What’s the point part 1

Over the past month or so, I have been working on something pretty important as I think about extending the original micro layout. 

I’ve been building a turnout. You’ll all be familiar with my method of building plain track using Plastruct embossed corrugated sheet. I needed to know if this construction method would work for turnouts. I know there’s lots of people 3D printing turnouts, and I may well go that way. But first I have to know if my method of track building would work. 

I decided to build a Y turnout from the drawing in the late Roy Link’s Industrial narrow gauge handbook.

I enlarged the drawing to size and got to work. I shall try not to bore you with a ‘How I blew my nose” approach to describing the work. Just list the significant steps. Suffice to say the method of building turnouts is little different whatever scale or track you use.

The template from the Roy Link handbook, blown up  and taped on a board. During an earlier rush of blood to the head, I had cut all my embossed styrene into sleeper lengths. In order to get the correct length sleepers I had to glue them together. Each butt joint was reinforced with styrene strip in the channels.

A lot of people asked me about my railbender. This is it. I found it on eBay from a seller called harrgar52. It looks to be an adaptation of the tool for removing watch backs, that has been described in the model railway press in the past.

Stage 1. Cut all the sections of rail to size. I made multiple easy passes through the railbender in order to get the curvature correct. The rail came from some sections of Atlas O scale 2 rail track. I think that makes it code 148. 

A simple jig was needed for the crossing vee. Just a couple of pieces of wood set to the correct angle. Filing the rails to the correct angle of the vee, gave me a good idea of how much rail would have to be removed for the blades. A lot.

Then I had to leave the project for a couple of weeks as I prepared to run my 24th marathon.

Some Progress Photos.

It's been a bit quiet hereabouts while I devoted some attention to my US outline O scale project Minneapolis Fork, and now with the weather picking up and I am able to to some spray painting outside. With all that done I thought I'd put everything together to get a quick feel for the progress. I hope you like these images.

An empty yard

An almost new skip wagon is in the workshop

Motor Rail gets ready to head out with the fuel bowser wagons

Brush loco “Amberley” shoves a skip loader with stone into the unloaded

The images look OK. I’m quite pleased with them.

Fueling up.

Another project that has seen the light of day in the 16mm scale workshop over the past few months, is this fuel bowser arrangement. It’s a project I’ve wanted to create for a long time. In fact, I think I’ve considered it in most narrow gauge scales I’ve modelled in. This is the first time I’ve put my thoughts into action. 

The first time I saw the set up was in Roy C Link’s Industrial Narrow Gauge Modelling Handbook. Ostensibly a vehicle for his own products, the book contains a lot of useful information about industrial narrow gauge railways and how to recreate them using his products (the range is now produced by KB Scale and carried by Light Railway Stores.co.uk). The arrangement was meticulously drawn out in Roy’s own inimitable style and I knew one day I’d model it. Wether it would be using the kit in 0:14 scale or a creation of my own, was hidden in the future. 

Waiting for final details and the paint shop.

I thought that the internet would be filled with pictures of a prototype. I was wrong. I could only find a couple of images online in the Industrial Railway Society archives. Even asking fellow modellers only produced the same pictures. Anyone who had modelled it was using the same source material as me. I was going to be on my own. 

However, it was a pretty simple job. Binnie tipper chassis are used as the base, and the oil drums are produced by a company called American Diorama. These accessories are made for the automotive modeller, in scales such as 1:43, 1:14 and 1:18 There are nice items for workshops, as well as mechanics, workmen, and even bikini clad car wash girls.

The rest of the work on the project, like the cradles for the oil drums and the hand pump was modelled using styrene tube, rod and angle. The main achievement was the bending of some 2.4mm styrene rod on a convoluted path from the oil drum to the pump. A task completed at the first attempt.

Bending the pipe around the chassis at the first attempt.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this.

Simple but effective

There we go. It was little more than a day’s work. Though I expect it would have been longer if I hadn’t been able to bend that styrene rod correctly the first time…

Tasks to finish the model include strapping to hold the drums in place, a handle for the pump, and a hose for dispensing the fuel. These tasks wait for things to warm up, so I can get into the garage to spray paint everything.

LocoRemote Motor Rail 12HP

 It’s been a while since I last updated this blog, so please excuse a couple of rapid entries as I get you back up to speed on the project.

First up, the LocoRemote Motor Rail kit. 

As you well know, my enthusiasm for Chris Rennie’s kits knows no bounds. They have introduced me to a whole new world of railway modelling I didn’t know existed. If you would have told me before the Covid epidemic that I would be modelling in 16mm scale. I would have laughed at you and asked where I was getting the money from to run live steam in the garden. But Chris’s products have shown me otherwise. I’ve said previously that working on 16mm scale micro layouts fills me with the same kind of excitement that I got from the early days of Gn15, all those years ago. It’s all down to these kits that give me little locomotives full of character, for about $100. 

A loco with a working headlight that sits on your hand in 16mm scale.

The unique boxy lines of the prototype are well captured.

The kit is as simple as the Huddy and Brush Amberley loco’s that I have. So there’s little else to say about the construction, other than they go together perfectly. I decided not to add any little bits and pieces to it in the way of detailing like I did with the Huddy. There’s barely any fettling to do to get the parts to fit together. The LocoRemote control unit and battery fit snugly in the engine compartment and the on/off switch is invisible, mounted so that the switch is under the chassis. In fact the only problem I have is my impatience with the glue setting. Revell Contacta professional is recommended, and it’s a fine glue, that when set makes good strong bond. It just takes a long time to get there. Too long, when I want to be getting on with things. Some of the superglues I’ve used previously also take a long time to set for me. So I must just be too impatient for the material to be bonded together.

The loco now sits awaiting primer and paint. Winter has been especially long this year in Minnesota. I’m not complaining as it has given me more time to cross country ski. But it’s also stopped me going down to the garage to spray paint all the projects I’ve accumulated over the past months. As I write this the snow has gone. But things are not warming up much. So painting is still a few weeks away.

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.

Skip two my Lou

A dreadful play on words, for which I’m deeply sorry.

Two of my Binnie skips have been at my novice weathering hands over the past couple of days and though not perfect, for some first efforts at serious weathering in any scale I think they pass muster. 

A couple of my Binnie skips are now looking well worn

Even though I have discovered pictures of new, almost pristine Hudson skips. The real things spent the vast majority of their lives in battered conditions. (I’ll bet that there isn’t even a clean one in preservation, he said hoping to be proved wrong). So I needed to model a couple of them after some years of hard work. 

Both wagons started off the same, assembled per the simple instructions as befits such a simple piece of rolling stock. This was followed by a spraying of a red oxide paint. They sat in that condition for many a month, waiting for inspiration to hit me. For some reason inspiration hit me a few days ago.

The first thing I did was give them a washing over with my favourite paint. DecoArt “Asphaltum”.

My favourite paint

It’s an Acrylic paint I found in my wife’s collection for her ceramics projects. She used it, (note the past tense) for dirtying things up. So that’s what I used it for. Oh my Lord. What a weapon this paint is. Just a thin wash over a painted item kills stone dead, any sheen in whatever colour you apply it to. When I first started using it many years ago, I dry brushed it on axle boxes and loco underframes for a little basic road grime. But as time went on I started using it more and more. I have even used it as a base colour for scenery in places. 

So I attacked the skips. The wash was applied pretty unevenly, thicker in some places than others. As I was adding other colours to it,  I erred on the side of caution and kept it simple. I could always add more colour, but removing it might be difficult.

Before the Ashphaltum wash

Afterwards. The sheen has gone.

Rusting is a subjective thing. What you, personally, might think is right, someone else might say that’s wrong. So for these first steps I went with what I myself was happy with. I used a bright Orange acrylic I had in stock. A cheapy from Target, from their ‘Mondo Llama” children’s range. Zesty Orange. I brushed it on where I thought rust and rusty streaks would form. If I didn’t like anything, I just smeared it off with my finger. The Asphaltum wash underneath killed the colour and added another tone to the base.

 As I say, overall the effect pleases me. I need to do a little fettling and fine tuning with some rust streaks. But it looks like a rusty, well used wagon to me and as it will spend time on the layout filled with rock and stone. It’ll be perfectly fine. One piece of advice that was passed on to me through my Facebook page was to ‘beat up” the edges. This was achieved by softening the skip over a flame and then bending and tweaking it with a pair of pliers. After a touch up with paint, the final result really pleased me, 

One of those days when I impress myself with what I can do

One down, one to go. 

From the earliest days of this concept. I really wanted one of the skips to be derelict and form a little vignette on the layout. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the best way to represent this would be by having a big hole in the skip itself. This was achieved with a reamer bit in my Dremel. Of course, the model skip is far thicker than the real thing, but I managed to hide that thickness when it was placed on the layout, as I added weeds growing out and around it. I used a new product to me from Woodland Scenics. Something called “Briar Patch”. It looks to be just smaller pieces of fine leaf foliage. It certainly helps create the right impression.

Left to rot

There we go, another footstep on my 16mm scale journey. A footstep that I am more than happy with. I am reminded of what I wrote in my on my panel track building in issue 127 of Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review. 

“If I ever find myself doubting my abilities, all I need to do is pull out <my original section of track>, take a good look, and remind myself of what I can do when I put my mind to it.” 

You can do it too. Just put your mind to it.
 
 

When a picture is worth a thousand words

Things are coming together

 (Don’t worry, I won’t write 1,000 words).

 It can take a lot to please me when it comes to my model railway projects. I think that may be why I flit from project to project, scale to scale. I’m trying to find a way to create that indefinable "it" quality that I see in other peoples work that drives me on in this hobby. Like when I first saw pictures of the old Model Railway Journal O scale layout Inkerman Street. That layout had the "it" quality for me. So therefore, I reasoned, if I want to produce a model railway with the "it" quality, I must model in O scale. Or if we choose a more up to date layout. James Hilton's Canal Street Wharf also has that personal "it" quality. Therefore I should model in 006.5 if I want to produce a layout with those qualities. Of course we all know that’s not the case. It’s what YOU put into YOUR layout that gives it that quality.

 For me, this new picture of my layout has that quality, the atmosphere that I’m after. It feels like the corner of a yard on a small industrial or estate railway system somewhere. The elements are there. The workshop with tools and equipment on view. (I may yet lay a temporary section of track into the workshop, so I could display something in there). The wall on the left hand side looks the part. It was the correct decision to go with this rather than the hedge I originally considered. The track in the back corner is getting buried up to rail level. I wanted a short section of buried track. I didn’t want to bury it all as I’m quite proud of what I achieved with Plastruct sheet to make the sleepers. I may yet use this back corner for a working tipper feature, as was the original plan and also on Carl’s layout. The corrugated building will be used for loading the skips. Much like the original Squarefoot. I’m very pleased with the way the angled wooden building draws your eye towards the loading shed. 

 Just peeping into the picture is the Landrover view block. That works surprisingly well, The Amberley loco is a little too tall to be totally hidden by it though. Shorter locos are hidden very well.

 In my minds eye I can now see the weeds, litter, and other detritus on the ground all adding to the atmosphere. Buildings need to be bedded in, bargeboards, gutters and down pipes added. Some weathering needs to be done, but its getting there.

The layout is really coming together now.