jukebox

Here's a close up of the foliage

There's a stand of nine or so rather tall, slender, tress near my work that caught my eye, and I'm contemplating modelling... They have a very distinctive look - tall, slender, and foliage in clumps. They're obviously planted specially there many years ago, as there are no others in the vicinity... I rather like the height to width ratio... They don't quite look like conifers - they have leaves, not needles - but not being horticulturally inclined, I have no idea what they are. Can anyone who knows a little about these things offer any suggestions? Cheers Scott

I'll do my bit to help your page count, Shaun! Congrats on your decade here - you joined almost the same time as me (my 10 years was apparently early last month, but I confess I had to probe my profile to learn that). Sorry to hear the real world wasn't co-operating with your modelling plans - looking forward to seeing your progress when you get back in the saddle, and hope all is well health-wise. Regards, Scott

Sunday evening down under, and a good afternoon of progress here. First up - although it was actually the last thing done today - the lads are hard at work levelling the green on the Railway Hole. I found some figures in a container under the layout, and they are useful to give a sense of scale: That's a pad of plaster, which I am hoping won't crack too much. The next shot shows the contours better: Gonna be hell to pay if you overplay that one. Up the top of the hill, more figures give a sense of the distance to the pin: Meanwhile, trackside I used 5 batches of plaster this afternoon to progressively "skin" the cutting: The view from the junction - you can see there's a bit of cracking starting at the join to the previous skin. Hopefully it won't open up excessively: And the view back down the cutting, the plaster still glistening wet... After I look these shots, I put the damp cloth over back the top: That will be the plastering here done once I patch any cracks. Hopefully they aren't too severe, and I can knock them over with a midweek evening's attention. Then it's time to change trades... to grass, flock, and ground cover. Cheers Scott

Early batch/batches of the basic (non-DCC) models - circa 8-10 years ago now - were problematic; some would spontaneously activate and/or the drive would not stop at the end of it's travel, resulting in a continuous clicking sound until the unit was powered down (search for "Cobalt clickers"). The prescribed cure at the time was a solid whack with a screwdriver handle, but that didn't work for the mine that succumbed - approx 10 out of 36. However, as Ron points out, the after sales support is exemplary, and every one of mine that has failed was replaced without hesitation or cost. The newer models have much more secure wiring terminals, which is a bonus.

Unacceptably seriously, you might say. We are, after all, just talking about playing with train sets in the big scheme of things. Life throws up many of us a lot more concerns worth getting flustered over than that. Cheers Scott

34C here today, and still lingering heat when I slipped upstairs at 8:30pm... at least 28C inside, probably more. But the sight that greeted me was a lot more encouraging than Friday evening. It does appear my strategy to mitigate the cracking is working: The darker areas are the fresher plaster that went down Sunday afternoon. Looking down the fairway, all is good in the world. Looking up from the green it's all well behaved; I'll use some sandpaper to remove the worst of any of those spatula marks... And lastly, the cutting: Just a small crack there. I only skinned the first 300mm or so of the cutting - I want the top of the hill to be cured, and I'll lean across it and down into the cutting when it can support my weight - the area I highlighted in orange, above. Cheers Scott

Coda: I went back up after 4 hrs, cut up and wet some cloth, and layed that over the fresh plaster - sort of like putting wet hessian over fresh concrete, to keep the moisture in. Hopefully that will help slow the evaporation.

Having re-skinned the new contours last weekend, I went back upstairs to continue my work today, to be met with an unpleasant sight. Cracking. Not the polite (and manageable) cracks like that last round of photos, but tectonic openings, the worse of which had contra-contour curled edges that look like gaping wounds: There's lots of reasons this might have happened; I made up a very large batch of plaster to do the re-skin. It may have had too high a water content; it may have had a lower ratio of PVA that I add to plasticise the mix; It could be that using PVA soaked cloth makes it wick more than plaster soaked cloth; it could be the ambient room temp at this time of year. There is nothing I can do but patch and cover, so that became today's task, using the normal sized batch, and mixed a little on the drier side. The cutting before and after: The fairway and the return to the station car park (after only); It's certainly not the end of the world - far from it - just caught me by surprise; I suspect even the repair layer I just put down might crack, too. It will be an iterative process to finish it off, but is manageable. Let's wait and see. Cheers Scott

Knocking On Heaven's Door - Dylan As an aside, the pre-op nurse who attended me whilst I was in the "pen" waiting for the theatre to be ready for my vasectomy showed a dark sense of humour. I was serenaded with AC/DC - Big Balls...

You should be grateful Gordon plays golf instead of skiing...

...and so to the part where our hero grits his teeth and takes a step back. Spent this morning adding modifiers to the contours; because these are on top of existing plaster, and don't need the strength, I went the shortcut of just dipping the cloth in 1:1 dilute PVA. As you can see, I've lifted quite a bit of the hill... This area got quite a high levelling - up to 50mm in a few places; wet newspaper rolled up created the thickness - then placing PVA soaked material strips over the top to marry into existing, and ease the contours that were there. I didn't completely fill the gutter, but eased it out at the lower part of the slope (the blue material). The black material is the extension of the slope onto the new baseboard. Still hard to capture, but you can sort of see how I've eased out the contours here... (that last strip on the right is not folded under - it has a curved seam from a shirt sleeve - but it sure does my OCD in looking at it in this photo!). This shot from behind the green looking back up the hill probably shows the contour improvements best. In this last shot you can see the slope now extends across onto the short side of the baseboard. With the new plywood sheet in place, the scale of the space here is a lot clearer for me. Eventually it will form the Platform, Ticket Office, and Stockrington Station forecourt and car park. Those cloth strips need a few days to dry and build up strength, then I can re-skin the lot with another 5-10mm layer of plaster. Cheers Scott

Well because you suggested it....

Curiously, MRD have Hornby O1's for the same money - but be quick, 1 only each of Early and NE branded.

Well said, Gordon. This sums up my perspective on RMWeb perfectly. Onward! Regards Scott

Yes, Troon has the Railway Hole... but that's parallel to the fairway, rather than behind the pin, which would be a little higher risk. The green will be flat, Gilbert, I promise. It's the sand traps you'll need to avoid in your lay up shot approaching the green...

Thanks for the feedback, gents! Regarding the "gutter" - it may well be cone of those cases where even though it's not un-prototypical, it looks wrong; I'll see how it comes along was I skin it with another layer of plaster. Gordon - that's a great photo; the cross-fall of the fairway certainly does suggest mine would not be out of place. Iain - I have some ideas for reproducing the green - how they pan out is another matter. I will do some test sections and see how they translate. I figure getting the green right is more important than the fairway, though that needs to look the part, too. The bushes-behind-the-pin is something a few have flagged; I don't want to totally block that vista looking across to the church, so will have some shubbery, but nothing too high. Cheers Scott

I wasn't going to do an update this weekend, but had a change of heart... Plastering is going well, if slowly because of the heat. I added a skin of 5-10mm plaster to the top of the hill, and only got a little cracking: The plaster-and-PVA soaked cloth that forms the contours is quite flexible, so the idea behind the skin is to create a rigid shell. I have only done the top of the hill, so that once it hardens, I can lean on it and do the cutting: I also started terraforming the green. It was about then that I realised this is one of those "now I need to go a step further than planned to keep the scenery continuous" moments... This corner leads to Stockrington Station, on the right. That baseboard is not full width - the plywood I had left over from the house extensions only came out 900mm - that made leaning in easier when I was building the backscenes. But at the corner where the meets that short face, I now need to install the remainder of the board, so the hillside can wrap around the corner: This part of the layout looks like one of those how-do-you-build-scenery demonstrations at an exhibition - it runs from plywood, thru paper then plaster bandage to plaster shell... I'm happy how the green is coming along, but have some doubt about the lie of the slope coming down to it. There's a bit of a "gutter" in the contours (shown by the yellow lines) which would be fine if the golf hole followed it, but the fairway (in red) cuts across it at 30 degrees: I'm thinking (which if you have been playing along at home, know really means, "he's going to...") I will infill some of that gutter to make the fairway flatter. Same process as the green augmentation - crunched up newspaper, PVA- dipped paper, followed by PVA-dipped shirt, then re-skin with plaster. On the bright side, the modified contours from the green still look natural from the track side of the fence view, and will come to life with the scrub and bushes. Cheers Scott

Sorry I missed this, Keith. I plan to use a fine turf flock from Woodland Scenics (weeds or similar) Cheers Scott

Curious Transmission Line Trivia: 1/. One of the biggest dangers for electric shock was when we built lines parallel to existing ones. Even though they were a good distance away, the induced current was significant, and additional earthing precautions were needed when we strung the conductors. 2/. The other big danger was storms. Not the ones we could see and feel, but ones 10's of km away that could drop a lightning strike on the line. This is also a very real issue for rail workers in remote areas here in Australia: https://thewest.com.au/news/regional/lightning-strike-hits-11-men-in-the-northern-goldfields-ng-b88629156z

Don't dispose of the 37 in too much of a hurry, Gordon. It would come in handy for hauling a CMX around Eastwood Town. Cheers Scott

From memory... They have a system where if the line "earth's out" - say a tree branch blows too close and it flashes over - the circuit breakers trip. Normally, after a few seconds it tries to open the circuit again (it was called "automatic re-close?); if it trips again, it then stays closed and alarms go off. In my job, I had to take possession of a vicinity permit, and they would turn the auto re-close off. At the end of the shift, I'd phone the control centre, and notify them we were clear of the area. Once or twice, I got the call that the line had tripped... and were our guys okay? They were. In that job, you always treat all lines as live, unless you had signed on to a permit that told you otherwise.

Happens more often than it should.... Note the date on this one: https://defrock.org/2020/02/16/power-towers-crash-to-the-ground/

Apologies for the delay in adding to this thread - and if anyone has responded in the meantime (I did scan the pages, but not forensically... Jamie - I used to work in this field, 1990-2000, as a young Site Engineer. Building transmission lines here in Australia. Surprisingly, many of the design here are/were variations on Balfour Beatty ones... although our industry here has a strong Italian/Portuguese/Spanish influence from the migrants who built our first HV lines for our Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme in the 1950's... Paul - not sure about the UK, but here in Oz we certain use MSJ's - mid span joints. These are two parts a steel inner, that if for the strengths, and an aluminium out, for conducting the electricity. MSJ's as a rule couldn't be installed over roads, railways or other critical areas. The length of cable on each drum was dependent on the diameter of the cable, but was, I recall, between 1000m and 3500m? Joins done as the cable is strung allowed runs of 10km or more between Strainer (Tension Towers). On long flat runs, our authorities introduced Tension towers at intervals for safety - if a line were to get pulled over, the idea being the tension tower would limit the destruction.... Cheers Scott

I like version #1, as it works as a gradual and ambiguous transition from the shadowy ground level surfaces to the sky. You could of course paint on a distant mountain silhouette, as seen in your sample photo... Cheers Scott