Easton, Isle of Portland

[mullie]

Reminds me of this.

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/r/rodwell/index.shtml

 

I've only been to England once in the last six weeks and that was for a car battery!

 

Martyn

[john new]

1 hour ago, mullie said:

Reminds me of this.

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/r/rodwell/index.shtml

 

I've only been to England once in the last six weeks and that was for a car battery!

 

Martyn

Not been over England since lockdown began either. Other than to pay in any cheques received for the Society not any real current need until a few more of the shops open safely for what we can't buy on the island. All a bit like the nineteenth century before they built the bridge.

 

Edited May 1, 2020 by john new
Typos corrected

[Mick Bonwick]

1 hour ago, KNP said:

 

 

1 hour ago, KNP said:

 

I assume the area will be rough grass, shrubs etc and the road country lanes?

 

A bit like this:

 

[Mick Bonwick]

The pile of polystyrene was deemed too ambitious, so a modified heap was finally installed, shaped and covered with plaster bandage. The result is here:

 

 

Once dry, the plaster bandage was covered with a brown emulsion paint (bought as end-of-line from Wickes) and work started with static grasses, scatters, paper leaves, ground-up coloured foam and other scenic materials. What I was trying to do was to produce a scrubby area that loooked half-way realistic at normal viewing distances. I now have no photographs of the finished area in place, but took some close-ups to see how parts of it would stand up to close scrutiny for photograph backgrounds.

 

[Tony Teague]

 

21 hours ago, Mick Bonwick said:

See if you can spot which is what:

 

 

So I was thinking that you expected to guess which bits of polystyrene had come from the packing of which domestic appliance or similar!

I'd been working on that for 3 hours when relisation dawned....

[Mick Bonwick]

47 minutes ago, Tony Teague said:

 

I'd been working on that for 3 hours when relisation dawned....

 

Kept you out of mischief for a while, then.

[Tony Teague]

13 minutes ago, Mick Bonwick said:

 

Kept you out of mischief for a while, then.

 

Yes, I was working through my own polystyrene store - where the origin of every piece is of course meticulously indexed - looking for matches........

The things we do when we have time on our hands eh?

 

[Mick Bonwick]

On 02/05/2020 at 09:17, Mick Bonwick said:

 I now have no photographs of the finished area in place,

 

I lied! I have found another photograph taken when working on scenery techniques. So much for tags and indexing.

 

This one is datestamped January 2016 so must have been just before the test piece was scrapped as a potential layout component.

 

[Mick Bonwick]

At round about this point in the story, Easton took a back seat in modelling terms. Other interests took over, and the available modelling space was full of equipment, tools and materials for those interests. Spray booth, compressor, airbrush, paint, pigment, you know the sort of thing!

 

From time to time, thought, the need to do something 'for a change' presented itself, and I digressed.

 

On one occasion I went back to the scenery ideas, and worked on trying to represent actual plants, rather than generic examples. Here is one that appeared as a result of that little exercise.

 

 

I decided afterrwards that a little bit of attention to scale would be required. The Modelu figure is 4mm scale and the less-than-perfect hollyhock is not, although it should have been.

[Alister_G]

That's a vey lovely hollyhock, but sadly more fitted to 7mm modelling...

 

I had exactly the same problem years ago when making a model lawnmower. My first example looked good, but was wildly out-of-scale:

 

 

So I gave it to a 7mm modeller to use on his layout.

 

The second attempt was slightly more successful...

 

 

 

 

Al.

Edited May 3, 2020 by Alister_G

[teaky]

7 hours ago, Mick Bonwick said:

 

I lied! I have found another photograph taken when working on scenery techniques. So much for tags and indexing.

 

This one is datestamped January 2016 so must have been just before the test piece was scrapped as a potential layout component.

 

Oh, to be able to produce such "scrap"! 

[Mick Bonwick]

4 hours ago, teaky said:

Oh, to be able to produce such "scrap"! 

 

 

What you haven't seen is all the efforts that preceded it and were actually scrapped. This one still exists as an example of how NOT to do some of the trees planted on it, it just won't form part of the layout.

[Mick Bonwick]

The fiddle yard baseboard surface (trackbed) was Sundeala, and the track was only pinned down, not glued. This meant that the trains running throught it were very quiet. The scenic section baseboards had no Sundeala on them and the track was to be glued down. How to minimise noise?

 

I had read about the use of cork and the use of closed-cell foam, but could not decide who to believe. The solution to the dilemma was to try both on a test board and do my own comparisons. I made up a plywood-topped , 2" x 1" framed board 3' x 2' and stuck stuff on it.

 

4 pieces of Peco code 75 were stuck (using Copydex) onto:

 

1 layer of 1/8"cork

2 layers of 1/8"cork

1 layer of 3mm foam

2 layers of 3mm foam

 

A 5th piece of track was pinned to the foam.

 

The quietest piece of track was the pinned down one, and there was nothing to choose between the others. Decision? Use Copydex as the glue and lay track onto a single layer of foam.

Why? Most of the traffic running on Easton would be travelling very slowly and trains would not be very long, so there should not be very much noise generated.

 

[Mick Bonwick]

Easton station was aligned North-South on the island, with the approach from Portland coming in from the South, even though Portland is to the North. Because of the geography of the area (rocky, slopy, islandy) the line was built around the Eastern side of the island and came inland to Easton from the East, turning North. To make it easier to visualise, here is a map, unashamedly copied from B.L. (Brian) Jackson's book, "Isle of Portland Railways Volume Two":

 

 

The area I am modelling, as seen in the very first post in this thread, is slap back in the centre of this map. The main difference beteen the real place and my model is that I have a fiddle yard (the rest of the world) that allows trains ot enter and exit from the North end of the station. In reality only stone trains were able to do that, because the only track North of the station was to Sheepcroft quarry. Modeller's licence.

 

I am putting things into context here because the next few posts will describe how I went about laying track from the North end of the fiddle yard to the North end of the station area, i.e. Sheepcroft.

 

[sb67]

Just found your thread Mick, looks like a fine layout coming on. I'm looking forward to seeing it grow and seeing your exemplary modelling, those scenery photo's posted earlier look superb 

[Mick Bonwick]

The original plan had two tracks from fiddle yard around the ends of the room to the 'scenic' bit, but the new station layout had only one track entering the station from each end. After much deliberation (measured in years, not hours) the decision was made to retain both tracks on the fiddle yard side but only have the one track coming in to each end on the station side, and decide what to do with the two spares later on. Is that a decision or not? I'm undecided.

 

When working on the fiddle yard, great care was taken to ensure that points did not get placed above or too near baseboard support crossmembers. Take a look at this short sequence of photographs and see if you can spot anything significant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Stubby47]

The inner point appears to be laid diagonally over a thin cross beam (guessing the two parallel pencil lines under the knife indicate the presence of the beam) ? 

[Gordon A]

No wire for the crossing Vs?

[Mick Bonwick]

37 minutes ago, Stubby47 said:

The inner point appears to be laid diagonally over a thin cross beam (guessing the two parallel pencil lines under the knife indicate the presence of the beam) ? 

 

Absolutely correct, Stu. Not only that, but the other point's position gave insufficient room to place the point motor, too.

 

37 minutes ago, Gordon A said:

No wire for the crossing Vs?

 

They are there, Gordon, but at this stage of the process, the insulation covering (I use white heatshrink) had not been added, nor had I soldered on the extra wire length to allow connection to the switch that supplied them. More of that later. Much later, probably!

[DLT]

Terrific project Mick, I shall be fuloowing keenly.

Cheers, Dave.

[Mick Bonwick]

1 hour ago, DLT said:

Terrific project Mick, I shall be fuloowing keenly.

Cheers, Dave.

 

 

Welcome aboard, Dave.

[Mick Bonwick]

During the course of building this layout, many little side projects have been instigated to try things out. I have made brief mention of shwubbewy and tracklaying, but there have been others as well. Would brief excursions into these be of interest to watchers of Easton? There are things like tree making, static grass experiments, building a hut from scratch, getting frustrated with JMRI, blowing up decoders and probably quite a few others that might come to mind as time passes.

 

Any interest?

[Stubby47]

Definitely - it's always good to see how others approach a challenge.

[sb67]

Yep definitely interested 

[mullie]

2 hours ago, Mick Bonwick said:

During the course of building this layout, many little side projects have been instigated to try things out. I have made brief mention of shwubbewy and tracklaying, but there have been others as well. Would brief excursions into these be of interest to watchers of Easton? There are things like tree making, static grass experiments, building a hut from scratch, getting frustrated with JMRI, blowing up decoders and probably quite a few others that might come to mind as time passes.

 

Any interest?

I can get you some Portland stone if you want, there is loads of it lying around!

 

Martyn