Jump to content
 

Ravenser

Moderated Status
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    3,562

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by Ravenser

  1. Ravenser

    Shock to the system

    By Ravenser,

    The small shunting plank is firmly Transitional. It may use diesels (or an honourary diesel - Y3) but it's the sort of inner city goods depot you really can't justify existing after about 1970. Consequently the modest fleet of stock for it is very traditional indeed: no air brakes here. The ex LMS fish van is meant for it , and various circumstances resulted in me acquiring and building one of the new generation Parkside kits for the BR standard 12T van . Potentially very useful for the plank
     
    In the last couple of years I've been fairly heavily committed on a number of fronts , not least with Blacklade, and not much has happened on the plank side of things . In fact the little depot has hardly been operated - I seem to have been too busy. However with one or two commitments winding down I've a little more time , and one Parkside kit sparked off another and another.
     
    Ravenser Mk1 was a compact shunting micro of an unorthodox design, taken from a plan called "Swan Yard" in RM June 1988 (I think) . For various reasons it didn't work terribly well, but when the trains weren't falling off the tracks the operational interest was high. A fleet of about 20 wagons and half a dozen locos was accumulated over about five or six years. It was set in North Lincolnshire, and, largely by accident, in 1983 - I had some 16T MCOs and then discovered unfitted operations ended in December 1983. The Speedlink airbraked stock was RTR but the traditional stock was virtually all kit built . This was my first serious venture into building wagon kits, and nearly all of them worked . It was also my first attempt at proper weathered stock.
     
    When I moved into my present flat about 7 or 8 years ago, I had grand ideas about building Ravenser Mk2 . The study was earmarked for it. However I'd joined a club and a couple of societies, and became actively involved with a club project and one of the societies, which ended up meaning quite a lot of commitments. I'd also started a light rail project , and Ravenser Mk2 never actually happened. The shunting plank was built as a micro for a competition a little later and then I built Blacklade for the RMWeb Challenge to act as the larger layout I'd never actually managed to get. Ravenser Mk2 was quietly abandoned as an aspiration at that point. The main rationale for the early period on Blacklade is to provide a use for locos and passenger stock acquired for Ravenser Mk2; the later period provides a home use for various items acquired in support of a club project , though in both cases the core of what I had anyway has been expanded with new purchases
     
    However, this means that for the last 6-7 years all the wagons from Ravenser Mk1 have been sitting in a stock box in the study, unused. When I built the current shunting micro , I realised that it would have to be set pre 1970 and it became an excuse to build all the kits which were completely out of period for a TOPS era BR Blue layout but which I had somehow acquired or really fancied - fish vans, Palvans, wooden PO wagons, cupboard door and slopesided minerals , prenationalisation vans etc etc, and Silver Fox bodied shunters. It also became a test bed for trying something better than tension-locks - Sprat &Winkle couplings. TOPS lettered wagons with tension locks didn't suit, and there they sat. I've ended up with three completely different OO fleets, one of which hasn't been used in years .
     
    So, with one or two commitments off my plate , and a nice new Parkside kit under my belt in double quick time, I had a rush of blood to the head. Out came the old stock box and I had a look through it for suitable candidates for a set of new couplings and a revived life on the shunting micro.
     
    I said earlier that nearly all my early ventures into kitbuilding worked. One didn't. I built a Red Panda Shockvan , and it looked very pretty. Unfortunately the chassis wasn't square and it fell off the track with much more enthusiasm than the other wagons. Effectively it was useless . And Red Panda underframes are delicate and fragile and this one got some knocks and was rather battered with bits missing.
     
    A Shockvan would be very nice on the shunting micro , and a Red Panda underframe kit was found in the kits box in the cupboard.
     
    Not a pretty sight at first:
     
    .JPG]
     
    The old underframe has been removed. The problem has been identified - one end is very slightly lower than the floor at one side (the body is smaller than the underframe, since this is a shockvan). This has thrown it out of square. A little work with the file and we are in business. The kit provides for a sliding body and thus fills up part of the area between the solebars . This made it awkward to break out the old chassis bits , and it also means that there isn't much room to add lead . Sadly I didn't remember to put it inside the body in those days. the van turns the scales at about 35g - once the couplings are on and a bit more lead stuffed into the last orifices, I hope to get it up to about 40g , though that's really still too light
     
    I was rather pleased with the finish of the body and have managed to retain this. I was trying to retain the vac cylinder , but unfortunately stuck on the new solebars the wrong way round. I resorted to stuffing clippings of lead inside the replacement cylinder before supergluing it in place , in a desperate attempt to add a fraction more weight. Fitting the brakeshoes was not a nice job - the mouldings have to be cut down severely to fit and are easily damaged in the process. I got them in, just, but not all the push rods (45 thou wire) are dead straight . I've added rain strips of the 3 part variety from microstrip , after cleaning off most of the incredible never-drying matt varnish on the roof ) with white spirit. The van used to stick to the plastic lid of the stock box and was a mess. But I didn't dare try adding a canvas roof - I reckoned I'd damage the finish on the sides in the process
     
    I haven't posted in the first and latest models thread , but this one will have to do. "And here's one I made earlier". Its not in fact amongst my earliest efforts, but shows an old Lima body with vents added on a spare Parkside claspbraked underframe, which was a RTR upgrade for Ravenser Mk1 inspired by reading Rice's book. And next to it is a brand new Parkside kitbuilt van . (The thing they are standing on is my Sprat and Winkle fitting gauge)
     
    .JPG]
     
    The kit provides alternative ends and alternative planked and plywood doors. I went for plywood doors/planked sides for the hell of it , with the later hydraulic buffers. It seems ply doors/planked sides coincided more or less with the change to clasp brakes. Thus the conversion to the left is wrong - the doors shouldn't be planked ,or if they are , it should have push rod brakes; and that on the right is questionable - the clasp braked underframe would arguably have been more common on these , though lot 2990 apparently featured ply doors on the older underframe, and the wagon will carry a number from this lot. But the only photo I've found shows the older buffer design....
     
    Oh dear! I can only plead that published info is limited, and when I did the original conversion years ago I had almost zero info on BR 12T vans
     
    The body and underframe are now painted and await transfers and weathering. I've got Spratt & Winkle couplings on this one andthe LMS fish van , so they are useable on the shunting micro - unfortunately there is a minor clearnece issue with the 12T vent van in one place, so a little discreet carving is called for.
     
    Getting Sprat and Winkles on the Shockvan will be more interesting as the lead sheeting prevents the normal mounting block and melt in staple attachment. It can be done , with wire fixing and the baseplate glued onto the lead sheet but it won't be as good and I'm uncomfortable about hanging a heavy load behind it. Fortunately on this layout it won't have that issue
     
    And with an excess of enthusiam , I've dug a kit for a Parkside LNER fruit out of the cupboard and made a tentative start on that as well....
  2. Ravenser

    Single Yellow

    By Ravenser,

    Progress on the wiring continues, though more slowly than I'd wish.
     
    The three station signals were finished and duly installed. . Wiring has proved a rather lengthy and tedious process with 8 fine short wires and two resistors needing to be soldered under the boards for each one. Resistors have been fitted to scraps of veroboard and the various wires soldered to these small boards in situ: the job's done now , but it's taken an evening's work per signal. They are driven off the spare contacts on the Tortoise point motors , and while this isn't perfect it gets a reasonably prototypical set of aspects.
     
    The only real anomaly is that if the roads are set out of platforms 1 and 3, you get a yellow out of platform 2, even though the next point is against you. To achieve a proper aspect here would have required a third set of contacts on the point at the entry to the back platform, 3 , to select between red and yellow. As it is. using the contacts I've got, BL 22 displays either green for route out via crossover /platform 1 or yellow/feather indicating route via the diverging road down the middle. It's almost certain that any route out via Platform 1 must be clear right through - hence the green , - but not certain that the middle road is clear right through - hence it gets the yellow . BL 20, the starter from Platform 1 does all the tricks, as in this case a second point motor on the same board is available for switching. Red shows the crossover is set against it, then switching by the next point gives either yellow ("main" roads in the fiddle yard via the slip on the second board) or green + feather- branch or fuelling point. Since the crossover on the second board is wired as such, there is no possibility of an incompletely set route in this case, hence the green.
     
    And BL 23, the Platform 3 starter at the back, gives either red or yellow. The feather has been wired to two of the pins on the bulgin plug, so that it can be switched by the motor for half of the slip, which is on the other board.The said motor has not yet been installed
     
    All should be a little clearer from the pictures and especially the signalling diagram in the thread I posted on how to wire the Hoffmann motor: Hoffmann point motor
     
    The only catch is that to see the signal aspects you need to stand at the far end of the layout. Unfortunately I tend to operate from the other end - the NCE socket panel is on the fiddle yard board , since this has the fuelling point road / programming track. Thus the signals don't really help check whether I've set the road. At least I know they're there....
     
    The Hoffmann motor is now in place: in fact it's the only new point motor I've installed. The 16V AC is taken directly off the auxilary power bus, with one side switched by the spare contacts on the Tortoise . It is not 100% reliable in throwing and cutting off - ithe motor's shown a tendency to stick and stall in one direction . though the point itself is fully thrown. A quick reach under the board sorts this , and since there isn't space for a Tortoise in this area I didn't really have much alternative. One complication is that there is only one set of switch contacts on the Hoffmann. With the spare contacts on the Tortoise at the other end of the crossover in use for switching the 16V AC supply to the Hoffmann , this leaves me with nothing to switch the ground signal at the exit from the fuelling point . However NCE suggest that a pair of opposed LEDs can be wired into the power supply between the decoder and Tortoise on one side and the Tortoise will act as a suitable current limiter so that no resister is necessary. As the direction of the current changes with the throwing of the motor, the current will flow via one or other LED. They envisage this as a panel indicator - I don't see why it can't work a ground signal instead
     
    Other jobs finished include connecting up the Express Models lightting kit I installed in the Portakabin to the 12V DC stablised converter unit on this board. I found an old rocker switch in my electrical bag that came from I know not where and wired this in. In daylight you hardly notice that the Portakabin's lit : in poor light it's horribly apparent I didn't fit an interior...
     
    I also wired up one of the Kadee electromagnets as an encore, having found a substantial push to make switch in the electrical bag. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work - there's no buzzing noise when you push the button. I suspect I haven't scraped the protective coating sufficiently effectively off one of the wires on the electromagnet. Power supply for this is a variable transforfmer from Maplins , set to 15V (the max) to deliver up to 4A . I presume this is adequete.
     
    I then gave the layout a test running session , which had mixed results. Slow speed running is good . But there were derailments , seemingly caused by the unrestrained slip and dead patches , allied to the board joint , which is not ideal. Coupling issues probably played a part too - the Bachmann GUV has it's NEM pockets set too high , and one Kadee on the PMV needs the spring replacing . And I think the 3link on the Hornby 31 may foul the Kadee slightly. Added to which 31 + GUV + 50 van just fouls crossover 1 at the end of the centre platform - replace the GUV with another 50' van and all would be well. Another reason to finish the Van B. The 101is a little suspect too - almost certainly where there wasapatched repair to the chassis unit after accident damage. I have a replacement chassis in stock, so this could be a priority
     
    And an attempt to fit a replacement TCS decoder in the150 failed because I couldn't break inside - the two end screws just wouldn't shift
  3. Ravenser

    Skeleton in the Cupboard

    By Ravenser,


    Tramlink
    A very long time ago, I went to one of the CMRA Workshop events. The bookseller was selling a copy of "Tramlink - Official Handbook" published by Capital Transport. (It was Geoff Gamble - I told you it was a long time ago)
     
    Anyway I bought the thing, discovered that Alphagraphix were doing card kits of light rail units, and I got fired up with the idea of building one , and making a working model. This obviously would need somewhere to run, so the idea of building a small layout based on Tramlink was rapidly born. The overhead was fairly simple posts, concrete sleeper track could be used... Ravenser Mk1 was visibly a problem - try again with some proper boards
     
    This whole thing occupied much of my modelling in the early part of the millenium, along with the club project and the Boxfile. The baseboards were constructed in a one bedroom flat using a junior hacksaw and a plastic benchhook - the main plywood plates being cut to size by the timber yard. (Never again... I bought a Black & Decker Workbox not long after. And the timber yard has now closed and been flattened for redevelopment as housing. No-one within 15 miles can cut time to size as far as I know)
     
    The basic design can be seen from the photos:
     
    Each board is 3' x 11" - they box up as an opposed pair, and the idea was that they would just about be carriable on public transport as a boxed unit. At that time I didn't have a car, as I was commuting daily by train .
     
    Here is Elmers' End. Two Wills kits are still in stock for the platform canopy. The photocopy mock-up of the Goods Office is still in place, pending the rework and building of the full kit...
     
     
     

     
    And here is the second board, labelled as Beckenham. I know you can't actually run from Elmer's End to Beckenham on Tramlink, but this was not conceived as  finescale layout. In fact Beckenham was originally conceived as the fiddle yard, until I thought that a terminus in a station forecourt could be suggested, and therefore I could have a fully scenic layout:
     
     

     
    The "unique selling point" was that it was to be an all-card layout
     
    I built the first LRV . It was successful - sort of . It has a Tenshodo at one end , it runs - but it's very light weight and propelling trailer first into (or was it out of?) the cripple siding at Elmer's End it came off every time. 
     

    The system of articulation  was shall we say basic, and would never feature in MRJ. I think the idea was to have one trailing bogie live vto one side, and the other to the other rail. These were A1 etched H frames for wagon bogies, and I cadged some bogie castings off Mark Hughes, who makes a respectable whitemetal kit
     
     

    But it did get written up in the DOGA Journal (also a long time ago)
     
    Then I attempted proper Croydon cars from an Alphagrapix kit. These are skirted vehicles, and the skirts fouled the H frames and it wouldn't take a curve at all.... Since the body is a sealed unit there is no way in bar tearing it apart....
     
    (That photocopy mockup really needs replacing. The back of an advertising hoarding was to go in the gap)
     
     


    Oh and one end sat too high....
     
    About the last thing to be done was a push to build super-detail semis from Bilteezi sheets, which stalled:
     
     

    There was even briefly a thought of expanding it with a representation of the depot inserted in the middle
     
     

    Tramlink (Kent) has been stored, boxed up, in the study with an ever growing pile of Railway Modellers on top for more years than I like to admit to. For some years it was occasionally hauled out for use as a DC test track, The wiring was always very, very, basic with hand thrown points and something has come adrift and the Beckenham board is dead.
     
    After I built the external CDU for the Boxfile external CDU and connections I had good intentions of sorting out poor old Tramlink with a rewire. Suitable DIN sockets were sourced from Maplins (remember them?) to take the connectors from the Boxfile. I even sourced a new small radius point , to replace the troublesome Settrack  point at Elmers End, with a view to lifting and relaying and realigning the lead into the cripple siding . Not to mention two solenoid point motors - might as well fit a point-motor while I'm doing it , and then we could see if a point motor could be retrofitted at Beckenham.
     
    I have all the bits - nothing has been done, as I have a long list of jobs with more urgency and more obvious reward.  When I still haven't fixed the W Yorks 155 , Tramlink is unlikely to get priority.
     
    Once or twice the idea has crossed my mind of scrapping it and reusing the boards for a shunting layout to give the stock off the Boxfile more room to breath (and maybe some of the kettles a chance to use it, too) . But to be honest I don't really want to destroy all the buildings which took a lot of work and scrubbed up well, and I can't see how any kind of meaningful shunting plan could be arranged without doing that. Come to that I don't actually have a meaningful 6' x 11" shunting design
     
    So poor old Tramlink stays in its box buried under the magazines....
     
     
     

     

  4. Ravenser
    ORBC
     
    by Ravenser
     
    original page on Old RMweb
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Fri May 04, 2007 5:24 pm
     
    As I'm hoping that I will actually get something done over the bank holiday weekend, I thoughtt I'd better salvage the spiel about the Bratchill 150 from the old forums.
     
    Having gone back to RMWeb2 , I was confronted by my New Years Resolutions from January last year:
     


    I must make some progress on other fronts this year. I have a lot of DCC installations to sort out: the 31 where I misconnected a loose wire and fried the decoder, an extra 20 I bought because the number was the first 20 I ever saw, a Voyager for the club layout, probably a 60 (ditto)
     
    Then there are various MUs and locos. An old Lima 20 which I rewheeled and fitted with added pickups needs the body sorting out (yes I know, but I've already got the stuff and in the immortal words of Magnus Magnussen "I've started so I'll finish...") A decoder could sensibly go in that at the same time. There is the Bratchill 150/2 kit - should be simple and therefore an early candidate. Its about time I chopped up the Hornby 155 into a pair of 153s. More Beetles, more T1 decoders. Can I finally get round to the Home Made 37? Will the Ultrascale wheels for the Athern chassis turn up before 2007?
     
    Then there is the Branchlines chassis for the 04 I started almost 12 months ago . Not to mention the small Dark Secret in the cupboard
     
    And I really should do something about the light rail project this year (Other than operating it with a pair of 153s) . Even your average cowboy builder doesn't take 3 years over a pair of semis
    Well.. most of the DCC installations are done (the Voyager still needs more work and the 31 needs sorting out)
     
    The Athearn wheels for the 37 did turn up - but nothing else got done. The 153s are still an aspiration - though my Challenge project gives them an immediate use (once the Challenge Project is far enough advanced). The Sentinel got built
     
    The rest didn't , though I got a fair way with the 150/2...
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Fri May 04, 2007 5:30 pm
     
    So here we go (just under 13 months ago...)
     
    Quote:
     
    Not a lot has happened recently but now DMUs seem to be on the agenda.
     
    The other evening the Bratchill 150/2 kit came out for the first time. Fit of parts seems reasonably good : a little bit of filing was needed around the corridor connection on the ends. One area that will need careful attention is at the front end , around the interlock between sides and roof . There is a visible bump here and this will need filling and filing down as no such bump is visible on photos of the real thing.. It will also be critical to ensure exact alighnment of sides and roof so there is no "step effect" as you go round the rim.
     
    I'm also agonising over whether I need to fill the join lines where the end fits into the roof. I'm a bit short of 150 photo reference especially for internal ends and have resorted to gawping at a few other Mk3 MUs . Yes there seems to be a faint seam , but not a prominent one...
     
    One thing I didn't buy at Ally Pally was a set of Lima 156 bogie mouldings, as recommended by cloggydog
     
    Nothing has actually been glued together yet.
     
    Unquote
     
    4 days later a start had been made:
     
    Quote
    Posted - 12/04/2006 : 14:19:34
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    I've actually managed to make a start on the Bratchill 150/2.
     
    Progress to date amounts to gluing in the ends and making a start on gluing the sides in place. I'm having a spot of bother with one side, - there's a kind of interlocking step between side and roof at the cab end and the side isn't absolutely seating properly here, meaning that there's a hairline crack between roof and side towards this end. So of course the solvent wont grab at this end, and the side is only glued for about 2/3rd of its length .
     
    Fixing in the cab end might help. Unfortunately the instructions say that glazing should be fixed with contact adhesive - I'm not sure if this applies to the clear ends as well, and I don't think Uhu is going to give me a great bond here. I may have to slip in a sliver of microstrip or micro-rod to get a bond at the cab end and resort to a bit of filler to fill in any residual hairline cracks. (The other side's fine)
     
    I've started to fix the sides of the second vehicle - at this stage just at the inner ends . I've still got room to work on the interlock at the cab end to make sure that this time it really does seat properly
     
    Unquote
     
    By the end of the month , one concern had been allayed by the Fatadder:
     


    I have never had any problems using my normal Mek poly or plastic weld gluing the clear cabs onto by bratchel 456s, so there shouldnt be any problems.
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    Rich
    Dreaming of Mountains and Snow.


    Fatadder:
     
    Thanks. That's one problem out of the way then . The ends can hold the sides in place and I sort out the hairline crack over the last 2 inches with filler
     
    I didn't really fancy trying to slip slivers of microstrip in - it would probably have been too thick and over done the correction.
     
    I might actually get some 21st century modelling done tomorrow then...
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Fri May 04, 2007 5:36 pm
     
    By mid June , things were far enough along for a first assessment:
     
    Quote
     
    Is it just me?
     
    I took yesterday off and full of good intentions decided to do some modelling. Hoping and expecting to make Some Serious Progress on several fronts.
     
    The net result? Er 8 small holes and a couple of bits of whitemetal stuck with Araldite . And no we're not talking big subtantial structural items like boilers and footplates . Try a few underfloor casting bits...
     
    The 150/2 has now reached the stage of 2 bodyshells. Yes , I should have drilled out the headlights before I stuck the ends into the bodyshell . No, I didn't . (And no it didn't turn out to be mission-critical). An Express Models lighting pack for the Dapol 150 has been procured as I'm not up to doing my own LED lighting installation , and I've managed to drill the headlights out to suit (actually starting with micro drills and opening out with broaches. If I'm honest, despite my best effort trying to centre the drills on the headlight , the results are only 98% straight, but they are the same size)
     
    After much effort with the needle files and fibreglass pencil I finished/gave up on cleaning the main engine and gearbox castings (given that the castings are ex MTK as cleaned up and sold by NNK , finishing and throwing in the towel come to much the same thing. In fairness the engines were always going to be the roughest and most awkward castings by some way).
     
    These are now araldited in place, after much comparison of the ex MTK instruction sheet, Jim Smith-Wright's Update drawing, and drawings in Railnew Stockspot 2. All show slightly different positions for the engines and transmission relative to the windows, meaning much poring and moving of bits of whitemetal , but Update and Railnews are pretty close here
     
    Also aradited were a pair of brass coupling hooks for the Dublo 20 (and one exhaust pipe on the 150/2 before the araldite went off). This now has main handrails one one side - the second side was going to follow the 150/2, but I didn't get that far....
     
    I still need to sort out some ex Lima 156 bodies for the Sprinter - so no progress on running gear.
     
    I think I'm now at the point where some intelligent comment can be offered on the Bratchill kit. Where Bratchill's own work is concerned, assembly is pretty straightforward and results good.
     
    But I'm a bit disquieted by the amount I'm going to end up discarding - basically everything below the bodyshell - and the amount I'm having to source from elsewhere. The underframe boxes etc supplied with the kit are nothing to do with a DMU and have been put aside. The bogies are well designed , and would be easy to build and attach - but they've got damper arms so must be discarded and alternatives sourced . I do hope I can fit the Bratchill centre bolsters , otherwise I've got to devise and fabricate alternative arangements
     
    So all I'm going to get from Mr Bratchill is two body shells - not including the seating , which is courtesy of DC Kits (and looks like Modernisation Plan benches - more work with file and paintbrush. ). Considering the kit cost me ??????‚??67, this seems a bit meagre. I'm having to source bogies, underframe detail castings , motor bogie, wheels, seating, and lighting units myself . That's quite a lot of the finished vehicle. And some of these items will require some work. The additional items will cost about ??????‚??85 -90
     
    Ouch.
     
    Obviously things look rather better if you're building one of his EMUS , where the bogies and underframe detail are right. But still, the 150/2's not cheap and it's not complete.
     
    Unquote
     
    Quote:
    Speaking of MTK, I've spent the afternoon sticking a few bits of whitemetal. Here's the base of the Bratchill 150/2 kit.
     

     
    Most of the bits on the side are now stuck to one of the underframes.
     
    Working out what is what and what goes where from Jim Smith Wright's drawing, Railnews Stockspot2 and the NNK/MTK leaflet is a bit difficult. J S-W and Stockspot seem basically to agree, but the castings don't necessarily match. The two objects on the left with round fillers are the two ends of the fuel tank. They are neither the same shape , nor remotely the same length (one's about 2/3rds the length of the other) nor the same height. The circular discs appear to be meant as representations of the ends of the air tanks???
     
    Its going to have to be strictly representional , I'm afraid , but at least it will be a represenatation of a DMU , not (like Bratchill's bits) a representation of an EMU
     
    Gives the thing bags of weight though
     
    Having discarded chunks of the kit to replace them with detailing bits from elsewhere, I'm now discarding detailing bits to replace them with bits from the kit...
     
    Those curious objects looking like whitemetal archery targets seen in the piccy above which are alleged to be airtanks , or at least the ends of airtanks (one of the late Mr Massingham's less plausible fibs) to be precise. I stuck them on, found they were wonky, shakily attached , and didn't even begin to resemble the air tanks found under Mk3 derivative stock , or the drawings or anything else really. Sanity dawned, I reached into the relevant bag of Bratchill bits, retreived 4 x plastic air tanks and stuck 'em on. A plastic rod drive shaft between gearbox asnd engine went in to
     
    Apart from that I've been adding plasticard sides to MTK/NNK's cast facades for battery boxes etc
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Fri May 04, 2007 5:46 pm
     
    By the time I reached the bogies , we were into mix and match territory...
     
    Quote
    No work done, just some shopping
     
    I finally phoned MB Models in quest of the Lima 156 bogie frames recommended by cloggydog. Unfortunately they're now out of stock , as they've had quite a few people buying them recently . Wonder why that would be....? Perhaps I'm not the only person who's actually building a Bratchill Sprinter
     
    So I resorted to Plan B , and ordered some Hornby Networker bogies and one or two other bits from East Kent Models . Service was exemplary - stuff ordered on Tuesday afternoon was waiting for me when I got home yesterday
     
    The sideframes will need to be sawn off the bogie mouldings and superglued to etched H-frame units - I have a pack of A1 Models etches in stock. It looks like I will have to fill in the slight recesses around the bogie pivots , and possibly file down the mounts as well (fortunately the holes are the same size in the Bratchill floorpan and the etches)
     
    The trailing vehicle is the easy bit . More awkward is the powered vehicle. Gluing the sideframes to the Beetle is not difficult . However I will have to provide pickups on the trailing bogie and that's a bit more problematic.
     
    Soldering a wire across the top of the cross stretcher for wiper pickup from the top is easy enough, but means the H frame is live to one rail. Fitting a second pickup is then more awkward. Last time I tried this , on a light rail vehicle, I ended up with through wiring to 2 trailing bogies , each one live to one side, because attempts to fit a second pickup on a bogie resulted in shorts.
     
    Through-wiring an articulated LRV is one thing, but I'm not going to do that on a 2 car DMU. And there must be a chance of simply fitting an excellent set of brakes to the trailing bogie
     
    Seating is another problem . I took the Hornby 155 out of its box last night and a number of problems started to emerge for the 153 conversion. The moulded seats in the 155 are nothing like the seating units supplied by DC Kits - which I'm increasingly certain are 2 + 3 high density seating for a Modernisation Plan unit, and not 2+2 seating for a Sprinter. So they are completely unsuitable. I'm not sawing down 3 seat units one by one into 2 seat units (This is despite being quite explicit on the phone to DC Kits about what I wanted , and being assured they would provide a suitable pack)
     
    Unfortunately E Kent's Hornby spares list does not include seating units for the 155. The candidates are Networker seating (almost certainly 3+2 suburban), Mk3 seating , and Eurostar seating . If anyone has any comments , I'd be glad to hear them , but present thinking is to go with the Eurostar seating units as being 2 + 2 and presumably having plenty of airline seating
     
    I'll need more seating for the 153s anyway , as the seating needs to be extended at both ends to fill the unit, as well as installing end partitions. And I suspect I will have to replace the bogies with etched H frames when I do the conversion - the Hornby versions are the very opposite of open
     
    There's also the complication of the wiring and installation for the decoder on the 150 . I'm making the coach with the toilet the powered vehicle with a view to hiding the decoder in the toilet compartment
     
    It doesn't seem to be getting more straightforward
     
    Unquote
     
    By mid July the tale was looking still more like a corkscrew :
     
    Quote
    And things have got even less straightforward , as the person who was going to paint the unit (and any 153 conversions) can't now do it intil the New Year , if even then
     
    The gubbins has now been installed under the second floor pan , and here is a picture for anyone else who is trying to reconcile a bag of whitemetal bits with a couple of drawings and concluding that the two things don't exactly match.....
     

     
    This is the second and very slightly better underframe. You will see that the two ends of the fuel tank bear no relation to each other....
     
    I don't guarantee this is absolutely accurate compared to the real vehicles - in fact I'm sure there are some differences (fuel tank for starters , and the exact shape of the exhaust arrangement being two). However it is a reasonable approximation of the equipment underneath a 150/2 , as opposed to the excellent model of the underneath of a 321 MS which is what you get if you s8imply use the bits in the kit
     
    After further investigation , I've decided the best way forward for the seating is Mk4 TSO coach interiors from E.Kent Models. These have the right sort of seats in a 2+2 arrangement with a fair amount of aircraft seating in the mix . A fair amount of chopping up of the units will be necessary, but it's the only route that offers something approximately correct
     
    It's perhaps worth adding that there are two black plastic airtanks underneath the exhaust unit, both mounted laterally , not transversely, with the smaller tank towards the centre. Black on black hasn't shown up well
     
    Unquote
     
    The start of August saw things working towards the rails:
     
    Quote
     
    I had a day off yesterday, and actually got a bit of modelling done
     
    Thankfully the weather is now cool enough to dig out the soldering iron. 3 x A1 etched H frame bogies were folded up and soldered, and the sideframes cut from the Hornby Networker bogies stuck on with cyano. The brass of the etch does project slightly above the cosmetic side frames but I think I'll have to live with that.
     
    I've fitted two to the trailer vehicle, using the Bratchill screws and attachment points. The recessed wells in the floor pan have been packed down to floor level to provide a bearing surface for the fold up bearing tabs
     
    And suddenly I've got a vehicle, instead of a collection of bits and sub assemblies. All it needs is windows, interior,lights and one or two details. Photo will follow
     
    Even better, my Boy's Bumper Bag of Kadees arrived from MG Sharp, and a little experiment showed that a dropped head Kadee should mount at the correct height via the enlarged coupler slot I filed in the front
     
    I'm told that The Thing To Do is to use a medium shank Kadee at one end and a long shank Kadee at the other , as this will get it round a 2' radius curve. There's a packet of medium shank overset Kadees in the Starter Pack, but no long shank equivalent, and the separate packet of #49 long shanks I ordered is still on back order..
     
    I've decided to make the DMSoL the motor car as this gives me a toilet compartment in which I can hide the decoder
     
    I've even started to contemplate the supplementary pickups off the trailing bogie in a cheerful frame of mind .
     
    And I've found someone else to do the paint job. It's starting to come together
     
    Unquote
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Fri May 04, 2007 6:23 pm
     
    Quote
    As promised, a photo:
     

     
    I'm afraid black plastic doesn't produce the clearest results. We'll have to say its currently a Stealth Sprinter. But it rolls very freely, sits very steady and weighs quite a bit
     
    As the Mk4 seating has arrived from E.Kent Models, I've started some desultry hacking. I was going to fit interiors after painting , but I've come to the conclusion I'm going to have to fit the interior on the powered vehicle before it goes away for painting, so that I can get all the wiring round it. (to be specific , Decoder, leading bogie pickups, Beetle pickups, and Express Models lighting)
     

     
    The problem of the snowploughs seems to have a solution , and I'd better order some for the 153s as well
     
    Unquote.
     
    It was not long after this that we managed to break RMWeb1.5....
     
    A hasty knot in the thread and we rejoin RMWeb2 late in September...
     


    The cast brass snowploughs for the 150 have arrived from Hurst , so we may see some progress on that front , too.
    Some comments from bigjim, who had done some 153 conversions :
     


    quote:
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Originally posted by Ravenser
     
    The cast brass snowploughs for the 150 have arrived from Hurst , so we may see some progress on that front , too.
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    they are good those ploughs, i find when fitting them put a dummy bsi on and glue the plough to the body and rest them on the coupling too, otherwise they fall off, or use miliput, they really make a world of difference to the 153 models, i have done loads of them now, far too many, i can do them in my sleep now!!
     
    heres one of my efforts, i know you have seen my "times are changing" so heres a different one "heart of wales"
     
    And bigjim again:
     


    quote:
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Originally posted by Ravenser
     
    Thanks for the comments. I'm afraid I don't have any bright ideas to sort the bogies, so a little bit of trickery with a mk 1 paintbrush looks the only option
     
    The Hurst snowploughs do seem to "lift" the 153s. My 150 looks very naked around the front end withough ploughs .
     
    Whose conversion pack did you use for the 153 conversions ? I've got a Hornby 155 to rework at some stage and some A1 packs in stock .
    And how were the vinyls done?
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    the kit i used was the hurst one, really good quality and simple to do.
     
    as for the vinyls i took pics of the real thing and measured the dimensions (got some funny looks off the passengers as i did it during a turn round at crewe a few years back!!) and got someone to make them for me (lettering only) but the big pic on the side was simply done by photographing the real thing side on and reducing it in size on the computer then printing it onto a sticky label!!
     
    if you want some "heart of wales" decals i have some left over and a set of "times are changing" too, i also have loads of arriva decals
     
    i tried to fit a spud motor to another 153 i did and it ran like a dog, i got it in a mtk class 150 kit which i ended up using the motor/underframe castings on a 153 and chucking the rest in the spares bin (where it is still languishing) i ended up putting the Hornby motor back in
     
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Edited by - big jim on 16/10/2006 21:36:01
    And rather embarrasingly, there the matter has rested ever since, as a couple of locos , a Challenge layout and the club project plus various bits of admin have been ahead of the 150 in the queue
     
    With most of those disposed of, I'm hoping the 150 and the Challenge project can make some progress this weekend.
     
    The delay hasn't entirely been a bad thing. Thanks to one or two people I now have some much better ideas about how to install the Express Models lighting kit. The circuit board will now be mounted on the roof, avoiding much awkward sawing up of the interior seating to fit round it. This will also mean that the LEDs can stay firmly inserted into the cab front, and there will be no complications in routing the wire+ plug to the slave lighting unit in the trailer via the gangway. Effectively the whole thing becomes part of the removeable top - not the underframe
     
    This also means that the partitions can be glued in place and I just have to cut a notch in the top for the wire to pass through. And it leaves the underframe clear to install a Tony Wright style simple wire coupling between cars. This gets round the possible problem of Kadees uncoupling between the cars if standing in the wrong spot
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Tue May 08, 2007 5:22 pm
     
    I had lots of good intentions for the Bank Holiday weekend. I was going to crack on and sort out the bogies for the poweered car , pickups, motor bogie , that sort of thing.
     
    And what happened?
     
    Er, well I almost finished the trailer car instead.
     
    It now has an interior, with seats concocted out of chopped up bits of Hornby Mk4 interiors. Unfortuately part way through the process I rechecked my references and realised that 150s are supposed to have 3+2 seating , not 2+2. At least nearly all of them do. I'm afraid I was led astray by too many miles on 153s and 156s . The HornbyNetworker interiors would presumably be more appropriate, and I suppose I should have written off for some and called a halt till they arrived...
     
    In fact being a OO bodger , not a P4 modeller , I'm afraid I assembled the interiors using 2+2 seating , set in "airline seating" on the principle that it is going to be pretty difficult to see the details of the interior through the windows and so long as there are shapes , of a suitable shape , in a suitable place , of approximately the correct colour , the eye will be happy and not enquire further
     
    Lighting has been fitted , using double sided stickytape to hold the slave unit of the Express Models lighting kit to the roof and the cab front (sticky pad behind the gangway door)
     
    I've also added part of a Hurst Models detailing kit (for the 155). I took some effort to file the profile of the top of etch to match the moulded gangway, and on checking a photo I find that the top of the gangway seems to have less of a rounded corner - like the etch. Are the Bratchill moulded gangways not quite right?
     
    I'm struggling with the other bits on the etch. I've identified the door opening buttons (already used A1's), the windscreen wipers (moulded on the glazing) but there are 2 square brass frames which sat inside the gangeways on the etch and some other tiny bits, and I've no idea what they are....
     
    All that needs doing to the trailer car now is fit the etched roof aerial pod and the brass snowploughs - plus painting and fitting of the glazing
     
    Then I've really no excuse for not sorting out the power car
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Wed May 16, 2007 9:24 pm
     
    Over the weekend I actually got the pickups installed on the power car. Two bits of brass handrail wire soldered to a piece of copperclad strip (as sold for building points - spare from a Mainly Trains sample pack) , with a connection to the inside from some strands of computer ribbon cable.
     
    The copperclad was pared away with a craft knife before cutting off to length so that the whole lot would be low enough to fit on the cross beam of the H frame without fouling underneath the floor. I added loops to the ends of the pickups - much easier to adjust than bare ends
     
    The worst is almost over. Can the end really be in sight now?
     
    Thanks to several threads several new loco projects float back into view. The Airfix 31 should definitely be tarted up. I even have a spare painted body , bought as part of the Dapol factory clearance along with the body I used for the 20 (as well as a battered and crudely painted one bought for 50p) I shall probably spare the original body ton please collectors and rework the spare.
     
    However a hasty check throws up no photos of 31 402 - and besides it seems she went from FP to the WR . Besides , the Airfix body is pre refurbishment, and couldn't easily be altered. I'm not certain of the visible differences between an unrefurbished 31/1 and original 31/4 conversion so I'd best stick to an early 31/4
     
    Checking through a Cl31 site threw up another, better candidate loco : 31 408 . This is well recorded in photos , was at MR, BS , and CD in 1985-90
     
    And best of all is this:
     
    http://www.class31.co.uk/picture/31408-bk-090383_t.jpg
     
    a JohnTurner shot of her at Brocklesby in March 83 with a Cleethorpes/Newark local service ( 4 x Mk1s) - allocated to IM and working in N.Lincs. Any unrefurb 31/4 is going to be slightly out of period on Artamon Square in 1988-90 (a Steve Jones shot at Stafford in 1988 shows her refurbished) but 31 408 is going to be spot on for my theoretical ultimate N.Lincs early 80s interests
     
    And thanks to Jim S-W , the scrapbox 37 is definitely back on as Athearn PA1 chassis can be DCC'd. The second Athearn PA1 chassis is earmarked for the battered 31 body to give a green headcode box Brush 2 for the little GE BLT project I've got involved with (We'll try to keep it to the Gresley compo kit and the Dublo 20 not the ex LNWR BCK and the road van)
     
    A further thread took me to Russell Saxton's livery site. And a photo then raised an interesting possibilty for the Ultrascaled Lima headcode box 20 lurking in a cupboard. Maybe not a mid-late 80s blue IM loco. Nor a late 60s blue loco for the cancelled Thamesside plank.Try a late 70s green TO loco?? I hadn't realised 20 177 was still in green , at Toton, in late 1976. That could easily find itself in the Scunthorpe area
     
    Speaking of Ultrascales I must write off for repleacement wheelsdets for the Pacers to sort out the binding problem in the diverging roads of the points (what was that Capain Kernow was saying about a Jinty and an A6??) . With any luck I should have them by the start of 2008. I don't think sorting out the Pacers is going to be an early priority
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by Pennine MC on Wed May 16, 2007 9:39 pm
     


    Ravenser wrote:
    . I'm not certain of the visible differences between an unrefurbished 31/1 and original 31/4 conversion so I'd best stick to an early 31/4
     
    None, bar the ETH gear (which Airfix didnt model anyway). Some (non-ER) 31/4s had the boiler exhaust plated, but so did some 31/1s - an easy mod with thin plasticard. So with another Fotopic trawl, you *might* just find a 31/1 that was still unrefurbed in the late 80s
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by Phil on Thu May 17, 2007 7:03 am
     


    Ravenser wrote:
     
    Try a late 70s green TO loco?? I hadn't realised 20 177 was still in green , at Toton, in late 1976. That could easily find itself in the Scunthorpe area
     
    Ravenser - try 20141. I think that was the last, or one of the last 20s to carry green livery - possibly even into 1980. At least, I think it was green under all the dirt !!!!
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by Phil on Thu May 17, 2007 7:07 am
     
    The ever helpful Brian Daniels fotopic site :
     
     
    http://briandaniels.fotopic.net/p38615978.html
     
    Continued thanks Bri !!!!
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Sat Jun 23, 2007 7:45 pm
     
    This is by way of a blatant bump , in order to stop the thread being locked.
     
    The melancholy fact is that with various distractions, I haven't actually made any progress on any of these fronts in the last month. In particular no progress at all has been made on the Sprinter.
     
    Maybe tomorrow, or possibly next weekend. At least the external distractions are clearing, and I'm hopeful some of these projects can be finalised in the next few weeks.
     
    In the meantime I have managed a little bit of modelling , and have started a very elderly building kit, which is going to need a lot of upgrading. Yet another large cardboard box with a half built project in it is cluttering up the sitting room
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Mon Oct 22, 2007 8:49 pm
     
    Resurrecting my workbench thread from the depths , I'm shocked to see exactly how little I've done, and for how long. Building a layout does seem to preclude building any stock. There has been zero progress on the Sprinter
     
    However the purpose of this is to record a way forward for dealing with the factory weathering on a Hornby 31. I didn't really feel comfortable with the weathering or the colour it left the blue - photos suggest the sides of 31s were fairly clean and blue , not covered in brownish gunk on their lower half - that stayed below the body
     
    You are of course always advised to try out a new weathering technique on a piece of old junk in case it goes horribly wrong. So I tried it out on a new Hornby 31... In reality if you want to see what you can do about a particular factory effect , you don't have a lot of choice.
     
    I took a scratchbrush , aka a fibreglass pencil , to the paintwork. At the top of the thread I mention
     


    the 31 where I misconnected a loose wire and fried the decoder,
    I now have 2 x Hornby 31s: rather than risk 31 174, which works, has a bodyside band and was allocated to IM in the 80s, I tried to minimise my risk by using poor 31 270 , which is none of these things and is still stopped. I started from the bottom , and worked up , very gently - the whole process was rather hair raising when you recall the price of these things, and the idea was that if it went horribly wrong and I went through the finish, it could be patched up and rescued as rust affected/paint stripped areas, which appear on the bottom of the body in shots of run down 31s
     
    Thankfully it worked , and the preliminary results are seen here.
     

     
    I haven't finished work - I've simply gone far enough to be sure it's working. When I do press on , the intention would be to apply a thin weathering wash of grey over all then pick out grills in black . Applying my usual matt varnish overcoat might be awkward here.
     
    And if I'm going to put that effort into weathering, I have to get the thing to work again....
     
    I've also started work on adapting the inevitable Pikestuff kit for a low relief building. After the long struggle with the ballast, quick results are morale boosting.
     

    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by Platform 6 on Tue Oct 23, 2007 1:29 am
     
    Thanks for the update on your thread - especially on the Hornby 31. I have a couple but I don't admire the Hornby "weathering". I really want to do my own. Removing it is a first step I've wondered about.
     
    I've also got a Pikestuff 3-road shed from a few years ago and again, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know of any sheds in "Pikestuff blue" - I'm thinking of a light grey to respray it. I'm modelling pre-TOPS blue.
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Tue Nov 06, 2007 6:03 pm
     
    Platform6:
     
    I've treated the Pikestuff shed with Humbrol Metalcote, a light silver, and it seems to give a very satisfactory result (details in the Blacklade construction thread near the end). You could also try mid green : there certainly seem to be some green sheds near us
     
    I know the Challenge is over , and I really shouldn't be working on Blacklade but... While trying to sort out the photos on Sunday I posed an unbuilt card kit for a warehouse in the right place to show the effect, and well.. I couldn't help thinking that all it needed was layering up and one thing led to another and I had yesterday off and by lunch time we were well under way to a warehouse.
     
    The kit is one of those added to the Bilteezi range in the early 80s as a sort of postscript and drawn very nicely by Maurice Bradley - I think he was an architect as he has "letters" - ARIBA.
     
    I've bought 2 kits , and I'm layering them using mounting board with the printed windows and cut out. This gives some genuine relief to the model. Photos to follow - the basic principles should be applicable to the Bilteezi range in general and also to Street Level Models kits
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by MartinWales on Tue Nov 06, 2007 6:55 pm
     
    Nice work on the 31-I'm just plucking up the courage to weather mine!!
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Mon Dec 03, 2007 8:48 pm
     
    I've been working on another building for Blacklade . This is one of the Bilteezi sheets - not the original Vacy-Ash sheets from he 50s but one of the low relief buildings drawn by Maurice Bradley in the 80s. He seems to have letters - ARIBA - so I assume he was a qualified architect
     
    The original building was in Hampshire I believe but similar Victorian brick warehouses are common enough in the E.Midlands and therefore right for Blacklade.
     
    The big issue with the Bilteezi sheets is they're flat. The printed windows can be worked round but part of the character of these buildings is they're chunky and have deep inset brickwork.
     
    Never fear - heavy rework time ....
     

     
    Here we have the bits. At ???’???‚¬????????‚??1.50 a sheet (actually 2 x A4) , buying two isn't a hardship. One front has had the recesses cut out, and been mounted to 1mm mounting board. The other has had the windows cut out and been mounted to 1mm mounting board. All brickwork has had a light rub over with a suitable pastel pencil to tone down the yellow and give it more of a Midland redbrick look - in this case, Derwent Terracotta
     
    To minimise warping , I'm using permanent Photomount to fix the thin card to mounting board. Blacklade isn't going to be exhibited (for lack of means to move it) and I hope this will be perminent enough
     

     
    Here we see some hasty masking up with freezer tape to keep Photomount off the bits that will be visible after layering up
     
    A fair bit of the afternoon was spent cutting slivers of card from spare bits of the kit and sticking them over the exposed mounting board edges . All the windows and all the doors have been done as well as the recesses. Not quite as bad as it sounds, and the finished result can be seen here
     
    Close flash photography is quite cruel to my felt tip and pastel pencil touching in of the edges, but there is an awful lot less edge to touch in than if I'd just left the mounting board unclad (brown seems better than red , and a rub with something called Sanguine de Medici seemed to help - this pencil is from another range , grabbed cheap in a closing down sale . Quite why the Medicis are supposed to have had a darker shade of blood I can't say....)
     
    And here is the result. :
     

     
    The imperfections are not quite so obvious in life ("honest guv!") and the result is a very chunky frontage with heavy relief . You'd not think it was a flat card kit to start with
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:26 pm
     
    The warehouse is now finished and awaits installation.
     
    So last night, between sneezes, I opened one of the packets of Ultrascale wheels for the Pacers, expecting that this would be the usual 5 minute drop in job.
     
    It isn't
     
    There are no instructions, which is a good start.
     
    I've removed the trailing wheels , only to find the replacements won't fit. They have a dirty great boss on the back of each wheel which fouls the plastic moulding very comprehensively. Still worse , this moulding is a bearing surface - the pin points fit into an open U where the W irons whould be , and are held down by plastic in the centre on which the axle runs . Except that on the placement wheelsets thereis a rubby great boss in the way. So somehow I've got to file the plastic down , on both sides , to get the replacement wheelset in.
     
    I can't simply leave the original Hornby wheel set in place (it was the driven axle that caused the problems over point work). This is because the Ultrascale wheels are smaller diameter than the Hornby wheels they replace
     
    The driving axle is more fun. It looks as if I have to knock the old axle out with a nail (and the gear wheel!) to extract the old wheels , then remount the gear wheel on the new axle - somehow - and add the wheels
     
    I suspect a tiny drop of superglue to secure the gear wheel may be appropriate - I don't have any Loctite (And I do mean a tiny drop)
     
    I bought a Pacer replacement chassis from Branchlines a month or so back , and compared to this it looks relatively straightforward , reliable and well engineered. Significantly easier to do , in fact. I never thought I'd ever say that about attempting a chassis kit....
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by jim s-w on Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:36 pm
     


    Ravenser wrote:
     
    The driving axle is more fun. It looks as if I have to knock the old axle out with a nail (and the gear wheel!) to extract the old wheels , then remount the gear wheel on the new axle - somehow - and add the wheels
     
    I suspect a tiny drop of superglue to secure the gear wheel may be appropriate - I don't have any Loctite (And I do mean a tiny drop)
    Hiya
     
    Out of interest are the Ultrascales 10.5mm diameter or 12mm like the Hornby originals? Rather than Gluing the gear on a better bet is to knurl the axle by rolling it with a file a few times.
     
    Did you get your 150 finished? Did you have any window frames off me
     
    Cheers
     
    Jim
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Sun Jan 06, 2008 3:44 pm
     
    Jim:
     
    1. Hornby 13mm diameter; Ultrascale 12.25mm
     
    2 There is roughening /knurling of the replacement axle at its mid point. However alignment may be interesting as the gear will have to be fittted in place - you can't extract the wheelset , as it slots through a metal casting with the gear sitting in a cut out in the centre.
     
    The more I look at this, the worse it gets . I can't even fully disengage the motor unit from the chassis without unsoldering connnections
     
    3. The 150 is still unfinished. Having got the warehouse out of the way , I was looking for a nice quick win before turning to finish off longer term projects , and I thought an Ultrascale rewheeling pack would be a doddle: 10-15 mins at most....
     
    A final push on the 150 should be the next item on the agenda, or pretty close to it
     
    I haven't had some of your etches, but I probably need them. How do they fit into the build sequence ? I'm having the unit painted by someone else, and they asked for it before the glazing is fitted, to simplify masking. I assume the etches must go on before painting as the paint partly covers??
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by jim s-w on Sun Jan 06, 2008 4:44 pm
     


    Ravenser wrote:
    Jim:
     
    I haven't had some of your etches, but I probably need them. How do they fit into the build sequence ? I'm having the unit painted by someone else, and they asked for it before the glazing is fitted, to simplify masking. I assume the etches must go on before painting as the paint partly covers??
    Thats right - etches go on before paint.
     
    If it were me I'd use the Branchlines or High Level kits for the 142. Ultrascale sounds like a bit of a pain and will result with the wrong sized wheels anyway.
     
    Cheers
     
    Jim
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:10 pm
     
    Jim: This may be a stunningly stupid question but - can you fit the glazing after the etches - or does this require the sequence glazing/etches/paint , meaning the glazing has to be masked for painting?
     
    I've a feeling I may be parking the Pacer in the too hard basket for the moment . Making up the girders for the bridge looks like a more productive use of a Sunday evening
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by jim s-w on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:32 pm
     
    Hi
     
    No, you fit the glazing after the paint. You do need to cut your own but there is a small overlap between the etch and the hole. I have asked a lazer cutting company about the costs of getting windows cut - if its viable i'll let you know
     
    Cheers
     
    Jim
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:35 pm
     
    So I'd have to throw away the window glazing in the kit?
    __________________________________________
    Comment posted by jim s-w on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:44 pm
     
    Yeah
     
    Its means you loose that god awful prism and the over thick frames effect too You do re-use the door glazing though
     
    Cheers
     
    Jim
    __________________________________________
     
    ??? posted on Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:22 pm
     
    Hmm.
     
    I'm starting to wonder just how many bits of this Bratchill kit I'm actually going to use , having already discarded virtually everything below the floor and replaced with components from other sources
     
    I made a little progress with the Pacer. The trailing axle can be pullerd out and worked on seperately. The moulding has an open U-iron on each side - the wheelset is held in place by running through two slots in plastic lumps that project upward between the wheels (ie within the back to back). I reckon you need to file these back from the outside to get the wheels in place. It may or may not be necessary to file down the projections to the bottom of the slot . I did, over filed , and will now need to cannibalise a spare moulding off the second Pacer. As I have a Branchlines pack for the second Pacer, that's not a problem . Anyone with just the one Pacer and an Ultrascale pack would now be tearing out his hair.
    ________________________________________
  5. Ravenser
    It's officially a day for quiet reflection and I'm back from Warley after what inevitably seems to turn into a spot of retail therapy. And since I've not actually made or done anything - I've simply flashed the plastic in various directions - it seems inappropriate to muse on the fact on a workbench blog. That's for making things.
     
    I finally succumbed to an order from Hattons a week or two back . I'm now the proud owner of a Central Trains 158. It needs a decoder fitting of course, but that is one of the shortfalls in stock for the late period covered. There were also two new Skaledale buildings because they're from my home town and I knew the businesses concerned (strictly speaking Mawer & Plenty is actually Rubery's the Chemist where I used to get the meths for my Mamod traction engine, and Rubery's isn't , if you get my meaning , but I digress) . And while I was about it I had a quick hunt through the bargain list and splashed out on a Base Toys 70's lorry because it was only ??2-50 and spreading the postage across more items helps. Just the sort of thing that might come in handy one day - and then you won't be able to find one for love nor money
     
    How much stuff do we buy "because it 'll come in handy one day" even though at the moment we don't, strictly speaking, have any use for it all?
     
    I've got a cupboard full of the stuff .And a small chest of drawers. A hasty check behind me reveals an S-Kits air-con unit etch sitting on top of a card kit for a building in Barcelona (in 1:100) and one of the Maurice Bradley Bilteezi sheets which was intended for the light rail project.
     
    Which has been stalled for at least five years. The heavy rework of a Bilteezi semi detached (cut down to 3/4 relief) is still in a plastic bag in the topmost of the chest of drawers, unfinished. There were supposed to be two pairs of semis. I can't remember if the second one was started or not. If not , the sheet is presumably in the same pile, underneath the building from Barcelona . Along with the part used sheets for a firestation , started but not finished for a competition, and destined for a club project which may have been overtaken by events. The bulk of it is safe in a shoebox cluttering up the sitting room. Now I've got a bit more time - if you ignore the fact I've been out the last 2 Saturdays and will be out next Sunday and the Saturday after that , and then it's almost Christmas - I may actually get it finished and out of my life
     
    On top of that lot is two Knightwing oil tank kits. They were bought for the fuelling point on Blacklade but proved far too big so were never built. They could well come in handy one day..... Or , more realistically, I forgot to get them into the second hand stall at the last club show. A set of C+L plastic windowframes seperates them neatly from a yellow box containing a Ratio Southern bogie brake. This is meant for the parcels train on Blacklade - along with the LMS BG I've already done - since 2 x 50' vans + 31 will fit neatly into the middle platform without hanging off the end. 50' van + 57' GUV won't - though it didn't prove a real issue when I had the last operating session. I sprayed the sides BR blue when I was starting the SR PMV kit - and that's as far as it got, though I have sourced transfers .And on top of those are some blue and white ABS packets newly bought at Warley. They had axle unit castings for a BR CCT along with clasp brakes , and MJT supplied some suitable etched BR plate W-irons. Somewhere in the depths of the pile of stock are two boxes with twenty -odd year old Lima CCTs from my first modern image layout , which I'm hanging on to, with a view to upgrading for parcels use on Blacklade (tail traffic perhaps) . Though now the PMV's built, the need is less urgent.
     
    The light rail project does see occasional use as a DC test track, by the way - though the electrical connection onto the second board has broken and so it is temporarily only 3' of test track. Another job , midway down the list, that needs sorting. Which is why, when I succumbed to the siren call of the Bachmann stand at Warley and bought a medium sized black kettle, cheap, it went round the test track, to check it worked and run it in before chipping.
     
    Yes, I know I shouldn't have succumbed to a loco I don't strictly need. The idea was that it could serve as a sensible sized railtour loco on a club project (it's a preserved example) - I'd resolved I wasn't going to succumb unless and until I saw it heavily discounted : and there it was. Thank you! Which way is the cash dispenser?
     
    The fact that the project in question is a bit up in the air at present , and things could go in a direction where the kettle wouldn't be needed isn't a great objection. It was "only"??50 , and since it has a tender cab it could - I suppose - appear on Blacklade with a 2 or 3 coach steam special without looking completely stupid. And I could actually use the small number of Mk1s and Mk2s I bought when the local model shop closed down . Not to mention the BCK I bought off the Bachmann stand a while back for a tenner, or the unbuilt Kitmaster Mk1 someone in the local group gave me. Or - assuming we ever manage to build the thing - the little Eastern branch terminus the group intends building. I shall probably find the ER never had any.
     
    Anyway , it's a nice loco. And I don't strictly need it. And in its last 3 outings, the Bachmann stand has caught me 3 times in this way to the tune of ??150 in total. All of these locos might run on Blacklade - but strictly speaking they're not necessary. They're nice locos and they run well, though....
     
    And in the top drawer, on top of the plastic bag with the unfinished semis there is now (since last night) a bag with some laser cut sheets for red pantiles, and some laser cut doors and uPVC window frames. Which I'm sure will come in very handy for- something. These are from a new firm York Modelling , and are some of the first British outline products I've seen using this technique. Its been around in the States for a little while I think. He's also done a low relief terrace kit in 4mm as laser-cut MDF. It requires you to add your own brickpaper or plasticard cladding but that's no problem. Unfortunately I've no obvious use for it at present - Blacklade's far too narrow for such luxuries . So I managed to resist it. (We don't seem to have a smiley with a halo...)
     
    I've also sourced 20 swg piano wire from Eileens - who seemed think Xurons could cut the stuff without damage to themselves. This removes the one obstacle to fitting the last few point motors, unless you could the inertia unit fitted to my drive.
     
    And it looks as if I'm going to have to paint my 150/2 myself, somehow. Anyone know any Halfords car colours that match colours in Regional Railways livery?
     
    The two major omissions were a lighting unit for the Pacer - no sign of Express Models - and a replacement underframe for the 101 , though E. Kent gave me a list , which shows this as a spare. However I risk buying other bits to make up the order.
     
    I'm trying to be good and not buy stuff I don't need, or start more projects . But I reckon I must have spent close to ??150 yesterday - excluding travel
     
    (And I'm not even mentioning the tram habit. 4 kits (etched LCC F, whitemetal LCC snowbroom, Keilkraft W Ham balcony, Streetlevel LCC M) in 4 months. I'm not committed to building Highgate Archway circa 1936. Honest. I haven't got room or time even to consider it. I keep telling myself this, at regular intervals)
  6. Ravenser

    Taking Stock

    By Ravenser,

    It's the time of year for casting an eye over projects unfinished and unstarted, reviewing progress and considering what's been achieved, and making resolutions for the New Year.
     
    We could start with the 2009 New Year's Resolution (buried in a transfer off the old site far below):
     
     
    That one I actually kept, more or less. A few bits and pieces were bought - a couple of second had wagon kits, a 153 (but that was a carry over from the 2008 Rolling Stock Programme) , a Central 158 and a cheap black kettle. But I did manage to avoid racing out and buying a lot more unfinished kits. The two Parkside kits acquired are in the thread below , finished. I got round Warley without committing myself to anything significant new...
     
    There is still a large backlog, and some of it has been outstanding a long while. But having wholly or largely shed one or two commitments at the club recently, I have more time and there are signs of progress. So where do I stand?
     
    Wagons
    Air braked stock:
     
    Blacklade was designed as passenger only - apart from a couple of oil tanks (built) and maybe a short Civil Engineer's train it doesn't need wagons. Given the way things are developing with club projects, it's unlikely I will have much requirement for airbraked wagons in the next couple of years, and what I have may be unsuitable anyway . Apart from the PNA (see below) which is not really a priority, I'm not sure there's any point working on more airbraked wagons - I haven't got a use for them. That simplifies things a bit
     
    Steam age stock.
     
    I seem to have launched into a new round of stock for the plank. With 4 vans in the bag , or almost there, this means I need 2 minerals and an open. There's an MCV in the box with the stock off Ravenser Mk1 - a quick change of branding and some Spratt and Winkles and that's one mineral - the second hand kits included an old Ratio coke wagon - that's two. All I need then is an open - there's an ABS LNER 6 plank in the cupboard , and possibly a battered body or two somewhere. I could also very usefully finish off the DOGA LNER COV B which has been lying about part built for an embarrassing length of time, and was supposed to be part of a previous round of stock for the plank
     
    I'd almost forgotten the Walrus and WD brake, both of which need finishing
     
    Coaches
     
    Here it gets a bit more serious. The PMV is built and in traffic. The LMS BG is also finally in traffic. I can run a parcels train on Blacklade . However 50' BG+ 57' GUV + 31 is a bit long for the platform. I can manage, but the train hangs off the end by an inch. And a blue/grey LMS BG with gangways may well not be accurate for 70s/80s parcels - all blue with plated over gangways would probably be better
     
    So the Ratio ex SR BG is right at the top of the list to do. At Warley I got the underframe bits to rework one or more of the old Lima CCTs which were originally acquired a very long time ago for my first teenage modern image layout, so a revamped BR CCT should also be on the agenda this year . I acquired an all blue ex LMS BG secondhand at a show late last year but reworking that is less urgent - maybe 2011?
     
    Then there's steam age stock . The small GE BLT which a little group I'm involved with is nominally supposed to be building hasn't made much progress, so I've done little about stock in that direction. But some old comments I found in Michlner's workbench thread- have sparked a few stirrings. (My minor thread hijack is below all the pictures of fine LNER models...). A hasty check of the boxes has revealed that actually I chucked out the old Ratio clerestory kit as past redemption during a clearout, and I'm increasingly confident that the M&GN would only have had corridor vehicles transferred from the LMS , since Birmingham/Yarmouth on a summer Saturday is a long way for non-corridor coaches. (The kit I kept is a MR suburban, and therefore no use).
     
    For those interested, the Ratio MR clerestories Ratio MR clerestories are those in Historic Carriage Drawings 2 p96-7 ; the 51L clerestory kits, which may well be the corridor vehicles confirmed on the M&GN are covered in the same book p101-3 (and the well known Ratio MR suburbans are covered in the intervening pages). (NB I have no knowledge of the supplier linked to - he's just a convenient source of suitable images)
     
    And the ex LNWR 50' corridors known to have been transferred to the M&GN in the early 30s are these Ratio kits. Once again - I have no knowledge of this retailer, it's simply a source of images. My 2 kits (Brake compo/all third) came from a local model shop's closing down sale . Some survived past 1948 on the GE Section and like other pregrouping coaches maintained by Stratford, would have retained LNER Brown under BR until scrapping (see this rather fine model of a GE brake by Buckjumper). I'm not saying they'll be built instantly, but thanks to the thread discussion, I now have some idea how to do LNER brown, and painting the sides will be the first step.
     
    As for other bits and pieces- the 3 or 4 Bachmann Mk1s and Mk2s bought in the same sale, the Kitmaster Mk1 kit someone gave me, the two Phoenix/BSL kits - not this year. What use have I at the moment for a Gresley buffet??
     
    It's very unlikely I'll have a fresh stab at cleaning up a Hornby Mk2b which I started then dropped in haste when the problems started emerging. There are plenty of more productive uses of time (The coach is off my first modern image layout, again)
     
    Maybe this year will finally get to be "the year of the Coach"
     
    DMUS
    And here it gets very serious indeed. One Pacer is already started, but will be a big job - new chassis, lights, modifications, DCC, Kadees. The second, a chocolate /cream reprobate exiled to the E.Midlands , will be a rewheel/DCC job , and I should have a go at the rewheeling asap as James Makin reports no problems... . That gets 2 unserviceable models into traffic.
     
    Smaller high priority jobs include weather/paint and people the interior of the 108 . (That's a "quick victory" to get another unit for Blacklade completed and looking the part). DCC installation on the Central 158.
     
    And a replacement for the damaged and patched underframe moulding on one car of the 101. A spare has been ordered from E Kent , along with a trailer moulding to allow a power/trailer conversion while retaining easy reversion to a 3 car unit. I'm in several minds where to go with this unit. 3 car is a bit too much and blocks up the fiddle yard. But the unit in question was a Tyseley unit at almost the right period. Did the TS 3 car sets sometimes run without their centre cars? Or should I convert it to a 2 car power/trailer unit - then hope one was allocated in the right area at the right time, and renumber? Leaving a surplus centre car?. Either way, the "black box" underframe needs tackling and if I have to replace the power car moulding anyway, that is the obvious time to do it. This looks like morphing very easily into "upgrade the 101"
     
    I really must build the DC Kits 105 this year - before Bachmann get their's out. It has to be the 105 because the 114 will be in blue/grey - a much more difficult paint job. The original idea was that the 101 could be sorted , slowly, once I had the 105 built to replace it......
     
    And yes - it is high time I finished the Bratchill 150/2. Just to make it more difficult the person who was going to paint it in Regional Railways livery has backed out, and somehow I'll have to do it myself.
     
    What are the automotive spray can equivalents for Regional Railways livery - or at least the Hornby version: 'cos this will probably run with a 153 from time to time.
     
    And I've a Trains4U 150/1 on order which will need the usual weathering etc....
     
    There's a lot of work to be done on this front (We'll ignore the Dapol railbus for the GE BLT..)
     
    Locos:
    None of which are weathered. There's an off chance my 57 might be needed elsewhere so an early weathering is desirable. And it's the smallest of my 3 Type 5s, so the most suitable for fuel tanks on Blacklade
     
    The 60 needs a small bodyshell repair - that's urgent. It and the 66 need weathering - not so urgent.
     
    Now for the more serious stuff. There's an elderly Bachmann 03 off Ravenser Mk1 lurking in a cupboard. I could usefully convert that to DCC - it would be ideal for tripping in a single TTA or shunting a CCT or PMV in the early period. And while I'm about it I should add supplementary pickups as I've done on the Silver Fox 05 (well, large Hunslet) which runs on the plank. And the recent George Dent book on Detailing & Modifying RTR Locos (Diesels) contains some notes about upgrading the handrails, cab interior, and windows....
     
    There is also the case of the Airfix 31. It's running with a decoder but I have a spare body which I'm intending to detail up for it as 31 402 in blue. This may be an early project, and it's just occured to me that with all that fresh air inside if I ever wanted to have a DCC Sound loco , this would be the one to go for. It would give it something over and above the very serviceable Hornby 31 that's its rival (The loco is another vetern off my first modern image layout)
     
    (And while 31 174 is fine, I must check if I really can get the body back on the unhappy and stopped 31 270 - or whether it's a mazak casualty)
     
    Putting a decoder in the 29 was abandoned when it became clear it was one of the earlier Ringfields and not a straightforward hardwired installation. If I have time on my hands , chipping the Bachmann 08 (also ex Ravenser Mk1) would be more productive .
     
    There is also the Dapol/Branchlines 04 Drewery I started building for the plank rather longer ago than is comfortable, and whose part built chassis still adorns the bookcase. I really ought to do something with that, too, this year. It's not made any progress since this:

     
    This is rather a lot of stuff. Visions of stuffing Athearn chassis into a further spare 31 body (whether ochre or not - for the GE BLT) and an old Hornby 37 body, etched loco kits, whitemetal Y5s , Lima 20s etc etc can wait for another year. And speaking of weight, it seems sensible to decide at this point that the wretched A1 Models Baby Deltic kit has a promising future as ballast weights:
     

     
    The Sentinel got built , by the way .
     
    And I will have an ROD . A Frodingham one , if I can afford it...
     
    Then there's
     
    Layouts...
     
    You're probably as sick of me muttering "must build screen walls/motorise remaining points" about Blacklade as I am of saying it. It will get done in the next few months. Promise.
     
    There are a couple of structures I ought to finish for a club project
     
    I'm not even going to think about the half built light rail project , though as it's my occasional DC test track , I must repair the broken wire on the second board....
     
    And if I get even 2/3rds of all that done in 2010 , I'll have had a busy and productive year.
     
    But - and it's a sobering thought - I don't need to buy much for all these projects. It's basically all stuff already bought and projects already committed to. It doesn't even clear the whole backlog.
     
    And the other theme is that a lot of this is about getting stuff from old layouts back into use and circulation. I've quite a lot of stuff that for one reason or another is "stored unserviceable". If I could recycle some more of my yesterdays , I'd have a lot more toys to play with and a lot more to show for myself.
  7. 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
  8. Ravenser

    The End is Nigh

    By Ravenser,

    Despite the silence I have in fact been doing some modelling over the last couple of months - I just haven't written it up . However this is to record that I have finally finished construction of the Ratio Van B . It still needs lettering , spot painting and weathering, and there's plenty of scope for things to go wrong in all of that, but the last tiny scrap of etched brass has been stuck in place . At least the last one that I'm sticking on - there are still a small number of tiny bits on the etch whose purpose is a mystery to me. At the death , I decided to use the etched chalk boards , as they are abit neater and more regular than my home made replacements - I've stuck them over the card versions which makes the detail a little chunky , but then the chalk boards are.. It won't be the best coach kit ever built, though I hope it will at least look adequete against the rest of my fleet . This is my first proper attempt at a coach kit, if you discount some cack-handed teenage efforts at Ratio suburbans
     
     
    It's taken two and a half years to get to this point , although there have been some delays , distractions and interruptions along the way. That's surely too long for a plastic coach kit. The trouble is that everything has been made into as many individiual components as possible. I've just finished sticking 4 tiny etched door handles on one side of the coach with cyano. Not to mention 4 very very small grab handles just below them, each of which rfequires it's two tiny legs folding into aright angle to enable it to be stuck to the side. and so on. I can't help feeling all this would have been better moulded onto the side itself - certainly there would have been a little less finesse if the kit was in the hands of a skilled builder, but for 80%+ of purchasers it would have vastly simplified and speeded the build. Why were seperate doors and seperate etched brass hinges necessary? Couldn't the side simply have been moulded as a single piece of plastic?
     
    One area I am not sure is entirely satisfactory is the attachment of the bogies. This is by a pair of screws, but I can't get them any further home and the bogies hang very loosely. The coach runs ok , but the body flops and rolls about a bit , and on its one trial outing on the layout it seemed prone to the occasional derailment . Nothing I can do about it (this is afirst kit, and rearranging the running gear is a step too far for me at this stage), and the coach works , but I think there are better arrangements on other kits.
     
    Since I started , Hornby have announced a RTR model , and I think the first batch may even have been released. I recall someone expressing the view that Hornby's model was a waste of time and no benefit to modellers because there was already a kit. Well, having built the kit, I beg to differ. Hornby will achieve a better model than I've managed to achieve , a significantly higher standard of paint finish, and it will run better, and have better engineered bogies. It will also come with NEM pockets, making changing couplings a matter of seconds. And it won't take 2.5 years of anyone's life . There's nothing inherently unbuildable about any part of the kit - but I reckon at least 90% of modellers would not manage to finish it.
     
    I do have one consolation - Hornby haven't so far annouced a version in BR blue
  9. 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)
  10. 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
  11. Ravenser
    We left the NBL 21 as a nearly finished bodyshell, here . The sticking point was the need to produce flush glazing for those large curved cab windows by hand.
     
    Finishing the loco was my first big lockdown project and turned into a bit of a fight.
     
    It wasn't really the glazing - like quite a few frightening jobs that didn't prove as bad as I feared. I had used the Shawplan window etches as a template for the shape, traced onto an old business card. (Before I glued the etches onto the model, obviously).  I did this 3 times, to give me spares in case one window went wrong. These templates were cut out and fixed to clear plasticard, then I cut round . (I'm trying to remember whether they were held to the glazing with Pritt-stick or judiciously placed sticky tape. I think I may have done both). They were then filed until they went into the aperture and fixed in place with Rocket Glue and Glaze, which took care of any slight gaps between glazing and frame . Yes, ideally the fit would be good , but it looks perfectly ok at any normal viewing distance and in photos. The front quarterlight was also filed to fit - the rest of the glazing is SE Finecast
     
    Next for the chassis. I had sourced a Class 29 chassis frame and two Class 29 trailing bogies from Peter's Spares. I bought a Hornby Class 25 in blue as mint second-hand at Warley last year for about £50, and I robbed the 5 pole motor bogie out of that. (Before you suspect me of terminal cruelty to Rats, I then bought a Bachmann 25 with damaged handrails at Peterborough for £75, and the medium term intention is to combine the Hornby body with the Bachmann body to produce a super-douper blue Rat at a modest price. Ah, the days when we had shows, and could pile up more and more future projects that we never got round to doing...)
     
    Hornby Ringfield motor bogies were standard items across the range, so it snapped into one of the Class 29 bogie frames. The other bogie was rewheeled with Hornby disc coach wheels. This means a finer wheel profile with shallower flanges that don't catch and lift on stray bits of ballast on my SMP code 70 bullhead track, and has proved effective in preventing stalling on my Baby Deltic. Since there are traction tyres on the motor bogie the resulting chassis picks up on 6 wheels plus 2 crossed fingers. A spare Hornby weight - surplus from the Pacer I started long ago - was slotted into place. Those, too, were standard items at Margate.
     
    I fitted Kadees - long underset , from memory - to the bogies. The Hornby coupling is cut away, a plate of 40 thou plasticard glued underneath to bridge the gap, and then the draft box glued on top of this with solvent, microstrip packing round the sides if possible, and with a Kadee nylon screw  inserted from below for added retention. I think I may have added a spot of UHU on the top to stop it working loose.
     
    While I was about it, I did the same to my old Hornby 29 which was detailed up years ago it a desperate attempt to find a main line diesel that would run reliably on Ravenser Mk1. This loco needs converting to DCC and my first attempt about 18 months ago  failed ignominously, trashing a decoder. A complete rewire is needed: when it was first detailed I fitted Ultrascale wheels and all-wheel pickup, and something is evidently not right somewhere. This loco needs a damaged radiator grill replacing and I will probably have a go at reworking the cab front windows as well. The substantial difference in appearance this makes will be obvious from the photo below, and I have a second Shawplan etch in stock. While D6119 has a 3 pole motor and will never run quite as smoothly, this would at least get it into some kind of use. The "rationale" would be that the loco was appropriated by RTC for test train use after withdrawal in 1971, replacing the Baby Deltic.... 
     
    A TCS T1 decoder from stock was fitted , programmed much in line with the Baby Deltic and test running began.
     
    There were problems. (Entirely prototypically, I might add..)  It kept stalling. A prod was required to get it moving. I added more weight , because the thing seemed to be slipping. I played about with settings, but still it kept sticking in places. Sometimes it would run fine . Then it would start to stall and spin.
     
    After several days of frustration, tweaks and weight adjustments, the penny suddenly dropped. The wheels on the motor bogie had been eased out to 14.5mm back to back. This adjustment meant that sometimes the final drive gears to one axle would slip out of mesh. Hence the slipping and stalling. Nudge the loco and they meshed again. 
     
     The back to back was closed up fractionally (it's now about 14.2-14.3mm)  and all was well. Previous CV values were reverted to in the matter of start and mid volts. And now it runs as well as can possibly be expected from a 5 pole ringfield with traction tyres on one side. There are pickups to those wheels, but I doubt if electrical pickup is more than erratic. So we have 6 wheel + 2 pick up, rather than proper 8 wheel collection
     
     

     
    The underframe was then weathered, with washes of Railmatch Frame Dirt and Brake Dust, and some AK Light Dust Deposit on the centre tanks. And I wasn't happy. The problem can be seen by comparing the top and bottom photos - the bogies were just too bright orange. A further wash of AK Shaft and Bearing Grease over the lot knocked it back to something acceptable , though I left the sandboxes  as colour  photos show these as something of a tonal highlight. The second photo shows D6103 after the extra weathering wash.
     
     

     
    The loco is seen  departing Blacklade with the steam-age engineer's train, my recently completed Toad B leading, and the engineers'  ex GW 4 wheeler (Ratio) just behind . Set 4  (Hachette Mk1 + Hornby Gresley BCK) lurks in the background . I need to weather that BCK at some point. D6103 is evidently working test trains so the engineers at Derby (or should that be Toton?) can work out what the heck is wrong with these things.
     
    This one fought me all the way, but I now have another small short Type 2 that is pretty well bang in period for the Kettle Period. This final write-up has been part finished and outstanding for an indecently long time (D6103 has been in traffic since August) , but we are done. Sorting out the 29  is still outstanding......
  12. 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
  13. Ravenser

    This Time I May Be Committed.....

    By Ravenser,


    Layout schemes
    I mentioned in a previous posting   Shifting Sands  that recent developments in RTR had tempted me to consider a possible 009 layout. Things have now moved on...
     
    In the end, the Bachmann Baldwins proved rather too tempting to resist. I think the tipping point was when a little internet research revealed that 2'6" gauge was a de facto British military standard up to WW1, accounting for the Admiralty operations at Chattenden and Devonport and the RNAD explosives factories and depots. 9mm gauge is of course just as "accurate" for 2'6" gauge as it is for 2' gauge. But lines like the Welshpool & Llanfair and the  Leek & Manifold were very much more "proper railways" in character compared to some of the 2' gauge quarry and industrial operations, or the traditional 009 "rabbit warren" layout - and as I noted in the earlier posting, I am after something a bit more substantial than the usual cute 0-4-0Ts and 0-6-0Ts. (The Festiniog was (and is) a substantial operation, but it's loading gauge is very tight - witness the saga of Russell's cab - and this makes its stock seem rather more modest.)  Now one Baldwin was re-gauged for the 2'4 1/2" Snailbeach, so re-gauging  to 2'6" ought to be possible... And if it was possible, why wouldn't a 2'6" gauge line operated by the British military have done exactly that? There must have been hundreds of Baldwins going spare....
     
    In short OOn3 representing 3' gauge would have been a significant hassle to do, but 009 representing 2'6" gauge is now dead easy, and would have some prototype justification. The Peco 009 "main line" track would be ideal for this look.
     
    So - the Dogger Light Railway it is to be. The back story is more or less as described in my original posting: the need to bring fuel, munitions and stores in by sea, and move them up from Doggerport to the RAF base provides a raison d'etre for the line, and a justification for running plenty of freight trains. The fact that the Great Dogger Mole is the only causeway linking the two islands will tend to force inter-island traffic onto the train, justifying some local goods (how else would you move livestock from one island to another?). In the inter-war period there would be hardly any private cars here - probably little more than motorcycles and bikes
     
    I can also justify running prototypical vehicles from other English narrow gauge lines. Some re-equipment would have been needed during re-armament in the late 1930s - the ex WD WW1 stock would have been nearing 20 years old by then. What would be more natural than that the Dogger Light would buy serviceable rolling stock from lines that were closing down, like the Leek & Manifold (1934 - and the same gauge) or the Lynton & Barnstaple (1935) and the Welsh Highland (1936)? In Ireland the West Clare - as the last 3' line to close - ended up with a motley collection of survivors from other 3' systems operated by CIE. A quarter of a century earlier the Dogger Light might have done something similar - after all the Longmoor Military Railway collected quite a few cast-offs from BR as well as its own ex WW2 WD-ordered equipment
     
    I have been quietly buying a modest amount of 009 RTR. I am now the proud owner of two Bachmann Baldwins. A decision has been taken to standardise on Bachmann WD opens , and Parkside kits for ex WD vans - not least because getting lead weight into vans is easy , and the Bachmann open wagons have the merit of weight. (This was after I bought 1 Parkside open wagon kit).  I bought an L&B open in plain grey, and an L&B composite in plain Indian Red. The latter was something of a mistake. I meant to buy the brake composite to give an instant passenger train. And these are really rather big vehicles - a slight embarrassment on tight curves. 
     
    An error when clicking to add to basket resulted in my buying two of the Golden Arrow Models whitemetal kits for the Southwold's 0-6-2T "Wenhaston" when I only meant to get one. Still they are entirely credible as locos ordered as part of the Royal Navy's pre-WW1 buildup. I assume that the railway's earlier locos - or most of them - were worn out by intensive use during WW1and the Baldwins represent replacements in 1918 or so, using what was then readily available. A scout round Newark show at the weekend produced a Minitrix 2-6-2T off a second-hand stall for a bargain price of £30 - it runs very nicely, though I'm a little daunted by the need to cut down the chassis block. Provisional names for these will be "Dogger" and "Fisher" ("German Bight" was vetoed as too long for the side tanks and conceding rather too much to the opposition... )
     
    I also acquired a Dundas 4-wheel passenger guards van at Newark - the composite needs a brake, the goods trains also need a brake and this option was cheaper than buying a Peco Glyn Valley brake and repainting into Indian Red - as well as an Irish 4 wheel open to go with it. This latter is no doubt a relic of the pre WW1 railway... I have a resin kit for a Southwold van tucked away somewhere, and I bought a pair of Peco flat wagons recently because you get two wagons for £17.25... Two whitemetal kits for IoMR bogie coaches (brake and full) from NNK  are tucked away as well. These are more modestly proportioned than the Peco L&B stock.
     
    Liveries of Bauxite/Indian Red for coaching stock and grey for wagons have been adopted.
     
    The concept for the layout is shown here - unusually for a concept sketch this one was drawn to scale.
     
    Dogger Light.pdf
     
    I have my eyes on the Airfix RAF Bomber Re-Supply set: a fuel tanker and trailer is needed to move aviation fuel from the railhead to the RAF station, bombs can be wagon loads, and many of the other items can find a use on the layout. Motor transport on the island is likely to be military. Having bought a boxed set of four Airfix 1/72 aircraft kits cheap a few years , I'm very tempted to have a Mk1 Hurricane coming into land dangling from a little fishing line. They became operational with the RAF in 1938, so that sets the date for the layout - military activity is presumably being prompted by the Munich crisis. Clive Mortimore suggested at Newark that a Bofors gun would be appropriate as both anti-aircraft and anti-shipping defences - Airfix do one of those, too.
     
    I haven't tried any Airfix military kits since I was a young lad - this gives me a chance to dabble in another branch of modelling
     
    I have also acquired two semi-circles of Peco 009 Setrack curves. So I now have a basic circle on which trains can run round on the dining table . Table-top railways indeed!
     

     
    Fortunately the IoMR coaches are at least a centimetre shorter than this one...
  14. 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)
  15. Ravenser
    This blog hasn't been too active recently. Not a lot has happened on the layout in the last 18 months , though it's been up and run a few time. I had some time for modelling in the early part of last year , but that was almost completely absorbed by a bout of stock building. Only some of that was written up in my workbench blog , and I must add the other items.
     
    Basically the idea was to try to sort out the outstanding/stalled projects , plus the easy bits and pieces then get stuck into some of the major projects I've been meaning to do for so long. Needless to say, what actually happened was that I made limited progress with a couple of stalled projects, finished off a few bits and pieces , started several new wagon kits and didn't finish them , weathered a couple of items and only really managed one modest new project....
     
    Somewhere well down the blog , I mentioned the very long list of started or possible layout projects I have : http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/343/entry-5665-the-donkey-and-the-bales-of-straw/
     
    Since then there has been a development - a simplification in one sense, a complication in another. The GE branch terminus project which was mooted by a group I'm involved with seems to have drifted into limbo. We haven't seen one key player , who was to build the boards, for about a year because of domestic circumstances , and there's no imminent prospect of anything happening.
     
    Having acquired a discount Hornby L1 during the year because it might be suitable for the GE BLT , as well as to "support the cause" in terms of manufacturers producing LNER locos, I find myself with a modest amount of steam era stuff that has no obvious use. The thought occured to me that I might be able to muster enough to run a steam era period on Blacklade. This would not be very authentic - the station will have corporate image nameplates and so forth - but at least the steam stuff would get used occasionally rather than spending the rest of its existance in its boxes.
     
    What I actually have is a Bachmann 4MT 2-6-0, and O4, a Hornby L1 , a secondhand whitemetal N5 (all in BR black) and a detailed Hornby Dublo 20 in green. I'm likely to get a Bachmann J11: in the mid 1950s 40C (Louth) had C12s, J11s, and N5s , so I need to have one , and the recent future of kitbuilding thread seemed to suggest that the Craftsman C12 was an excellent easy to build kit . Perhaps I should try it... Diesels could be added, and DMUs - and at this point a problem became apparent.
     
    Coaches - Blacklade being a passenger layout.
     
    At the moment I don't actually have any serviceable and complete steam era coaches for any of these locos to pull.
     
    What I do have is a very motley assortment of basically unbuilt kits:
     
    - 2 Ratio ex LNWR corridor kits. These were to provide the branch set on the GE terminus . If this seems bizarre, the LMS off-loaded some of these vehicles on the M&GNJR in 1936, shortly before walking away from the joint venture leaving the LNER holding the baby . These coaches might well have been found eking out their final days in LNER brown on some minor branch in the late 1940s /early 1950s . If you consider what kits might be available for other pregrouping coaches more typical of the early 50s GE Section , how difficult they would be to source and build for a novice, and what they might cost, you will see the thinking here.
     
    - a second hand BSL kit for a Gresley steel composite
     
    - a battered Ratio MR suburban first, built in my early teens and not well finished
     
    - a Ratio GW 4 wheeler ditto, whose chassis isn't square, and which can be discounted
     
    - a secondhand BSL kit for a Gresley Buffet. This can also be discounted
     
    - Various Mk1 and Mk2 project coaches, some in blue/grey and none really suitable for local services to a minor urban terminus in the 1950s
     
    - An unbuilt Dapol/Branchlines railbus kit, meant for the GE BLT
     
    - DC Kits' Test Car Iris, which isn't really fundamental to Blacklade, and is therefore nowhere on the work list. I was already inclining towards doing it in late 90s overall green , as this would be much easier than the blue/salmon RTC livery , even if the latter might look more attractive and be appropriate for Blacklade's "early" period (1985-90). Of course this,was originally built in 1956 for minor branchline service on the LMR, and wore green . So it wouldn't look immediately out of place in a mid /late 1950s LMR local service
     
    - a Triang Maunsell Passenger Luggage Van , passed to me third -hand after someone had gone most of the way upgrading it with the Roxey kit
     
    The problem is obvious - not only is nothing actually built, only one kit is a brake coach so forming sets is very difficult.
     
    I had been hoping to pair the Gresley composite with one of Hornby's Gresley or Thompson non-gangwayed brakes. But they were very pricy , it wasn't urgent, I was waiting for them to be discounted - and when I looked around late last year I found the brakes had all disappeared from the shelves. No matter - what about a Kirk kit? Much cheaper. I phoned the model shop near where I was then working , only to learn he had none left and wasn't expecting any more until some time in 2013. Chivers Pigeon van and another short coach? (we're getting desperate). Chivers kits are out of stock...
     
    This left me searching for ideas, especially as money is relatively tight at present , and I'm not prepared to spend large sums on a sideline like this.
     
    The most suitable, cheapest and easiest to build brake coaches I could come up with were a kit-form Dapol LMS ungangwayed brake third, and a Ratio MR suburban brake . I duly went to St Albans last weekend ,and acquired a Dapol Crimson ungangwayed brake third for under a tenner.
     
    I also spotted a Silver Fox Baby Deltic body kit for £15 - which after a moment's thought, I went for. I have toyed with the idea of doing a Baby Deltic in the past, and I even sourced some mechanical bits: with a bit of modeller's licence D5901 in her RTC days might just be faintly credible in one of the proper periods (Perhaps she was preserved......)
     
    It had also dawned on me that I don't actually have any useable green diesels at the moment either. The Hornby Dublo 20 is one of those models which are nearly impossible to DCC: one brush holder is integral with the chassis block, which is electrically live. Certainly it's far beyond my capacity to convert. I have a detailed blue 29 , with one slightly damaged grill, which is not DCC . I have a spare Hornby 29 body, acquired with faint ideas of producing an early NBL Type 2 for someone else's London area layout , but they went EM.. And I have a second spare Airfix 31 body, and a spare Athearn PA1 chassis and some very faint aspirations towards a green 31 for the GE BLT. Maybe something can be done with an old Lima 20.
     
    I've now driven over to a model shop about 15 miles away and acquired a Ratio MR suburban brake, and a few relevant bits , and for about £50 total outlay , we look to be in business . Three 2 car rakes and a green Type 2 should now be possible with modest effort. I need to fit decoders to the L1 and 4MT . The N5 is parked in the "too hard" basket for the moment, since the chassis is live to the rail on one side. Most of the stock can come from the pile of unbuilt projects, which should be suitably reduced. I even have very wild ideas about a possible project involving two Dapol non-gangwayed brakes, a Black Beetle and a 1956 Derby experiment with a DMU conversion
     
    All a bit of a diversion from my main interests, and it's definitely not going to be a strictly prototypical mix of stock - but if it gets stuff out of the cupboard, built and into use, so much the better
  16. Ravenser

    Troublesome Bogies

    By Ravenser,

    This is by way of a short bump or plea for help , sparked by a few comments in the MBA thread.
     
    One of the wagons I'm currently working on (or should be instead of typing) is the wretched Walrus. An ancient kit from deceased estate. As I mentioned somewhere down below , the bogies as supplied are unbuildable. I can't get them together for modern wheels ,. The only way forward I've found is to use some A1 Models H- frame etches.
     
    The bogies are GWR Plate type, and even this approach is a bodge. The minimum wb permitted by the etch is about 1mm too wide. The second problem is that the brass of the A1 etch protrudes beyond the sideframe - which will now be cosmetic. I can trim the brass but not quite enough to eliminate the problem completely . It will look okay unless and until you compare it closely with the real thing - at which point it will be not much better than Dapols efforts on the MBA
     
    The frames are soldered up, but before I'm finally committed to this compromise (like it won't get done tonight) does anyone have any really bright ideas for alternative solutions? Anyone built this dratted kit themselves - if so what did you do?
     
    Comments , gentlemen, please....
  17. 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...
  18. Ravenser

    Troublesome Wagons

    By Ravenser,

    Now for a proper update (rather than transfers from the old forum)
     
    Some progress has been made in the last 2 months, though sometimes it doesn't feel that way.
     
    The two SSAs are finished , though I'm not 100% satisfied they're OK... One is in blue and is not quite as free rolling as I'd like , while the other is in EWS red and has given a good deal of trouble with the weathering. Really , I think the proper tool for the job - depositing a fine even layer of grime - would be an airbrush. I haven't got one, and painting with washes has resulted in a slightly uneven effect. I hoped a second wash coat would even it out - in fact it looked pretty bad , and in desperation I resorted to the technique of trying to wipe it away with cotton buds and white spirit. The result is a lot better and may even have had an effect on the first wash, which was added weeks ago. But I'm not convinced by the muck in the corner framing - not on these vehicles in this condition. To my eye it looks too much like "model railway weathering - heavy" and not the real thing
     

     
    And next to it is that other problem child, the PMV, possessed with gremlins to the last. I boosted the weight with a bit more lead - and duly cracked one of the improvised roof vents while doing so. Trying to reattach it with a brush full of solvent resulted in the solvent attacking the paintwork around the vent. I've managed to touch it up. And once again I broken one of the underframe tie rods. The dirt on the underframe "makes" the wagon - the light tone works well , but it has very much been a case of pulling out all the stops to patch up an acceptable result. If I'm p[lease with this one its not because of any particular excellence - it's more in the spirit of "we got a result"
     
    Here's the other SSA , in grubby condition, with the LMS Fish next to it. The latter just needs Sprat + Winkle couplings but has weathered up well
     

     
    A very little progress with another beast of a wagon, the Walrus - I've stuffed bits of lead strip between the hopper base and the side to weight it. This throws up an interesting conundrum. The common formula for weighting wagons is 25g per axle . Therefore this would give 50g for the PMV , and 100g for the Walrus.
     
    But both vehicles are the same length. It seems very odd to make one twice the weight of the other.
     
    The NMRA have a formula which is based on so many grams per inch of length, but simply to work on linear measure and ignore the difference between bogie and 4 wheel seems problematic as well. I suppose almost all US vehicles are bogie types , so this does not arise for US modellers
     
    Anyway, I reckoned the PMV was a bit light at 50g and I've managed to push it up to 65-70g with a bit more lead. That should do. The Walrus is now nearly 60g and counting - I haven't even added the bogies yet so we may make it past 75g. Given that the adhesive weight per wheel is reduced because it is spread over 8 wheels, I think it needs quite a bit of weight, but 100g seems over the top
     
    So - 3 wagons off the bookcase, one very close to it, and a very little progress on the Walrus and Pacer.
  19. Ravenser

    Unfinished Business

    By Ravenser,

    There will no doubt be a proper way to do this, but I can't find a facility that allows me to store snippets of info... I don't know when Andy will be locking down RMWeb3 and whether I will still be able to gain access to old PMs, so to save embarrassment, - dimensions of a batch of PNAs , as kindly supplied by the Fatadder in May (scratchbuilt bodies, for the use of...) . I haven't actually got round to using them, mind, but perhaps this year.(It's the time of year for reviewing outstanding oprojects, progress or lack of it and tasks for the year ahead. This one's on the to do list)
     
    <H3 class=first>Re: On Rich's Workbench - Urchins and Parrs last page</H3>Sent: Tue May 05, 2009 10:00 pm
    From: The Fatadder
    To: Ravenser
     
    PNA details:
    Height - 14
    top rib -2.6
    other ribs - 1.6
    length (excluding end ribs) 105
    width (over top rib) -35.7
    inner width 31.2
     
     
    And I should get a proper blog update on the outstanding steam age vans up in the next day or two. I might even have the couplings on them by then so they can be released to traffic
     
    Addendum - New Year's Day, the year after the end of time...
     
    Just to add some further detail on this one while I'm about it: the Cambrian POA/SSA kits come with a lot of extra bits, including several types of solebar. While the Bachmann PNA covers one type of the wagon, PNAs seem to be a motley bunch, built on a variety of second hand underframes of varying lengths . There is a reasonably extensive section in the recent Burkin/BRM book Modern Wagons in 4mm Scale, which quotes wagons as having lengths of 28' 8" over buffers / 101 mm over headstocks (as Bachmann) , 103.5mm over headstocks , and 106mm over headstocks. The Cambrian solebars are 104mm long , so you get a varient with a very different underframe and length.
     
    Going through the photos turns up several wagons at the 103.5mm length, and CAIB3840 - disc braked , Gloucester suspension units, straight solebars , with 7 ribs spaced very differently to Bachmann and very minimalist underframe equipment - looks the best candidate (p99 bottom). It will certainly be a little different from RTR. One issue may be sourcing suitable transfers for the very weathered Railtrack lettering
     
    I think, as near as I can make out, it's one of these:
     

     
    It ought to be a reasonably straightforward scratchbuild job for the body.
     
    I had understood Cambrian sold their plastic fold up axle units seperately , but can't find them. I may use conventional W-irons as an emergency fudge to attach the moulded plastic suspention units to
     
    (Given how long its taken to find the Burkin book, I badly need a clearup in the study . And yes I am putting everything here so I can actually find it easily...)
  20. Ravenser

    Wagons Roll!

    By Ravenser,


    Mercia Wagon Repair
    So - the wagon works layout project described here is now on. And very much as forshadowed in the subsequent comment.
     
    Several things have pushed me into actually doing something. The first and most powerful is a problem that has developed with my right eye. Gloomy reflection suggested that if anything was to be done with the N gauge bits it had better be done quickly, whilst I was capable of it. 
     
    (I am glad to report that I saw the eye specialists yesterday, and they stated firmly that it is not macular degeneration, but something completely different , which is eminently treatable with an 85% success rate - and also that my left eye is entirely fine. To quote Mark Twain  reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated, and I should have a long term future in constructional model-making. I am feeling a great deal more cheerful.)
     
    Secondly, the "corporate developments at work" duly resulted in redundancy as I privately feared. However I have found a new job and start there on Tuesday, so I've actually only been off work for 5 weeks or so.  This gap created a little time to do things, though rather less  than I had been expecting. The labour market, at least in freight, is quite strong - indeed at one point, for the first time in my life, I actually found myself with two job offers.
     
    Over and above all that, I haven't started a new layout project in over 15 years (January 2007 with Blacklade). The previous 28 years saw 8 layout projects  (Flaxborough, versions 1 and 2 of Blacklade Corporation Tramways, Ravenser, Tramlink (Kent), the club project, the Boxfile, and Blacklade, if you ask). So I've been getting a little stale and restive and it shows, in the various speculative layout postings in this blog. .
     
    Of all these schemes, the wagon works in N is the only one that is "oven ready" in the sense that I have a  core of rolling stock available and a place to put the layout. The OO9 scheme comes close, but the space isn't quite there. The possible house move is definitely on hold until I have my feet securely under the table in the new job and the eye is sorted out, but it remains very much in the frame thereafter. At which point the OO9 layout should become a genuine starter. In the meantime the OO9 bits can be test-run on the N gauge layout, rather than the N gauge bits test-run on the OO9 layout....
     
    And the last few months have prompted some very sobering reflections about just how many projects and things that "might come in very handy at some point" -  points that have failed actually to arise in the last 20-30 years - I have stuffed into various cupboards and drawers. Not to mention how slowly I am building things. As Dr Johnson remarked "the prospect of imminent hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully". Lockdown only grazed the surface of this mass, and the last 12 months have managed to produce two coaches and a 1/72 scale aircraft.  I am not quite in the mood to start disposing of stuff, but the clamp on buying any new projects is firm. Purchase for immediate constructional need only.
     
    I was a good boy at Ally Pally , except for bits for the N gauge project.
     
    If I am being more ruthless with my prospective commitments, then a half-built diorama layout started in 1999 and untouched since 2007, that needs significant work to restore to operation, and a lot of work on stock and scenics to finish - but has limited operating potential and some reliability issues - is a good place to start.
     
    So poor old Tramlink (Kent) is no more.
     

     
    The buildings have been carefully salvaged and boxed up in one of the many cardboard boxes lying around since lockdown ("Waste not, want not..."). Most of the scenery was mounted on foamcore packing and came off fairly easily. The track and ballast has been removed by pouring on hot water and scraping with a kitchen fish slice, ready for reuse of the boards.
     
    Track will be Peco code 55 live frog, which was bought at Ally Pally. Although this will be an essentially RTR layout, I see no reason to compromise and use less than the best available commercial products . These will be live frog and control will be DC analogue. I am not up for the hassle and expense of trying to fit decoders into N gauge stock, and I'm not sure the job can be done with the one shunter I own, an 04.  In practice, the layout will need a shunter and a mainline loco, perhaps with a backup for each. There is no obvious benefit from DCC in such a scenario (unlike Blacklade with its multiple units and intensive operation). Point motors will be solenoid, because the framing of the Tramlink boards is quite shallow and Cobolts won't fit. This is entirely acceptable with commercial track, and Peco motors have given reliable service on the Boxfile . The Gaugemaster 100A and external CDU box used for the Boxfile can be redeployed for this layout too, along with the interboard connector - DIN sockets had been sourced when this was simply going to be a rewire of Tramlink
     
    A roll of 1/32 cork sheet was also bought at Ally Pally , and I've sourced some Pikestuff N gauge buildings. However they are quite small, and I'll need more material to construct a rather larger shed.
     
    The layout also has a provisional name: Mercia Wagon Repair - Guthlac Road Site. This is suitably generic - Mercia was a large kingdom, so the layout could in principle be anywhere from Grimsby to Gloucester, or from Cambridge to Chester, inclusive. We are in a largish Midlands town, housebacks will be seen along the backscene, and that's all that needs to be said. The business is generic and not tied to any particular railway company, so the stock tells no real tales.
     
    Site clearance has now reached this stage:

     
    If you are wondering why the old platform hasn't been removed, well it's very firmly stuck down 4mm ply. My intention is to lay the front siding (departure/finished wagons) on top of it, which means the siding will sit about 3-4mm higher than the other tracks. This introduces a little bit of accidental relief onto the site : it amounts to a 2' difference in levels full-size. Sanded cork underlay will provide an approach ramp at 1 in 75 to 1 in 100, which I don't expect to be an issue when shunting a single wagon. 
     
    One issue still not quite settled is the couplings to be used. I'm dimly aware that the "standard" N gauge Rapido coupling doesn't have a great reputation as a coupling for shunting. Everything I own has NEM pockets bar a Farish VBA and VGA , and those look fairly easy to convert. So Dapol's replacement knuckle couplers , or even Kadees, look like a practical option
     
    I am also likely to join the N Gauge Society. Their Hunslet loco would be ideal as a shunter for this layout, and a few of their wagon kits would be suitable and interesting
     
     
  21. Ravenser

    Waste Not, Want Not

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    I have to confess that I've slipped off the straight and narrow (no, I'm not modelling the Nullarbor Plain as 3'6" gauge...) 
     
    The plan was that I was going to systematically work through the litter of stalled unfinished projects on the bookcase, to clear the decks , clear my head , and achieve a maximum of result for a minimum of effort . No new projects!
     
    However I've come off the wagon, fairly spectacularly..
     
    There were two catalysts. Firstly, there was the ex LNER Toad B which I reported stalled here  as I couldn't find the packet of handrail knobs. As you may have guessed, the packet of handrail knobs duly turned up, so work resumed . Secondly, I dug out the Boxfile to have a running session. And I dug out the second stockbox - and into use went an LMS fish van that fell off at every turn. Closer investigation reminded me that I have two ex LMS fish vans, after I bought a built kit off a second-hand stall under the misapprehension it was a plain ordinary ventilated van. One is - just about - okay: the other isn't . This was the one that isn't....
     

     
    A couple of years ago I had a big push to sort out the problems of reliability on the Boxfile. This brought on the realisation that all was not well with the wagon fleet, and a determined effort to sort it out: Troublesome Trucks  . Unfortunately, like a lot of my determined efforts, this one petered out about 4/5ths of the way through, leaving a substantial improvement in the situation and a pile of unresolved loose ends. Or at least, 6-7  wagons that definitely derail. Worryingly, at least 3 of them are RTR chassis , which really ought to be square.
     
    So another push seemed needed - especially as 3 of them are vans, and I am under quota for vans anyway, whilst being over quota for opens and minerals.
     
    You will now realise that my latest efforts have improved the availability of serviceable opens and minerals...
     
    The ex Hornby Dublo steel High (OHV) had been a nagging failure for a while, and it sat carded in the storage file. Checking the thing revealed that the Parkside chassis was tight and not quite square. Never going to stay on like that.  I've melted in one bearing to create a little slop - an ugly bodge, but it won't be good enough for the file. (I've been here before with a Parkside BR van that ended up redesignated to Blacklade).
     
    In a box in the modelling cupboard amongst other unbuilt kits lurked an old Parkside kit for said wagon. This was the version without the "dimples" in the side for securing. I'd prefer the more characteristic dimpled version, so I was thinking about building this for a friend's EM shunting layout and buying the more recent retooled Parkside kit... Nothing got done .....
     
    Coronavirus simplifies matters - I'm not sure he still has the said EM layout. Besides, there will be no shows until at least next year. The club's 4mm steam project is therefore stalled. And the employment situation prohibits unnecessary spending. 
     
    So I decided simply to build the thing as a straight replacement, and dug out the kit. While I was about it, I also dug out of a box from the depths a Hornby refridgerator van. This was always vaguely planned as a conversion for the boxfile. I'm convinced it is ex NER from the body style, but I have no firm details. Buying an entire volume of the new Tatlow 4-5 parter on LNER wagons for reference for one wagon, when I also have the old one-volume version was never justifiable. (Pt 1 GN/GC/GE was an indulgence. Pts 4a and 4b a necessity)
     
    So - from a livery diagram in the preface to Tatlow Vol 1  I think this Hornby model may be based on NER dia F3, 17' over headstocks / 10' wheelbase, wooden underframe, presumably clasp-braked. No kit exists for a 10'wb /17' long wooden fitted underframe. (Of course not) The Hornby body seems to be 67mm long - 1mm short (unless I am measuring over angle irons and it's 2mm short.) . I intend to live with this slight discrepancy. A scratchbuilt underframe will be needed - I have plenty of etched W irons in stock. Since the axles are displaced well to the ends, I intend to "adjust" by reducing the wheelbase to 9'9" to compensate and maintain proportions - it's only a matter of where I set the W-irons on what I believe to be a clasp-braked vehicle. 
     
    A packet of ex MR buffers from ABS had been bought years ago as the nearest available match for NER buffers. These will be set on spare Cambrian buffer beams surplus from a mineral wagon kit - which neatly provides the round base. After more hunting through boxes, I found the Mainly Trains etch of wagon strapping where it should have been - so I have crown plates and other garnishings for the solebars
     
    The wagon has been stripped of old paint and a coat of primer and a first coat of white applied
     
    And the remaining MR buffers  have a use too....
     

     
    Many years ago, in my early teens, I bought a Slaters rectangular tank wagon kit and built it. (Not particularly well, obviously.) It ended up painted in a fetching cream lined grey along the edges (not especially accurately) and the battered thing has been lurking in the depths of a box for several decades as not bad enough to chuck.
     
    So I dug that out as well, and stripped off the paint at the same time. 
     
    One solebar broke loose under gentle pressure - the other didn't, but that was enough to rebuild it square. The buffer beams were removed , cleaned up and replacement whitemetal MR buffers fitted, as 3 of the originals had broken away. The whole thing was reassembled, a missing brakelever replaced with something of an old sprue , and another one patched up. A missing V hanger was reinstated (another bit from the boxes of accumulated spare bits from kits  ). As much lead sheet as I could was jammed in underneath - I reckon it's at least 40g which I hope it just enough, though ideally I aim for 50g . Cross-shafts were installed from plastic rod, brass bearings and a pair of split-spoke wheels  fitted from another box and we have this:
     

     
    Transfers are bits and scraps from various sources including the sheet numbers on Modelmaster transfer packs. I'm not sure a wagon with only two brake blocks should carry a fast traffic star but some things that shouldn't really did, and tank wagons could be rather archaic in the 1950s. The fetching weathered effect is where one transfer started to break up under the weathering wash... A little further weathering of the chassis , then a coat of matt varnish, is still required.
     
    Prototype reference is here RMWeb thread and here: Paul Bartlett - Croda Rotherham, 1984   I will repeat my astonishment that such archaic vehicles survived so late, when I was discovering blue 31s on Transpennine South loco-hauleds and approximately the date of Blacklade's "blue period".  Just to ram it home - this wagon kit was originally built 6 or 7 years before the prototypes were photographed at Rotherham. Nobody mentioned I was getting a contemporary wagon kit....
     
    The OHV is a reasonably straightforward kit build, complicated only by my possession of a copy of Geoff Kent's "4mm Wagon". This means that I've done most of his upgrades - whitemetal buffers, profiled brake levers, better whitemetal brake cylinder - and whitemetal clasp brake shoes, though that was much more about trying to build in as much weight as I could. I also made the effort to suggest the drop doors from the inside as the interior is very visible, and the Cheona LNER Wagon book includes shots of the interior of a wagon preserved at  Quorn on the GCR. The door area is cross-scribed with a scrawker to represent the chequerplate, and fine microstrip added on both edges then sanded down
     
     

     
    And painting has reached the point where we now have:
     
    The number is reasonably accurate for the contractor-built fitted wagons with smooth sides and steel doors. Again the underframe needs more weathering washes and the whole thing a coat of matt varnish
     
    I still have to reletter the original OHV that started all this off, and which seems to behave itself on Blacklade, and to sort out the couplings  all round. And the LNER brake van has been given a trial trip out in traffic - though it too needs an underframe wash and some matt varnish to seal the transfers
     
     

  22. Ravenser

    Way and Works

    By Ravenser,

    As well as floating various tramway pipe-dreams I have actually made a bit of progress with Blacklade in the last 2 months. A sustained attack during part of my holiday last month has cleared a number of outstanding jobs . The remainder of the station screen wall has gone in , and although the back of the station building needs adding (I'm not actually basing the model on Kings Cross circa 1942, even though it looks remarkably like bomb damage!) , we are more or less there in terms of the station building
     
    Various other nagging jobs have been sorted out as well. I originally painted the baseboard fronts black, "as you do" but a friend urged me strongly to change the colour as he reckoned black was far too strong and dominant. As the frontage needed a second coat anyway, I decided to do something about it: unfortunately I couldn't find a small pot of a suitable gloss paint and had to shell out for a full sized tin - £10's worth , even sticking to the cheap B+Q range. The closest I could get to the recommended brown was something called "Cocoa Bean" , which is a purplish brown. It's much less prominent, and being much closer to the red-brown of the brickwork helps as well. I painted the plywood bracing straps on the legs while I was about it, which
     
    I'd had problems with running out of the back platform: somehow, despite my best efforts when laying the track , the back road had become misaligned at the board joint and although trains running out of the centre platform seemed to cope, things running out of platform 3 tended to come off. I know its a fudge, not recommended in the best finescale circles, but I unsoldered the rail ends and eased them across a bit so they aligned reasonably well, using a roller gauge to maintain the track gauge . There may be a very slight kink in the alignment as a result, but it's dramatically better than the status quo ante, and trains no longer derail. I also sorted out a minor programming error in one of the macros, resoldered a stray signal wire that had come loose , and Blacklade seems to be running well.
     
    A few other DCC jobs were also sorted out - the 150/1 is now fitted with a replacement TCS decoder so it can be easily consisted, the Bachmann 21 pin decoder I removed has been cascaded to the ROD which is now up and running (not that there's much call for it on Blacklade) A cheap Central 158 acquired from Hattons last year has also been chipped and runs very nicely
     
    A couple of shots of the station area as it now is:
     

     

     
    There are still a few things needing finishing off - I should probably fill in some more of the gap along the top of baseboard and touch it over , the Kadee electromagnets need sorting out (the red button is for the first of them, but for some reason , the magnet doesn't seem to be live - I've now got a further 2 heavy duty push to make button switches from Squires for the other electromagnets), and a couple of signals on the other board. Not to mention "make good and touch up" some holes in the ballast
     
    But for the moment I shall probably focus on the stock. The 3 long outstanding jobs - Van B kit, Pacer upgrade and Bratchill 150/2 - are all still outstanding. I seem to have backed myself into another parcels project, and have ordered a Replica chassis and DC Kits 128 Parcels unit body kit. Van B and Pacer are quite badly needed for operations, and the 128 is apossible workround , as 31 + 57' coach+ 50' coach hangs over the edge of the central platform and stricklythe Kadees on the Bachmann GUV are too high . And an awful lot of stuff needs weathering . Starting with the 150, the 108, and arguably the two 158s . The 156 and 155 are another matter - both need underframe surgery and sourcing castings is a problem . The 155 , being worse, and more frequently used, is probably the higher priority. I might even sort out the unused Provincial 155 sat somewhere
  23. Ravenser

    West Yorkshire Sow's Ear - 1 : Diagnosis

    By Ravenser,


    Constructional
    I have two Hornby 155s sitting in the pile of stock boxes
     
    One is in Regional Railways livery. I've had it for at least 15 years and it's never run. It was meant as material for converting into 153s to support a proposed club layout project which never happened
     
    The other is in West Yorkshire red and white . This was acquired as a modest priced placeholder for a later club layout project (which got as far as running bare boards and some scenery before it died ). It has a decoder (a Macoder if you ask), it's run , and as Blacklade is supposed to have services south from West Yorkshire via Sheffield, its perfectly in place. Since the thing actually ran quite well, it was a regular on the layout until I installed Knightwing point motors (the dummy prototype sort cast in whitemetal) . These fouled the "black box" on the underframe, so the unit was stopped.
     
    As the packets of NNK/MTK underframe castings have turned up, and as the 101 is now done, and the Kirk Gresley 51' pigeon van well advanced, attention has turned to the poor old W.Yorks 155 while I still have some modelling time. I want at least to get this started , and resuscitation turned from a good intention into an actual project.
     
    Sorting out the various RTR DMUs and their shortcomings has always been a good intention for the future. However with the 101 done, we move on to the next. The W Yorks 158 is in their later livery and not really suitable for an "early period" sequence set in 1985-90. The 155 is eminently suitable.
     
    The Hornby, (ex Dapol) 155 dates from around 1990, and has not been in the catalogue for a few years now. It's quite probable Hornby will never produce it again. It's not a great model, dating from a time when OO RTR was much more basic than would be tolerated nowadays, and originated by a company whose standards were some distance behind the cutting edge at the time . It was the least worst of the 3 modern multiple units Dapol produced in the Dave Boyle era - the Dapol Pendolino was a crude lemon beside its excellent rival the Bachmann Voyager, and the Dapol 150 is a model that is spoken of with a shudder when old modern image modellers sit in the pub by the fire and tell of the terrible hardships they endured in their youth. Hornby seem to have chucked the tooling for those two in the skip (where it belonged) but they re-ran the 155 for a number of years with a decent finish and an improved mechanism.
     
    However it's considerably cruder than the 156 they inherited from Lima , and since only 7 units survive, owned by West Yorkshire , the rest being converted to 153s in 1990-2, its commercial potential is pretty limited.
     
    For these reasons it is most unlikely anyone will ever produce another RTR model . Like the EM2s, it's been stranded by the tide of history. Unlike the EM2s, it's never going to be iconic. It's a grubby middle-weight Sprinter.
     
    And next to a Hornby 153 (like wot I've got ...) it looks rough.
     
    There's so much wrong with this model that simply listing the issues is going to be quite enough for a substantial post. I'm not aiming at "the definitive 155". Assuming anyone could ever be bothered to attempt it, you wouldn't go this route . It has been suggested that a 155 can be converted from two Hornby 153s - a sort of reverse version of what BR did. However that would cost you at least £200 in raw materials, and assuming a professional paint job is required, the bill will be close to £300.There would also be the fun and games of hacking the chassis and consisting two separate mechanisms requiring two decoders. Money is tight, and even if I could source 2 x 153 it's not on for lots of reasons. I'm not that desperate for a perfect 155.
     
    So this is an attempt to patch up the unit I have , at minimal cost using stuff I have in stock, and tackle the shortcomings as far as I sensibly can.
     
    Here's a picture of the trailer car dismantled to help you spot the problems:

     
    Starting at the bottom - the black boxes on the underframe have to go : not only are they very wrong, the model is out of gauge with them. Fortunately this isn't going to be too hard, as can be seen.
     
    The tension-locks go and Kadees need to be fitted. I'm hoping I will be able to consist this unit with a 153 - the mechanical mismatch between a Limby motor bogie and a big Bachmann centre motor drive having proved impossible. This also means close coupling to minimise the Straits of Dover between the two vehicles.
     
    Unfortunately it's not going to be possible to fit working gangways and eliminate the gap completely. I have an Express Models lighting kit - arguably lights are needed on a second generation DMU and they are certainly an operator's convenience. These kits rely on wiring through from the power car, and they recommend you route the cable and plugs through a hole in the gangway between the vehicles. That's incompatible with fitting a paper bellows gangway. The Kadees would be in the way if I tried routing it below the gangway. And it looks very much as if the gangways are a little too narrow anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the whole unit is 1-2mm too narrow, and that they've lost it in the gangways. (I have a decent scale side elevation drawing from Railnews Stockspot, but no scale drawings of the end from which to check).
     
    There is no solebar. The bodyside has been continued right the way down to the bottom of the chassis, and no doubt panel proportions have been played about with in the vertical axis (I said it wasn't up to modern standards...) . I gather the traditional fix for this was to paint a "fake solebar" along the bottom edge of the bodyshell
     
    Ploughs will be fitted , as I have some. Correct from the mid to late 90s but not in 1987-91. So ok when running in a "late period" running session (2000-06) but not for "early" (1985-90)
     
    The interior is incomplete. On the power car this is because the motor bogie fills up the driving end and the start of the passenger saloon. The only way you could address that would be to scrap the existing mechanism and replace with a Black Beetle and dummy at a cost of about £65, which is a step further than I'm prepared to go. There's a vast gaping hole in the floor at the cab end of the trailer, because they've used the same chassis moulding for power car and trailer car. For reasons which escape me, they've left out any interior at the inner ends as well - the seat moulding stops one window before the end of the passenger saloon and the rest of the vehicle is empty , so you can see straight through to the end doors on the other side.
     
    Providing extra seats and partitions at the inner ends is easy enough. On the trailer car I can fit partitions behind the cab and behind the vestibule , and extend the seating forward by one window : unfortunately because of the way the bogie is pivoted and retained at the sides it's not possible simply to extend the floor all the way, and nothing but complete reconstruction of the chassis at this end, with a totally restructured bogie and an entirely new pivot and retention arrangement would address that. Again, this kind of drastic rebuilding is further than I'm prepared to go: the more modest work will address most of the problem, and a one window gap in the trailer car seating will have to be lived with.
     
    It looks as if there should be clear plastic covers on the gangway doors at the cab ends . One or two shots show a yellow plate (eg 155 341), but generally the cover is clear but frequently very dirty. If it's dirty , it will conceal the wires running up from the Express Models lighting. I'm not renumbering - Sandakan's quality of finish is very good indeed and for my purposes one W Yorks 155 is as good as another.
     
    The final issue - and a major one - is the glazing. The real things are flush-glazed. So are Hornby's 153s. The ex Dapol 155 is not, with very obvious ledges at the windows. The glazing comes out easily enough , but the only way I can see of fixing the problem is to cut out each pane individually and slightly oversize then file to a fit and fix . I am going to give it a first shot on the door windows , where the recess looks particularly bad - if that works , then I may be up for doing all 44 windows in the passenger saloons
     
    As far as I'm aware there's no replacement glazing available from any source
     
    If anyone knows how this problem has been tackled by anyone in the past, I'd appreciate the info. If the work is really too difficult or securing too uncertain I might have to leave the main saloon windows as is , but it's a big visual issue , and I'd really like to avoid that
  24. Ravenser
    There are so many things to sort out with this one it's difficult to know where to begin. I began with the trailer
     
    To my surprise and relief , when I removed the screws holding in place the Black Box on the underframe came off "just-like-that" , and it was empty . No messy sawing and cleaning up needed. Since the weight in this vehicle is all above the floor, there was no need to sort out alternative replacement weights. And if I ever feel bold enough to tackle my second 155 it should be possible to cut out the representational equipment box fronts for re-use, since further underframe castings are unlikely to be forthcoming.
     
    The enigmatic archery targets by the bogies were removed and replacement air tanks fabricated from Plastruct tubing with milliput stuck on each end and filed round when set. I had to buy an entire packet of Plastruct tubing - this should keep me in underframe airtanks for several lifetimes
     

     
    The interior mouldings are the same in both power and trailer cars, and so are the chassis mouldings and bogies. The interior therefore stops well short at both ends of the vehicle leaving vast empty zones in the ends. Remedial action is necessary - and the work done can be seen below. Obviously nothing can be done about the driving end on the power car: as you can see this is filled by the motor bogie. The only possible solution here would involve replacing the motor bogie with a Black Beetle, complete rebuilding of the bogies throughout, new trailing pickup arrangements and completely new pivot arrangements.
     
    The bogie pivot arrangements at the outer ends preclude carrying the floor right through the trailer . I cut away the projections on the bogie unit (which is the base of the power bogie with the mechanism left out) to allow extension of the floor on that side. Additional seating was cut from spare Hornby Mk4 interiors left from the Bratchill 150 project . Not an exact match but packed up to height with 20 thou styrene and painted suitably it is effective. Saloon end and toilet partitions are made from 40 thou styrene. On the trailer I used some Bratchill interior partitions for the cab partition and vestibule/saloon partition , then realised I will need to make replacements if I ever finish the power car on the 150. Photographic evidence for W Yorks Pacers shows red upholstery - so both interiors have been suitably painted with Humbrol acrylic crimson
     

     
    The satellite half of an Express Models 155 lighting kit has been installed running along the vehicle roof (and through cutouts in the cab end bulkheads). A hole for the plug/socket has been drilled out and removed at the base of the gangway
     
    Kadees (number 42 - medium overset with 1 mounting shim) have been fitted to the outer ends . So far the trailer car has a medium underset Kadee at the inner end - there is no need to observe the Kadee height standard on a coupling internal within the vehicle
     
    The biggest and nastiest job is the one I didn't manage to duck - flush-glazing. Nobody does flushglazing for a 155 or is ever likely to - so I had to do it the hard way - remove the glazing strip, cut it into pieces, and file them down until the window glazing fits into the aperture. To minimise any damage to the surface of the glazing during the long and tedious process of filing down I applied sellotape over the raised section of the glazing. In one case - I still don't know why - a small crack appeared in the bottom of the glazing , visible when seen from one direction. The filed-down glazing was held in place by running gloss varnish thickly round the frame of the window aperture with a small brush , then pressing the glazing into place from behind
     
    This took over a week of work, three or four windows at a time - and that's for only 1 vehicle out of 2. There are 60 windows in the sides of a 2 car 155 unit
     
    Yes, it's a big improvement. It has to be, for the effort. And now I'm committed to doing the same with the Pacers, which only makes it worse.
     
    (One additional point - before removing the glazing it was necessary to cut through the downward projections, and glue them in place on the bodyshell using solvent run in under capillary action, very cautiously. This is necessary because these projections contain recesses into which the body-retaining lugs on the chassis fit.
     
    I laid the glazing in the bodyshell overnight - next day I noticed that one strip had become slightly clouded in 2 places. I don't know why , and a coat of gloss varnish on the back was only a partial fix. The final effect is of 3 dirty windows - not perfect but not a disaster. Windows did/do occasionally get coated with a scurf, presumably in the carriage wash, but I could have done without this weathering effect)
     
    The fight goes on...
  25. Ravenser
    A large part of the problem with this unit is the underframe, and the black box masquerading as a large part of it . This was fouling a point motor casting on the layout [quite possibly the one I've now resited] so it needed to go if the unit was ever to run again, quite apart from the fact it looks unrealistic and unsightly.
     
    Fortunately I had two packs of MTK castings on hand . Not all of the castings are actually needed, since the engine blocks and a number of the boxes are already free-standing mouldings. And some of the castings are no use to man nor beast - especially the 4 cast whitemetal dartboards which are supplied in lieu of air tanks. The definitive proof that Dapol sent a development model to China for tooling which used a set of MTK castings is provided by the presence of these same curious dartboards on the RTR model.
     
    The black boxes simply unscrew and drop away, which is great. That on the power car contains a great shiny rough-cast block of a soft but very dense metal. It couldn't possibly be lead - the notoriously rigorous Chinese H&S regulations , tightly enforced by vigilant and incorruptible officials, would never permit that. But there's a lot of weight there and it needs replacing.
     
    I've araldited in place the replacement castings, built up the fuel tank to a box and stuffed in some more lead - fixed with more araldite. I've also removed the moulded underframe exhaust pipe and silencer and replaced them with the equivalent MTK: it looks slightly better and every bit of weight helps . I've left the Dapol/Hornby moulded exhausts on the end - although there is no fat cylindrical section (filter? silencer?) on these, there isn't on the MTK castings either so there's no point in changing them.
     
    The metal plate between the chassis and the seating moulding has been replaced with lead flashing to compensate for the considerable weight lost when removing the black box beneath. Electrical insulation tape has been wrapped round the edges to protect the wires from the trailing bogie which run alongside - I don't want any sharp edges cutting through wires from the pickups. One slight drawback to all of this is that the lead is not rigid and therefore the power car chassis is now a little flexible in a way that it wasn't, even when the seating unit is screwed back into place.
     
    Here's a view of the finished result:

     
    I've also filed down and refitted all the glazing along the sides to achieve a flush result. It was an awful lot of work, and I must admit that I'm now in two minds about the result, especially where the main side windows are concerned. It is not nearly as neat as I would wish, and it does rather shout "hand-made!" at you. It's more accurate, but I'm not confident it's a lot more convincing. I'm seriously thinking about leaving the main windows alone if I tackle my second, long-forgotten, 155 at some time in the future. The small windows in the doors would still need doing, but when surrounded by a very dark blue the main windows are much less obvious and the RTR finish is much neater than I can achieve. The Hornby Pacers, where the inset of the windows is much greater, and the number of windows involved much smaller , are another matter.
     
    Further upgrading work on the ends involved fitting etched gangway plates robbed from an A1 Models 156 upgrade kit (I have all the necessary bits for a 156 in the Hurst kit someone on here sold me), and adding Hurst cast brass snowploughs. The projecting lugs on the latter around which you pour superglue gel need filing down a little to get the chassis to seat neatly at the ends.
     
    One key upgrade, though a fairly simple one, addresses the problem that Dapol simply omitted the solebars and extended the bodyshell down to where the bottom of the solebars should be. The chassis clips inside as if this were an integral construction coach like a Mk2 - which it's not.
     
    The traditional fix for this is to paint on a fake solebar, which is what I've done, using Tamiya masking tape and brush painted Revell anthracite - a useful "off-black". I also added lifting points over the bogies with scraps of 40 thou plasticard filed to the body profile (These actually now help to get the body off)
     
    Roof aerial plates (A1 etch) have also been added. Snowploughs from Hurst Models brass castings (remember Hurst Models?) were deferred as I was hoping to get the unit ready for Blacklade's first show, so I could display multiple unit working with a 155 + 153 consisted.
     
    However the 155 had other ideas and fought back at the last moment, stopping dead......
×
×
  • Create New...