Last But One

With the drawing done and the floorplan tested in place on the layout I have been able to begin work on the penultimate house.

This one divides into three clear sections, the first part of which being, what I suppose, was once double garage which has has half the space converted into a living area at some point.

This will be one of those houses which gets put together as a number of sub-assemblies, so there was no point in hanging around until the other walls had been cut out, so I've glued it together into a box already.

You'll notice how the wall at the back is deeper than the others - an typical quirk of these properties - and also the very stylised, steeply pitched roof.

A lot of useful storage space up there, I imagine.

In fact the whole thing would make rather a good railway room, don't you think?

Shades Of Grey

Himself has been busy having a go at colouring the rocks I cast using real pieces of shale from Wales.

The picture doesn't quite do them justice, I have to say.

He dry brushes them with acrylic paints starting with a range of greys and then adding other colours to pick out the details.

There is still more work to be done on the examples in the picture above but it gives you a flavour of the work he's doing.

I was comparing one them with the piece I used for the master and, as I held one piece in each hand, I became genuinely confused about which was the casting and which was the genuine piece of rock.

(It didn't occur to me to turn them over and see which was flat - and still white coloured - on the back)

Brass Roof

Himself has being doing a lot of scenery work recently so he was probably secretly pleased when I handed over the latest Superbarn (118) for him to finish off - although he disguised his excitement well.

He's begun by cutting, shaping and fixing the brass roof skin into position which makes the bodyshell become very rigid.

Annoyingly, he also spotted something that I've forgotten.

There are supposed to be a couple of blocks that hang down from the frame in line with the centres of the bogies - I've no idea what they are for but I expect some of the Boston Lodge staff who read this blog may leave a comment to enlighten me.

What was annoying about it was that I also forgot to put these on the previous carriage I made, 117.

I'm obviously losing the plot.

Planning Permission

I'm very keen to get cracking on these last two houses for the estate scene and I've managed to get both of them drawn and cut out cardboard floor plans.

Yesterday on my way home from work I was able to pop in at Himself's and see whether they fitted into the space we've allocated for them.

(The novelty of just being able to 'pop in' and check out details like this has not worn off yet - previously I would have had to post the bits across the border and try to interpret the results from photographs.)

It looks like we've got it pretty much spot on, which is a tribute to the way the Artistic Director designed the the rest of the houses, and established the formula for the sizes of their component parts, which I have used as the template for drawing up the handful that remained to be done.

These two are also, by some margin, the simplest of the properties on the estate in terms of their shape.

There will be a little bit of empty space left at the very front edge of the board but there would only be room to model less that half of the houses which go there so we've decided it will look a lot cleaner, and neater just to leave it blank,

I shall begin cutting styrene very shortly.

It's All About The Angles

Having cast a veritable avalanche of rock slabs for Himself to be getting on with I had a choice of what project to take on next.

The options are to try to play catch-up with the carriage works - always a lost cause - and make the latest of the WHR saloons, 2047, or I could get on with completing the housing estate scene by making the final two properties.

In the end I decided that with Himself doing well with the tree construction, and making a move towards lining the cutting, we are tantalisingly close to getting Bron Hebog to a point where you could sort of claim it was 'finished', so I plumped for the houses.

These two are slightly more straightforward than some of the others in the estate.

One of them is a pure bungalow and the other, which I'm starting on first, is another which is half on one level and the rest with an upper floor.

This one also has a garage attached which looks to have been partly converted into living accommodation.

Planning out these houses I find that the key to them is to establish the pitch of the roofs, then you can work out the width and the height of all the interconnecting sections.

Just to be sure that they will fit in the space that we have left for them in the scene I shall draw out both and cut out some floor plans first, and try those out on the layout, before I begin constructing them.

Cutting Casting

The story of my modelling week has been casting a job lot of resin rocks for lining the massive cutting at the back of the layout.

I've made five molds using pieces of shale collected in the North Wales area over the years and I've made a few copies of each.

In order to give Himself more options when using them, in a mosaic fashion, to line the cutting I have cast a number of smaller pieces by pouring resin into only a small area of the mold.

One of our concerns is that it repeated patterns could be obvious in the rock walls so this should help him break it up a bit.

The reason we're doing this is because Cutting Mawr is so long and deep that to line it with real rock would make the baseboard very heavy and more awkward to carry and lift into place when the layout is exhibited.

Incidentally, the difference in the colour of some of the pieces is because half way through I moved onto using a new bottle of Isocyanat.

Enigma Variations

I have posted before about how Boston Lodge has developed a hybrid SAR wagon design which has been dubbed the BZ.

It features a large centre door within otherwise fixed sides, just like a B wagon, but it is built to the much more user-friendly height of a DZ wagon.

It also has another Welsh innovation which is end pieces that are hinged to fold down flat so that, when parked, a rake of wagons becomes a drive-through platform.

Very clever.

Himself saw the second of these nearing completion while he was volunteering on repairs to the works recently, and returned north with the unwelcome (but inevitable) news that they are not identical.

Far from it, in fact.

This second once has been built with a major revision to the side door arrangement.

Instead of a door which was the same width as on B wagon, on this 2nd BZ it has been extended to occupy the space of two of the previously fixed panels either side.

Compare the latest wagon above, with the first version below.

It would also appear that the most recent one has been converted from an existing DZ - the brackets along the side being the giveaway.

The significance of this, of course, is that it scuppers any ideas I held of making one master model and casting a run of them.