Weathering the Loader

 As you can expect. I couldn’t leave things alone, and had to add some weathering to the loading chute. Weathering is subjective. One person’s weathering masterpiece is another’s primitive daub. My work keeps me happy and lies somewhere between the two extremes.

A light weathering.

As with all my work, I start by giving the model a good scrub down and dry brushing with my favourite Asphaltum acrylic paint. It really kills the plastic feel of the models in my eyes. 

I’ve had this paint for years.

Then I scrubbed it on a bit darker in places, and added dabs of orange to suggest the beginnings of rusting. Finally because this would be a dusty, sandy place, there would be dust and sand collecting in crevices and on horizontal surfaces so I dry brushed some white on there too. I think it needs more of that and probably some sort of sandy colour too. One can get caught up in the minutiae of this process. But right now, this is good enough for me. Don’t you think?

That will do for now

Riveting work

Just a short report today. As I’m packing and getting ready for our vacation in the U.K. starting on Sunday. I just booked a couple of tickets for return trips on the Ffestiniog and Tal-y-lyn railways for our days in North Wales. 

One detail that I’d decided to incorporate on the skip loading chute was rivets on the girders. Sixteen millimeter scale is large enough to warrant this level of detail. I had no idea what to use for the rivet heads, but a quick ask around some forums and tiny rhinestone jewels used for decorating fingernails was suggested. I bought a pack from Amazon. 7,200 of various sizes between 1 and 3mm for $8.99 should keep me going for a while.

I figured the easiest way to apply them is a dab of glue on the surface and then put them in police with tweezers. That was pretty much right. I also found that a scalpel to adjust the jewel to its correct spot was a good idea. After 30 minutes dabbing and adjusting I had one side of the loader started.

Can you see them? 

It’s certainly a fiddly job. But right now not too tedious. I certainly have plenty more to add. But it’s a good start. I also don’t doubt that someone, somewhere will tell me the correct pattern of rivet heads. But I don’t care. It creates a good effect, and that will do for me.

The next big step.

We all progress in this hobby. As we spend more time working on our layouts, we develop. We learn skills.  We become better at them, Then we learn new skills. Things that we thought impossible become easy. The bar becomes raised. Sometimes without even noticing it.

Then one day you do notice it. All the little steps amount to one big step. You’re left wondering how did I get here? 

It was only a few years ago that I learned how to make my own panel track seen in this image. That too was a big step preceded by lots of little steps.

In this image there are many of the little steps since then, that lead to this next big step. 

A 16mm scale Peter Binnie skip. This is a new scale to me. I actually don’t make many kits, and those I have started usually end up unfinished. I have half a dozen Slaters O scale wagon kits in such a state. This is a simple kit, little more than 10 parts so it got finished.

It’s battered and rusty. I don’t weather. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to ruin really nice trains with some hamfisted dirty streaks. I buy R-T-R trains with weathering on them. The rim of the skip is banged up. As I don’t weather, I never thought about this before. This simple trick was suggested to me by another 16mm scale modeller. It’s a simple fix but it makes the wagon look like it’s been in service a while.

Static Grass. I have never used static grass until recently. While you were all covering your layouts with grass fibers from expensive, or even home built applicators. I was still in the last century using scatter materials. I had convinced myself that these fibers of grass were round whereas a blade of grass had width so the two couldn’t look the same. To a certain extent I still subscribe to that point of view. But the way those long fibers grow around the timber baulk buffer stop looks very pleasing.  

The timber baulk is distressed, something else I hadn’t thought about until recently all you have to do is drag a razor saw blade down it. That’s not hard.

Weeds. The weeds are the last step. I have no idea why I thought modelling individual plants was something I could do. After all, I had seen Roy C Link’s nettles in his Crowsnest Tramway book, and thought to myself. Never.

It just seemed at that moment something I wanted/needed to try. I remembered that I had made many tiny trees for my Hitsu and Gonou T scale layouts. It couldn’t be any more difficult than that. I made about half a dozen, Then another dozen, followed by 20 more. Now I have about 40 weeds, a mix of Goldenrod, Ragwort and Cow Parsley to plant. It’s probably not enough. They are individually identifiable plants. A new skill has been learnt. A new step taken. Strangely, I find myself wanting to model nettles now.

I started to plant a few weeds on the layout. Ragwort at the sand pit end because they like sand. I pushed the skip up against the timber baulk. Just to see what it looked like.

That’s how I got here.

Looking at the scene, and the image, made me pause. I was gobsmacked. Without realizing it I had just raised my bar. All those small steps and decisions have pulled together to create a whole. The scene has a sense of place, an atmosphere. To a certain extent I feel like I’m there. To be honest, I want to go over there and tip that rusty old skip bucket over. 

So I did.

 

So here I am. In a new place. A new realization that I can do whatever I put my mind to. I’m still a long way off the abilities of the true artists of the model railway world. But in my own way I think I’m with them. In spirit at least.

Weeding - Day 22

Making them, not removing them that is. 

One of the great things about modelling in a large scale such as 16mm is that you can do much more than suggest plants you can actually model them, and depending on how skilled you are. With quite some accuracy. I wasn’t too bothered about recreating nettles in painstaking detail like Roy C.Link did on his Crowsnest Tramway layout. But I was keen to try to go a bit further than using commercial products. I wanted to make some of my own. 

Driving around with all the summer flowers, (and weeds) in bloom. It was clear that yellow would be THE colour to use. But how to make the plants?

The secret to the method lies in tree modelling in smaller scales. There are skilled folks out there who use stranded wire twisted and bent to all sorts of shapes to recreate stunningly accurate models of trees. This may go back to G. Iliffe Stokes in August 1958 Railway Modeller. But a much simpler method will suffice for plants like Cow Parsley and Ragwort for example.

Ragwort

Cow Parsley

One thing that is apparent about all these plants in the field is how straying the stalks are. It seemed quite natural to use straight wire to model straight stalks. Keeping the stalks straight during construction was nigh on impossible.

The wire 15 AWG multi stranded hobby wire

The wire was cut to a suitable length and cladding stripped off.  The individual strands of wire were then thinned down into smaller groups of between 4 to 8 strands. These were then twisted together to create the desired shapes, and a little solder was melted into the end of the stem. This I hope will make it easier to plant the stems into the baseboard,

Strands ready to be twisted together.

Twisted strands ready to receive solder

I was feeling pretty good about the way things were going. Nothing had been too difficult. Twisting the wire strands had been fiddly, then I remembered that I had made a bunch of  trees for my T scale layout Gonou, culminating in flowering cherry trees. Happy with the way the stalks were looking it was time to foliate them.

Step 1. A spray of a green paint to get rid of the copper wire colour

Step.2 A spray with Woodland Scenics scenic cement, and a sprinkle with fine foam

Final step. Dab the ends of the stalks with white glue and sprinkle yellow (for Ragwort) and white (for Wild Parsley) scatter on the ends.

I’ve only made a dozen so far. I just made a few to see how it went. To see if I enjoyed it enough to do a load more. I don’t know how many I’ll need. But these look the part, and when grouped together will probably look quite convincing.

Another new skill learnt.

Day 13. Jiggery Pokery.

There’s a lot of glue setting going on on the layout today as I prepare to think about boxing the layout up in its display case to help protect the EPS substructure.

If you’ve been following along with the blog posts. Then you will have noticed that I have made several jigs to ease construction of layout elements. Here they are gathered together for a photograph.

All the jigs

It was James Hilton, in his blog at Christmas who described his use of jigs or templates, on a project he was working on. The relevant part of the video is here. I took this information on board and saved it 'til later. As I started work on this layout I realised that now was the time to make use of this insight. 

The jigs were all very simple and very easy to make. They were made from foamcore and stripwood. Oh, and one piece of embossed styrene that just happened to be the right size.

The one that looks least like a jig, the large carpenters square, was pretty important as it enabled me to lay the sections of stripwood for the tipping dock deck and retaining walls squarely.

Above that is my old faithful mitre box. It was taped to a piece of foamcore and an adjustable stop, also made of foamcore, was taped at varying distances to get the correct length of decking, posts and styrene girders that I needed.

Above that, the one that I used to make the three rail fence. That one took some working out, getting the rails at the right height.

To the right of that is the one I’m most proud of. If one can said to be proud of a jig. The one used for the posts for the safety railing on the tipper deck. 

To the right of that, is the one for the bents to support the deck. It was the first one I made and if I had made it later, after having built the others. Then I would have probably done something different. But this did the job perfectly.

These simple jigs made the constructional tasks on this project much easier. They were really easy to assemble. If you ever have to do several of the same thing on a project, then you should probably be assembling a jig. 

Day 12 The skip loading chute. A day of mixed fortunes.

I wasn’t expecting this to happen…

When I changed my mind about having a workshop on the layout and replacing it with a loading chute. I knew exactly what I wanted. Something akin to the one that features on David Barham’s Fen End Pit layout. I am not planning an operating dragline excavator though. 

Having a working feature like this at the front of the layout opens up interesting opportunities at a show. One could invite viewers to load the skips, thus drawing them into the world of the layout rather than just watching. 

The first mockup of the chute was well received over on the NGRMOnline forum and I got some good feedback on things to incorporate. 

As per usual, a drawing was produced, The most important thing about this drawing was it would enable me to get the size of the panels for the chute correct. Something that required me to dredge up knowledge from grammar school technical drawing classes to correctly design and build it.

A quick layout drawing of the loading chute

With the help of the drawing, progress was pretty swift. By lunchtime I was well on the way to having it completed.

Coming along nicely

Though much of the design is inspired by the design on Fen End Pit, as I worked further on it, I decided it needed a bit more bracing between the legs to aid rigidity. Plus it would give the structure my own touch of individuality. Luckily, I did have enough right angle section to be able to do this, and as my afternoon tea break approached, things were looking very good indeed. 

Another structure looks pretty good.

While the kettle was boiling and the tea brewing, I took it outside to give it a quick spray of primer, and then let it dry whilst I enjoyed my Earl Grey and biccies. 

Suitably refreshed, I went outside to continue priming.

OH SH!T.

A gust of breeze had got up and blown the model off the bin I had been spraying on, and it had fallen on the concrete path. To say I was shocked was an understatement.

Perhaps as a testament to my construction processes, the chute only broke into two parts. So repair shouldn’t be too difficult. But it most certainly wasn’t what I was expecting at the end of the day today. 

Day 11. Railings

I was pretty nervous about this project, so I spent quite a bit of time working out the best way to complete it. 

In smaller scales of course, you just go out and buy some fencing to suit. If there’s anything in 16mm scale I couldn’t find it. So scratch building was called for.  

I did my due diligence, researching dimensions and sizes. I wanted to use styrene tube for the posts and rail. In the end it turned out I didn’t have any tube in the size I wanted. I had lots of 2.5mm rod though, and it looked like it looked right. So rod it was. I’d just have to drill a few extra holes, that’s all. These extra holes were going to be in the end of the rod though. But as I had already drilled out rod when working on the exhaust pipe for my “Huddy” I wasn’t phased by that. The first thing I needed was a jig.

Another task, another jig.

Pretty much every job on the layout has needed a jig somewhere to aid its construction. This one was no exception. Sections of strip wood hold the rod in place, and allow me to cut the rod to the correct length. A section of the corrugated sheet that I used for the sleepers had holes drilled in it at the correct distances for the safety rails. This should, in theory, give a batch of identical fence posts, and it pretty much did.

All identical (or pretty close)

A hole was drilled in the end of the fence post, to accept a short length of .75mm rod to locate it in the deck and similar lengths of the rod were placed in the holes on the post to help locate the rails.

From then on, it was pretty simple. Yes you had to be careful, but as all the rods had been cut to the same length and drilled correctly it all went together quite easily. I didn’t even need a jig for this stage of the project. Before long I had a pretty good looking section of safety railing.

First section. Yes, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself.

The second section was a bit more challenging. But not much. It involved a right angle turn in the railing to enable it to go partly across the end of the deck.

But simply with careful drilling and lining up of the holes the pins were easily placed to make the turn possible.

By now, I’m feeling invincible

Some holes were drilled into the deck and the safety rails were put in place for the first time…

Well, what can I say?

Even the right angle turn worked out.

A quick spray of paint to cover the white and job’s a good’ un

Needless to say. I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. This is something I’d never needed to do before. It was something that I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do. There may even have been an easier way to do it. Though I’m not sure that just butt jointing the sections of post and rail together would have resulted in as good a join as I have this way.

The lesson everyone can take away from this is never be afraid to try something out of your comfort zone. 

Pause, reflect

I've reached that stage.  I'm the vast majority of the way through the layouts construction. It's just detailing work to do. I can add bits and pieces here and there to my hearts content to make the scene looked lived in. Like a place of work should. There's so many little things to be done, or could be done. But what? Time to pause and reflect. Here's some things to think about.

To do: Detail the workshop with tools and other rubbish. Perhaps a delightfully dated, (maybe some will say sexist), pinup poster on a wall. The workshop will need properly bedding in, like all the structures on the layout. In the future, I may also run a short section of panel track into the workshop to model a wagon under repair.

 

To do: Do I need to do more? I could add pipe, or girders, bag of cement, and even more wood to a pile of workplace junk. But would it achieve anything extra to what's already suggested here?

Quite a nice vista. Not a view that the regular layout viewer would see.
To do: Anything? Right now I can't think of anything much. A new viewpoint like this can make you think. How about a rack of steel sections in front of the sheeted over items maybe?

To do: Why is that ladder up against the gutter? Is he going to clear the gutters out? I once had a sunflower growing in one of the gutters of my garage. Weeds in the gutter to add to the scene then. The door does need a handle though.

Just messing around. To do: More tension needed in the weighted down ropes that hold the tarpaulin in place.

This is good. Seriously, I might not ever top this as a vignette where I set out to do something and achieved what I set out to do. Nothing else needed here.

Aerial view. There's a surprising amount of space to fill. If I wanted to, that is.

From this view you can see all three tracks, as set out on Carl Arendt's original Squarefoot estate railway layout.

I have a couple more Binnie skips to build, and as you know I plan to model those as fairly new and free of damage. There's a Motor Rail kit coming from LocoRemote too. Then there's an 'Issing Sid kit to build for fun. All those items will need painting, and it's too cold here in Minnesota to go down to the garage and spray paint things right now. Perhaps I will have to wait until March to do that job. The only truly major task to do is to devise the tipper to fill the wagons. I have a few ideas on that, it just needs fine tuning to fit the location. So perhaps there won't be much activity on here in the coming weeks. We'll see. 

What do you think I could add? Reply here or wherever you were referred from, either Facebook, NGRMOnline, or Voie Libre. I'd be interested in feedback. 

*It should be noted that the figures aren't painted for a reason. My wife wants to paint those. So I'm leaving them well alone.

Did you know that Hudson skips used to be clean?

It’s difficult to believe I know. Generally, the only pictures we see of them are when they are battered and caked in mud, dirt, and rust. With that rust eating though to become fully fledged holes. It’s difficult to believe that at one time they were brand new and clean.

I often wondered what they must have looked like brand new, or at least just a few weeks or so old, they must have got dirty very quickly.

Then while leafing through Steve Thomason’s excellent website industrial narrow gauge railways in search of  atmosphere for the revamped challenge layout. I discovered some pictures of skips that were only months old. The rust was starting to build up. But they were quite clearly yellow in colour. Upon delivery this must have been quite the bright yellow indeed, probably matching the hi-vis yellow of the loco’s. On top of that, there was a logo on the side. “HUDSON RALETRUX”. The spelling didn’t do much for me either. But it was there, and working on the theory that you don’t see many Hudson Skips in a relatively clean condition on layouts. I thought that when I assembled the next two Binnie skip kits I have, I’d do them in a relatively clean condition. So I would need decals for this logo.

Hudson “RALETRUX” logo

I call myself a graphic designer. I spent 15 years designing and making signs after four years at art college. But I left the art and design industry behind almost 20 years ago. Things have some along a lot since then. Tasks that were done in design programs like CorelDraw that cost hundreds of dollars back then can now be done in Apps that are free or cost only a few dollars.

I design trackplans in an App called Graphic ($8.99). So I though that producing the artwork for my own decals wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Especially as the typeface was very square. Then I as I started started to work on it, I recalled terms like “node edit” vector/raster graphics, which I knew little about back then and had forgotten most of that by now. But I was confident I could solve those problems. 

Let’s get started…

I opened up Graphic and full of the confidence that working in a new scale brings, started work. It’s true that I got a tad frustrated when I couldn’t add nodes to manipulate things the way I wanted, but the simplicity of the typeface made it quite easy to find a workaround, and after a couple of hours had flown by. I had a logo that I was very happy with. It might not be exactly to scale, but it looks pretty good. Now all I have to do is print it off. Printing my own decals. There’s something else I know nothing about. 

Done! Feeling pretty pleased with myself

The lesson learned from this is to try things. You never know what you can do until you try. I need to take that attitude into other aspects of working in 16mm scale. Already this 16mm scale journey is very rewarding.