Supplementary Seats

In a few snatched minutes of modelling this week I have knocked up the first pair of the big Pullman armchairs for the back of 'Glaslyn'.

Now I've sorted out how I'm going to make them, what size of strip to use where etc, I should be able to rattle off the other 10 fairly quickly.



You'll notice that these seats are rather less detailed in the leg department than the smaller chairs in the observation compartment, and that's for no other reason than you wouldn't be able to see them even if they were there. (Unlike at the front of the carriage where I can't get away with such shortcuts.)



Such a slipshod attitude is the reason I will never be inducted into any finescale fellowship, but I've never really seen the point in doing details you can't see. There are too many models to make and too little time.

Discuss.

Celebratory Sneak Peak

And so the Bron Hebog blog passes another milestone - the 250th post.

Himself doesn't usually like posting pictures of models midway through the painting process, preferring the world to see them as the finished article, but I discovered he had taken a snap of 123 in its almost-there state so I imported it onto the blog when he wasn't looking.

(It was taken on a camera phone so please excuse the fact that it's a tiny bit blurred)



At these anniversaries I also enjoy taking stock of where the blog has got to in terms of readership. (After all, there's no point doing it if no one's reading it, is there?)

I was very gratified the other day to have finally 'bagged' Sweden, getting my first visit recorded from there - I was beginning to think the Swedes don't go in for modelling narrow gauge railways, unlike the Danes and Norwegians who seem to log in here on a regular basis.

Surprisingly, for the world's most populous country, I've not picked up any hits from China. But then again, given the nature of the Government and its control over what's viewed on the Net, perhaps that's not such a surprise?

However, I am getting close to a full set of states in the USA. There are just a handful of missing ones 'to get'. So if any of our Stateside readers have modelling acquaintances in Vermont, Michigan, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Idaho, Utah or Alaska please suggest to them they take a quick look at Bron Hebog and you'll make this blogger / modeller very happy!

MOTW - Linda

Time, I think, to feature another locomotive on Model Of The Week and I've chosen the FR's recently-returned workhorse 'Linda'.



Linda and her sister Blanche have been on the FR for so long now (it'll be 50 years for Linda next year) that I've begun to consider them as 'native' engines like the Englands and Fairlies.

I've got a couple of reasons for wanting to feature Linda now. One is that this model will be retired in the coming months when a replacement, built from a brass Backwoods kit, comes into service. (You can read the latest entry about this project here)

There is a second reason why Linda is on my mind at the moment but I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while for me to tell you about that - it's top secret.

This Linda is mostly made from a whitemetal Parkside Dundas kit. I say 'mostly' because 20 years ago when she was constructed the only kit available was for Linda (and Blanche or Charles) was in original Penrhyn condition, ie. no tender.

So how did we go about making a tender for Linda? We did exactly what the FR did - we adapted one from an England engine, in this case a Langley 'Prince' kit. We widened the sides of the tender by building them up with styrene and dug out the whitemetal casting of the coal and replaced it with the oil tank.

The other obvious alteration was the retro-fitting of outside frames / cranks. This was done by disassembling the Ibertren chassis and replacing the original axles with longer ones, hand-filing and drilling a set of cranks and fitting them onto the ends and then slipping a false frame, made of very thin styrene, behind in the cranks and in front of the wheels.

This arrangement served both Ladies very well until Blanche dropped her knickers in spectacular - and terminal - style at an exhibition earlier this year (read the sorry tale here).

This event prompted Himself to resume work on a pair of Backwoods Miniatures kits which had been languishing in a drawer for too many years.

Blanche is now finished (see here) while Linda is awaiting her new dome which is being turned up for us with the safety valves on the top which will be correct for her intended livery - the Midnight Blue she wore in the mid-1990's.

The wheel has come full-circle on the real railway with Linda returning to service this summer once again sporting FR green, once again making our model correct.

Here's another shot of her double-heading with 'Mountaineer' on Dduallt.

Kinky

Regular blog readers will know that I frequently tease Himself about the amount of time he spends playing at the real FR / WHR when he should be hard at work building the layout, but I have to admit that sometimes it pays off.

Take one of his visits this autumn, for example, when he joined the crew of the Greasers Express - a train which tours the entire system over the course of a weekend, stopping at every point to service the mechanism, remove gunge and apply fresh grease.

While riding in the open B Wagon he noticed a distinct kink in the formation on the run from Cemetery Crossing to Goat Tunnel, to the south of Beddgelert station.



This is at the far left hand corner of our Bron Hebog layout, a section upon which he had recently completed the scenic outline - but without the kink!

Unfortunately I don't have a snap of this bit of the layout to hand but I have doctored a copy of the picture above to try and illustrate how our trackbed cut straight across the kink and the hillside, instead of having a hollow, continued down to meet the track.



There was nothing else for it but to hack back all the scenery that had been so carefully crafted: peeling back the chicken wire and modroc surface and re-profiling the wooded formers beneath.

These views below show the section following the scenic re-design and should conform a little more closely with the real location.

Legs 56

Another fiddly session with the observation armchairs adding the legs, four of them on each of the fourteen chairs.

With the huge window at the end of the carriage there's no hiding place here so each of the styrene sticks had to be cut and glued in place individually.

Here are two of them posed in position.



All 14 have been done but they won't be fixed in place until the other bits of the interior - like the compartment dividers, tables and the big wing chairs - are made up and ready to go in.



So there's still a way to go but I'm getting there....

MOTW - The Iron Bogie

Interactivity is all the rage in the media these days. It's no longer any good for professional journalists - like me - who've spent their whole careers researching a subject to tell you what to think about it, now every ignoramus has to have their say. (*Irony alert for those with no sense of humour!*)

So in this spirit I'm delighted to be able to respond to a reader's request for the subject of this Model Of The Week feature, the 6 wheel coal wagon or 'Iron Bogie'

Or, as my correspondent referred to it, the 'I can't believe it's not a Cleminson' wagon.



It was built at Boston Lodge Works in 1880 and mounted on flexible two-wheel trucks, but later investigations revealed its underframe arrangement does not conform precisely to Cleminson's patent. Although the outer axles can turn and the middle one can swing there is an extra link between them missing.

Some have suggested this may have been an error born out of ignorance or a cunning wheeze to avoid paying for the use of the patent, but either way they probably need not have bothered because experiments running the chassis around sharp curves during restoration in the 1990's showed the centre axle hardly moved anyway.

Which is all the justification I needed for not bothering to articulate this model at all! The one concession on an otherside solid chassis is the some side play on the centre wheelset. Instead of a pin point axle it has a longer axle and the centre axle boxes are drill through allowing it to move about 2-3 mm either way.

I confess I can't remember a great deal about how I built it (it was probably more than 15 years ago now) but I seem to recall I chopped up some old Egger wagon frames to make a 3-axle chassis and the body was built from styrene.

What I do remember very clearly is attempting to slice the thinnest possible slivers of styrene rod to represent rivets on the strapping on the iron body and gluing each one of them on by hand.



In these days of waterslide resin transfer rivets these now look horribly crude and make me wonder whether I should build a replacement with more subtle detailing?

So, to bring us back to the theme of interactivity with which I began this post, I'll throw the question out to you all.

If this was your model what would you do?

Armchair Modeller

I'm turning my attention to the interior of the 7mm WHR Pullman Obs 'Glaslyn' now that most of the main construction work on the body is done.

I've begun with the posh armchairs in the Observation Saloon. There are 14 of these to make. Here's a snap of the early stages of four of them.



If they look a little short to you that's because I haven't added the legs yet!

I make the semi-circular sides by rolling a pre-cut and shaped piece of styrene around a small cylinder - something like a pencil - which releases enough of the tension in it for it to be glued to one part of the base, left for a while, before curling it around and bonding it on the other side.

Another 10 to go and then I'll start on the big 'wing' chairs for the back half of the carriage.