Gloucester Road

Spent some time this afternoon sticking the last of the backscene parts to the Brimsley boards Then here are the pictures of 159007 with the new gears, valance attached and some weathering. Then out for a test run. Leaving Brimsley Passing the signal box Passing through the station with 156xx waiting for a clear line

Feeling fairly pleased with myself tonight. My Farish (not Bachman) 159 has been in bad shape for some time, poor running and noisy with lots of cliking sounds. I have suspected split gears, as Farish was (?) prone too. Tonight I took the wheel sets off and took apart the gear stacks and to my surprise found not one but two split gears; one on each gear stack. So off to the parts bin (you never know what will come in handy) found two wheels sets with correct gears on them. Reasembled the gear stacks with new gears put the power car back together and onto the tracks. Blue sparks and a puff of smoke later it all came to a dramatic end. Or so I thought. The springs that take power from the wheels to the motor had shorted through, new wire and solder later it runs a treat. Took the additional step of cutting the big coupling off the outer ends and taking the skirting off. After cutting the coupler connection the skirting was reattached to the body not the bogie. Now when the bogies turn the lower skirt stays in place, it looks so much. Tomorrow will do some weathering and post some pictures.

Happy New Year to all. A big thanks to Andy and his efforts to get (and keep) rmweb up and running. Progress on Gloucester Road has been slow over the Holidays, but as things start to settle back down into routine work is picking up. Have done some more work on the backscene behind Brimsley and purchaed the Station Structures from Scalscenes. YGA and YGH wagons arrived for Christmas; these are great wagons and I have started to add all of the details. Also 47474 arrived, this is a vast improvement on any class 47 that has been put out before. Details will be added and both the loco and wagons will be weathered in due time. Sky and fence behind Brimsley Bright sunny day New fencing YGA and YGH 47474

Thats brilliant, very Christmassy. Whats the music?

Thank you for the above comment. With Farish having really upped their game and Dapol producing newer models (need to work on reliability) the future of N looks great

Not sure about the weld lines, it looks ok and might try it on the others. Thanks for the comments.

The Missus had a Ladies Christmas party last night so I disapeared to the train room for several hours last night. My rake of four Farish HHAs need to be weathered so out came the powders and some transfers of grafiti. Then this morning my yougest said "Dad lets play trains", who can pass that up!!!! 2 pics of the HHA the rake was then seen passing the unfinished portion passing out of Upper Brimsley then several pics in Gloucester Road And finally the happy driver The next thing on the list of things to do; there is a lack of housing above the station in Brimsley. Have completed one set of low relief buildings from Scalscenes (see earlier entries) and so last night set to and started on two more sets.

Having passed my annual checkride and with six months to relax before my next one I decided to do some weathering. 67027 was the victim, as the pictures hopefully show I added the buffer detail and added the front valance. I seperated the valance from the bogies and reattached it, now when the bogies turn the valance doesnt go with it. Found a picture of 67027 online and went to work with my powders. I am fairly happy with how it turned out. Before mod Buffer details Valance not attached to bogies before weathering weathered arriving from the works light weathering close up stabled for the night welders at work

So the postman delivered a package from Osborns today that contained a bulldozer and an exteneded crane. They are both very convincing models , though the crane is much taller than i thought it would be. Anyway they have been weathered and added to the housing site, I think they finish off the scene nicely. Any thoughts? Had to add muddy tracks for the heavy equipment Here is a picture of the bulldozer with driver The workers getting to it Two views of the work site Some closeups of the crane

That is well done, any plans for roof in the middle? Should it angled in the middle or some sort of drainage system so "rain water" wouldnt collect there?

The weekend after Thanksgiving there is an event in Southern NH and Eastern Massachusetts that this year involved 23 open houses/layouts that you can visit. This year on Saturday there were 11 open in MA and on Sunday 12 in Southern NH the event runs from 9-4 on both days and allows one to visit layouts that are not open to the public. It is rather fun to sit down and plans one attack, then with mobile, camera, map and two excited boys we left mum (who looked rather pleased at our leaving) to enjoy driving and visiting layouts. The highlight this year was seeing Tom Oxnard's Boston & Maine layout which was featured in the December issue of Model Railroader. There was also an n guage layout set on three levels and completely controlled via computer. We managed to see 5 houses in six hours, and returned home about 6pm tired and happy. Pictures will follow here and in the Gallery section. Joel Ditrolio HO layout Tom Oxnards HO layout John Newick N Dave Kotsonis HO Bobby Babrera HO

Very interesting and ambitious. No doubt that it will be very well done... House move in order to get a dedicate train room, hmmmmm.

Got around to lightly weathering the 08 this afternoon.

So finished rakeing the leaves off the lawn today. Many people come to New Hampshire to the view the leaves as they change change colours, however they leave when it comes to cleaning them off the lawn. Decided to have a go at my shunter 08921. Had thought about taking off the couplers on one end, like on my other locos, but figured that might effect how usefull it would be as a shunter. Was going to put the included pipes onto, but they got in the way of said couplers so. I weathered it lightly instead, there are some before and after pictures here and in a new gallery.

This morning 57003 was held at Brimsley, sort of unusual to catch a picture of it as it passes through at night. Managed to remove grass while taking the above pic. So why the hold up, off to find out. From the vantage point of the air we could see an engineers possesion at Gloucester Road We landed and headed back to investigate. 08921 was shunting the wagons and 67027 had been called in to cover for the failed class 37

Glad you guys like it, not finished off yet; but I want to make sure I dont make it look to cluttered. There is an overall shot of the layout in my "unnamed layout" gallery. I think its picture dsc00540.

Not the final name for my small layout, but I got tired of calling it unnamed; so for now this is it. Took it outside for some naturel light, WOW ! More than pleased with how they turned out. autumn sunshine the first delivery class 57003 shatters morning peace All these and some others have been put in my gallery.

My boys enjoy watching theses videos. Nicely done and enjoyable to watch. It is interesting to see how your editing and story telling have changed/improved since you started.

Thought I would post some images of the construction of Scalescenes small terrece houses. I had lots of fun building these; as with all scalescene the instructions are very clear and construction is straight forward. The first two I did are complete with the interiors all done up and the front walls are removable to see inside. The last two I thought would be done as if if they were still underconstruction, so no windows and the roof is under construction. The wood and flooring is strips of balsa wood, not to scale but it looks ok. Just awaiting some construction equip. and workers to show up to finish the cameo. foundations in place interior shot front wall on building the roof in place, just waiting for workers to come and finish their job

My sons A4 Seagull made an appearance today. My son is nuts over steam traction where as my other boy loves diesels, so we have charter trains often pulled by Seagull. Our last two visits to England we have gone to the NRM in York where we sit infront of Mallard for ages. When we purchased Seagull we were going to runumber and name it Mallard, but he seems happy to leave Seagull alone. Seagull waiting in Brimsley Leaving Upper Brimsley Arriving in Gloucester Road

This is an overall view of Gloucester Road and three shots of the extension

Did some work over the tunnel that leads to Upper Brimsley, grass and heather has grown and filled in nicely. Just tried uploading an image and got an error so will try again later. update: success

Have been lurking around for sometime now, both on the old RMweb and here on the new site. I am still having image issuses so I won't put any on here till that is resolved, but there are pictures at www.freewebs.com/nguagingwilliam. I have been interested in modeling trains for some twenty years and have built several over the years, some good some not. All have been a learning experience; now my two boys are interested and we spend time together playing and modeling. Gloucester Road is not based anywhere, its just trying to get the feeling of home which we visit every other year. Living in America one relies on trips, photos, memories and the internet for modeling inspiration and now, hopefully, feedback from fellow modellers here on RMweb. I have two layouts at the minute, one is Gloucester Road and the other is very portable (unnamed at the minute will take suggestions). I was inspired by all the fantastic boxfile layouts, mine is in a shadow box and uses Scalescene products exclusively. My hope is to take it out much as Sandhills does with his portable layouts. Gloucester Road began towards the end of 2003. Built in N guage it measures 6ft long and 2 ft wide; all track is Peco with isolating switches. Buildings are from Graham Farish, Hornby, Metcalf and Scalscenes.com with rolling stock from Farish, Dapol,ATM, Peco, Minitrix, and N-Thusiast Resprays. Starting last year an extention was added that adds anothe 6 foot branch line.