New Year Update

It's been a busy few weeks on the railway front. First it was the SWOONs open day on the Saturday where I had my sales stand for STModels and then it was the annual committee meeting on the Sunday for the 009 Society which, in my role as 009 News Editor, I attend. The following weekend was the regular Wiltshire 009 Group meeting. Then it was the 2 day Southampton show where I was exhibiting Melin Dolrhyd as well as having the STModels sales stand. Last weekend it was the Alton show where I helped operate Garreg Wen for Matt Kean.

All set up and ready for customers at Southampton

STmodels continues to grow and I have done 3 commissions in the past month. The first was for some tank wheels, the second was for some Vale of Rheidol lattice fencing and lastly a request for Southern Railways 8 Wire Concrete fence posts. The last two are available to be bought on STModels.

Southern Railways 8 Wire Concrete posts

The layout with no name has also progressed. It now has the track down, it's wired up and a small amount of scenery has been created. The points are planned to be operated by wire in tube and that has been installed but doesn't show up in the photo. 

Adding the backscene former

The track plan is roughly what was on the initial sketches on the notice board. In the end the actual positioning of the points was dictated by my stock. The points are positioned such that I can have a Bachmann Baldwin and one WD bogie in the headshunt whilst also having 3 WD bogies in the loop and being able to run round them. The section of track between the loop and the running line is long enough to hold a Baldwin without fouling the running line.

The most recent job has been to add the backscene former. This was created with a piece of timber across the back, down the sides and along the bottom to which a piece of 5mm ply was glued. It's added some much needed rigidity to the board. 

The trouble is that it has given me a headache I hadn't envisaged. The layout was planned as something to take to shows that was simple, more easily transportable and more light hearted than Melin Dolrhyd. Keeping it simple was the mantra. The problem is that with it in the railway room against the wall I can't easily reach the point switches. The electrical section switches don't matter as they will always be on. I can just reach the point switches but have a habit of knocking trains off the track. I know I will want to 'play' with the layout and use it to test stock running through the points so it really needs to be useable in the railway room.

The only sensible thing to do is to change the point operation so that it can be operated from the front as well as the back. If I want to extend the mechanical operation in some way then I will have to break up that lovely curved front of the layout, that is if I could work out how to do it!

In the end I have to go back to point motors but I have decided to try servos - this layout was aimed at trying new things, after all. I am currently looking at an Arduino to drive the servos. I had already planned an Arduino Uno to operate a couple of working signals. All this means is I have to extend the system to handle the points as well.

In the stash I have an Arduino Mega, some Dingo servo mounts and some 9g servos. Time for a little experimentation!

Enginering Works Complete

Long post alert! The last few weeks have seen some significant activity to get the layout working again. Mostly it went well but there was one setback...

In my last post I said it was time to get on with the ballasting. I decided to use my usual Woodland Scenics but using the medium rather than fine versions. The more I looked at the pictures of the trackbed the more I realised I had been incorrectly using the fine size and the individual stones were larger than I had imagined. I mixed up some light grey and grey to give it tone and put it down. I stuck it down with watered down PVA with the obligatory liquid soap but I did have misgivings on how it looked. It was really too bright and I had made the mix 50:50 and it would probably be better at 80:20. I tried toning it down but that made it worse....

I was going to live with it until I went to Warley and I was perusing the Attwood Aggregates stand. I was taken by the way real stone has variety of colour built in. I took a couple of bags, one greyish one for this layout and another more sandy coloured one for the Ashover layout. I took up the fresh ballast and, needless to say, it went down a lot easier. I don't know if it is because it is natural and not fabricated but it didn't shift when I applied the PVA.

Here's a couple of shots of the ballast including some taken using the macro lens on the phone:

 

The other big change that I decided to do at the same time was to replace the traverser. The traverser is a great bit of kit but as others will testify, modifying a layout once complete is rarely a wise move which leads to compromises and bodges. My bodge was that the traverser was 48" long but it had to fit into a 51" space. This necessitated some bridging timbers which, combined with some rather mediocre track laying my yours truly, meant that reliability was often an issue with derailments at the joins. Theoretically there really should have been no derailments on a layout that has not points!

If you have followed the blog from the beginning then you'll know that the driver for the traverser was that my original 4 road fiddle yard was connected via 9" radius curves which my newly built coaching stock woudl not go round. I still had that fiddle yard with its dowels to connect to the back of the layout so I dismantled it and used it's front and rear faces along with new sides and top to create the fiddle yard below. 

The yard now 5 roads with the centre one straight. What I have discovered with this layout is that running tends to consist of running the same train round several times whilst talking to visitors and only changing the train occasionally. Hence, the desire to have a straight track to limit the chance of derailments. Last year I invested in a Morley controller which can be seen in the photo below. There is a carefully cut hoel under the controller to take the cabling.

I then had to relay the track on the end boards since the levels had all changed. I took the opportunity to take this very slowly and carefully to ensure good transitions at the baseboard joins. I've found I can put up the main board, fiddle yard and one end board in the room which is how I have been working the last couple of weeks. First is a photo of the underside with the wiring in place and tag strips ready for the necessary point motor wiring. I need one more MP1 point motor and they are in short supply currently. For now it works fine without them.

Here is the completed fiddle yard complete with test track. since Melin Dolryhd only needs one controller it seemed sensible to use the second controller as a test track. The track is wired up and the buffer stops are my own 3D designed and printed coupling height gauges. 

So the engineering works are complete and the layout is ready to go to Maidenhead Show the first week of January. Actually I need to redo the curtains but they will get sorted the week before the show when the layout gets erected in the lounge for a quick check.

Photographing models

Recently I have found that I have struggled to take good photos of models. I would balance track on different boxes or mounting board but it was never a good experience. I can always use Melin Dolrhyd but the lighting isn't as far forward as it really needs to be for good photographs. I had a piece of track that originally was a DCC programming track set on something that could be fashioned into an embankment but it had no depth so something had to be done.

I found an offcut of MDF and started cutting out foamboard. I had an idea of a curve of track, set on an incline with a platform that could be used to host non track based products. The first picture shows the basic shape. A piece of wood is holding the stone walling join against the platform edge.

After that it was a case of laying track, putting some sandpaper down to represent the platform surface. Rummaging through the bits and pieces box I found some fencing from my first 009 layout and then I found a nameboard from the layout. I had to pause then as most work is done early morning and late night and I realised that static grass cannot be done in artificial light. It needs some natural, if grey, light to help with the colour blending. The second progress shows the progress after doing the grass.

After that it was onto the homeward stretch for a little bit of weathering and a hedge across the back to help with hiding the back. I also have a piece of backscene on a some floating mounting board that can go behind. The final picture is the finished product with Triumph on display with its nameplates that arrived from Narrow Planet recently.

All in all just a few hours work and now I have something readily available for photography.

Quick, do some work, there's an exhibition coming!

The bi-annual Pewsey 009 Meeting will be happening on Aug 17th. You can find show details here  where you will discover that your truly has been invited, or was that coerced. Never mind! I'm taking Melin Dolrhyd so I thought I should do some of the jobs I had planned since its first outing.

The first job was to hide the layout exit a little. My stash of trees is looking a little empty but this one did well enough though I think I need to do some work round the base to make it look less out of place.

The second piece of work was to add a little more detail round the Mill garden in the form of someone working and a gate and fence. There's much more to do here but I currently expect this to be the only person on the layout!

Lastly, I've started to add vegetation along the embankment wall. I don't want to overdo it but I suspect in real life, even for the era I am modelling, there was probably significant vegetation against the wall.

Do come to the show if you want to see a good number of narrow gauge layouts.

Static Grass

Eventually it had to be done - a first foray into static grass. However, there were a couple of steps to finish off first.

The first job was to finish the landscape round the mill. In the last post I was laying polyfilla mixed with brown acrylic paint and water to bed in the mill and raise the land. All went well but I needed to raise it a little more. No problem except that I used a new box of own brand filler from a value store and instead of drying solid it dried to powder so all needed to be scraped out and replaced with a more reputable filler.

The second job was to finish the river. I'd done it in two parts, left and right and just needed to put one last coat of Deluxe water. As in a previous post, this stuff dried way thinner than expected so one last coast was all it needed.Well blow me down, this coat went and dried all thick with a curved edge to it. There are definitely times when railway modelling can drive you to drink. There's no going back short of ripping up the whole river. It isn't bad but I know that before this last coat it looked better.

Anyway, time to try the static grass device. I'd bought a sieve version as recommended by the war gaming fraternity and after a bit of play I chucked down a layer of 2mm green over the whole area which made a huge difference.

After a trip to ExpoNG it was time to take the bull by the horns, throw caution to the winds and make more progress. I'd found Kathy Millatt's videos several months ago and saw her recommendation for War World Scenics Layering spray so I had a can along with many different sizes and colours of their range. I have to say I really like them and they were easy to use. Here's some photo's of what has been achieved so far. I hope you like them.

No going back

There is progress to report. The mill has finally been put in place and glued down. There is still work to do on the front openings and providing some chimneys but enough has been done to justify committing the building to the ground. A significant amount of multi purpose filler has been used to complete the burying and bring the ground up to the height of the front door. I always mix acrylic paint, burnt umber, into the filler so that if scraped, it doesn't show white. I could have added some black as well as this batch is drying lighter than before.

The mill wheel motor has been glued down but the housing is still loose.

Other work done includes the ballasting. The sleepers and rails were painted and then the ballast done. I've also added the stones to the right hand side of the river. Still some fettling to happen there before I can add the water on top. I do need to think how the side openings are going to be disguised!

Paint and Water

It's starting to come together. At this point it really is a case of working on several items at once. The Mill needs painting but also needs to blend into the wall beneath it. The wall beneath it needs painting but it needs to blend into the bottom of the Mill Race. This morning's first job was, therefore, to fill in the 'floor' of the mill race while listening to the Chinese GP. After that it was a case of making sure there were no gaps at the edge. I alternated between filler and Deluxe Materials Super Phatic glue which is good at bridging holes.

Once the base was in and reasonably dry I painted the floor with a dark brown/black/green colour and then set to painting the walls. This was again a mixture of browns and greens but applied with a sponge and a finger. Effectively it was dry brushing but with a sponge and where I put the paint on too thick I just used a damp finger to spread it the paint out a bit. When it came to the wall under the Mill I also used the sponge on the Mill itself to blend it all in.

There is still the need for some washes of reds, greens and browns but generally it's best to not overdo it, in my opinion, by trying to cover every stone.

The next task is going to be to add the water into the race. This is going to be a serious exercise as there is a lot to fill but hopefully the four bottles of Deluxe Materials Aqua Magic will suffice otherwise I'll be buying 4 more!

Groundwork

Another flurry of activity has taken place. With the Mill building in prototype form it meant the groundwork could be finished off. There were a very messy few evenings where I carved and shaped the polystyrene and then I used up a coupe of tubes of border adhesive and laid down some strips of J Cloth. As that was drying I mixed up some polyfilla, added some brown pain (not enough) and was fairly liberal with the gloopy mix to eliminate a few areas that were still too flat. IT was then left to dry and 48 hours later some of it is still damp but that's fine. The overall effect is pleasing. If I did it a second time I'd blend the right hand side into the backscene better but too late now and it's amazing what you can hide with trees and bushes!

Here's an overall view of how it looks. The top fascia has been mounted at the back just to keep it out of the way. That is not the usual position!

A backscene at last

It's been a long time coming. Thoughts of how to create the backscene have been at the back of my mind since the start of the layout. I thought I had got enough depth to model the embankment behind the layout as the land rises quite steeply behind the mill. It turns out I don't have anywhere near enough space to model the rise.

Several options came to mind:

1. I toyed with the idea of extending out the back of the layout but that would have had to be supported somehow over the fiddle yard and would have had complications for fitting the layout into the car.
2. I thought about painting my own backscene. There is an excellent book on doing this, imaginatively titled "Creating a Backscene" and over on "Nick's Workshop Mutterings" you can see this being put into effect. I knew if I went down this route I'd still be talking about doing it in a year's time.
3. Cheat.

Cheating seemed to be the best option. There is a track that runs from the back of the mill down to where the water tower should be. I figured that I could make the ground rise behind that, as it does in real life, but plant a significant number of trees along the rear edge of the track that the back of the layout was obscured. The next task was to find a backscene. Eventually I settled on the Old Mill Town Pack B from id Backscenes. Howard Scenic Supplies quickly delivered so I decided the best mix and went to stick it on.

Bit of a disaster. There are two choices, self adhesive or not self adhesive. I chose the former out of some misguided idea that it would be easier. If you have a flat backscene that is not already on the layout then it must be fantastic but working on an already installed backscene working round some scenery was impossible. It's actually too sticky. It's either on or off and you cannot pull it back off to reposition. I ripped it all off in disgust and ordered the non sticky one.

Above is the result of applying the non self adhesive version with border adhesive. There is one slight crease over on the left hand side and the join between the two pieces goes right down through the buildings on the right but that will be hard to see as it is right behind the mill. There is work to do to blend in the sides where the embankment goes through the hillside!

It has raised another possibility, however. The existing scenery formation and the backscene do seem to blend reasonably well and I am toying with the idea of not using trees to hide the join but to accept the way it looks now and blend it in. It will mean losing any hillside behind the mill but looks like it will be a better compromise than the trees. A good friend is going to today supply me some polystyrene to fill in the remaining gap. Hopefully by the end of Christmas this will be in and a final decision can be made. It's going to be a compromise anyway so it's simply a case of determining the best compromise.

Now it runs

Well it ran for a while, all of probably 10 minutes before the gremlins started appearing. On the right hand bend trains were slowing far more than the tightness of the curve should have caused. A quick check of the cables underneath and one of them was getting warm, a sure sign of overloading. I had thought this might happen so wasn't particularly surprised. I decided I need to increase from 3.5mm plugs to 6.25mm plugs. When I took the 3.5mm plastic plugs off, nearly all of them had cracked. The just weren't up to it. It could have been my soldering of them but I'm fairly proficient at that so probably not the cause for all of them. Suffice to say we now have metal connectors and plugs and it all works fine. I took advantage of dismantling it all to trim some excess timber and to tidy the wiring.

Time to progress the scenery. I'd read a discussion online about the use of Celotex as an alternative to polystyrene. I'd also seen a discussion about whether it contained fibreglass or not and one poster assured everyone that if you bought the proper branded Celotex then it did not contain fibreglass. I can report he was wrong. Mine says Celotex on the outside and fingers tell me it contains fibreglass.

It may or may not be clear but I've put in the stone wall at the back of the mill race and glued down and carved the first piece of Celotex. I'm struggling to know what to do about the backscene. In my minds eye I saw the embankment behind the mill rising steeply up to the road and out of sight. The reality is that the mill is quite large - it's the white cutout on the right and the layout needs to be another 12 inches deep to get a good embankment. There are a variety of subterfuges I can use but nearly all backscenes portray an impression into he distance, the exact opposite of what I need to do here. Something to think about as I build up the contours.

As a separate exercise I've rejuvenated my website at www.goingloco.org.uk. I'll be adding to that as and when I feel the muse!

Getting Stoned

As always progress goes in fits and spurts. A few early mornings has seen the river get some serious attention. The catalyst for this was finding some excellent stone from Stacey's Miniature Masonry on Ebay. It's called Herebrook Grit and you can purchase it in 5 different sizes. I bought the 4 smallest sizes.

I have a picture in front of me from The Telegraph in May 2017 which shows a dry river bed in the Lake District. The detail that can be seen shows that the biggest stones are where the water is deepest and, presumably, moving with sufficient power. As you go up the bank the stone sizes get smaller.

I hope I have recreated that effect here.

Wall being painted

I've finally got round to finishing the wall. It's had a coat of white Gesso primer and is now getting some colour onto it. The first was a dirty wash to try and take the white from between the stones. Then I took a damp sponge and applied a mix of grey, brown and green. If you put too much on you can just wipe it off again with the sponge. Working in artificial light after sunset means it is really difficult to tell how it is coming out so it makes sense to keep the first coat light and do the next in daylight.

Here is how one end of the wall is looking.

Trackbed in place

The concept behind the layout is that there is a single line that rolls across the front of the layout. What is nice about the line is that it is on a permanent bend of varying radii and it is on a slight gradient. Nothing straight about this!

The line itself runs between the river and the mill race so it is effectively elevated for all the visible section. I had guessed on the height and it turns out I had set it all a bit high but that is not an issue as I can raise the river bed and can make the front lower fascia deeper to cover it. I knew there was a reason why I didn't glue the front fascia on!

The plan was to reproduce the curves and incline as best as could reasonably be achieved. I used foamboard and cut out some sections that had a 1 in 100 incline on them. the foamboard, I discovered, would bend sufficiently for my needs so I set about gluing it down a few inches at a time as far as each change in bend would allow. 

Eventually it was all down and I discovered it wasn't level front to back. I clearly wasn't as accurate as I should have been but a bit of card packing soon sorted that out. I added some bracing and glues the top down. As can be seen in the picture I cut the gaps where the mill race enters and leaves and where the two sluices are. The next step is to add cladding using Wills coarse stone sheets.

The lighting had to have an adjustment. Once the track bed was in place, the front row of lights were found to be just behind the leading edge in the middle of the board so created a shadow. I added a layer of foamboard to the underside of the wood sticking out on the lighting beam and added more LED strip to that. I also took the opportunity to add a run of warm light on this. Iain Rice, in his book on Cameo Layouts, says that warm lights are not suitable for British weather. However, I am hoping to create a yellowy/brown reflection off the river right beneath so I though tit worth a try. I can always just snip the wire to that strip of LEDs should it not work out.