D869

Hey Pete - welcome back!

Look forward to seeing the viaduct take shape.

Regards, Andy

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the comments. I haven't forgotten that I need to say some stuff about the layout, but with the current rate of progress I think there will be plenty of time over the next few months for some more 'retrospectives' when there isn't much else to say about active projects.

I can, however, report some recent progress on South Yard. I have given the backscene two coats of emulsion from a matchpot that cost me about 50p from Wickes. they call it 'sky blue' I think but I'm not sure that I like the shade though - maybe a bit too blue.

Regards, Andy

> Etched Pixels also produce some bogie side frames

Yes, I noticed that too, but I've asked Allen for a set now, so I think I'll wait for those.

Etched Pixels also do the Ultima kits now, so if I order from them I'll be very tempted to buy a bunch more Hawksworth coach kits that will go straight into the gloat box.

> and then not being able to see it through to completion

That happens to me a lot too (I recently finished off a Stewart Hine etched SR GUV kit that was shelved incomplete well over 20 years ago), but having written about the class 22 build on here, I have more people watching, so I reckon that I have more motivation to see it through. It's still a bit sould destroying though when it seems that every job you try to do ends up needing a re-think.

Painting will likely be a big hurdle (eventually) - this is never my favourite stage of any build and always a bit hit and miss with me. Sometimes I get results that I'm really happy with and sometimes it just goes horribly wrong.

I've been looking at these photos some more and checking the very sketchy info elsewhere.

The sidings depicted seem to be north and south of the Foundry Lane level crossing and the works are Holmans No 3 Foundry. This was not the original terminus... and possibly not the terminus at all even at the time of the photo. Mr RA Cooke's plans say that Holman's bought the line North of MP 313.34 in 1970. I'm guessing that 313.34 was just North of the crossing where Maurice Dart's West Cornwall Mineral Railways book has a photo of some steel gates which you can also just about see in the second photo.

According to Mr Cooke, the line by the dock was a short loop installed in 1966 which rejoined the branch before the level crossing. North of the crossing there was one siding to the right of the line and two to the left.

The first photo tells quite a story really - steel ingots and either coal or coke sat on the loading dock with more ingots in the wagon. On the left are a couple of (con?)flats with compressors on them. My first assumption was that this was some sort of PW train but then I realised that the CompAir compressors are brand new and are probably the products manufactured by Holmans being dispatched by rail.

As an aside, page 40 of 'Heyday of the Hydraulics shows D1039 at Paddington in 1970 with a big advert for Holmans compressors behind it.

Ah... for the days when Britain had a manufacturing industry.

Thanks Matt - love the pics.

Looks like the Roskear branch terminus would make another excellent micro layout. I've never seen a pic of the place other than an aerial photo before.

Regards, Andy

Hmm...

Turntable offset to one side... roundhouse on the other... add some Cornish class 37s...

Guess where?

Regards, Andy

Thanks Matt - glad to hear from another WR fan.

I hope you manage to track those photos down because I can't recall ever having seen many pics of Drump Lane - the only one I can think of is in GWR days.

I look forward to reading about your new layout in RMWeb soon!

Regards, Andy

Trevor: Thanks. I've been modelling in 2mm for a long time so it doesn't really seem small to me. It does have its advantages in terms of being able to portray a bigger scene as we are doing with our group layout - St Ruth. For a bit of balance I also have some 16mm trains that appear occasionally in the garden.

Pete: Yes, this is South Yard... which also doubles as my test track and parking location for incomplete models - it's more difficult to forget about them if they are on show all the time. Because it's so small I can't fit too many half finished things in so it encourages me to get on and finish stuff. I haven't forgotten that I've promised to post more about the layout... although you can see pretty much half of it in the photos.

Regards, Andy

Good idea - enjoy your beer.

Andy

Oh dear!

Time for a bit of stiff upper lip... character building... will make you feel so much better when it goes well... etc. etc.

I'm sure you'll find a good solution... no shortage of ideas from your various readers.

Regards, Andy

Hi Pete,

Glad to see you persevering.

A tip that I've found useful for clearing flangeways is to find an old, cheap jewellers screwdriver or similar with a tip roughly 1mm wide and grind half of the the end away to make a stepped shape. Check the longest part of the step with the calipers and grind it until its width is the same as the 2mm flangeway width. Then you have a tool that will scrape any crud from both the top and the side of the rail head as well as clearing the flangeway - much more effective than a piece of wet and dry for any cleaning up after painting or in your case plastering the rails.

Regards, Andy

Yes - on two counts actually. One of not being able to paint things because fo stray PVA. The other of multi-layered ground surfaces flaking off. I noticed that a small white patch had appeared yesterday in the yard on South Yard because the top layer of my Polyfilla ground surface had decided to part company with the layer below. Nothing terminal - I can paint it and call it a pothole, but a bit annoying all the same.

I'm not sure how good this clay is at sticking to itself so sloshing some PVA around might help too - but don't get PVA anywhere that you want to use water based paints etc afterwards.

Hi Pete,

We also got some cracking when using DAS on the St Ruth sea wall but nothing like the crazing that you have got. I'm guessing that it might be down to thickness (or lack of it) - our DAS is about 2-3mm thick. Our cracks are probably at the places where different slabs of DAS were butted up to each other... but we did use a lot of water to smooth things down here. It might also be down to the difference in thickness between and on top of the sleepers.

Might I suggest making up some off-layout test pieces and experimenting there?

Here's another inset track approach, but the bit between the rails may not translate to 2mm. The filler might be a useful option to consider though.

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php/blog/1/entry-44-inset-trackwork-on-keyhaven/

Thanks Pete. I am also much more used to working in plasticard, but that's on moulded plastic loco bodies. The headcode boxes are a pretty major piede of front end detail and the key to getting the position of all the other stuff correct so I didn't see much option other than to do them 'properly'. At the end of the day I probably spent a good deal more time drilling the handrail holes, so the metal headcode boxes feel like a reasonable investment of time.

Don't forget that I've done a lot of filing, scraping and fettling before taking these photos so my soldering isn't that great. I get plenty of the stuff where I don't want it - more so as the size of the things being soldered gets smaller.

80s music is fine - they were my formative years but I think you need to be careful about what you might start.

Now St Ruth is set in the 60s... just off to find some Beatles or Rolling Stones lyrics for my next posting... or maybe some Woodstock era stuff...

Quite a few years ago in the earlier days of digital cameras when 3 megapixels was the state of the art, we decided that these new-fangled gadgets had, at last, become suitable for recording hand-written 17-19th century documents in dimly lit record offices.

Yep - been there, done that. I used a 4 megapixel camera for a lot of my family history research - including some stuff dating back to the 15th century. Prior to this I had a brief try with a 2 megapixel camera but the results were not very usable.

OK, so 'lack of' was oversimplifying the situation but as far as I can tell the NRM holds a lot of stuff in its archive that has not been catalogued in a way which is searchable on the Internet - including holdings (if any) of WR operating documents from the 1960s.

I guess it depends on the specific institution, but to me a 'library' and an 'archive' are different things - a library contains mostly published works whereas an archive contains mainly original documents, plans, photographs, manuscripts etc. The catalogue on the York University web site is for the NRM library rather than its archive - i.e. mainly books rather than original documents.

The NRM does have some of its archive collection searchable via the excellent A2A site at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ but again I get the impression that only a small fraction of their holdings are actually visible this way - as a quick test their web site tells us that they hold 87 drawings from the S&DJR Highbridge Works but searching for 'Highbridge' within the NRM on A2A turns up nothing. Searching for 'timetable' turns up a few things but nothing of real relevance.

I guess that there is hope that this material may appear on one of these two existing online catalogues or on a completely new catalogue at some time in the future but until then contemplating a trip to York would be a very speculative venture for me.

The model is looking good Pete. Not sure about the 80s lyrics though.

Have you decided how you are going to paint all those stones?

Nice loco. There's ample precedent for unique NG industrial locos and so plenty of room to be creative.

Glad to see that you give in to distractions from time to time - but this one seems to have been over in a flash - I'm sure that it hadn't been painted when I looked earlier .

Perhaps you need a narrow gauge connection to a new industry - the Highclere Jam Butty Factory perhaps?

@Matt: Thanks. I'm glad that my postings have sparked your enthusiasm. I ordered the MP15DC on eBay from Garden State Models but I don't think that this shop have any MP15s listed just now. It cost me about 100 dollars including postage which at the time worked out to about 65 of our pounds. I did try to find one in the UK at Osborns Models of Bideford but all of their non-DCC ones are out of stock. They do have a DCC fitted example for £83.74, so if you want DCC then that might be a good bet - you would probably get it delivered without such a nail-biting long wait. A couple of days ago I also found a company called Model Junction in Slough that seems to stock a lot of Atlas stuff but their prices seem to be rather higher than Osborns for the MP15.

@Trevor: Thanks very much for the photos especially the one of D6309 showing the boiler vent. It looks like I'll be building my first choice loco now (and probably ordering a nice print of that photo at St Blazey to go with it), so I can save deliberations about any oddness on D6323 for another time.

Thanks everyone.

@Trevor: I hadn't noticed anything odd about D6323 but I will take a closer look at the photos - trouble is that none of them is particularly good because all are taken from some distance away or in poor lighting conditions (or both). I'm still hopeful of doing D6309 instead and D6315 also seems like a possibility - all withdrawn in green and known to appear in Cornwall. I have ordered some photos from Exe Rail who seem to have better coverage of the Devon and Cornwall class 22s, so hopefully these will help me to make the final decision.

@Pete: Yes I've been impressed with the Atlas stuff that I've had in the past. Shame that the inside of an MP15 is too small for flywheels which would make it even better. The valances are included in the kit but I haven't fitted them yet. There is an etched overlay available for the bogies (and you can now buy the kit with this included for a few pounds extra), but I bought my kit a couple of years ago, so I don't have the bogie overlays just now.

I keep thinking that there are no more class 22 photos to be found on the Internet. I keep being proved wrong.

Maybe I should post a list of everything I've found or been sent... but maybe that would spoil the fun for somebody else.

Thanks!

Andy - another enjoyable read and nicely detailed account of the methods used to get to where you are.

 

As Steve says, I think the layout will be spectacular - At the Expo I really enjoyed the 12ft concave seawall frontage which really pulls the viewer into the layout.

 

Would love to come and run all my BR Blue on it

Thanks Pete. You (or any other 2mm member) would be very welcome to come along to a meeting if you find yourself in our neck of the woods - just let us know. At the moment we don't have any more exhibition invites in the calendar in the near future but we would be happy to talk to any exhibition managers.

Do you think your 37s will be able to cope with the waves crashing over the sea wall OK?

I agree, looking at the photos, that the sea wall and the retaining wall ought to look more or less the same colour - though the sea would regularly wash the sea wall and the retaining wall might well have been affected by different things, like the smoke from the steam locos.

 

I found this close-up of the sea wall

Thanks - it never ceases to amaze me what photos turn up on the Internet. We have a few photos of the top of the wall taken from the footpath and a distant one that I took from the Scillonian but it is very difficult to get a decent close up of the real wall because someone put the sea in a rather inconvenient place. We've concluded that there is a stong brown hue to the local stonework - this is evident in the sea wall photos and also in photos of some of the stone built houses behind the tracks. The Scalescenes retaining wall looked great when we first did it but we've now decided that it's the wrong colour.

Steve - thanks. Actually I find painting the wall quite relaxing... at least on those occasions when it's going well