Day 9

After a little respite yesterday to review one weeks work. It’s time to move on again. I will try set out with the aim of working on an item for the layout a day. Working during the week on bite sized chunks to keep things progressing. There’s things like the fence, the handrail around the tipping deck, things like that. To that end I decided to start with the short section of fence around the end of the dock. It was simple enough to find drawings on the internet that showed the dimensions of a simple three rail fence. 

First up I needed a couple of simple jigs to get the same sized parts to fit the same way.

It might not look like much, but this simple arrangement of stripwood and foamcore board is the key to getting all the parts to fit.

This is how it holds all the parts together.

The assembled fence. Next a quick wash with alcohol/India ink.

In place and ready to be bedded in

One more simple job done.

The eighth day review.

After one week on the project, I thought it would be good to sit back and take a look at what happened in the previous seven days. This is an overall view of all 4’ x 14” of it.

Overall view

Yes. I know that at 4’ x 14” it’s over the four square feet maximum. But putting on my ‘Editor of the Micro Model Railway Dispatch” hat. I’m always happy to give larger scales line 16mm and 7/8ths some leeway. It’s still most definitely “in the spirit of a micro” as Carl would say.

Let’s take a look at the progress of the scenes.

The skip loader in a sand quarry setting. It’s difficult to to put over the effect of a full-blown sand quarry in a couple of square feet. But a few piles of sand will help. As for the “sand”. How do you model it in 16mm scale? 

I’ve no idea, but this is how I’ve started. After I’d covered the contours with spackle, I painted the surface a cream colour, just in case whatever I chose to represent the sand came off exposing the base contours.

The first ground cover was Woodland Scenics “yellow” turf, that looks more like a green. This was sprinkled on a smothering of white glue. Then I ballasted the track with Woodland Scenics buff fine ballast. It’s starting to look OK but some more sand is needed. It feels like Steve Bennett’s early layouts.

The other end of the layout has a totally different feel to it. More conventional in its scenic treatment. There’s going to be a lot of scrub and weeds and such underneath the tipping dock. Right now the two scenes are separated by a retaining wall. It might have some vegetation growing over it, it might help to blend, yet separate the two scenes. I am very inclined to add a small shed of some description leaning against it. But probably not a prefabricated concrete garage.

At the end here, a fence and gate is planned, perhaps with a premises sign. 

The previous two pictures also show the problem with vehicles in this scale. The Land Rover is a small vehicle and yet it’s eight inches (200mm) long. I wouldn’t want a vehicle much longer than this in there. I did find a 1:20 scale toy garbage truck that could probably could have been worked into a lorry. But it was 15” long, as the layout is 14” deep so fitting it in would be rather difficult, if not impossible.

So that’s it then. One weeks work. Still lots to do, but lots to keep me interested.

Oh, one last thing. How did I get the incredibly flimsy tipper shelter to stand up? This rear view should clear things up.

How to stand the shelter up. Extra long legs hidden behind everything

 

 

Day 7

Day seven. Technically that’s one week since the project started. From the outset, I doubted that I could build a 16mm scale layout in the time frame. I’ve come on a long way though. It’s definitely starting to look like a micro layout. How does the old adage go? The last 20% of a layout’s construction takes 80% of the time? I’m getting perilously close to starting on the last 20%.

One thing that has been causing much head scratching has been the shelter for the tipping point. In the photograph I have, the structure looks flimsy. Very flimsy. It looks like it would get blown away in a strong wind. I’ve since had it confirmed to me that these structures were not to the strongest construction. The problem was to be recreating that flimsiness while building a structure that will withstand trips to model railway shows. 

With only one photo to work from and no dimensions. A lot of guesstimation was involved. I had a feeling that to keep things simple, the shelter height was the same as a sheet of corrugated metal (why waste time cutting things?). The standard sheet height was eight feet. The internet also told me that a sheet was about 28” wide. Knowing that there would also be a one and a half corrugations overlap between sheets helped calculate the length. I had some corrugated sheet that looked right and cut it to size. After that, I searched through my stock of styrene girders and found stuff that, once again, looked the right size. There was even more guesswork attached to the roof. But no-one will know. Besides, I probably used the same frame of mind in the construction of my model as the man who built the original.

My take on the tipping shelter. It looks good enough for me.

As for looking flimsy, but being sturdy. I’ve accidentally dropped it a couple of times and it has survived each fall. Job done then.

One job I hadn’t done yet was to bed in the tipping dock. I’m surprised I hadn’t done it as soon as the rails were laid on it. Because that meant I could run a train on there. There’s still lots of work to do on the tipping dock, finishing off the shelter of course, hand rails around the edge and a buffer stop at the end for starters.

But that shouldn’t stop me fitting it in place and trying things out…

You know you wanted to see a run of the train on the layout… 

The Motor Rail uses Chris Rennie’s LocoRemote WiFi system. Right now I’m perfectly happy with it. The big thing is there’s no wires to the track and the rails can be as dirty as you like. The trains will still run.

I suppose that you could say that with trains running and some scenery in place, I have built a layout in seven days…

Day 6

Right now I feel compelled to work on the ground, the contours.

In the smaller scales you can model the ground level in something like a small quarry as flat and get away with it. Maybe a larger bump and rut in a rough road. You could get away with using different grades of  scenic scatter to suggest the unevenness of the ground.

Not so in 16mm scale you can model every bump and rut, every puddle. You could even model every messy footstep in a muddy morass if you so desired. 

I built up lumps and bumps with offcuts of EPS, and cut away the basic shape for my ground contours in the sand loading area and gave it a skim over with lightweight spackle. There’s lots of lumps and bumps and even a pile of sand shaped out. The areas that I cut away might end up being filled with water for puddles.

Shaping the ground on the sand tipper level

The lower level called for something much flatter. So I gave a general, level coverage to the area. Then thickened that up in places and dragged a piece of strip wood through it to simulate tyre tracks, then just because I was feeling silly. I took a figure and childishly walked him through the thick patches to leave footprints. Right now It looks like someone has been out in a snowstorm so I need to add a wash of earth colour to get rid of the snowscape.

Tyre track and footprints in the snow.

After letting the spackle dry for a while the surface was given a base colour to kill the snowscape.

The mud looks good (though has not reproduced well in this image), and you can still see the footprints among the tyre tracks.

The tipper vignette starts to come together

I sit staring at this mock up of the tipper shelter, and the picture in issue 134 of The Review trying to work out how to make one myself

All in all, another good day with lots of solid progress.

Day 5.

 First thing on the cards today was the laying of the rails onto the deck of the tipping dock. Spiking rail, as you know, is not my favourite task. But as confidence was at a high after yesterdays progress, I felt pretty good about pressing home tiny nails into basswood. 

Spiking in progress

When a succession of spikes go in easily, I feel good about it. Sometimes they don’t. Then the job becomes tedious. But this is still a new technique for me. I’ve been spiking little more than a year. I’m sure I can grow to tolerate it. 

But I did feel good when I had the whole deck spiked and a wagon on it..

A skip tipping on the dock. As it should be.

In other news, there’s been a slightly major change of plan. Having waxed lyrical in praise of the prefabricated concrete garage. It’s now gone from the layout, to be replaced by a skip loading chute. 

Last night as I was about to go to sleep, an idea came to me and I needed to sketch it so I didn’t forget.

Had to scribble this before I fell asleep

As I was emptying a skip at one end of the layout, it seemed to make more sense from a story telling point of view to load wagons at the other end. 

I had been having informal discussions with Chris Mears about his scheme, and he told me how he would get more pleasure out of loading and unloading skips than anything. That remark stuck at the back of my mind a while. Laying there dormant, until I needed it. 

There’s nothing wrong with my idea of a workshop scene. I’ve done too much research on prefab concrete garages to let the idea totally drop. But it doesn’t tell a story. Wagons would just appear from offstage and be tipped. Without reason. Small layouts, and particularly Micro layouts need to tell a story to get audience engagement.

If the two scenes here can be successfully separated to represent two ends of a small industrial system. Then a story can be told. Material is loaded into a wagon at one end of the line. Material is tipped out at the other. There’s countless small systems where this happens. 

I’m liking this concept more and more as I think it over. There is the potential at a show, to invite punters to load the wagon somehow, and then see the load tipped out. For a child, you could even tip some sweets or candies into a wagon to be transported to be tipped out in front of them. Audience engagement.

I mocked up a wagon loading chute to get a feel for the idea. 

A mock-up loading chute idea.

The mock up looks pretty good. I went a bit further and mocked up a few more scenes up and took a few more shots. This time I converted them to black and white to remove the distracting scenery and colour of my kitchen. The overall effect has great promise. As with Croft Original Sherry. “One instinctively knows when something is right”

A pile of sand or some change of relief is needed to help separate the two scenes

Aerial view

Perhaps a shelter for the tipping point could be useful.

Still lots to think about. A lot of headway has been made these last couple of days. Things are feeling really good.

Day 4.

The days seem to be rushing by. I don’t see how I could finish this in three more days. I desperately need something to come together to make me feel like I’m getting somewhere.

Today that happened. 

I’ve been cutting and staining strip wood and slicing up styrene girders for the past 2 days. I was desperate to see some progress. Today, with some jigs and a little patience, I achieved something.

Something!

The tipping dock is in a state where it looks like what it’s going to look like. It stands on its own 10 legs. I shan’t fix the deck in place until I’ve laid the rails on there. 

The superstructure is rigid thanks to all the bracing I put in place.

The underside showing all the bracing in place

After that my confidence was at a bit of a high, so I started to think about the garage/workshop. I poured over photographs of prefab garages getting a feel for how they were assembled. You can even find the instructions on the internet. For a while I gave some thought to actually making panels and assembling them like the real thing.

Perhaps not…

I mocked up a shell of the building to get the size right. I was originally going with a scale 16’ long building bit I felt it was too long. So I decided a 12’ structure would fit the bill.

A slightly smaller structure than planned. But all is good.

All in all a good day. A confidence building day. I’m looking forward to getting a lot more done in the next couple of days.
 

Day 3.

 I left the decking overnight hoping that it would be likable in the morning. It wasn’t. I gave it another wash of a lighter grey to kill the blue tinge of the darker wash. Then let that dry. 

It’s not too bad now

It’s better now. I’m looking at it from directly above, an angle no-one will see it from. 

While this dried, I started work on on the legs and support frame. I have expended much brain power on working out the best way to assemble all my sections of Plastruct girder to make something that looks like the prototype. I figured a pattern of some sort was in order to make enough identical supports.

After a few hours I had five pretty identical legs.

This may well look like a wooden fence, (something to bear in mind for the future) but it is actually the timber deck for the tipping dock.

Another day finished. I expect tomorrow I’ll have to lay the rails on the decking before assembling the substructure. What else will I have time for?