Review Of The Year - Part 4

And so to the final three months of 2021 as we look back on what Himself and I got up to...

October

In the first of these review posts I remarked on how there had been little progress with my prototype for a model of the FR's infrastructure well wagon.

I decided not to wait any longer for a bespoke etched brass part for the durbar plate deck and had a go at seeing if I could cast it in resin instead. 

First, I cast copies of the small piece of brass I had in stock, then placed them side by side to make a large cast sheet which I cut and shaped into pieces to fit onto the wagon, and used them as masters for a final set of castings.

Round about this time Himself was adding more finishing details to the Dinas shunter.

And in a surprise development, he announced the purchase of another Worsley Works body kit for Vale of Ffestiniog, because he'd decided to make a model in its current two-tone green livery, which will look more at home on Bron Hebog than the original National Power livery on our first model.

November

A few weeks later, and number 9 had been painted and was posed for its first pictures on the layout.
 

By this time painting was underway on the Hudson toast rack carriages which featured prominently in the previous blog post covering the summer months.

And the building and painting of Ashbury 21 was completed, too.

December

By the year end, along with apparently the majority of 009 modellers (and a lot of OO ones, too) we were taking delivery of the exquisite Bachmann Double Fairlie models, the existence of which had only just been revealed to a shocked ready-to-run market.

Our choice of a 1960s Earl of Merioneth was completely out of keeping for either Dduallt or Bron Hebog, but the way the model railway market operates these days with limited production runs it's a case of 'you snooze, you lose', so we knew this was going to be our best opportunity to get one at a 'reasonable' price, and I've always had a fascination with this engine, having never had the chance to see it running.

My childhood memories of the FR also revolve around green engines and red carriages, so it's a nice piece of nostalgia for me.

We were intrigued to find out how the a plastic RTR model - complete with coreless motor, flywheels, DCC chip and sound would compare against our kit-built, Mashima-powered, brass Backwoods Fairlies, and filmed the trials for your entertainment.

A pretty conclusive result......so don't expect to see our Backwoods models being retired any time soon.

I rounded off the year by laying the narrow gauge side of the 'test track' project at home.

The early weeks of 2022 will, hopefully, see us getting this wired up and ready to start, ahem, 'testing' things on....

Best wishes to everyone who drops by this blog for the new modelling year. 

Review Of The Year - Part 3

Here we are into the second half of our annual review, and the pace of projects slowed down a little over the summer months, as I suspect it does for most of us.

July

We were fortunate to be able to get hold of one of the last of the batch of 009 Society Hudson toast rack kits, which we made up to represent number 42 on the WHHR.
 

In this picture it is positioned between one of our Dundas 37 / 38 pair and my original scratch built 39 which I must have made in the mid-90s.

Himself got on very fast with the RT models Baguley Drewry shunter kit prototype we obtained from RT Models, having swapped the etch brass fly cranks for some cast brass ones we had spare.

August

I was working away at my version of the toast rack to represent the FR's replica 39, which I was making using a basic resin casting for the body side and then using styrene angle and brass wire to complete.

 

Himself had the idea of using a spare Lynton and Barnstaple bogie van kit to make a freelance FR-style track cleaning wagon.

This has a sprung pad beneath it which wipes the rail heads, and the whole wagon is weighed down with lead, to the extent that it needs to have a locomotive at each end of it to be pushed around the layout.

At my house the 'test track' project had reached the track laying stage.

September

By now now the toast rack 39 carriage had reached the stage where it was almost ready to have a roof added and be sent for painting.

In order to better represent the Dinas shunter, number 9, I produced a styrene master for some alternative bonnet doors and grills which I turned into a casting.

And after a saga which went on for more than a year we finally got hold of etches to make a model of the Ashbury replica 21, which Himself soldered together in short order.

I'll bring the story up to date with a final instalment to be posted on Hogmanay.

Review Of The Year - Part 2

Picking up on our look back at the year, and a lot of what we were up to in the spring revolved around the carriage fleet.

 

April

A long-term ambition had been to get round to buying and assembling a Chris Veitch brass kit for the FR 'sentry' brake van, which makes a very distinctive model full of Victorian character.

Trying our best to keep up with the carriage works in Wales we also set making a miniature version of the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway's new Pickering brake replica.

This project had a false start because, at first, I purchased the Dundas brass kit.

Once Himself put the body together he found there were a few inaccuracies in the dimensions, but more importantly from our point of view, the design made it difficult to paint and to fit an interior.

So we put that one on ice and got hold of the alternative body kit from Worsley Works.

If you read the first part of the Review you'll have seen a picture of the early stages of my commission to scratch build a model of Carnforth buffet car 114.

This was a snap I took just before it was sent off to its new home.

May

A crucial part of the Pickering project was to find a way to depict the fake lamp pots on the roof.

I had a number of goes at scratch building one which could be copied with resin casting.

Himself got round to finishing off the paint job on the 3mm scale ex-GWR 2-8-0 tank engines he'd been building for the Engineering Consultant.

It was just as well we kept in his good books, unknown to anyone, he was about to become a very important person in the top left hand corner of Wales.

In this month I also resolved that the time had come to make a model of the WHR's diesel shunter at Dinas.

The post about my intentions resulted in an offer to try out one of the prototype body kits from RT Models....

June

The paint job on the Pickering brake was one of the more straightforward ones so we didn't have long to wait for a picture of it posed ready for service on Bron Hebog.

With the Pickering built it left the Hudson toast rack carriage as one of the obvious missing vehicles from our WHHR sets.

We managed to get hold of one of the 009 Society kits before they sold out, but I was also keen to have a second model of the FR replica 39 in its current green livery, so the only option left was to scratch build.

This was a fortunate move because it transpired that Winson Engineering wasn't capable of making an exact copy of the original carriage, and there are some fundamental differences between the 1990s version and the original carriages.

My plan was to make a master for the carriage sides in styrene and cast a copy of it - the one in the picture shows me starting to embellish it with extra details in brass and styrene.

And June was also the month when, after much planning, we began installing the baseboard for a permanent dual gauge test track, my first home layout since I was a teenager.

We came up with an 8ft x 5ft board which can be folded into a frame on the wall when the space in the study is required for something more boring, such as *spoiler alert* self-isolating from Covid-19.....

Replicas Running

Now the varnish has set, and the bogies been fixed on,  Himself has sent me a couple of pictures of our new replicas - Ashbury 21 and Hudson toast rack 39 - on a test run on the layout.

21 is from a Worsley brass body kit and 39 was scratch built with most of the body cast in resin by myself,

This gives us a very respectable length of a 'Garraway' vintage set strengthens our 'Col Stephens' options as well, although we are a few green bug boxes short in that department.

They look very good posed in the platform at Beddgelert station on Bron Hebog.

It shouldn't be too much longer before our Bachmann Double Fairlies arrive and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the green Earl of Merioneth looks like hauling some of our green and ivory and all-over red stock.

Totally out of period for us, of course, but it's nearly Christmas so we're allowed, aren't we?

Open For Business

I've got more action to report from the paint shop.

Himself has been busy with the multi-coloured Hudson semi-open carriages - one the replica for the FR and the other for the WHHR fleet, which have different origins.

The red (WHHR) one is from the very neat 009 Society injection moulded kit, and has had a few enhancements such as brake pipes and the safety chains across the passenger access openings.

The green (FR) version is one I cast in resin from a scratch built master I made in styrene, and has a number of differences, including the positions of the right angle uprights and the number of slats on the end panels.

The mesh doors - a mid-life upgrade which offer significantly more protection than the chains on number 42 - are 3D prints which were kindly donated to the project.

For a few minutes Himself thought he had caught me out by noticing that number 39 currently has fewer, and thicker, planks on the ends, but he forgot the golden rule of FR modelling, which is that things change so frequently you have to choose the day you are modelling your locomotive, carriage or waggon and stick to it.

Thus, this 39 shows the carriage before its most recently, and thorough, overhaul.

Toast Rack Update

Tinkering has been completed on the scratch built Hudson toast rack replica 39 and it is about to move to the painting stage.

Himself has taken my resin cast body and added a a brass roof as well as finishing details such as the vacuum pipes, electrical connections and emergency stop apparatus.

It's had a trial run on (most) of Bron Hebog along with the 009 Society kit version which we are going to finish as the version of this type of carriage running on the WHHR. which is more correct to the kit.

The front one will be finished mostly in green and the rear one mostly in maroon.

Given that I was only working from photographs with measurements of the key dimensions of the Society kit when I started I'm pretty pleased with how it has turned out.

Mesh Door Solution

You can call me a hypocrite if you like, and I won't disagree, but after many years of - lets call it scepticism - about 3D printing the new fangled technology has proven to be the best solution to the problem of how to recreate the small mesh safety doors on the Hudson toast rack carriage 39.

Even better was that I didn't have to do anything to get them, having been offered eight spares from fellow NG modeller, Colin Lea.

As printed, they were just under a millimetre too wide for the gap between the body panels - if it was the 009 Society / Dundas kit it would have been even more so - but it proved possible to file them carefully at either side to fit snugly.

You can probably make out in the picture that I have made and fitted the seat benches and the backrests.

Now it's just about ready to pass to Himself to add the brass bits and get it painted.

Cheers Colin!

Two Slices

I've been getting very behind in my blogging again.

It's not that there's no modelling going on, but the lack of updates here is because I have been lured back to the dark side of standard gauge and have spent much of my spare time in the last couple of weeks working on the tracklaying on the dual gauge 'test track' in the study.

Officially, this is a more practical solution for my son's OO 'train set'.........

I have stayed away from posting updates about that here because you come to read about narrow gauge modelling, right?

I did manage to get some FR work done immediately after my return from a few days in Wales  - the first time at the railway since 2019.

With the arrival in the post of a pack of fresh Hudson bogies I have trial-fitted the chassis in the toast rack carriage 39.

The task which am putting off - and which the OO track is providing an ideal excuse for - is trying to find a way to represent the tiny mesh safety doors fitted to this carriage.

All suggestions welcome...

Toast Rack Update

I apologise for things being a little quiet on the blog in recent weeks, which is on account of a number of factors including holidays, effort on constructing the dual gauge home 'test track', and a secret project that I can't tell you about.

All of which means that there hasn't been much progress with my scratch built model of FR Hudson 'toast rack' replica 39 until the other day when I cut out and test fitted a styrene floor / chassis for the body which has been glued together.

At the moment I only have the one pair of bogies - which I've stolen off the 009 Society kit - so I can't glue the floor into place and finalise its position and the running height until they are both on the rails and I can accurately compare them.

I have a pair on order but it's likely to be more than a week until I receive them.

Another Round Of Toast

Having embarked on my project to scratch build models of the FR / WHHR Hudson 'toast rack' carriages, on account of the 009 Society kits being sold out, imagine my surprise when one of them turned up in the post at Himself's place.

As luck would have it this appeared just before I began any serious work on the model of the WHHR example, which regular blog readers will know has its L-section strapping the opposite way - the correct way - round compared to the replica built for the FR by Winson Engineering in the early 1990s.

While I was away on holiday in the West Highlands last week, Himself put together the kit, which includes very neat etchings for the protective hoops on the side, which I scratch built using brass wire on my model.

In the photo you can see it posed next to my first attempt at scratch building FR carriage 39 which I did from guesswork more than 20 years ago - it wasn't such a bad effort.

Hooping For The Best

For what appears to be such a basic and insubstantial carriage it's remarkable how much fiddly work is involved in scratch building a model of FR 'toast rack' carr 39.

Last night's task was to begin bending and fitting the distinctive hoops at the side of these Hudson carriages.

This involves forming sets of U shapes of three radii out of 0.45 brass wire and carefully fixing them in position.

Thank goodness for 60 second superglue!

One down, one to go.

Non-Identical Twins

I suppose in a way my naivety is quite touching, but I really shouldn't have been surprised when my plan to make one master for the sides of the FR and WHHR Hudson toast rack carriages hit a snag.

A correspondent informed me that there is a clear difference in the pair in the orientation of the upright L girders on the sides.

While the WHHR rebuild has them as per the original carriages the FR replica - built by Winson Engineering in the 1990s - has most of them facing in the opposite direction.

I am also informed that this is not what was designed, however, that is what was delivered!

Armed with this unfortunate information my options were:

a) build separate masters for the two carriages

or

b) try to slice off the uprights to make a generic master to which I could use to cast incomplete sides and add the uprights separately for each carriage.

I've decided to go for the second option.

This now looks a lot more basic, although I have been able to add on the footboard and some resin rivet head transfers along the frame.

Hopefully cutting and sticking on the girders will be much less hassle than having to make a whole second side from scratch.

Hot Toast

It's been an ambition for a while to get a second model of Hudson 'toast rack' carriage 39 in the fleet, wearing its Col. Stephens green to match many of the other vintage carriages.

Our existing model is one I scratch built in styrene probably the best part of 25 years ago in its original red and ivory colour scheme.

As well as the FR one we could do with a third model to represent carriage 42 on the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway.

So when I heard the 009 Society had produced a run of their exclusive, members-only, kits for the first time in many years I thought that would be the ideal opportunity to get these models built.

Alas, it appears they have sold like hot cakes - or more like hot toast? - and by the time Himself obtained a login for the members' section of the shop they'd all gone!

So rather than wait for an announcement about if or when there might be another production run, I've decided the best thing to do is to make a pair myself.

I've done it before so it won't be difficult.

I'm going to make up masters for the sides and ends and cast copies in resin.

A friend, who got in ahead of us and bought a handful of the Society kits, kindly helped me out with a few measurements and after a couple of hours work last night I've got this far.

Just like the Society kit the semi-circle hoops which are such a feature of these carriages will be added on by hand, and I've still got the footboard and the triangular underframe to add - plus bolt heads / rivets - before it is ready to make a mould from.

The ends will be slightly more involved as the FR and WHHR examples are different - or at least they were in the period I'm going to model them - 39 had many more horizontal slats before it was taken in for a heavy overhaul ahead of the 2021 season.