Tales from the river bank.

If you are associating the title of this post with a children's programme from way ago you are of an age where age doesn't matter any more!

A bit of work last night on the river banks. Mrs. Woody had a parcel delivered (one of many!) with some rigid foam surrounding the contents. That almost ended up in the bin but I had the idea that it would be useful as the subbase to my landscaping of the river banks. Normally I would use polystyrene - the type which disintegrates into those small spheres that through static charge get stuck all over you. This foam however was as light as polystyrene and could be cut with a knife without me ending up looking as though I had been through a snow storm and having ended it in a collapsed igloo. I have therefore had a pleasant hour or so cutting it into the rough shape and gluing it all with PVA with no big mess to clear up - working smarter not harder as I get older! 

Its a bit cold in the Room of Gloom as I call my man cave, so the glue will take a while to set. However once set a bit more snow free carving should see a basic shape which will then be covered with plaster and paper towel to give a rigid base for scenic treatment. That is for another time though when there will be more Tales from the river bank! 

Oversized washing machine!

Last week it was clearing vegetation at the Rocks by Rail Museum but this week it was a chance to use the oversized washing machine to do some ballast washing. Now I generally like to keep away from washing machines as close contact with them can lead to all sorts of unreasonable domestic expectations about me using them from Mrs. Woody. However supersize the machine and put it in a railway setting - well that is a completely different situation that I like to be involved in.

It may look somewhat Heath Robinson in nature but the system is sheer brilliance. The basis of the system is an old cement mixer with a drum of about 4 to 6 cubic meters capacity. Dirty ballast is loaded into it via the hopper at the top.

Add some water from the nearby handy water container that was previously a 14 ton molasses tanker

Let the drum rotate for a few minutes. Put the drum into reverse so that the ballast comes out and it spills down the screen deck where it gets a bit more of a hose down into the waiting front bucket of the JCB. There are two wheel barrows under the screen which collect all the fine material that falls away from the ballast so that it can be reused elsewhere on site. They fill up more or less with each wash cycle and with added water weigh a ton - I know from experience now! It is surprising just how dirty and contaminated ballast can become.

Having been washed the ballast then gets transferred into the nearby Trout ballast wagon ready to be spread around the tracks. I do have a gravel driveway at home which looks a bit dirty - wonder if Mrs. W would notice if I used the washing machine..........

Glacial progress!

In light of various things going on with the climate I am sure there are actually glaciers that are moving one way or another faster than my progress on the narrow gauge layout. You think you will have time to do a few hours and then find yourself getting pulled into other jobs. The good weather the other day meant a too good a chance to catch up with tidying up the garden so that was most of the day taken up. However at least there has been some progress with the layout with the two river crossings more or less structurally complete. On the bridge with the wood deck I had to take the sleepers off the track. In real life the rail across most open deck or wooden bridges is supported by a sub-structure which holds the rail in place. If there were only sleepers then there would be no ballast to hold the track firm. In model terms taking the plastic sleepers off is fairly easy - a little action with a craft knief and they are gone. However the remaining rail does need some support to retain rigidity and avoid the track warping. Therefore I soldered some copper clad strip under each rail. The copper clad strip is plastic sheet covered with a layer of copper which makes it useful for all sorts of things including circuit boards in most electrical appliances. However as with many items people find uses for products which were far from the minds of the original creators as in this case.

The copper clad strip cut to length.

Now soldered into place giving rigidity to the rails. I am going to have to recess the rails into the bridge deck which is something my original plan did not envisage but that plan also did not take account of my miscalculations on levels! Say no more! 

With some of my woeful geometry calculations for angles, the abutments for both bridges are done and it is mow looking like this.

The unusual looking item on the right of the picture is supposed to be a cattle grid. Made from some off cuts of plastic sheet and rod it is my idea to disguise the joint in the road between the two baseboards of the layout. How good it works out is another matter!

The second bridge is much more conventional in style. The steel girders have been hanging around in my scrap box of bits which "may come in handy one day" for over 30 years. However despite not having seen them for most of that time I still remembered that I had them. Now if only I could remember what Mrs Woody was saying the other day - that would be progress!

Starting over!

Sometimes you have to admit defeat and go back to the drawing board. That was the case with the bridge on my narrow gauge layout. Originally it looked like this.

It was a nice build but didn't fit the curve of the river. I hummed and hared, tried bending parts of the abutments but soon came to the conclusion the bridge deck and abutments needed to be on an angle. So that journey has started and its looking like this at the moment.

I will have to get some of my wood butchery tools out to reprofile the edge of the baseboard so that should be fun and generate some income for the swear jar! However the project is moving on, slowly but it is at least progressing a little faster than glacial speed!

Finally!

Yes - finally! I have completed the 5350 Mustang truck! Its been a long journey and I have been distracted from finishing so many times but it is done! I always said I was impressed by the way this kit had been designed and the fit of the parts and it is a credit to Zvezda. Obviously there is some licensing issue with the trucks real manufacturer Kamaz as the name plate on the front has been amended to 'Kama3' (see photo 5) which is no doubt sufficient to keep lawyers happy! It amused me anyway!

Coupling Up!

The other day I had a session just playing trains on my Last Great Project Layout. That involved watching the trains run around the layout - very therapeutic and relaxing! I also had a play with my USA switching layout. This layout is very much about shunting wagons about. The importance of couplers between the wagons and locomotive is always a matter that raises lots of chat and debate between railway modelers. UK outline stock is usually offered with a variant of a coupler which goes back to the 1950s or possibly earlier. It is termed as the tension lock coupler and to put it mildly it is ugly and out of scale. It couples reliably but uncoupling is another issue. There are uncoupling ramps available and some electrical ramp systems but they all have issues. The photo below shows a really nicely detailed class 33 locomotive but with that tension lock coupling on the front it looks somewhat strange and not what you see on the real thing. As modelers, most of us just accept it and I guess we turn a mental blind eye to it.

Meanwhile our American modeling friends have enjoyed the delights of a coupler that actually looks like a real life coupler. It couples reliably and equally it uncouples reliably with the use of a magnet which can either be installed out of sight under the track or incorporated as a crossing point. This photo of one of my USA locomotives shows how much more realistic it looks with what is known as a Kadee coupler.

The Kadee coupler has a metal pin hanging under it that is repelled by a magnet - that is it moves away from the magnet. The two photos below show the pin being repelled on the loco as it crosses the magnet which is part of the level crossing on my layout.

If you can imagine the same action happening on an attached wagon's coupling which will move in the opposite direction then you can see in the photos below how the locomotive and wagon uncouple.

The further beauty of the Kadee coupler is that once uncoupled you can push the wagon to where you want to park it on the layout - wonderful!

Why don't UK suppliers put this coupling on UK models? Well there are all sorts of answers but I guess we have just had the tension lock coupling for so long that it is unlikely, because of compatibility between existing and new models, that modelers would take to a new coupling with all the costs of converting old models to couple up with new models. Meanwhile I will enjoy the coupling up delights of the Kadee on my USA Switching layout.

Life is like a roller-coaster!

Not the Ronan Keating hit, Life is like a roller-coaster but hopefully the aptness of the title will become apparent as I go on with this post. Tuesday was another day at the Rocks by Rail Museum and as predicted in my last post on this subject it was a continuation of track levelling. The evening before I had my Covid booster and I did suffer on the Tuesday feeling as though I was coming down with a bad cold and left at lunchtime. However I did take part in some track leveling and as you can see in the picture below there was a big dip in the left hand rail that took a lot of jacking (it was me operating the jack as I am a 'Big lad!' so I do know how much it had to be raised and yes my back knew it too!) and a lot of packing of ballast underneath. It may not seem like much but riding in a train it can feel like life is a roller-coaster so for the benefit of passengers a level track is desirable unless of course the Museum wants to become an amusement park!

Following a few hours work we have level rail!

Looking around this track leveling looks like it could be like painting the Fourth Bridge if this siding next to the mainline is anything to go by...Anyone fancy a roller-coaster ride?

In a few moments of waiting to repair the Kango which decided to snap its blade I did a bit of weeding! This growing patch of no doubt scientifically interesting selected weeds was cleared...

and ended up looking a little bit clearer but I suspect this job is again like painting the Fourth Bridge! Oh well there will always be something to do a bit like life being a roller-coaster!

 

Time to play trains!

 Making and building models is all well and good but sometimes you need to realise that part of the fun is actually 'playing' with them! Tonight its cold with stormy weather over the UK, there is not much on TV and the news suggests that Covid may be having a fight back with us all. Now with all that doom and gloom what better therapy than to step into my man cave, ironically AKA The Room of Gloom, to run a few trains and simply enjoy watching them go round. Its therapeutic and takes your mind off the troubles of the World. In your own small World you control what goes on and how its done - Perfect!!!! Well that is until Mr.s W starts asking questions about where I am with her list of ''Must Do' jobs!

Anyway, on the tracks tonight, a selection of trains that you would never find sharing the tracks in real life but this is my railway where that well establish railway modeler's Rule One is in force! That is, 'Its my railway and I will run what I like!'. 

Looking left to right, A Bachman 6 car Western Pullman set, a ViTrains Class 37 in very early EW&S livery before it became plain EWS hauling a rake of 5 Seacows and a Shark brake van (you have to love the way that the track maintenance wagons are name - there are also such things as Trouts and Mermaids) and Tornado the new build Peppercorn A1 class hauling 5 Hornby Teak coaches.

On the outer tracks we have a Hornby 9F hauling a mixed rake of 18 various goods wagons including vans, cement wagons and mineral wagons. There is also a Hornby Class 40 hauling 6 Oxford Rail Mk 3 BR coaches.

There is a Bachmann Class 20 in Rail Freight livery hiding on the right in what will be a goods /maintenance yard as the layout build progresses. That large gap between tracks 2 and 3 will eventually be a platform unless I decide on a different track plan and with my track (no pun intended) record that is a strong possibility.

I am lucky in having three running lines with various loops so trains can be changed and alternated. On the other side of the layout in one of the loops a Bachmann Windhoff maintenance train in the old Railtrack livery awaits a turn. A very odd piece of kit but something about it that makes it almost cute!

So having had a good couple of hours just playing trains, enjoying them as they circle the layout with no purpose other than to amuse and entertain me, I am a happy bunny with a clear mind, vacant of the weather and bad news stories although that Mrs. W list of jobs is bound to come back at some point! On that note maybe I will just let the trains run for a few more minutes!

On the level!

Another day of volunteering at the Rocks by Rail Museum yesterday. On entering the site I noted that the two gunpowder wagons that I talked about in a post at the start of November - click here to see it - had been split from each other and moved. One is to be a store for wood and the other a store for one of the loco preservation groups that use the site to store and work on their locomotives. 

The weather was bright but cold so some physical work was just the ticket to keep warm! That work turned out to be some track maintenance work involving ballast. Not digging it out this time but using it to level the track itself. On model railways the secret to reliable running is to ensure that your track is laid flat and level. That applies to real railways too. It is just that the physical effort to get the real track level is somewhat greater than that needed on a model railway as my back can testify!

The process is fairly simple in that there is a sighting board set up at two points and you then use a third sighting board to see whether the track needs to be raised or lowered. No high tech laser sights or theodolites - this is all done with the Mark 1 Eyeball! The picture shows one of the fixed sighting boards and there is another about 200 yards down the track. You look across the top of the cross piece of this fixed board and the cross piece of the third board should line up between the two fixed boards. If it doesn't then the track needs raising or lowering accordingly.

We knew that the track bed had settled over the years and that is no surprise when you have 20 to 30 tons of train trundling over it on a regular basis, so it was just a question of raising the track to the right level. It was at this point I was introduced to the delights of man handling 15 ton jacks which my back was delighted about! These are placed under each rail.

At 15 ton capacity these jacks are powerful and it doesn't take much effort to get the rail to lift. Further work with the sighting boards and spirit level gets the track to the point it needs to be. At this point it is then about getting ballast under the sleepers to pack them into their new position. Network Rail probably have a £15M track maintenance train just for that purpose. At the Museum we have a £150 Kango hammer! It does the job though and although hard work it is not too long before you can tell that the packing of the ballast has worked as the jacks become loose as the weight of the track is taken off them.

No day at the Museum would be complete without Riley the dog being on hand!

Whilst we were at it a bit of work on one of the track joints was carried out replacing a fishplate and bolts as the old one was showing signs of aging - just like my back!.

As with all such work it is very necessary but when there are only a few of you it takes time so I will level up with you and say that I am probably going to be doing this for a while yet!

Did I get it right?

Out with Mrs W near a place called Culverthorpe in Lincolnshire we stopped for a walk just before dusk. Not often I take a picture that either looks nice or sums up the atmosphere of the season but I am quite proud of this one.....seems right to me!