O Gauge on a budget

A good friend of mine at the railway club had some old O gauge stock given to him some time ago. He recently told me he had 'done a bit of weathering' and what did I think? This 'bit of weathering' was so good I took the following pictures during our running evening and asked him for an article to accompany them. 

It didn't end there though he also inherited a couple of white metal bogies and a chassis frame which we identified  as parts of an old Queen Mary brake van kit. This came back to the club as 'a basic scratch build', which took the drawings for me to spot descrepancies the prototype. This is his article:

"The GW open wagon is scratchbuilt on a Webster chassis. The Queen Mary is scratchbuilt using commercial bogies – make unknown. The vans are kits and the mineral wagons a mix of kits and Triang Big-Big train. The Triangs had the W irons drilled and filed out and the tie bar between the axle boxes removed. Metal wheels were also added.

The scratchbuilt wagon and the Queen Mary were built using 1mm ply (from Mick Charles Models) and card for the open wagon metalwork. These two were sprayed with grey undercoat aerosol and brush painted with Fox transfers added.

The mineral wagons were also sprayed with a grey primer then brush painted all over with a rust colour. This was followed by stippling on Railmatch frame dirt mixed with talcum powder to give a rust texture in random areas but where corrosion is likely to occur. The rust colour was not totally dry so some mixing of the colours occurred. This treatment was also applied to the interior with the darker colour (and plenty of talc) used more at the bottom of the panels, blending to a lighter colour at the top. The top edge is mostly a dark colour, again with plenty of talc. Next I applied Maskol in random areas on the outside and top edge where the rust was to show through. I found it better to apply the Maskol thickly, as although it took longer to dry it was easier to remove. Once dry the model was brush  painted with BR freight grey, all the markings added and the chassis painted with Railmatch weathered black.  When dry the Maskol was peeled away and a final weathering applied to tone down the grey and reduce the contrast between the two areas. This was achieved dry brushing with various paints  and weathering powders. The loads are builders sand and limestone roof chippings on a piece of shaped softboard fixed with PVA."

I hope you were as impressed with my friends rolling stock as I was. To me it clearly shows what can be done with basic materials and old rolling stock. Some would say it doesn't have the fine detail, or the under frame might not be quite right but to me they are far more realistic than a perfectly accurate set of immaculate wagons. And certainly a lot cheaper than £100+ O Guage Queen Mary kit. 

Cardboard City

When I started to consider the scenery I initially painted areas of the board where 

I wanted the various major elements to go, brown for platforms, grey for biuildings and green for fields. To my surprise this immediately highlighted a couple of areas where my vision was not going to work very well, primarily the road running around the inside of the layout. Where the road turned the corner following the inside of the track onto the end of the layout it used all the available space and left no room for buildings. Not very interesting. After some thought I decided to put in a sharp left turn towards the scenic break and place a builders yard in the corner plot. This also had the added advantage of giving me more room on end board for the semidetatched houses I wanted.

I then decided that building simple 3D models of the major scenic elements would give an even better visualisation of the layout, how the various elements would look in place and if they would blended together well. I could have built a reduced scale model of the layout but as it was set up for several months in my mum's garage I decided to build them full size. I had an excellent source of raw material for this as my office uses a lot of photocopy paper and the reams come in thin but sturdy corrugated cardboard boxes. These boxes are held together with very little glue, relying on nylon straps to take the bulk of the weight. So whenever an empty or nearly empty box appeared I would separate the glued ends and flat pack it for transport home. 

The first item I built was the station and platforms, which quickly made me realise just how close the station was going to be the the edge of the layout but did confirm there was just enough room.  

Next was the bridge. I had decided to put this diagonally across the left hand corner of the layout to give  more interest than one directly across the track at right angles. However, the cardboard model presented me with a dilemma. It totally bisected the usable scenic space in two, greatly reducing my options of what to place there. 

Also the road by the station climbs up to the level of the road bridge (the Purley Way) and I was intending to build this, placing some single storely shops on the road for interest. That didn't work either, as the slope and shops almost completely hid the trains from the viewing public for a quarter of the layout. So what was the solution?

My mother suggested moving the bridge towards the station but not quite 90 degrees to the track, this retained a more natural look while giving the corner space back for modelling. The road will remain flat joining the Purley Way slightly off scene so as to not hide the trains but I'm going to keep the single storey shops for interest. Finally I had to admit defeat and do away with the waiting room on the platform opposite the station, as there was just not enough room between the platform and the track in the goods yard behind it. However, it will still have a long canopy similar to the original and other LBSCR stations.

 

Metcalfe kits were used for the engine and goods sheds and I added a foot bridge, terraced housing, and fencing from cardboard. Everything was built very quickly and held toether with no more than Sellotape, pva glue or Pritt Stick. All this effort was well worth it and I now appreciate the advantages when people build scale models of their layouts at the design stage,  just to see how it looks.

Balast

I was asked a couple of times at our club show what balast I used. The answer was simple, a bit of everything. I wanted to get the balast to look the right size and colour. So, starting with the colour, that must be straight forward right? You just look in a book with colour pictures from the steam age. Which is ok up to the point you actually open your first book. It's a browny colour, no it's light grey, no medium grey with black speckles. Excerpt where the trains break on their way into the station, where the loco's stand dripping oil, or where fresh balast has been added and tamped down.

Well the size must be straight forward. I don't like oversized balast and a lot of people advise you to use 'N' gauge balast on OO track. So I bought the Peco fine balast, then did a test piece, err... No. I had some dark grey Woodland Scenic grey balast. Nice and fine but very...  grey. It was just too flat and uniform. So I bought some N gauge grey balast from Gaugemaster, a better, lighter grey with black speckles in, this would be great....  Still no. The speckles were shinny and the balast was very, very, fine, rather like grey silver sand. Woodland Scenics brown? No, far to red.  

The answer was a last ditch attempt at coming up with something I was happy with and involved a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. Yes, I mixed my own. What ratios did I use? I have no idea. All I can say is I started off with what I had the most of, which was the Peco balast and added quantities of everything else to it. I was rather worried I would get halfway around the layout and run out, so I mixed a lot of it. So much that after balasting both main lines I still have a 1 litre icecream tub full of the stuff. Never mind though there may always be another layout and all in all I am very pleased with the results. The final look will get some break dust on the way into the station an some greasey patches where loco's would stand, all gently airbrushed in.

Preparing the layout for its first show

With just four months to go before my club show it was time to put the layout back together and to get some of the major scenery elements done, specifically the hills and platforms. The first task was to drag the boards out of their eight month hibernation and check they all still worked. I managed to get it all set up in two hours without any assistance. This was quite quick and with an assistant to help me position the boards and a battery powderered screwdriver for the bolts I was hoping to halve the time.

Next on the `to do` list  was to connect up the new DCC Power Cab to the main board. This was a simple process as DCC is just a single positive and negative connection and just required removing the old connector and re-routing the power leads to the new location on the board. Fitting the DCC connector points was relatively straight forward. After checking there was no critical wiring behind where I wanted the board to go, I drew a pencil line around the cover plate and in the connector holes, to give the size of the required hole. I then chose a small wood drill and starting at the corners and working inwards drilled as many holes as I could until they started to join together. The final trimming out was then with a narrow chisel and course file. Aim for a hole slightly smaller than you need, as you can always take more out, which is easier than putting it back. As you can see from the picture ( to follow) these sit nice and flush on the side of the board. Three were installed, one for the main controller and two for the second but in practice I don't think the third will be needed. The big question that remained was regarding the power of the basic system, was it enough to run the entire layout or did I need the booster? Well, the system not only worked once it was connected but happly powered two fast trains and a third shunting in the goods yard.

I had also been given some black curtains formerly used on mixing desks by a friend at the club. Not only were these quite thick but they have been fire proofed and have velcro attached at the top. I bought several strips of fluffy self adhesive velco from Wilkinsons, which my mother subsequently informed me could have been obtained much cheaper from a fabric wholesailer and both stuck and stapled these to the edge of the board. I thought the weight of the curtains or a hot hall on as summers day may see them peeling off if I just them stuck on. I,m pleased to say that not ony did these reach to within  a couple of inches of the ground but ran around the three scenic sides of the layout almost to the inch.

Repainting a Bachmann Class 153

A friend at the railway club asked if I would paint a modern 153 DMU in an Anglia Railway livery for his brother. Drawn in by the challenge despite having so many projects on the go, I said I would give it a try and was duly handed the bodyshell, less running gear and windows. I started by masking off the ends to preserve the numbering, cab glazing and the roof colour. The sides then got a coat of white primer, as white was one of the two main colours in the scheme and it meant just the blue had to be painted on. Once sprayed two problems showed up. The first was a reaction between the white and one of the original Bachmann colours. Fortunately this was just a slight wrinkling of the primer and was resolved by sanding back once dry with a very fine decorators sponge and applying another light application of paint. The second was the thickness of the lettering, which was also resolved with some careful sanding, although this did remove some of the rivet detail. Had I known what a problem the rivet detail would be I wouldn’t have been so careful.

Once the second coat of primer had dried I started work on the blue. I bought two acrylic blues close the original colours, one was a light blue for the doors and the other was a little darker for the body sides but not as it turned out dark enough. So about a heaped teaspoon of paint was put in a pot and tiny amounts of dark blue added until the colour was as close to the photographic references as I could get. I didn’t worry too much about an exact match, as it varied in the photographs depending on the light and weather. And according to the owner of the model (an ex-railwayman) the colours quickly faded in service as well. I also learned the school kids used to peel off the warning stickers, so there was no been to worry if they got painted over.

I started with the blue band at the bottom of the body which was quite straight forward. I had sprayed the lower band in the original blue before realising it was too light, so using a lining pen I drew a broad line across the top in the adjusted colour and pained the rest in with a broad brush. As it was already blue this was achieved in just the one coat. Then came the problems. The next step was to use the lining pen to put the outside line in around the windows. This was just above the rivets and where the pen hit even just the side of the rivet it jumped up and down, giving a saw tooth look to the line. Annoyingly, study of the photos revealed flush sides and a complete lack of rivet detail, so had I looked at these before the priming stage, I would have removed all the rivet detail from the model, making life much easier.

Painting around the windows was time consuming and I was going to paint the frames a metallic colour but the owner said not to bother, as the window frames were painted on the glazing. Next the photographs showed a black door seal towards the cab end being a sliding door, so the doors were painted with a light blue and the door seal in black but 100% flat black doesn’t look natural so this was toned down with a Lifecolour Tyre Black. Also the cab ends were all yellow but all my photo references showed them to be half blue, so this was also carefully painted in.

The white primer showed up as the faintest of white edges where it met the roof, so this was washed in with a little dirty brown black, with some black soot weathering around the exhaust. Then came the Orange overhead warning stripe. I used a Humberol rail colour for this, which I think is the BR orange lining colour. The match was good, the paint flowed freely through the pen and gave good coverage, meaning I didn't have to go over it again. Sometimes yellows and reds have poor pigment density and painting over the right colour primer is essential for block colours. And because the line was well above the dreaded rivets, it went on straight and even.

Finally came the dreaded logo. To my knowledge, no one does Anglia logos as transfers and being white they are not easy to print at home. Therefore I found a picture of the logo on the web and scaled it in Photoshop Elements to the size needed on the model. Then I drew it on tracing paper, reversed it and finally rubbed the positive back onto the model. It left only the fairest of outlines but enough to trace with a paintbrush. They are not perfect but until I'm given a set of transfers they are the best I can do. Not bad at 22mm wide by 6mm high though.

So that's it, a final coat of Testors Matt varnish, which was allowed to harden for a couple of days and then back in the box for the return journey. Hopefully I will get the chance to see it running in the near future with all the seats and windows in.

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.