I have a dream...

 I just got back from a family holiday on The Mull of Galloway in Scotland which was, as ever, very relaxing. The Mull itself is like an island but is actually attached to the mainland, the scenery has been very inspiring for a future extension of the IoSR. I didn't have any modelling with me but I did ponder the next phase of construction of the layout; at the moment my music equipment is in the way but a chap can dream. After an evening of planning in my head and on paper I actually dreamt about the layout and solved a couple of problems.

This is a panoramic view of the area that the extension would/might occupy. The fiddle yard is just visible on the extreme right.

The plan is to replace the fiddle yard with a corner board where the line curves round and there is a station with passing loop, rather in the style of Tan y Bwlch and then the line would run under the window on a section of roadside tramway line before turning again into Port Lucy Station which would be where the keyboards and racks are on the left in the photo. Port Lucy is where the Main IoSR line meets the Underhill branch, being the modelled part. The mainline runs into the same station out of a tunnel, this is where the trains would disappear but I've never worked out how to have them turn round for the return into the station. I've had all sorts of fancy ideas about balloon loops on silly gradients but to no real solution. Anyway, what I'm driving at is that I dreamt all this in action and the mainline trains were PECO L&B coaches with driving trailers on both ends...

So, on my return to Wales I ordered a couple of Dundas VoR vans and a KATO 11 109 chassis to make the first of the driving trailers.

Raw ingredients

Work after the first night's efforts.

The chassis parts and the floor were put away for later use and the sides and one end stuck together as nature intended. After that I cut the other end to provide a low front and a back to the cab area. The duckets have been placed nearer the double doors creating a shorter van section and then infront of the gaurd's door is the driving compartment. Styrene strip was used to plank over where the ducket should be. I used the bonet and radiator from the trusty RAF ambulance Airfix kit to give the beast a snout.

After lowering the body slightly more and adding some detail parts here it is on test.

It will need some weight adding as it struggled to pull two carrs and the half truckle which I used to represent the other, un-powered driving trailer, as yet un-built.

Quite pleased with the look of it so far, need to build the other end now then paint them.

It's always nice to have a guest operator and visiting trains and just before we went to Scotland there was just such a visit from a rather Ffestiniog Flavoured modeller. These are his Dundas bogie coaches with a PECO bug box in green.

This is his ROCO diesel in FfR livery, loco named Barnard Castle

Here it is again with my rake of ROCO skips in tow.

These rather nice Victorian Bug Boxes came to stay also, which was nice, as they are absolute works of art. Just need a suitable loco now...

Out to lumch

Since my last ramble on here I've been quite busy on the layout and the laptray. So, not necessarily in strict chronological order... 

With Narrow Planet's etchers cautiously back in operation 'Wendy' now has her nameplates

'Dolcogh' has been weathered and has crew aboard. The are very nice 3d prints which I found on evilbay. My usual Preiser crew looked daft as the size of this loco and the size of crew are well known. I painted the crew and was surprised to find that I had inadvertently made a model of Tal y Llyn ex GM, Chris Price.

Sadly, the driver can't really be seen, but I know he's in there.

I decided that I shouldn't let the stack of rolling stock kits building up on my shelf just gather dust so I made a start and put together the pair of Tom Bell kits, a cattle wagon and another of the little brake vans. Once again they went together pretty well with a bit of cleaning up. The only difference I made to previous kits was to use the PECO NEM pockets and their couplings to suit. Quite simple but not really an advance from BEMO ones.

Also on the slightly diminished, shelf of shame were a pair of Colin Ashby four wheelers which I had acquired by asking on the NGRM forum if anyone had a couple going begging. These kits, although fairly long in the tooth, go together very well and make nice not exactly FR bug boxes. I decided that when it came to finishing, I'd do one in cream and green to go with the other one but I'd do one in unpreserved green and slightly rotten. I really like the tatty one and it has a place with a few other similar grotty vehicles.

The layout has had a few bits and bobs done too, the most major thing is the relaying of some of the road surface in Underhill. It was always a bit of a rush job which I did when initially building the layout in a hurry. I ordered some embossed, printed brick paper from a bloke in Greece and eventually it arrived. It would probably make good walls but I only wanted it to use as a sort of stone sett. I also replaced the pavements with Metcalffe individual paving stones. It was a long winded job but the result is so much better.

Rock Beach now has a Fromage et Fritte van at the market which is an Oxford diecast Citroen H van. It came in a revolting shiny green colour so I dismantled it, stripped it and gave it a paint in good old, Halfords grey primer. I had intended to paint it further but realised that it was exactly the right colour as it was.

A couple of nice Eggerbahn blue clerestory coaches have joined the heritage collection, I've always liked them and now I have a pair, probably need another one to complete the train.

The restaurant car had a trip out but looked rather sad in its drab green and dust livery so I bit the bullet and dismantled it for a tart up and a repaint. Obviously based on the classic Dundas models DM40, I somehow managed to make one side shorter than it should be so it never really fitted together properly.

The interior had survived pretty well with only a shelf having come loose. I was always proud of the diners and the kitchen which is basically all made of Preiser products; I don't think my eyes would be up to it these days as there are individual cutlery pieces etc on the tables. 

I added details to the end and the roof to bring it more in line with my PECO L&B coaches and also some under floor truss rods etc.

The windows are now divided into smaller panes which is in keeping with other DM40 I have. Also replaced is the door furniture so now it has brass handrails and so on.

Something I've learned is that the detail on the roof is some of the most important as we always see the trains from above, so it gained some torpedo vents and rainstrips.

Not quite finished as it will have a brass etched 'Restaurant' sign and fleet number transfers. I think the roof could do with another coat of paint too, otherwise job done. Another useful addition to the carriage fleet.

 

I have three of the Chris Ward 'Townsend Hook' alikes and so when I saw that EDM were going to sell their 3D print in 4mm scale I had to have one. In a circuitous way it's my fault they make them at all. The EDM version is true to scale and so is slightly longer but with shorter tanks, it also isn't designed to suit any particular chassis. I may have to have a go at building one... one day.

Becoming Dolgoch

I've recently bought this little chap, rather shiny and orange and with a face and a skinny chimney. Fortunately those lovely chaps at Narrow Planet supplied me with most of a Dolgochification kit. What to do? A faithful model of the Tal y Llyn loco which has always been a favourite of mine or to do something Fletcher Jennings style but more uniquely Isle of Stoner.

I contemplated a cabless loco by way of making it interesting

Once the kit arrived the die was cast as it includes a very nice replacement cab, so full cab it was.

In the instructions to the kit it says that acetone will strip the paint from the casting and I mistakenly thought that it would do the same for the plastic footplate... actually it melts the plastic. Fortunately I realised what was happening and hooked it out in time to rescue the now very floppy footplate. Some of the smaller details had melted beyond saving but nothing too vital. Lesson learnt.

First steps towards a model rather than a toy.

On test with my rake of TR based coaches, it looks at home with them. It was at this point that I decided that it should be Dolgoch. But what era?

One of the etches with the kit is for the preservation era 'greedy bars' bunker extension which I had added, but once I decided that late 1940s/early 1950s era was what I would aim for they had to go. I'm sure they'll come in handy somewhere else.

The kit comes with some excellent brass castings for the clack valves and some of the other brass work but I wanted to go deeper with the detail so have spent some happy hours poring over photos of the real thing, principally in Martin Fuller's excellent trilogy of TR and Corris loco books. A feature I always loved from the first time I saw it was the wooden shed door added to the cab so I made one out of styrene strip.

The whistle as supplied is also wrong for this era so I cut the NP one off the safety valve handles and added a more appropriate one to the side of the dome. There were also a variety of other bits of sundry plumbing which I've made a stab at, including the cylinder 'onion pot' lubricators of the front of the footplate. Like a burk, I've managed to not place them exactly symmetrically and am currently striving to not notice. 

This is the state of play before the spoiling by painting phase.

In other news, I finished off the new van in a tatty, un preserved state and it will see most service with the quarry traffic. Very happy with this vehicle and the finish.

With all this furloughed time on my hands I've also been mending things from the 'great unfinished and broken' pile and this has included both my Arnold Kof powered locos. Long story short I had 2 chassis, one had a limp the other didn't go at all. The non functioning one was a simple fix, in removing it from the n gauge body I hadn't noticed that the pickups were no longer connected to the motor... a couple of waves of the soldering iron and that was fixed. The other one was more serious and after consulting the hive mind of the NGRM forum a conclusion of a split gear was come to. By removing the gear from one of the drive axles a smooth, but powerless chassis was achieved. I swapped them over so that 'Little Red' had the 4 wheel drive chassis and the lighter green thing had the feeble one. It will just pull 5 peco skips so it is fine for now. Little red is much refreshed and has been on quarry train duties again.

Lord Stoner's inspection saloon has been out and about with its new Kato 109 chassis and is seen here with the larder car tied on, obviously a picnic is scheduled. I have two other 103s which are now up for replacement but that will be another story.

Don't it make my blue Hunslet browny red?

I'm acutely aware that there has been a lot of froth on the internet this week about the announcement that KATO and PECO have teamed up to bring us a ready to run England and even more surprisingly a double Fairlie. I knew about this for some while with my work hat on and indeed know some other things that would create even more froth, however mum's the word. But all this got me thinking about my Brian Madge 'Britomart', it has been looking pretty tatty for a while and the cab had broken loose too. I'd never been happy with the paintwork as the real one has intricate lining which I am not able to even contemplate reproducing.

So... I decided that a repaint and a rebuild were in order. The chassis is a good, smooth runner now it is run in so I didn't mess with that, except to replace the couplers with RT models lost brass PQR ones. They are a big improvement and really look the part.

The loco came apart very easily into three major sections, i.e. the chassis, the boiler assembly and the cab. Once in pieces the cleaning up started, I removed the name and works plates and the handrails came off along with the chimney and the safety valve casting.

The plan was to conceal the identity of the original and to rename it 'Daisy', I'd been planning on doing this for a while so had the Narrow Planet plates to hand. The major difference that I could come up with for an Alice class was to add a dome to the boiler. I don't think any were originally built with them but 'Velinheli' now sports one; although I believe that the boiler is originally from 'Maid Marian'. I'm not about to get into the lineage of quarry Hunslets though. I had a dome made by N brass in my loco fittings box which looks about right and with a little fettling up it worked fine. Initially I made a mistake and drilled a hole centrally for the dome. This left the tank filler out of whack so a second attempt moved it forward a little. It also left a hole in the tank top needing to be filled.



The other additions to the boiler were a new cast chimney and turned brass smokebox door darts. The door furniture was a big improvement but the chimney was just too small. It looked OK without the cab on but was evidently wrong once all was re assembled. I think it is an RT models Waril one. Nice but wrong.

With new handrails fitted, this time not with the loop round the chimney as another difference I painted her. I tried a variety of colours but none looked right, I wanted that faded Dinorwic sort of look so I ended up blending a scarlet and a brown to make my own colour. It still isn't quite right but it's closer than anything I could find in a paint and look very not blue. I will add some weathering once all is settled and dried hard and I get the nerve to spoil a pretty reasonable paint job. I'd like to add lining but as mentioned before I don't have the nerve.

Meet Daisy

I've also been adding some detail to the 3D print on a Fleischmann chassis loco I built a while ago. I'm waiting for name plates from Narrow Planet but it will be called 'Lucy B'. I wasn't quite happy with the look of the loco and couldn't quite pin it down so I've added a handrail on the front of the smokebox and a turned brass whistle. Both have just added a little detail and I've cheered up about it. Plates will be the finishing touch.

Meet Lucy B. next to the lighter green Lucy

It's a bit tricky adding crew to locos with the Fleischmann 7000 chassis as the motor takes up all of the cab below window level. The way I've got round this is by gluing pieces of styrene to the tops of the motor magnets and then a sheet of black card on top of that. The moving bit of the motor protrudes just higher than the magnets as I've found out before. Crew are the cruelly chopped at the waste and stuck on top of the card. Needs windows glazing too.