Fen End Pit

Very, very nice... David

That looks like a fun project, similar size to what I'm building with Clare. I think the new Peco Bullhead track looks great and I'm not sure that I wouldn't have gone with it if I didn't have all the P4 stock already! Don't be put off hand building the odd point though if the location deserves it, it really isn't that hard with C&L or Exactoscale components. Are you planning to blend the sides of boards 4 and 5 into A and B? Good luck with it! David

I decided to give the 3D printer a little job and modeled up some right angle magnetic clamps. These have 4 strong magnets mounted into them and while obviously of no use for anything 'hot' for holding two pieces at right angles while they glue they could come in handy. I'll put the .STL files on the thingiverse if anyone is interested, I made too different sizes, one 50mm and the other 30mm. They proved to be very useful when assembling walls of my station building toilet block. This was cut in two layers of 1.5mm MDF. I managed to cut the quoins for the main building out of thin 160gsm (200 micron) postcard card. These did tend to come out a bit like a cake doily and were very fragile, once you have 'half cuts' for the brick joints there is a risk of them falling apart before you can stick them on. I sprayed the main 3mm MDF walls with a Halford's red oxide paint to seal them before adding another coat of Humbrol Matt 70 brick red. The centre parts were masked and then the edges sprayed with Matt 83 which was also sprayed on the quoin 'doilies'. Before assembly I rubbed some Wilko fine filler into the brick joints and brushed with Vallejo grey model wash. I am amazed by how fine the laser cutter can cut 1mm MDF, the glazing bars on the windows come out at about .45mm and I was able to paint them with the light green edging, though it is virtually invisible in the photographs. I will be painting the window sills in this colour to match the colour photograph I have from about earlier 60s'. The windows are not stuck in yet and the roof needs a little work to fit better. I used the 'engrave' operation on the cutter to take the surface of the lower pane of the window back before cutting but I think I need to cut it back a little more so that the lower pane seems to slide behind the upper pain. I've found that with care I can just shave a British Standard Gnats off the central glazing bar to improve the look but this is not for the faint hearted! I have a little fettling of the platform to do to make the hole the building fits into right. As a bit of a break from CAD and the lasercutter, (the 3mm MDF brickwork took about 90 minutes to cut, the quoin card nearly 30 minutes) I made up a facing point lock for the Cavendish end of the loop. Now I have to do a detector for the ground disc, but that probably comes when I start worrying about signal cabling. Thanks for your interest. David

I hadn't thought about that. I probably wouldn't want to get into the production business but I'd be happy to share the drawing if that would help. Maybe someone set up for cutting large quantities of ply like Tim Horn could help? David

I've thought about this, wondered about making a 3D printed insert which acted as a 'puttaona'. David

So, this one is a bit detailed and has a few ramblings.... Sorry Some modellers are very clever, they come out with perfectly formed designs, work tirelessly to bring them to fruition and produce superb pieces of work first time. Some practice 'slow modelling', being superbly organized, only getting out the tools and materials needed to for the job in hand and breathing deeply while wielding their scalpels. Much respect it due to these folks, if you feel you fit into these categories then good for you. I'm afraid that I have neither the skill nor the patience. I tend to build things the best I can at the time and have no qualms about 'going back and having another go'. One of the great benefit of the automated tools I have at my disposal is that a lot of the grunt work of redoing something can be done in CAD and on the lasercutter/3D printer. Sometimes I waste a bit of raw material but if can make something better in increments then I'm happy. Perhaps I should coin this 'Agile' modelling after the current trend in software development. I guess I work on the principle that sometimes it is better to build something, even if it turns out to be wrong or could be made better, than not to make anything - 'slow modelling' can risk becoming 'no modelling' if all you ever do is sit in your armchair. Even if all I do is learn how to make a better one then I feel that is a gain. Anyway to the case in hand. I've had a few iterations now of cassette design for my fiddleyard which I thought I'd share. The original design had two low ply sides and a curved handle. The end has a tongue and a slot which aligns the cassette. I realized that these would fit nicely in the 3 larger drawers of my Ikea drawer unit but not the 3 slightly shorter drawers, the handle over the top of the cassette was unnecessarily high and could be cut down a lot without impacting the strength of the unit. I also found that if I flatten out the top of the handle it would be possible to stack one cassette on top of another and they wouldn't slip off which could aid handling and storage. Both these designs though had a common flaw, the sides of the cassette, even though they were only 25mm high, made getting stock onto the rails very difficult if not impossible. As you can see there is no way to get your fingers into the align wheels with the rail particularly with bogie stock. So we come to the third iteration. By extending the sides up to the top of the handle and cutting large holes in the side the unit keeps its strength, still stacks, if anything better than before and you can get the sides of bogies. A pile of cassettes can be made without the risk of them slipping off each other. The other change I made was on the arrangement for current collection on each cassette. On the original version I had made a sort of 'side scraper' design with a phosphor-bronze wiper mounted to engage with the side of the adjacent cassette, this worked from an electrical point of few but I found it could introduce a slight sideways force on the cassette. The original arrangement looked like this. As the cassettes are held in compression by the sliding end clamps I realized that this was unnecessarily complicated and that just a sprung upstand on end of the cassette would press against an identical upstand on the next cassette. These are very much simpler to make and easy to clean and tweak to give a good connection. So in the end I got the cassettes converted to this new arrangement and built another four long and two short cassettes. All this cassette work obviously lead to running a few trains around and it was very satisfying get some stock out of the drawers again. The Class 15 made an appearance with a very mixed bag on a parcels train. There is a Mk1 full brake, a ex-LMS full brake, a GUV, a Gresley full brake and a couple of CCTs on the rear. The station building now has the roof on, I was pleased with the way the various pieces went together, trying to draw up the hipped sections strained the brain a little! I've also had a first short at the toilet block. So I hope you liked this longer than usual entry and please enjoy you modelling, at whatever speed or style works for you. David

After many hours in TurboCAD I've finally made some physical progress on the main station building for Clare. There has been much counting of bricks and much studying of an April 1986 copy of Practical Model Railways which features some drawings of Lavenham by Jas Millham. Clare was a 1865 'medium' design but I have been able to incorporate what I've learnt in my building of the platform 2 waiting shelter and, even further ago, my station based on the GERS drawing of Takeley, an 1865 'small' design. I've drawn the parts of the building in a single TurboCAD drawing with the base brick work on one layer and the raised quoins on a separate layer. This makes the drawing show things in context but makes it easy to just copy the base and the quoin overlays into different cutting files for the laser cutter. I managed to get almost all the parts on a single piece of 3mm MDF 500mm x 245mm from the Model Shop in London. As usual the Lasercut software got its estimate of cut time wildly out, estimating 24 minutes for a job which actually took nearer an hour! I think it can't cope with calculating hundreds of 1.1mm cuts. The little tabs and sockets which align the parts are hidden behind the quoins so should be invisible. They do ensure that all the parts fit together straight and square. I got as far as a dry assembly to see how the parts go together, apart from one tab which was 1mm too big which could be cut down easily, it all fitted well. This is the road side, there is a glass canopy over the middle section. The platform face has a brick built shelter in the centre section. The brick section is low and is topped with windows in the same way as the waiting shelter opposite. I tried the building in place and it looks pretty good. I'll let you know how it progresses. David

Yep, I am intending to fit a detector on the shunting signal and an FPL on the main loop point. David

Thanks Dave Yes, I will slow the servo down a bit, it is a little fast. The wide sleeper gap is a baseboard joint and you are right I need to put in a cosmetic sleeper where the join is, you can see the solder where the rail ends are soldered to a brass bolt which goes down into the end of the baseboard. David

The S&T team were out again today, taking advantage of the reduced Sunday service to install a ground disk at the exit of the down goods lay-by. This signal was built from some etches which I believe were produced by D&S in the last century. It is f**tingly small!, the disk being about 5mm in diameter and the total height only being about 11mm. Normal/Danger:- and when cleared The wire linkage through the baseboard also drives the balance weight.. Normal/Danger and cleared. Hours of fun to be had.... David

I managed to make some more progress on the signals for Clare and now have the down home and up advanced starter in position, if not properly bedded in. Both have 3d printed tapered 'timber' posts and lamps with the rest of the details, arms, ladders etc being from Model Signal Engineering. The taller home signal was printed on the Anycubic photon but I reverted to my new Ender 5 to print the shorted starter. Both have a length of brass rod running up the inside for strength. The advanced starter has a patch of white paint on the bridge to aid sighting, the signal still needs some colour in the spectacles. Yes, I did have to have two attempts to place it which is why the hole in the ground is bigger than it ought to be! The home is taller and the arm is visible over the bring parapet so that the signalman can see it. The track on the left is the goods lay-by, the signal reads for the running line on the right. Both signals are driven by servos and a MERG Servo4 board running the 'Sema4' firmware. This means that the servo can be set with on and off positions, the speed of the movement and optional values for 'bounce'. This last one is going to take a bit of adjustment to get right, but it is fun playing. https://youtu.be/KFD-4s0eeVY Also over Christmas and the New year period I was able to get some thin ply (thanks Michael) added to the front of the layout. This allowed me to tidy up the contours, hide the polystyrene and generally make things look more pleasing on the eye. I am still undecided as to the final finish, I think it is too light at the moment but don't know whether to vanish/stain it as wood or paint a suitable colour. I've still got to apply some more static grass to the section nearest the camera. Happy New Year and hope 2020 goes well for you. David

My clever wife bought me a new 3D printer for Christmas (how did she guess what I wanted?) I was a bit concerned because the box was shipped direct from China by FedEx via what appears to be a puddle at Cologne Airport. Creality customer service were very helpful and we decided it was worth trying to build it and just replace any bits if we found they had been damaged. In the end everything went together very easily ( about 30-45 minutes assembly to first print) and I managed to print off the sample 'little dog'. The only issue I had was that the print bed was just slightly bent and trying to get it level just using the four leveling screws proved difficult. This wouldn't be a problem for small pieces but trying to print large models would have been impossible. Fortunately I had already fitted a BLTouch probe to my old Wanhao duplicator i3 plus printer and I decided to move this onto the new Ender 5. This device allows the printer to detect the actual position of the bed and the firmware then adjusts for any differences in height. The mounting bracket was printed off prior to fitting. You can see that a diagnostic test of a single layer print adhered well to the bed and gave a decent evenly printed part. I was a little scared of doing the additional wiring and firmware update to make this work but in the end it went pretty smoothly following some decent guides on Youtube. As I had white filament supplied with the printer and it is Christmas I found a polar bear on the thingiverse to print. It came out really nicely and the layer surface finish is excellent for a filament printer though it is hard to see in the pictures as my camera seems to refuse to focus on the part properly. You'll probably be wondering why I wanted another filament printer. Well while I think the Anycubic Photon is great for the small detail work in resin but the old Wanhao was still used for 'structural' bits like servo mounts and uncoupling magnet mechanisms. It is very noisy compared with the new Ender 5 and I wanted something that I could do various upgrades to. Festive greetings to you all. David

Back in 2011 I played about with my Scalefour Society lever frame to use servos to lock the levers. 2011 blog entry At the time I implemented the locking by connecting a PC and running JMRI, this used the 'logix' operation to monitor the state of each lever and then lock/unlock other levers appropriately. This worked OK but obviously required a PC to be connected to the layout. The locking was also based on my previous layout design rather than my current Stour Valley project. Revisited the project over the last few months I had several goals. 1) fix the one broken locking tongue on one of the levers. 2) make interlocking correct for current project 3) remove the reliability on a connected PC by using programmable boards from the Model Electronics Railway Group (MERG) The little tongue on the bottom of each lever makes the locking operate by passing through (or being locked by) the turning servo. On the first iteration of the frame I'd made these tongues rather small and one of them had broken off the bottom of the a lever. Rather than just replace the one broken one I decided to replace all 25 with a slightly large version. This meant lifting the frame 3mm further away from the servos and an additional packing layer was cut from 3mm perspex on the laser cutter. The new lever tongue is about twice the width of the previous version and the additional size means that the part is much stronger. It also needs locks better against the servos. The locking plan for Clare had been designed and thanks to input from Keith Norgrove we had a plan which only required simple 'AND' logic for the interlocking. By that I mean that all locking could be expressed in terms like 'lever 1 is unlocked if lever 2 is normal AND lever 3 is normal AND lever 4 is reversed'. This form of locking could then by programmed using the MERG CANCOND board which listens to CBUS Events and generated an event when a condition is met. That event can then change the state of a servo locking or unlocking the appropriate levers. It took a while to get the logic worked out but in the end I managed to sort it. Lots of head scratching and 'Its ON so I want to turn it OFF' mutterings and a large spreadsheet to keep tabs of the logic were required. I put up a little demo video on youtube. https://youtu.be/MbY-ROpETUs Since the video I had changed the labels on the levers to include their function and, in small but still vaguely readable text, the levers which are required to be pulled to release a given lever. Some of those lever handles are getting a bit rusty now, I think the signalman needs to start using a rag to pull them. David

Hi Al That looks very nice, it is certainly an attractive model and weathers very well. The prototype would have had a cabled a bit differently though with cables going around the wheels on the sides of the jib. David

Hi NXEA The ballast is just Woodland Scenics medium grey with a wisp of Railmatch sleeper grime over the top. David

Thanks to some encouragement from one of my friends this week I got around to trying to layer some additional grass textures on the cutting sides. I used Peco Scene Layering Spray which worked pretty well, it doesn't seem to colour the existing grass but holds the next layer of static grass securely. Getting different lengths and colours of grass fibres makes quite a difference to the overall look. The pickup goods approaches the overbridge on its way from Clare to Cavendish. Cambridge bound Cravens DMU crosses over into the loop and heads over the small girder bridge. The same train pictured from the overbridge, I think the cutting sides look a lot better now we have some additional layers of static grass. I also managed to get some work done on the coal siding, adding some coal pens and sacks of coal (3d printed from the thingyverse). I need to make some coal scales and a suitable shed. David

Last week I finally managed to get back on to doing some scenic work on the main layout, I was waiting until I had both platforms cut and assembled and that was waiting on getting the platform 2 building built. I managed to get the track through the platforms painted and ballasted and then the basic ground works cut in polystyrene, scupltamolded and painted. This evening I drove a few trains around to celebrate. The Brush Type 2 arrives with the pickup goods while the Cravens DMU waits in platform 2 for token. I need to do something about the platform surfaces, platform 1 is much too dark and platform 2 is just unpainted MDF at the moment (it is still removable). The ground behind platform 2 is very uneven as it included some of the earthworks associated with the castle bailey. The ground is obviously also quite unstable judging by the state of the current platforms and the fact that by the 1960's the original platform walls had been trimmed back and replaced with a fence in a couple of places. The photographs also show that the station garden had a serious fence between it and the coal siding. I still need to drill some holes to bed the fence posts in which is why it is so tall at the moment. The view down the whole length of the layout is getting quite impressive now. I see this is blog entry 300 after 10 years of blogging on RMWeb. I must admit it is interesting to go back and read through some of them, some projects have come and gone, some things didn't work out as intended but I can look back and be quite pleased with the content of the blog over that time. I hope you've enjoyed reading them. David

Just a quick line to remind folks that we are taking Fen End Pit out to the Uckfield show this weekend. There are going to be some fine layouts there and it would be great to see you there. David

For a bit of silliness this evening I thought I'd try to recreate an original photograph. DisusedStations.org has this rather nice picture from 1965. I know it is the wrong sort of DMU but I think you can get an idea of what I'm going for. Now I've got the other platform built I'm not long of being able to ballast this section. David

I've managed to get the platform for platform 2 made and cut in the position of the platform building and platform walls. The building now has a roof, with slates cut from sticky labels and ridge tiles and guttering 3D printed on the Anycubic Photon. This shot along the platform gives a pretty nice view to compare against prototype photographs. The main station building is still the '1865 small' based on Takeley (but with the colours reversed) which I built a few years back, the platform cutout on platform 1 was for the 'medium' building. The platform wall was cut in 4 pieces. Top is the coping stone, middle the main wall with a front of 1mm MDF and a back of 2mm and bottom is the fancy brickwork which is on the platform face only. I've found that flooding a little Roket Hot superglue onto the very fine bits of brickwork helps prevent damage while I'm painting. I've found that painting and applying 'cement' in the form of Wilko fine surface filler works best prior to sticking the layers together. Once assembled I wash with Vallejo Model wash grey. Really the gap under the roof isn't that noticeable! In fact, you can see hardly any of this from the usual operating position as it all has its back to you! A quick edit to add a photo with the chimneys.. David

I didn't take many because they were a bit all in each others way, but I did rather like this breakdown truck. David

This weekend is the annual Ploughing festival near Ely. The farmer behind the drainage engine museum lets lots of vintage tractors plough his field for him. There was a good crowd on Saturday morning, unfortunately I'm not sure the weather is going to be as kind tomorrow. I hope you'll forgive some shameless photographs of vintage vehicles. First up are Archie and Arthur, a beautiful pair of shire horses who seemed to really know what they were doing. I was amazed when the drive just said (and I mean said rather than called) 'Arthur to your right' and Arthur just side stepped to his right while Archie stood still. Next in age terms there were three traction engines and a steam roller. Lovely to see them trundling down the farm track and getting their wheels dirty. The variety of tractors was extensive, the usual collection of little grey Fergusons but lots more obscure too. And not everything had wheels either. All in all a good morning out. There's more pictures if anyone is interested.. David Now I wonder is RMWeb censors Prickwillow ?

More drawing and laser cutting and the Platform 2 building is coming along nicely. I've now cut the complete building in 3mm MDF and painted it the base brick colours. The best approach to keep the quoins clean and crisp seems to be to 'grout' the main shell with the fine filler I use in the mortar before applying them. The cream coloured quoins don't show the white mortar much anyway and the Vallejo grey wash I add afterwards seems to blend things together nicely. I also cut the parts for the roof from 3mm and 1mm MDF. The hip roof looks ok, it is currently held with tape while the glue dries. The brick quoins have been cut in postcard thickness card, I've tried giving these a drip of 'Roket Hot' super glue as this makes the card go pretty rock-hard . I'll stick these in place later. The most satisfying bit was the windows. I cut these from 1mm MDF and was able to get some ridiculously fine cuts for the glazing bars. I also 'engraved' the MDF in places to get the recess for the sash area. I was very pleased with how these came out. Looking forward to putting this lot together. David

The station waiting shelter on platform at Clare is an attractive '1865 style' medium building. The building currently has a sign in the window which says 'coming soon - model railway' but I don't know what is planned or who is building it. Platform 1 by the way is a now a very pleasant little cafe which does a damn good bacon roll. I've been trying to refine my technique for making these because I felt that the quions (the raised brickwork) on the previous attempt was a little too much relieve. The prototype building detail looks like this.. You'll notice that the quion brickwork is only raised by less than an inch and that, in this particular builders' version, the brickwork is yellow brick down the whole corner and not just in the raised areas. My previous model of a GER station building was based on the drawings of Takeley but in the primarily red brick colours. I used very thin ply for the quions in the past but thought I'd try a couple of tests with thin card. Seeing Alpha Mill at Scaleforum on Saturday encouraged me to have a go. The first attempt was a bit rough and ready, this really is a cruel enlargement. Second go I took a bit more trouble over putting together and I'm happier with the outcome. I've got the drawings done for the brickwork of the whole building so I'll try and get the complete building cut and see how we go. David

Glad you liked it, we had a fun day out. David