Coming up with the goods(shed)

I have spent the last week or so cobbling together the goods shed and its loading platform. I've used my favourite Evergreen "Metal Siding" (0.030" spacing) styrene sheet, which has a passing resemblance to corrugated steel or iron. I've used this on my previous layout and nobody has told me yet that it is over scale. They're probably all far too polite, or they didn't realise that it was supposed to be corrugated iron! Whatever, I think it looks pretty convincing and it's a whole lot quicker and easier than scribing it by hand or rubbing two coffee jar lids together. Being 40 thou. thick, it does have to be thinned down at the edges, which can be a bit of a chore.

Here are a couple of progress shots taken next to some 2mm FS track on steroids. Most of the building stands on brick 'stilts', one of which can be seen here. There's only another 20 of these little buggers to build – and paint ...

I have a plan ...

This is something I should have had right from the beginning, of course, but it's only now that I've finally got around to defining exactly were everything should go. Bearing in mind that I still have hopes of bringing the whole lot over to the 2010 Expo by public transport, I have made the layout as small as possible. The obvious result of this is that I don't have an awful lot of space to get all the features in that I would like, so every millimetre counts.



I have made quite a few adjustments to my original ideas as built into my corrugated cardboard mock-up. In order to keep the spacious look I have reduce the amount of "greenery" to the bare minimum. I have also straightened the front goods siding a little and added a goods shed similar to the one at Kyle. In best railway modelling tradition, this will be about half the length of its real counterpart and in a different position. It will also act as a view-block at the front of the layout which will hopefully add a little interest to the scene and obstruct the view, under the bridge, directly into the fiddle yard.

Cutting Corners

One of my pet hates on model railways is square corners in backscenes. Not as bad as no backscene at all, but an irritation nevertheless. So what were those right-angled bits at the back of my new baseboard doing there! Fortunately, I had the solution to hand – and it originated, very appropriately, in Scotland ...



As you can see from the photos the corners are now nicely rounded courtesy of a certain well known, and highly recommended, distillery. Five pieces of cardboard tube, laminated together with PVA glue, proved to be strong enough to match the rest of the plywood construction.

Waiting for Easitrac ...

Typical. You wait for ages for the next blog update to come and then four of them turn up, all at once! Not that I've been idle in the last couple of months, mind you. While I wait for the new Easitrac point components to be available, I've been using the time to get on with some building work – on buildings no less.

I've made good progress with the station building which I started many moons ago, as evidenced by the yellowing Plastikard. It's based on Kyle of Lochalsh but probably less than half the length of the original. The basic structure is finished and ready for painting, after which I will fit the canopy and the roof. For the windows I was going to use glass microscope cover slips on the premise that nothing looks more like glass than – well, glass. I have use them before, on some warehouses on Chapel Wharf, and was well pleased with the result but, I had forgotten how fragile they are. This time around, try as I might, I just couldn't seem to cut them without breaking them, so I opted for some 1mm acrylic sheet which is flat enough, shiny enough and clear enough to do a pretty good representation of window glass. I have some ultra thin white styrene Plastruct strip for the framing, which will be added later, after the painting, and left unpainted.

Becoming a buffer stop buff

As a change from layout building, and because I fancied a bit of real modelling, I have built the first of the four buffer stops I will need. After experiments using plain rail strip (not very realistic) and bullhead rail (distorted and broke) I decided to try annealing the nickel silver BH rail. The first attempts resulted in rail that was so soft you could almost roll it into a ball! I then tried to heat only the few millimetres where I intended to make the bend and finally achieved the result I was looking for. The flame on my miniature blowtorch had to be kept as thin as possible and the heat removed immediately the metal showed signs of turning red. Here are the pieces require for a standard BR buffer stop.

I used a couple of makeshift jigs for the initial construction stages, and a few choice swearwords during the final assembly when previously soldered joints started springing open again! With a bit of determination I managed to get it all to stay together but I am going to have to devise some kind of jig for the rest if I am to preserve my sanity (sanity? What sanity? :-)

Sticky-backed Templot

Now I have made a start on the main board. I had just started sticking down the Templot printout, with double-sided carpet tape, when I realised I ought to cut out the holes for the point operating bits first! Because the plywood I have used is so soft I was able to stab these through with a scalpel – not the most suitable tool but, with a little care and safety glasses, it worked. The pins for moving the point blades will require two very small slots cut in the paper which will be almost invisible.

Not so easy track

After a busy period at work I have had a bit of time to work on the layout. I have been making some progress on the fiddle yard and now have all the traverser tracks laid using plain rail soldered directly to PCB sleepers.

I have had my first experience of laying Easitrac on the entry tracks. Rather than glue down lengths of completed track, I have opted for cutting the sleepers from the sprues and sticking them down separately. This is certainly not the way the designers of this system intended, but it suits my need to do things differently and, more importantly it gives me more control and I don't have to struggle to get everything lined up before the glue dries out. Also, I prefer to ballast before laying the rails which I find is easier than trying to do it afterwards. The resulting track is superb and I am looking forward to laying the rest of the plain track.

My usual method of track alignment has proved to be a little more awkward to fit than I had first thought it would be. Because I need three tracks to enter the fiddle yard, and they all need to be accessible to/from the traverser, there is very little space between the tracks for the alignment bolts. I have had to make these to a very narrow design indeed and I have had to be very careful to fit them in the right order so that all roads line up in any combination.