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Ravenser

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  1. Ravenser
    It is fair to say that the North British Locomotive Company's attempt to move into the brave new world of modern traction was an ignominious failure. After six decades as one of the leading locomotive builders in Britain it attempted to enter the diesel era via a licencing deal with MAN of Germany; but the results of this push can be classified into two groups - failures and complete failures. NBL folded in April 1962 under the resultant weight of warranty claims and lack of new orders, its financial position being made even worse by a commercial policy of selling the Pilot Scheme batches at a loss to buy its place in the new diesel era.
     
    Which of NBL's four classes of diesels - TOPS classes 16, 21, 22, and 41 - was worst is debatable. A sufficient commentary on them is that 3 of the classes were eliminated immediately by the National Traction Plan in 1968, and the Class 22 "Baby Warships" succumbed in 1971. Since the latter were still in original form and were further doomed by being hydraulics, they were arguably the best of the very bad bunch.
     
    20 of the Class 21s were rebuilt with new more powerful Paxman engines in the mid 1960s and became Class 29 , but even that was not enough to save them , and all the rebuilds had gone by the end of 1971
     
    Of NBL's British diesel designs only classes 21 and 22 proceeded beyond a pilot batch. 58 Type 2 NBL diesel-electric lemons (designated Class 21 under TOPS) were built between 1958 and 1960, but as early as March 1960 most of the ER allocation was reported as being stored unserviceable at Peterborough. The entire class was banished to Scotland a month later, on the theory that it would be quicker and easier to send them back to NBL under warranty from a Glasgow shed (although there was speculation that the move was in fact an attempt by the BTC to hide the debacle from the London-based national press); but NBL's collapse two years later put an end to that idea. Class 21 locomotives were being stored unserviceable as early as 1964; and some of them may never have turned a wheel again, being sent directly to the scrapyard from store. It seems to have been ScR practice to send them out on trains double-headed in the hope that at least one of the locomotives would still be working when they finished their diagrammed day's work.
     
    It is therefore arguable that Class 21 constitutes the worst design of diesel locomotive ever to go into volume production. Bad as the Type 1 locos of Class 16 were, there were only 10 of them, and they lived out their short lives at Stratford. Some of the Class 21s may have had service lives of as little as 4 years before they were stored; and there is no parallel to their mass withdrawal and exile to Scotland in 1960
     
    I've always been intrigued by these locos ever since Hornby introduced their "Class 29" in the late 1970s. This was a strikingly ugly loco, and a fascinatingly obscure one; when Ravenser Mk1 was struggling to find a small mainline diesel that would work, one turned up in my local modelshop second hand for not much money and I promptly bought it. I later detailed and repainted it as a Class 29, and getting the thing converted to DCC is now high on the agenda. (The back story being that RTC Derby claimed one of the last locos in traffic to replace the Baby Deltic, so it survived to c1980 as an RTC loco)
     
    At some point I also acquired a second battered body for £2, followed by a chassis frame and Hornby power bogie. The latter items went to my Baby Deltic project - but with that complete the possibility of a second compact Type 2 for Blacklade's illicit "steam period" began to stir in my mind.
     
    The "funny trains" period on Blacklade is nominally set c1958. We may imagine that an NBL Type 2 has been sent to BR's principal diesel-loco building works for evaluation trials to find out what is wrong with the thing. These trials can quite plausibly bring it to Blacklade on short trains. (Since Blacklade and Hallamshire replace Derby and Derbyshire , Derby Works doesn't exist under this scheme of things, and the MR's locomotive works is now at Toton. As there is a regular Nottingham/Blacklade service, the appearance of an NBL Type 2 hauling two Midland suburban coaches is perfectly plausible.)
     
    Dapol are bringing out a new high-spec 21/29 any year now. When it finally appears it will cost at least £150 - and I don't want a Class 21 that much. So this is an exercise in a fun loco on the cheap.
     
    For a power plant, I bought a second hand Hornby Class 25 at Warley. This will provide a 5 pole all-wheel pickup Ringfield motor bogie , and the Hornby body can be donated to a "high-spec 25/1" project
     
    I have a Class 29 chassis frame and weight from Peter's Spares and a pair of Class 29 trailing bogies - the second will donate a bogie frame to the motor bogie.
     
    Detailing bits come mostly from the scrap box - an A1 Models roof fan etch, another A1 pack giving cab-end detailing etches. These are supplemented by some very nice etched nickel-silver etches for cab windows from Shawplan. (A tip from C.A.T.Ford on the DOGA stand at Warley)
     
    Progress to date is shown here:
     

     
    The biggest problems with the Hornby model are in the cab front. They modelled a weird arrangement, with a Class 29 headcode box overlying nose doors - I can only believe that someone was working off an NBL drawing amended to show revised arrangements. For a Class 21 the headcode box must go - A1 provided a replacement etched nose door and etched discs.
     
    And the transformation provided by the Shawplan etch for NBL cab windows is dramatic . I have deliberately photographed the end where I haven't finished filing out one window so you can see what I've done. Getting these in place with superglue - and making sure they stay in place during filing - is a little awkward.
     
    One buffer head was missing - I've fitted replacement turned brass buffer heads from an A1 Models buffer beam detailing pack. I really had no other obvious use for these.
     
    This is about as far as I am taking the bodyshell . I know someone did an extensive conversion building up the nose and reprofiling it. I'm not really sure what was involved and I'm keeping it simple and leaving the basic shell as it is.
     
    Hornby modelled the original form of the main radiator grills - rapidly replaced by a squarish grill .I do have a set of replacement A1 Models etched grills, but as I am modelling a Pilot Scheme batch loco in 1959, I shall be leaving these grills alone.
     
    As an original condition ER loco, livery would have been plain green - which is easy enough to do with a spray can.
     
    The Baby Deltic proved to stall in some places on the layout - no doubt due to its deep flanges fouling lumps of ballast or chairs on code 70 bullhead. I've managed to remove projecting bits of ballast in several places , which has resulted in a partial cure. But (as noted elsewhere) I've developed a further fix - replace the chunky Hornby wheels in the trailing bogie with Bachmann coach wheels with their pin-points sawn off with a piercing saw. I still have to give the Baby Deltic a test run to see how much of an improvement this gives, but the theory is that if only one end of the loco is vulnerable to grounding then there should always be a supply of power to avoid stalling.
     
    (I also suspect that - as with other defects - once the underlying issue is found by a vulnerable loco and tackled I'll see better running from other items of stock , which were just about coping with it)
     
    The NBL Type 2 will be fitted with Bachmann wheels on the trailing bogie, and I bought a substantial DCC stay-alive along with a suitable decoder at Warley - I'm hoping this will result in a smooth-running and reliable loco.
     
    I'm aware the Hornby model sits too high. But as I can't see any obvious easy way to fix this , I'm intending to leave this issue alone
     
    I'm very pleased with the relatively quick and painless progress made to date. This should be a distinct cut above the 29 I detailed nearly twenty years ago
  2. Ravenser

    Set 1 - Under False Colours - Pt.1 - Overview

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    Having rashly flung down the gauntlet and declared I'm thinking of running a third , not terribly authentic, period on Blacklade to give an airing to the bits of steam era /green diesel stock I seem to have acquired, I've actually made a start in the form of a pair of Ratio kits: two of the LNWR kits to be precise. The twist is that these will actually constitute the ER's contribution on the coaching side, until I lay my hand on some Kirk kits.
     
    I've rather fancied the Ratio LNWR coaches since they first came out . They were new products, they looked really rather stylish with those big windows, and I suppose they were a bit cool. As I went modern image in my early mid teens, there was never any scrap of justification for buying one - until I got involved with a small informal group locally. Amongst other things we were talking about building a small branch terminus, and because of others' interests it was bound to be steam.
     
    The LNWR seems to have embraced the concept of corridor coaches and gangwayed connections very quickly and with some enthusiasm. By 1893 they had commissioned a full train set for the 2pm Euston - Glasgow express - thereafter, for a generation "the 'Corridor'"(until the LMS formally named it "The Mid Day Scot") - and by the late 1890s they were building corridor coaches in volume for their own main line services, not just the WCJS. Ratio's range of 4 kits represent these , built from 1898-1903, and not extinct until after World War 2. I've always been surprised these kits never took off - there was a time when their MR coach kits seemed virtually ubiquitous and if you wanted a pre-grouping coach it was a Ratio MR kit or a Triang clerestory, but somehow I've hardly ever seen the LNWR kits crop up in layout articles. The prototypes feature in Historic Carriage Drawings Vol 2 - LMS , edited by David Jenkinson, as do the MR suburbans and the MR non-gangwayed express clerestories : and no doubt that's how Ratio came to choose all three types.
     
    The twist in the story comes in 1936 , when the LMS offloaded some of them on the M&GNJR, apparently along with some ex MR gangwayed clerestories which I think are available as kits from 51L Models/Wizard , and which are far too grand, sophisticated and expensive for me to consider... A few months later (October 1936), the LMS offloaded its interest in the M&GN on the LNER. Given that the LNER promptly scrapped most of the M&GN loco fleet -, and the LNER wasn't rich enough to indulge in extravagences like "scrap and build" - I think we can take it that the M&GN was in dire need of re-equipment by that point and the LMS wasn't prepared to stump up hard cash. It's pretty clear why the choice fell on these coaches for transfer. The M&GN was a lengthy cross country main line and its big passenger traffic was holiday expresses from the Midlands. A lot of those passengers were families making 3-4 hour journeys, and by the mid 1930s subjecting them to non-gangwayed stock without access to toilets was unacceptable. The LMS duly off-loaded some of the oldest corridor stock it had in order to "modernise" the M&GN, and since the MR came to corridor coaches much later and more tentatively than the LNWR , inevitably old LNWR stock was going to feature in the transfer.
     
    So some elderly ex LNWR and MR coaches ended up as LNER stock in E Anglia . Beyond this point we find ourselves peering into the mists of history - which are pretty thick and misty hereabouts. As a modern image modeller of Eastern leanings , my references for this are pretty scanty : 3 volumes of Historic Carriage Drawings, Harris' LNER coaches and the notes to the Ratio kits , prepared by a Mr P Millard. According to the latter "several" vehicles were transferred to the M&GN , but he doesn't say what. I have been shown a photo of an M&GN train from the mid/late 1930s with one of these coaches clearly visible , still in LMS livery . It wasn't a brake, and holiday expresses aren't obviously in need of lots of all firsts, so I think we can assume some all thirds were transferred. Whether any brake coaches were is anybody's guess: Historic Carriage Drawings does not even mention the transfer, and nor does LNER Coaches
     
    The Ratio instructions claim extinction dates of 1950 for the brake composites, and 1952 for the brake thirds, but 1947 for the all thirds, even though more of them were built than everything else put together. Historic Carriage Drawings gives an extinction date of 1953 for the all thirds, and says extinction dates for the other types cannot be established but all types reached BR and probably became extinct 1953-5. It's evident from one or two other entries that events in apple green territory are beyond the ken of LMS coach scholars, so these will be for the vehicles which passed from the LMS to the LMR
     
    It is quite possible the vehicles which passed to the LNER lasted a little longer. By M&GN standards, in 1936 these were relatively modern coaches. In late 1934, the LNER had set out to eliminate 4 and 6 wheel coaches - of which it still had several thousand - "except for third-rate branch lines, miners' and workmen's trains". What this meant in practice in E Anglia can be established by looking at some branch line monographs. Witham/Bishop Stortford trains were still 6 wheelers until 1940 , when they were replaced by ex GE 50' corridor coaches. The Thaxted branch retained 6 wheelers until 1946-7, when GE 50' corridor coaches were provided - working in 2 car sets. The Mid Suffolk became the last place in Britain served by non -bogie coaches (until the DoT inflicted Pacers on us) - here the 6 wheelers survived until a few months before closure in 1952, again replaced by ex GE corridor coaches working in 2car sets.
     
    Given this , it seems unlikely the LNER would have scrapped these ex LMS vehicles before the war. In fact it seems quite plausible that after 1940, when holiday trains would have been few and far between, and the M&GN section probably had surplus coaching stock, they might have been pressed into service to replace 6 wheelers on some very minor branch. Photos show elderly pre Grouping coaches as branch sets on many ex GE and ex GN branches in the early 50s - what probably swept them away was a combination of the first round of ER closures in 1951-2 plus cascading following the arrival of the first Mk1s in 1951-2
     
    So - a pair of ex LNWR coaches from the Ratio kits make a plausible E Anglian branch set on a very minor branch in the early 1950s. By that time they would have been in brown - on the GE, pregrouping stock was not given BR crimson, but was repainted in brown with BR lettering , and examples survived beyond 1955. When my local model shop closed down about 4 years ago I bought a brake composite and an all third , for use on the little group branch terminus project. All the other authentic options would have been difficult to source and much more difficult to build. I think they had been in the shop some time - one kit was the earlier version with plastic wheels - and they were discounted. I gave the sides an undercoat and , since it wasn't an urgent job, they sat in the cupboard , waiting for the branch terminus to happen first......
     
    As these two kits include the only kit for a brake vehicle I have , it seemed the obvious place to start. I have very little coachbuilding experience - a couple of Ratio kits in my early teens - and Ratio kits seemed an easy place to start. (That theory took a serious knock with the very over-complicated Southern Van B kit, which took me 2 years to finish)
     
    First stages are shown here. The exact shade of LNER brown seems to be open to question and photographic research. I bought a tin of Precision Pullman umber and another of LNER dull teak. The original idea was to mix up a suitable brown , but then I reflected that Precision paints don't cover half as well as Railmatch or Humbrol and I'd never match the colour for the second coat - or the second vehicle. So I gave the sides an undercoat in umber, in order to darken the teak top coat - and stopped there.
     
     

     
    On restarting last week it became clear that the undercoat on the brake composite was badly affected by nibs and whiskers . I don't have an airbrush , and neither colour is available as an aerosol can. The all third was ok, if not 100% perfect . So I gave the latter a coat of teak - and the brake composite sides got a coat of Modelstrip. The teak coat wasn't 100% perfect either: Precision paint seems to love to form tiny bubbles as you brush . I did the best I could. The brake was given a fresh undercoat of umber, and then teak over. Despite my careful cleaning/degreasing of the sides and cleaning of the brush on a bit of soap to rid it of any nibs, the finish still wasn't perfect - and all sides visibly needed a further coat. There is no way you can apply three brush coats of paint and get a flawless result. I have learnt my lesson and sourced a spray can of Railmatch crimson for all the other coaches, but with the LNW set , damage limitation is all that's possible
     
     

     
    These kits are slightly peculiar - at least to me - in that they are built round the interiors. In this they differ from the other Ratio coach kits I built long ago from the other 3 ranges. They also show early signs of the overcomplication which makes the Ratio Maunsell Van B such a laborious pig to do. I can't see that moulding the floor pan as two halves which join together with a kind of mortice joint is any improvement on the single piece floor pans found in the MR kits - unless there was an overriding technical reason in the design of the moulds, and since they produced a lot of earlier kits with single piece floores , I can't see it. Similarly, the all third corridor sides are two pieces with a tenon joint - though in the brakes these have to be two seperate mouldings , as the guard's van is in the centre not the end. However the fit of the parts so far has been excellent - the floor pan needs only routine cleaning of the edges and no packing or filing down has been required. In one or two places a few strokes of the file were necessary along the compartment partitions to get the side even. There are little locating pegs on the floor to locate the interiors (except for the toilets) - the all third has these pegs on the compartment side too, but the brake doesn't
     
     

     
    In the process of fitting the first side, stage by stage along the side, and holding it tight to the compartment partitions till the solvent set , I managed to get solvent onto the side with some damage to the paintwork . As "cracklature" was definitely not wanted, I have rubbed down the affected panels and they will need touching in - the damage can be seen on the photo . The compartment interiors have been painted with Tamiya Flat Earth acrylic, to avoid anything embarassing being seen through the windows. I am starting to feel that if I have to apply any more coats of brown paint to this kit I'll scream
     
    On the corridor side there are recesses for the glazing strip - why the glazing on the corridor side of the all third has to be 4 seperate recessed sections , when the brake manages with just two sections, beats me. The corridor handrail is a piece of styrene micro rod (more brown paint) applied between slots . On the all third, I made the mistake of using solvents at the retaining slots, As a result , I have marks on two windows just above the rail, where it wasn't 100% straight and capilarity drew the solvent where it wasn't wanted. Damn. On the brake third , I learned my lesson , and used the Revell Contacta bottle . In fact I've taken the heretical approach of using Contacta cement very sparingly applied as the first tack bond for the major pieces, with solvent applied to finish the join
  3. Ravenser
    A very long time ago, in my teens, I tried to build a layout. It was my first diesel layout and it was definitely modern image : not only was it BR Blue , it was contemporary. For some reason I decided I wanted some parcels vans and I duly bought a pair of Lima BGs and a pair of Lima CCTs. These things have been lurking in boxes ever since the half built layout was abandoned and dismantled (Several years in Australia, followed by university , didn't exactly help progress)
     
    Several decades later, there is still no alternative model in 4mm for the BR CCT. So far as I'm aware there has never even been a kit. Blacklade is small so small vehicles are attractive, and the idea of a CCT as a "swinger" - DMU tail traffic - seemed worth pursuing. When the layout was started I bought one of the Hornby re-releases, but although the body finish and the wheel profile is much better nothing else has changed since the Lima model first appeared 35 years ago.
     
    I had a little time for modelling a couple of months back, and I finally managed to tackle the long intended rework of one of the CCTs - bits had been in stock for a couple of years
     
    Firstly , some shots of the real thing, rather folorn, at the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway this Easter:
     

     

     
    And here is a shot of an unmodified Lima vehicle:
     

     
    (To be strictly accurate, this has an unmodified Lima body with a Hornby underframe swapped under it. I have 3 CCTs, and I decided in the latter stages of upgrading the first one that as I had castings and etched brake gear for only two, and as repainting the body and transfers was a major job, I was only ever going to do 2 CCTs, the Hornby body would save me a job, and the spare components could be assembled into a complete vehicle and sold on second hand)
     
    There are a number of problems with the original Lima models.
     
    The self-coloured plastic bodies do not look good . The windows are not flush , and the recessed effect with slab sides is bad.The internal window bars are just scratches on the glazing
    The wheels are badly wrong - something which should be obvious from the prototype shots. They should be 3'6" wheels (14mm) but Lima fitted 12mm pizza-cutters.
    The underframe is fairly approximate: the buffers are too small and wrong , the brake lever's not much good, the axleboxes and springs are pretty representational, and the brake shoes are an extension of what passes for J hangers
    The roof vents are hopelessly inadequete.
    The massive tension locks are a problem if like me you are using Kadees. No NEM pockets here.
     
    I've probably overlooked several second-order problems in that list , but there's quite enough to be getting on with.
     
    The first step was to tackle the body. The roof was removed - it is a one piece clear moulding, with the glazing on both sides as an integral part, so you have to push in the windows to release it. Then the body was released from the chassis (push in the 4 lugs from the chassis and try not to break them) , and the body sprayed with 2 coats of Railmatch blue . At which point the can expired, but the Lima lettering was virtually invisible by then. Once dry I used a packet of SE Finecast flushglazing which has been in stock for years for this job, stuck in place with UHU - the improvement is huge. Glazing bars were concocted from the spare elements in the Roxey Van B/CCT etch, cut down to fit
     
    The side glazing was cut away from the roof moulding with a razor saw, leaving a small strip about 2mm deep below the guttering to locate the roof . (I had to file this down in places to clear the flushglaze inserts). The very perfunctory roof vents were removed with a file, and I just about managed to avoid damaging the roof ribs in the process. I fitted whitemetal torpedo vents, as a man at Warley sold me some as he believed they were correct for a CCT . Neither the photos in Parkin's book, or on Paul Barlett's site are conclusive, but I've a nagging feeling the real vehicles may have shell vents.
     
    The big problems lie with the underframe. The undersized wheels cannot be readily replaced because not only are them on Lima's 24.5mm European axles, but the bearing holes in the plastic axle guards were set too low, to compensate and adjust the ride height. Not that Lima's representations of axleboxes, springs and W irons are much good anyway
     
    There are 3 possible approaches at this point.
     
    - I know Captain Kernow devised a tool to bore out new bearing holes in the Lima axle guards , and set them at the correct height, and this was written up in an article in an early Hornby Magazine. I couldn't identify the issue in question, and it's probably out of print so this route was closed. I think he left most of the underframe largely "as is"
     
    - I believe Bill Bedford has produced an etched brass kit for a CCT underframe. However I also understand that he doesn't provide any instructions with his products on the grounds that anyone who needs instructions is unfit to build them. My etched kit experience is strictly limited - while I might well be able to build a well designed kit with good instructions , I stand no chance with a naked etch to a complex design which may or may not cater for OO and which may require unspecified modifications in unspecified areas to do so . So that route was not an option, and 15 quid stayed in my bank account
     
    - The third route is to cut away the Lima W irons and springs , and replace the lot with whitemetal castings from ABS. As I didn't fancy my chances of assembling whitemetal axleguards dead square, especially on such a long wheelbase 4 wheeler, this also meant etched brass W irons - which automatically results in a compensated underframe: highly desirable here. This was the route I took.
     
    This shot of the underframe as modified should show the work involved:
     

     
    The whole of the central spine of the underframe has to come out, and so does the floor of the underframe in order to recess the W irons suffiently - I glued a large piece of 40 thou across the area to provide a new false floor. This means you have to discard the long iron plate that Lima use as a ballast weight, since it will no longer fit. I aradited lead sheet into the centre section of the underframe , sufficent to bring the total weight of the CCT up to 75g . All the components and subassemblies were put into the pan of a set of kitchen scales and lead added to make up the weight (Health and Safety note - this is all my scales are ever used for , so there is no risk of heavy metal contamination of food)
     
    Chopping the whitemetal W irons and locating areas away from the axlebox/spring was a very awkward job - every single J hanger broke from the casting in the process and all had to be stuck back with cyano at least 3 times. In retrospect this was unnecessary trouble on the fixed axle - they should just have been stuck in place on the solebar - a scrap of microstrip needs to be slipped underneath as packing . This should be omitted on the rocking axle else it won't rock - and there you really do have to stick the darn things back on the whitemetal spikes at the ends of the spring
     
    I chickened out on thinning down the whitemetal castings before sticking them to the W irons with cyano, so the model is probably a little chunky around the axleboxes . However the overall improvement in appearance is so great I can live with this The W irons are MJT BR heavy duty plate , which are probably correct. The etch supplies coupling hooks - which Lima omitted, though I seem to have used ABS whitemetal ones
     
    One or two bits of struts were lost in the process of attacking the underframe with a cutting disc - my el-cheapo fixed speed mini drill runs at a nominal 18,000 rpm which may be too slow (t's hardly ever been used - which doesn't encourage me to splash out on a more sophisticated one).
    These were reinstated with microstrip and damage where I had to thin the solebars from behind to get the compensation units in patched as best I could. I tried to save the brake levers but eventually concluded they had to go anyway. I drew reference lines across the plasticard floor sections with a set square to enable me to locate the compensation units but I'm still not 100% sure they are absolutely square : all you see is through a small hole in the etch , and to compound the uncertainty my lens prescription does interesting fish-eye things to plane surfaces (think Esscher's goldfishbowl-world engraving, only very very slightly) . However the underframe seems to run okay. Wheels are Hornby 14 mm carriage wheels .
     
    I didn't have an exact match to the buffers fitted - the nearest I could find were a packet of InterCity Models wagon buffers. The fabricated lower-door stops were represented by gluing a cube of 40 thou plasticard to the casting with cyano. Whatever their imperfections they look the part - and a good deal better than Lima's efforts
     
    Brake levers came from a Mainly Trains etched fret drawn by Ian Rice which just happened to have 2 sets of long CCT levers on it (It was at this point I decided I was only ever going to do 2 CCTs). Perhaps they are a bit heavily cranked in order to clear the castings but again they are a big improvement
     
    The tension locks were chopped off with Xurons, 40 thou plasticard glued underneith and the hole made good with scraps of plasticard and liberal quantities of solvent (not filler , as it needs to take the fixing screw for the Kadees, which are long centreset , to cope with the buffers - I think they are no 46)
     
    Lettering is from the HMRS pressfix sheet for BR coaches. I gather Express Parcels is a rare branding but it appears on a 1980s reference photo so is in period and the CCT looked a bit bare without it. I had some trouble with the data lettering - one panel broke up , one was slightly damaged by weathering washes and that meant I used up all the CCT lettering on the sheet - another reason for using the ready finished Hornby body for the next one and stopping there... I had already cannibalised CCT lettering for the PMV I built some time ago . End electrification flashes are old Woodhead transfers, held on with varnish - the CCT and the Van B have used up my last old style electrification flashes and I must get some more (from Fox?
     
    The underframe was painted Railmatch Roof dirt, and weathering featured washes mixed from frame dirt and roof dirt , partly taken off with a cotten bud soaked in whitespirit
     
    The roof was a bit of a nightmare with at least 4 coats with various mixes and washes needed before I got something which was roughly the right shade and reasonably even , not streaky. A coat of enamel matt varish over the lot finally killed the sheen and blended it in.
     
    The whole thing recieved a final coat of Railmatch matt varish from a can (along with the Van B and some 2mm containers) . At which point the can expired...
     
    Here's the finished result:
     
     

     
    And if anyone knows how to delete the duplicate large version of the underframe phot I'd be grateful . It's not showing up on the posting text
  4. Ravenser
    Longer-standing members will remember the 2006/7 Layout Challenge which started on RMWeb2 before we broke it. This produced a number of rather fine layouts including Keyhaven. It also - mostly - produced Blacklade.
     
    The basic remit of the Challenge was to produce a small layout providing a showcase for some of the high standard RTR we have enjoyed in recent years . LisaP4 defined the rules to require layout to have a maximum footprint of 6 square feet . That killed off an idea of mine to base a small layout on a version of the Timesaver shunting puzzle and mocked up to represent a version of Tyne Commission Quay transplanted to the foreshore of the Thames in the 1950s and electrified at 1500V dc. It would have required 8 square feet . In retrospect Tynesaver Wharf ("For Your Economical Fuel!") was a merciful escape - the work involved would have been far too much and I'd have been stuck with a half built layout stalled and abandoned. As opposed to a 4/5th built layout stalled, like wot I 'ave..... The scheme would have required amongst other things a DC Kits EM1 and a Judith Edge EB1 (and possibly an EF1 to boot) and a heck of a lot of inlaid track - always bad news on the work front . The EM1 kit I acquired cheap when the local model shop closed down is still sat behind me with no obvious prospect of being built. It's not merely well down the list - it's not on the list at all.
     
    As well as this still born scheme , the Challenge produced a large range of schemes which never quite made it - I think at one point there were just under 80 layout proposal threads in the subforum on RMWeb 2 and to my mind the unbuilt proposals were the saddest loss when that version of RMWeb congealed and froze. I recall Buckjumper had a proposal for a gaslit subterranean S7 affair in 1890s E.London ("Always carry a revolver east of Aldgate, Watson") illustrated by some atmospheric sketches (Sepulchre St wasn't it?). A particular mention is due to two very innovative and radical schemes to use the footprint - Kenton's "Long Thinney" and a bold circular doughnut multilevel scheme in N , whose name and builder I have forgotten (Sorry!) . Both proceeded a long way into construction before abandonment for differing reasons and both used the idea of a very narrow board to maximise length .
     
    But to return to what actually got built on my part
     
    I attach the link to the thread on RMWeb3 (itself starting as a repost of the RMWeb 2 thread - I'm sure some of this material must have been through either the Library of Alexandria or the Saxon monastery of Jarrow at some point):
     
    Blacklade - RMWeb 3 Challenge thread
     
    It is perhaps reposting the initial ideas:
     
    Quote
     
    Plan B revolves around on of the plans from Carl Arendt's micro site , which has attracted me for a while:
     
    http://www.carendt.c...lans/index.html
     
    The plan in question is under Shelf Switchers / Passenger Lines , and is called "Amalgamated Terminal 2" . It's a slight tweak of "Amalgamated Terminal"
     
    Carl has designed this around shunting passenger coaches, thinking in US terms of loco hauled passenger trains being shunted and reformed.
    I looked at it and thought "small terminus for DMUs"
     
    Some people may remember the long threads on RMWeb 1.5 about modern small termini and MUs:
     
    [Links deleted because dead]
     
     
    and there was a discussion on RMWeb 1.0 sparked by some photos of Manchester Mayfield. Cloggydog [Alan Monk] declared an unfulfilled urge to build a small Manchester terminus in the late 60s.
     
    Anyway, my concept here is to take Amalgamated Terminus 2 and lengthen it to 8' 4" : ie 2 boards each 4'2" long, 5" wide at the board joint , and 12" wide at the end.
     
    Someone who can remember things like triganometry may be able to confirm, but according to my maths (done using strips, trriangles , and fractions on the back of an envelope)that's just under 6 square feet.
     
    There are a few tweaks to the trackplan. There'll be an extra crossover between the centre platform and the front platform, giving access to what Carl Arendt marks as "Engine Ready road" and for me will be a small fueling point. And there'll be an extra fiddle yard road at the back
     
    What's marked as "Covered Concourse" becomes the back platform. The middle platform moves to between the front and middle roads
     
    We are in a largish Midlands county town , somewhere between 1989/90 and 2000/1. [in the event, I've slipped into an "early" period 1985-90 and a "late" period 2000-6: The end of the Central Trains franchise closes the latter] It isn't Derby, or Nottingham, or Leicester or Lincoln. Maybe it replaces one of them, and it resembles bits from all. It had an ex GC through station and an ex MR terminus, and now the rather battered MR station remains, served by DMUs
     
    In the early period we get 114s, 105s, 150/2 , 153, 155 and Pacers. (In other words I build the kits in the cupboard and finish the conversions) Maybe a 108 and 101 in blue/grey (I grab some new RTR). Parcels are possible (CCTs + 31). A 20 brings the fuel tank for the fueling point. Maybe a 31 and 2 coaches subs for a DMU [i bought the RTR; Hornby forstalled the 153 conversion , and I bought 2; the other conversions still await - a tentative start has been made on one Pacer: see my blog]
    In the later period the Modernisation Plan units disappear , and I get to run my Central Trains Turbostar and the 156 I'm promising myself. [and got] Maybe a 158 (See Steve Jones picture) [W Yorks 158 in service, and I'm finally going to order a CT 2 car set from Hattons. The photo in question was of a classic CT pairing on the Joint line - 153+158] Maybe I'll sort out the 37 conversion and use it for the fuel [ Maybe by the end of the next decade. A cheap 57 off the Bachmann stand and a discount 66 will serve in the meantime]
    It will be DCC ; some of the interest will be joining and splitting trains. I can just manage 150/2 + 153, and 142 + 142, or 142 + 153 , or 153 + 153 are possible
     
    It will be OO. I want to have pukka OO track, and as beginners don't start with double slips, I'm thinking of investigating Marcway. This may affect the geometry slightly: as drawn it seems to use Peco medium radius. [ I went Marcway]
    It will use stock I'm going to build for the club project , which will be DCC anyway, plus units intended for the home layout I haven't built. The only things I would need to buy is two Pacers. Virtually all the structures /bits can be sourced out of my cupboard.
     
    In any case there's only a few low relief flats involved. I don't need to build stock specially. So it should be a relatively quick project.
     
    8'4" comfortably fits in the "study" where the home layout was going to go [ Ended up as 8'6" long]
    I've roughed it out with stock and Peco templates on some lining paper full size. I've never tried XtraCAD, and this seemed quicker. Also I'd endorse Neil and Shortliner's comments about needing to check every quarter inch
     
    And it fits. I need to get a friend to turn it out in Templot to check the geometry 100% for handbuilt, but it drops in place and all the stock fits...
     
    The "bow-tie" shape has caused a few interesting issues with the pointwork and motorisation of same in the throat area, but works, more or less, scenically
     
    After October 2007, construction gradually slowed down, and by the beginning of 2009 it more or less ground to a halt as I became occupied on other fronts. I repeat the last posting in the old thread , dated Sat Aug 29th 2009:
     
    Quote
     
    Its been a long while since anything was posted - most of my efforts in the last few months have gone into stock.However this does mean that there are a few new items to play with and the other evening I had a running session.
     
    I went for an early period session and managed to get 8 trains on the layout, being W Yorks 158, 2 x 153s, W Yorks 155, 108 , 3 car 101, parcels (31 + 2 bogievans) , 20 + TTA .Operation was on the same principle as those puzzles they used to sell , where there were 9 positions and 8 tiles, so you had to shuffle things round using the one available space. I managed to run trains for over an hour and a quarter before getting myself boxed in to the point where I needed to take something off in the fiddle yard to make another move possible . Given the small size of the layout and the lack of frieght , the operational potential is good, even if permissive working was stretched a bit now and again.
     
    The 3 car 101 is probably a bit much. The original idea was to make up a 2 car set , but as Hornby's unit was actually allocated to TS at the right period, it seems a pity to rework it as power car+ trailer and dump the centre car. Whether such a 3 car unit would ever have run as a temporary power twin at this period is unclear, but there seems to be some evidence formations were starting to get a bit improvised and mix'n match by the mid to late 80s. It would certainly make operations simpler if I just removed the centre car on an ad hoc basis. Both of the DC Kits in the cupboard are for 2 car units (105 and 114) so once one of those is built there is an alternative anyway
     
    The running session has clarified things in terms of fleet strategy and what projects I start next. I was a little surprised to find that I already have almost everything for the early period (1985-90) and potentially plenty to spare, whereas I'm short of stock for the "late" period 2000-7. I'd assumed it was the other way round. To get a complete blue period fleet, I need to swap over the W Yorks 158 and the Central 153 (which was pressed into service to test consisting - dead easy with the PowerCab). I've already got a Provincial 150/1 on order from Trains4U - far from being an unnecessary indulgence, it can replace the 158 with something appropriate in short order. Longer term , I'm intending to buy a second RR 153 to go with my existing one, once Hornby release a RR livery in late condition with ploughs. In the medium term , however, it looks like I need to get on with reworking one of my Pacers with the Branchlines chassis pack. Neither Pacer is operable at present (no decoders/coarse wheels jam in the points) so this would get some "dead" stock into traffic.
     
    I was considering one of 3 possiblities as "next cab off the rank" - the Pacer project, detailing up a body for the Airfix 31 and building the Ratio Southern bogie brake van . However it looks like the choice is made - I already have a perfectly serviceable Hornby 31 and 2 parcels vans...
     
    Another way of freeing up space in the fiddle yard would be to fit a decoder to the old Bachmann 03 lurking in a cupboard , and sort out the pickups, couplings and a few other bits of upgrading . Again it was on the list as a "quick win" project to get some stored stock back into use and may well be prioritised
     
    Looking at the fleet list from the other evening, if I was running late period, i'd need to swap out 2 Modernisation Plan DMUs, the parcels trains, and the 20+TTA. I've a couple of Type 5s and a late green TTA recently finished,so the fuel oil is covered, but the only other DMUs currently available are a Turbostar and a 156. I had been hesitating whether to get a Central 158 from Hattons, on the grounds I didn't really need it - perhaps I do. And it does suggest I should get my finger out and finish the Bratchill 150/2 which has been stalled for an indecent length of time. Even with both I'll only have one DMU spare for the later period. If I just build everything I've already got for the earlier period, I could have 4 spare units, 5 spare locos and at least 3 spare parcels vans....
     
    It's one thing trying to calculate what stock you can and can't run and do and don't need, but once you actually try a session everything becomes a lot easier to see
     
    Nothing has been done on the layout since. However it has seen occasional use as a programming track . You'll have spotted that a couple more items of stock have been finished (PMV , TTA) or begun (Pacer)
     
    Having recently managed to shed a couple of commitments within the club I should now have more time to sort out the long list of jobs to be done in other areas - finishing Blacklade being one. The items still outstanding are the old ones - the remaining point motors and the station walling. But with luck we may see some progress in the coming months
     
    As I've now found the Create Blogs page again, and managed to transfer this to a blog, I can update this entry to say I've given the thing another running session, and what sticks out like a sore thumb is that the points do not throw completely . If you don't check each one is fully over and snug , and push it into place where necessary derailments result . The problem is clearly the one discussed here:
    Strengthening Wire on Tortoises
     
    I can watch the wire bending instead of the point moving if I view it from below. So this will need sorting out when I find out where I can source piano wire - and what I use to cut it with . I'm not going to wreck the edge on Xurons- they're expensive tools.
     
    This time round the 101 was reduced to 2 car, we acquired a "swinger" in the form of the newly built PMV and I found I didn't need the second diesel loco , as the 31 could be used for the TTA and minor pilot duties . That's 7 and a half trains, but proves comfortable to operate: I managed over an hour and a half of train shuffling without getting boxed in. Part of the concept is that each unit needs to go onto the fuelling point as some stage - this gives some point or or purpose to the train shuffling moves
     
    On account as it were are two quick snaps:
     

     

     
    And yes I really do need to add the station buildings, or at least the surrounding walls which would once have supported the overall roof
  5. Ravenser
    I said in a posting on my workbench blog that layouts required seperate comment, and I've remarked a couple of times that I got myself hopelessly overcommitted on far too many fronts , even before work matters absorbed all my energy in the first half of last year. The two things are linked..... so perhaps a survey of my layout commitments is over due, at least to show where I'm coming from
     
    For quite a number of years I was extremely heavily committed to a layout project in my club . It wasn't without it's frustrations and difficulties, but I suspect a good many clubs have housed a struggling project with large ambitions and limited numbers of people and experience actually behind it. Eventually it all got too much, especially when coupled with administrative responsibilities, active membership of a society, long working and commuting hours, and the household chores arising from being single. Something had to give and late in 2009 I dropped out of the project, in the hope of getting my life back - only to be hit by a train coming the other way.
     
    Changed personal circumstances now largely rule out my becoming involved with a club layout group again , even if I wished to. I no longer work near my club, and just getting there costs almost £20 and involves an hour and a half of travelling each way. I've managed it only once in the last 6 months, and while I certainly hope to do better in 2011, those aren't conditions which allow you to be actively involved with a project. And the project itself has been taken on by new people and gone in other directions. There is a club nearer to me where I have one or two contacts, which has a couple of layout projects each of which might connect with some of my interests - but to be honest I'm rather enjoying my freedom and I'm really not sure I want to get involved with layout groups and the Exhibition Circuit in that way again. Quite a bit of my life had to be put on hold in the years when I was spending 2 nights a week at the club and getting home at gone 11 o'clock, and it's nice to have the chance to pursue other interests inside and outside the hobby again.
     
    So that's one bale of straw - a big one - out of the way.... Plenty still to go.
     
    First and foremost there's Blacklade, which is nominally the subject of this layout blog. Unfortunately the lack of postings in the last year would suggest - quite correctly - that nothing has been happening on it. The job is 85% done - I just haven't been in a position to focus on the layout and carry out the few remaining major jobs.
     
    For those who haven't been living in these parts since the last century, a bit of background may be in order. About 4 years, and 2 iterations of RMWeb, ago , there was the Layout Building Challenge. The rules for this were build a layout in 12 months, with a maximum footprint of just 6 square feet, including fiddle yards. Andy Y's Keyhaven started as part of the Challenge and so did a couple of other rather fine layouts . My initial thoughts and a photo of the layout as it stood 14 months ago (and still stands) are in the first posting in this blog , not very far down the list.
     
    One of the major reasons for building it was that I'd started to acquire - almost involuntarily, as you do - stock for use on the club project. I wasn't really supposed to be a stock provider but I'd started picking up a few brightly coloured DMUs that were being discounted and would fit the project perfectly. It was only really backup stock so I didn't work on it, but when we ran the club project there were inevitably gaps to stop up, and you get sucked in. I tucked the boxes in the gap between the bookshelves and the wall and before I'd realised what was happening the pile was 3' high and climbing. Whoops.
     
    The project I was involved with was DCC, so I needed a test track and DCC programming track at home to enable me to do my own installations. I didn't want to be dependant on others to chip locos , especially if that was going to mean paying for a topline decoder every time (My normal fleet decoder is a TCS T1 , which at one point was available for £11.50 sans plug. Prices have climbed a bit since then, I'm afraid) . It occured to me that if I had a layout at home on which I could run this stock , it would give me an incentive to do something with it, and would at least ensure that it all ran properly. And if I could also use the various bits of stock that I had for what was supposed to be my real modelling interest (1980s ER secondary) that would be even better. There were enough gaps to require a bit of retail therapy, plus some kit building, which was better still... If the club project ever fell through or my stock wasn't actually required on it I'd have a Plan B (If this seems a bit dour, somewhere at the bottom of that pile is an elderly Hornby 155 in Provincial, bought to be converted into 153s in support of a previous proposed club project. That dropped through without anything actually being built, and I don't think the 155 has ever run. I suppose one day I'll tweak the wheels, stick in a Macoder which lurks at the bottom of the decoder bag - it's all it deserves - and there'll be another early period DMU. Yes , I know they were all allocated to Canton. It's running trials after visiting Derby for overhaul. It's nil cost - and quite as far down my list of jobs as it is down the pile of stock...)
     
    As it happens, I've ended up there by a different route . However, although I'm now out of the club layout game, with a couple of exceptions, all my stock fits Blacklade very nicely.... Blacklade gets erected in the sitting room when I need to program a decoder, and I even managed one short running session about 2 months ago
     
    I need to motorise the last three points, finish off the wiring, and build the station structure (largely surrounding walls) . I also need to sort out the one major problem to date - the Marcway points are very stiff and the wire supplied with the Tortoises is too flexible, resulting in points not throwing completely. I bought some suitable steel wire for replacements at Warley just over a year ago, but haven't got round to fitting them. If - a very big if - I can get this all done by the middle of the year , there are two modest group events I might just take Blacklade to . Although I originally intended that it wouldn't be exhibited - which is why the boards are 4'3" long - I now have a car, and a bit of measuring suggests I might just get them in with the back seats folded down, and without having to fold back the passenger seat - so a second operator could travel in the car. We shall see.
     
    This is very much my main layout now, and while I'm not really sure if I would want to be on the circuit, I would at least like to finish it and if possible take it out in public a couple of times, just to show that I can actually build something that looks ok and runs ok. At which stage, point made, I might bow and retire
     
    Then there's the Boxfile, which I've referred to from time to time as my shunting plank. It does have a proper name and it's actually two boxfiles, linked, but it's the Boxfile . It was built for the DOGA competition some years ago, and represents a smoky hole in East London which handles a few wagons: the track plan is a loop and two sidings(sort of) and it functions as a shunting puzzle, with a loco and 7 wagons. Period is post war - ranging from the early 50s when the Y3 is running/slipping to the mid 60s, and if I manage to build the Y5 in the cupboard it may even run as early as 1948
     

     
    One of the attractions of the exercise was that it allowed me to build all those interesting wagon kits which are strictly out of period for 1980s Lincolnshire - but which had somehow found their way into my cupboard nonetheless. Suddenly I was free to go out and buy all those kits I really fancied but which were normally strictly off-limits for me; not surprisingly I've ended up with way more wagons than are needed to operate the boxfile. About 4 times as many, to be precise - I'm now slowly reaching the latter part of Tranche 4 - and four times as many locos as well (05, Hunslet tram, Y3 and Knightwing shunter to be precise). I've got a part built Branchlines chassis for an 04 sitting on the bookcase, and a second hand Stephen Poole kit for one of these lurks in the cupboard
     
    :
     
    I believe North Woolwich museum has closed: does anyone know where the Y5 is and whether it's in good keeping?
     
    Quite a few of these wagons have passed through my workbench thread ORBC- the Boxfile is where my steam-age wagons end up. It may seem excessive producing decent kitbuilt wagons just for a boxfile, but turn it the other way round - the Boxfile does at least give me something to run my wagons on. I
     
    've also salvaged and recycled a few of my early teenage efforts, and got decent wagons for the 'file out of them.
     

     
    I originally posted these shots at the start of the very first incarnation of ORBC on RMWeb. The Conflat is "scratchbuilt" to match the Bachmann container (the old Red Panda clasp braked chassis kit, with a spare Parkside floor and side/chain pockets added in styrene) and the Mogo was stripped down , patched up and reworked from a teenage effort
     
    The finished wagon is seen here alone with a Ratio Mink built at much the same age, and also recycled and refurbished:
     

     
    This was one of the reasons behind the whole exercise - get things out of the cupboard, get them sorted out , and get them into use so I have something to show for myself. Both wagons have seen a bit of service since they were done and I'm quite pleased with them
     
    I'd hoped that the boxfile would give me a layout I could run quickly easily, and potentially a lot at home, and it was designed to be set up and run on the dining table. But the sheer pressure of other commitments and stuff needing to be built has meant that this has only happened occasionally. Now I have a bit of time again, I hope that will change. But at least this is one layout I finished (which is more than can be said for the COV B kit, which is supposed to run on it..)
     
    Then there's the little layout which a small informal group I'm involved with are nominally building. We meet up every 6 weeks or so, and it was suggested that we build a small layout as a focus for our activities. So far two baseboards have been built (not by me) and a third is required, for the fiddle yard. That's as far as matters have got.
     
    The other members of the group are a bit older than me, so this layout was only ever going to be steam or steam/diesel. Since anumber of group members would be running stock they've had for some years, it will be DC - in any case there's very little advantage to DCC on a small steam layout of this kind. Track will be Peco code 75, and the track plan is an Iain Rice design , Broadwell Green, which appeared in the fifth issue of the late lamented MORILL. Although based on Fairford, we decided to do it as a minor Great Eastern branch line terminus. My wagons off the boxfile would be ideal, and so would be the Dublo 20 I detailed up a couple of years ago. I've got a second hand whitemetal N5 in a box somewhere... I can't quite recall whether the headshunt was long enough to take an ROD on the pickup goods or not. I remember a B12 would go , but a Sandringham definitely wouldn't. A Hornby L1 would certainly be easier than a kit built Gobbler
     
    My potential contribution includes a couple of Ratio ex LNWR coach kits, as handed down via the M&GN, one of which has got as far as a preliminary undercoat of brown on the sides before construction starts, and a GE station - one of StreetLevel Models' kits sits in the pile. But I'm not the prime mover on this one, and, until it starts to develop, this one is on the backburner as far as my own modelling is concerned.
     
    Then there's my light rail project, Tramlink. I had seen the Alphagraphix kits for light rail, and a book on Croydon Tramlink, then newly opened . I thought a model light rail unit could be made via that route, at modest cost - at that time Mark Hughes was offering a whitemetal kit which would cost at least £100 all up when motorised, and I reckoned that this way I could do it for about £35, with flushglazing and livery ready applied. There's no point building models if you've nowhere to run them, and I rapidly decided a little diorama layout based on scenes from Croydon Tramlink could be done. The unique selling point was that it would be entirely card, even the stock
     

     
    I was younger then, and innocent, and my life was a great deal less encumbered. I was also a great deal less experienced , and several errors were made. The layout was making good progress until I found my second LRV , a Croydon unit , wouldn't take any kiind of curve , and the first (Metrolink) didn't like a reverse curve through a Setrack point in one direction, so it derailed every time it reversed out of the cripple siding. And at that point I was shanghai'd into the club project and the whole thing came to a grinding halt. It got a little further than the photos show, but not that much
     

     
    Tramlink sits, boxed up , in the study, under a pile of magazines, and gets dragged out occasionally when I need a DC test track. A wire's broken underneath so only one board is currently live. And I look at the buildings and think they scrubbed up well (and that the photostat mockup of the warehouse needs to be replaced with the actual kit), and then it goes back in its box again. Two boards , 3' long by 11" wide with integral plywood backscenes, opposable and forming a case , small enough to take on public transport and get through the automatic ticket gates
     
    Then we come to the shadowy realm inhabited by the Ghosts of Layouts Past and Yet To Come (complete with Prieser figure of Bob Cratchitt carrying a 30lb goose)
     
    The first spirits to visit us are those of Ravenser Mk1 and Mk2. Ravenser was a minimum space (in theory) freight only layout set at an imaginary small port in N. Lincolnshire. Think Boston Dock (or Gunness) transported to the banks of the Humber and the top end of the N.Lincs Light Railway from Scunthorpe and you have the scenario. It used a plan published in the June 1988 RM , entitled White Swan Yard, which incorporated a fierce curve, but I enlarged the board a bit and added a fiddle yard.
     
    I made lots of mistakes with this layout. The curve proved unworkably sharp - derailments due to coupling issues were frequent. An elderly Wrenn 20 and Lima 08 proved hopeless for reliable running. Initially I thought only a low standard would be practical on such a portable layout, a decision I rapidly regretted, and could not wholly reverse.Setrack points were another very bad decision: I learned a lot about wheel and track standards as a result. A Lima 20 upgraded with Ultrascales and all wheel pickup could not be got to stay on the track round the loop: I never had the heart to tackle the body as a result. Ravenser Mk1 resulted in my first serious successful attempts at kit built and upgraded RTR wagons, through the fleet was ultimately limited because I ran out of space in the stock box (a converted cassette case)
     
    Ravenser Mk2 was to be built around two walls of the study in my new flat. A design was prepared , this time incorporating a small passenger station. I was going to have 20s, 31s, 114s , maybe a 105. It was never started, because I got involved in a club project. However Ravenser the layout has its place in this story because the stock is slowly being recycled into other projects. The 20s, 31s, and DMU kits can be used by Blacklade running early period. The 03 could be reused for the oil tank on Blacklade, as ultimately could the Bachmann 08. The Knightwing shunter is an interloper on the boxfile, and some of the wagons have gone the same way. Most of the Crane Train I was buil;ding is being recycled for the early period CE train on Blacklade. I still have the buildings , including a scratchbuilt 18th century warehouse from Louth and a freelance 1950s office block. And the baseboard, after cluttering the study for many years, went to the tip a fortnight ago.
     
    Then , older and fainter, come the spirits of the trams - the other Blacklade Artamon Square, and the possible London tram layout.
     
    Long, long, ago, in a far-away galaxy, sorry continent, a teenage boy built a OO tramway in his bedroom. I would very much have liked it to be a model based on the Sydney tramways, but kits were not readily available. I only ever saw such things once - someone was selling home made kits done with glassfibre resin (like wot you use to make surfboards) at Sydney exhibition one year . He had some of them on his layout, built up and they looked good. I only had enough money on me to buy one kit, and no motorising units - so I passed . I'm still kicking myself.Scratchbuilding wasn't an option for me then - Sydney was into crossbench cars big time (and a K-class is still fairly high up my list of Things I Don't Want to Scratchbuild). Anyone got a kit for a Sydney corridor car?
     
    What was available was a Mehano US outline model which I bashed into a British single decker, vaguely resembling the LCC's single decker cars for the Kingsway Subway (guess whose references comprised a couple of magazine articles, a booklet on the Kingsway Subway, and NSW Tramcar Handbook Parts1+2). There were also BEC whitemetal kits available, and I built two - an LCC B , and a balcony car. Both were modified to fully enclosed with 20 thou plasticard and painted for the fictitious Blacklade Corporation Tramways in a simplified version of Sydney's new Mercedes Benz bus livery which I rather liked. One of the minor mysteries of transport history is why Regional Railways then adopted a Sydney bus livery...
     
    I've got two photos of how Artamon Square looked when I dismantled it - annoyingly the scanner refuses to scan them, so you'll have to make do with a blurred shot at a very early stage of proceedings:
     

     
    This does at least show - very badly - the Mehano car, the BEC LCC car (almost certainly still under construction) and the general arrangement. More buildings - the Builder Plus terraces and detached Victorian houses- and some scratchbuilt buildings as well - followed. Builder Plus even did - briefly - a big shop based on Hamleys. I had that, and cut it down to fit the tapering site. This was the first Blacklade Artamon Square..... I reckon the railway station I'm now building must sit in the cut-out.
     
    The stock and buildings came back with us when we returned from Australia and have been sitting in boxes ever since. I collected the remaining buildings from Mum's loft at Christmas and brought them home - most of the Superquick and some of the BuilderPlus were too far gone to keep, but the terraces, Hamley's and the scratchbuild stuff is ok. The trams are stored in the cupboard, though my efforts with the 20 thou had shed too many window pillars and had to be removed. Thorough refurbishment will be needed.
     
    Track was OO , of course , and the back story said this was a 4' gauge system, like Derby and Bradford. Nice little get out clause
     
    Over the years since I've picked up 2 of the Keilcraft Birmingham kits (one for 50p of the DEMU second hand stall) and one of their West Ham kit , a Tower Models Feltham and E/1 (all plastic) another LCC B (ABS/BEC) an LCC stores van (ABS/BEC) and an LCC single deck subway car.
     
    You can see where this is going... I keep picking subjects with overhead, and keep not building the said overhead. The LCC was a conduit system - so no wires. I've got plenty of reference material. I'd definitely want North London not South London , but all the North London routes bar those through the Subway went by 1940. I want a Subway route. I want something more than a straight length of track (Blacklade had a dogbone loop double track route, with a single track branch, and a depot) Highgate Archway in the mid 30s has distinct possibilities....
     
    I'm definitely not committed to this of course. Or do I build the Keilcraft Birmingham cars and revive Blacklade? If I see a cheap Corgi Feltham around I really should grab it. The Festival of Tramway Modelling is back at Kew Bridge this year.... Maybe if I have time on my hands I build the Keilkraft kit for this:
     

     
    Last and faintest ghosts are the other scales. Someone gave me a low emission Dapol 66. I've subsequently acquired another one, a Farish 57, and 04, some modern wagons - the large ones that are such a problem to fit onto a layout in 4mm. Maybe I should build a freight distribution park they can run to?
     
    Then there's the large padded envelope of wagon kits left from my flirtation with 3mm, not to mention the small collection of Traing TT, the Brush 2 and the unfitted new armature, the BEC/2SMR J11kit. I was thinking of an urban goods station, but maybe the boxfile's got that out of my system. Then after I'd built two wagon kits and bought some 12mm Peco points I got heavily involved with a society and the whole thing wasdropped...
     
    Not to mention the HO - a NSWGR 422 class and two NSW coaches in Tuscan. But Currawong Heights, a small terminus in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, is scarcely even a ghost
     
    Projects, projects, projects. All too remininscent of the story of the donkey surrounded by bales of straw, which died of starvation because it couldn't decide which bale to eat first....
     
    No. Blacklade , the railway, comes first. Followed by tidying up stock and bits for the boxfile. Everything else can wait - and some of it, I suspect, will be waiting avery long time
  6. Ravenser
    For my next trick, as they say, I have a pair of Ratio MR suburbans. These are intended to form the second set of steam age coaches on Blacklade
     
    The reason for selecting these is simple. In my early teens, before discovering modern image modelling , I perpetrated several Ratio MR coach kits . The best of them, replacing my first attempt at a kit , was this gruesome object . It's also pretty well the only one to have survived . I remember I was quite pleased with this at the time
     

     
    The worst of this is the dire paint job, and since money is a little tight at present , the idea was to strip it, patch it up as best I could and pair it with a newly built brake. A Ratio MR suburban 6 compartment brake 3rd kit has duly been sourced
     
    So now the weather is a bit warmer , and hile I still had a bit of time available it was subjected to Modelstrip overnight and cleaned up with a toothbrush under the tap.
     
    The roof had already come off , but as I cleaned it up most of the rest started to come away as well. I think I painted parts before assembly with this one , and I suspect elderly cement bonds may be affected by Modelstrip, especially if they were patchy to start with. With a bit of judicious encouragement , I was soon left with this:
     

     
    This is no longer an attempted patch up but a complete rebuild, though in terms of the final result that's all to the good . It also gets me round one potential difficulty , which was repainting with spray can paint - now the sides are seperate , or more or less so, and the glazing removed, they can be sprayed normally, along with the sides for the brake.
     
    Like Ratio's other LMS coaches, these vehicles are covered by Historic Carriage Drawings Vol 2 - LMS. The Midland built a number of batches of arc roofed bogie non-corridor suburban coaches during the Edwardian period for suburban services around Manchester (1903) , Birmingham (1907-9), London (1910) Nottingham (1911-13) and Sheffield (1912) . The last three batches featured 8' bogies, not the 10' versions depicted by Ratio, and those for London and Nottingham were 9' wide not 8'6"
     
    These coaches are, for a miracle, more or less authentic for a steam era period for Blacklade set in 1958. The Nottingham area coaches survived until 1957-8; the Birmingham area coaches until 1956-7: Blacklade Artamon Square would have LMR local services to both. It is extremely unlikely any of the ex MR suburbans ever recieved maroon, so these will be painted BR crimson
     
    Since a total reconstruction of the all first is now in hand, I can take advantage of the fact that the composites for Manchester and Birmingham sets used the same body as the all firsts , with three compartments reduced in size by internal partitions for third class . I have a Cunning Plan for using this fact to improve the weight , which is a major problem with these kits. Before dismantling , the all first weighed only 50g , which is about half what it should . No wonder my teenage Ratio coaches were not reliable runners
     
    A reasonable start was made on these kits while I had time available , and progress shots are shown here:
     
    The reconstructed all first - to become a composite

     
    and the new 6 compartment brake third

     
    Sides were prepainted with an aerosol can of Railmatch Crimson, 3 thin coats, and the improvement in quality of finish compared with the brushpainted LNW coaches is substantial
     
    The instructions urge you to start with the underframe . The all first has a very slight twist in the floor pan , probably caused by it's previous incarnation: I didn't quite manage to eliminate this in reconstruction, though it's possible that adding the roof will finally do so, and since there is inherently a bit of slop and rock between bogies and body, absolute squareness is less critical than with a wagon , where if it isn't square it won't run . The brake 3rd seems to be dead square
     
    I now have two bogies, one suitably cleaned up from the all first, and the second reconstructed from the heap of bits into which it had disintegrated. I'#m sure the bit of the sprue with the brake blocks was knocking around in my box of spare sprues for ages , but I have an awkward suspicion I eventually threw it out....
  7. Ravenser

    At the Dawn of Time - Chapter the First

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    In which the Author discovereth a Cardboard Box in the Study which recalleth his Childhood; and subsequently journeys into the Western-most Parts of Great-Britain.....
     
    A few years ago I saw a reissue of the Airfix kit for Trevithick's locomotive in a shop. I had one of these as a child, when I was too young to have any real understanding of how to build it: I recall some attempt was made at it, though it certainly never got as far as any paint, and one or two cogs and bits survive somewhere in the depths of a scrapbox.
     
    It has always lingered in my memory as one of the most interesting Airfix kits, both for the subject and for the fact that this one was supposed to work. In the 1970s there was supposed to be a motorising kit available, though I never had it, or knew of anywhere you could get it. Occasional sightings of a residual part would prompt the rueful reflection that it would be interesting to attempt the kit now - when I actually know what I'm doing and might make something of it.
     
    So when I saw one I bought it, and brought the thing home - and it's been sitting in a pile of magazines on top of Tramlink
    ever since. I seem to have bought it from Modelzone in High Holborn, it's that long ago.
     
    The kit seems still to be available in places https://www.steamreplicas.co.uk/Airfix-1804-Steam-Loco.asp - I know nothing of these people except that they come up on a Google search and seem to specialise in Mamod live steam.
     
    I was meaning to dig out the Judith Edge Vanguard Steelman kit this weekend . But there was the Airfix kit, and it doesn't need a soldering iron, and I don't have to worry about whether it will run... Also Ally Pally is coming up and there's usually someone there who sells display cases, into which I can put the finished model.
     
    Here's the kit , with the basic boiler assembled:

     
    Essentially the kit is built round the boiler
     
    It's a very long time since I built an Airfix kit , other than a wagon kit, and impressions are pretty favourable.
     
    It takes a little getting used to the idea that every part is numbered on the sprue and you assemble by part order. This isn't what you expect in a model railway kit. The pictorial instructions are clear, and once you recognise the code, quite detailed. I've only found one place where the instructions weren't clear exactly where a piece went in, and one place where it isn't entirely clear exactly how it will all fit together.
     
    The fit of the parts is excellent - quite a bit better than I'm used to. In two places - the boiler and the chimney - two halves leave a seam through slight misalignment, and I've had to use filler and file/emery board to get a totally smooth finish. The seam at the top of the boiler is visible in the photo. Otherwise it's all startlingly good - and this is a forty year old kit. There's minimal flash on the parts. As a result of all this, I'm finding I true up and finish pieces to a fairly high standard
     
    There are prototype issues.
     
    Wikipedia is not a reliable source, but it is a convenient one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevithick
     
    In summary, accepted wisdom is that Trevithick's 1802 engine for the Coalbrookdale plateway was 3' gauge, and the furnace door and chimney were at the same end as the cylinder and the reciprocating machinery. It is generally assumed there would have been a small wooden tender pushed in front of the loco.
     
    Firing under the piston, slide bar and connecting rod would seem fairly hazardous, and there seems general agreement -I'm not familiar enough with the scholarship to say upon what basis - that Trevithick reversed the arrangement for the 1804 engine, with the furnace door and chimney at the opposite end from the reciprocating machinery.
     
    What Airfix have modelled is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coalbrookdale_loco.jpg , but to 5' gauge. As a modern image modeller I'm unfamiliar with the detailed provenance and exact sources of this drawing
     
    https://www.locos-in-profile.co.uk/Early_Locomotives/Early_1.html
     
    A further point is the boiler cladding - or lack thereof. Airfix - and modern drawings - assume an unclad iron boiler , probably painted black.
     
    However the only contemporary colour image of a Trevithick loco seems to be Thomas Rowlandson's watercolour of Catch Me Who Can at Euston in 1808. The best version I can find is here:
     
    http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co66226/richard-trevithicks-railroad-euston-square-1809-drawing
     
    And to my eye that clearly depicts a brown /teak boiler , with horizontal lines and boiler bands . In fact it is plainly varnished wooden boiler cladding, as seen on the restored Locomotion No1 and Wylam Dilly, and on pictures of Planet, Murray's Middleton locos , and other early engines.
     
    But Trevithick's tickets for the show just show a plain black boiler : https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Richard_Trevithick:_Catch_Me_Who_Can
     
    That , I suspect is the engineer's view - the boiler cladding is a detail to him.
     
    I can't see why boiler cladding would have been newly invented in 1808 - surely the purpose was to lag the boiler and improve thermal efficiency?
     
    So my money is on both the 1802 and 1804 locos having had varnished wooden boiler cladding as well
  8. Ravenser

    Layout Operation - Some Definitions

    By Ravenser,


    Operational
    This arises from the recent thread on Ally Pally.
     
    Blacklade's modest experiences at the show are matter for another post, but one aspect of the post-show discussion was the claim by several people that many or most of the layouts were not running trains, and somewhere [probably at post 358] the idea arose that this was because the layouts and their operators were using timetables or sequences or something of that kind.
     
    As will be evident from the subsequent discussion http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/117493-london-festival-of-railway-modelling-alexandra-palace-2526-march-2017/page-17 there was some confusion as to exactly what was meant , what it is called, and what might or might not have been going on.
     
    I've no wish to blow on the embers of an almost dead argument; but by that stage the discussion was largely about general principles, rather than the specifics of a particular layout or even show. And as the issue and argument seems to recur I think a few definitions and clarifications are useful, in the interests of light, rather than heat.
     
    "Timetable" operation I understand to mean that there is a WTT with actual times at which a train runs. And there is some kind of clock, and the train does not run until the clock shows the correct time for it . Moreover the times of the trains are almost certainly derived prototypically, from an actual timetable for the full-size prototype, or from how long it would take to make the move in reality.
    The Yanks do this quite a bit I believe on their big basement permanent layouts, which are designed for private operation by a team of operators. A "fast clock" - running several times faster than real time - is often employed (Apparently the NCE Powercab has a built-in fast-clock function)
    For obvious reasons this is extremely rare, if not unheard-of at British exhibitions. I've never encountered such a layout in over 20 years of visiting shows. (I believe the Sherwood Section and Crewechester may have worked like this but those layouts had a lot in common with the big US basement empires in their concept). Post 426 notes that Heckmondwyke tried it once - and then reverted to operating a sequence.
     
    Suggestions that some operators /layouts at Ally Pally were standing around waiting until it was the right time according to their timetable to run the next train were at best extremely sarcastic (and at worst misleading - some people evidently started to think that there were actually layouts at Ally Pally running to a timed timetable . To the best of my knowledge there were none.)
     
    Running to "a sequence" is a much more common practice. There is a list of each movement to be run, in correct order, and traction and stock is allocated to each. There may well be a list of what points have to be set. But, critically, there is no clock. Once you've run move 22, you then run move 23 . You don't wait until it is "the right time" (If you have to wait until someone else has finished doing something else , then the operator's instructions will say so - "Wait until move 21 shunting is complete, then run move 23")
     
    The sequence may be based on the prototype timetable, suitably condensed - or in the case of a rural branchline, augmented - and the time the real thing ran at may be noted in the sequence - "Move 22 - 3:10pm Peterborough-Grimsby semi-fast". Some layouts display the move and its details somewhere on the layout , so that spectators know what they are seeing. But none of this makes a sequence into a timetable. There is no clock, and no "waiting for time" - Move 23 still follows Move 22 as soon as practical.
     
    This point is worth stressing, because it seems some people are under the impression that running a sequence slows down the operation of a layout, and results in periods - perhaps frequent periods - of inaction.
     
    On the contrary, a sequence should speed up operation. You cut out all the "head-scratching time" while the operator tries to work out what is possible given the current state of the layout and how he can or should make his next move. In fact this is probably the only practical way to operate a large layout with junctions that set up conflicting routes at all intensively . Otherwise you end up tripping over your own bootlaces at regular intervals and operating becomes limited and erratic to avoid the possibility of conflicts.
     
    But if a sequence is in place, operators can make the next move quickly and confidently, knowing exactly what they are supposed to do, and having full confidence that the move won't conflict with anything else. All the thinking has been done for them by the person who developed the sequence.
     
    A good sequence will allow your "party piece" operations to be shown to the public on a regular repeatable basis, as well as ensuring a good variety of stock appears front of house and your choicest models.
     
    And for exhibition use it's essential that the sequence returns all the stock to their starting positions, so you can repeat it.

    t-b-g notes that Narrow Road operated to a sequence that lasted an hour, and as part of this there were often multiple trains moving at once, sometimes up to five at once. You can only do that sort of thing with a sequence - and also quite a few operators, since controlling two different trains simultaneously is extremely difficult. Since operators' accommodation is the most expensive thing for a show on the layout side, there are practical restrictions on having large layouts with clouds of operators [And at post 442 we seem to have a witness to the famous comment about Heckmondwyke, with its authentic block-bells to offer trains - "the bells ring but the bloody trains don't run!".]
     
    For the record there was another well-known 1970s continuous circuit mainline layout, Winton, which managed a kind of hybrid between the timetable and the sequence. The layout ran to a sequence, but instead of using flip-cards they recorded a commentary/explanation on cassette tape for the public, and the operators had to keep up with the tape... It was written up for the Railway Modeller in the late Seventies, but nobody since has dared to attempt anything like it since.
     
    One caveat is that a complex sequence is not something operators can be expected to deliver on the fly first time. You do need a team of operators who have practiced, so they know what they are doing . Effectively, you are putting on a model railway play, called "a day at......." and like any play you need rehearsals before attempting a performance. That implies a team of regular operators, and opportunities to erect and run the layout away from shows. 
     
    Now such sessions can be rewarding in their own right. In fact - heresy of heresies - it is entirely possible that such sessions, not public exhibition, can be the main object of building a layout. That was the whole raison d'etre of layouts like Sherwood and Crewechester , two generations ago. I was fortunate to be invited along several times to a big coarse scale Gauge O garden railway that had several operating days a year , and ran to a sequence loosely representing a secondary MR main line
     
    And lest we assume that operational layouts are some kind of crude and primitive form of the hobby that went out with spring-drive , it's worth remembering that Peter Denny's Buckingham GC operated with several operators to a complex sequence covering both the Buckingham line and its minor branches for several decades. Buckingham GC didn't fade away when the constructional articles stopped - it was operated, for Peter Denny's pleasure, over many years. It's just that the British hobby, focused on finescale construction and exhibiting , wasn't really interested in that.
     
    In the US , on the other hand, operating a layout is very much the core of the hobby. Indeed I sometimes think that in some ways Buckingham was a rather American layout - it's just that Peter Denny was modelling the GC in the Home Counties, not some subdivision of the Union Pacific in the Rockies.
     
    But I digress......
     
    The next group of ways of operating a layout might be labelled "task-based operating". This can take a variety of forms, moving from the switching micro up to the basement empire; but what links these forms of operating as a group is that there isn't a set list of choreographed moves. Instead the operator is working ad-lib, but to perform a set task or tasks within rules and parameters.
     
     
    "Shunting puzzles" are the most obvious example, but all shunting layouts work on this broad principle. A train runs in, you shunt and sort the wagons into the sidings, and then you form up another train to go out. The arrival and dispatch of trains is a peripheral, vestigial activity - there is no sequence, just a "rest of the world" to send wagons out to and receive from. In some respects this is a game of model railway patience played with wagons rather than cards - and each train in or out is a shuffle of the cards.
     
    Canada Wharf at Ally Pally was obviously being operated on this basis, and so was Kirkmellington Most branchline layouts also tend to work on this principle. The main task is shunting the pickup goods, which can take quite a while - subsidiary tasks are running some passenger trains and maybe one or two "special" trains. Leysdown seems to have run on this basis .
     
    The fact is that shunting a train can provide hours of innocent amusement for all the family - in sharp contrast to what I was once told, that "You can't shunt on an exhibition layout. We never shunted on X"
     
    The big US basement empires commonly fall under this heading. It's startling to discover that a 40' x 25' basement empire with twelve operators for a session lasting a half a day may in fact only run 8-10 trains. However, in U.S. prototype style each train (with 2 operators per train) wanders around the layout, shunting a whole series of separate locations in accordance with prototype rules. This is task-based operating with a vengeance.
     
    One potential problem with shunting is the question of "what do I shunt, and why?" In the US it is normal to answer this question by implementing a system of wagon waybill cards, whereby each location has defined traffic generation, in or out, and cards are produced representing the movement instructions for a wagon to satisfy this. Thus each train is accompanied by a fistful of cards - each one representing a wagon in the train, with its load, and telling the operators where the wagon is to go to, and what is to be done with it thereafter. At each location, the operators find cards for wagons already there, with instructions on what is to happen to them.
     
    Effectively the train runs much like the real thing, and the second operator is there to deal with the paperwork, much like the conductor on a real US freight.
     
    You can do something like this on a British layout - in fact PD Hancock apparently implemented a wagon waybill system on Craigshire in its later years. But in Britain card/waybill systems and other such practices are things tolerated between consenting adults in private but not to be mentioned in front of the children.
     
    Essex Belt Lines seems to have been running a US style operation at All Pally, with a central dispatcher calling the shots and individual train crews working around a series of locations, but I think they had left the car waybills at home.
     
    The very simple layout where the operator performs the same basic operational task over and over again belongs in this group as well.
     
    Finally we have what I think of as the "cavalcade" style of operation. In this style of operation, normally found only on a big continuous circuit layout, there is no timetable , sequence, or tasks - just a socking great 14 road fiddle yard at the back, filled with trains. The operators simply fire out a series of trains from the fiddle yard round the circuit in each direction. Some layouts may run them round once, some may send them round for two or three circuits. Then they run another train . This goes on all day
     
    I have to admit that the cavalcade is not really my cup of tea - certainly it's not what I want to do for myself with my own layout, and I don't have a 36' x 12' space in which to do it. But there is no doubt it is what a significant section of exhibition goers want to see, and some tend to regard anything else as in some sense a fraud on the public perpetrated by the layout operators . As I was once told by a member of another club, "You must remember that people don't go to exhibitions to look at the layouts. They're there to look at the stock". And therefore in his view the actual layout should be as nondescript as possible - the set should not distract attention from the star actors .
     
    For this reason the cavalcade is the natural layout format for those folk who are essentially stock-builders. They simply want a stage on which they can display the trains they have built to the public.
     
    I find I can happily took at a cavalcade layout providing there is enough high quality structural modelling interest around it. Layouts like Gresley Beat, Dewsbury Midland, and Sydney Gardens are fine by me - I am effectively admiring a high-quality scenic model with the trains as an agreeable supplement. It's when the stage is nearly bare that I start losing interest.
     
    It's worth pointing out that a layout running a sequence might look like a cavalcade layout to the punters. I strongly suspect, for example, that Stoke Summit ran to a sequence - it featured authentic ECML services with authentic formations, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they ran in a set order, roughly corresponding to the time of day they ran on the real thing. But the average punter was probably unaware of these subtilties - he just saw a continuing passing parade of trains on a simple 4 track section. It was a very popular layout.
     
    At this point I ought to declare my own hand.
     
    I have 3 layouts (okay Tramlink has been dormant for years...). I've always tried to design in as much operational interest as possible, so that I have something to do with it when it's finished. All three in practice fall under the heading "task-based operation"
     
    The boxfile is a shunting puzzle. You have four wagons on-, and three off-stage. You have to work the three off-stage wagons on, under the hoist, and to the correct spot, and work off the three empties. You swap an empty for a full behind the scenes. Working your way through this can take over an hour. And there is a panel on the flap giving "The Rules of the Game"
     
    Tramlink, and to a certain extent Blacklade, were designed to work on the same principle as those puzzles where you have 8 tiles in a 3 x 3 frame , and one gap. With Tramlink there are two sidings on each board, and it was designed to operate with 3 LRVs, and one empty siding. So you have an empty slot, and a choice of two possible LRVs on the other board to run into it. Soon your choice is constrained (I've just run this in , so I must run the other out...) 
     
    Blacklade has 3 platforms on the station board and 4 roads on the fiddle yard board, one of which (the fuelling point) can only be accessed from the front two platforms. So you play the same game with DMUs, and in the BR Blue period (as we ran at Ally Pally) with a Loco-hauled Substitute - 2 coaches, worked Minories-style by two Type 2s . This can only really fit in the long back platform , and the long front fiddle yard road, with comfort. 
     
    There is a run-round loop in the throat, but that can only really serve the short centre platform. So there's a parcels train that runs in at the start and is run round , before collecting a CCT van which arrives as tail traffic on a DMU. That is then replaced by another DMU. In theory , every item of traction should spend some time on the fuelling point to refuel - think of it as a scenic road of the fiddle yard - and there's a TTA of diesel which either needs to be worked onto the layout and back to the fuelling point, or else worked off, by a loco. Cue some shunting....
     
    And for the first time at a show I managed to run the engineers' train, which comes on, runs round and goes back. That was at the end, when we were starting to box up the DMUs.
     
    So there's plenty to keep you busy , and trains were worked back and forth in rapid succession throughout the show
     
    But it's worth pointing out just how unprototypical all this intensive operation really is. In real life, Blacklade would see 5-7 movements an hour. So something would happen every 10 minutes or so.
     
    That's on today's crowded high-frequency network. Things were a lot quieter in the days of steam.
     
    In 1962 there were 5 trains a day each way between Kings Cross and Edinburgh, excluding sleepers. (In 1910 it was only 3, with two Scottish sleepers and the Aberdeen mail). By 1975 that had grown to 9 trains northbound and 10 southbound, and it went to 11 each way from 1978 with HSTs . It's a lot more today.
     
    Louth was an important double junction on the GN secondary mainline from Peterborough to Grimsby. In the summer of 1922 it had a service of 13 trains a day each way, of which 6 were local shuttles between Louth and Grimsby and a further one a shuttle which ran through to Mablethorpe. There were 6 more trains each way to Mablethorpe, and 4 on the Bardney branch. The entire service on the E Lincs mainline south of Louth was 6 trains each way.
     
    And on Sundays the branches were shut, and the mainline service comprised 2 trains each way.
     
    Freight traffic in 1946 comprised 9 up trains a day and 13 down, plus a pick up goods on each branch.
     
    That's 68 movements a day, spread between 4:00 am and 9:45pm. Almost 4 movements per hour, or an average of nearly two trains an hour each way.
     
    For nearly all the day you could have sat on the platform at Louth for 20-30 minutes without seeing a train move.
     
    This is for an important double junction on a secondary main line , with additional local services running in 3 directions.
     
    An important part of the character of the steam-age rural railway in Britain was the long - often very long - periods of stillness when nothing at all seemed to happen on a sleeping deserted station. The Central Line in the rush hour - which is what people seem to want to see at shows, or else - it was not.
     
    [edited to tidy up typos and commas]. And in a futile attempt to remove underlining...
  9. Ravenser

    Route One

    By Ravenser,

    With DCC Installing the point motors and decoder isn't necessarily the end of the story. Yes, it gets the points working , but more than just that is possible, and yesterday I took the final steps in commissioning the installation
     
    Working the points one by one through the handset is a little slow and clunky . Probably no slower than flicking a set of switches on a DC panel, but just as liable to operator error. I suspect that one of the major causes of derailment and intermittant running on the average layout is the operator having failed to set some point in the route somewhere, and I'm no better at it than anyone else
     
    Much more sophisticated automated approaches are possible with DCC, and most of them cost a lot of money. In fact I believe several small building societies are now offering mortgages of up to 80% LTV for first time buyers of Railroad & Co software... Having been born in Yorkshire I'm not going down any route that involves several hundred euros and the installation of lots of special electronic devices sourced from someone unpronounciable in the Black Forest.
     
    Fortunately that's not necessary. The NCE Powercab - which is what I have - offers a feature called "macros" . These allow you to store instructions to up to 8 accessory decoder addresses , and send them as a single operation. There's even a nice prominent button labelled "macros" between "select loco" and select accessory". Just press it. type in the number of the macro and press return - and instructions to up to 8 accessory addresses can be sent at once (I'm being very careful in my wording here - both the MERG point decoder and the DS64 accessory decoder have 4 outputs and therefore 4 addresses . The Lenz LS150 has 6. And one output/address can work two points , typically as a cross-over. )
    The PowerCab supports 16 of these macros , numbered 0-15 (I presume the Procab does the same)
     
    Blacklade has 9 points (2 of which form a single slip), two point decoders, and 7 addresses in use - there are 2 crossovers, wired as pairs. There are 3 platforms in the station , one of which (Pl 2) can be reached by either front or back routes , 3 roads in the fiddle yard and the fuelling point. That gives 4 x 4 = 16 possible route options , though in reality it's only 14 , as you can't reach the fuelling point from platform 3 (the back platform) or from the back exit from Platform 2
     
    So each possible route on the layout can be given it's own macro which will fire all the points necessary to set it up with a single instruction. Full entrance/exit route setting - for nowt. 'Cos it comes as a standard feature on the Powercab....
     
    The first step was to check each point address and work out which way was Normal and which Reverse (these are the 2 options in NCE - Digitrax prefer Closed and Thrown). I drew a very crude panel diagram in pencil to record this - the standard convention being that Normal is a thick continuous line, and Reverse is a break in the line . Then I started programming the macros starting with macro 1 (Platform 1 to fuelling point) , programming the correct setting for each point in the route with reference to the pencil diagram. When route started to involve the slip it seemed like a good idea to run something through to test it and make sure I had the polarity right through the slip, so out came a153. Program macro , press button, enter macro number, hear points throw, run train. And so on steadily down the list of possible permutations
     
    After about an hour and a half I had a layout where I could set up any possible route in one go , just by pressing a button and entering a number . And the appropriate signals came off as well.. The 153 ran slowly and reliably back and forth across the layout.
     
    For ease of operation, I've written out all the macro numbers as a table on the back of an old business card and stuck it on the backscene at the station end. I've also drawn out the panel diagram neatly on two business cards , with point numbers, so that if I have to change points "manually" I do at least know which way to select on the menu . It doesn't really matter which way is Normal for a point so long as you know which option to select to set the point in the direction you want. The amount of time wasted trying each option in turn until the point moved was embarrassing, and trying to work out the number of a given point without aclear memory aid is very difficult - which is why the real railways put a block diagram with all the lever numbers marked in every signal box. I'd strongly recommend drawing out a panel diagram whatever your system, for these reasons alone.
     
    I don't usually do DCC techno- posts and this posting may leave folk with a different DCC system cold. However the PowerCab is quite a popular DCC system and I don't think I've seen any comment on using this particular feature before. Obviously 16 route macros will only go so far on a large layout, where there are more than 16 possible routes and some involve a lot more than 8 points; though I gather from another thread that great northern has been experimenting with macros on Peterborough North. However you wouldn't use a PowerCab to run a large layout anyway, and for the average small terminus 16 macros should be more than enough, especially if the fiddle yard is a sector plate or traverser. It really is a powerful feature to be able to set up any route completely and reliabilily just with a single entry , and the improvement in speed and ease of operation is dramatic
     
    Something similar should be possible on an number of other systems. The Digitrax DS64 accessory decoder supports "routes" at the level of the decoder itself. Unfortunately you can only set up routes involving points controlled by two different DS64s if they are linked by Loconet, the Digitrax cab bus, which means that you can only get comprehensive route setting thisway if you have a Digitrax system. I think Lenz support route setting , though I don't know any details and I have a suspicion it may even be available with the Multimaus
  10. Ravenser

    NRX Van

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    Next cab off the rank is yet another project that was supposed to be a quick win - and hasn't been.
     
    In a moment of weakness at Peterborough show a few years ago I bought a Replica Mk1 BG in Transpennine livery . They were being discounted to a tenner at the show, and it seemed too good a bargain to pass up. After all a Mk1 BG is the archetypal modern image parcels vehicle , and I didn't have one for Blacklade.
     
    After I got home I decided that it was a bargain I might have been better missing. The lack of flush glazed windows grated seriously, and the whole thing was more basic than my Bachmann Mk1s. A Transpennine passenger full brake wasn't really likely to find itself on parcels work in the Midlands, and it probably wouldn't have been cascaded to other things until several years into the 1990s . Since Blacklade's "early period" is supposed to be 1985-90 this wouldn't really do (Actually I suspect I am drifting towards this splitting into Periods 1a c1983-6 and 1b 1987-91. And I have a nasty feeling that the steam period may go the same way in the end)
     
    Therefore the box went into the stock pile and stayed there.
     
    Last autumn, while I was off work, I was rummaging through some of the boxes in the modelling cupboard , and found a Hurst Models etched brass kit to convert the Replica BG to an NRX container van. (One of the few things still available from Hirst,actually - rather like the Cheshire Cat they seem to be fading away until only the website is left). These 2 vehicles were an experiment by the Parcels Sector around 1990, the idea being to create a van capable of loading airline hold containers of the type used for airfreight. This would then allow BR to compete for inter-airport transfer cargo. Nothing seems to have come of it: the two demonstrator vehicles rapidly ended up in general parcels traffic, acquiring RES livery in 1991, and in 2001 they were repainted into EWS livery and sandwiched between two PCVs to provide a 4 van express pallet freight service for Securicor between Walsall and Aberdeen. What happened after that I don't know - I suspect this was another of EWS's entreprenurial ventures that faded away later
     
    But in their original guise they're just in my earlier period, and one might just have turned up in a parcels train at Blacklade.
     
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/50619197@N07/7901510494/in/photostream/
     
    [ Errr.. this shot shows handrails on the ends - something that Hirst don't mention. Looks like remedial work is needed....]
     
    The first problem was that the bogies on the Replica BG were wrong . The NRXs had Commonwealth bogies - the Replica model had B4s . These were hastily removed by pulling out , and a pair of Bachmann Commonwealths substituted from the bits box. Since these plug into a spigot on the chassis, and the Replica bogies have a spigot that plugs into the chassis , I used two suitable brass bolts with the bogies retained by two nuts on each, the bottom being retained in place by a dab of UHU on the nut and thread so it didn't work off (This bodge was pioneered on a pair of spectacles where the screws kept working loose - a replacement glass lens cost £100 and I didn't want it happening again).
     
    The coupling boxes were removed, a plate of plasticard glued across the top, and underset Kadees in draft boxes glued in place with scraps of microstrip wedged down the sides to reinforce the thing. Since the van will not run in any train longer than a couple of coaches, this will do
     
     
    Work then began on the body and results are shown here. The Hirst instructions were followed , not necessarily in strict order , though I picked up from an old Model Rail article (Feb 2002) that the top of the roller shutter doors needs to be turned in . I also used a substantial plate of 20 thou plasticard across the back to support the doors
     
    This shows the body more or less complete. It took some time to pluck up courage to saw into the body , but
     

     
    So far , so good, but...
     
    I used an elderly tube of Molak Stucco filler which I think came from a ModelZone. I'm driven to the conclusion it's not much cop, as it seems to crumble away , lift and not fill properly - something which has also happened on the 31 . I suspect I ought to replace it with something like Squadron
     
    I then made a big mistake. After a light spray of etch primer I set about painting the body Royal Mail/RES red, with Railmatch enamel - brushpainted as it doesn't come as an aerosol. I really should have spayed a second coat of normal primer over it first, as the covering power of red is dire . And I should have made determined efforts to remove all the stripes with a cotton bud dipped in surgical spirit. (It doesn't shift the upper blue though) .
     
    Paint , rubbing down and a couple of traces of thick cyano as a desperate filler have pretty well removed the faint traces of the door lines. But they haven't quite removed the very faint traces of the old livery on certain panels, although some of the detail has unfortunately lost some of its sharpness under the coats.
     
    At the time of writing I'm still painting in red.....
  11. Ravenser

    Butchering a Meat Van

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    I've been fairly quiet for a few months, partly because of work getting on top of me . But after finally managing 2 weeks holiday , having previously not managed more than an odd day off since I started the new job just over a year ago , I'm feeling human again , and I'm trying to resolve some of the various unfinished projects .
     
    One small project is nearly there - an ex GW MICA meat van.
     
    At present the main vehicle available for the cold store on the box file is a Blue Spot fish van from a Parkside kit. Nice kit - but it's really a bit big for the box file. The thought occurred to me that I should repaint the Blue Spot van as a BR Blue example in parcels service , for use as tail traffic on Blacklade - and replace it with a reworked RTR body from the junk box - either the Hornby ex NER refrigerated van, or an elderly Hornby Dublo GW MICA. As I didn't fancy scratchbuilding a 9'6" wooden underframe using castings, I went for the MICA.
     
    There is nothing original about the conversion - it's based on one of the first "proper" wagon-building articles I ever read as a boy - "Taking the MICA" by Grp Capt Brian Huxley , in the Railway Modeller for July 1977. It was the first of a whole series of articles covering different headings in the GW wagon diagram list - he was trying to build a "representative collection" of GW wagons, meaning a model of pretty well every wagon diagram
     
    However as most people won't have access to 40 year old Railway Modellers, the details of this exercise are worth summarising here.
     
    The old Hornby Dublo MICA is a hybrid. Most MICAs were 16' long and had full width bonnet vents on the ends. The last diagram, X9, was on a 17'6" RCH underframe with bonnetless ends . Hornby Dublo, Wrenn and Dapol sold you a 17'6" van with bonnet ends.
     
    There were therefore two approaches in the article.
     
    Firstly you could cut out the van sides neatly, reduce them by 3mm each end, chop 6mm out of the rest of the body moulding , stick the whole lot back together , add a suitable underframe (Dean-Churchward brake gear, anyone?) and get any type of 16' MICA.
     
    Or secondly, you could cut out the ends, replace with plain planking . add a standard RCH 10' wheelbase fitted underframe and get X9 of 1929.
     
    The world has moved on since 1977 - there is now a recent Parkside kit for the 16' X7 MICA , and that is probably the easiest route to the 16' vans. And these days most folk model post war, not - as was the norm in 1977 - the interwar GWR. The earlier vans are probably much less relevant now.
     
    So finally, after 40 years, I've done the deed. (Since the wagon had a cast Hornby Dublo chassis it must be nearly 60 years!)
     

     
    The ends are Slaters planked plasticard , as recommended by Brian Huxley. However the planks don't line up exactly these days, despite my efforts - mind you some of the preserved examples have the same issue.. The steps were removed from the original ends with a chisel blade in the craft knife . I seem to have found this rather easier than it was in 1977 , though there are plenty of spares.
     
    A Parkside 10' wheelbase underframe has been fitted from the spares box, built onto a 40 thou plasticard floor. Unfortunately, at that point I realised the kit was clasp-braked, and the prototype had 4 shoe Morton brakes. A rummage in the cupboard produced a packet of ABS Morton brake gear, and this was added with cyanoacrylate. I couldn't find the buffer beams so used some which I think came from a Cambrian PO wagon. They were rather too deep so had to be filed down top and bottom, and cut to an angle at both ends. The buffers had to be replaced with more ABS whitemetal castings for RCH fitted buffers. I had glued a couple of strips of lead flashing inside and with the whitemetal parts the total weight was up to the desired 50g (25g per axle)
     
    These later vans used dry ice, and had a single hatch at each end, not two - so the roof hatches had to filed off the model and replaced with new ones (7mm square in 20 thou plasticard). Brake pipes are DMR brass from the bits box, and spoked wheels are Bachmann
     
    It now needs only the end handrails and axlebox tiebars adding, priming (I'm not taking a chance with different coloured ends and white paint) and painting into BR (grubby) white
  12. Ravenser

    Shifting Sands

    By Ravenser,


    Layout schemes
    This is by way of a speculative post.....I've remarked before that it's been a very long time since I started a new project. Over a decade in fact. Between 2000 and 2007 I launched into 4 different layout projects, all 4mm/OO - Tramlink, a club layout project, the Boxfile, and Blacklade - but since then, nothing.
     
    I've recently resurrected the Boxfile - see postings here - and though I'm still hunting gremlins in the stockbox it's working a whole lot better than ever before. Proper systematic debugging will hopefully get it running with a high degree of reliability - in the meantime it's already possible to have a play at shunting as originally intended, quickly and with reasonable reliability (except for the couplings).
     
    Blacklade has been out a few times to shows and it works reliably as a home layout. The club project is long buried. So...
     
    A long time ago, at the end of the last century, I joined the 3mm Society. I acquired a little secondhand TT3 - a Brush 2 and a diesel shunter, along with some wagons and coaches. Matters got as far as an ambitious order for about 15 wagon kits from the 3mm Society, and the acquisition of a 3SMR J11 kit and an etched brass diesel shunter kit. A design for a compact urban goods depot was sketched, I built a couple of wagons which didn't seem to roll freely , and I bought about half a dozen of the then new Peco 12mm gauge points. At this point I got shanghaied into the club layout project, I became involved with a society, and what with Tramlink, work, commuting, etc. anything in 3mm was squeezed out.
     
    I'm still a member of the 3mm Society. It's a nice size. The padded envelope of wagon kits is still in the cupboard . The replacement armature for the Brush 2 is still in its packet somewhere.
     
    In the years since the idea of doing something with those Peco points has crossed my mind occasionally. A 3mm layout is one possibility , but what about OOn3 ?
     
    That means staying in my familiar 4mm scale - for which I have masses of stuff in the cupboard and elsewhere.
     
    Now narrow gauge and me are not a natural match. Because narrow gauge normally means OO9, and OO9 has traditionally meant rabbit-warren layouts dripping cute and twee - the Hobbiton and Munchkin-land Junction Railway, with a spur to Ivor the Engine's branch operated by an Eggerbahn railcar on a 9" radius curve using a Gaugemaster shuttle unit, the whole thing being built on a 4' x 2' board in four tiers of granite hillside, modestly populated by colonies of small pet Welsh dragons who eat buns from the tourists.
     
    I'm afraid I tend to penny-plain realism in muted shades of grey, and minimum gauge railways have never really gripped me. I like proper trains on proper railways doing a proper job - it's probably no coincidence that the narrow gauge locos that instantly appealed were the WHR's Garretts. I come from Lincolnshire, and Eastern England is a plain spare landscape with a notable lack of thatched cottages with holly-hocks round the door set amid rolling hills, nor does the Celtic twilight rise at dusk like a mist.
     
    My idea of a toy railway is Canary Wharf DLR. (I'm sure they must have used lithographed tinplate somewhere in the structure. Hipster-designer lithographed tinplate, of course.)
     
    But 3' gauge railways are another matter. The CDJR , L&LSR, and the Manx railways were serious and substantial operations. So were a number of Midlands ironstone systems. OOn3 means something a bit different (definitely a plus for me) and in prototype terms implies a proper railway which feels much more like a minor standard-gauge rural railway, doing a proper job. (There's also the faint possibility of what MORILL years ago called 3n3 - that is 3' gauge in 3mm scale, using OO9 track and N gauge mechanisms)
     
    This thinking has, over the years, led to the acquisition of a Southwold Railway van kit in resin, and a couple of ex MTK Isle of Man coach kits. Oh, and there's those Peco 12mm gauge points. But what might be modelled has been rather hazy.
     
    Only once in my life have I been to Ireland, and then only to Dublin, with a day trip by rail to Galway. (For much of my lifetime Ireland has been the island of bombs and balaclavas - I've never been to Northern Ireland and still feel no urge to go). Consequently I don't really feel any personal connection with Irish railways - certainly not enough to commit to the solid slog involved in building a OOn3 model of one.
     
    I don't really want to build an accurate model of a specific Manx prototype, and there isn't really space on the island to accommodate a fictitious one.
     
    There was no 3' narrow gauge in Wales, and almost no narrow gauge at all in Scotland. In any case granite mountains are not me.
     
    That leaves English 3' gauge lines, of which there are usually said to be two - the Southwold (closed 1929) and the Rye & Camber, a rather small operation abandoned in 1945 after the Admiralty had finished with it. In fact there is also the original Ravenglass & Eskdale (1875-1915) and a number of fairly significant ironstone systems in the Midlands.
     
    I have occasionally toyed with the idea that the promoters of the Mid Suffolk Light might have made it a 3' narrow gauge line, using Leek and Manifold style transporter wagons, in which case they might have focused on the proposed line from Needham Market via Debenham and with the reduced construction costs of narrow gauge have made it into Halesworth to link with the Southwold - the whole 3' gauge empire being inherited by a rather reluctant LNER (and no doubt worked very hard in support of the USAAF during World War 2)
     
    But the most tempting scenario involves "conjuring spirits from the vasty deep" in the general vicinity of the Dogger Bank.
     
    Long ago as a child I read that until the 12th or 13th century the coast of Lincolnshire was sheltered by low sandy islands on what is now the Dogger Bank - their loss began a cycle of occasional devastating storm surges across the North Sea, starting with the loss of much of Mablethorpe in 1283 and continuing down to 1953.
     
    Whether this is true I do not know. In recent years prehistoric archaeologists have conjured up a very much larger ghost, in the form of "Doggerland" - a vast region of low hills and plains spreading across what is now the North Sea until rising sea levels drowned it in stages in the later Mesolithic and early Neolithic:
     
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
    https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/doggerland-rises.htm
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27224243
     
    What we know as the Dogger Bank represents the central uplands of "Doggerland"
     
    It's fair to say that modern archaeologists believe this whole area was under the North Sea thousands of years before the 13th century - but for the sake of a layout, we can envisage that two or three largish sandy islands continue to exist on the Dogger Bank down to our own day - thus permitting not merely Early English narrow gauge, but emphatically 20th century narrow gauge too.
     
    Whilst medieval Great and Little Dogger would have been inhabited only by a few wretched fisher-folk, from the 17th century onwards they would inevitably have been of great strategic importance to the Royal Navy and from the reign of William III through to the late 1950s there would have been a strong naval presence there. As well as being dotted with 18th century batteries and Napoleonic Martello towers there is also the famous Great Dogger Mole, an 18th century naval equivalent of the Cob at Portmadoc, which links the two islands and creates a sheltered anchorage for small naval vessels in the inlet which separates them - as legend tells us , this was built out of ballast stones brought from England in the holds of ships which came to Dogger to load barrels of the celebrated Dogger herring. Horatio Nelson's famous letter, written as a young lieutenant in 1776, in which he complains of being cooped up on "two miserable sandy islands containing a handful of mean houses and meaner inhabitants" has been rather generously rewarded by the signboard of a large pub overlooking Dogger Haven, the Lord Nelson....
     
    Railways came to the Dogger Islands as a result of hasty repairs to the Great Mole , and the construction of two new batteries, at the start of the Crimean War. A narrow gauge horse-worked line was established from Doggerport, up to - and across - the Great Mole, (and thus past Dogger Haven) and up to a suitable point on Little Dogger for the off-loading of stone for the new fort . This stone obviously had to be imported, since the islands have no stone ( and not many trees ), and afterwards the tramway was found very convenient by various parties, civilian and military, for moving stores, coal , herring barrels and the like around the island. It was upgraded to a steam-worked line in the early 1870s with a passenger service serving the islands' three main settlements and the naval installations - a small number of Beyer Peacock 2-4-0Ts and some 0-6-0Ts reminiscent of the R&ER being supplied.
     
    The naval arms race before WW1 saw it modernised and developed, and this accelerated during WW1 when the Dogger Islands were a key base for minesweepers and torpedo boats in the N Sea : indeed in 1917 the Dogger Light Railway acquired Britain's only narrow-gauge rail gun. Petrol locomotives appeared during WW1 and the railway's rolling stock was augmented by standard WD narrow gauge equipment, running on 3' gauge bogies.
     
    After a quiet period between the wars, the Dogger Light Railway was again at full stretch during WW2, but thereafter things began to run down and when the RAF Coastal Command base ran down in the late 1950s , that was the end.......
     
    Buildings - brick boxes. I have a number of Lincolnshire buildings in Skaledale form which could find a home on such a layout.
     
    I've also acquired several Dundas WD wagon kits. If I could get someone to produce a fold-up etch H-frame wagon bogie, to which you could stick the moulded bogie sides , they could convert to OOn3...
     
    But I have to admit that the new Bachmann OO9 stuff looks rather tasty. I don't quite see that you could regauge the Baldwin 4-6-0T. And nobody could accuse the Western Front in 1917-8 of being cute or twee.....
     
    Hmm.
     
    I have Stewart Squires' "Lincolnshire Potato Railways" - I knew his son at school. There is however a large gap between the handful of systems in the Tetney/Grainthorpe area and those in the fens or Nocton Estates.
     
    Suppose there had been some potato railways in the Marshes between Mablethorpe and Skegness. Chapel St Leonards has caravan parks - but it never had any railway near it.
     
    Suppose someone in the early-mid 1920s proposed a 2' gauge narrow gauge line from Mumby Road on the Mablethorpe loop to Chapel St Leonards, linking several private farm lines with the LNER , and offering a primitive service to holiday makers going to Chapel St Leonards - using surplus WD equipment (shades of the Ashover Light Railway)
     
    Hmm
     
    The only space that might be available for this would be if I finally decommissioned the old computer and removed the computer desk . That might give an L- shape about 4'3" x 2'4", with the short leg being a narrow ledge under the window sill.
     
    But 4'3" x 18" max doesn't really seem too promising for depicting low coastal sandhills or flat Marshland potato fields - both of which require a sense of flatness and openness
     
    Hmmm
     
    Somehow nothing has quite gelled on this one....
  13. Ravenser

    2018 - Deja Vu ?

    By Ravenser,


    Reflections
    It's that time of the year when I survey the state of the bookcase and the cupboard and post over-optimistic ambitions for the year's modelling....
     
    At least this year I'm sitting down to contemplate at the start of January, rather than the middle of February, which I suppose is progress. There's also the fact that I need to write up some of 2017's output for the blog.
     
    After a pretty patchy year things took a sudden leap forward when I realised I didn't have to wait for a suitable IKEA product in order to mount the Boxfile on a solid base (a chassis??) . That project is written up here, http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343-blacklade-artamon-square/ but as noted towards the end, it spread into quite a bit of work on the stock. I don't think I'd done any significant wagon modelling for five or six years.
     
    This gave me a real incentive to finish off the MICA and get couplings fitted. It also spurred me to take action to deal with the Blue Spot fish. Rail Blue looked just too dark compared to some of the photos on Paul Barlett's site - some look almost as if Parcels transfers have been applied straight onto Ice Blue - and I was lucky enough to find a jar or Railmatch faded Rail Blue in the paint box. Much better. With HMRS transfers (and a bit of cobbling from other sources) and Kadees the van is now ready for use as an NRV on DMU tail traffic, though perhaps the weathering wasn't really heavy enough, and I suppose the real things disappeared a couple of years before Blacklade's "mid-late 80s" period (As far as I can gauge from Paul Bartlett's photos they went in 1981-2 ).
     

     
    For the MICA I improvised with the only black transfers I could find in my collection - a Fox sheet for the BR Insulated van in 2mm/4mm/7mm which was a give-away with MORILL.... Ah. That must have been over 20 years ago. It's not surprising the transfers had yellowed, though I managed to touch round with white and after weathering and varnish it's not really visible. The number's not quite right either, although I used a 7mm letter for a W-prefix , and the capacity should be 8T not 10T - but you can't read the capacity from a distance of more than 6 inches.
     
    Another two wagons for the Boxfile were sorted out over the weekend, which takes me to 24 serviceable wagons. The "extra weight plus Hornby wheels" formula is working well. Two wagons more will receive Sprat and Winkle couplings this week. Another wagon should respond to the standard treatment - and then I'm down to a hard core of 3-4 wagons where further thought will be required.
     
    And one Saturday before Christmas I bought another boxfile from WH Smiths and converted most of a corregated cardboard box into dividers... This one takes various bits - the LMS interdistrict Brake 3rd (which had its underframe weathered while I was doing the CK), the Tourist Brake 3rd, a Lima LMS 42' GUV I bought for reworking, the NRV van, a stray Grampus...
     
    I don't think I ever wrote up the Lima 37 upgrade which I was threatening in last year's "2017 programme" posting. I think that one was done in time for Blacklade's appearance at Ally Pally: certainly it was available well before the layout's outing at Shenfield in September. There was nothing ground-breaking about it, I'm afraid, and as Tim Shackleton wrote up a more comprehensive rework of exactly the same loco in his diesels book I shall be modest and brief. A new etched roof fan from Shawplan, Shawplan etched window frames and Lazerglaze windows (fettling them to fit is still laborious - but infinitely better than attempting a home-made job), new and substantial buffers, etched depot symbols and nameplates (more Shawplan) , Kadees and weathering. I'm not terribly proud of the Kadees - there's not enough room for the draft box on the bogies so the box and coupling protrudes and there's an uncomfortable resemblance to a Eurostar 37. It's a lot better than the tensionlock , but that's not saying much. Only touch-up repainting was needed as the target loco (37 688 in two-tone Sector grey) was what Lima had produced in the first place.
     
    And an old Express Models DC directional headlight kit went in. I had it kicking around with no other sensible use , and working headlight when you ease open the controller is better than nothing. Lights are an operator's convenience, basically
     

     
    An interesting minor point concerns the nose grills. Some photos show these in black on 37 688, other shots of 37 688 show them in grey as represented by Lima. So somewhere between 1985 and 1990 this loco got a repaint. I left the grills in grey, with weathering - I didn't think there was any real gain in fitting etches, even though I have two packets of the things from the time when I thought this loco would be done using a Triang-Hornby body (recycled from Flaxborough in my teens - and even then second hand from the Aswell St junk shop) on an Athearn PA1 chassis. (Those bits will now become a plain blue 37 172 sometime in the distant future). the biggest gain on the grills is removing the body grey Lima left showing in the recessed bits. It was an IM loco in 1990, but still carrying BX depot symbols
     
    The roof "shoulder" grills are incorrect for this loco - Tim Shackleton corrected them, I didn't dare to. He also lowered the loco on its bogies - I thought about hand-filing bearing surfaces flat, and chickened out.
     

    This loco was a bargain find at DEMU Showcase - right number, right livery - for £18, it runs well and with all the bits the whole project cost no more than about £35 (plus decoder). I can justify that for a space/backup loco that only needs to shift two coaches- whereas a three-figure sum for a new Bachmann one would be an extravagance
     
    Now to plans for the coming year.
     
    First of all the outstanding projects, and here a little clarity is dawning.
     
    - Finishing the wretched Coopercraft Tourist brake third has to be a high priority, so that I can commission Set 4, and have some proper "modern" mainline corridor stock and some coaches in post 1956 maroon for the steam period on Blacklade
     
    - A relatively quick win would be finishing the complete rebuilding of an elderly Ratio GWR 4 wheeler. This survived intact from my early teenage steam layout, was stripped down with Modelstrip, and duly broke down into its component pieces as its vintage polystyrene cement failed. The sides have been filled and sanded to represent an elderly departmental vehicle with a few plated-over panels, and sprayed with Games Workshop Chaos Black. I have a Shirescenes compensation unit in stock for this for this ( last time the chassis wasn't square). This would go towards a steam-age engineers' train. Again this is a 2017 project I never got round to writing up..
     

     
    - There's a Cambrian Starfish kit sitting in the cupboard that might go nicely with this.
     
    - And if I finished off the stalled vintage Parkside Toad B sitting on the bookshelf , that could be paired with the olive green Shark to make up an Engineer's train for the steam period (It doesn't have hand-rails - and I've been chickening out of doing my own...)
     
    - The 128 made some progress this year , until I realised it was sitting askew on one bogie. The plastic mounting had fractured, and after several briefly-successful homemade repairs with superglue, I discovered at Peterborough that I could get a replacement part from Replica. I now have to do that, and get this one finished. I can then run an alternative parcels train featuring the 128 and NRX or my blue GUV (which has been sitting in its box for a long time). Or a BG. And the 128 can be consisted with my 101 or 108 without forming an awkwardly long train
     
    - I have a more or less finished Silver Fox Baby Deltic body and all the components of the chassis : finishing this should be another relatively quick win. It's been on the list to finish since 2016....
     
    The revival of the Boxfile has sparked renewed enthusiasm over some very long stalled projects.
     
    The correct intergroup ratio for wagons , I read somewhere long ago , is LMS 8, LNER 7 , GWR 3, SR 1. I'm one over the top on GW, have no SR, am on par for the LMS, and two light on the LNER (And one of those I've got is a Single Bolster - useless on the 'file). The ratio adopted between types is 4 vans: 2 minerals: 1 open (the Boxfile takes 7 wagons). I have four rounds or tranches of stock plus 4 locos - and I'm one open over the top and two vans light.
     
    There are 3 vacant slots in the two stock boxes.
     
    So obviously I need 2 x LNER vans... And an etched kit for an LNER van has been sitting on my bookcase part built for an inordinate length of time. I think it was started before the Boxfile. Provenance is 5522 Models, offered as a complete package deal by DOGA long ago. This is an obvious candidate to finish off.
     
    And for the second one, I have a Hornby LNER van sitting somewhere in the cupboard. They've done it in white as N E in the past - I am pretty confident it's an NER prototype but can't confirm (I wasn't prepared to pay £35 for the NE volume of the new Tatlow for 1 wagon - but I do have the old 1 volume Tatlow, which shows some very similar NE goods vans). Whitemetal NE axleboxes and buffers from ABS are in stock..
     
    I have several first loco kits in the cupboard. One is a Judith Edge Thomas Hill Vanguard - slightly late for the Boxfile, but of particular interest as it is designed to fit a Black Beetle . So no chassis building needed... I was getting quite enthusiastic about building this - then I checked and found a) it needs a 36mm x 14mm wheels Beetle , not the usual DMU types and b ) Beetles have almost disappeared. A hasty check round various suppliers ended with me buying one of Branchlines' last two of these units. (I also got a Mashima motor for the Craftsman 02 kit lurking in the cupboard)
     
    So it looks like I will be building show etched kits in the near future.
     
    - Another, much larger, stalled project is the heavy rebuild of a Hornby Pacer using a Branchlines chassis . This would be a very useful model if I can get it into traffic, so I really ought to have a serious go at it once I've cleared the other unfinished items out of the way.
     
    - I have a Lima 42' LMS CCT which can be cleaned up and upgraded: I have Comet LMS bogies in stock. This will presumably be in Crimson - I can't quite make out when they disappeared but I presume they had gone by the mid 80s ? (If not it would be a useful vehicle , as this plus a Mk1 BG would fit into the platform...)
     
    This accounts for all the occupants of the bookcase bar the WD brake and the Bratchill 150
     
    If I get beyond that , there are some DC Kits DMUs I could build, or some blue/grey coach projects. Maybe fix the N5? Or perhaps I could try to sort out Tramlink, still buried under it's pile of magazines. There's an elderly Bachmann 03 and a not so elderly Bachmann 08 - neither DCC Ready - which could live useful lives if given a decoder, not to mention the "stuff a Hornby 0-6-0 chassis under a GBL Jinty" project
     
    I really don't need to buy any RTR this year (though a Stirling Single hauling a couple of blue/grey mark 1s could be justified in the E Midlands in the mid 1980s....)
  14. Ravenser

    Hanging By A Thread

    By Ravenser,


    Electrical
    One of my outstanding projects is to do something about electrical connections and points on the boxfile
     
    This arose from some comments from a fellow DOGA member a couple of years ago. DOGA had their stand at Watford show that year, I was helping on the Saturday, and I took along the boxfile as a display item , and also something to provide intermittent movement (We had a Hornby Sentinel on it for a while and it looked the part - I really must built my Judith Edge Vanguard Steelman..)
     
    However this also displayed the boxfile's glaring practical weaknesses
     
    When I built it , some years ago, my knowledge and experience on the electrical side was very limited, and the boxfile represented a major step forward - for the first time I was fitting live frog points and point motors to drive them. This led to some mistakes.
     
    Even longer ago I bought several clearance packs of electrical "goodies" from a company called Greenweld. They were job lots of connectors , cables and such like which in a fit of enthusiasm I thought might be useful. Few have been. A rummage in this stash produced an audio cable with a 5 pin DIN plug on each end, and another with a 7 pin DIN at one end and fine wires hanging out of the other end. These, I thought, would make pukka connectors for the boxfile. DIN sockets were duly sourced and we were in business.
     
    Here they are:
     

     
    The first problem is that those very fine wires are the devil to secure in the screw connections at the back of the Gaugemaster. I tried making them solid with a bit of solder - that just made the job desperately fiddly instead of completely impossible
     
    The second problem is that the points don't throw particularly well. The siding into the wagon hoist is completely reliable, the nearby headshunt can overheat after extended use and the point into the coal siding is a real problem. It worked until I stuck the weighbridge building on top of the motor. Then it would only throw in one direction....
     
    Of course I didn't think to build in a CDU. And since the wiring is hidden inside sealed buildings I'd have to destroy parts of the layout to retro fit one.
     
    My friend recommended an external CDU , which would then allow thicker wires to connect to the Gaugemaster , and make setting up dead easy.
     
    So far so good - and an All Components CDU was duly sourced and has been sitting in the study ever since waiting for me to acquire a round tuit, or more accurately a suitable enclosure.
     
    It was only when I read the instructions that the real problem leapt out and hit me. They recommend using 6A wire, or as a minimum 3A to carry the current to the motor. I don't know what the current rating of the wire in those audio connections is, but it looks well under 1A "layout wire" (7/0.3 wire I believe). Any internal wiring within the file was carried out in blithe ignorance and 1A layout wire.
     
    A little measuring suggests there's 2.4m of extremely thin wire between the 16V AC outputs and the point motor into the coal siding. Plus a couple of foot of 1A wire and various connections. No wonder that point struggles to throw.
     
    A crude hasty test on the remains of a 10m hank of 24/0.3mm wire (say 5-6m) and the 1.2m interboard connector using the multimeter suggested resistance through the audio cable is about 30-40% higher than through a run of 5A wire at least 4 times as long. I'm aware that resistance becomes more serious the more current you push through. Oh heck.....
     
    By this time I'd also come up with the scheme of resurrecting Tramlink by fitting DIN sockets and audio connector as interboard connections to replace the extremely crude arrangement currently in use , whose wiring has come loose on one side, leaving one board dead. Tramlink serves as my DC test track when I dig it out from under the magazines, so something needs to be done. I probably need to replace and relay one point , and the idea of retrofitting point motors to the two points was and is rather appealing. So I could face the same issues there.
     
    Anyway I pressed on, hoping the thing would deliver some improvement. The external connector (the one with a DIN plug at one end) was shortened to about 18". This should remove about 20-25% of the distance from the power source to the furthest point motor (and half the run of wiring to the two points on the first file). Logically therefore , it reduces the total resistance by 20-25% to the worst affected point.
     
    Now if half the power leaving the power supply is lost due to resistance in the wiring, (and the very poor throw of that motor suggests the loss is substantial) a 20-25% cut in resistance should equate to a 20-25% boost to available power at the solenoid. If the loss due to resistance is less than half, the gain in power is less. But if the loss due to resistance is more than 50%, then a 25% cut in resistance would translate into a boost to available power of more than 25% - perhaps significantly more
     
    This is before you add the benefit of upping the current and voltage by using a CDU. If the path from the power supply to the motor is too long in too thin wire, the cumulative resistance can strangle the output from a CDU and you may see very limited benefit
     
    Here are some of the basic components before starting - the Maplins PSU enclosure , the audio cables, and some Maplin grommits (Wallace is not in the shot)
     

     
    A piece of 5mm balsa wood was glued to the base of the plastic box using aradite, with a strip of doublesided sticky tape under a recessed area and some UHU along the top of the sides. I don't want this base breaking loose if the box gets knocked about . The CDU unit is screwed down to this - the balsa allows for seating of the underside where there are projections caused by soldering components to the circuit board . I took this approach with the MERG decoder I built for Blacklade and it seems to work fine, though there the mounting screws do pass through the balsa onto the ply board top.
     
    A second strip of balsa was wedged/araldited across one end to take a small connector from one of the Greenweld bags. It had tags with loops on one side and a larger tag , presumably for some kind of spade connector , on the other side. These fouled the CDU board , so after 24/0.7 wire ("5A") had been soldered in place the prongs were bent over . These form the connection between the two wires in the audio cable which connect to the track and heavy duty black and red wires which run to the controller .The fine wires from the audio cable were soldered to the tags on the opposite side. I was a little nervous about whether the joints might be dry, as the metal is not terribly good for soldering to - a hasty test with the multimeter gave readings of 0.07- 0.05 on the lowest resistance scale through the entire set up fron DIN plug to the end of the 5A wire - a little under half the value originally measured through a 1.2m audio cable. So the joints are presumably good
     
    The two wires in the audio cable carrying the current to the point motors were then extended with short lengths of "1A" 7/0.7 wire , the joints protected with heatshrink, and the extended ends connected to the output terminals of the CDU
     
    A general view (heavily zoomed and not in perfect focus) of the contraption is shown below
     
     
     
    I then set it up, managed to get the wires connected to the correct terminals on the CDU output and we were in business.

     
    Despite my fears , the improvement is dramatic. Instead of throwing with a loud buzzing , the points flick over instantly with a click. Even the point on the second boxfile works perfectly
     
    And connection to the screw terminals of the Gaugemaster is now simple reliable and a matter of a couple of seconds , instead of the previous fiddle trying to get tiny wires caught by the screws
     
    There's a further, unexpected benefit. When I tested the traction current with my lumbering black 05 , running was much surer, smoother and more reliable. Since I'd done nothing dramatic to the traction circuit and I was testing on the second file , with a further audio connector in the path to the motor, this was a real surprise
     
    I can only conclude that the connections at the terminals of the Gaugemaster may have been a significant part of the problem. It looks as if the fine wires were not only fiddly to trap in the connectors, they were making a poor connection even when trapped.
     
    In short , a big improvement all round, and I think I will probably chance my arm and rewire Tramlink using the same set up
     

     
     
  15. Ravenser
    The obvious thing to be done when you have a new model is to run the layout... So the 101 was given a thorough workout during a running session, just to make sure there were no hidden bugs
     
    :
     
    Tail traffic is an operational feature of the layout - the CCT will be attached to the outward working of the morning parcels. Hence DMUs need functional couplings. This gets in the way of full end detail, and I'm toying with the idea of giving the 114 fully detailed ends to use the Craftsman pack I have - when I finally get around to building the DC kit in my cupboard. The idea is that a 114 would be 2" longer , and therefore much less suitable for tacking CCTs and the like on the back of.. As it is, a short-frame DMU plus CCT just fits into Pl.1
     

     
    The Blue period engineer's train awaits running round. The Zander has had additional lead stuffed under it to ensure it behaves
     

     
    A busy scene at Blacklade.

     
    While I was about it, it suddenly occurred to me that DMUs do after all work in multiple , and I now have two low density 2 car DMUs of classes 101 and 108. Could they be consisted?
     
    Despite rather different mechanisms (Limby motor bogie and Bachmann motor bogie) it turned out that they could , quite comfortably. Admittedly the resulting 4 car formation is a squeeze into Pl.3 and is way too big for anywhere else , so it's not terribly practical. But I have a DC Kits 128 to do, and that would give me a very workable 3 car formation - so long as the Replica MLV chassis proves compatible with the other 2 units
     
    Along the way I discovered that the Bachmann/ESU decoders I fitted in the 108 don't support advanced consisting - just basic oldstyle consisting. So we now have Coupling Codes: Blue Square for units supporting only basic consisting, Red Triangle for compatible units supporting advanced consisting, Red Circle for second generation units with Limby motor bogie or compatible (Red Triangle and Red Circle units can physically work together, but it's inauthentic) , and Black Cross units - meaning the 158 which has a thoroughly uncompatible centre motor drive and no working couplings on the end.
     
    With a reworked 155 under way I should (hopefully) have another unit that can work with my two 153s, and then finally I start to get a variety of permutations for multiple unit working in the later period too.
  16. Ravenser

    Thoughts on Track

    By Ravenser,

    I wouldn't normally touch on controversal subjects in a constructional blog. But in the case of the current OO track thread, http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/79416-poll-ready-to-lay-oo-track-and-pointwork/ my views arose in the context of the layouts on this thread, and are best explained in their context , and flow back into "matters outstanding" with the layouts, and things that need to be done.... So really it's more sensible to reflect on how my own approach to OO track has developed and some of the practical issues involved here, in a rather quieter atmosphere
     
    We start with Ravenser Mk1 - so far , for various reasons , which can be summarised as life getting in the way, there has't been a Mk2.
     
    Ravenser Mk1 was a portable small industrial layout , based on "Yarmouth Quay", the Plan of the Month in Railway Modeller June 1988. I was living in a bed-sit at the time and assumed no very sophisticated level of modelling would be practical under the conditions. This decision I rapidly and bitterly regretted. Setrack points seemed to be the obvious accepted way on a layout with severe curves - the plan called for something like a 9" radius in places, and the authors assured us that they had tested these with a Mainline 03 and it was very happy. So I bought a new Bachmann 03, and a Hornby 06 because it was cheap and I was young and poor. I added a connection to a traverser fiddle yard and the rest of BR. The Airfix 31 and Triang Hornby 37 from my teen-age modern image layout, Flaxborough, were patently unsuitable, but the Wrenn Class 20 was pressed into service as the mainline loco, and the Lima 09 was also recycled
     
    Ravenser Mk1 never worked very well, and the main reason was those wretched Setrack points . Operationally it was very interesting , with a lot of traffic potential - when things weren't derailing. I discovered Parkside wagon kits and started building them - and Romfords and Setrack points don't mix very well. At first I thought it was just me , and some negative force field I exhuded. However somewhere in its early years I joined DOGA and duly discovered the subject of wheel and track standards. Such things simply weren't mentioned in the magazines of the day - and hadn't been for about 20 years
     
    In those days Setrack points featured flangeways 1.55mm wide - as I found out when I eventually measured one with feeler gauges . Perhaps they still do. This proved disasterous. I had bought a secondhand Lima 20 to replace the Wrenn 20 in the hope it would run better. It still stalled on the dead frogs, so I invested in a DOGA pickup kit [now discontinued as all RTR locos come with decent pickup] This meant replacement wheels - and the only available replacements were Ultrascales. I invested 30 quid in a set - but Ultrascale wheels are EM profile. And the EM value for flangeways is 1.0mm. I rewheeled the loco, fitted the pickups - and every time it went round the run round loop it fell off somewhere, because the check rails were far too far away to check anything and the gaps at the frog might as well have been the Grand Canyon
     
    I got clever, hacked out the plastic check rail and superglued in a short length of rail gauged out using a Romford wheelset (a technique gleaned from an Iain Rice book) Unfortunately the new checkrails sat rather higher , and as the additional pickups had had to be fitted under the keeper plate , they fouled it. Result - an abrupt halt. Any plans to detail the Lima body quietly died at that point. After a nice new Bachmann 08 failed to deliver reliable running Ravenser Mk1 was effectively abandoned, though it lay around for a number of years before I acquired a car and carted it down to the tip.
     
    Next came Tramlink. Croydon Tramlink is laid in concrete sleepered FB track , with concrete sleepered points.Until recently , Peco only provide concrete sleepered flexible track in code 100. So unless you built your own plain track - and 10 years ago that meant sleeper by sleeper, and only one very obscure product catered for FB track with concrete sleepers - the only option for modern image modellers was Peco code 100. After all modern image modellers are just teenagers running brightly coloured coarse scale RTR with steam-roller wheels, one stage up from the train set, aren't they?
     
    So Tramlink was laid with Peco code 100 . Because I thought that light rail meant sharp curves, and because it is a small diorama layout (it was supposed to be quick - except that everything had to be near scratchbuilt ) I used a Peco code 100 small Y and a Setrack point to save space.
     

     
    This proved to be a mistake. My cardboard Manchester Metrolink is feather-light, and the Tenshodo is at one end. It would go through the Setrack point into the Cripple Siding with the Tenshodo leading, but propelling the unpowered half through that point via articulation comprising 2 panel pins invariably resulted in a derailment... Conventional RTR locos were fine, but not the LRV. Since the idea was that 3 light rail units would have 4 possible sidings , and operation would consist of shuffling a unit into the empty slot, like a form of Light Rail Solitare , this was serious. I removed the check rail on the point and fitted a replacement, gauged with a Romford wheelset (see above) but while this didn't foul anything it didn't solve the problem, either When I tried to build a proper Croydon unit from an Alphagrafix kit, the skirting around the bogies fouled them ( I was using A1 Models etched H frame wagon bogies) and the unit wouldn't take any kind kind of curve. Drastic rebuilding was called for, and the project ground to a halt to a soundtrack from the musical Oliver ("I'm reviewing the situation... - and I think I'll go and think it out again")
     
    Tramlink is currently sitting boxed up about 18" from my right shoulder as I type. Where it has been for quite a while. At some point, when I've caught up and finished off other projects, I really need to turn back to the project and try to finish it and sort it out. One big question is whether I rip up all the track and relay or not. Or put another way - can I somehow coax the Metrolink unit and other light rail vehicles through that dratted point or not? Ordinary railway models (eg a Bachmann 08) were fine - but light rail vehicles made from Alphagraphix card kits are really very light - and as I built them , sealed units . The Croydon unit stalled at the point where I realised to modify it I'd have to get inside - which would effectively destroy what I'd built this far. I've got a couple more Croydon kits in stock , a Midlands Metro kit , and one DLR unit kit from Street Level. Yes , the Halling model would almost certainly take the point happily - but it was pricey, at the time it was released my employment was uncertain, and it's HO, whereas everything else is 4mm. Now Croydon Tramlink units are big and boxy, and so should a model be (as this is a text-heavyposting, cue a gratuitous shot of a Croydon unit last year,
     

     
    and a model of a unit seen at Kew Bridge model tram exhibition a few years back

     
    ) . And the Halling HO models would look a bit petite. Not to mention that I'd need at least 2 , arguably 3, and that's around £500 spent on what has become a side interest when money is a lot tighter than it used to be
     
    Or - if a bit of weight won't cure the problem - rip up all the track and relay with Peco's new - and distinctly more British looking - code 75 concrete sleeper flexible , and their new concrete sleeper code point. I'd still have to use a small Y point with the sleepers painted at the Beckenham end . But I would get live frogs , and it would make it much easier to fit point motors - which I omitted first time round . The baseboard frame isn't really deep enough to allow a Cobalt Blue , never mind a Tortoise (two of which I do have surplus - as they were too big to fit in the narrow neck of Blacklade), A Hoffman/Conrad could be fitted, but with commercial points there would be no objection to using SEEP or Peco solenoids - I'm sure I have a CDU or CDU kit somewhere.
     
    However the track was pinned and ballasted with PVA and ripping up might be rather destructive. And the replacement point would be longer, and the fouling point on the Cripple Siding further back , and in the context of a diorama layout I'm not sure if I have those few critical inches.... [ I don't , as the below shot illustrates. A Peco code 75 concrete sleeper point is medium radius and therefore 2 inches longer than the point currently used - the frog is 4.5cm further along] Then there's the thought of drybrushing all the ballast for that "brand new look" . Last time I used an ad-hoc mix from white and black - so the whole thing had to be done in one hit with one batch because colour matching was impossible. Maybe Railmatch BR Grey acrylic??
     

    Hmmmm . Where've I put the "too hard" basket?
     
    Next came the boxfile. This was built for a DOGA competition some years ago. The catalyst here was my discovery that yes, two Peco small Y points would fit in a boxfile back to back, and there was even enough room for a headshunt which would just about take an 08 with the switch blades of the point snapping at its heels , sorry wheels. At which point my scepticism about Phil Parker's competition idea evaporated and I got cracking...
     
    Given that there was a deadline and that the whole concept was based on the fact that two Peco small Y points would fit , this was never going to be a "teach yourself pointbuilding" test bed - especially as the thing was , well - a boxfile (Two boxfiles, to be pedantic). But I was determined to raise my game in the matter of track, so the boxfile was done in Peco code 75 with three small Y points. Not only that, but they are operated by point motors - I fitted Peco solenoids under adjacent small buildings operating the points from the side. With switched live frogs and full sectioning this was a considerable advance on Tramlink (I'm still wondering why I fitted section switches - on a one engine in steam shunting puzzle I've never found any need to use them and they're left permanently switched on).
     
    The problem of the incorrect sleepering was side stepped by making part of the visible area cobbled with inset track (Metcalf cobbled card) and swamping the rest in black flock, representing ash ballast, so that you only see bits of a sleeper here and there. This is effective , but it's a bit of a fudge, and only offers a solution in very special circumstances.
     
    My big mistake was forgetting to fit a CDU . One point is , at the best of times, unreliable in throwing in one direction - at the worst of times it just gives up. Another point is liable to stick when it gets warm, and only one point is rock-solid reliable. A CDU might have cured all this or at least greatly mitigated it. But I can't retro-fit one because all point motors - and the relevant bit of wiring - are sealed inside buildings , and I'd have to destroy one to get access to wire in a CDU.
     
    Whoops. Running on the boxfile is not of exhibition quality - but coaxing small 4 wheel (or occasionally 6 wheel) shunters across a lot of point frogs and board joints at minimal speed with absolute precision of positioning is a very demanding application . And the worst problems relate to the rather dodgy track joints between the files and couplers uncoupling thereon
     
    Which brings us to Blacklade . This time I was determined to go the whole hog. Hand built track to a proper track standard (DOGA OO Intermediate) with 4mm sleepering, using wheels to a standard (RP25-110) which fits the track properly . The last bit was the easy one, since this is essentially what you get on modern RTR - subject to the manufacturing tolerances of Chinese factories on things like Back to Back . The biggest compromise on wheels is the use of Romfords on a few kit built wagons (If they don't come with Romfords I fit Hornby wagon and coach wheels set to the correct back to back of 14.4mm)
     
    The original Carl Arendt plan envisaged Peco streamline points,no doubt hand operated. Since I was once again up against a deadline, and a slip was involved, I chickened out of attempting to learn point building and contacted Marcway . A full size plan of the layout on lining paper using Peco templates was sent to them - this was a very useful exercise as it allowed me to check clearances and train lengths full size. They advised that almost the whole thing could be done with their standard 3' radius points. However I did have to order two bespoke units - a single slip more or less to the same footprint as Peco, and a crossover at 2 '6" radius with continous checkrail. This is not quite as bad as it might be, since one leg is kinked - but the dogleg to straighten up for the platform still introduces a reverse curve.
     

    (considerable progress has been made since!)
     
    This one kink apart, the whole thing flows in a very pleasing manner and I was feeling really quite chuffed with the result until I saw a shot of one throat on Jim Smith-Wright's P4 New St.
     
    Running reliability is generally good . Occasionally a piece of stock derails at the board joint on the back road, where alignment is not perfect and I had to tweak a rail out slightly. That's more down to the imperfections of my carpentry - I didn't quite focus on the need for absolute precision there
    The wheels on a second-hand Hornby Pacer jam in the continous check rail at the crossover at any B2B - but then they are coarse steam roller wheels. Pacer rebuilding is one of my stalled projects.
     
    The major problem in terms of reliability is the points , and their uncertain closure. I've already had a couple of goes at fixing this: round one is reported here http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-6357-mind-the-gap/ where thicker wire was fitted to everything bar the bespoke crossover at the platform ends, and round two last summer involved a lot of digging round with a scalpel blade. They now close with reasonable reliability except for the slip (occasionally) and the bespoke crossover. The plan to solve the latter involves detailing up the old Airfix 31 , which is normally very happy running through it - whereas the Hornby 31 generally derails (Hornby 31s do seem to be a little track sensitive.)
     
    As an aside , the Airfix 31 runs perfectly happily through pointwork built to the the old BMRSB OO track standard (which lies within the envelope of DOGA OO Intermediate) and I'm glad of the fact . Indeed it runs a great deal better than it ever did on Flaxborough , for which it was originally bought, long ago - this is possibly due to the fact that 30 years ago I thought Brasso would be an effective track cleaner, and Flaxborough was laid with 1970s Hornby points. (There were no internet forums in those days and no local clubs so I was very much on my own.)
     
    But the fundamental issue is that the Marcway points are very stiff. I've come to believe that the real problem is that the switches are not loose heeled and rely on the rail bending. My experience is that all too often the throw rod from the point motor bends before the switch rail. The smaller Cobalt Blue , with it's shorter throw rod, seems more effective than Tortoises- and the wire supplied seems to be thicker than that supplied by Circuitron with the Tortoise. It's almost certainly significant that the points where the problem is most acute are the shortest - the bespoke crossover at 2'6" radius and the slip, which has very short switch blades .
     
    At this point we come to Joseph Pestell's OO track thread: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/79416-poll-ready-to-lay-oo-track-and-pointwork/page-54 Go back through the pages and many contributers are hotly denoucing Peco's loose heeled switches and demanding flexing switch rails. Based on my own experience with Blacklade I'm firmly opposed. Even at 3' radius I've found "flexible" switch blades stiff and potentially unreliable. Go below 3' radius and they become a serious problem.
     
    A number of contributors to the thread seemed to deal with this and other issues by arguing that there is no need to cater for radii below 3' because OO modellers oughtn't to want to use anything below 3' . I have to say that those contributors who model in EM , P4 or S7, not OO, generally seem to take this view - and of course 3' is the accepted minimum radius in those finescale gauges
     
    Again I have to disagree, sharply. Every single layout mentioned in this posting would have been impossible if a minimum 3' radius constraint had been imposed on me. By most modellers' standards, Blacklade is pretty generous in terms of radius - generally 3' with 2'6" in one or two places and not in the form of reverse curves. Many OO modellers find themselves using crossovers formed of small radius points. But Blacklade does not meet the minimum radius standard many are advocating.
     
    In fact a lot of modellers are in OO precisely because it allows them to build a layout in the restricted space they have -which the finescale gauges would not permit. Any OO product which ignores that reality is not going to meet the needs of a large part of the target market. Certainly medium radius is the place to start, if there's only one point in the range . But a smaller radius point is going to be required on occasion by 75-80% of the OO market
     
    This brings me to a further point. The idea that OO track is basically a matter for those working in OO seems to be viewed as aggressively provocative rather than uncontroversial. However people who don't model in OO have no real interest in seeing OO track brought to market. They aren't going to buy it - the lack of it doesn't affect their own modelling (A few may even regret the introduction of such a product because they would like to see people abandon OO in favour of their own gauge , and if OO points were available they would weaken the case for doing so)
     
    In addition people who don't model in OO are naturally ignorant of conditions on the ground . Of course finescale modellers - who adopted the 3' constraint so long ago they've forgotten about it - can't see why anyone would want to use radii below 3' . Of course they think such radii are unacceptable. The trouble arises when they assume that OO modellers must see things the same way. OO track threads sometimes seem to become a strange world in which the one group of people whose opinions on the subject of OO track have no real validity are those actually working in OO.
     
    Enough - this has run to considerable length . I'd encourage anybody reading to vote in the poll in Joseph Pestall's thread . The more whjo vote, the more useful the data becomes. No doubt it isn't representative of the statistical average - but perhaps a more useful question is what does it represent - and what does it tell us about them. In this context the fact that users of code 75 is currently outscoring the total for users of the various flavours of code 100. This seems to suggest that the poll is representing the views of those looking for something better than code100 Streamline - and that - as a minimum - the market for OO track might very roughly equate to the existing market for code75, perhaps plus a bit (to allow for those "converted"by seeing a superiore new product)
  17. Ravenser

    Served Up On A Tray

    By Ravenser,


    Boxfile
    This is by way of a short "statement of concept" note.
     
    The Boxfile (formally Whitefriargate Goods) has been out of commission for a couple of years, after the end of the fiddle yard track became damaged. At one level this simply means a basic and fairly straightforward repair. But it has thrown into sharper relief the main problem with this layout.
     

     
    That's the board joint. The two files are currently held together - when assembled - by fishplates connecting the tracks. This arrangement has proved vulnerable to damage of the exposed track ends, and it's a bit of a pig trying to slide everything together, as some of the track doesn't cross the joint at 90 degrees. It's very fiddly, and there's a risk of damaging the track.
     
    As a result of this setting up the 'file has taken 10-15 minutes of fiddling about, which is a serious disincentive to using the layout
     
    And when you've got it all together - the track joints across the gap are pretty rough, which has affected running
     
    When I was toying with the idea of building a tramway micro as a boxed diorama, using IKEA storage boxes (see http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-18982-im-not-committed-to-building-this-you-understand-mark-2/) I noticed that there was a version of the product that was effectively a tray, and I had the idea of buying one and fitting the Boxfile inside it, permanently assembled
     
    This idea faded away when I discovered that IKEA weren't actually selling the storage item in question http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/119680-snack-boxes-are-back-at-ikea/ but has now resurfaced.
     
    I thought the stumbling block would be storage. At present the Boxfile lives in a storage drawer under the bed, along with two boxfiles containing all the stock, a small stash of modern N gauge which I ended up acquiring, the controller, light and some empty boxes. I had thought that if I mounted the complete layout on a tray it would no longer fit in the drawer.
     
    And the flat is very full, and there is nowhere else obvious to keep it.
     
    However some actual checks last night revealed that if mounted in a tray it should still fit.....
     

    (This picture may be some help to those folk who believe they "don't have room for a model railway")
     
    So it's game on.
     
    The intention is to use 4mm ply to construct an open-fronted tray to act as a frame around the assembled layout. This means in practice a flat piece of ply (tee-hee - the ply will have to come from Wickes or B&Q as the local timber merchant has gone) with strips of ply along the sides and back. The files can then be glued down inside, with the track properly joined , and the damaged piece replaced and relaid across the interfile joint
     
    I don't think the bottom of the files are entirely rigid anyway, so the whole thing may actually end up flatter. Sides will be 1 3/4" deep , as this should avoid some of the switches and DIN sockets . Holes will have to be drilled for the rest , and I might consider removing one or two of the entirely pointless section switches I originally installed
     
    The fronts and lids of the files would still fold up to provide a sealed and protected unit, but the layout would effectively be a single unit 29.5" long, meaning I could simply put it on a table, plug in the connectors, set up the light, add the stock and away we go.
    Some of the reliability problems at the joints would also vanish. No longer would trains auto-uncouple entering the fiddle track, or jolt across a chasm.
     
    The ply tray will probably be painted black - I have a tin in the airing cupboard, so long as it hasn't gone off
     
    And if the layout can be set up quickly and runs more reliably it should be used more. I can invest time in finishing off a few wagons, and maybe building up a Judith Edge Sentinel or two from the cupboard. A Peckett or a Barclay could be contemplated.....
     
    The DIY sheds beckon tomorrow
  18. Ravenser

    The Ghosts of Flaxborough

    By Ravenser,


    Reflections
    A very long time ago, I read an article by Cyril Freezer in the Railway Modeller. It was called "Modern Image is Easy" and if you judge by the impact on my modelling it must have been the most important magazine article I've ever read. At least it's the only article that has ever resulted in me scrapping my layout, selling up my stock, and completely changing direction in my modelling.
     
    Mind you I was a highly impressionable young teenager at the time.
     
    I was then attempting to build what can be classed as a trainset, which was supposed to be a GWR/LMS joint operation, and a branchline. It was GWR/LMS because those were the cool companies in those days , unlike dowdy difficult and neglected things like the LNER or SR, where you needed to be a scratchbuilder of the calibre of Frank Dyer , Barrie Walls, Iain Futers or Nigel Macmillan to be able to make a go of a serious model. At that age I couldn't build a wagon kit tidily. It was a branch line - because that's what you did, as evidenced in the Railway Modeller. And it was steam because it hadn't occurred to me that you could model anything else. In those days even modelling BR steam was a case of "why would you want to model a depressing period of decay like that?"
     
    It was a startling revelation to find the editor of the Railway Modeller arguing in detail in a 3 page article that it was not merely possible but straightforward and attractive to model contemporary BR . The attraction of modelling a railway I'd actually seen, rather than one that had effectively vanished about the time I was born and I would never experience, was immediate. The East Lincolnshire line had closed in 1970 so I hadn't seen a lot of the contemporary railway, but I'd seen something . The thing was out there, and getting to Grimsby or New Holland or Market Rasen or even Kings Cross was a great deal more practical than acquiring a TARDIS and visiting the 1930s.
     
    And CJF had explained in detail how it could be done. There were even layout plans, taken from his 60 Plans for Small Railways - one of these (that marked 3) purported to fit a continuous run in 6' x 4', and I came to the conclusion that a version could be done in 10' x 8' in the loft. I didn't much like the through terminus Cyril Freezer had drawn so I thought a few loop lines tricked up like a station would act as a sort of fiddle space.
     
    So I got parental permission and funding for some lengths of half inch chipboard about 18" wide to be supported off the roof trusses on metal shelf brackets There was no baseboard frame - these were effectively crude shelves. My existing rolling stock - three engines, some coaches and wagons - was sold. (There seemed no point trying to sell the few kits I'd attempted to build. Three wagons were much later rebuilt and recycled for the boxfile, one Ratio coach eventually went in the bin, another has just been completely rebuilt for Blacklade, and that just leaves a badly built GW 4 wheeler which I 'm considering rebuilding as engineer's stock.)
     
    With the modest proceeds I had a model railway spending spree. My birthday produced a blue Wrenn class 20, and the rest of the funds went on a blue Airfix 31 - the latest thing in RTR diesels then - three or four coaches and three "BR vans": my first venture into the world of the discount mail order box shifter, bought from a prominent advertiser of the time, Eastbourne Model Centre. I soon discovered that the "BR vans" were not like the ones that took malt from ABM Louth - they were pre-nationalisation types, and further investigation suggested there weren't any of those left. But I was stuck with them , even if they weren't authentic.
     
    Cyril Freezer had claimed that an authentic modern BR train could be made up with a van , two brake seconds, an FO, and a catering vehicle; and that a mix of Mk 1 and Mk2 stock was authentic. I duly bought a pair of Hornby Mk2 "BSK"s and an Airfix Mk2D FO . An old Triang Hornby Mk1 RMB was found on a junk shop, and repainted rather roughly into blue-grey with Humbrol enamel (I remember freezer tape was used as masking, the catering red stripe was actually a narrow strip of the original maroon self-coloured plastic, the corners of the grey weren't rounded and there was no lining. Or numbers and branding). I also acquired two Lima BGs, and a pair of their CCTs - I thought I could add a parcels train to the mix. The idea was that with a BG and RMB I had an InterCity rake, with these cut out and a 31 on the front I had a semi fast/local train. My express loco was to be a second hand Triang Hornby 37 , bought for a tenner from the junk shop. It barely ran. I eventually took it to a model shop I'd discovered near Grimsby station to be sorted out. They did their best , but it was still pretty rubbish . I bought a new Lima 08.
     
     
    It was a badly flawed project. Nobody in the family had ever had a model railway, I didn't know any other modellers, there were no local clubs, no local model shops and in those days of course no internet. I was totally on my own bar a few copies of a monthly magazine, and I had no real idea what I was doing. I was under the impression that Brasso would be an effective track cleaner. After all it is sold for polishing metal and rails are metal... The whole thing ran like a dog with frequent derailments. I'd reused every Hornby point I'd ever bought - it's only now, many years later , that I wonder if there might have been some back to back issues in there somewhere , and whether some of the points may have been a bit coarse for some of the wheels. I remember I ultimately rewheeled the Hornby coaches with wheels sold by a model shop in Grimsby - Romfords no doubt. Were those really going to run happily through 1970s Hornby trainset points?

     
     
    About 18 months into the project my father was seconded out to the Australian branch of his company, and progress stopped.
     
    We spent most of the next few years in Sydney, where I found a 1500V dc suburban railway with a 15 minute frequency service on my doorstep , and in due course acquired a NSW Student Railpass for use on the same. A chance find of a months old copy of the Model Railway Constructor on the bookstall on Wynyard station ramp led to modelling restarting in the form of a small tram layout , which went through 2 versions , the second of which boasted two BEC kits and worked quite well though it ate card buildings and came back asking for more, and I never did get more than a few centre masts without wires up..

     
    An attempt was made to resurrect Flaxborough when we returned home about 9 months before university, and during holidays , but it didn't work well, progress was limited - and when I moved south to start work the project was quietly abandoned . Modelling restarted about 2 years later with Ravenser Mk1
     
    However this was not quite the end of the matter, because I was a good little boy, kept my stock boxes and packed everything carefully away in cardboard boxes in the parental loft (beneath the derelict remains of the layout). Those boxes eventually ended up in my own flat - and as I don't like wasting stuff , the stock is very slowly resurfacing.
     
    The Wrenn 20 and Lima 09 were reused on Ravenser - where their mechanical limitations became abundantly obvious. The Airfix 31 which was probably the best of the locos is now being detailed up for Blacklade. One of the two CCTs has already been comprehensively upgraded, and another awaits its turn. An Airfix LMS van which suffered my first attempt at weathering was reworked for the boxfile, and a Mainline Mink is now earmarked for reworking as a tail load parcels van for the steam period on Blacklade.
     
    Other stuff will surface in due course. The two Lima BGs are earmarked as donor vehicles to take a couple of pairs of Comet sides when I pluck up the courage to face attempting blue/grey with spray cans . I don't suppose there'll be a lot left of them when I've finished but at 64' there's not much else to be done . There's a Lima Mk1 SK tucked away somewhere - which raises the question of whether the secondhand Kitmaster SK kit someone gave me should be built as a TSO instead. Most of the TTAs I got for 50p each second hand have now been reworked , and at some point I may get round to reusing the body of the 37 with an Athearn PA1 chassis and some Dave Alexander bogie frames ( both already stockpiled) under it .Whether the Mk2s are really worth the huge effort of upgrading is moot. I started , got seriously discouraged - I'm not sure I'll finish
     
    There's one other ghost, a slightly more subtle one. The tram layout, allegedly 4' gauge, was set in a Midlands county town, which was supposed to have a GC and MR presence (E Midlands county towns generally did) . I had a copy of the East Midlands volume of Great British Tram Networks, and Leicester, Nottingham and Derby were very much in my mind. There was supposed to be a city centre tram terminus and a depot outside the lesser , MR, station, serving a secondary group of tram routes , and this was allegedly what was being modelled. The town was called Blacklade, and the square outside the MR station in which the trams terminated was named after my initial misreading of the name of one of the stations on the North Shore line. The real station is Artarmon, but I quite liked my version.... When I needed a backstory and scenario for a small rundown terminus in an East Midlands county town , it was easy to blow the dust off the fiction.
     
    I seem to have mislaid the layout photo I was going to scan... (Which is why this post has been an awful long time in draft)
  19. Ravenser

    Messing Up Sydney Harbour

    By Ravenser,


    Layout schemes
    This is another of those speculative posts about possible layouts, so here goes....
     
    Not so long ago someone posted a video to Clive Mortimore's layout thread that got a few people going - including me.
     
    http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/87205-sheffield-exchange-what-a-to-do/page-66
     
    In short it was a rather eye-opening documentary film about operations at Darling Harbour Goods in Sydney in its dying days during the late 1970s. Backed up with another film mostly shot 7-8 years earlier showing the last stand of steam shunting in the Darling Harbour yards using Victorian 0-6-0s : these locos were over 90 years old when finally withdrawn in 1970-1. A total of 35 minutes of fascinating and very high quality rail video.
     
    Now, the family went out to Sydney in 1979, and came back at the end of 1983 - Darling Harbour Goods shut the following year. Although the general lack of rail enthusiast material in Australia meant I was only very faintly aware of the existence of the place, never mind what was down there, and so never attempted to go and have a look myself, still - this is very firmly in "my period". And 35 minutes of video is a lot of reference material - about as much as my treasured copy of Sydney's Forgotten Goods Railways which I was lucky to get my hands on.
     
    So I went poking around on a few Aussie manufacturers/retailers sites to see what is actually available for the period. There's no 19-class , 73-class shunters have been done and sold out, its all pricy , but still... Somewhere tucked away I have a Hornby-Lima 422-class and two NSWGR coaches. Arguably I need to acquire a few more bits of stock while I can - say a brake coach, some wagons , a brake van...
     
    What would I run them on? Well, a half-formed idea about a NSWGR industrial shunting micro set on Sydney's North Shore has been kicking around my head ever since I reach a brief comment in Sydney's Forgotten Goods Railways about an obscure operation in the North Sydney area served from Darling Harbour Goods:
     
    For those unfamiliar with the geography - ie 99% of the forum - this is almost under the shadow of Sydney Harbour Bridge, on the north side of the harbour, directly opposite the Opera House. Admiralty House is the official residence of the Australian Prime Minister in Sydney - in other words Kirribilli is today a very posh harbourside suburb with historic properties and the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron
     
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Sydney_Harbour_Bridge_from_the_air.JPG
    In this photo Kirribilli is in the lower centre, and Lavender Bay is upper right, above the Bridge
     
    And in the heading photograph, Lavender Bay is to the left of the Bridge, and Kirribilli out of shot to the right (I think this photo may have been taken from the Opera House. Ahem, Fort Macquarie tram depot, as was...)
     
    Half-remembering the details I went searching on Google. As I searched on the wrong point, I didn't find much , but what I did find was this:
     
    https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lzw1AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA9-PA14&lpg=RA9-PA14&dq=lavender+bay+goods&source=bl&ots=s8FGT8HpJF&sig=SvkuezDcD6ccu9cUHa_aOxsXdMs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwig3abN64rbAhUrAsAKHYjKDocQ6AEIQzAF#v=onepage&q=lavender%20bay%20goods&f=false
     
    which is a transcript of hearings by the Public Works Committee of the NSW Legislative Council into the proposed extension of the North Shore Line from St Leonards to Milson's Point in 1890 (a gentleman will be passing among you handing out matchsticks for your eyes very shortly, though I assure you it's really quite fascinating if you know the patch, and the history of what was actually built and when...)
     
    Here is chapter and verse explaining the background to that car-float operation , complete with all the politics and arguments in Dolby Surround-Sound and glorious Technicolor
     
    What seems to be a talk on Darling Harbour Goods given to the NSW branch of the Australian Railway Historical Society (whose bookshop in a terraced house near Central I remember from my teens) gives a few further details of the operation:
    http://www.arhsnsw.com.au/lunchclubnotes/1309dharbour.pdf
     
    There is even - this being the age of the internet - video of the fire on Facebook
    https://www.facebook.com/nfsaa/videos/1457559367588249/
     
    This seems to have been Sydney's - and Australia's - only car-float operation: something quite common in New York and some other big American cities, but - as far as I'm aware - extremely rare in the British Empire.
     
    Now car-float operations have been seen by US HO modellers as an ideal subject for an urban shunting micro. Here is a self-contained freight facility to shunt, with a built in "fiddle yard" in the form of the car-float . This can be made removable so that you can actually dispatch and receive wagons in a prototypical manner , giving the layout operational credibility. I think Chris Leigh floated the concept a few times in Model Trains International
     
    Very promising indeed. And here's one right on my patch,just down the hill from where I went to school for a couple of years, which was supposed to be served by what was my local line. .Mmmmmm.
     
    Some historical background is useful to make sense of the sources. After a long - and in places, wild - boom, Australia entered a severe depression in 1891, culminating in the collapse of most of Australia's banks in the first half of 1893 . My fifth-form History of Australia notes three pillars of the boom - the "land boom" , speculative property development ; the wool industry; and public infrastructure, above all railways: "the colonial governments had carried their railway building to excess, just as private investors had done with urban building and pastoralism....lines were pushed out into thinly settled districts where there was likely to be little settlement for years to come...freight rates were kept artificially low to stimulate traffic so that although in the long run most lines were of value in encouraging economic development, in the short run few of them could pay their way."
     
    All of this is vividly on display in the testimony to the Public Works Committee in 1890.
     
    We learn that the NSWGR were offering wool shippers free cartage from Darling Harbour Goods to any wool store in the city centre - not, say the Railway Dept witnesses, out of the goodness of their hearts, but because Darling Harbour was so congested that they needed to get the stuff out the door straight away or they would be overwhelmed. Not being in the city centre, the Pastoral Finance Association’s warehouse didn't benefit - so they wanted their own direct rail link with wagons delivered to their door.
     
    It becomes painfully obvious why "acquiring the necessary property proved too difficult". After 1891 Australia was in much the same state as Ireland after 2008 - the cash just didn't exist for this kind of "top of the boom" project. Extension beyond Milson's Point was quietly forgotten about and once the worst of the crisis eased, the Pastoral Finance Association was offered direct delivery by car-float as a compensation. A lot of time before the committee was spent arguing about the idea of running trains onto train-ferries at Milson's Point and floating them across the harbour to meet a new railway (which didn't exist either) round the city centre to the main railway station, as an "alternative Main Northern", based on US models. This was nonsense, if not nonsense on stilts, but you can see where the idea of a car-float came from.....
     
    It is also clear that a number of witnesses were adherents of the "if you build it, they will come" theory. Unfortunately in the end you will build it, and there will be no-one left to come, and the sky will fall in on you..... The first whispers of the gathering storm can be heard in the admission by a number of witnesses before the Committee that in the last year or so trade has been a little quieter.
     
    It is fascinating to see the idea of a harbour bridge being considered so early - that was still four decades away. And some prize should be awarded to the proponent of the alternative route, who was also proposing a cross-harbour railway by laying two tubes on the bottom of the harbour , to be reached down a bored helix at Milsons Point on a 1 in 70 grade , the whole thing to be worked by steam...."1073 Q: Can you refer me to an example of such a railway? A: I do not know. Q: Then we should have to make an experiment?" Ouch!
     
    What was actually built shortly after was the railway to Milson's Point, as proposed by the Railways Dept; and it was a purely suburban line - and in due course a very busy one. The ferry connection to the city was operated by the existing ferry company. Building the Sydney Harbour Bridge was the centrepiece of the 1915 Bradfield Report, the blueprint for Sydney's 20th century public transport - construction began in 1924. As the North Pylon of the Bridge essentially obliterated the old Milson's Point terminus the line was cut back to a new terminus part way up Lavender Bay - after the new line opened, the platforms were removed and it became carriage sidings. They can be seen here- despite all the grand talk about "1560 feet of harbour frontage " nobody has ever built commercial wharves in Lavender Bay. It remains a quiet anchorage for small boats.

     
     
    The North Shore line was electrified at 1500V DC in 1932 in connection with the opening of the new line through North Sydney, across the Harbour Bridge and in tunnel under the city centre to Central. There was talk between the wars of a Northern Beaches line turning east towards Manly - it was in the Bradfield Report, the Depression killed the idea and I suspect that it will never happen.

    In the late 1970s there was a pickup goods along the North Shore line - I never saw it , but I saw occasional traces of its presence in the appearance or disappearance of a refridgerated box car outside what appeared to be a coldstore dock at St Leonards. I think it disappeared sometime in the 80s
     
    So - any model would be a compact urban shunting layout, with a small two wagon or four wagon car-lift as fiddle yard. Almost a cassette fiddle yard. It would feature a big Victorian Italianate warehouse as its backdrop. On one side there would be a blocked tunnel mouth for the access route that never happened . It might be set into a ledge carved out of the sandstone hillside.
     
    Traffic would be wool and meat for the cold-store. Possibly some general goods across a wharf, maybe a little timber.
     
    We need a trackplan. Now the only space which might be available is the 4'3 x 18" where the desktop computer currently sits - and which has an alternative claim from a possible OO9 layout: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-20376-shifting-sands/
     
    That's too short for the obvious candidate, John Allen's Tymesaver . Cut it how you like, 51" is not enough length unless you lose chunks of the layout to a sectorplate. And how you would arrange the carfloat connection on such cut down versions I can't see:
    http://www.carendt.com/micro-layout-design-gallery/micro-tymesaver-designs/
    http://www.carendt.com/micro-layout-design-gallery/dense-track-designs/
     
    A hunt around Carendt.com turns up one possible design - Triple I Industrial Park:
    http://www.carendt.com/micro-layout-design-gallery/dense-track-designs-2/
     
    Something can certainly be done with this. The great Victorian warehouse towers at the back in half-relief - I can certainly spare an extra 4" depth to take it, and it provides a perfect backscene. "Industry A" then becomes the wool reception road, and "Industry B" the cold-store road. The extra 3" in length would be added on the left side: "Industry C" becomes a track on the wharf, and "Industry D" gets a Y point and becomes the car-float connection. What is marked as "office" is the plant where the wool is "dumped" (compressed into bales). Wool wagons are shunted across from A into here, after which they are empty and due to go back to Sydney on the barge
     
    Yes, using C as the headshunt off the car-float is awkward, but this would be the least used siding of the four. With the extra length you would have about 20" clear of the point after allowing for buffers
     
    Stock? Well NSWGR refridgerated vans are available RTR from specialist Australian sources. As is the 4 wheeled S-wagon , prominent in the Darling Harbour videos , and evidently still in regular use as late as 1977. Other opens and vans can be sourced.
     
    But some of these vehicles are big - NSWGR and VR bogie vans can run out at 56' or longer. That starts to be problematic for micro plans based around US 40' cars. There's no justification for goods brakes
     
    Traction is a little complicated. For the 1970s you'd need a 73-class. But if you go back before 1970 things are more difficult. The NSWGR wasn't really into tank engines - and definitely not small ones. Their idea of a dock shunter was - as we've seen - a long-boiler 0-6-0 goods. They never owned British-style 0-6-0 diesel shunters. C30-class 4-6-4Ts seem to have been pressed into service for trip goods /shunting : these were what worked Sydney's suburban lines before electrification (limited to 6 bogies on the N Shore line out of Milson's Point). A Baltic tank is nobody's idea of a small shunter....
     
    And currently 73-class are out of production, while nobody seems to have produced the C30s RTR , never mid a RTR 19-class.
     
    There's also a serious issue with period. As already noted "my period" would be the 1970s and early 1980s. But we are talking about an operation that in real life ended in December 1921 - a huge time- gap. In the USA car-float operations were vanishing fast after about 1960s and seem to have barely made it into the 1970s. If I were to push things back a decade or two for credibility - say to just before the end of the N.Sydney tram system in 1958 - a suitable loco is quite a problem
     
    And this highlights a real problem. The Aussie stock I actually have comprises a 442-class - that is, a 1970s mainline diesel - and two coaches. I could not run any of it on such a layout, and in any case it would all be out of period. If there was access from the right, as envisaged by the designer, I might have a pickup goods, perhaps worked by a 48-class diesel - something that is small, available, and which I understand worked the N Shore goods. But on the right there is actually the external wall of the flat. And a 48-class would not have come across on a car-float
     
    Oh, and any rail access would have been from the left, not the right, in reality.The thing starts to bristle with problems and won't quite gel.
     
    I might well attempt a version of this project at some time, but as far as the space in the study currently occupied by the desktop is concerned, the 009 scheme fits more neatly, works a little better scenically , and uses things I already have in stock. And the extra stock to be bought can be obtained from a nearby model shop or from traders at shows . There are no currency issues to face.
     
    Hmmmmm
  20. Ravenser
    After a brisk start , this project seems to have gone to sleep again. 
     
    Not quite true - in the last 10 days I've actually managed to paint the bodyshell, and matters now stand thus:
     
     
     

     
    I see I have managed to capture the corner where one of the window pillars became damaged and had to be repaired. It looks much worse blown up to around 7mm scale. I also haven't removed the Maskol from the handrails
     
    Transfers are Modelmaster (someone said he's dropping transfers?) and the etched NBL diamonds are 247
     
    All it now needs is a coat of matt varnish - and a working chassis to put it on
     
    (As an aside I now have a further excuse to own one of these locos. There's a group talking about building a replica Class 21 Class 21 replica project  - and from them I learn:
     
     
    The possibility of running one in Lincolnshire - maybe even at a pinch on the E Lincs line - hadn't occurred to me)
     
    I've also added a little representational buffer beam detail. When I were a little lad (ok, armed with an ABC..) buffer beam detail seemed to be the core of diesel modelling. It was almost the whole of "detailing a diesel" - and as I used tension-locks in those days it was out of the question for me. These days I use Kadees, which though neater still swing, and I've still pretty restricted in what I can do below the buffer beam. I do try to do something but it veers from the representational to the frankly vestigial.
     
    However all Hornby attempted in the 1980s was a vague blob where the coupling hook should be, and so something had to be done to fill up a notably "busy" area. I've now replaced the blob with a proper whitemetal coupling hook, and fashioned a very rough representation of the two large jumper sockets on the buffer beam out of the ends of two Langley cast speedo cables, with a bit of cable - probably overscale - looped up to one side. It's not much, but it's something , and should be a significant improvement on the starting point. I'm not 100% sure about the shade of red on the buffer beam , but looking at the photo above I think it might be ok
  21. Ravenser

    Troublesome Trucks

    By Ravenser,


    Operational
    When I built the tea-tray in which to mount the Boxfile, I had the naïve idea that replacing the damaged track and sorting out the track joints between the two files would solve all the 'file's running problems.
     
    Unfortunately what it actually revealed was that there were problems with the stock. A replacement Tenshodo rejuvenated the Y3, a little running in helped the Knightwing shunter - and then it became painfully obvious that all was not well with the wagon fleet.
     
    An extensive programme of testing , recorded in a spreadsheet , resulted and it seemed that Romford wheels and lightweight vehicles were the obvious issues. So I set to, and started tackling them.
     
    It's been very much a snakes-and-ladders experience and my last comment was, once again, over optimistic
     
    Things that were supposed to work - turn out not to. I took the boxfile along to a recent DOGA area group meeting, and a fresh clutch of gremlins crawled out to gloat at me. (What is the correct collective noun for gremlins? A breakers' yard?)
     
    The LNER unfitted van -compensated -that ran with rock-solid reliability before I fitted the couplings now falls off with absolute predictability. The GE open jumped the rails unless taken very gingerly. That one at least is explicable - at just 32g I was pleasantly surprised it ran in the first place. And several locos found a tight spot at the file joint on the coal siding and fell off.(The wagons didn't seem to mind it),
     
    The latter problem was duly sorted out with a couple of panel pins inserted to force the track back to gauge and a careful trimming-back of one of the plasticard gap-inserts , which was not quite flush - and now all locos run down the siding very happily.
     
    But the wagons are proving more difficult. I've just tackled another 4 of them with mixed results. An ex Airfix LMS van has received Hornby wheels and more weight, and lo and behold it now runs reliably. However at some point it's lost its vac pipes, so I need to reinstate those
     
    And while I was about it I managed to get a little more weight into the GE open , which is now about 45g and much more reliable
     

     
    (However the Cowham & Shearer PO seen next to it is still a bit marginal at only 32g and with nowhere else really to add weight)
     
    A little testing and tweaking of couplings meant that a Bachmann Conflat lost its red-card and was declared fit for traffic. But despite adding still more lead under the load and pushing its weight up to 50g a Bachmann 16T slope-side mineral still falls off, every time a coconut, when running one way round.
     
    What's disturbing about this is that these two wagons have ready-to-run chassis, and Bachmann wheels. Both weigh 48-50g. You'd expect these to be absolutely and unquestionably reliable - instead I've been struggling with them.
     
    Even more disquieting - when I started tweaking the height of the wire on the S+W couplings to stop the Conflat uncoupling at the file joint it promptly started to derail on entering the siding - every time
     
    I really don't understand why adjusting the couplings should result in a wagon derailing. The only thing I can come up with is the brass paddle touching the axle and somehow causing a derailment. Anyway I now have a Conflat that doesn't derail, but uncouples every time it's pulled across a particular joint. And if I adjust the wire I get a Conflat A that stays coupled - but derails every time it's pushed across the joint. Not a happy set of alternatives
     
    But this throws a worrying light on two of my other failures - the LNER unfitted van and the 16T slope-sided mineral . Is it the couplings that are somehow causing derailment? These two chassis really ought to be completely reliable. I have an awkward feeling the van may have couplings salvaged off the Blue Spot Fish - which also derailed
     
    I don't understand what is going on here, or what should be adjusted , and I have a regular problem with wagons becoming uncoupled at a particular joint. I can no longer simply put this down to a really ropey track joint because that has been patched.
     
    Some pictures to lighten the mood. Here's two I made earlier
     


     
    These two now have Sprat & Winkle couplings and seem to run reliably - touch wood.
     
    I'm now down to 5 "hard cases". The LNER van and the Chas Roberts slope-sided 16T have been mentioned already.
     
    There's the Conflat V I built with a Red Panda chassis under a spare Parkside floor and homemade bits along the edges (I don't think you can say a Conflat has sides) with a Bachmann container on top. It weighs 48g, the sheet says Romfords though they might just be Hornby under the paint, and it falls off with great reliability. My spreadsheet notes that the chassis is tight
     
    There's the Parkside BR van I built at a wagon-building class. It's always given trouble because the chassis was completely rigid and somehow twisted during drying. I ended up melting in a bearing to create a little slop - but it doesn't like the back siding. My spreadsheet says Hornby wheels and 48g. There is framing on the underside which rules out compensation. I really don't know where I go with this one.
     
    And finally the steel High - an old Dublo open body on Parkside chassis. 35g, Hornby wheels, and no room underneath to stuff more lead. Hmmm.
     
    Perhaps I ought to finish this off as another LNER van...
     

     
    It's been gathering dust on the bookshelf for a frighteningly long time - I think I started it even before the boxfile...
  22. Ravenser

    First Night Nerves

    By Ravenser,


    Reflections
    The layout has been to its first show. We survived. (Actually it went quite well.)
     
    Some years ago I was involved with a rather unhappy club project. That layout's career culminated in a disastrous trip to a show as a part built item. Some of us in the group had hoped that this would mark a turning point in the project and that we could put on a good show for the public to re-establish some credibility. Unfortunately that was not to be, as someone who technically was not part of the group unilaterally decided to rewire one end of the fiddle yard and replace the control panel software during set-up. Neither worked, and having left the clubroom on the Thursday with a working layout I walked into the hall on the Saturday morning to be greeted with "We've just run our first test train: there are only 3 roads working in the fiddle yard, and you can only use them from that end."
     
    There were other problems, and in retrospect that awful weekend was the beginning of the end for both the group and the project. At a personal level I spent three-quarters of an hour pacing up and down my room that Saturday night vowing that when I finally extricated myself from the project I was never, ever, going to be involved in any way ever again with any kind of layout group or group layout..
     
    So it's fair to say that I have a lot of what Aussie cricketers call "mental scarring" where exhibiting, exhibition layouts, and operational reliability are concerned, and my attitude in recent years to the whole business of exhibiting has been rather ambivalent
     
    Yes, Blacklade can actually be fitted into the back of my car. Yes, in principle the layout could be exhibited. Yes, it has in fact been taken to a couple of small informal closed events on a "show and tell and run some trains" basis. But - I've not actually done anything to get it invited to any shows, or even tidied up a few loose ends that were left outstanding. If the idea of exhibiting ever crossed my mind I was inclined simply to lie down in a darkened room until it went away......
     
    That was until the chairman of a group I belong to volunteered me for the high-jump.
     
    The society was going to mount a presence at a largish show. The stand would be there, and so would be a couple of layouts owned by members. There was even to be a small dedicated room. Excellent news , and a venture emphatically to be supported.
     
    Then it appeared there was a small glitch. It seemed that there was some kind of small gap.
     
    At which point I get an email from the chairman: "How long's your layout?".
     
    To which I made the mistake of replying - "8'6" " .
     
    "Right , you're going to Middlemarch".
     
    After which there was a reassuring silence for about 6 weeks. Then an email from the organisers arrived. Details and photos were sent back to them, with which they seemed happy , and I received a formal invitation. The first symptoms of panic appeared.
     
    The first task was to tidy up some minor electrical work - detailed here: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-16577-electrifying/
     
    Then there was the question of drapes - which was ably dealt with by my operator and his wife.
     
    That sort of cleared the decks on the layout front.
     
    There were various administrative matters to attend to, but basically my attention could be focussed on stock. How productively is another matter.
     
    The big effort was a desperate attempt to push the 155 on to completion, since that would give me a spare unit to play with. More precisely - the layout was to be shown as BR Blue modern image layout, c1985-90, since that's the suite of stock that's more or less complete. For that period the red and silver wave West Yorkshire PTE livery on the 158 is strictly incorrect (although it doesn't jar); however the 155 is in the earlier red with white stripe and would be spot on. Having it in service would also allow me to consist, with 155+153; and that formation fits neatly in Platform 3 and in one road of the fiddle yard. Even better, if I could build my DC Kits 128 I could run 3 car Modernisation Plan formations by consisting it with my 2 car units.
     
    Sadly it was not to be. I'm at least 2 blog postings behind on the 155, but suffice it to say that by the weekend before the show I had pushed it to the point where I had started test-running the chassis - at which point it suddenly died and refused to report CVs. A desperate rushed installation of the new decoder (which I had hoped to avoid till after the show) ended with a dead chassis and the decoder refusing to report CVs. Frantic testing with a multimeter could reveal no shorts and no missing connections. Having apparently blown two decoders in quick succession, I could go no further.
     
    Meanwhile unexpected pressure of work meant that the 128 had dropped off the to-do list entirely.
     
    Back to layout administration. I had knocked up a layout description and emailed it to the organisers for the programme (though they lopped off my opening flourish "Welcome to BR's "crumbling edge of quality" - wholly appropriate I think as description of what I'm trying to portray")
     
    With a new operator, and first time out on the circuit, it seemed prudent to arrange some operator training.
     
    So my main operator came over one Saturday when he was en route to an evening engagement nearby, and we spent a couple of hours running the layout and going through the various party-piece moves and recovery measures. One further issue showed its face - he had only just bought a PowerCab and this was the first time he had tried using one in anger. As we had 2 PowerCabs available, I tried operating with his PowerCab as a "slave" handset. This works , but there is quite a crippling lag in response with the "slave" handset. Another consideration was that all the route macros are on my PowerCab . We agreed he would bring his Powercab to the show as a backup, but mine would be used for operation unless it failed.
     
    The layout behaved absolutely faultlessly throughout the afternoon- much to my surprise and relief. My decorative spirit thermometer was reading about 24 degrees - I suspect that the points may actually be heat-sensitive, since when I was struggling with point throw during the summer the ambient temperature was commonly 25-28 degrees
     
    One absolute essential for a DCC layout, at least in my book, is a sheet for the operators listing every single item of traction, with number and DCC address. Otherwise nobody knows what they're doing. I drew one up in Word as a table, and emailed it to a fellow exhibitor for plastic lamination. The address sheet shows the TOPS number, class, TOC/Livery and address, with a column showing whether the item does or doesn't have lights, and another one showing the consisting code . (see here) http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-16399-multiple-as-in-diesel-multiple-unit/
     
    Since I envisage the sheets being used at future shows I added several other items likely to be finished in the near future (e.g. the 128) with a warning mark
     
    The exhibitor's paperwork arrived about a week beforehand. Wheels were cleaned during the week before, and I assembled an emergency toolkit - strictly out of duplicate tools in case I somehow lost the lot
     
    And so to the event itself.
     
    I loaded everything into the car on Thursday evening, and drove into work the next morning: since I have to park in the street on an industrial estate I draped a blanket over the boards and took the holdall with the stock into the office. I left work a little after 1pm , and was soon onto the motorway. An hour into the drive I stopped at a leafy service station for water and a sandwich , then pressed on as the gantry signs were warning of delays ahead - that proved to be a false alarm, and I was checking into the accommodation, a Holiday Inn in a nearby spa town, by 4 o'clock.
     
    I then got a phone-call from my main operator to say he was already at the venue, which was open for setting up, so I drove out with everything to get Blacklade set up.
     
    The venue, a modern museum in open country,, is one of the glitziest places I've seen used for an exhibition; but its one big drawback is that it is cut up into various relatively small rooms - in that respect it was more like the typical school venue. We were in a dedicated room at one end of the venue, with three other society layouts and the stand. For exhibition purposes Blacklade sits on tables (the legs are a bit embarrassing) and two tables (phew) had been provided. Blocking out had not yet been done and proved a little fluid, but to cut a long story I pushed the tables against the wall, set up the layout along the front edge - remember Blacklade is a maximum of 1' wide, narrowing to 5" at the central board joint - and got all the electrical equipment plugged in.
     
    Here we are - I was tense, nervous and uncertain, and not really up for recording every moment for posterity in case I fell flat on my face, so this is the only photo.

     
    I had brought two clip-on lights, but to be honest the lighting in the room was so good that we decided they actually detracted from the overall effect and they went back in the bag. Stock went on the layout, the track was cleaned (do it the other way round) and I did a little test running. Coupled with operator training in recovery measures and stock recognition (Do not assume that a steam-age modeller knows what a 101 is)
     
    We managed to get a short on the station board. That knocked out the MERG decoder , all points on that board dead - unplug PowerCab and 16V auxiliary supply, plug back in, reboot. . Test decoder's back in business- try Point 3.
     
    Point 3 doesn't move. Try point 3 the other way.
     
    Point 3 doesn't respond. Sits there silent and still. Points 1 and 2 throw. Try again in rising panic. A 2 day show with one point on the station board dead and my longest platform locked out of use....
     
    Desperate measures taken. Clear the stock, tip up the layout. I had an earlier problem with intermittent failure of one output to respond . I solved it by moving the point concerned - this point - to the spare output. I'll have to put it back on the old output and hope to limp through the show with all the route macros out of sync.
     
    I had actually removed the first wire when the penny dropped. The point concerned was now on output 4 . Point 3 didn't throw - because output 3 isn't connected to anything. It's now point 4. But as I only ever use the route macros, I hadn't remembered that. Point 4 - throws.
     
    Panic over - stock back on the layout , and we head out of the venue, back to the hotel, and to a local waterside pub with decent food.
     
    The next morning, after an excellent breakfast with operators and adjacent layouts (including the striking sight of Simon Kohler sharing a table with his successor) we headed off to the venue and were in place for 9:30
     
    The first hour, when I was operating, was not good. The Airfix 31 would not stay coupled to the loco-hauled set, due to misalignment of the Kadees. It wouldn't stay coupled to the engineers' train either , thanks to the plough interfering with Kadee tails. (I thought I had sorted that). The parcels derailed. We had several renditions of the Hokey Cokey with the power supplies to the PowerCab and 16V auxiliary bus in order to reset the MERG decoder. A matter of 15 seconds each time, but I was getting tense and edgy given the need to deliver reliability in front of the public, and that tends to result in operator error.
     
    After an hour I handed over to another operator, and took the wretched 155 with me in quest of Digitrains. The venue was by this time packed tight with people, and traders were busy, but I left the unhappy thing with them to test the decoder, having bought a Gaugemaster budget decoder to supply a harness with which to test the TCS MC2.
     
    I also bought a little plasticard with a view to inserting it into the offending Kadee on the 31 to pack it up. That didn't work, so loco-hauleds were canned for the day and we dropped back to a plain vanilla DMU operation. From then on, Blacklade ran more or less without any problems until the end of the day - the only remaining issues being caused by an operator forgetting to set the route or moving the wrong unit. When I returned to Digitrains late on the day, the crush had eased and they confirmed that the decoder was not merely alive but running very happily on their test rig.
     
    We shut down for the day ,and went up to the exhibitors reception. This I think would have been improved by providing something a little more substantive to eat - certainly despite it being billed as a 2 hour affair I think pretty well everyone had gone after an hour. We were with the operators from the other layouts in our room, but somehow folk didn't seem to mingle, and I didn't meet anyone from other layouts. After this we headed back to the hotel and off to the pub for our evening meal. On the way I spotted one of those punning names that you only find on layouts - a local solicitor named Wright Hassell (Just say it... ) Someone is clearly modelling in 305mm to the foot scale.
     
    Sunday began with a determined effort to get the 155 into traffic. A seized armature was diagnosed, oil applied and the whole thing run for 5 minutes to loosen it up. This seemed very promising : unfortunately the plug of the Express Models lighting kit was catching across the gangway and derailing the unit, so that was that, and it went back in the box. On the plus side I remembered that I'd packed a 20 as spare loco, and while it wasn't suitable for passenger trains the oil tank and a limited parcels service could be reinstated. Watching it drift slowly down from the fuelling point into Platform 1 was very satisfying.
     
    Sunday was busy but not quite such a crush and we ran through the day pretty comfortably, with operators changing hourly. This meant we all got a reasonable chance to see the show and the standard was high . It isn't possible to mention all the excellent layouts present - a number of them have operators who are members of this forum - but one layout quite new to me which caught my eye was Sydney Gardens - a finely modelled diorama of an elegant part of Bath which happens to have the GW main line running through it. Cavalcade layouts normally leave me cold, but here the outstanding setting was modelled so well that it was an admirable foil to the trains (I have seen it suggested that Brunel deliberately designed this section as a showcase for the GWR, displaying his railway to the gentry taking the waters)
     
    There were - as it happens - no layouts in non-commercial gauges other than one 3mm layout. I only realised that after the show - which demonstrates just how high a standard of railway modelling is attainable in OO. The absence of P4 and EM simply didn't register - the show was full of top-quality modelling
     
    And by the afternoon I'd had enough of rebooting the MERG decoder and bought a Digitrax DS64 (like wot we have on the other board) to replace it.
     
    After the show closed at 4pm , we packed up the stock , dismantled the layout and took it out to the car. I realised that as Blacklade is my home portable layout I am actually pretty adept at breaking down; and the fact that the boards are light enough to carry in one hand through the venue helps no end.
     
    It's a curious fact that we ran through a 2 day show without cleaning either wheels or track after set up. I had too many other things on my mind to remember - and the stock never reminded us by stalling. This is quite a tribute to the mechanical merits of modern RTR
     
    With good access for vehicles outside the whole thing was quickly loaded, and my wheels were turning at 4:57pm
     
    The journey home was hindered by the major road works on the A45 on the south side of Coventry and at the junction of the M6 and A14, both of which cost at least 20 minutes, and by a stop at a Little Chef for a bite to eat.
     
    The following morning it was back to work.
     
    The show netted no additional invitations to exhibit , which is not surprising since there were quite a few big high-profile layouts at the show, and exhibition managers would naturally have been drawn to them instead. I have no illusions that I was other than last and least in the layout list - but we were to a perfectly respectable standard, and I don't think Blacklade looked visibly out of place in such distinguished company. I was extremely relieved and heartened by operational performance through nearly all of Saturday, and the Sunday. Despite minor problems the layout was running smoothly and reliably - there is a short list of matters to be fixed, but nothing that makes me doubt the fundamental soundness of the layout.
     
    Would I do it again? Certainly
  23. Ravenser

    Baby Deltic - Released to Traffic

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    After a good deal of last minute panic I now have a working Baby Deltic, and here is a picture of it on the rolling road to prove it:
     

     
    The Mk2 stiffened chassis also developed bend, and I stiffened it with two short lengths of brass bar araldited in place. It is now rigid and more or less straight
     
    Fortunately for me the Hornby Ringfield motor bogie I had in stock is the final Chinese-made 5 pole unit with 8 wheel pickup. Not only does this pick up better and run better, it is also not live to the motor casing, meaning that it is within my capabilities to install a decoder. It has accordingly received a TCS MC2 - the last of the 5-pack I bought
     
    The superglued traction tyre has given no trouble and shows every sign of being secure. However there is a noticeable wobble on one wheel of the motor bogie
     
    A certain amount of tweaking of the decoder settings was needed to raise start volts for a reliable start, and hold down mid and top volts. Acceleration and deceleration are perhaps a little too slow for a short terminus to fiddle yard layout
     
    I'm not convinced the body sits absolutely square on the chassis, but that may well represent the inside of the resin bodyshell not being totally square. Given my fear of resin dust nothing will be done about this until next spring.
     
    Running has been a touch erratic. It's perfectly fine on the rolling road, but has an odd habit of sticking on the layout. As this was happening in specific places I set about chasing raised bits of ballast with a screwdriver - the problem is almost certainly deep flanges catching on any slight obstruction . Running this wheel profile on code 70 bullhead is arguably sticking my neck out, and I may need to look at how the flanges could be reduced
     
    Otherwise it seems to run smoothly and reliably enough. Some extra weight has been added in the form of the off-cut from the 155 ballast weight to hold down the unpowered bogie. Waste not, want not (and I am almost out of sheet lead)
     
    I have also weathered the underframe suitably with multiple washes of Humbrol Dark Brown wash, AK Interactive Light Dust deposit, mixes of both, and a final wash of AK shaft and bearing grease in selected areas, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the results
     

     
    As can be seen, the wretched Tourist Brake Third is also effectively finished. As a result I'm starting to get very ambitious about new projects again - though really I ought to finish off a few more things that have already been started.
  24. Ravenser
    As I noted here the two quickest wins amongst the possible coach projects were commissioning the Bachmann Mk1 BSK and upgrading the old Lima Mk1 SK - since those two projects didn't require me to do a complete paint job. 
     
    So upgrading the Lima Mk1 it was. And after getting a fair way with painting the SK  interior (along with all the other interiors) the penny dropped that I had two Replica TSO interiors in the coach box, and conversion to a TSO should therefore simply be a matter of swapping interior mouldings and painting . So I did just that - the Replica interior fits witout any noticeable difficulty, although the table tops possibly sit a shade high.  (Or the Lima windows are a fraction too deep). I found some suitable figures to represent passengers in another box and painted them up with acrylics: some are resin castings from Peter Goss bought at Southwold one year when World's End was there, while others are Slaters and Prieser figures which had already been part painted by me.
     
    The Bachmann Mk1 BSK also needed some weork to commission it: the seats were painted a light grey, but no passengers were added . There are only 4 compartments, and by this period compartments were less popular with the travelling public. They might well still be empty on a train which will not be departing for some minutes. A Kadee #5 was jammed in the hacked NEM pocket at the brake end with superglue. Somewhere in my boxes I have a Keen Systems replacement close-coupler cam, left over from my upgrade of the Hachette Mk1 SK , which ought to be a drop in replacement to bring the NEM pocket to the right height. However I couldn't find it despite searching - so for the moment the coupling internal within the set is a Hornby/Roco close coupler, which will tolerate a slight varisation in height
     

     
    However the TSO interior is much more open so passengers are necessary. The white-topped tables catch the eye, even with the coach roof on and glazing in place. I didn't want the job of neatly repainting the interior of the bodyshell in white in order to represent the last phase of Mk1 construction with white melamine interiors and strip lights. So the target for the model became Lot 30525, Wolverton 1959-60: plenty of vehicles  from this Lot were still listed in traffic as late as 1992 (the earliest coach listing I have): they were fitted with B4 bogies not Commonwealth or BR1, and had broader aisles with the later seating style , but they retained darkish timber interiors.
     
    (The photo above shows the TSO with a new interior, and bogies and underframe items replaced , but glazing and roof still to be sorted out)
     
    The major faults of the Lima model have now to be addressed.
     
    - Lima's bogies, trussing and underframe detail are unsatisfactory, malnourished, missing or wrong. I removed the Lima bogies, chopped away everything below the solebars and made good the holes with plasticard plates and milliput.
    - The glazing is totally unsatisfactory, with deep slab sides. Fixing this is make or break for any upgrade of this model to modern standards
    - The ends are a complete mess : footsteps that were removed in the early 1960s, moulded handrails that should extend onto the roof but don't, self-coloured black plastic (the ends were blue with markings), gangways with random holes in them, mickey mouse buffers... 
    - The roof vent arrangement is quite wrong for a TSO. (I'm not sure what, if anything, it's right for. These were generic roof mouldings for the whole Lima Mk1 range)
     
    So -
     
    I soldered up MJT rigid 8'6" etched bogies. This was the first time I'd attempted these, and although they proved quite a bit of work (not helped by several errors on my part that had to be reversed) I'm pleased with the results. I used the press-stud system and find the ability to remove the bogies at will quite convenient. It also means that such bogies can be added to a body that is sealed up without needing to break into it, and there is no risk of a bolt or nut coming loose inside which you are then unable to get at and repair.
     
    I added cosmetic whitemetal B4 bogie sideframes from stock (They are actually MJT B5s, but you have to be pretty knowledgeable to spot that something is not quite correct). I also used the etched tongue that folds up into an NEM socket, which MJT supply separately. These need to be cut down a little to avoid fouling the rocking bogie pivot. (I used a piercing saw). They project rather further out than Bachmann /Keen Systems CCM cams, so you need a supply of short NEM Kadees
     
    A replacement underframe truss was stuck in place - I used the plastic Mk1 trusses available from Phoenix Precision in the ex NNK range. These were obviously intended to sit behind a solebar, so the plastic base needs to be cut away. A little bodging with scraps of microstrip under any short legs was needed. Comet underframe castings were used . Unfortunately these are designed to fit behind solebars on an etched fold-up floor plan, not to sit on a plastic floor at the level of the bottom of the solebar. So the battery boxes and other castings had to be cut down to suit. These and the bogie sideframes add a lot of weight to the finished coach, which helps road-holding. Since I can only run 2 car sets there is no question of this making traios too heavy for the locomotives.
     
     For future projects I will use the Replica underframe equipment mouldings, as these can be stuck to the base of a coach without needing to be cut down.
     

     
    The ends need extensive reworking. The footsteps on the ends of Mk1 coaches were removed after 1960 because climbing up to the roof became an intolerable risk once there was 25kV overhead on the network. Normally the bottom step was left in place. The footplank above the gangways was also removed, leaving only the brackets. However every manufacturer of Mk1s throughout history has produced them  with end steps even though the real things carried them for less than a quarter of their service lives. Apparently everyone models the 1950s - nobody models the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties or Nineties.
     
    Taking them off the Lima Mk1 with a sharp craft knife is fairly simple, since the whole end needs repainting in blue. Removing them from the Bachmann  BSK is rather more difficult as you need to make a neat job without requiring a repaint of the ends - I'm afraid there are still slight witness marks, (although a plate was often left at the base on the real thing). As the photos reveal  I didn't dare attempt removal of the upper footplank on the BSK. On the TSO I did remove them, leaving vestigal plastic bumps , which are very representational attempts at the support brackets for the missing footplank, left in place by BR. I also removed Lima's moulded representation of the end handrails and filler pipes, and replaced them with brass handrail wire - in the case of the filler pipes, these extend onto the roof. Only one end of a TSO has these filler pipes.
     
    Lima's representational buffers were quietly cut off and replaced with MJT castings. The ends were painted blue , though there was a slight mismatch between my Railmatch BR blue and Bachmann's rendering when touching up the the BSK ends. Transfers were then added - Bachmann omit electrification warning flashes so these were added to both vehicles. A corporate image Mk1 has a noticeably bare end compared with a 1950s Mk1 festooned with steps.
     
    The roof is held on by clips that fit into holes in the end within the gangway. I painted the outer gangways grey, but the holes looked horrible, so a piece of paper cut to match the gangway door was painted rail grey and stuck in place to hide them once the roof was back on. At the other end the plastic gangway was cut down to half thickness and a working gangway made up from black card stuck to a plasticard plate using an old MJT etch as a template: a thin plate of plasticard was glued across the passenger end gangway of the BSK as a bearer plate to let it slide without catching
     

     
    As already mentioned, the glazing is the most critical part of the whole project. Shawplan's Lazerglaze will not help you here - it's back to an earlier generation of upgrade parts. I used SE Finecast vacuum-formed glazing. The edges of all window apertures were carefully painted in thinned anthracite black to disguise them. In order to get a genuinely flush-glazed effect I had to trim the flushglaze for the main windows neatly around the base and push them well forward.
     
    This won't work with the ventilators, and vents with the glazing recessed by about 1.5mm - which is what you get if you simply fit the flushgalze from behind as it comes - would look pretty unrealistic and spoil the project. Initially I tried glazing the vents with Rocket Glue and Glaze. This worked, sort of: it sagged under its weight, and even a second application left the glazing dished. It was also a very slow process . Eventually I fitted the flushglaze anyway, and poured Glue and Glaze on top of it to fill up the recess. The Glue and Glaze  is now supported by the flushglaze underneath so it stays flat, and a lot less is needed so it dries quicker. The vac-formed pieces for the main window had a noticeable gloove around the edges - I tried carefully filling this with a filet of Glue and Glaze using the microtip. At least it should ensure the windows don't get pushed inside if I pick the coach up carelessly.
     
    Which just leaves the roof, which Lima moulded in clear plastic and which incorporated the glazing. The moulding was scored underneath the gutter line and the side glazing snapped away. All existing ventilators were carved and filed away. Since the moulding is actually clear plastic a full repaint is therefore needed. Parkin's book includes sketch drawings of the roofs and ventilators for most types, and the roof was drilled for new whitemetal MJT dome  vents in appropriate locations , as shown in the relevant drawing. The whole lot had then to be repainted - with several coats required to cover the clear moulding properly. The top coat was Railmatch roof dirt mixed with a dash of frame dirt.
     
    The resulting 2 car set can be seen in the photos. The Bachmann BSK is a touch track-sensitive and can derail if run the other way round , but the new TSO, with all that weight from whitemetal castings, is rock-solid reliable. That said, it's not quite to the standard of the Bachmann coach. At normal viewing distance , the glazing is okay, but at 12"-18" the glazing though flush is undeniably a bit rough and untidy , and noticeably so when compared with the crisp neat glazing  of the BSK. And I have a suspicion there is a slight difference in the actual windows between Bachmann and Lima. Also I forgot to add a strip of microstrip along the roof edge to represent the gutter, so the roor profile is subtly different between the two layout coaches.
     
    The TSO is numbered using some Modelmaster transfers, which include at least one E-prefix number from the correct Lot
     
    So  the TSO is definitely a "layout coach". The medium term plan is therefore to finish an upgrade of my vintage Hornby Mk2a BFK and run it with this TSO. Both vehicles will then be glazed in the same manner, and since the windows on their prototypes are different anyway awkward comparisons are avoided. This will also mean that the finished set gains some first class accomodation.
     
    (This of course leaves the BSK without a partner, and the longer term plan is to floow on by building a second, rather better, Mk1 TSO to run with it using the Kitmaster plastic kit I have . Kitmaster's flushglazing should sit much more comfortably with a Bachmann Mk1)
     
    In the meantime I have a decent second loco-hauled substitute set for the layout. All items used were already in stock , where most of them had sat for a good few years, so the project cost me nowt at the point of construction. As an aside the original Lima box survives with a price tag of £3.50 on the end


  25. Ravenser
    This is the story of a cheap and nasty kit for a cheap and nasty coach. Actually that's a little unfair - to the prototype
     
    In recent years Coopercraft , like the Cheshire Cat in Alice , has been slowly fading away. Two or three years ago, before matters reached the final stage of a Smile Without a Cat, I purchased a couple of kits from their stand at Ally Pally.
     
    One, the Kirk non-gangwayed LNER 51' full brake was a decent kit, and was built some time ago.
     
    The other was the Mailcoach kit for the Tourist Brake third . For some reason , these slightly unusual Gresley vehicles have always caught my interest - they were not teak, they were built for a rather different purpose, and they stood apart from the general run of LNER coaches in most respects. However they do seem to have been used in general service post war - and here was a plastic kit . Moreover I reckoned I could build a plastic kit..... Added to which, here was a mainline corridor brake with an unusually high seating capacity which might well appear on marginal duties like short portions .
     
    I'd heard one or two grumbles about the kit from the likes of micklner and Tony Wright - but I assumed that as their level of refinement as far above mine (and above what is being attempted with a theoretically quick 'n cheap fleet of coaches for RTR kettles) this just meant it wasn't really up to the standards of a Comet kit. Little did I know.......
     
    Firstly some comments about the prototype, since there appears to be little on the internet - the following rests on Harris' LNER Coaches.
     
    Once the Depression began to ease, LNER management decided it was time to eliminate the remaining 4 and 6 wheel coaches from revenue service. One pocket of this would found in excursion traffic where 36 sets of ex GN suburban 4 wheelers displaced by the Quad-Artics had been retained [The idea of KX to Skeggy in those makes Liverpool St-Cromer in a Cravens unit seem positively civilised....]. The LNER commercial management wished to compete with coach operators, and Gresley came up with the idea of some special modern excursion stock as a part-replacement. Five 12-car sets were ordered in 1933, each comprising two Brake 3rd Opens , four articulated all 3rd twins and two buffet cars. Four more sets were ordered in 1934-6 and one in 1939
     
    These coaches were all opens with low backed bucket seats, plywood paneling, and finished in a surprising green and cream . Interiors were cheap Art Deco, and by the mid 1950s a BR report was speaking of the buffet cars - by then in general service - as "truly very bad indeed". High backed seating seems to have been fitted post- war. The plywood panelling was liable to deteriorate badly and many of the coaches ended up replated with steel panelling. They finally disappeared in 1963-4, though a couple of buffets lasted on the LMR (who must have been desperate) until 1967.
     
    These coaches seem just right for a place like Blacklade
     
    I wanted to check the actual colour of Railmatch maroon jars against the Hachette Mk1 since patch painting was required. So - I did the obvious thing and hauled the Tourist Brake kit out of the cupboard. The sides are moulded in clear plastic with raised window frames and whatever opacity they acquire is given by the paint...
     
    The maroon was dark. I tried lightening it by applying a coat of Railfreight Faded Red (=pink) on the inside. And after a couple of coats of paint I found I was committed, and the Porthole Brake 3rd was laid aside unstarted.
     
    Matters have now reached this stage:

     
     
    I think this has now taken 4 coats of brush-painted maroon, and a certain amount of patching along the way. Tony Wright , who evidently has a higher-opacity red, only required three. In the circumstances it's a reasonable finish, but nowhere near sprayed standard. It's also had about three interior coats. The opacity still isn't all it should be around the window frames - painting these without getting paint on the glazing is very difficult, especially around the ventilators
     
    And I was several coats in and part-built before I realised there were long sunken marks at the bottom of the sides in several places (Perhaps the mould pressure wasn't quite high enough?) . I rubbed back and patched the worst of these with filler, then touched back in. Obviously I should have spotted these, and filled them systematically, at the start : I suspect they weren't terribly obvious on translucent sides - and of course I got stuck straight in to painting as a colour test patch.
     
    There is a pinhole in one of the door droplight windows. I've tried patching it today with some Microsol product - only to find the whole bottle has congealed over years in storage. That's been thrown out
     
    The seating provided seems to derive from longer (compartment?) mouldings , roughly sawn in half , apparently with a Junior hacksaw. Not having spare 2+2 seating available (the remains of some sawn up Mk4 interiors are not suitable here...) I cleaned it up as best I could , painted it and installed it, on the basis that you can hardly see the interiors of coaches anyway - so any unevenness won't be visible
     
    The battery boxes were mere facades. As a bodge, I've thickened them up with a piece of 40 thou styrene glued behind. I didn't feel up to the delay, and the cost of sending away for proper Comet ones, when the overall quality of the kit is so mediocre. "Lipstick on a pig" is the phrase that comes to mind. I has whitemetal Gresley buffers on hand so I substituted them. The Gresley bogies seem to have built up ok - I just need to get my head around fitting Kadees
     
    As I had bought a packet of 10 LMS/LNER coach duckets to replace one missing from the MTK Porthole kit , I used one here. It seemed a better proposition than the one in the kit
     
    Then there's the roof. After a bit of playing around and thinning the ends with a Stanley knife blade, I reluctantly concluded that the profile of the roof moulding supplied , and that of the ends and partitions simply could not be reconciled . I therefore bought an aluminium roof from Wizard Models . This will need to be cut to length, and then a suitable - and matching - rake back filed on every corner. So far I haven't plucked up the courage to attempt it.
     
    That is the current state of play. (And I've just realised I'm out of torpedo vents). The thing has been sat in a box for at least 3 months.
     
    This is not a particularly good kit. It's certainly the worst coach kit I've encountered - but as my experience has been confined to Ratio, Parkside, Dapol and Kirk, I've led a sheltered existence.
     
    I'm sure that the MTK Porthole must be better than this - though I may live to regret those words
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