Packing up the layout

I will soon be posting an article on the blog about adding the third rail to the layout and mocking up the scenery from corrugated card but thought I would quickly show you it all crated up ready to go home. Quite understandably my mother didn't fancy sliding around on the drive de-icing the car now the cold weather has set in, which meant taking the layout home.

The layout arrived at my mothers as individual boards, which unless great care was taken could easily be damaged. On top of that I have now added a delicate 3rd rail as well. Therefore to protect the boards I opted for the age old method of crating them together in pairs, face to face. This was always my intention and another reason I used the metal locating pieces for the bolts. As you can see from the photos, the end boards are just thin ply left over from the build with batons of wood to strengthen them. The batons are glued and screwed in placed in line with the captive locking pieces of each board. Some additional captive fixings had to be added where the boards join on the side instead of the ends.

The track exits the side of these boards as well, so additional protectors were also formed from scrap wood. You can see this on the side of board with 'start' written on it and the one behind. Some of the end pieces will become redundant once the scenery has been added as they currently hold the boards very close together to save space. The pairing of the boards may also change if buildings conflict with each other.

The intention is to now work on the boards one at a time or in pairs until May, when it will get a test run at our club open day. This will still be as a work in progress though but after that I have permission to put it back up in my Mum's garage again, thanks Mum! (She reads the blog by the way). However, the pressure is on as the layout is booked in for its first proper show in November 2013. Still, only the scratch built buildings to do, all the figures to paint, rolling stock to weather, kits to finish and couplings to add to the freight stock. Hmmm think I'm going to be busy.

Concrete

I've been helping a friend at my railway club, who is putting a French layout together for exhibiting. While modern French railways are certainly not high on my list of interests, I have done a couple of minor modelling projects for him, giving me the opportunity to try out a few new techniques and materials.

He wanted a large concrete paved area for a loco stabling. The basic concrete pieces were cut from a plastic display board material used for signs and presentations, several sheets of which I managed to rescue from the bin at work. It's quite thick to cut and shape but it also meant I was able to score in casting lines of the concrete where it would have been poured in sections. I also added some breaks and cracks with a sculpting tool.

Once cut to shape the peices were painted with a grey spray primer and left to harden. The intention was to paint the entire area with a lighter concreate colour but as the primer matches the ballast so well, this was shelved in favour of just washing and highlighting. The wash in the photos was a mixture of various black and brown oil paints, diluted with turpentine substitute. This was painted into the lines and cracks but doing this standing up and against the clock inevitably resulted in a little going over the edges. As I wiped this away it gave a very subtle shading effect, so I continued this across the board. What's nice about oil paints is that you can work them for several hours, so where I ended up with too much wash this was easily removed with a tissue dampened with the turpentine substitute. Like many washes the effect started to fade slightly as it dried, so I,m looking forward to going back to the club this week and see how it looks. Then it will be time to add the ballast and highlights.

A new layout

I haven't posted anything in a while but fear not, railway modelling has been taking place. A couple of years ago I started work on a fairly sizable layout in OO. I wanted to model a busy Southern Region commuter station in the 1930's. It should have good operating potential and include a goods yard. Even though I wanted to model a station in the central London-Brighton area, modelling licence would be employed and all manor of Southern Region trains both east and west will be seen on its rails.

After a lot of searching through books and pondering over various stations I came across Waddon Station. Not the one we see today but the one built before the turn of the last century demolished in the 1930's. The old station looked quite house like and incorporated the station masters dwellings.The new (and current station) is a very plain brick box affair with an iron riveted bridge replacing the wooden one.

I chose Waddon as it had a very interesting layout which I could model without without resorting to bespoke point work. Being my first layout running only relatively new stock, it was going to be Peco Code 75 at the front and very old but serviceable Peco code 100 at the back. The latter was salvaged from a loft layout built by my late father over 30 years ago and apart from being completely oxidised, has presented no problems following a good clean.

Waddon was and still is a two line station but there used to be run around points, a parcels bay, goods yard, signal box and as it later turned out a set of run around points at the end of the head shunt as well. Although it had a goods yard it didn't have a goods shed but I will be adding one typical for the area as well as a small engine shed based on the one at Epsom. The station was electrified early on for EMU's and suited my chosen theme of a busy 1930’s commuter station in the expanding London suburbs.

The station platforms are also staggered making it a little more interesting visually, with little obscuring the busy rush hour up line platform.

The picture shows early development of the layout with some track laid and some just placed on the layout to plan it out.

The layout was going to be a round and round layout as I wanted to have fast trains rattling through the station and if they do three or four loops before the next local stopper appears then so what? I've seen enough exhibition layouts to know that anything running maintains public interest (and I like to see my loco's get to stretch their legs).

The first four boards were built to form a wide 'U' shape for the front of the layout and I quickly clamped them together and laid out the track. I was so impressed with the long run that I drew out the plan and began laying track. It was at this point that I realised all the boards were end to end and the layout was sixteen feet long not twelve! Oh well, too late now.

The photographs show the initial build which was in my living room and then the full circuit which was completed in my Mother's garage. The buildings will be scratch built copies of originals but the met calf buildings were added for scale and appearance.


In retrospect the only thing I am not entirely happy about is the very straight line of the track. However this does give a good fast run through the station and curving the track would have meant considerably expanding the width of the boards or loosing the goods yard, neither of which was an option. Therefore it's going to have to be the scenery that makes the railway flow through the landscape.

 

Fitting Point Motors

Although Waddon was started in my living room it was moved to my mums garage for a couple of  months while I built the back of the circuit containing the fiddle yard. This would have been very expensive, eight roads of  twelve feet with twelve points and motors except for the fact that it was nearly all  reclaimed from a long since dismantled loft layout. A couple of points failed muster and I was short of one point motor but apart from that I had all I needed to complete the task.

The motors at the back are the Peco type, which work fine but I don't like the big hole you have to cut under the points if you are going to ballast the track. They are also fiddly to fit, particularly getting the tie bar though the points. After much cursing and swearing I found the solution was to solder a small wire to the end of the point motor rod and then feed this through the hole in the tie bar. You could then concentrate on getting the metal lugs to locate knowing the bar was held in position.

The point motors at the front are the Seep type. These seem to work very well and you only have to drill a tiny series of holes and join them up with a file to enable the rod can pass back and forth. A lot of people find them fiddly to fix in place as there are just two small screw holes in the circuit board mounting the motor. My solution, was to place pieces of card between the blades on each side of the point to centre it.


Then go under the board and push the long rod of the motor through the tie bar, lining the motor up with the direction of the slot cut for the movement of the rod. Then making sure the rod was in the centre of the motor I fixed it in place with a hot glue gun. This seems to have worked very well and all the motors are still in place and working after two years in storage. Only one didn't work properly when fitted as it was out of alignment with the movement of the point. However, it was just a matter of cutting free with a craft knife and gluing it back in place with the correct alignment.

As the layout is DCC the control board is just for points and I opted for 'push to make' buttons for the fiddle yard and probe and stud for the station area. The push buttons change the points at both ends of the fiddle yard, while the prob allows route setting with just the paired run around points interlocked. There are two capacitor units, one or the front of the layout and one for the back, both powered by a basic Hornby controller.

 

Wiring the layout

I wanted to keep the wiring simple and always intended to use DCC. I had bought a Dynamis system and tried it out on a test track with a couple of loco's, however I had no idea if it would be able to power the whole of my new layout. Fortunately the power output is quiet good and it has no trouble running two King Arthur's flat out pulling seven coaches.

I decided the points would be operated conventionally as flicking between locos on the controller is OK but I felt the addition of route setting or point numbers was just going to be too slow. The cost was also prohibitive as although an accessory decoder will power four points, I was still going to need at least six units at around £30 a time.

Power is supplied through two umbilical cables running from the panel at the centre front to the back of the layout, one in each direction to reduce power fade and also carry the wiring for the points. All the connectors are the white chocolate block type with the big connecting pins, as I feel these are easy to wire and plug in. I had considered computer cables and connectors but the pins are small and the wires thin neither taking kindly to being dropped or trodden on. This also means faults are relatively easy to find and can be tracked down by plugging in one board at a time.

Next article, mocking up the scenery.

The other Scalescenes Christmas Card

Back to Scalescenes. The other Scalescenes Christmas card was made for my Mum. She is very creative and makes a lot of her own cards, employing all sorts of skills and techniques. So no pressure then.


I decided to use the Garage Kit T017 and essentially built it as per the instructions. The same snowy glitter effect was used as that on the Cinema card but with the addition of icicles. These were made from clear plastic packing material cut into thin triangles of varying sizes and lengths, then coated with a glittery version of the snow effect. When dry they were glued to appropriate edges and gutters for effect.

I used the garage as I had the idea to put Santa's sleigh on the forecourt. The only problem of course was that I had to build the sleigh from scratch and quickly. The side of the sleigh was drawn out on plastic card and then two thicknesses cut out at the same time producing two blanks. Straight spacers between the sides were added and allowed to dry before adding the outer body. This was gently curved by hand and then one end glued in place. Once dry it was gradually curved and glued in place a little at a time and then excess material trimmed back. Pipes, handles and fittings from the scrap box were then used to make the lights, gauges and rocket engines.

Finally the figures were added. Santa was a business man with his coat extended, waist line increased and a pointy hat added, all tiny amounts of green modelling putty. The elf was a European station guard with paddle, which became a lollipop. He was cut off at the knees and glued back on his boots to reduce his height and a pointy hat added, again with green modelling putty. Finally I had some ground crew brought second hand at a show and employed a couple of them as mechanics trying to fix the sleigh. There was no time to add interior detail to the garage but fortunately the viewers focus is on the sleigh outside. I am pleased to say that Mum was delighted with the results.

Building a Class 71

Taking a break on the blog from buildings I thought I would show you the Class 71 I'm building.

I bought this old MTK kit a couple of years ago from one of our club members before he sold it on our second hand stall.

Now I call it a kit, when really it's no more than a basic body shell with bogey sides. This of course turns my 'cheap kit' into a not so cheap project, as a) it requires a donor vehicle and b) a pantograph. Fortunately I managed to acquire both at the Erith show in Dartford, namely a secondhand Lima Warship for £22 and a pair of pantographs that looked about right for another £18. In order to recoup some of the cost the I'll be selling the body of the Warship and the spare pantograph on e-bay.

The first step was to put the shell together. There were two halves to each side, two ends, two roof sections and a box section that fits in the bottom to help maintain the shape. As the castings were so thick and heavy I decided to solder them together, as I felt gluing them with Araldite was fraught with problems. Sections would have to be held in place until the glue set and then one careless fumble and you get all your parts back in kit form again.

The castings are quite basic and the white metal is very soft by today’s standards. I presume the softness is due to a high lead content, when modern white metal castings tend to contain little or no  lead, having a higher tin content. This makes the metal harder but a little more brittle.  

All the flash and casting tags were removed and the sides flattened by pressing them on glass. All the components were then checked and filed for a good fit before soldering. The two halves of each side were soldered together first, then the ends were added to make an open box. The two halves of the roof were then joined together before checking and adjusting the fit.  I also soldered the join lines on the outside of the body as well, covering up the joins and adding strength to the body shell. I had to be careful filing back the solder though, as it was harder than the white metal of the body shell. This made it essential to hold the file parallel to the surface of the model or to avoid filing the body away while just rounding off the raised solder.

There were still a number of fine imperfections in the outer surface of the castings but I decided to primer the shell before filling them, to to better show up the imperfections. The photos show the body shell after it was scrubbed with a bleach kitchen cleaner to remove all the oxidation of the old metal and then afterwards in the primed grey.

I could go a lot further and remove some of the cast details, such as the lamp brackets and hand rails, so they could be added in brass but I decided not to as the detail in the overall model is very basic and I decided a good coat of paint and gentle weathering would be better. Some things will be added that are not on the casting like the distinctive front handrails and possibly a headboard. I will be adding some plastic card  battery boxes as the cast metal pieces were appalling.

My next blog on the Class 71 will show the dissecting of the Warship Chassis and fitting to the body shell, so watch this space.

Scalescenes Christmas Cards

No Scalescenes don't do Christmas cards but with the festive season upon me I decided to turn two of their kits into cards with a difference. It was also nice to be able to build a couple of the Scalescenes kits that normally wouldn't have a need for on my layout. 

The first Christmas card utilised the Low Relief Cinema kit T006. I regularly go to the cinema with a friend of mine and thought this would be an ideal theme, as long as I could make it look Christmasy enough.

As usual it was a great kit to build and the options are excellent. It's almost two kits in one as you can build it as a cinema or shop, with a brick or block faced building. The centre aperture in the upper section becomes the stairwell and lifts for the shop and it comes with a variety of popular high street names for the entrance. The cinema also comes with several period names and styles, from pre-war to modern day. There is also a selection of film posters to suit the various decades since the war. The clever bit is that while the Scalescene's Pdf's are protected from editing, the designer John Whiffen has enabled a clever little facility to allow the reader to add their own text above the entrance. While this is meant to be for the film of choice it was an ideal opportunity to add a Christmas greeting.

 

As usual the kit went together very well and the instructions were very clear. The only glitch I had was the opening in the stone block frontage that goes around the entrance. Although I made it to the correct size, once wrapped around the building there was a large gap between the walls and the doors. After some head scratching and double checking it became apparent that it was the material I was using and not the kit that was at fault. Scalescenes recommend 2mm greyboard and the link to a supplier listed theirs as 2300 microns, which I presume is 2.3mm. I was using regular mount board from the art shop which was only around 1.7mm. It was the slimness of this mount board of up to half a millimetre that was causing the problem. However, all was not lost as I simply printed the required pages again and created a new building front with a slightly narrower aperture for the doors. It's worth noting that the wall coverings in these kits wrap around the edges of  the windows and doors, so the fact that I made the opening a little smaller didn't mean I had bare card exposed down each side.

As a personal touch I didn't use the film posters supplied with the kit but went to Flixter and downloaded the film posters of what we had seen over the last year. I then scaled these to size in Word, printed them off and cut them out. Colouring the edges of course as all the borders were black.

Next came the snow. I wanted the snow to have volume, look realistic but to also have that Christmas sparkle. Fortunately my mother is an avid card maker and gave me three different samples of snow and sparkle effects. One was like very fine scenic scatter, one tiny sparkly snow and one more like a glitter. I sampled them all and none of them gave the effect I was looking for. The answer was to mix all three together, so it had volume, whiteness and sparkle. I avidly applied PVA to all the top surfaces and edges and carefully added the scatter before turning in for the night. I though it look great, however I didn't know it at the time but I had made a newbie mistake. The snow was applied to the white PVA which acted like a primer base but by the morning the PVA had dried and was now translucence, so the nice white snow on the pavement was now a dirty grey! It was very disappointing and I prevaricated for some time as to what course of action to take. It was too horrible to leave as it was and too delicate scrape off, so I decided to paint all the snow white and then re-flock everything. To my surprise this turned out for the best, the snow was now very white and the second layer gave it added volume.

The final touches were to add two people, a bus stop and a greeting on the back in the form of two Christmas themed cinema tickets. Interestingly these are original Airfix figures and not the Dapol figures. Although they are fundamentally the same their size and the detail is slightly different. The Dapol figures still have detail, so I don't think it's the original mould that has just started to wear, it is more like the originals have been copied and new tooling used.

What was the other card? It was the garage, again covered in snow but this time with icicles and Santa's sleigh broken down outside. I hope to cover this in my next article, so watch this space.

Epsom Model Railway Club Show

Epsom Show at Nescot

There were some great layouts at the Epsom Club show this weekend, held as usual at Nescot College in Ewell. I always enjoy this show as they seem to find great layouts and have a good cross section of traders. Assuming they will be there again next year, it's well worth looking up and putting in your diary. There are a few pictures below to show you some of the layouts but there were many more and the quality was excellent across the board.

Very nice narrow gauge slate quarry on multiple levels with working lift.

Excellent N Gauge with real attention to detail.

One of my favourites, put on by the Crawley Club I believe. Country farm at one end, then this lovely row of houses on the corner, each with a different garden and town with bowling green on the other corner. It's also a Southern Railway setting which appeals to me and as a round and round there are plenty of train movements with nice period stock.

Nice narrow gauge railway in a European setting.

Excellent Swiss railway on multiple levels with great scenes and figures all over the layout, including a working Faller system bus.

A very small layout but the buildings are superb, including the roses on the walls and plants in the conservatory.

Scalescenes Tunnel

Blog 2

 

The second Scalescenes project attempted was the tunnel mouth. I downloaded the red brick version, being typical of the Southern Region I am modelling. What's nice about the Scalescene kits is that they are produced in different finishes, which not only includes different colours of bricks but various stone finishes as well. There are also four different curves for the aperture, plain arch and oval, for single or double track layouts.

The kit went together very well except the tunnel section which I found a bit fiddly. As you can see from the photos first you cut out the tunnel aperture, then the tunnel section, scoring slots in the back so it will curve (the dashed red lines) and then gluing the brick paper to what will be the inside.

The problem I had with this was the tunnel section is made of thick card an wants to spring open or twist. The only way to avoid this is to make the scores very deep but then it can become flimsy or you can end up cutting right trough the card. The second problem was the brick liner. The instructions advise you to glue on the brick paper and work in a curve pushing out bubbles and creases from the centre. Having used Prit Stick this grabbed very quickly, preventing movement and resulting in horrible creases on the inside of the tunnel.

My solution, after printing the appropriate page again, was to produce the tunnel section in plain card and then tape in the tunnel mouth cut out as a former. This helped to keep the tunnel section curved and straight. The tunnel face was then glued on and again temporarily taped with Tamiya masking tape to hold it in place.

Once dry the tape was removed and it was then far easier to glue in the brick paper with the correct curve already in place. The photo below shows the tunnel edging bricks being glued down on the tunnel face neatly hiding any join. You can see the excess tunnel liner at the bottom, which is still to be trimmed off. Why so long? Well it has to fit double track tunnels as well the single track version I was building.

The rest of the kit was very straight forward and went together beautifully. One big tip I would give anyone thinking of making cardboard kits though is to colour in the edges. The Metcalfe kits are very nice but time and again I see pictures in magazines where all the edges and corners of the red brick walls are clearly grey card. If the edge is white paper then effect is even worse. It's a very simple process to colour them in and only takes a few minutes to complete. I use watered down acrylics, as I paint a lot of models and I can get a good colour match. However coloured pencils, water colours and felt tip pens can be just as effective. My only word of caution is that card can be very absorbent and can draw the ink out of felt tip pens very quickly, so try them on a piece of scrap first. The wet colour can also look too dark, so give it time to dry out.

A First Look at Scalescenes

A First Look at Scalescenes

My railway club is building a 00 layout with a long stretch of terraced houses lining the back scene. The intention was to detail Metcalfe kits with gutters, slate roofs, panelled doors, letterboxes, lintels and soil pipes. However, once I had drawn up a template of the road and worked out how many kits were needed I was rather stunned. It turned out it was going to take in excess of thirty! Detailing that many kits was ok but the cost to the club was going to be prohibitive. On top of that the road is on a slight curve so the shops and houses will need to be tapered to form a continual terrace, even with the prudent inclusion of alleyways and the occasional detached building. Adapting a pre-cut kit in this way is not necessarily an easy thing and mistakes can costly if you get it wrong. This led me to look at the Scalescene kits, which often feature in the Hornby Model Railway magazine.

There is a full range of both railway and domestic buildings including terraced houses and shops to suit our layout. For those of you who do not know about these kits, you purchase and download the PDF file and can then print the kit or parts of the kit as many times as you like. The drawbacks are the cost of printer ink and that you have to glue the printouts to card and cut out the parts, while the Metcalfe kits are all pre cut. However, it also means you can print individual pages for parts, so should I make a mistake tapering a house I can possibly get away with just remaking one or two walls. I can also print them fairly inexpensively in black and white on a laser printer to mock up the shops and houses and see how they will look on the actual layout. Whether I stick to this or not has to be seen, as building around 60 properties twice over may prove too much.

At this point you are probably asking why, if you are talking about terraced houses, have you got pictures of a low relief warehouse on the blog? Well before I jumped in and started buying things I wanted to try out a kit to see how easy they are to build. Fortunately Scalescenes provides a couple of kits on their web site that are free to download and try out, the low relief warehouse being one of them.

I followed the guidance on the site that gives you hints and tips on materials and was very surprised how enjoyable and easy it was to put together. The instructions are very clear and have plenty of graphic illustrations and although the kit is free it comes with a number of different company and warning signs to suit different uses and eras. I printed the kit on photo matt paper as this is a little thicker than standard letter paper, takes the glue better and is very white, so the colours are strong and vivid (you should see the new recycled paper we have at work it’s a like a used dishcloth). It’s more expensive of course but you can find it for around £7.00 for 100 sheets.

I have since bought and built some of the other kits and they will feature in later articles but I have to say that I am very impressed with the kits and would thoroughly recommend them to anyone thinking of trying them out. After all, the warehouse, small goods store and inspection pit are free, so what have you got to loose?