Portchullin Tatty

I laiminate single thickness etches for rods or brake levers to a piece of 5 thou brass. It is a bit of a fag but brings things to a sensibly durable thickness. Good luck on the fix.

Thanks very much for the compliments David / John. And to any of you that were confronted with the sight of me attempting to rewire a board on Sunday morning I apologise. We had an electrical gremlin that woke up as the hall got hotter and gave us an intermittent short that reeked havoc with the DCC once an engine reached that board. I have already had a firm word with the wiring below all of the boards and have agreed on a mutual divorce; so we will have all new electrics for our next show which is the National Festival of Railway Modelling.

June is going to be a busy month for Portchullin. Firstly, we will soon set sail in the van to Perth with both Portchullin and Oli & Chris' Cessy en Bois for their model railway show. The details for this are below and there are a lot of good layouts there, including the two biggest P4 exhibition layouts - Mostyn and Burntisland. So there is plenty to see even if Portchullin does not float your boat (..........as if..........). If you are visiting do please say hello. Its a long drive to Perth from Surrey, so to break the journey up a couple of us are going to visit a number of home based model railways that you can't see at shows. The current plan is to visit eight layouts, two preserved lines and the Perth show, so we will be well and truely model railwayed out by the end of the trip! As you would imagine, being able to visit a number of layouts that don't generally get seen will provoke the camera to come out and as there are a number of treats in stall, so keep an eye out for future blog posts. The other activity for the month has been the writing an article for publication in July 2024 issue of British Railways Modelling. This, combined with photos from myself and Andy York makes what I hope is an enjoyable article. I have particularly talked about the origins of the layout and how it was conceived, with a smaller amount of information on how it was done. It should be available simultaneous with this post and if you have any thoughts on it, I would welcome feedback.

Geriant (and others interested), Laser measures are now so cheap, that you might feel it worth investing in. They start at about £20 (see Amazon or ebay) and once you start using one you will largely ditch the tape! They do not work well in bright sunlight though.

Hi Nick, is there any chance that you have put the outer valances on back to front? They do not look to be equal distances to both ends?

Whilst the traditional answer is a porter's trolley (or perhaps brute in your era) what about some orange plastic fence/hoarding around a hole and then some workmen sitting beside drinking tea? Pretty prototypical?

Having assembled the basic post and ensured that it was working, the bolts can be filed away and we get to the following stage. The spectacle plate plate is rather unusual in that it only has one lens which isn’t available via any manufacturer and the arm is notably shorter than I am used to so I had to etch these to suit. Although I could not find a lamp that matched what was on the prototype, I was able to modify a MacKenzie & Holland lamp from MSE to suit. Thereafter, the remaining assembly of the signal was fairly unremarkable. And then once it had been painted, including the unusual red highlighting on the finial that I rather like: And of course we must have the obligatory video to show that it really does work! And if anyone wants the drawing if the signal at Didcot it was based on (which has two arms, not the single as modelled):

A little something is on the way to Duncan for the layout............. More details on either my external blog at https://highlandmiscellany.com/ or RMweb thread (see link below)

Swapsie - the childish act of swapping things according to Wiktionary. Do you remember at school swapping a Top Trumps set for a the latest Hot Wheels car or similar? I do! I remember getting roundly b*llocked by my mum for not recognising the value of things I was giving away and (metaphorically I am pleased to say) swapping gold bars for glass beads almost like the Incas and Cortez. In the world of toy trains, the same happens and is very useful where someone can offer something that you don't have (or find difficult to make) in return for something you do have. This is one such example. Sitting next to Duncan Redford at an EM Gauge Society/Scalefour Society skills day a few years back demonstrating signal construction a barter was arrived at whereby I would build Duncan a signal in return for him doing some 3D design and printing. I think it is fair to say that neither of us have rushed with our respective shares of the bargain but with the next ExpoEM only a week away, I have shifted into gear to finish the started signal that was my part of the deal. Duncan is building a GWR broad gauge era layout and wanted a close replica of a signal that the GWR Society has recreated at Didcot, but adjusted to have only a single arm. So after coming out in cold sweats about the idea of modelling anything GWR (!!!) I took a look at it. Like many signals, there are differences and similarities with other signals but after a bit of study it became clear that it was sufficiently different that a site visit to Didcot to be required. Having measured it up including, when no one was looking, a climb to the arm/lamp to measure it, I came home to draw it. I was shocked to find that it was tiny; 3mm/1foot at best and I had a panic attack -had I mucked it up and mis-measured it. Obviously, being a professional surveyor I could not possibly have done that, could I? After a few months, the fear that I had niggled on me and so came about site visit number 2 and a further climb up the signal ladder. Nope, it really is tiny - both the post and the arm are notably smaller than I am used to. There are several unusual aspects to the signal; the one glass spectacle plate, the tapered arm and the very pronounced stiffening around the slot in the post were all going to be key to capturing the character of the signal. So out came the computer and a small fret was added to an etching order for the arms/spectacle plates. I then formed the basic post from 4mm square section brass which I filed to a taper with a 2.5mm cross section at the top. Despite having built a few slotted signals already, they are still pretty difficult to get to work well. The difficulty that I have had is to get a soldered joint onto the arm spindle when it is encased in the brass post around it that acts as a heat sink. On a number of occassions the joint has broken and the arm no longer operate. I was determined this was not going to happen this time and have adotped a different approach, by assembling the arm first and then mounting it within the post whilst this was being assembled. I had filed some 4mm square section into a taper to form the full length of the post. Even though I was about to cut a section of this out, it is necessary to form the full length of the taper so that it is consistent across its full length. Once I was happy with this, i filed two pairs of slots in the outside of the post on oppposing faces. The depth of these was such that the tongue between them was the correct size for the slot in the post. I chose to mount the finial at this stage, with some 296o solder and a lot of heat (from a minature blow torch). This is what it then looked like: Next, I cut away the block of post that sits between the two filed sections to create a hole in my post. As there is around 2 hours of work to get the post to this point, it is a bit nerve racking chopping it like this! I then cut a pair of 1*4mm brass plate lengths to sit on the tongues and drilled both to receive a 14BA bolt. This was threaded through the first of the plates and adjusted until this a continuation of the taper of the post - this entails some filing of the metal to make the outside face match the post and plate match. It was then soldered in place, again using the 296o solder and a blow torch, to look like this: The photograph above shows that these plates were wider than the post, in practice the prototype acheived this by planting timbers across these sections but it is easier to do this by way of using the sider plate material. The photograph above shows that these plates were wider than the post, in practice the prototype acheived this by planting timbers across these sections but it is easier to do this by way of using the sider plate material. Temporarily mounting the second plate enables the hole for the arm spindle to be formed through both parts of the arm. The arm was now attached to the spindle with more use of the 296o solder and the use of a couple of minature washers either side of the arm so that I could be confident that the joint would hold. Releasing the second plate now allows the arm/spindle assembly to be inserted and any adjustments made to ensure that it can move freely in the slot by securing the second plate in place with a 14 BA nut. The nuts and bolts are scarificed in the build by leaving them in place for the next step because once I was happy that it was correct I soldered the second plate in place including the nuts and bolts. This time I used 145o solder which meant that it would not disturb the first plate as I was doing this and this is what it then looks like - a slotted post with an arm within that is firmly attached to its spindle! More to follow; including the second piece of bartering that I know someone is looking out for progr

Mike, Can I hold my hand up for interest in the modifications that you have made on the brake van please? I am close to finishing a Bradwell BR underframe and have a second in its pack which I had in mind modifying as the LNER predecessor. I know there are underframe / body differences but not put any effort into determining what they are yet. I also know there are rather a lot of variants within the BR standard. You can save me the research! Mark

Duncan, The chances are that all goods yards at the time had cinders ballast that covered the sleepers and may have been surprisingly close to the railhead. This is because the shunting locomotives would have been the version with a tail and four legs and walking across what we now think ballast was uncomfortable for them and the raised height of chairs/rail was an encumbrance* to getting the most out of the horse as it had to step around these rather than lean into the weight. Have you seen the Chris Nevard method of ash ballasting? I think it is the most realistic approach and uses Das modelling clay, a thumb and paint. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=463962129104807 *We call this a trip hazard now; that is not a concept I think they will have used!

NanoCAD is well worth a look at; it is an AutoCAD clone and other than a few commands being titled differently is almost indistinguishable. There is a totally free version - NanoCAD 5 - or the upto date version is free for an initial trial period and then as long as you promise you are not making money out of using it you can carry on using if for evaluation. Cracking model; as ever! Mark

A toy train video starting with a bit of Everlong - whats not to like!! I too enjoyed that Jessie.

I had (until I moved house recently) a Dunster House log cabin and I know a number of others that also have. They do a variety of grades; you want to go for the one with the greatest level of insulation to it and double glazing throughout. They are relatively easy to build if you have a moderate amount of DIY nouse but there are stages that need two people and even then it will take a number of days. I built mine on old railway sleepers that I supported on concrete pads excavated about 300mm into the ground. The first year the interior was fairly moist as the timber needs to dry out and season. So you need to bear this in mind. After this it was always really comfortable with nothing more than a greenhouse heater bar for comfort. I was very pleased with it. A view of the inside can be seen here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2013/01/20/glenmutchkins-part-1-have-summer-house-will-build/

Some photos to wet your appetite; taken at the Tonbridge show.