*Fy Merlen Bach*

Winter is coming…The phrase that spawned hundreds of cringeworthy internet memes. To me it means that any model making I do will be confined to the basement of our little house. There will be no baseboards built, and no models spray painted. Because it will be too cold to work in the garage. There will be days when it will even be too cold to walk down to the garage, let alone work in it. 

So, like a student cramming for an exam. I need to get some things ready for working on in the dark days of winter. First up, is “Merlod Bach” or Little Pony. My version of the LocoRemote “Tiny” that I was inspired to buy whilst reviewing the real thing at the National Railway Museum in York, whilst on vacation in the UK.

I decided to go with a new name. A Welsh name. Principally because I had been inspired by the foundry at the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, and wanted to keep the Welsh theme going. The Ffestiniog Railway has Welsh Pony, and I thought Little Pony was an appropriate name given the diminutive size of the real thing.

With the temperature being a balmy 55 degrees on Sunday I gave the main body parts of “Merlod” a coat of primer.

And so it begins

Tiny comes 3D printed in Black, and I am certain that I don’t want a Black locomotive. If steam locomotives aren’t Black, then they’re Green. 

As you know, I’m in America, so the chances of buying a can of GWR Brunswick Green are next to impossible. Even more vexing was the fact that my local hobby shop only had Tamiya Green paints. Dark Green seemed the simplest colour to go for. So the boiler and water tank were sprayed Dark Green, the other parts Black. Then it started to rain, curtailing my painting activities for the day.

Colours.

Only the major parts were sprayed as I’ll test fit the other parts before I decide when, how, and what colours to paint them.

But with the main body parts sprayed I couldn’t resist the temptation, and I just had to test fit them to see how “Merlod Bach” was going to look in Green.

I think it’s going to look quite good. Don’t you?

*My Little Pony*

Intermission.

As you can see, a pause in the project has been reached. My unfamiliarity with the scale and the size of the items I’m planning to recreate, has caused me to sit back and think about the design and the layout. 

I know my furnace will be about the size of a Pringles tube. I know I’d really like the layout to have an area of no more than four square feet. I have an idea of what I’d like the scene to look like. But will everything work together? This then is a first sketch of what I’d like.

First thoughts

You can clearly see which holiday snap of mine influences it.

Influence

It contains the elements I’d like to see. The stone walls. The furnace. An open roof space to show the joists and timbers. A wagon turntable. For no other reason than I like them and I’ve never recreated one. Patterns, moulds and other casting accoutrements strewn all over the place. One detail that I’d really like to include to see how many notice it. Is to have a pattern and mould for the window frames. It was something that we noticed at Llanberis. Back in its heyday they must have made everything there, and I mean everything. There was even the pattern for the window frames on display, right next to a window containing the cast frame. All in all, the foundry display at Llanberis was quite remarkable, and has certainly made quite an impression on me. 

You will notice one thing missing from my sketch that is in the photo, and that’s the crane. That’s one thing I really can’t visualize the size of. So I’ve left it out for the minute. Though a crane that could pick something off a wagon and place it on the foundry floor would be a great working feature. It’s a feature I’ve recreated before on Whinny Lane in Gn15 and that went down very well at shows.

The Whinny Lane crane

The layout really needs to have the facility for a continuous run when running at a show. So that when I get distracted by the public, the train can run in circles. As long as there is activity on a layout people are happy. When I’m running a shunting layout and I am pulled into conversation, I need someone to step in to take over seamlessly so trains can run and I can talk. There have been several times lately with the 16mm scale layout, when people tried to engage me in conversation as I was pushing the skip up to the tipper, and my concentration was focused on that. It may have made me look standoffish and anti-social. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

A quick draft of a track plan using the geometry of Chris Rennie’s LocoRemote track pieces as a guide, shows that it might fit in an area of 3’6 x 2’. But does it “fit”?

A track plan

How much space is there in front of the mouth of the furnace? What size of mould could you fit between the furnace and the track to recreate a casting process vignette? Can I fit a crane in? Will the geometry of the track allow me to fit everything where I’ve drawn it? 

The track is drawn at the width of the track gauge, with tighter radius curves hidden off scene. As you can see, the track runs pretty close to the baseboard edges. It may well be too close. The grid squares are one inch. So you can see that the track comes within one inch of the edge. 

Clearly some track is needed so I can see if everything will fit. The LocoRemote track is available as a free download for those who have 3D printers. I don’t have a printer myself, but there is an ever-growing band of modellers who do. So I asked one of them nicely if they’d be able to print some sections of track for me and they kindly agreed. 

Their printer is working away as I type, and as soon as I receive the package of track, I will be able to see what fits where and I can move on to the next stage of the layout design.

In Praise of the Pringles Tube.

What is one of the most versatile things in the model railway hobby that has nothing to do with the hobby?

How overlooked is this humble item?

That’s right. The Pringles tube. The cylinder that holds those processed potato snacks has many varied uses in the hobby. Who amongst us uses them to store styrene rod and strip? I do. I have one for rod, one for strip, one for angle and one for misplaced offcuts.

Styrene storage

The cylindrical section has many uses for structures on layouts. Grain elevators in H0 scale for example. Slice them down in height and they’ll make big oil storage tanks in N. I’m sure many will have used them as the base for other things for a layout.

Now I have discovered something new for them to be the basis for. A cupola blast furnace in 7/8ths inch to the foot scale. 

That’s right. This container is a good size for the central feature for this new micro layout.

How on earth did I discover this?

I had spent a lot of time studying the photo that I took of the foundry at Llanberis looking at the detail in the furnace trying to work out the size of it. I wished I’d taken more photos. My best guess for the size was three feet in diameter, maybe a bit more. I didn’t even know anything about blast furnaces to have an idea.

Luckily, I was saved by James Waterfield and Volume 1 of his study of the railways of Sir Arthur Heywood. To start with, that’s where I learnt the name. Cupola Furnace. The furnace was discussed and the iron making process too. Sir Arthur’s furnace was described as being small. The capacity was barely enough to cast two locomotive cylinders at once. A dimension of 2’ 3” outside diameter was mentioned, and along with an annotated drawing of a furnace that was enough to get me thinking. 

A quick measure of my photo showed that this furnace was larger than that. Is it three feet? Maybe, but likely more than that. Perhaps four feet. I don’t know. Three feet six inches diameter seems a pretty reasonable compromise. That would put the charging floor (another term I learned from James’ Book) seven to eight feet off the ground. Which looked that it was about right. A three foot six diameter furnace it was then.

All this thinking made me peckish. I reached for, (you guessed it,) the Pringles. 

Hang on a moment… this is a cylinder… what size is it?

I found a ruler. 74mm. In 7/8ths inch scale, a foot is 22.225mm that makes the Pringle tube approximately three feet four inches in diameter (about one metre in new money). That’s seems pretty close to what I was thinking, and good enough to start to size things up. 

I think that’s a pretty good comparison don’t you?

This simple discovery really helped the design process to come together. The ideas as you can expect, came quickly, and a mock up was quickly put together.

The first mock up

I sat in front of this scene and stared at it for an absolute age. I got quite lost in it, getting a feel for atmosphere. Already I feel better about the size of things and the possibility of a true micro in 7/8ths inch scale. The old baseboard I used is 36” x 14” (915 x 355mm) and the short train fits in there quite well with the furnace, and I was prompted to do a quick sketch.

I think this all shows some promise. I have no track plan right now, and that’s pretty important, but the mock up definitely shows that things should fit in pretty well.

To think that this morning I had I little to no idea at all what to do. I had no feel for the size and bulk of things, until I came across a Pringles tube. 

It’s amazing how things can come together, isn’t it?