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D869

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  2. D869

    Last of the First - Part 3

    By D869,

    This is a catch up installment on D604... and quite a long one. I was quite keen to get it into a presentable state so that I could use it at TINGS, so that meant no mucking about on RMWeb for a little while.
     
    In the last installment the basic shape of the bodyshell was completed but the detail was yet to go on. There is a lot less to add to the class 41 than the class 22, but there was still some work to do.
     
    The roof has most of the right things in the right places. Unlike the 22 there is no overlay so the panel joins are etched into the main body shell. The snag with this is that the underside of the roof is etched with lines to make rolling easier. Where the two etches cross we get a hole. This means that the panel joins show a sort of morse code effect. I tried to fix this by filling the underside with solder but it needed a lot of cleaning up and tended to fill the whole panel join in places. After doing two joins I left the others in the hope that the paint might fill up the holes. The other thing that needs to be changed is the boiler top in the centre of the loco. There seems to be a misapprehension about what was on this panel. My old Ian Allen drawings book shows a circular hole with a grille mesh. This is what Allen provides, as does the Etched Pixels detailing pack. All of them are wrong. Photos show that there was indeed a circular hole but that this was almost completely filled by a solid disc with just a narrow gap around the edge. I used some dividers to mark out two circles and then filed out a disc that was a little smaller than the hole with some 'spokes' sticking out to the edge of the hole. This needed careful filing and fitting but was eventually soldered in place. As you can see in the photo it now looks just like a broken etched line but I hope it will look better when fully painted and weathered. The photo also shows the morse code in the panel joins.
     

     
    There was not too much work to do on the sides. For the boiler filler doors I used the parts from the Etched Pixels pack. The vertical louvres for the upper cooling group intakes were made from Evergreen car siding. This has very fine lines moulded into it, intended for American match board sided vehicles. Even so, the lines were too far apart for my needs, so I cut enough out to do all of the vents and then carefully scribed an extra line down the middle of each 'plank'. The results aren't perfect but I'm reasonably pleased with them.
     
    And so to the ends. I had chosen to model the loco in a form that was a close match for the etch in the kit. I used the oval vents provided by Allen and kept the horizontal handrail holes. One of the vertical handrail holes was drilled out to take a lamp bracket and an extra hole marked for the middle lamp bracket. The brackets themselves were cut and filed from 5 thou N/S strip and soldered in place. The (tail?) lamp on the right hand door had a surround added using 5 amp fuse wire wrapped around a drill and then cut to make a stack of circles.
     
    I changed my mind a few times about the headcode discs but in the end went for having them removable. The discs themselves are from an Etched Pixels etch and have a piece of 0.5mm brass wire soldered perpendicular to the back. The nose is drilled to take these wires, hopefully as a push fit. Three of these holes go in the middle of etched circles. The fourth goes at the bottom of the left hand door (Allen only provides an etched circle on the right hand door). The discs were then stuck into a piece of blu tack and painted. Each closed disc is different, depending on where it sits on the nose, so the result was like a little flower bed, as you can see in the photo.
     

     
    The buffers on the class 41 show a rather higher degree of design thought than most later locos - they have neat fairings to give a smooth transition between the buffer body and the nose. Naturally there is nothing off the shelf to suit this so I cut some short lengths of brass tube for the buffer bodies and opened up the holes to be a push fit for some oval plastic buffer heads that I bought years ago (I think they were labelled 'Lima' but don't know if that label was accurate). The surrounding area was then built up with Milliput and filed when set to give a smooth transition. One of the buffers lost its Milliput during filing, so I stuck it back on with super glue which seemed to do the trick.
     
    While doing the other nose detail I was getting increasingly uneasy about the oval vents. They just looked too long compared to the real thing but I didn't have any great ideas for how to make better ones. In the end I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at fixing them. I unsoldered them from the nose and then cut them in half with a string knife. I then filed down the cut ends until I thought that the reduced height looked right. Then I soldered them back together... easy to say, not easy to do. After trying a few ways the best way seemed to be to place both pieces on a flat card in the correct alignment and then trap them under a second piece of card to hold them still. Then add plenty of green label flux and apply the iron. This approach had a reasonable success rate without too many burned fingers. The reassembled vents were then cleaned up with a file and scraper and stuck onto the nose with super glue (there was no way I was going to attempt to solder them on).
     
    While out for a meal just before the body went to the paint shop I remembered that I had not done the 'eyebrow' vents. Once back at the workbench these were added using very thin slivers of 5 thou plasticard super glued in place.
     
    Next to the paint shop. The first task was to chuck the body into a bowl of warm water and scrub using an old toothbrush with Flash floor cleaner to de-grease it. This is also a good test to see if any bits fall off. After a rinse the body was given a blow dry with the hair dryer before being mounted (using gloves) on a block of wood and put in its Ferrero Rocher anti-dust cabinet. I noticed a few flakes of Milliput lifting from the roof area when drying the loco so these were carefully removed before going any further. The body was then sprayed with Halfords grey primer before being put aside to dry.
     
    On inspection a few hours later the results were not quite what I had hoped.Many of the places where the Milliput had been sanded to a feather edge had lifted a little leaving the edges of the filler looking quite obvious. Drawing on past experience with hairs in the paint on my sleeping cars, I got some wet and dry paper and used it wet to smooth down the blemishes. This was followed by another blow dry and a second coat of primer. This time the results were much better. The next coat was Humbrol matt white on the ends, followed by Humbrol signal yellow. At this stage the loco looked like it was in the old BR 'dutch' livery. Here's a photo, but you don't really get the full effect.

     
    Next the warning panels were masked (Tamiya tape) and the loco sprayed with Precision BR green. I mixed in some white again, but made sure it was a new tin on this occasion so there were no problems with white flakes in the final finish. I sprayed on quite a warm day so used plenty of thinners. I gave the loco a fairly decent coat, hoping that a smooth finish would allow neater lining. After a few hours to allow the paint to set but not fully harden the masking was removed. I'm always quite disappointed at this stage and wonder whether the end result is going to be at all convincing. Here's a photo.

     
    I scraped the paint off cab window frames before the green had fully hardened. This might or might not be good practice but it was probably motivated more by wanting to see something relieve those huge areas of dark green.
     
    The last paint job (after the green had properly hardened) was to mask around the roof panels and wrap the whole body in paper and then spray the roof grey. Once this was dry came the lining - a 2 day job using the Bob Moore pen. I have to say that the results weren't quite as good as I had hoped given the improved smoothness of the green finish.
     
    The transfers are a mixed bunch. I'm still relying on resurrected Woodheads for the BR totem and the electrification flashes. I'm running out of numbers on this sheet so I ordered some new numbers from Cambridge Custom Transfers. These came with D600 and D603 ready made up, but sadly not D604 so some degree of cutting and fiddling was needed.
     
    The CCT instructions recommend against using decal setting solution but I was not convinced. I did an experiment on a test panel and I thought that the result was better with Micro Set than without, so I used it on the loco.
     
    Regular readers may recall some difficulties with varnishing and Micro Set. I had resolved this problem last time around by a simple time saving expedient - just don't bother with the varnishing. The Woodhead transfers (in combination with liquid decal film) seem pretty tough. The CCT instructions and advice from others were, however, pretty clear - some sort of varnish is required.
     
    After discussing this question on the 2mm VAG I was recommended to try Testors Dullcote. This turned out to be tricky to track down but eventually I managed to buy a tin from a wargaming shop on the Internet. I gave it a try on a test piece and the result was very matt indeed. Although I intend to weather D604, I didn't feel ready to dull the finish to this extent. In the end I decided to go back and try the Tamiya varnish again, but making special effort to keep the coat thin. The photo below shows the result. Oh dear!
     

     
    Looking at this in reflected light it seems that the milky white deposit has a very matt finish in comparison to the unaffected area, so I think that rather than being a chemical reaction it might be something to do with Micro Set's surface tension affecting properties preventing the varnish from forming a smooth layer.
     
    I wasn't too downhearted this time because I'd managed to fix this problem on the Hawksworth coach. I did the same thing on D604 - using a fine brush and some well thinned Precision green I managed to erase the white deposits where they were most noticeable. I also tidied up the ends of the lining and a couple of slightly ragged edges as well as touching up a couple of paint chips on D6309. By now it was the Thursday night before TINGS and I was starting to be quite pleased with the result.

     
    By Friday lunchtime when I left to load St Ruth I still had no nameplates. I'd been asking Shawplan for these for quite some time but Brian had been away. I rang him when he returned on Wednesday and he promised to put them straight in the post. When I got home on Friday evening they had indeed arrived. I quickly fitted some windscreens cut from 10 thou glazing fixed with Formula 560 Canopy Glue and finally added the nameplates. I've always had kittens when gluing nameplates on, having tried epoxy (too slow and messy) and super glue (too fast and sometimes also messy) in the past. Since the Canopy Glue was to hand, I thought I'd give that a try. I found it ideal - applying a couple of small dots with a compass point and then putting the nameplate into place I could just see the glue squeeze to the edges. It also gave me enough time to make adjustments and after a short rest was sufficiently well set to allow me to do the other side without too many worries. The only real problem that I had was very odd indeed - for some reason when I did the second one everything had become statically charged and the nameplate is so small and light that when I put it on the loco side it stood right up on its edge and jumped away from the place where I wanted it. No amount of touching radiator pipes or other earthed conductors seemed to help but fortunately the Canopy Glue was stronger than the static electricity.
     
    Here's a photo of D604 ready to go to TINGS where it successfully started to earn its keep.
     

     
    Cossack is still far from finished. Most notably the chassis detail owes far more to a class 47 than a class 41 so this will be the next job on the agenda.
  3. D869

    Last of the First - Part 2

    By D869,

    A second installment of the D604 build...
     
    In the previous episode the body was just starting to go together but was still short of quite a few important external panels.
     
    Next step was to fit the nose ends. Unlike the class 22, these are far from flat so they had to be bent to the correct curve. This was tricky for a couple of reasons. Firstly there is no good reference to use to find the 'correct' curve, so I had to judge this by studying photos.
     
    The NBL factory photos showed that that there was a shallow curve where the gangway doors are and I thought that this became more pronounced on either side. The second thing that's tricky is forming the curve. The presence of the etched lines for the gangway doors means that the end just wants to fold along those lines so it needed some careful work with pliers to form the curve by creating small bends in the plain parts of the etch and trying to avoid creating a fold at the door edges. There was also quite a lot of straightening things out again where I'd gone too far.
     
    Soldering the end on is also tricky because there is nothing that can easily be used for alignment, nor is it even entirely clear what the vertical alignment should be. I knew that the top of the nose had to curve downwards so I worked from this. In doing so I decided that the bottom edge of the nose etch was actually too low, so aligning this edge with the bottom edge of the valence was a non-starter. In the end I used the top corners and aligned these slightly below the top corners on the side etches. This gives a reasonable 'drop' between the windscreen surround and the nose.
     
    I was a bit wary of the fold lines at the ends of the sides but in the end decided that I just needed to have faith, make the folds and see how things worked out. After tack soldering the ends to the sides, I got out the set square and some nice flat surfaces and spent a lot of time peering at the model to see whether the nose was truly vertical and in alignment with the central pillar of the windscreens. Naturally my first attempt wasn't quite right, so adjust and try again...
     
    After the experience with the class 22 I was expecting the cab roofs to be straigtforward. The class 41 kit contains similarly shaped etches which are even labelled as cab roofs, so what could go wrong? I rolled one of these around my solder sucker and tried it in place. It dropped straight through the cab. It seems that these etches are too small in both directions which is pretty strange. I was going to need to make new ones. After a pause for thought I had an idea about how to make this easier. I dug out the used etch from the class 22 and some 10 thou sheet (brass because I had no nickel silver). I then used the hole in the class 22 etch as a template to scribe the shape of the roof. Cut it out with scissors, clean up with a file and I found that I had a pretty good fit at the first attempt. With hindsight it should have been a little longer because I had some tricky filling on the outer corners where it meets the windscreens.
     
    As per the class 22, I used thick fuse wire and plenty of solder to fill the gap between the roof and the windscreen surround.
     
    For the top of the nose I thought that filler was going to be the only practical answer but I needed something to apply the filler to. I cut some strips from the edge of the body side etch and curved this to the shape of the windscreen bottom. A second shorter piece was added to meet the middle of the nose end and the whole lot soldered between the sides to leave a decent gap below the windscreen surround. I also added a short piece of 20 by 40 thou nickel silver so that I could anchor the bottom edge of the windscreen surround to give it some strength.
     
    The photo below shows the kit at this stage.

     
    I did my best to fill the nose corners using solder, but there is only so much that can be done here because there are some sizeable gaps near the top. I also had my first attempt at forming the various curves on the corners, filing off the excess etch and solder where needed, but I knew that the real work of forming the nose shape was yet to come.
     
    Now it was filler time, so I attacked the nose with copious amounts of Milliput and also added some to the cab roofs because these were not in perfect aligment with the main roof. At this stage I also had second thoughts about the curvature of the nose, so I added more Milliput so that I could have a gentler curve all the way to the edge.
     
    Here is the result. Looking good eh?
     

     
    Now I'd reached the make or break part - shaping the nose. To begin with I decided that I had to get a consistent shape with some reference points, even if it was a long way from the final shape. To do this I tidied up each face so that it was either flat (the sides) or had a simple single curve (the nose and top). I deliberately left the corners as sharp angles so that I could check for symetry and get both ends consistent. The next four photos show things at this stage. I'd also checked the photos again and decided that my initial thoughts about the nose curvature were correct, so the extra Milliput was filed off again.
     




     
    Finally it was time to shape the corners. The top of the nose is fairly level for about half of its length and then it curves downwards to meet the front panel. The joint between the two is still quite a sharp angle though. The body corners are the really tricky ones because no two photos show them in quite the same way. In the end I decided that there was a comparatively large radius near to the bottom but that the curve was a sort of conical shape because at the top the radius reduces to almost nothing. Finally the corner between the nose top and sides was rounded off - this one was fairly simple - and the top corners blended in. After finishing both ends I was much happier with the shape of the second one, so the top of the other nose had to be re-filled and shaped again.
     
    I haven't attempted any detailed photos to show the final shape because the combination of white Milliput, shiny solder and shiny nickel silver makes it very difficult to see with the Mark 1 eyeball, so I reckon that the camera will have no chance. Running my finger over it seems to be the best way to check the shape, but I don't think you can do that yet on RMWeb
     
    So here's a photo of the loco with the nose shape fully formed. I've also started to add the nose detail, but more on that next time.
     

  4. D869

    St Ruth at TINGS

    By D869,

    I was contemplating some rather lame puns for the title of this posting but I thought I would spare you all. We're just back from two days at the N Gauge Show which takes place in a barn on the Fosse Way near Leamington Spa - just down the road for us... which turned out to be just as well.
     
    I'm glad to say that St Ruth performed well during both days with just a few minor issues appearing during opening hours. The same cannot be said for the setup day on Friday...
     
    We had given ourselves plenty of time because we wanted to do some setup work on the new signals once the layout was up. Having completed a one hour stint adjusting things mechanically and programming the servo travel I was just packing stuff away when the signals went haywire and all of the lights on the control panel started flashing on and off. John pulled the plug quickly and then we noticed a nasty electrical burning smell.
     
    Unfortunately this happened shortly before the hall closed so in the remaining time we could only find out that the smell appeared to be associated with the power supply box and that none of the points would move. Then we had to leave without really knowing what we needed to replace to make the layout work again.
     
    So we arrived as early as possible on Saturday armed with pretty much everything that we might need including the kitchen sink. The signal controls were all disconnected and the 12V supplies piggybacked from a bench supply. Thankfully we then had a working layout for Saturday, albeit with non working signals.
     
    On Saturday evening I lashed up a MERG controller to some switches on a piece of ply to try to get the signals working again, fed from yet another bench power supply. Another early start on Sunday had this installed on the layout, followed by more mechanical and programming adjustements. Finally we had the home and starter working. Unplug the programming cable and the starter leapt up out of the ground because of a massive servo glitch. Suffice to say that further attempts to get the starter working were all followed by another glitch so the starter remained static. At least we had one signal working though.
     
    We were also joined by guest operator and 2mm committee member Jim Allwood who brought along some interesting things to run on the layout, oh and a Dapol Voyager that is about as uncontrollable as mine (2 speeds - flat out and stop).
     
    Some photos, mainly of more recent additions.
     

    I thought I'd try a photo from the opposite of the usual perspective.
     

    Jim Allwood's tamper and class 14. For once St Ruth was running every WR diesel hydraulic class... although there are no plans for a class 14 to be added permanently to the roster,
     

    The home signal and route indicator with a loco that some may have seen on the Hydraulic Heaven blog.
     

    Cossack again, arriving at St Ruth.
     

    One more building added since Nottingham - the hotel on the corner.
  5. D869

    Last of the First

    By D869,

    The story so far... as regular readers may remember, we are at a point where we just about have enough locos to run the schedule at St Ruth. Recent additions from my direction prior to the Nottingham show earlier this year were a Farish Warship and a much modified Western, both in maroon.
     
    A long time ago I promised myself that I would not be building a class 41 Warship - these were the very first WR hydraulics and were rather outside the WR's hydraulic concept, being the result of a political fudge by the BTC so that the WR got its preferred transmission but not the lightweight German inspired body design - instead the design and build work was done by NBL in Glasgow along similar lines to the LMS 'twins'. Apart from being WR's 'unwanted' locos, my own chosen period is 1968-72 and the class 41s were withdrawn in December 1967... although it may be that this was why my chosen period starts in 1968.
     
    I've since become rather more flexible, having realised that pushing the date range back a few years allows me to dilute the never ending stream of Mark 1s on the coaching stock front. While operating the layout it also occurred to me that it would be nice to introduce a bit more variation to the diesel hydraulic roster so my views on the class 41 have mellowed... to the extent that I have now splashed out on one of the Worsley Works kits.
     
    Rather than dithering for ages over the choice of prototype (after all, there are only 5 choices) I have selected my intended loco before starting this build. It will be D604 'Cossack' - the last one built. Like their smaller class 22 cousins, the class 41s went through a lot of detailed changes in spite of their extremely short lives, so choosing the combination of these changes is another important step. I've gone for August 1965 on the basis of a photo in Strathwood's 'Looking back at Warships' showing D604 at Laira in work-worn condition. This was not her final condition because all of the class were fitted with 4 character headcode boxes before the end... but in my view these always looked like an afterthought, apart from being a pain to fit to the model.
     
    So, to the model... step 1 was to cut a socking great hole in the side. Why? - after checking photos I found that the layout of one side was incorrect. The BR crest and nameplate should always be to the right of the centre door, but on the etch I received there was a boiler filler door and a louvre vent in the way. I thought briefly about whether I could live with this but it didn't take very long to reach an answer so I drilled 4 holes a short distance away from each corner of the louvre and used a coping saw to turn these into a square cutout with a reasonable margin outside the louvre vent.
     

     
    I then chopped a second hole in the new intended location and after a fair amount of fitting and filing I soldered the louvre into its new location. I then tidied up the first hole and cut a piece of 10 thou to fill this in. The etched boiler filler door was filled with solder and all of the solder joints scraped and sanded flush. I doubt whether the fix will be completely invisible but once the nameplates etc are in place I think it will be very inconspicuous. I will fit new boiler fillers to both sides using the Etched Pixels parts. In case anybody else is considering this kit, I have contacted Allen about the error and he has corrected his artwork based on the prototype photos that I sent him.
     

     
    Step 2 was to further butcher the sides. One of the earliest changes to these locos was the removal of the louvres over the upper air intakes for the cooler groups.
    The modified intakes seem to consist of a very fine vertical ribs which are practically invisible in many photos. Unfortunately neither the original kit nor the detailing pack from Etched Pixels caters for this configuration - a shame because the locos spent the majority of their lives in this condition. I convinced myself that I had at least one way to represent the later intakes before hacking out all of the upper louvres. I found the best way to do this was with a sharp knife with a piece of steel behind the etch, keeping a stone handy to resharpen the knife at regular intervals. Once the majority of the louvres were removed I cleaned up carefully with needle files, taking care not to distort the remaining pillars.
     
    I mentioned the Etched Pixels detailing pack. This contains some extremely fine overlay etches for the louvres. They are beautiful etches but on a practical level I could not see how I was going to be able to use them - they are at a finer pitch that the Worsley louvres so could not simply be overlaid. I could have removed all of the Worsley louvres but this would have left the new etches unsupported and I don't think they would survive normal handling without some sort of backing. In the end I reluctantly decided to save these etches for a future project.
     
    After completing the butchery of the sides it was time to fold up the main body and fit the two bulkheads. This has gone in a similar manner to the class 22 so I won't repeat the description. The ends of course are rather more complex than the class 22. The kit provides a fold up inner support for the nose which I fitted next. The cab window surrounds were the next item. The side etch has a smooth curve between the windscreen pillar and the nose but photos show this to be incorrect, so I filed this to a sharp corner which also simplified the fitting of the windscreen surround.
     
    That's about all in terms of progress on the body for now. Here's how it looks right now.
     

     
    Given the smooth running of the class 22 I spent some time searching for a pinpoint bearing chassis but was unable to find anything with suitable dimensions... actually that's not quite true - the US 'Erie Built' diesel is about right and there is a reasonably modern model but apparently they are like hen's teeth, so pinching a chassis from one of these is very unlikely to happen. Instead I've gone for the usual option of a Farish class 47. I've opted for a BachFar one because the class 47 bogie centres are too far apart for the class 41. I intend to shorten the bogie centres in the same way that I did for the Western. The chassis is in the process of having various changes made (e.g. improving pickups) but I'll spare you the photo of what looks pretty much like an off the shelf item.
  6. D869

    Umm... Research Trip?

    By D869,

    Thought it was time for some first hand research regarding what's so great about the railways of the south west...
     
    We're in coach A
     
    Films are by other peeps...
     
     
    Wrong sea wall for St Ruth but just to show that other sea walls are available...
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc5ox1tZ6sI
     
    Signal checks on the return journey at Goodrington, Newton Abbott and Exeter meant that Britannia was putting in some serious effort by the time we got to Cowley Bridge Junction... and me with my head out of the window.
     
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qz9Yx9Pq5k
  7. D869

    Your Starter for Ten

    By D869,

    Our next planned outing should be TINGS near Leamington Spa in early September although the show web site is curiously shy about our presence and that of another 2FS layout of this parish which I'm told will be in attendance.
     
    There are still a few more buildings needed and some of these may appear before September but I think it's time to make a start on another aspect (get it?) of the infrastructure - the signals.
     
    St Ruth needs a lot of signals so there is zero chance that they will be finished any time soon but they certainly won't get finished until we start on them.
     
    The first thing we need is a plan. This has been work in progress for a long time - the original plan was created before the control panel and then drawn using a PCB design tool. The printout became the template for the control panel. Our understanding of the way we will operate St Ruth has now moved on so there have been some changes such as adding full running signals to allow departures via the east crossover. I re-drew the control panel overlay using some free software called 'Dia'. The new plan is rather closer to the conventions used by the drawing office at Reading but it wasn't possible to get it exactly right because of limitations of the tool.
     
    Here is a PDF of the new plan. It is oddly shaped in places because it needs to fit over the existing switches on the control panel. struthsigplan.pdf
     
    We've tried to avoid inventing our own arrangements and have tried to find precedents from the prototype as much as possible. It's probably best described as a hybrid of the pre and post 1938 plans for Penzance with the addition of the branch line and goods loop. The signals for the east crossover are based on the postwar arrangement at Newquay which also gives us an excuse for a GWR backing signal. The trickiest part was the branch because there doesn't seem to be a perfect precedent for a single line junction joining a double track line within the limits of a terminus station. The closest I've found is the arrangement of the spur from Barnstaple North into Barnstaple Junction but it's not a perfect match and is only partly GWR.
     
    I am sure that signalling lawyers could pick hols in the plan but we've done our best to stick to the rules and get it right. Looking at the plan again I am thinking of some further minor changes - arm 62 might become a disc because it only covers shunt moves unless the branch points fail again and 65 should probably be lower than 15. The three doll bracket might also gain a slotted distant arm for the next box to the east.
     
    So far we have one signal which is mostly finished. This is the starting signal from the arrivals platform (number 68) and is one of the very few single arm signals on the plan. It has the extra advantages of lacking a rule 55 diamond and having its balance weights hidden below platform level. The intention is to operate all of the signals using servos as described in MRJ 201. This signal has been fitted with a servo on a test rig and seems to work OK.
     
    The signal also has a working lamp. This consists of a tiny white LED to which some enamelled wire is soldered. This is contained inside a short length of heat shrink sleeving in which two holes are drilled for the lens and backlight. A short length of 1mm styrene rod is pushed into the top and the whole thing painted black. It is pretty close to the shape of a GW signal lamp but perhaps a little 'chunky'. The power feed for the lamp comes via a resistor under the baseboard and then up the ladder as
    described in the 2mm handbook. The lamp man's platform is some thin double sided PCB with one side used for structural solder joints and the other side used for the lamp power feed.
     
    There is still some more 'development' work to do. We haven't yet finalised our servo controller approach. I used a 555 timer circuit (see photo) to get the thing working initially and we tried out a MERG SERVO4 unit yesterday. There will be some more head scratching about powering the LEDs on multi-arm signals because the easy thing to do would be to wire them in parallel but I'm told that having LEDs in parallel sharing a single resistor is a bad idea. I'm sure that using the first few signals at a real exhibition will also reveal some more problems for us to think about. The jury is still out on the colour for the post. I tried metalcote 'steel' but this was too dark so the signal was repainted in light grey which looks less wrong. I now have some metalcote 'aluminium' which I will try on the next signal.
     

     
    Here are some pics of the signal on its test rig and temporarily fitted to the platform at St Ruth. The clear signal was a bit of a cheat because the photo was taken before the servo was fitted. The servo is now in place, albeit with no controller or wiring yet.
     

     

     
    Now I'm working on the second signal. This one is rather more complex and provides lots of new challenges for me to think about, but more about that another day.
  8. D869

    Resurrection

    By D869,

    My workbench sits in a bay window that gets the full sun in the afternoon. I had a bit of modelling time on Friday but it was just too hot to be spending time sat at the workbench. Sometimes I set up in the back garden with something fairly self contained like assembling some bogie kits, but I already have several bogies assembled and waiting for coaches to make use of them.
     
    I've been buying and building a lot of coaches recently to run on St Ruth. I've enjoyed doing this but it's always a bit disappointing that I can't run them except when we have St Ruth fully set up - South Yard can't hold more than a couple of Mark 1s - hardly an impressive train and even then they can't go anywhere.
     
    I had a bit of an idea. About twenty years ago when we lived in our old house I started a branch terminus layout called 'Taw Bridge' based on the track plan of Swanage. It was 8 feet by one foot and used to live on top of some long bookshelves. We moved to our current house 16 years ago but Taw Bridge has no suitable home and has been languishing unfinished in the garage and gathering dust ever since. The temperature in the garage on Friday was pretty bearable so I thought I would see if Taw Bridge still worked.
     
    Having scraped the worst of the dust off the first question was whether I could get the points to move. These are operated from a Gem lever frame connected via a mechanical locking tray to wire in tube under the baseboard. Initially just one point lever would move (surprisingly it was part of the double slip). The locking tray seemed OK but most of the steel wires had seized in the copper (Mercontrol) tubes. A bit of oil and some persistent wiggling managed to free up three of the point levers. The only one that remained stuck was the release crossover but this had other issues anyway - one of the tiebars was missing.
     
    Next step was to arrange some juice. I still use the original transformer box on South Yard, so that wasn't a problem. Before plugging it in I checked for shorts in the panel with a multimeter - no problem. Plugging in the power didn't blow any fuses and I was able to trace the 16V AC feed through the panel - result! On to hooking up a controller... This was a bit trickier because I've changed to mini-DIN connectors since abandoning Taw Bridge. I had to make up an adapter. I made this up to the pin wiring suggested by the Abingdon MRC because this is the standard that we now use on St Ruth. Unfortunately Taw Bridge was wired with a different arrangement (from Helsby, Tumill and Haddon if anyone remembers that) so I also had to re-wire the socket on the panel.
     
    Having completed the wiring changes, I hooked up a controller and the lights came on. I then plugged the control panel into the centre board, cleaned some track in the goods yard, plonked a loco on it, turned the section switches on... turned the controller knob... nothing.
     
    I then tried the platform road and this time... success! Taw Bridge was up and running for the first time in 16 years. After some more track cleaning I was able to run the loco on the run round loop and even drive in some directions through the double slip. One of the tiebars had detached so it wasn't all working. I also found that the loco stalled on the other side of the slip and vaguely remembered that this was a deliberate safety feature - a module needed to be plugged in to the fiddle yard before this track became live. That reminded me about the way that the goods yard wiring worked. It has a kick-back siding and the section switch only does anything when the siding points are reversed. I reversed these points and the goods yard started working too.
     
    At this point time was up but I was pretty pleased that Taw Bridge still worked - the wiring had survived 16 years of disuse without a problem. The (soldered PCB) track was still capable of running trains. Even the points and double slip were mostly working - with the exception of a few where the tiebars had come adrift.
     
    So I put Taw Bridge away again slightly more carefully. Next time I shall fix up the tiebars on the double slip and eventually repair the release crossover and its operating linkage. The basic homelessness problem remains, as do some issues with the baseboard joints and all of the other mistakes that I made when designing and building it so I don't see any prospect of it acquiring any scenery or any more buildings in the forseeable future but at least it will see some occasional use even if only as a test track.
     
    Finally a picture of Taw Bridge in all its unfinished glory lit by the sun streaming through the garage windows.
     

  9. D869

    Reducing Gloatage

    By D869,

    I thought it was time for a few words and pictures to update folks about the latest happenings chez moi. Things have settled down to a more err... leisurely... pace since Nottingham and I've been trying to get some of those half finished projects completed and reduce the level of overcrowding in the gloat box (this never works, I know).
     
    One item that didn't quite make Nottingham was one of two Association CCT kits. I've now finished painting it. Fetching it out for a photo reminds me that I still need to fit some handrails. There isn't much to say about this other than that I followed the instructions and it went together pretty much according to plan. The only departure was for the buffers because pretty much everything suitable was out of stock. I didn't want to hold the model up just for this so I used some buffer heads from the Association shop and brass tube for the stocks.

     
    The Thompson BG was one of two Ultima kits that I bought before Nottingham and intended to build ready for the show. Our practice session showed that we needed more locos, so Western Talisman got built instead. I'm glad that I did the Western because the BG proved rather more challenging than expected. The main problems were with the fit of the various body parts and also a moulding defect in the roof that needed to be fixed with filler. Nothing insurmountable but it did rather reduce my motivation to get on with the build. You can see some of the extent of the extra packing and filling in the photo below. You can also see my gangway end plates made from 15 thou black plastikard because the etched ones in the kit didn't look right - especially at the bottom. There is also zero chance of bare brass shining through any damaged paint with my solution.

     
    The roof provided with this kit is a Bulleid roof rather than a Thompson one so it needs some modification to the rainstrips and destination board brackets. I departed from the instructions by keeping the upper strip and shortening the lower one to represent the strip at the top of the destination brackets. The end result isn't quite right but neither would it have been if I'd followed the instructions and just deleted the upper strip. I didn't fancy trying to add new strips - I have never found a way to do them that looks anywhere near as good as the moulded ones.

     
    The hood vents over the doors are provided as etches in the kit but I couldn't see a nice way to hold these in the correct alignment while soldering them. Glue didn't seem like a nice option either (visions of them falling off during or after painting). Instead I used some nickel silver strip. This was almost cut through with a knife to the correct length and a slight bend introduced at the point of the cut. The strip could then be used as a 'handle' to locate the vent while it was soldered in place. Once the vent was fixed the rest of the strip was snapped off. I wasn't too hopeful when I came up with this idea but it worked a treat.
     
    One final problem became apparent after assembly - the bogies seemed too far from the ends. This is a 'foreign' vehicle for me so I don't have a big pile of books about LNER coaches to check the dimensions. A query on the (excellent) BRCS Yahoo group yielded the major dimensions. Checking the model against these proved that my gut feel was correct. I've since exchanged emails with Mr Ultima and apparently there was a mistake on the artwork - the bogie centres were to 2mm scale but the rest of the coach is to 'N' scale. I unsoldered the bogie pivots, filed new holes to the correct centres for 'N' scale and refitted the pivots. The result was a big improvement.

     
    The bogies are Association kits bought in some haste before Nottingham. There were several alternatives available, so I rather guessed which ones to buy. The BRCS posting also yielded the correct bogie wheelbase (8 feet). Surprisingly I had actually bought the right wheelbase. Further discussion on the thread brought me to the realisation that they were still the wrong bogies though - they should be the heavyweight variety. Ho hum. I will order the right ones next time I'm buying stuff but in the meantime the BG can keep these ones.
     
    The plan is to follow a photo in Dave Larkin's Bradford Barton parcels stock book and paint this vehicle in unlined maroon as E18E. It will probably replace the Hawksworth BG in the mail train. Neither BG is any more out of place than the other but the high windows on the Thomson BG seem more 'in the style' for a mail train. The Hawksworth BG will then be freed up for the milk train which currently lacks any guard's accommodation - fine for the early 1970s but not so good for the mid 60s.
     
    And finally... following the success of my recent theme 'building stuff that is then announced by Farish or Dapol', I am now trying a new theme - 'writing about kits that other people can't buy'. The Thompson kits are now unavailable because there are no remaining stocks of the roof mouldings. Still, I hope you enjoyed the read anyway.
  10. D869
    I tried to convince these folks of the merits of Easitrac or even soldered PCB construction, but they seemed happy with their own way of doing things
     
    http://youtu.be/0jFZReHQTTE
     
    Still, they managed to lay about 12 feet of track in under 5 minutes, so maybe it's not a bad approach.
     
    Their next move was to rip it all up again, which sounds a lot like what some people write about on RMWeb, so I think that there's hope for them yet.
  11. D869

    A Tale of Two Westerns

    By D869,

    I noticed during the first of our St Ruth test days before Nottingham that we were having to do rather a lot more loco swapping and sharing between trains than I was comfortable with. This prompted me into a re-evaluation of my gloat box to see if I could scrape together some more motive power... pronto. The first thing to make it out was a Farish warship - Hermes. This was a really minimalist conversion - wheels turned down by the Association's wheel turning service (the warship has a smaller gear than most locos, so there are no drop-in wheels available) plus some DG couplings and away it went in time for our second test session, but that's not what this post is about.
     
    The second 'new' loco involved rather more work - I had been taking a look at a Poole Western (Courier) that had been languishing since new. I had the wheels turned down for this years ago but had done nothing else to it. On putting it on the track I found that it was not running properly at all and the usual remedies weren't working, so my attention moved to another gloat box resident - a China made BachFar Western (Fusilier) that I picked up in a moment of rashness on eBay a couple of years ago. This had had literally nothing done to it but on transplanting Courier's wheels I found that it ran pretty happily so there was my starting point.
     
    I could have just turned out Fusilier as a minimalist conversion, after all the BachFar product is a significant improvement in terms of the paint job over the early Poole offering, but somehow I just couldn't bring myself to accept the moulding lines, the cab windows sticking out past the roof and most of all the split front skirts to accommodate 'N' gauge curves.
     
    Back in the dim and distant past I converted another Farish (Poole) Western to 2mm with some upgrades for the worst aspects of the Poole product. This is D1051 which you can see in the photos, chosen based on the nice double page portrait of 1051 at Laira in the Bradford Barton 'Westerns' book. I decided to upgrade Fusilier along the same lines, but using a second hand (green - yuck!) body as the basis so that I could keep Fusilier's body in reserve just in case I didn't finish in time.
     
    To cut a long story short, the new loco was ready to roll on Thursday evening in time for the setup day at Nottingham. By then it had transfers but no actual identity because I needed to pick up name and number plates from Shawplan when I got to the show. After getting home that evening I still had to fit the engine room glazing and said name and number plates in time for Saturday morning.
     
    The Farish interpretation of the class 52 is noticeably too long, but if that was going to be fixed... well... I wouldn't start from here. The changes involved cleaning up the moulding lines, replacing the glazing (including the engine room glazing that isn't glazing at all), lowering the body, correcting the middle skirts and cutting proper apertures for the various fillers plus handrails, lamp brackets, headcodes etc. Probably the biggest change is to the front skirts - new ones were fabricated from Plastikard with the 'T' shaped recess for the buffer beam and couplings that is such a feature of the front end... and that is the one thing that makes this upgrade a bit tricky...
     
    The problem with fitting new skirts is that the ends of the bogie want to be in the same place. Shortening this end of the bogie is not a good option because the keeper retaining clips are right at the end. For 1051 I solved the problem by turning both bogies around. The other end of the bogie is shorter so this gives enough clearance behind the skirt. The motor magnet was also reversed to make the loco run in the expected direction. This was not an option with the Bachfar mechanism because the gear tower is offset towards the end of the loco. I noticed that the bogie pivot on the Bachfar chassis is moveable - there are several notches in the chassis block that give a choice of positions for the pivot. Turning the pivot around gives more options. The main snag is that if you move the pivot then the plastic driveshaft is too long so I made a new driveshaft from brass tube and brass rod and found to my surprise that the chassis still ran just as well with this installed. My modified chassis has bogie centres 3mm shorter than the original. This is spot on for the Western but there are plenty more dimensional issues, so it's a minor victory. It does mean that the front skirts are correctly proportioned from the side view, which is something that is not quite right on 1051.
     
    The paint job involved spraying the fronts white and then yellow, followed by masking the warning panels and an overall coat of maroon. I used Precision maroon but added some Humbrol 153 red to lighten it a bit because I think that the Precision colour looks a bit too dark when compared with most photos. Transfers are resurrected Woodheads again.
     
    The loco ran well at Nottingham... considering that it consists of bits of 4 different locos bodged together in a hurry. The wheels are a very mixed bunch because I'd already stolen four of Courier's axles for my class 25 and didn't want to take the 25 apart again just before a show. Some of them have also had split gears replaced and are a little bit wonky as a result and only two of them have the faces profiled as they should be. I might treat it to some new drop-in wheels as a reward, but then again I might just get its original wheels turned down and save the extra pennies for Mr Dapol. There are still some jobs left to do - like a cab interior to hide the rather prominent worm gears, the fillers that didn't get done in time and some brake rigging on the bogies, plus some fiddly painting to represent the window pillars. I'll also weather it, but not too much because I intend to represent the loco in a pretty clean condition.
     
    Oh, the identity... I wanted a maroon loco with small warning panels to fit in with the mid 60s nominal date for St Ruth but I also wanted one that stayed in this scheme for a long time. My first choices were Western Lancer or Trooper and I emailed Shawplan to ask them if I could pick these plates up form them on the Friday evening. To their credit, they did indeed sort out the plates that I asked for... and then left them back at their base. We also both managed to leave behind my email with the list of choices but I remembered that third choice was Western Talisman which was still maroon in July 1969 and finally came to a nasty end in the Ealing accident in 1973. Shawplan had the Talisman plates on their stand, so the decision was made. I'm not sure if the maroon Talisman and the blue Ambassador could really have stood next to each other, but there is only a year between two dated photos that I have of them in those liveries, so maybe.
     
    No doubt my efforts will be eclipsed soon my Mr Dapol, but his new release will be too late to have helped our motive power situation at Nottingham. I'm not sure if it's fate but I seem to have developed a nasty habit of building models that are the subject of releases by the main manufacturers - the sleeping cars and the Western were both done knowingly, but I also have an incomplete Mark 2 FK and you can probably just see a maroon CCT in one of the photos - both recently announced by Farish.
     
    Some more pictures of Talisman and Ambassador lined up side by side on South Yard. I must dust that platform though.
     


  12. D869

    A Grand Two Days Out

    By D869,

    Just back from St Ruth's first 'real' outing at the Nottingham show. I really enjoyed myself and I think the rest of the team did too.
     
    It was really nice to be in a 2mm finescale 'ghetto' surrounded on three sides by Fencehouses, Brafferton and Annedale Town. At times the number of 2mm Association faces in attendance made me wonder if we weren't at a 2mm Expo. The quality of the whole show was well up to its usual standard - this is a show that I attend as a 'punter' pretty much every year but this was my first time on the other side of the barrier.
     
    The layout behaved itself very well, in large part due to the two test days that we spent knocking the rough edges off its reliability. There were some gremlins, however - mainly in the guise of annoying derailments, vertical alignment on the baseboard joint nearest the fiddle yard and the joint onto the fiddle yard traverser being probably the worst offenders. We also had the branch junction point fail on Sunday lunchtime and had to spend the rest of the day with the point fixed in the branch direction. Happily the east crossover allowed us to bypass the problem and carry on as normal.
     
    On the whole I'm just glad that the layout and stock all kept working for two days (not to mention the operators) and slightly relieved that the mad scramble to get everything ready is over. No doubt all of our better halves have a list of household activities saved up for us.
     
    I didn't have time to spend on posed photos, but here are a few pics from the weekend.
     

    I'm sure there's room for a few more things in there.
     

    Serious business, this playing trains.
     

    The goods yard looking less congested than it did at some points of the day.
  13. D869

    Nighty Night

    By D869,

    One of my jobs for St Ruth is the preparation of the operating sequence so that we don't get stuck in a rut of just running the same trains up and down. I've done this by referring to the WR working timetables for Cornwall for the late 1960s and the excellent carriage working information available on the BRCS Yahoo group. This material has provided plenty of ideas for introducing variety into our train services without the need to depart from reality. One of these ideas was the working of a sleeping car/Motorail service to arrive in St Ruth each morning with the return working in the evening. With the announcement of sleeping cars by Graham Farish, this service became a possibility so I put it into the schedule.
     
    Those who have been checking the Farish web site waiting for new coaches to be available may have noticed that the sleepers are currently 'on order' and have been so since at least last November. When I spoke to Farish on their stand at Warley last year they told me that they were 'imminent', but so far they don't seem to have appeared. The GUV and BG also seem to have gone back a month. I could have just removed the train from the schedule, but I didn't really want to do that so I decided to create a 'Plan B' for the Nottingham show if the Farish sleepers weren't available by the start of February. While the train would be a bit short, I thought I could manage to put two coaches together if I got my skates on.
     
    I found that ERG do vinyl sides for the Mark 1 sleepers and that Ultima also do an etched overlay intended for the older Farish coaches. Now Mark 1 sleeping cars have a lot of differences from 'normal' coaches apart from just the sides, so I thought that just overlaying the sides wouldn't really be my style even though it would probably be enough to convince most people most of the time. I also dislike the roof fitting on the old Farish Mark 1s, so I decided on a quite different plan with the help of my gloat box…
     
    A long long time ago when the very first Farish Mark 1s were released, I decided that they were not for me. Instead I opted to buy up a whole bunch of the (then) Fleetline Mark 1 kits along with a couple of Mark 2s and some parcels vans (but no sleepers, even though these were available). This was a fine plan at the time, but with the exception of a single Mark 2 TSO and a GUV, none of them have ever made it to become completed models. Nowadays the new Farish coaches mean that most of them probably never will, so it seemed like a good idea to re-purpose two of these kits by using the (excellent) Ultima etched sides.
     
    So here you have some pictures of the results. They are in running order but still waiting for some paint touch-ups, gangway end plates and their loo filler pipes, but the sun was streaming in through the windows earlier, so I thought it too good a chance to miss and took some photos.
     




     
    I don't intend to write a detailed account of construction because I seriously doubt whether (assuming that the Farish coaches will eventually appear) anyone would want to follow this path. Suffice it to say that the Fleetline body mouldings were used, with 0.5mm of packing to suit the extra height of the Ultima sides. The ends are plastikard filed to shape because the Fleetline white metal ends are not up to scratch. Here's a picture from before the paint shop.
     

     
    I used Ultima Commonwealth bogies instead of the BR1s in the Fleetline kit because these are more typical for sleeping cars in the late 60s. One vehicle has Ultima etched underframe detail (because I had one pack in the gloat box), the other has detail cobbled together from Fleetline and various other bits from my scrap box.
    The paint job is similar to my Hawksworth BG. I mostly managed to get the maroon 'right first time' although a stray hair forced a rub down and respray for one side. For the most part the lining came out slightly better than on the Hawksworth, probably because the underlying paint finish is better. Transfers are (as before), from a resurrected Woodhead sheet. The waist lining on the compartment side is too high up due to haste on my part, but I didn't notice the mistake until it was too late (at which time a suitable form of words was uttered), so it will just have to stay that way now.
     
    I noticed after my sides had arrived that Ultima's catalogue had been updated and that the sleeper sides have now been changed to 'special order', presumably in anticipation of the Farish sleepers, so if anybody else does want some then they will need to ask Alan to etch some just for them.
     
    So these two coaches should be in use on St Ruth at Nottingham in just over a week's time. As a final bit of serendipity, I remembered that my first four Fleetline kits were purchased at the Nottingham show (when it was at Victoria Baths) in 1984.
  14. D869
    Work continues to get the layout ready for the Nottingham show. For my own part I've finally completed work on the Hotel Royale and its neighbouring houses.
     

     
    As those who know the real thing may notice, I have omitted the glazed 'sun deck' over the entrance that existed in the 1960s and 70s and backdated the building to its original form. Due to lack of photos, I have had to speculate a little on how the entrance might have looked before this was added. In particular I have assumed that the big beam that is present today was added to hold up the 'sun deck' and was not part of the original structure. The two shop fronts on the ground floor of each wing may seem very odd (they do to me), but I have a 1960s photo and this is exactly what was there - both of them apparently without any sign of being active business premises.
     
    I found this quite an interesting building to get to know. When I look at the model on its own it makes me think of Miami or some of the posh flats in north London. When I plug the cottages onto the side of it it takes on a quite different character - rather making me wonder who thought it was a good idea to plonk a big art deco building into the middle of a street of more typically Cornish houses. I am also puzzled by the two shop fronts - if anything they seem even more out of place than the building itself. My theory is that they are evidence of the aspirations of the people who built the hotel - to turn the area into a modern hotel and shopping district, but then a certain Austrian decided to invade Poland and the rest is history.
     
    One of the reasons that it took so long is that I got rather bogged down with the internal walls. The intention is that the building will be lit at some point in the future so it needs a reasonably full set of internal walls and floors, plus provision to allow the light into the relevant rooms. This all had to be done in a way that allowed access to install glazing, interior detail and so on, so all of the internal stuff is made as a set of removeable boxes - 21 of them in all. I had planned to lay out all of the internal stuff for a photo but having persuaded them all to go into the building I didn't really want to take them out again. Here's a photo from the back of the building (which is close to the backscene) so that you can see how it all fits together.
     

     
    Other members have contributed more buildings than I have, but persuading them to write about it is another matter...
     
    Edit... in answer to Pete's question about how the windows are made...
     
    The windows are done using the Bob Moore pen and Humbrol gloss 41 paint. To get everything evenly spaced I made some stepped jigs from plastikard. The principle is simple - line everything up against the graph paper below the glass, put the steps on the steel ruler. Put the (bevelled) plastikard ruler on the top step and rule the first line. Move the steps outward and repeat. In two sessions with the pen I get a big sheet of windows.
     

     
    There were quite a lot of rejects - mainly whole sheets that went wrong because the paint spread into a blurry line for some reason. I have no idea why because it was the same paint, same sheet of clear sheet and the same pen. In the end I bought a new sheet and the problem went away.
  15. D869

    New Stock Boxes

    By D869,

    There has been quite a lot of activity chez mois in preparation for St Ruth's forthcoming appearance at Nottingham, mainly on the buildings front as those watching the St Ruth blog will have seen. This has meant something of a hiatus in areas like locos and rolling stock because once I get started on these the buildings won't get a look in.
     
    Those who saw St Ruth at the Oxford Expo in 2010 may have noticed a lack of many things including (but not limited to) coaches. This show came at an awkward time because it was a few months before Farish released their excellent Blue Riband Mark 1 coaches, so we needed more coaches but we didn't want to spend money on things that would be eclipsed by the shiny new offerings.
     
    Anyway, that isn't such an issue now and the credit cards have been in action on several occasions since then to acquire some of the nice new things. The only snag being that until recently, they were all sat in a carrier bag inside their original boxes - hardly a convenient way to take them to and from shows, so something had to be done.
     
    Some years ago when I needed a stock box I did a 'proper' job and made one from wood and ply with modules inside that would plug into my then layout. Nice, but rather time consuming. This time I decided to opt for a solution that could be done in the bare minimum of time.
     
    The trick was to find some sturdy boxes that were just a little larger inside than the height of a coach. The first thing I found was a gift box which once contained some socks. This was then lined with 5mm foam board and some partitions made from the same material. One partition was made from mounting board in order to squeeze 5 rows in. This is a handy box for parcels vehicles but is too short to fit two 64ft coaches end to end. The second box looks almost like a quality product (provided that you don't look to closely). In fact it is a box which once contained a children's painting set (the paints had already been used by said children I hasten to add). After ripping out the vacuum formed plastic inserts and getting rid of the strange adhesive that held them in place (something that looks rather like it might have come out of your nose), the box was lined and partitioned with 5mm foamboard.
     
    I didn't keep track of the time for the first one, but the second one took less than 90 minutes to make and cost me pretty close to nothing.
     
    Both boxes are already full of coaches, so I'm on the lookout for other suitable items to recycle.
     


  16. D869

    Building Buildings

    By D869,

    There is a bit of a theme to our lives at the moment... getting the buildings built.
     
    We have accepted an invite to the Nottingham show in March next year so it's now all hands to the pumps to get a reasonable set of buildings into place on the layout. Most of us have little or no prior experience of doing this, but I think that everyone has produced good results.
     
    The photos below were taken at our most recent meeting where we had most of the current crop of buildings in place on the layout... although unfortunately the backscenes were not fitted and I'm not such a dab hand with Photoshop as Mr Nevard of this parish... still, best to save some things for the show maybe.
     
    There are still some unfinished buildings and several that have not yet been started but I think that (as a project manager I once worked with would always say) 'progress is good'.
     

    The low relief warehouses are coming along behind Dick's station but the goods shed is conspicuous by its absence.
     

    Glyn's signal box, Chris's terrace and John's shops. Chris has now accepted the commission for the Cliff Hotel which will fill in the big gap in this photo.
     

    The Royale Hotel (mine) and its neighbours (John and Chris's). They will hopefully be at rather less jaunty angles before show time. Work on the houses to the east of the hotel is underway.
     

    I think that Chris is winning the stakes for the most buildings made. This is his latest residence.
  17. D869

    Half Term at South Yard

    By D869,

    I thought I would introduce South Yard by concentrating on what it is for so here is a picture of South Yard set up in the holiday cottage that we rented last week for our half-term holiday on the North York Moors.
     

     
    I don't claim any originality in any of South Yard's ideas (or the title of this posting) - the main inspiration came from David Mallott's 'Chapel Wharf', particularly his idea of having a layout that could easily be taken on holiday to provide entertainment in case of inclement weather. Fortunately we didn't have very much inclement weather, but the nights are drawing in so there was plenty of opportunity to run some freight traffic. There might have been passenger traffic too if I had remembered to take the bubble car.
     
    South Yard was conceived a long time ago - probably about 2001 as a 'quick' ultra-portable micro layout. I'd partially built a bigger 2mm layout some time prior to this but a house move left it with no suitable place to live. If the 2012 RMWeb challenge is for the longest time to build the least amount of layout then I reckon I'll be in the running.
     
    South Yard is set in the back streets of Plymouth. The fictional story is that the LSWR wanted to gain their own access to the Royal Naval Dockyard at Devonport and so built a line off their Stonehouse Pool branch to reach the southern portion of the dockyard (which really is called South Yard) and gain access to the yard's internal rail network via a gate in the yard wall near to the rope walk. A small station was also provided to cater for the yard workforce and local populace. This fiction probably has quite a few holes including some questionable gradients and the elimination of several streets near the yard, but is perhaps no less plausible than the real thing which involved the burrowing of a restricted height tunnel on the internal railway between the various parts of the dockyard.
     
    The setting and built environment draws much from David Mallott's inspiration - the Turnchapel Branch, although I've lifted bits of Turnchapel station rather than the wharf and grafted them onto a track layout mostly inspired by John Spencer's Ruyton Road. The dockyard gate was originally inspired by the entrance to Coypool depot from the Marsh Mills branch, although you'd be hard pressed to spot any similarity now. The road bridge and scenic break is from further afield - Exeter Central, the story being that a road widening scheme required replacement of an older bridge. The provender store was recycled from my older layout and was based on the photos of Barnstaple cement depot in the first MRJ Compendium. Finally, the coal merchant's office is based on a photo of the back of a building at Welshpool and pure speculation regarding how the front might have looked.
     

     
    My original definition of 'ultra portable' was that it should fit into a single compartment of a flight bag (not that I ever intended to take it on a flight). This dictated the 10 by 16 inch area available for the layout and also that it should pack down into something not more than a couple of inches in height. There is no fiddle yard, just an adapter that allows modules to be plugged in. The other ends of the modules are supported by a book of suitable thickness. Here's the layout just back from holiday and still without any of its removeable scenic bits.
     

     
    South Yard has never actually travelled in the flight bag as originally intended because I was given a rectangular brief case for which I had no real use other than as South Yard's new carry case. This also allowed me to postpone the construction of the originally planned protective case for South Yard.
     
    It would be nice to say that South Yard packs down into a nicely designed box complete with integral storage for stock and buildings. It would be nice but it wouldn't be true. The layout itself including buildings, scenery and fiddle yard modules all pack rather untidily into the brief case.
     

     
    The briefcase then travels in company with a Morrison's shopping bag containing the somewhat bulky power supply (also recycled from my old layout), controller, locos and stock plus a small toolkit and a box with whatever projects I'm optimistically planning to work on while I'm away. Speaking of which, here are the products from three separate weeks' holidays during the summer and Autumn.
     

     
    Happily, South Yard has completely fulfilled its original purpose and has been taken on holiday on several occasions as well as playing its regular role as the permanent test track in my study/workshop.
     
    There is still plenty more to do - the bare bones of the scenery is done (which is a major achievement compared to my previous layouts) but there is plenty more work to do in terms of detailing the coal yard and adding more vegetation. The dockyard could use some actual gates plus an extra module adapter to allow trains to be shunted through them.
  18. D869

    Royale Hotel

    By D869,

    A quick pic of (early!) work in progress on the next building that I owe to St Ruth, along with a rough mock-up.
     

     
    The plan is to try to follow the 'Pendon cottage' style of construction (well, sort of) - the key point being to cut the external walls from a single piece of card (0.7mm in this case) to avoid any joins. External corners will be formed (I hope) by creating a 'V' cut behind the corner and removing most of the thickness of the card... well, it worked for a PW hut but this is a bit bigger.
     
    Here's a photo the real thing taken in 2006. It is not a hotel now - it has been converted into flats.
     

     
    I have a number of photos showing the hotel in earlier times but they all share a common problem - they are taken from the level of the railway, so the retaining wall hides most of the ground floor. Right now I have no idea what the ground floor looked like when the building was a hotel. I do know that there were a lot of changes in this area - for example 1970s photos show a glazed sun deck (now removed) at first floor level over the entrance area but 1940s photos prove that this was a later addition. Unless I can get better information I will need to assume that the conversion to flats has basically restored the original appearance of the ground floor. This is certainly partly true, but I doubt whether the truth is quite so simple. Any help would be appreciated.
     
    Ironically, I was stood opposite the hotel in the early 1980s and took a couple of photos, but my camera was pointed towards the trains and of course I took zero notice of the buildings behind me.
  19. D869
    The full brake has now been handed over to the operating department.
     

     
    The painting sent somewhat less than smoothly (this is normal for me). A coat of Halfords primer from a can was followed by an airbrushed coat of precision maroon. This went on very well and I was very happy with the nice smooth satin finish... except... there were a couple of bits of dust that embedded themselves into the finish in quite a prominent place.
     
    I thought the best option would be to remove the offending bits of dust and rub the relevant area down smooth followed by a further thin coat, so that's what I did. This didn't go well - I think that I over thinned the second coat so the emulsion broke down a bit and the resulting finish was very flat indeed - nowhere near as good as the first coat.
     
    I decided to press on and hope that a final varnish coat would sort everything out. The underframe and ends were brush painted with a suitably mucky mix of brown and black. Some of this strayed onto the sides and was cleaned off with thinners but still left some residue, probably because of the flatness of the finish.
     
    The lining was done with the Bob Moore pen. While my results are not as neat as commercial lining, they turned out better than I had hoped - particularly the waist line which was done with the thick nib to put down a broad light yellow line (this looked awful on its own!) followed by the thinnest nib to draw a black line down the middle. One drawback of this method is that it is not for the impatient. The actual lining is quite quick to do, but there is a lot of waiting for the paint to harden. In this case, the lining took four sessions - one for each colour per side.
     
    I'm very unsure about the maroon colour. I'm pretty sure that Precision have done their homework and matched the spec of BR maroon, but comparing it to mid 1960s photos, the real thing appears to be noticeably lighter and redder. This may be a problem related to 1960s film but I don't think so. Some 60s photos show several coaches and demonstrate that there was significant variation in the real thing, perhaps due to fading. Photos of maroon Warships in later years show some quite ugly effects from patch repainting. In future I might lighten the shade by mixing in another colour.
     
    The lettering was done with resurrected Woodhead transfers applied with Microscale Micro Set. While doing the guard's door I also painted one other door with Micro Set to see what effect it had on the finish when dry. You can just tell that this story isn't going to end well...
     
    Some of the transfer film edges were showing a bit too much so these were tamed with Micro Sol.
     
    Finally the underframe and ends were masked and the sides given a spray coat of varnish. Having had bad results with Humbrol matt varnish I tried Tamiya gloss on this occasion. For the most part, I was quite happy with the resulting finish, except...
     
    I noticed a really strange effect where the Micro Set had been. Some light coloured flecks had somehow managed to form where the Micro Set had been used. This was worst on the door that I had unnecessarily painted with Micro Set. I can only assume that this is some sort of reaction between the varnish and the residue from the Micro Set but I've never heard of it before and it was a complete (and unwelcome) surprise. I wondered whether it might be the Micro Sol solvent, but the worst problem was in a place that hadn't been touched with Micro Sol. You can see the problem in the photo below.
     

     
    After some pondering I decided that the best course was to scrape off as much of the light flecks as possible and use a fine brush to retouch the problem areas with maroon. Fortunately this worked and the areas are small enough not to be too noticeable. It's still pretty annoying because I like both Micro Set and the Tamiya varnish... but it seems that they don't like each other.
     
    So there you have it - another tail of woe from my paint shop.
     
    I made up a simple interior from thin card. This consisted of a floor (to hide any remaining bare brass), the corridor partition and the guard's compartment. Most of it can be fitted easily when the roof is taken off but the full length corridor partition needs to be slotted in through the end of the coach (with the gangway removed). All of the interior was painted brown using watercolours. I don't know whether my shade is correct, but it's all removable in case better information arrives one day.
     
    Since this vehicle is likely to run with RTR 'N' gauge coaches I found it necessary to mess with the ride height a bit by adding an extra washer to the bogie pivots. This means that the gap between bogie and solebar is too big but the upside is that the cantrail height is then a fair match for the new Farish Mark 1s. Unfortunately even this compromise doesn't make it a good match for Dapol Colletts, even after fitting them with wheels that are 1mm smaller than they should be. The big advantage of this dodge is that it is very easily reversible.
     
    The model is probably a tad too shiny to fit in with the rest of my fleet but at the moment I am quite enjoying looking at it this way. When the novelty wears off then I will probably apply some further light weathering to the sides and roof but I'm not in any hurry so this job might wait until the BG has some more friends to play with - some more Ultima Hawksworths seem to have found their way into my gloat box recently.
  20. D869

    Geology

    By D869,

    This photo was taken at our most recent meeting. The idea was to provide a progress update... the snag is that none of the completed buildings were in place when it was taken, so much of the progress isn't visible. Oh well... maybe the idea was more of an 'action shot' to show work going on painting the rocky beach in the foreground. There is further geological work happening out of sight at the far end plus some work on boundary walls along the road side.
     
    One group member seems to be more attracted to the sponge cake though...
     

  21. D869
    The full brake is ready for the paint shop, all bar a few bits of fettling.

    I don't intend to write a blow by blow account here - after all the kit comes with instructions, so I'll stick to the main places where I have gone 'off piste'.
     
    Unlike David 71's build, I opted for using solder for all of the brass to brass joints. I stuck to cored electrical solder plus Carrs Green Label flux because I find this stronger and less messy than using lower melting point solder pastes.
     
    Footboards were added to the solebars using nickel silver strip. This was done with the chassis upside down using thin card to get a consistent level to the footboards. This helped with the next bit too...
     
    The biggest departure from the instuctions was in the assembly of the main body. I chose to solder the coach sides to the vertical parts of the floor etch. I was a little wary about this but it worked out really well. To get the alignment right, I pushed the thin card mentioned above back into the gap above the footboards. This gave me a nice datum to align the bottom of the sides while soldering, so I only needed to worry about getting them aligned at the ends.
     
    This method of assembly allowed me to really work on the fit of the roof and ends because these could be held in place by a little inward spring of the sides. It also meant that I could see the fully assembled coach quite early in construction, which really helps with the motivation. I added three cross members towards the top of the sides for strength - but leaving enough room for the roof section to fit between the sides. I found that there was a gap between the top of the ends and the roof so I added a 10 thou plastikard strip to the top of the ends. Once this was fully set I tidied up the profile to achieve a good fit.
     
    The kit comes with cast whitemetal corridor connections. These are OK but I prefer to make my own from black plastikard. These are sprung outwards and can be pulled back and held in place with a clip behind the end when not in use. The photo below shows the inside of the coach with one of the gangways dismantled.

    The kit provides two etched truss rods and 'V' hangers, but the prototype photos show four truss rods. The 'V' hangers should also be in pairs. Ultima sell these etches separately but I didn't have one. I noticed that the edge of the fret was very similar in thickness to the truss rods, so I cut this out carefully and soldered up a couple of inner truss rods using the etches as a template and some 2mm scale rail as the stiffening piece that is soldered to the floor. I also added the extra footsteps for the guard's door from some bits of nickel silver strip.
     
    The roof is removable. It is a reasonable push fit but is also held in place by small rare earth magnets glued to the cross members. Some small pieces of steel (cut from packing crate bands) are stuck (err... with blu tack) inside the roof moulding to give the magnets something to grab hold of. This is the first time I've tried this and it seems to work well. I was a bit concerned that the magnets might affect the DG couplings or be attracted by the uncoupling magnets but they seem to be far enough away to prevent any problems.
     
    The bogies are from the 2mm Association shop - fold up jobs in nickel silver. These are attached using the mounts that come with the bogies (i.e. not the Ultima ones) plus a captive nut attached to the coach floor.
     
    Interior detail will probably be very minimal because the windows on this vehicle are very small and I have no clue whether the internal corridor sides were solid or mesh screens. I will probably just fit a couple of plastikard partitions at each end of the guard's compartment to stop daylight being visible in the wrong places.
     
    I couldn't find any buffers that looked much like the square shank GWR coach buffers. On a previous model (a Siphon G) I modified some whitemetal 2mm Association coach buffers but these are not available now. Sorting through my bits box I selected a pack of TPM turned brass Oleo buffers that seemed to be about the right length and diameter. Each of these was mounted in the pin chuck and the shank filed as close to a square section as I could get. The end result looks reasonable provided that you don't look too closely.
     
    Painting will be in maroon. I've been practicing with the Bob Moore lining pen and can now produce a reasonable set of lines for maroon livery - at least on a small test piece. Time will tell if I can repeat that on a 64 foot coach.
  22. D869

    Class 22 - Part 10

    By D869,

    A quick update photo from the paint shop of the body with all of its main paint colours applied residing in its custom Ferrero Rocher anti-dust cabinet.
     

     
    There is still a lot to do - the lower bodyside stripes are next followed by tidying up of all of the messy and oversprayed areas (especially where it is yellow and shouldn't be), transfers, varnish and weathering to a very work-worn 1969 condition.
     
    Not everything has gone completely to plan - the worst problem being that the green finish has tiny white flecks in it. This was caused by mixing some Humbrol white with the Precision green to 'pre-fade' it. It should have worked OK but it didn't. I later found out why...
     
    I started the yellow panels by masking with Tamiya tape (I lost count of how many pieces) and then loaded the airbrush up with thinned Humbrol white and found that it would not spray at all. It seems that my tin of white had degraded to the point where no amount of stirring would stop it congealing. It congealed in the airbrush cup and the lumps got picked straight up by the brush and blocked it. That tin has now been consigned to the bin. After over 1 hour of cleaning the airbrush and a brand new tin of white things were back on track.
     
    I'm still hopeful of finishing this before we reach 'Class 22 - Part 22'.
  23. D869
    As previously advertised, some pictures of the row of houses that John has recently finished behind the station. Now we just need to persuade John to write some words about them.
     


     
    And the real thing...
     

  24. D869

    Hawksworth Full Brake

    By D869,

    The class 22 is in the paint shop (scary) so something new has taken its place on the workbench - an Ultima kit for a Hawksworth full brake.
     
    These coaches survived well into the 1970s in rail blue, so this will fit neatly into my chosen period. I also happen to think that the Hawksworth coaches are some of the finest looking coaches ever built, so I don't need much of an excuse to build one. I'm planning to make life difficult for myself by painting it maroon and using my new Bob Moore lining pen - rail blue seems a bit too boring for this vehicle.
     
    This is the first Ultima kit that I've built. It consists of brass sides and floor and plastic roof and ends, so I'm a bit concerned about the strength of the finished article. I'm also rather reluctant to follow the instructions and glue everything up into a closed box because I just know that I will need access to the inside at some point in the future.
     
    The kit is not a beginner's model - for example the instructions seem to be 3 years older than the brass floor etch and suggest that the floor is made of aluminium. I'm guessing that this also explains why the moulded bumps on the back of the ends don't seem to be at the right height to match up with the floor.
     
    On the plus side, the etched sides seem pretty clean, as do the moulded roof and ends. In particular the roof is devoid of any bowing, so I'm contemplating fixing the sides and ends to the floor and making the roof removable.
     
    Interior access probably doesn't matter too much for the full brake, but if this goes OK then I am hankering after a couple more Hawksworth vehicles to make up a more mid-60s formation for St Ruth even though the passenger carrying vehicles were all withdrawn by about 1967 and therefore are just a bit too early for me. I seem to be having a bit of a coaching stock phase at the moment - I picked up a couple more Farish Mark 1s at the RMWeb members day and I also have just sent an order to Masterclass Models for some Maunsell brake coaches to form a North Cornwall style 'P' set... which doesn't fit at all with my chosen period or St Ruth's geography.
  25. D869

    St Ruth Voyager

    By D869,

    I finally got round to putting some finescale wheels on the Yorkshire Voyager (Dapol) that's been languishing in its box for a few years now and took it along to this week's group meeting to try out.
     
    Actually, it isn't 100% what it seems - only two cars have finescale wheels right now because I didn't get the trailer wheels turned down. Instead I fitted 2mm Association disc wagon wheels. These have 1mm axles compared to the 1.2mm Dapol ones. Because it's an experiment, they also still have their pinpoint ends, so perhaps 'Ben Hur Voyager' would be a more suitable name. You certainly need to be careful when packing it back into its box. The good news is that this dodge seems to work pretty well, so I will probably do the rest of the set this way (but remove the pinpoints).
     
    I really like this model - the colour scheme and detail look great. Cheque book modelling can sometimes be satisfying.
     
    What I should also have done was take some photos of the row of shops behind the station that John has just completed. He has made a really excellent job, so now we need to persuade him to do a write-up here.
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