Further wood butchery but creative times for the 009 gauge layout!

Although a bit sparse on entries over the last few days progress is being made on My Last Great Project with further battles at the WMD HQ garage/Room of Gloom between me and various bits of wood that just do not want to go together. The good news is that I have the basics of the 'trolley' that the layout will sit on in my Man Cave. The idea is that I can easily move the layout around to access all sides. As I talked about in a previous post I am not getting younger and I really do not want to have to duck down to get into a central operating well and I don't want a lifting flap with the issues that can cause so whilst it has compromises this trolley idea works for me - well at the moment at least! The trolley castors are rated for 55kg each so should be up to the job which is good as I want to put a shelf on the lowest level for storage.

Meanwhile back at the WMD HQ garage/Room of Gloom those geometry lessons all those years ago suddenly came in useful! I did not want a straight end to the baseboard, more of a curve and this is what I came up with.

The picture makes it look a little distorted but in essence there is a 2 foot radius 'curve' on each side. Lots of head scratching, lots of cutting, lots of bits of wood ending up in the firewood pile but eventually it all got there without to much in the way of force to make things join! Still more to do and probably several more days until the four sections of baseboard are complete.

Moving onto the 009 gauge layout there has been some progress made. In brief the dummy point levers and the buffer stops have been installed, the quarry siding has been 'toned' into its surroundings and a scrap pile and wood pile have appeared as well as some additional fauna.

First off the dummy point levers needed to be set into the scenery so a bit of ballast and landscaping had to be removed to reveal the baseboard surface onto which the lever was glued. Luckily the damage caused to the ballast and landscaping was minimal so little in the way of repair was needed. I must be getting good at this!

Having left some of the original plaster mix to set in the tub I mixed it in, I used this to tone down the ballast in the siding to give the effect that the quarry material had spilled onto the track over the years. The hardened mix was broken up and crushed to a powder and as the ballast is sand and is like a sandpaper, some lumps of the mix were simply rubbed along the ballast to produce a powder that adhered to the ballast and surrounding area.

After a little while the original siding turned from this

To this

To add some interest a scrap pile made up from parts from the scrap box and mainly consisting of 1/35 scale tank parts was created, sprayed black and then treated to some rust weathering powders. A srip of balsa wood was cut up into some suitable00 scale plank sized pieces, randomly glued together and then treated to a dilute wash of Vallejo black paint. Both were glued in place and then using a variety of grass tufts and vine type scenic products some further fauna was added to the area to give that 'wild' look. I think it all came out well - but I would! These photos give some detail as to what I did.

This weekend's modelling is going to suffer as we loose an hour going into summer time but hopefully progress will still be made on this layout over the following weeks. 

Just to finish off, it's always nice to 'play trains' so here are a couple of photos of a West Highland Railway Baldwin loco doing the very unlikely haulage of some Lynton and Barnstable Railway coaches. But its my railway so anything is possible!

Time to load up!

Progress is being made on this layout at a pace not normally associated with my modelling. Usually progress is measured in some form of astrological event schedule such as the return of an asteroid from its journey in deep space. However I have to see this speeding up as a positive step. The layout has a quarry face and therefore some means of loading whatever the quarry produces (yet to be finally decided upon) has to be in place. In the last post I did state that what I had constructed bore some resemblance to what Tony Beets from the Gold Rush programme might have made. I constructed this on the basis of an auger that is loaded by machine from the quarry face  feeding some overhead hoppers that would then discharge into wagons waiting underneath. From an engineering view this whole contraption would have probably never worked and condemned for safety reasons before it had even seen any material pass through it. However, this is the World of model railways so imagination, available materials and skills all trump what engineering and health and safety might do in the real World!

The hopper and auger were made from sheet plasticard, some H-beam strips and some lengths of strip and rod ending up after a few evenings work looking like this.

It took a three evenings to build this with no real plan to it other than knowing how wide and how high it had to be to allow the rolling stock under. Guess how I knew to take account of that at an early stage? Lessons learnt from previous failures!

Once built it was sprayed in Tamiya Earth and this formed the undercoat for a light coat of blue Vallejo. The idea was that the overall structure would show age and negelect. Some weathering powders followed this and again highlight the rust and aging that such a structure would show after some years. Some weathering powders were put in the hoppers as the sort of residues you would find on a working loader and hopper and fixed in place by dripping acrylic thinner over them It all ended up looking like this. 

The hopper still needs to be fixed in place on some concrete blocks and a lot more blending of the quarry floor and siding need to take place but its getting there!

'Jab Done' and a good few days!

 A welcome trip away from WMD HQ on Monday as being of a certain age I got my Covid jab. A very slick operation by all concerned at the jab centre and my heartfelt thanks to them all.

Monday also saw the arrival of some post in the form of two MiniArt kits. I broke my New Years Resolution of no more kits but couldn't resist when an email popped up from Jadlem Models with the US bulldozer and a perusal of their site for some 1/35 Russian tankers to go with my recently finished T34 found me looking at paying about £13 or buying the T-80 light tank kit with a crew kit for £22. It was a no brainer! In effect the 1/35 MiniArt tank kit for £12! As a satisfied customer only, I will say it was good service from Jadlem - well packed and arrived in three days and no postage charge. Upon arrival at WND HQ unpacking was soon undertaken with the help of Sammy the cat who probably thought his food was in there somewhere!

Never built a MiniArt kit before but it has been started and I will update on progress and thoughts another time.

I have made progress with the narrow gauge 009 model railway. Most of the posts so far about this have been about various aspects such as baseboards, ballasting, landscaping and other such things. Today has seen a lot of progress on the scenics. Although some work has already been done a lot came together over the past few days. So here are some pictures that give a bit more of an insight into the layout. You can get a larger picture by clicking on them if you want to see more detail.

First off from the drone an aerial view showing the whole thing.

View looking down the road with a scratch built field gate, hedge and post and wire fence now installed.

Coming under the bridge the Baldwin hauling a goods train.

A bit further round the curve the crewless Baldwin (must sort that out as it looks most odd!) heads towards the quarry.

Passing the quarry the start of the loading facilities can be seen - again scratch built.

A closer look at the loading facilities and the grounded van store. All need a lot more work but gives a sense of what it will be like. I was aiming for something that if you watch Gold Rush you would think Tony Beets had constructed!

The train crosses the level crossing to head back up the cutting to continue its round and round journey!

I'll give a little more detail about some of the scenics and the structures in a later post but in the meantime I better feed that cat who looks as though he is about to open the boxes thinking his dinner is inside!

Ballasting Time!

Any railway needs firm foundations for their track and the ballast provides a lot of that. The stones that usually form the ballast are angular and when compacted lock together holding the sleepers and rail allowing the trains to pass over without deflection that could derail them. Ballast also provides drainage preventing water ponding and soaking into wooden sleepers and rotting them. Modern concrete and steel sleepers still need drainage even though they are less susceptible to deterioration from water than wood is. 

In model form ballast can take many forms. Usually crushed granite ballast is used or one of the other custom products from manufactures such as Woodland Scenics. You can even get underlay sheets such as those made by Hornby and Peco. Here at WMD and being tight fisted sand is the choice of ballast for this 009 gauge railway. Not ordinary sand but kiln dried sand. It is about the right scale for ballast in 4mm scale and it is cheap! What's more WMD HQ stores has a large bag in stock bought many years ago for about £3. 

So the material for the ballast is chosen. What happens next? Well before ballasting I should say that before laying the track I did weather it with a spray brush and picked out the spikes holding the rail to the sleepers with a rust colour so that was one job already done! Talk to many people about ballasting and they talk of problems with points. You do have to be careful but my dodge to try to minimise issues is to apply petroleum jelly to the moving parts. That way any glue used to fasten the ballast is unlikely to glue the point up and any stray ballast is therefore also unlikely to end up glued solid to the moving parts. Have a look at the phots below.

Applying the sand was done with a tea spoon (note to self; do not admit to Mrs. Woody use of kitchen utensils!) and a small soft flat brush was used to brush the sand into place. A handy tip is that when you have the ballast roughly as you want it use the spoon to tap the track or baseboard to in effect 'vibrate' the sand off the sleeper tops and into where it should be.

Once happy with the placing of the ballast it was time to fasten it down. The long used mix of diluted PVA glue with a few drops of washing up liquid was mixed ala James Bond style (shaken but not stirred) by putting the ingredients in a jam jar, remembering to securely put the lid on and shaking for a few minutes. The drops of washing up liquid will cause a froth but the main liquid is what is needed. Using an old syringe, (having cats means that you do end up with syringes from the vets to administer various lotions and potions) the glue mix was syringed onto the ballast. It looked a right mess as the pictures show, but as with any process where you have to let things dry, it takes on a whole different look once the glue sets.

Without admitting to Mrs Woody, the glue was given an encouragement to dry from her hairdrier!

Once the glue was set the track looked like this.

I think it looks good but then I would! With a bit of cleaning trains were soon testing their newly ballasted track. 

More Bridges and Roads

 With the road in place and painted it was time to start some detailing. I find I work best by doing a small amount and coming back on several occasions to add to the overall effect. For the road I first misted a very fine earth brown along the edges where the road surface meets the verge usually referred to as the gutter. If you look at any road the gutter will be full of dust, litter, nuts, bolts and many other things that commonly get called detritus and have either washes into the gutter or been dumped. For a country road like the one modelled I have assumed the locals are proud of their area and don't drop litter so the dust and other natural materials is the only things that accumulate in the gutter. On bends you tend to see an additional accumulation of detritus. My rendition of all of this so far and still more to do, looks like this -

With the road in place the bridge structure could also be added. This is the Wills SS28 Occupation Bridge and in an earlier posting I detailed how I had to make new abutments. I have painted the railings white and then have given both the bridge griders and the railings some rust weathering which I ma pleased with.

You'll notice that track ballasting and scenic work has also taken place but more of that another time. In the meantime I will await the first 00 gauge vehicle to cross the bridge and test its strength!  

We're on a Road to Nowhere!

Roads are a strange thing. They take you to places and most of us use them everyday. Lots of songs have been written about them including that classic by Talking Heads - We're on a Road to Nowhere - Youtube video. However in model form they usually go nowhere apart from in our minds and despite using real roads every day our modelling interpretations of them can be far off the mark. The main thing is that tarmac roads are not black apart from a few days after they have been laid. They weather and organically dry out so that the oils in the binder that holds the stones together become less effective. That is in essence how potholes start with the small stones becoming loose in the surface as the binder dries out forming a depression and allowing moisture into the structure. Anyway this is a modelling blog and not a highway maintenance tutorial! 

As we use roads so much it is interesting to still see the number of model railways where the road is modelled black. Have a look at some of the roads around where you live and you will see all sorts of shades of grey tarmac and chippings. On my 009 layout I do have a road which goes to nowhere and is of shades of grey. From one of my earlier posts you'll see in the picture below that the road just went along two thirds of the layout. 

Thinking of my plans to extend in the future I decided to run the road off the end of the board across the track. Some mounting card and some filler saw the road installed and then it was time to paint it all. The original part of the road had been given a random spray of Halfords (other brands are available but it was what was in the WMD HQ stores at the time ) grey primer just to seal the surface and I never saw this as the finished road surface. The grey for the road was mixed by putting some acrylic white paint into an old ice-cream tub (raspberry ripple if you are interested and no doubt there is a website somewhere that tells you what sort of person you are by the type of ice-cream you eat but I'm not going to look....yet!) and then putting blobs of black acrylic into it. Mixing the two colours in different parts of the tub gave slightly different hues of grey as you can see from the picture. 

You will also notice from the picture above a stranger to modelling materials - Talcum Powder! Strange as it may seem talcum powder mixed into paint gives it some texture. Roads are not smooth otherwise it would be like driving on a skating rink so they have some texture to allow tires and shoes to grip. Very difficult to achieve in 4mm scale but the talcum powder gives a good impression of it. In case you are wondering I have purloined this tin from Mrs Woody who informs that talcum powder is now out of fashion these days for various reasons so I have given it a good home and the road smells fragrantly lovely! Or is it my aftershave???!!!

Anyway the painting of the road continues and this road to no where will get finished!

Lets get plastered!

It maybe time for a drink but in this case the plastering I am referring to is part of the landscaping process. I had a rough idea in my head of what I wanted to do and although there are some modelers out there who have the skills and mindset to plan and draw out their layouts in incredible detail before they start to build it I am unfortunately not blessed with such skills. If you want to see someone who has theses skills, I would suggest having a look at James Hilton's Blog and this post as an example.

In the meantime my method is very much one of physically putting things on the baseboard and seeing how they look and making alterations as necessary. With this layout, there is a quarry face with a hill and a bridge taking the road across the railway. Having already built the bridge that at least set up a reference point for the rest and I had already shaped the profile boards on the edge of the baseboard when I built it so that gave further reference points to work to. So in true Blue Peter fashion out came the mount card that I luckily had in stock and I built a contoured set of formers to get the basic shape. Hacking bits off and adding bits eventually gave me the shape I wanted complete with the road in place. I infilled the contours with some styrene packaging that I had and carved this to shape with a bread knief. All very messy but great fun!

With the contours set and the styrene in place it was time to give a surface to it all. For this I used paper towel cut into strips roughly 8 inches long by about 2 inches wide and used a thin mix of wall filler type plaster to coat and soak these as I laid them over the contours. Two or three layers of paper towel were laid to eventually give a firm shell over the card formers and styrene. It takes about a day to dry fully in a warmish house. If you are doing a similar job it can be messy so make sure you cover what you don't want plastered. How do I know........!

Next time it will be time for some scenics.

The wonders of wiring!

The track plan for this layout is fairly simple and was shown in this post. Happy with the fit of the various track pieces wires were soldered to the fishplates strategic points. This is a neat way of in effect hiding wires and avoiding that soldered blob on the side of the rail. You do learn over the years and I do now wire power cables at each point so that both the entry and both exits have power to them rather than relying on the point itself. It may seem over the top but better safe than sorry as I have learnt over the years!, In addition as I was going to use both DC and DCC on the layout it made sense at this early stage to take this approach. The picture below shows the initial wiring in place. It needs tidying but it works. As I was going to use DCC, a tip I think I saw on a British Railway Modelling DVD was to twist the wires together to minimise electrical interference. I have no idea of the science behind it but that is what I did and it also avoids loose wires flapping about so even if the science doesn't work there is something to be said for doing it! In addition, although not doing it at this stage, holes were cut under the points to allow point motors to be retro fitted should I want to in the future - as I get older I think smarter! The track was fastened down to the baseboard using small blobs of superglue on the sleeper base. Track pins are a normal choice for most but gluing avoids those unsightly mushroom heads of the pin tops in the sleepers. You can also lift the track fairly easily if you only use small blobs of superglue by sliding a thin bladed screwdriver under the sleeper base and breaking the bond if an alteration to the track is needed. Eventually the ballast that will be applied will provide the final bond of the track to the baseboard.

Next on the agenda is getting some landscaping done.

What's the point!

As this layout was started during the first Lock Down of 2020, it was hard getting materials. The Lock Down saw many people suddenly with time on their hands. Things like model railways and other similar hobbies got a much needed boost as they became popular once more and it seems that their popularity has continued which is great! However, with a sudden surge in interest and shops shut, getting hold of materials such as track became a major problem. I recall points for all gauges simply disappearing from the on-line retailers. Luckily I had some 009 track in stock for this project. I had specifically bought the Peco ST-412 First Radius curves as I find with tight radius curves a set track curve gives a far better curve than trying to make flexi track do things that it really doesn't want to and was probably never envisaged by the designers as being able to. I also had some flexi track and some points. What I did not have was an 009 left hand set track point. Searching through the WMD HQ stock pile of things I never throw away I came across an N gauge left hand set track point. It looked a bit worn and dirty but testing with a multi meter showed electrically it worked which was a big relief. 

Whilst I know N gauge track has been used by modelers to depict a narrow gauge track, with all my other track being 009 an N gauge pint would stick out. I therefore got a small saw balade and cut alternate sleepers out of the plastic base of the point. I took care not to weaken the overall structure and I ended up with this.

 The white blobs on the sleepers to the left are filler where I filled in the holes for track pins as I would not be using these. Overall it looks more 009 then N gauge which is what I wanted. We will see how this fitted in later on but sometimes when a problem comes up rather than thinking 'What's the point?' thinking outside of the box can provide a solution.