'Up-cycle' Revisited?

Probably the last doodle for the wrapping paper box board for now, covering the last of the considered track arrangements. This time the evolution of my 'Upcycle' scheme from many years ago, but on a brand new board, not upcycled! Nothing too specific, a yard with assorted junk, a siding with an oil drum for fuelling locos and a nondescript hut...

Incidentally, I dry-assembled the board at the weekend, really just to check the mechanics of whether it could actually desk-sit. It can, just, but might raise more questions than answers about the ideal location of electrical connections and switches.

Colin

High Tide at Humberston

This photo appeared in my cloud storage 'memories' feed this morning, taken on Bank Holiday Monday, 5th May 2008. We were staying at the Haven site at Cleethorpes and I had caught the last CCLR train of the day to Humberston North Sea Lane to return to the caravan. To my surprise on heading through the flood gates at the top of the bank the tide was fully in and the far side of the Humber estuary was invisible, giving a surreal effect of being somewhere else completely.

(Click on the image for a larger version)

This has remained one of my favourite Cleethorpes images, in fact in 2020 a version appeared over my desk as a reminder of better days. It is still there now, a reminder of a stretch of railway that is currently out of use and the hope that it will see trains again one day.

Colin

Three Point Doodles - Take Two

As promised, we return to the theme of the miniature railway depot/shed scene for another plan. This time however I have flipped the plan back-to-front (the wonders of photo manipulation!) so the lead-off leaves the scene behind a building. I have not drawn it here, but the idea of revealing the interior of the front-right building was appealing. This version does need a fiddle stick off to the right to allow locos and stock to be exchanged. 

One thing I have become very conscious of is that I have a suspicion that I am under-estimating the sizes of some of these structures for the board space/height, especially to keep it in the box. Looking at these shed scenes again, the long, flat structure across the three tracks, based on the running shed at Cleethorpes, looks too 'flat' and really needs to be two structures with a step in the frontage to add some variety. These plans would definitely benefit from mock-ups as a next stage if developed further.

The last of the current batch of plans probably gets the structure sizes about right, and for the first time the loop and siding plan gets a sketch!   

This is very much in the vein of a scenic test track, the scenery is fairly stripped back to two small structures - a bus shelter and grounded wagon body, plus fencing and shrubbery. Yes it needs more fiddle yard than desirable but if it is for my own enjoyment only...

Colin

Three Point Doodles

I've found myself doodling again... several times... I'll spare you all dumping all the designs in one post, so here are the first two, based on the 'Tragbar/Chetley' plan. I realised that I may not have really done this justice in my original mock-ups, and looking carefully the rearmost, L/H point was aligned wrongly. 

The first plan on the revised template is designed to be simpler scenically than the Inglenook plans, although it shares some common elements. There are less buildings and any provision for concealed, rear operation, point controls is dealt with by a low rock face. A grounded 18" gauge wagon body (which I've possibly drawn a little too small) from 422 Modelmaking components sits behind a sleeper-edged platform. This arrangement will allow operation of a passenger train formed of couple of 4w coaches and for another locomotive to release the incoming locomotive.

In many ways I'd like to build something that stock and motive power from 'Shifting Sands' can operate on. In this sort of space the obvious idea is to model the "other" shed of the railway (the one at Shifting Sands itself cannot possibly house everything!). This plan turns things on their head, but only very slightly... The scenic area is shortened to allow a small fiddle area on the board itself, so it is truly self-contained. New style Peco loco lifts would be deployed to lift locos on and off the layout to take their turn at the sheds.

We shall return to this theme very soon...

Colin

Another Od-Job

Another day, another od-job. The old Black Dog Mining tub now has it's load of garden waste. Baking paper was again used to line the inside of the wagon and it was filled with offcuts of rubberised horsehair (from a hedge that never made it onto the layout), plus some leftover bits of sea foam that had previously been painted a darker brown. The baking paper liner was removed from the wagon before lots of hairspray was used to fix it together and left to set overnight propped up to retain the shape. 

Once set the bottom had stuck to the paper so I used this to my advantage, cutting away the sides and applying PVA to any gaps around the edge and adding scatter to complete the effect of material thrown into the wagon.

Colin

Odsock Od-Jobs

Whilst dithering in the workshop with all the "what next?" ideas I opted to get 'odsock Corner out of the box for a play and ended up doing a few odd-jobs. Firstly the Lister having a stretch on the circuit. This needs a little odd job of it's own when I have the patience, the pedal beneath the driver's right foot is absent, at least it is still in the box! 

Apologies for the iPhone photos by the way, they seem to have come out rather oddly in the background. My proper camera wasn't really playing either... 

The first job on the layout was to upgrade the light circuit for the office building to use a 9v battery and have a proper on/off switch added to the back of the layout, having previously relied on 2x AA batteries with a switch on the battery compartment, under the layout...

The light is now a little brighter with the more powerful battery, hopefully it will last a while in practice... You can now clearly see the Titfield Thunderbolt poster on the rear wall if you look closely.

A pure act of whimsey has seen the station cat part-repainted to try and match our 8-month old kitten Pebbles, who is a mix of black/white/ginger. Doing this in-situ was an interesting exercise but I think I've got it about as right as I can for now.

Finally the Black Dog Mining open wagon has received it's long intended log load, using dried garden cuttings. These were carefully superglued together to fit inside, having lined the body with baking paper first as a precaution to avoid sticking them in permanently. As it happens they are a tight enough fit to not need gluing in place.

The mine tub still needs a load of garden/forestry waste, that's a job for another day...

Colin

Ingle-doodles

I had some time over the weekend so created a template from my Inglenook v3 mock-up that could be used as a basis for sketching some scenic ideas. When I originally worked through this idea the look of the right-hand end was established in my mind, and the left hand to be simple and have plenty of greenery and a grounded NG wagon body. 

The more I thought about it, the low height of the backscene (95mm) would actually make this look rather odd, especially as there was no height for trees. Conversely, in this small space I actually felt the need to constrain the railway in some way... So this was sketch 1, I gave up on adding more detail as I realised those buildings might be a bit grand in scale!

The building end flat against the backscene was intended to use a (4mm scale) 3D print I picked up recently, it appears in the next two sketches at proportions closer to reality! 

I liked the lay of the buildings in that original sketch but needed to reduce them to much smaller buildings. There are no 7mm equivalents of the Wills kits to bash so I looked at alternatives. One is a very old set of Highfield vacuum formed sides that I have for a Highland Railway brake van, bought cheaply with the idea of building a grounded body. Here it sits in the centre of the scene, with a concrete hut based on a 422 Modelmaking kit on the right.

The grounded body (and extension on the right) serves to cover the pull rods that would be fitted to the points to allow operation from behind. These will have to sit within the backscene to allow the whole unit to fit on the box and therefore enclosed from the scenic side.  Although I liked this arrangement I had concerns about the angle the grounded body would sit along the backscene, with the roof potentially getting narrower to the right as space runs out.

However, by switching the grounded body to the right-hand position (on checking the website the 422 building transpired to be a little too long) it sat a lot better, with the bonus of more space around the door. In the centre I have added a new brick/tile building representing the back of an open-fronted farm store, the roof carefully calculated to meet the backscene at full width and angle away from it.

I've given the right-hand end building a bit more space on this version of the plan, having realised it was too small in the originals. The open-sided variant in the original plan looks great but would not serve to hide the potential to sneak this line off-scene if/when a fiddle-stick is added.

Colin