O gauge point

 As always there are a couple of side projects to do while the glue is going off. The first is Mr. Hill's Gauge O project. In an idle moment I grabbed a point plan (blown up some years back from the EM gauge society stash). This was stuck to a bit of  chipboard, and before I noticed I was welding up a point V. The rail is some 125 FB that I bought cheap at a Guildex last century, and which has been lurking around at the back of the cupboard ever since. There's already a built one in hand and I need five. 

This makes the third scale this week and it's only Tuesday.

O gauge layout for sale

 After much head scratching I've decided to move the O gauge layout Oake on to a new home. Principally because I can't really develop it with out lashing out a load of cash for stock and because it's simply taking up space. Contact me via the profile panel top right to get ahead of the ads in magazines. Price will be very reasonable, but reflect the materials and scale. Ideal for someone who couldn't resist purchasing the lovely RTR 0-4-0s and 0-6-0s like the above.

Railway Modeller February

 Out now. The last instalment of the O gauge.

DPM backscene

 I'm about 2/3 of the way though the track; just these last two points to do on the platform roads. As usual it's a little squeezy and there is is a lot of the Hopwood mentality in the approach. There is space for a 37/47 in the headshunt. No point for anything grander as it will get too big for the other end. To recap: these are the standard 43" long boards plus the Rhiw/Svanda fiddle yard, taking the overall to around 11'. Still not big, with the idea to be able to take the good bits from Rhiw and Hopwood and run some DMUs and parcels stock.

The building units are DPM and have been in Mr. Hill's care for probably 25 years waiting for a suitable use. Ideal for a non-specific industrial building that is only an inch deep. The area to the left will house another bland structure of a post office parcels building of the post war block type. his will drift away from the usual Wills sheet and probably move to a card/ Slater's brick to blend better with the DPM mouldings. Most of this will be masked by some tatty platform canopies still un-purchased from Ratio.

Predictably, due to space considerations in what is a small house, the O gauge layout currently running in RM is up for grabs and will be advertised in due course. Before I do that I'll wave it here to see if there is any interest. Email me through the profile page to your right.

O gauge brake van

 I finished the 7mm brake off last week. Apart from a couple of niggles it practically falls together. but isn't a particularly quick build. However it doesn't say this on the box and this is supposed to be a pastime not a race. Finished in a scruffy, but not filthy paint job with the usual mix of acrylics form Humbrol.

7mm scale signals

Never open you big mouth. I sent the review in for the Simon Paley book (mentioned below). A short while later: 'As you're well read in this now, do you fancy building these up for review?'

I have said many times over the years that I don't do wires - nasty tangly things full of stuff I don't really understand. The subject is a triple modular kit of a 7mm 3 aspect with a feather arm - the bit pictured above, the post and the feather in separate kits. The bit with resistors I didn't get so I rang AWK for some knowledgeable advise. That bit partially achieved I returned the instructions only to find that the bit I'd done I didn't need to do...yet.  The three sets of instructions are worryingly interlaced. I'd hesitate to say that this is bad practice, but it did take me a while to work out where to start. I'm sure it will all be fine.

 

O gauge in Railway Modeller

 Slightly delayed from its originally planned November slot to hit the (again planned) appearance at Warley, the O gauge layout Oake starts its trilogy this month. This should hit the shops tomorrow- if you could get to the shops that is.

O gauge brake van

This has been a bit of a slow-burn build. Not as slow as Phil's GWR steam railmotor, but slow nevertheless. Yesterday I girded my loins and finished all the handrails which are individually folded and inserted into marked holes. Easy enough, though they still need tweaking, but the wire supplied is on a coil. My only improvement suggestion thus far would be to supply this in straight wire form - there's enough space in the box.

As normal I've inverted the instructions. These said get the underfame built and running first. This is good practice, but bolting a load of flimsy footsteps on an the beginning of the build is not. I've taken what I consider to be the more pragmatic route of leaving them till last. Likewise the afore mentioned handrails were supposed to go on post-body build. Nah...  far easier to do this while the parts are flat and then build the box. Although this looks sort of done the roof is only dumped on for effect and there is a surprising amount still to do. It should feature in a blow-by-blow in RM in the coming months.
 

O gauge wagon

 The first of the completed wagons for Oake. Fairly mundane, but that's what's nice about wagons. Peco - ex-Websters GW 4-plank built as per the instructions if not in quite the same order. Perched on Dury's Gap for speed. I reckon I need about eight in total plus the brake with a couple of Slaters 4-wheelers. If you say that quickly it doesn't sound too much, until that is you compare with the same in 4mm mostly bought from club stands at exhibitions for £2-4 a pop. 

Saturday Ramble

 

With Hopwood almost out of the door it's time to move back to bigger things for a while. There are two O gauge wagons to deal with. Both of these are from the ex-Websters kits now in the Peco range. The first is the AA3 brake which at first glance is a more or less standard van, but is actually in the AA3 diagram group and therefore a tad shorter at 13' wb. This makes it highly suitable for a compact layout and better in this respect than the Parkside offering which is the much later - and longer - AA19. Compensation is plastic based which I'm always slightly wary of, but then it's not taking any great load and it purrs through the pointwork on Oake.

This is very much a period of transition for me at the moment in that I have been completely shut down by a combination of Boris and Covid. However new opportunities have presented themselves at least temporarily; literally via envelopes in car parks. How this will all pan out is anyone's guess at the moment.

O gauge sector plate

 And to return.

Due to the build of the layout being halted due to Peco closing, Warley bailing and me not exactly knowing what was going on, or if it actually had a reason to be built, I didn't get around to sorting the FY. Last weeks photoshoot with Craig didn't really matter as it was all about the pretty side of the layout and it didn't need to run. However... in order for it to move forward in any shape of form it should do. A simple two-road sector should do the trick. Here dummied up with some code 124 bullhead, it will actually consist of some copper clad sleepers and code 100 - to compensate for the sector plate thickness. Trials have proved that this should work, I just need to work the switching out. As you can see there is not a lot of room and I don't want expensive locos dangling over the edge of the board so it'll have to be simple and neat, possibly a centre off DPDT to energise one rail the other permanently live.

Saturday Ramble - O gauge lamps

 A month off. Sometimes there are other bits of life that need more attention. 

The final thing to go on the O gauge were these shorty platform lamps inspired by items at Bodiam. Nothing startling here: some roughly 4mm square rocket stick and a pair of Model Scene 4mm lamps with the posts chopped off. Tiny brackets from strip and gas pipe from layout wire. The layout has now been taken down to Devon and been snapped by young Craig. The original plan - and indeed its reason to exist  - was for it to appear on the Peco stand at Warley; it being sized to fit on the stand. Without this publishing peg point and due to the photoshoot being later than planned and becoming a little tight in the timetable, it now heads for the December RM.  What I do need to do is sort the sector plate out. This could be left off until now as it didn't need to be photographed.

Sales Department: Orne has now gone to a new home. There have been a handful of enquires about Hopwood, but no hard takers. The price is very modest - I just want it out of the way really. email me via the profile page top right. The O gauge will similarly need to be moved on at some point in the near future.

7mm scale station sign

This is another of those posts where I struggle with paint. The terrible trio of non-coverage: cream, red and white. OK so I'm not exactly doing myself any favours here and this is one of those instances, although minor, where if you want to go there, you wouldn't start here. 

The hoped for end result is the running-in boards for the O gauge. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've changed the name. Regardless of that I need to knock up a running-in board. There are no doubt special 7mm scale kits for this, but being a lifelong tightwad I'm looking at a few bits of plastic and some Slaters letters that were lurking at the bottom of the scenic stuff box. So far so good, except that the layout has a GWR/light railway vibe and every GW running-in board is white lettering on a black or dark blue back board. The later is easy enough, but the letters are made from black plastic. Black paint over white plastic is OK. White over black ain't. 

New layouts

Apart from the fact that I'm still spluttering from the general welcome given to the Government's rescue package for the arts - it may be welcome to the (already subsidised) management teams of venues like the Royal Opera House who are employees, but the army of freelance technicians, light designers, sound engineers, actors, musos, dressers, set designers and so on won't get a penny.  These are the people who actually make it happen. If and when it all reopens, they will all have moved to other jobs. Completely misdirected.

Mr. Hill dropped by. Much chat about the current situation and how and what may happen modelling wise and the wider picture. What we agreed on is that it's hard to plan anything at the moment. Added to that there is no desire to build anything new or even revise anything old. The wholesale selling of stuff is looking more and more likely to create a clean slate and in some ways to try to kick start some forward motion. This is probably a bit drastic, but at the moment I'm unable to think of another way.

The above shows that the shed is done. The lack of detailed clutter is obvious and I need to fish around in the box to find some suitable items. The layout has now been broken down. This presented the opportunity to throw the layout that I started in 2018(!) up onto the empty trestles. Time and the building of two items for Peco now makes this look odd and I can't get my head around what I was doing and why I started it. It's strange how even such a relatively short period of time can alter the head space and oh so subtly change the perspective.

Small O gauge goods shed

The 'unlikely shed' is being installed today with the steps to the platform the only thing to finish. This is the unpainted platform which has since been grotty'ed somewhat. The whole edifice jars a little, but with the obvious lack of front to back space as the controlling factor, set against the need for some sort of vertical feature to break up the plain and immediate backscene. The reality of the whole picture at this end is simply a short length of track to mask the storage area. In 4mm this could be fully developed; here in 7mm the space is only a little over an inch in front of the track and little more than three behind - compromised have to be made. That said, on modelling terms it's not been an unpleasant exercise. Essentially here and in other areas there is just some infill ground cover to do and some smaller platform items to finish off. At that point, the major questions arise.

Shed

The final building on Tiley Road is a very small goods lock -up. Quite frankly this is a little unlikely and in model terms is just there to fill a space and to stop the tail-end section being totally featureless. The inspiration is the shed that stood at Stratton and I found a couple of shots of it in a semi-derelict condition in a Chris Leigh book . Basic doesn't cover it. It was firmly rooted in the GWR's standard small building family with an end door and sliding side door, with a couple of small windows in the opposite wall. Where it scored in this case was that I could suggest most of this but make it more anorexic to fit the narrow space that I have at my disposal. The sides and ends are the same Will asbestos sheets, but I had to go with some Slaters material for the curved roof and side door. The rest is... scrapbox fare. Most of it has had a base coat of paint and I'm at the final coat and detailing now, though I'm leaving it deliberately vague. When done it'll sit on a low-ish brick platform as per the Stratton shed.

Film Friday - The Minerva Manning Wardle

While I'm not making a habit of doing box opening videos (no one sends me anything to open anyway) it was worth picking the camera up during the track testing to demonstrate yesterday's gushing report of this little beast. It does fit well with the brief of the layout, but at £255. is a little beyond my pocket at the moment.

O gauge - the full test

Regulars will be aware that the general layout building area in Ford Towers in the last couple of years has been the small workshop area. The pluses for this are that it's attached to the house, but mentally separate from it. The minuses (especially in this case) is that it's a through room and is a tight 2.8m long i.e. Hopwood will just squeeze in, but the current O gauge won't; I have to decamp to the vast open prairies of the front room to set it up fully. This is obviously, while not a negotiated arrangement, one that has to be carried out with a certain amount of understanding. Nevertheless yesterday saw the full post-ballast test - always a nail-biting moment. Lumps of stray ballast will derail things, previously perfect electrical connections will suddenly have become inert and there will be rails with a layer of PVA on top no matter how carefully you've cleaned it all. In the end all was well apart from a self isolating fishplate which needed a little squeeze, and soon the borrowed MW was whizzing up and down. I can thoroughly recommend this based on this performance - silky smooth and unfaltering is probably the best description. It does look very naked without at crew though. It does also have to go back, so there's little that I can do about this.

Repairing the O gauge

I spent a large-ish chunk of yesterday, fixing things on the O gauge. Not that things went wrong as such more that they hadn't gone right, which is a different thing altogether. I don't know whether it's the PVA I'm using (Asda's finest) or it's that I'm getting sloppy. 

I ran a hoover over the layout pre electrical test. Really just to pick up any stray bits of carpet underlay that will gravitate toward the motors. What happened next was predictable (now). Odd bits of ballast hadn't stuck and ditto bits of scenic fluff - not a problem in itself, but it was the range of unstuckedness that was the problem. I had to reenergise the ballast laying procedure just for a combined area of about 2" as well as the whole pallet of scenic bits. Essentially a micro layout's work. Of course once you have soggy ballast, even if it's a small area, any thoughts of electrical testing go out of the window until it's thoroughly dry and unconductable. I followed this with the waking of the bramble factory. The upshot is that platform furniture excepting and a couple of figures this main part of the layout is done.

Re my suggestions about exhibitions a couple of days ago: Mr Weller has given a lengthy reply in the comments of that post which is well worth some considered reading. 

Modelling the normal way

Just to prove that I can not only be flexible when the occasion warrants it, but will also refuse to follow my own advice.

It's a race to the finish now with Tiley Road and as with Hopwood the rat's tail siding section is the last to be tackled. 

After explaining at length a few days ago why I never follow the standard procedure of ballasting the track as soon as the rails are down, but leaving it until the bones of the scenic in place, I made an executive decision on Friday. Namely in order to get all the clutter of three open bags of ballast, runny glue pot, syringe etc. off of the workspace, I waited for Mrs F. to leave the building, dumped the third board on the kitchen table and ballasted said rat's tail track. Waiting for her to go out isn't usually necessary, but she's been using the same space to work from home and I couldn't be doing with the potential territorial grunting. 

Only some lightweight landscaping and a wiggly tin hut to finish this bit.