevent the wires being pulled off the rails if snagged. The three droppers from one of the points can be seen just to the right of the servo. The DCC bus can be seen running down the left side rail, this is made up of heavy duty wire and is feed to a set of DCC distribution boards that are mounted on the opposite side of the board to the CBus shelf. It was done this way to keep the DCC as far away as possible from all the signal electronics (and I don't mean railway signals, I mean low voltage electrical signals). This means all the red and black dropper wires run down the picture to the DCC distribution board that is just out of shot. Again the DCC distribution boards have LEDs so I can check the status of the DCC bus at each board. The final section, on the right of the top picture, contains just a single servo, uncoupling magnet, and DCC distribution board. I have however included a close-up of the servo to show the way it is attached. I bought some very cheap mounts on ebay that allowed me to fix the motors side on the the baseboard below the boards. I then ran a thin piece of piano wire through the tie-bar, looped it around the servo horn, across the other side of the horn and bent it at right angles. This means the piano wire pivots around the centre of the servo horn, so a very small movement of the servo is needed to change the points. It gives a very direct and simple to install mechanism, but due to the small degree of movement int he servo, less than 10% of the entire movement, it becomes hard to accurately set the end stops on the servo. I am considering replacing this simple mechanism with something that uses more of the servo's throw and should be easier to set up correctly. As it stands it does work, but the servos sometimes chatter, and this can not be good for them. So having wired this little lot up, I connected a computer to the USB interface, configured all the CBus modules (I'm using FLiM mode for those that know about CBus) and built a JMRI panel to drive the points and display the track occupancy. To my great surprise I only had two real problems; a bad connection to one of the frog juicers which was resolved by reseating a wire, and a dead sport caused by paint on the track. I was able to run a loco across all the points and siding within 5 minutes of first completing the panel design. There are a few rough spots on the hand-built track that will need a little tweak; one joint has somehow managed to loose it;s fishplate and the ends of on of the switch blades is causing a wheel to ride up. Otherwise I am pretty please with my first hand-built track-work and more than happy with the CBus control system. It was not long before I had a sound loco running and switched to using an iPhone to drive the loco. I have since added route controls to the JMRI panel - which makes it really easy to also set the points via the phone, and made it so the point control gets automatically disabled if a loco is in the point ladder at the time you try to change them. So is it worth all this complication, especially on such a small layout? Well, yes in my mind. I would probably not add so much if I was just building a shunting puzzle, I might do away with the block detection, but for anything bigger I would not. As a vehicle for testing out things it is really paying dividends. I would rather learn on this small layout then try things out and have my dream layout go badly wrong. It will soon be time to start on the scenic side of things, but some housekeeping jobs need to be done with the wiring first - like mounting the CBus RJ22 connectors, wiring the uncoupling magnets, building the DCC handset and maybe even a hardware panel. Another thing I want to try is to connect my RFID stuff up to the CBus, again not really needed on a shunting puzzle, but it gives me enjoyment and a place to try out the ideas. Now, where did I leave that labelling machine....