Skip

The last piece (for the minute) for Rhiw is a skip; one of those that sits by the lineside with a mix of gash inside and seemingly has no means of being retrieved.

The root is one of a pair from the Peco Modelscene range which is stamped Leafdale Models 1988 underneath. A couple of coats of paint to dull the bright yellow plastic and then the full scrapbox treatment for the contents. This was a scrabble down to the bottom for some small bits of sheet and wood and I can proudly announce a boxed ticked. Rhiw was the first layout for a while not to have any part of a Wills Occupation Bridge kit on it... now it has.

 

Concrete hut

 

Yes more crazy old stuff. ref. the post below, a tally hut for the private siding. The cognoscenti will recognise this as not being an expensive etched brass kit, and for me points out exactly what is wrong with the hobby; we're getting so the high cost and the new have become more important than polishing what is already out there. (tap, tap). It is of course, one of these...

The very long in the tooth Hornby, nee Triang, turntable motor covering hut. The window frames aside it is a very crisp detailed moulding and with a bit of gentle alteration and paint comes out quite well. These are ubiquitous in rummage boxes at exhibitions and can be pence to purchase. Play that against the equivalent P*c* kit at about £4 and you're on a winner. In a few short moments this will be installed on Rhiw 2 where no one will see it.

Fences

Catching up.

After a week in the sun, where I actually got some modelling done, it's back to the workbench. However this is not all moving in a linear fashion and I was minded to move away from the new project for a bit and get a couple of things done on Rhiw 2. This was far from urgent, but the stuff is floating around and I was in the mood to do it.

The private siding area has always been slightly vague and needed the viewer and operator to use a deal of imagination as to where all this stuff was going and why. It needed some sort of essential physical marking to show that stock was leaving the mainline and going somewhere else. Fences and gates are great for this, so here we are. Some Maquett mesh was cut on the diagonal and thin posts added from 20thou strip, with a couple of repairs added in. Posts and gate are Ratio and from Nigel's bottomless pile of bits. The tally hut to do and some light clutter to throw around. Understand that most of this will be hidden behind the bank and is therefore a waste of effort.
 

Jinty time

 

You didn't see this coming.

Amongst all the clearing up and out came this form the kits box. It's been there for a while and it was intended to use the the body for a Ted Polet type conversion to 009. This didn't happen and I didn't even try running it. It was absolutely filthy and appeared to be electrically dead.  The body came off and I dumped it in a some warm soapy water and attacked it with a toothbrush (she'll never find out). This was quite successful and some power was applied to the motor. It runs! 

Disassembly located the broken wire to the pick ups. I took the whole thing apart, cleaned the armature and brushes, removed the suppressor, and replaced the broken wire and the pick ups. The wheels were cleaned with a fibre brush and the whole lot put back together and lubed. It's probably 65 years old and it now purrs along. It also looks a lot better than some of the similar Ebay offerings and is now up for grabs.

First point down

Small progress. This is going to be steady methinks. And already I've wound people up. 

The holes in the boards for the joining bolts are on the sloppy side. This was the same with Rhiw2 and allows the track to be laid flat, but some up/down jiggle room for the difference between the code 100 and code 75 track. Other than that it's all pretty standard fare and what you have seen here on numerous occasions; no P4 precision here. It looks a little stark at the moment, but I'm basically cutting a middle ground between Dury's Gap with the mix of HO spacing and the Bullhead and AotC with the forward mounted switches. This notices a lot less when it's all prettied up with ballast and green stuff.  Right to left: copper clad sleepers pinned and packed to the Peco depth. 9" of Bullhead, Peco code 75 RH medium operated with a DPDT slider and some wire in tube. All of this (switch excepting) has been used somewhere else before, thus, total cost: c50p. A Bachmann C Class and an 08 run through without hitch. Onward again.
 

Boards up.

 With Rhiw lying unloved and unconnected, the new basic boards have been set up. This all happened without drama, though to be honest, if I can't do this sort of thing with my eyes closed by now then something is wrong. Simple is the key here and I'm imagining that this is going to form a small series of build posts. Not quite with the intensity of reach of recent efforts in RM, but possibly with a wider international one. That is but a consequence and not the reason; that is provide a short-order home-based BLT to sit where Rhiw is now that can be left up and operated at short notice; as well as clearing a lot of scrap and left-overs from the cupboard. The boards are bolted together with a mix of M6 bolts and wing nuts and are still without any proper reinforcement until the backs and front profile boards go on. Easier to get the track down and wired and then work the details around that. The ruler is in place to fix the crossover/headshunt position. This needs to be around 10" to take a standard British 0-6-0 goods engine such as a C or Q1. The points are Peco medium code 75.

The next job is to sort ot the join from the FY.

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Baseboards for Drovers Brook

 And there they are. In fairly short order two 3 x 1' boards thrown together. The casual viewer may think these are quite neat. This is the good angle and the lower regions are a mix of off-cuts and the sort of thing that I stash at the back of the garage, but most people would put in a skip. Probably the same people who would lash out somewhere in the region of £200 for something similar to these in kit form from one of the board hawkers. These? Ten quid tops. Nearer five. And TBH they took no longer than it would have done to faff around with the kit versions. The mistake... there's always at least one... was drilling out the side frames to save weight for transport until it dawned on me, while standing in a cloud of MDF dust, that as this project was not really for taking out that this was utterly pointless. The upshot is that one has holes and one doesn't. 

All there is to do now is get them bolted together and lined up with the new domestic fiddle yard. Track down by next week. 

Drover's Brook. A plan.

So here's a funny thing. When does a plan start as a plan, then get discarded, then expanded, then shrunk again? Here of course. This may be Drover's Brook. The quick of brain and sharp of eye will notice that there is much here that is classic CF. It's a BLT, it's four points laid out a la Ahearn's Gammon End and it's a foot wide (the metre rule marking the rear edge).

This is/was the first in the new five year plan/Project 70 thing. Then it got pulled up to 7'6", then I thought better of it and started thinking in circles. Now back to square one with an anti-AotC 6 x 1 plan which breaks not one boundary nor any expectations. Or does it?  It's front op'...pause while I get reminded about my experience with Rhiw Mk1. This though ain't an exhibition piece, it's a home layout that could be taken to a low-stress show (I'm thinking the WRG event or even the recently visited Bredgar show). Much to certain people's dismay, the slide switches will be on top and front as with Dury's Gap and could be accessed by reaching over in show mode. There are some who get apoplectic about this sort of thing, but quite frankly, I couldn't give a toss. If you can't recognise the concept of an electric toy train set then your problems are far worse than my slide switches.

The main positive with all of this is that over 90% of the materials can be drawn from stock and will clear some space in the cupboard. A sheet and a half of MDF and some scraps, the buildings and points were in a box and the couple that need doing are in stock. The track came out of one of those Peco card track boxes from retailers. I just upended it and this is what came out - a mix of Bullhead and 75 which can be mixed as with Dury's Gap. The only thing that I may be short of is a little picket fencing. In a nutshell: SR (ex light railway) BLT, 6 x 1, to fit the new FY, front op'. To go on the low trestles. If I pushed hard I could get it done before panto. 

Worth a run at?
 

Quick rod

The ground frame and waving 2nd man was present on Rhiw Mk 1 and has since re-appeared on the Mk2. On both versions without any exiting rodding for the point and the FPL. I'm sure that there would be various proto-guidelines for the operation of the crossover, but despite all the comment over a decade or so on both versions existence, no one has mentioned it. This backs up the theory that modellers as a breed are fairly blinkered and see what they want to see and that the niceties of safety and actual proto operation are comfortably ignored. Anyway...

Not wanting to cough up for the commercial point rodding items which look too thick to me and stand out too much, I elected to just hint at the existence of the linkage with some lengths of rod and some plastic strip for the upstand rollers. This I'm fully aware is a long way from looking like the real thing, but simply suggests. Likewise, the already suggested FPL was in place on the Peco point. Tiny details, but who adds FPLs to points? Only the P4 bods I would imagine. There's that comfortable blinker again.

The upshot of all this is that I can announce that I've actually done some modelling; the first for a couple of months and the first for me for longer. There are two more small jobs to do in the same area on the layout. Hang on to your hats, I'm on a roll now.