jukebox

I agree with Sandside - you are bringing the signature elements of that photo together very nicely. Well done! Scott

Sorry, I kind of set myself up with the "hint hint"... when I didnt actually mean it that way. I was being rather serious - and am very happy to be unfashionable on this topic! Hearing loss is a bete noire of mine. I went to one too many loud concerts in my yoof, and have been a tinitus sufferer since the age of 17. Even in the soft shelled room of Stockrington, I wear proper foam earplugs whenever cutting with a jigsaw - and the same when using my circular saw outside. That 25-30dB of attenuation may just save your long term hearing. The second best protection a chemist can sell you!

What hearing protection do you use when cutting in the bunker, Jeff? (hint, hint)

Only 8am here - a long way to bedtime!

Morning, Jeff! Rather than getting specific, I will leave you with a "broad brush" thought to mull overnight: Take the tracks that you have as a datum, and blank the rest. Now look at the scene, and imagine what the landform might look like with just the tracks running through it - maybe it falls away from you "into" the layout, maybe it rises. Also look at it left to right in relation to the viaduct valley? If you can visualise an overall landfrom that works, you might then use that as a basis for working out how the rest of the parts fit. In other words, look at it as a whole - something a lot harder for us (me) to do seeing it just in photos. I see you have a jigsaw at hand, so other than the trackbed, nothing else is really locked in.... Cheers Scott

Not suggesting another Lunside Fell... just 75-100mm rise of terrain towards the front of the board, that forms a valley the railway may have hugged: I guess a lot depends on how severe you were going to make your cutting - what I'm trying to suggest is something that would justify the existance fo the cutting, or is a continuation of the landform there... There's not too many flat and straight roads in the real world - maybe the terrain on the far side of the tracks needs to fall slightly from right to left - again 100mm? - and so the road comes down to the station? All simply my unfiltered thoughts, Jeff - just think of them as seeds to encourage you to think. Weed as you feel the need to! Cheers Scott

2c from Down Under: I'm with Andy on this one - I think if you carried on the idea of contours dropping down into the scene, a model that is Dent-esque would work well. By carring on the contours from the "small hillock" along in front of the station, you avoid the flat earth* scenario, and the railway then looks like it came after the scenery... (having said that, I also appreciate that Kirkby Stephen is a lot more level than Dent, so may be what you want to follow) Scott

I think he's going to buy a couple of Chia Pets and let it take care of itself...

Well, another week off work this week has given Stockrington a mid-week boost. Not great for the bank balance, but luckily tommorrow is my last day of enforced annual leave - I am back to work on Monday. Just as well, as I think Mrs.Jukebox would have killed me if I'd been home another week (I was last at work on 18th December - not sure I've ever spent this many uninterrupted days with her almost 24/7!). It was getting a little touch-and-go as the accured annual leave had run out last week, and next week would have been notice+redundancy if there hadn't been something for me to book time to. So I can put away the baked beans and instant noodles, and shop for some fresh meat on Saturday!!! So, this time off allowed me two three hour stints on the benchwork yesterday and today, plus a tidy up and vacuum (including getting the last storage box into the roof, closing up the manhole, and demobbing the ladder!). This is the South end of the room, 90% complete. I also took the time to do a stocktake on the remaining timber - as you can see, not much long stuff left. With a clean up of the room, I was also able to park all the boxes and supplies back under the bench - for the first time, I have a feel for how much space the layout will take up. It's been a strange 48 hours - looking at the benchwork, checking access and reach lines, pondering the "what if" of if I'd gone for two-aisles-and-three-pennisulas rather than just a central well... no regrets, just thoughts. The "Door Gap". Speed 3, perhaps? I still have to beef up the bracing on the two open ends - which is one reason why I made the L-girders here 100mm short from the door. I'm actually contemplating attaching the layout to the walls (something I had not planned to do). My concern is that as the layout is a "C" shape, and the lift section closes the "C" into an "O", if there is any movement in the jaws of the "C", I will get alignment issues. Now I intend to build the hinged flap like a battleship, and will include alignment fixtures, but the engineer in me is telling me that by anchoring to the walls, I will be restricting movement and that has to be a Good Thing. The rooms curtains are apparently six weeks away (!). I can't actually tracklay the storage yard as the guys installing the curtains need access, but I can get the ramps in and out in, and solder droppers on the ~40m of flex that goes in there. Maybe cut out and set up the turnout fans on boards off layout, too... there's always going to be something to do!

Hi Chris - welcome, and thanks very much for posting. Don't be too envious of the space - as you can read at the start of the thread, it came it a high cost, both financially and emotionally. By mid-to-late last year, it would not be a huge exaggeration to describe my state of mind as depression with regards the mess the builder made of our home. And the nagging thing is, I know deep down it has not been 100% rectified, so this coming winter I am going to have to go back into battle. But Gilbert (Great Northern), bless him, gave me some very good positive advice and helped me realise that all things must pass... and that eventually I'd be up to my armpits in model railway and a lot happier. And I am slowly getting to that place! The other thing that has happened in the last month is the incredibly sad news about the state of Dave Shakespeare's (Tetleys) health. I think the combination of these things has made me really want to just crack on and build. It's only a glorified train set, and if I make a mistake, or don't like something, I can change it - it's not a stone carving! Robert - yes, it's splinter and sawdust time! I must say I'm glad I did the homework, even if some of th eanswers were wrong, it still has helped me think about how the whole kit comes together, and so I've been able to get things built quite quickly. Still warm here - will be for another month or so, too. But luckily for me, Stockrington faces east - it gets a lot of morning sun, but also a breeze, so the room is very comfortable to work in. My mid-afternoon, if the day has been hot, the sea breeze kicks in and I just need to wedge the door open and it flows freely from the new lounge on the west side. Summer will be the worst season up there - in winter, because the stairwell is so open, it acts like a chimney and the heat from downstairs carries up. Just as well, as I can see quite a few hundred droppers need to be soldered by mid year!!

Kerfing, Jeff?

I think you have summed that up very well! As I said, my first reaction was "you have got to be kidding!"... but like Cobalts, Grassmasters and other bits of well engineered gear, there are times when if it does what it says on the packet, first time and every time you use it, it is not about the cost - it's about the price you would paying finding out the cheaper option doesn't work, or doesn't work as well as you need. As one of the master modellers over at MRF has opined: "I am too poor to buy cheap, as I can't afford to buy twice" (Erkut, of SELCUK fame).

Jeff - Digitrains in the UK sell them (I only know, as when I Googled CMX I found their site!). Check how that compares with buying direct from the USA - it seems a lot of imported kit gets marked up heaviliy in the UK (as it does here in Oz). Sitting down? You won't get much change from £110 (ouch!). BUT - and it's a huge but - I have not seen a bad review of these things. They are, I understand, as good as it gets for mobile track cleaning. A different league to the Dapol one - which was a nice mini vac to sweep up dust, but could not comprehensively clean rail heads. Yes, you propel it around - behind a nice big multi-axle powered diesel, preferably (it needs a bit of grunt). I winced at the price the first few days after I saw it - and no one seems to discount them, they sell for full RRP - but then realised that I didnt want to hand clean rails every time I had a session, and that with around 200m of track to be laid on Stockrington, 50m of it hidden/restricted access, a mobile soloution was needed. You may have better track access than me, so I guess it's just a question of whether you felt the need for that level of investment. Never mind all those sheep, it's horses for courses, I say! Regards, Scott

I agree 100% that you will be more aware of "the big picture" with regards the access and other issues (esp. as we see a camera-eye view, whilst you're living and breathing The Bunker), so know you'll rightly end up with the best soloution for your circumstances. Jumping ahead a few days (!), have you thought about track cleaning equipment? Whilst it's a pricey piece of kit, the unanimous excellent reviews have persuaded me to invest in one of these for Stockrington. There's quite a few pages of data in that link - IMHO worth some of your "down time" to research. Cheers Scott

Do ponder that a bit, Jeff. I'd imagine that the viaduct is just plain track, and so the odds of derailment there are very low*. So while you would use the access to attend to the rear, I'm thinking the need to access the front may be exponentially less. That, in turn, may mean you can increase the backscene height.... *assuming you do the requisite testing once you've energised, and iron out any niggles. Cheers Scott

Gilbert, you are correct - F8 is as small as it gets for the G12. There's no way to stop down any further. The only suggestion I can make to help the focussing, is if you compose the picture a little more zoomed out than what you need, the loco smokebox will be closer to centre frame, and the Auto Focus sensor may lock on that, rather than the bridge. Then, you can crop the picture tighter before you post it here. Not sure if you remember, but that screen at the back will tilt out, around, and twist up and down into all sorts of wonderful angles to allow you to shoot "remotely". Failing that, a small hand mirror behind the camera to show you what you the screen is seeing may also help! Loving some of the tightly cropped low shots - good to see you caught Sea Eagle rods down at six o'clock! Regards Scott

Ron; I was wondering - with so many (literally tens of thousands) of joints, have you had (m)any that have failed/delaminated/simply not quite had enough Mekpak and let go, as you've been manouvering substructures into position? Cheers Scott

I can see a point in time in the future when "the iconic viaduct and tunnel mouth" shot from K/L graces Model Rail, and is as well known as Dave Shakespeare's canal scene off Tetley Mills.... Just remember Lunesters, you were HERE when it all started! Cheers Scott

Well another hot one here - it was still 28C at 5:30pm - but I cracked on with the woodwork and at 7:30pm as the sun was setting, I grabbed acouple of in-progress shots, showing I now have end, the long side, and one half side free standing: There were no huge dramas - just a few seniors moments, as I realised some errors in my conversion of 2D plans into 3D ideas... only one of which involved nibbling a girder with a jig saw to make it sit down over an underlying bench! I wasn't an A-grade student in woodwork, so whilst I kind of know what I want, the results aren't always too finessed. But the L-girder system is very forgiving, and any errors I have made can be buffered out in the risers for the trackform. What was apparent was that a few of the longer pieces of timber had a degree of twist in them (the price of using freebies, I guess) and so some of the legs when attached tended to stray from vertical. Once I start adding track, the cross members it sits on will lock all this lot together, however for now I have added some temporary flat braces across the tops of the girders to to keep everything square and as level as possible. There's another leg + brace to add on the left hand side, whilst the river bed in the middle is the lowest point on the layout, and is set at 550mm (plus ~50mm for a base and whatever I material make it out of) . A good weekend's work, I think. Cheers, Scott

Well it's been another scorcher here in Perth - a really humid 38C - so whilst I spent a few hours upstairs erecting girders - I'm about 1/3 of the way there - it just got too hot to push on. Hopefully I will get more done tommorrow. I did find I'd made a few mistakes in visualising the 2D print into 3D, and have a couple of places to re-work, but no show stoppers. During the week I had a bit of a play with the geometry of the T14-DS1 turnout-double slip combination (see Post #99 ): out of the box, the Shinohara #6 combination has 66mm track centres: That is not a game changer, but it does make the IP-to-IP a massive 180mm. You can see one of the quirks of Shinohara - the R/H turnout has sleepers perpendicular to the straight leg, whilst the double slip treats each half like a "wye" and splits the angular difference. I figured I could do some surgery on these to get them tighter. Best way to do that is practice on Photoshop first! So I scanned them and layered them, and ended up with this: Thats about 44mm centres, and the Intersection Points are now under 70mm apart - so the whole junction is 110mm shorter - very important, as the line out of the double slip down to the storage tracks needs to drop away quickly to dip under an adjacent track. I will need to nip the ends off the last three or four sleepers at the back of the frog (arrowed in blue) so fit the straight track in, but it's not a complicated bit of butchery this time. These turnouts will be installed level, so I'm planning to actually build the junction on a board at my workbench, and install and test the Cobalts there too, and then fit the whole shebang once it is doing what it needs to do. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself... there's a few steps to get to that stage. Cheers Scott

Hi Billy and welcome! I'm quite a few months behind Jeff, I'm afraid, but at least there is now visible progress and hopefully a good story to tell as I progress. I'm happy enough with SCARM for my planning - but know there are better/more detailed programs out there as well. I think getting one that you are comfortable with is what counts. Those schematics took a bit of thinking - I over complicated the issue initially, but at some point I got a really good piece of advice: "play trains" on the drawing - imagine you are having an operating session, and see what you would do with your loco movements. That really crystalised what I was trying to achieve and made me see what trackwork I needed. I just need to make it look like feasible fiction now... and of course there's still the curly matter of wiring it all up! Cheers Scott

Okay, Stockrington re-tagged as a Lunester Layout, too Scott Antipodean Lunester

Remote control photography from 10,000 miles away! Thank you. Just what the Dr (well, BSc, anyway!) ordered. Good to get a sense of how the whole lot is coming together I think. Now, off for my toast and coffee... S

Well I can't speak for the others, but I figure if I can't be working on my own layout, I may as well be contributing to one I'd be happy to have built! (that layout list seems to be rather diverse too - not like it's 10 S&C tragics, all building a segment...) Don't forget to post a "wide angle" view every now and again, Jeff, so we get a sense of how much work has been done overall, as well as what remains. Regards Scott

Hmmmmmmmmm... so close to running trains, yet so far. And now the plaster bandages are out? I think Professor Freud would have a field day analysing that lot. Methinks it's time you turned that diorama into a model railway, Jeff!