Bridge over the River Loose

Today I continued with my woodworking epic and for once my plan and my measuring worked out pretty nearly perfectly. I built the lift out section which joins the new Port Lucy board to the rest of the layout, it has to be removable as it goes in front of the door. It has a dropped section in the middle with the continuation of the estuary/river which the station sits beside.

It still needs a backscene adding and some positive alignment to the surrounding layout but the tricky bit is done.

 

I need another sheet of 6mm MDF but that will have to wait until after payday, however there is plenty else to do. The first thing to get done is the backscene and the elevated part of the village especially the tramway which is intended to have and auto reverse trundling the steam tram back and forth.

This evening I've been painting a building for the road, it is an 'Armourfast' farm house. I've added a few extra details, namely Etched windows and doors and some gutters and drains. Its had a first coat of colours which look about right, I'll let it harden off till tomorrow night and then tidy it up. I've painted another building for this row of buildings so they both need curtains and glazing and then planting.

I think its intended for war gamers

The halfway station is now not a terminus so I need to decide whether I add a siding or not. I like the simplicity of the loop but on the other hand a siding would be handy to park the engineers train in and as a refuge. I have a plan that the platform building will be a model of the original Dduallt one, I did some plans and even bough the styrene to build it never got any further so maybe that is another few evenings entertainment.

More woodwork

Today I've been revealing to myself, yet again, what an appalling carpenter I am. Actually, carpenter is not the word for it; wood buggerer. The poor tree spends years and years growing and me and my saw set about it and reduce it to saw dust and kindling in minutes... I have actually made some progress too.

I've made the frame for the rest of the railway with the exception of the removable bridge section. Because of my brilliant lack of planning/measuring the new section will be virtually flat unlike the epic up hill section which follows. Variety is the spice of life.

The section in the picture directly above will have a wiggle in it, to keep things interesting. The sheet of MDF is just sitting on the frame to give me an idea of the space. I will make the track bed from 6mm MDF as I usually do. The scenery will be able to drop down in front of the track and rise up behind but because the lower level is higher than I originally intended there isn't much height.

The section above the workbench is the usual frame with MDF and this is glued and screwed so its track next on this bit. Another day off tomorrow so hopefully I can bodge together the bridge section and once I've roughed out the scenery I can start laying track and playing trains.

Would work

Finally, finally I've found a day to get started on the baseboard for Port Lucy. The advantage of not doing anything for ages is that I've had plenty of time to plan what I want from this part of the layout.

I had built the legs previously and started cutting 2 x 1 for the frame but had run out of timber, time and cash. Anyway, I managed to get quite a bit done yesterday which I'm pretty pleased with. As ever I've gone for a belt and braces approach with a solid sub-frame and then more 2 x 1 and 6mm MDF.

 This is the main frame with the main track level sheet of MDF sat in place.

The main baseboard is now fixed and the village to the rear is perched on bits of polystyrene, the track is roughly where it will be too.

More progress with the rear upper level.

 Backscene now added. 

The high street starting to come together with the steam tram halfway up the hill.

Paint it black

Got up early this morning because of the noise of the wind smashing my house about so I had some time before setting off for work. I used this time to slap a first coat of black and red on the ROCO bash.

Still wet so still a bit shiny but its coming on. I'm looking forward to adding some rust and general crud.

Another bloody engine!

This one has been sitting on my 'to do' list for ages but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. I bought it ages ago in a fit of nostalgia as the first working 009 loco I had was the old Atlas chassied version of this but it doesn't really sit with the rest of the IoSR fleet. I had thought that it might work under a Chivers Joffre but I don't have one and I'm not all that enamoured of the prototype. Two things have conspired to firm up my idea for this ROCO bash. One; I saw a similar idea on evilbay which I quite liked and two; the forthcoming Minitrains Brigadelok will need some company with a foreign accent.

All I've done really is hack off the back of the cab and add styrene supports and a corrugated iron backsheet, carve off the moulded handrails and add wire ones. I've also added new beefier buffer beams with wooden dumb buffers and moved the coal space to bunkers on the side tanks. There are a few other bibs and bobs from the big box of bits and hey presto ready for painting. I've got a brass whistle to add after the painting too. The livery will be heavily weathered matt black, the idea being that she is used in the famous Stoner Quarries; I have a rake of ROCO steel sided wagons which will look the part with her.

I ordered nameplates from Narrow Planet to suit the Brigadelok and another foreigner... so they will be called Agnetha and Anni-Frid. A small tribute to ABBA.

Painted

Slightly blurry pics of the new loco and wagon now painted. Glazing and weathering to follow. Name plates ordered from Narrow Planet.

A quick waft of primer