Hornby Terrier

 I've been pottering though this on and off for a couple of weeks. Standard Mk1 Terrier with added pipework, lamp irons, crew, cab details and vac pipes, and with the sand boxes moved from above the footplate to below as per the prototype. Mostly referenced with two colour photos of the loco at Sheffield Park and Kemp Town. Cost : £40 and time.

I like projects like this: high work to cost ratio and much more fun than buying the new Mk 2 item which has all the upgrades in place and finer wheels.

Multi gauge test track

A bit of a grease and oil round on Mr Hill's 20 year old Terrier. Without a 16.5mm gauge layout to test it on, the late 1980s test track made a surprise appearance. Supported on 3' of 9mm MDF it originally had a length of track fitted to EM gauge during my brief dalliance with the wider gauge. Gradually two more sets of rails were added with the end result that I can run 16.5/EM/21 on it as well as  a whole different set of 32mm on the flip side. Needless to say that the 21mm hasn't had a lot of use. What I should do is take the 21mm up and lay a length of N gauge down the middle of the 32. One day...

Morton Stanley is dead, long live Morton Stanley

With Morton Stanley stripped of the buildings there was a happy hour spent dumping different things on it to see how the board could be recycled into something new.

The Terrier from the Southern book, a Kirk BR van and a Bachmann ER brake were close to hand along with the freebie Metcalfe weighbridge hut given away with RM a while back. Some new track and buildings and.... Rother Wharf?

Hornby Terrier

Terrier done. This is all (as usual) fairly old fashioned stuff - taking a RTR item and adding a few detail bits. Unbelievably the Dapol terrier has been around since 1986; I still view it as a new model. The Hornby remake is, as far as I can see, unaltered from the original.

The one I had was numbered 636. Not that makes any difference as all the numbers would need an equal amount of work. Here the bunker is fine as is, but the upper sandboxes need to come off, which is the scary bit. Then various bits moved or taken off and lamp irons added. The pipework on top is the fiddle. There are some painty bits around the cab to do and a crew to add. Hornby give you a few extras to add including the extension ring for the smokebox. This visually the weakest bit for me as the line is impossible to disguise. Lightly weathered by airbrush... yeah right. Like I could afford one of those... Tatty No 2 brush and some Ga**s Wo**sh*p acrylic dry brushed on. Far more of a Ford technique. All of this will of course be detailed properly in the next printed volume - in case you hadn't spotted the thread of late.

Ratchet woes

The Terrier detailing continues apace. Well if about one bit a day constitutes pace. The problem is research which is the time swallower. You'd think it would be easy with such a well documented class, but that is not always helpful especially when every single loco has had different modifications. I worked on the cab interior yesterday, giving the upper areas a wash of sandy brown and highlighting some of the moulded details. The lever above went well  to begin with, with a touch of red paint. When the cab went back on the attention is drawn to it. 'That looks nice' I thought until I spoted that Dapol used a standard plug-in part. This would be OK if the floor were level, but as can be seen there is a hump to accommodate the final gear wheel underneath. The lever now comes in at about 6' high so I had to trim it somewhat and even now it's a bit on the tall side.
The Westinghouse pump was another headscratch. There is an OK moulding on the loco but no feed pipes. the one going down was easy, but the one going up disappeared over the tank to who knows where, and while there are oodles of side views i couldn't find any from a high angle. Peter Bossom (also known as the wise man of East Sussex) came up trumps with an overhead shot. Now of course I realise that there's more pipework on top than I'd thought. The more you know the worse it gets. And people keep telling me freelancing is harder.... errr no.

Bodge it and scarper

 Remember when you used to read things in mags like, 'the smokebox saddle was carved from Miliput...' . Well this is Squadron filler, but the principal is the same. The only way to get rid of the superfluous sand box is to hack the thing off and plug the gap with plastic and gloopy stuff. Bring back 1972.

New Hythe SB. Closed in 2006. Does anyone know if it's still standing? I don't really want to cross into the injun territory of Medway to find out. It's under a flyover so streetview isn't too helpful.

Ks Terrier

Interesting set of reasoning over on Phil's blog with his Radial from a K's kit and parallels with here. It's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume that newer is better or finer or more suited to your needs. I could go to town and upgrade the Terrier, but why? The duck analogy comes to mind - it looks like a duck... etc. The spec is as follows: 1960s(?) K's body kit, Branchlines chassis (90's) transfers Maybex, Romford wheels on EM axles, Mashima motor, and Goden Arrow plates. There is still the huge screw on the front as a fixing, but hey, Les Darbyshire's example appears to have the same deal on his Maidstone Road in MRJ, so if it's good enough... This small side project may have some legs.

Rooter repair.

A little repair work on the K's Terrier. I quite like these older kits, there is a softness about them. No, they don't have the crispness and detail of the modern kits and RTR, but instead they have a more personal feel and character to them. This little chap has been in the wars having been left in a drawer for a while, and has injuries, notably the safeties which hang over the dome. I looked at the part in the un-touched kit I have , and soldered a pair of copies up from some 1mm rod and a scrap of waste fret from a Langley kit.

 The broken remainders were drilled out ,

and the new scrap replacements super-glued on and painted. OK, so it's a bit rough, but from the normal distances would you know it wasn't the kit part?

Saturday ramble...

...on a Saturday for a change.
For me 2014 is drawing to a close, primarily due to the intense work schedule that wipes out December, I disappear at the end of November and re-emerge caterpillar-like in the first week of the new year. 2015 will be different; things are changing. I/we have done some eight shows this year; that ain't going to happen again; it can't. There are three layouts currently on the books: Svanda, Tal-coed and the embryonic Morton Stanley. Two of those are really only one day beasts, but more than that I'm tiring of the pure public show mentality; much better are the open-day type where there are a few like minded individuals to chat to and exchange ideas with rather than those events where I feel like I am train-operator-monkey shuffling my stuff up and down for people who quite frankly a lot of the time are just keeping out of the rain and couldn't give a toss.
There are essentially two more layouts on the 'five year plan': the GWR terminus and the O gauge which could go one of two ways. These will probably stay, but being that they are pretty much set as exhibition games, there is a feeling of relaxed in-urgency about them. They'll get done when the sap rises. So where does that leave me? Well I did have an idea to pack it in for a while and go back to being a rent boy, but I'm told I'm too old now so I may build a home layout instead. But what? and why?
There are lots of possibles: 009 is the most logical, it's home base and I have a lot of it in stock, but then to some extent it's another 009 layout for me, and I've had my fill over the last couple of years. What is rising to the top is something either industrial or light in 4mm. One of my favourite things is 4mm wagon-building and I do very little of it these days despite there being an unlimited  supply of cheap available supplies. Another factor is the liking for the Kent and East Sussex Railway. The prototype is around the corner and I have bits enough to start, like the above which I built ages ago from a part-built K's kit and a Branchlines chassis. There is another kit in stock and an LSWR 0330 saddle tank - all suitable stuff. It would be possible to wrap 2/3 stations around the room that I'm sitting in. As Paul Marshal-Potter put it in a recent post of his ' ...a railway that goes somewhere.' So in order to feel my way, in the Terrier arrived on the desk -  a little worse for wear: chipped paint, no crew and the ironwork around the dome to rebuild. The transfers are rub-downs from Mabex, now long gone. Are there newer replacements?

Saturday Ramble

I haven't done one of these for a while, but it's tidy up time.
The above was taken in Yarmouth on the recent jaunt. Unremarkable really, but that is my point - it isn't. It's a fairly ordinary dockside pub on the South Quay, obviously art-deco and dated at the top '1938'. Design wise it shows all the characteristics of it's build period and at the time would have stood out as a building of modernity. So where's the problem? The problem is that there's nobody in there. This means that in the current climate it is likely (if it's not listed) that within a few years it will be closed, demolished and the area re-developed. Which would be a real shame. The problem for us a modellers is that every time this happens we lose another bit of  background architecture that can be modelled and used as an inspirational period scene set. What we should be doing is at least recording all this stuff for the day that it isn't here any more.
Or is it just me who gives a shit?

 On the same topic something closer to home for me; sunny Newhaven. Above and below are the engine sheds for the port. These have remained empty for years, but now there are people beavering away in there so I'm guessing that they'll soon be flattened. The above is from the port entrance road and technically I was trespassing when I took the photo as there is a sign which informs me of this and states 'no photography'. Why? What's the problem? Or is this just French awkwardness? Bizarrely the French own the entire port much to the chagrin of the locals (the only sandy beach for miles, and no one is allowed on it). Below is the rear. To the left a part remaindered BR van and beyond that the railway social club which is still thriving despite there being no railway workers any more.

 Below a photo lifted from the net dated 1958. A much happier scene at the same point and during a period in history when the French were recently quite happy to have us arrive on their beaches.

Hayling Billy

Nigel sent me this this today, and no I don't think I'd seen this one. Full trip survey, and look out for the camera on the line shot. As this is really the classic branch terminus operation it's worth looking to see what actually happened rather than some pre-determined modellers idea of operation. This is not a nicely arrange sequence of moves to please us or an audience, but a system for getting the most done in the least amount of time. Note the fireman's fag and the bucket of water.
This really underlines my bugbear of... lets say middleclass office worker modellers who've never done a manual job creating a scene that is unrealistic, because it is badly observed and designed with a mindset which has no experience of the task.
Oh and you might be advised to watch with the sound off.

Kerswell, the ideal small terminus?

Photos: AW Knights

The 4mm light railway is a subject that I've had a bash at before (see Froxington in the sidebar) and it didn't really work. However this Twickenham MRC layout was at the East Grinstead show a few weeks ago and proved to me that not only could it work in a small (sub 4') space, but it could be done with PECO track.

It was pointed out that something similar could be done at least stock wise from what is in the cupboard. Goods stock is a mix of kits and RTR, the coach a re-roofed Triang and the loco the obvious Terrier.

Which brings me to a question. When the Dapol Terrier was launched in 1989 (yes that long ago) I expected a rush of light railways and Haying influenced models - it didn't happen. Why? It's such a logical small space idea and perfect for the builder of esoteric wagonry.

Natural stock

I always think that the KESR feels better when running with terriers and rattly DMUs - more its intended state. That and nice private compartment GER 6 wheelers.