D Minus 30

Just under a month to go, then, until Dduallt emerges from retirement to appear in public again at Railex and various refurbishments are being undertaken.

Replacing some of the crumbling lineside walls also meant digging up and replacing some of the ballast so the KMX tamper has trundled down from Dinas via the cross-town link to work for the first time in anger on the FR.

It is seen here in these exclusive paparazzi shots giving the track beneath Rhoslyn Bridge and at Barn Cutting a quick once over...




The tamper will be making it's public debut on the layout at Railex at Stoke Mandeville on the last weekend of May.

It's Coming....

....not long to wait now.



The world's first model of Lyd (?) will be unveiled here soon.

Furniture Factory

I'm still working away on my latest FR Barn carriage 106. This a model of the carriage in its 2002 rebuilt condition when it received a brand new body.

At the moment I'm concentrating on the interior. I make up each of the seats and tables and glue them in individually.

Here's how the third class double seats start off...



The square bits (with the rounded edges) will be the bottom section and the backs will be glued along the middle of each to make a double-sided seat.

You'll see the backs are not perfect rectangles - this is to represent the latest style of seats being turned out by the carpenters at Boston Lodge with a curved top to each seat, as seen below in 105...



My seats made out of 60" styrene sheet - a little thicker than it should be for scale, but don't have any 40" in stock at the moment.

These ones in the picture below are going to be the single seats at each end of the third class compartments, which are placed thus to make room for the through corridor...



Pieces of strip are fixed underneath to set the seats to the right height and to glue them to the floor / underframe combo.

So here are all the third class seats and tables ready to be fixed in the carriage..



And of course there is a first class compartment too. Originally the Barns were equipped with four ex-Pullman seats. After the rebuild the two composites, 106 & 107, have a simpler design without the wings on each side of the headrest...

Waller By Name...

...Waller by nature, it seems.

Himself has finished painting and weathering the replacement walls on Dduallt.



It turns out that the old Pyruma walls hadn't completely crumbled. The stones - the wee balls of the cement - were still mostly intact, but it was the bonds between them which had turned to dust. Quite prototypical in fact.





About 75% of the walls have been replaced over the last week or so, and some other running repairs have been completed - mainly to the Ratio signals - ahead of its appearance at Railex. The last time Dduallt was on show was at Warley at the end of 2009.

One of the irritating side effects of the deterioration of the pyruma walls is that the sugar grain sized dust has spread itself around the layout and got into all the foliage and flock. It's made worse by the way the layout is stored, with the boards fitting together one on top of the other scenery to scenery, so as the walls on the top one crumbled the dust fell down onto the board below.



After sorting the scenery Himself has been back in the paintshop and some pictures of a lined-out Lyd are promised later this week. If you'd like to see those as soon as they appear why not sign up as a follower of this blog, or do the same on Twitter or Facebook.

Walls Come Crumbling Down

I'd hate to think I was responsible for giving any readers a shock, so be warned, this post is all about some actual layout progress. Or, perhaps more accurately, some layout renovation. Even so it's quite unusual for this blog.

Himself has been doing some titivation of Dduallt ahead of its appearance at Railex next month. Many of the stone walls have had to be replaced.

The originals were made 20 years ago, in a characteristically labour-intensive fashion, using Pyruma fire cement. We rolled hundreds of tiny wee balls of the stuff between our fingers and then formed them into long strings which represented dry stone walls quite effectively.

They lasted well up until the last couple of years when the layout spent a period stored in an unheated industrial unit and was exposed to severe temperature variations between summer and winter, at which point the chemical structure within the ancient fire cement cried 'enough!' and this was the result...




Some rather crumbly walls...



Some which had not collapsed so much have been treated with superglue and are holding together for now, but the worst examples have been replaced with plaster wall sections from Ten Commandments, a product which had it been on the market back in the early 1990's we would have jumped at using, as indeed we are on Bron Hebog.

Here you can see the replacement sections grafted into place. The next step will be to paint and weather them to match the existing walls.



As you can see Himself has been doing the work under a track possession which explains why the sheep are being allowed to wander along the line...

A Brace Of Barns

Thanks to everyone who's got in contact with comments on the tamper here on the blog and also on Twitter and Facebook.

Also running off the production line this week are the pair of Barns I've been building for a client.



They've been made to a reduced spec of detailing (on my own models I'd include full seating detail, grab handles etc) but that's the beauty of a bespoke scratchbuilding service, you get exactly the model you want for the price you want.

If you'd like to see more pictures of this pair you'll find them here

KMX Komplete

....and so here it is. Finally, actually and properly finished.




For now I'll let you just enjoy the pictures. If there's anything you'd like to know about the the model and how I built it leave your question in the comments and I'll answer them for you.