Crinkly Tin All Round

One of the buildings on the layout which I'm surprised doesn't get more comments - or at least hasn't so far - is the Nissen hut perched above the 'coal hole'.

It's a rather incongruous structure to be found amid the decaying remains of an intricate Victorian freight transfer system, you might have thought, but no one at the exhibitions we've taken Minffordd to so far appears to have questioned its presence in the scene.

You might have thought it was a 'preservation era' addition - because, let's be honest, the FR has a pretty poor record for augmenting it's estate with inappropriate structures..... - but, in fact, it is an Old Company relic.

It was placed at the rear of the Goods Shed  around about 1940 to act as undercover storage for the sawmill which was being operated by the tenants of the Goods Shed - the railway by this stage trying to earn every penny it could by any means.

When the tenants moved out, and the railway moved back in, it was put to use by the Infrastructure Department and lasted until the mid-2010's when it was demolished to make way for the most excellent Waggon Tracks shed.

This archive picture from the 1960s shows the scene during the period we have modelled.

It was a late decision include the hut on our layout.

I'd initially left it out believing it might crowd the scene and give away how much we had compressed the yard.

But as so often I happened across something which made me think 'I wonder...'  and that something was discovering the Ratio plastic Nissen Hut kit.

Researching the dimensions, and making a mock up in cardboard, it transpired that it would be a perfect fit for the scene despite our Goods Shed being considerably under-scale, and the design of the kit allowed for you make it as long, or short, as you wished.

Making the kit up was very straightforward, although I have adapted it a little to represent the dwarf walls the real one sat on.

What was more challenging was replicating the paint - or was it even some sort of bitumen? - that the real one seemed to be covered in during the period.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and it seems to sit in the scene quite naturally.

Tunnel Technology

"Tunnel collision is the worst to be feared, Sir".

So explained the title character in Charles Dickens' famous short ghost story 'The Signalman',  and everyone with a model railway knows that's just as true in miniature form!

The real Minffordd doesn't have a tunnel, of course, but we had to bend reality - in all senses - to make the Cambrian section of our layout into a complete circuit.

In the Porthmadog direction the line goes under a bridge, which is thereabouts in real life, but our train doesn't emerge on the other side.

Instead it sneaks beneath the narrow gauge ramp down into the exchange yard.

What adds to the complication is that while they are under cover the trains pass over the first of the points where the storage loops begin, indicated by the arrow on the photo below.

Now, modern RTR rolling stock runs pretty reliably and these days you don't get trains derailing routinely on turnouts.  

Except, of course, where there's human error and one of the operators changes a point while a train is going over it..........and then you're in a whole world of pain and embarrassment while you attempt to retrieve it in public.

So Himself has included a neat little piece of technology to try to prevent this as much as we can.

In the tunnel, opposite the point blades, is a light beam sensor which detects when a train is passing over the point, wired to an indicator on the control panel.

When there is a train passing in front of the sensor it breaks the beam and a corresponding LED on the control panel warns the operator not to move the switch.

I suppose it would be possible to also lash up a fail-safe so that when a train is detected power to the point motor is cut, but we haven't taken it that far.

Should all that fail, and we still somehow end up with a derailment under there, Himself has built-in an emergency access flap.

We've never had to use it.   

Yet.........

Getting It Straight

When we set out to make Minffordd it was with the intention to make as much use of ready-to-run rolling stock as we could.

That may seen an odd approach for a layout team best known for amassing a huge collection of kit built and scratch built stock but we wanted to get it made as quickly as we could.

Wanting to have DCC sound on the layout was the other major consideration - so much easier with RTR!

However, there were still some locos which required some serious hacking about to be correct for our era, and one of them was Prince.

The era we are modelling Prince in the 1960s is the period where 'The Old Gent' was going through something of a mid-life crisis.

He hadn't yet started bulking up on the steroids - that came in the 1980s - but to try to keep up with the younger Ladies who appeared on the railway the decision was made to strengthen his frames and take out the classic step up beneath the saddle tank.

This look, which lasted for less than a decade, wasn't included in the 'tooling suite' for the Peco / Kato Small England so it was necessary for us to take the knife to it.

The good news is that the body breaks down into sub-assemblies, and the frame is one of these.

It was a relatively simple job to chop out the stepped-up section and join the two halves back together with some thin brass strip and fix the saddle tank section back on top.

To be completely authentic we also filed away the ballast weights in front of the smokebox and the resulting hole was disguised with some brass shim.

As the loco had to be completely disassembled in any case to hard wire in a DCC chip it didn't mean that much extra work.

Prince has come to be perhaps our most essential locomotive for operating Minffordd Yard because - on account of his traction tyres (I might have been wrong about those....)-  he's the only loco which can haul a full rake of wagons up to the Mineral Line,  all the rest have to drag them up a couple at a time and assemble the rake in the siding at the top.

Recreating Minffordd Station

I was asked last week if I would write a bit more about how I went about scratch building the station building for Minffordd.

It was an intriguing design.  Many of the stations on the Cambrian, particularly those which were passing places, had reasonably substantial brick buildings with staff domestic accommodation attached, while halts usually had only the most basic shelters.

Minffordd was designed for considerable freight and 'human cargo' interchange, but it was also effectively a halt in the middle of a section.

The building was mostly wooden on a brick base.

And, more the point, when the last staff were withdrawn in the mid-1960s it was quickly taken down with little trace remaining, replaced with nothing more than a large bus shelter!

This made modelling it a challenge because I had nothing much more to go on to establish the dimensions than extrapolating from photographs, making assumption about the sizes of the windows and doors.

The other think I was able to do was take a good look at the Minffordd diorama in the museum at Gelert's Farm.

I had a stoke of luck when one of my FR contacts pointed me in the direction of some archive survey pictures of the station towards the end of its life, which crucially included one taken from the very camera-shy rear of the building.

This showed where a few of the details on the diorama model were incorrect, particularly around how the different parts of the building at the rear connected up.

Having sketched out a design the first step was to create a mock-up in cardboard to test fit on the layout and see if the dimensions seemed correct.

It seemed logic to build it as three sub-assemblies.  The main section at the front, with the open-fronted shelter area, and two extensions at the rear.

As is my way most of the build was done in styrene. 

Making the main walls, with their wooden battening, was made simple by using the Seam Roofing Sheet product in the Evergreen range, which you can get in various sizes of gap between the battens.

The slate roof was cut from the Wills sheets which have been around for years.  They are very thick and hard to cut, but it is worth the effort in my opinion because the moulded slates overlap property.

The sash window frames were fabricated from styrene strip, which is a time-consuming and delicate job, but worth it, I think, to get the depth.

I painted the building using acrylics to look very much like it was very near to being closed. 

The poster boards have had whatever was on the scraped off.

The final details, as you will see in the picture above, were to add working 'gas lamps' and attach the screen for the gents' lavatory on the left hand side, and the crinkly tin outbuilding.

Mucking It Up

Our BR Sulzer Type 2 - or Class 24 as most of us probably call them -  is one of the staples of our Cambrian fleet on Minffordd.

It's a reliable, smooth runner, with a very nice sound file, too.

The only niggle is that until now it's been far too obviously clean.  

Too obviously 'out of the box'.

In the last few months I've been experimenting with weathering, which was quite a brave step for me because I was always fearful of ruining good models with incompetent attempts to dirty them up.

I do have access to airbrushes, but I've yet to use one, and so I've been having a go with dry brushing with acrylics instead.

I'm very aware my efforts bear no comparison whatsoever with what modellers blessed with much greater artistic talent are able to achieve, but I think I've at least succeeded in making them look as if they've got a few miles on the clock.

On the 24 I always thought the thing which really stood out like a sore thumb was that spotlessly clean, light grey roof.

From pictures I've found it seems they managed to keep the flanks looking reasonably clean most of the time.

We still have a number of locos in the steam fleet which also need some attention - in particular the Collett Goods and the Standard 2MT - but I feel they are less well suited to a dry brushing approach and it might be that I need to get some lessons in spraying, or save up to pay someone to do them properly.

Either way, it's unlikely to get done before the Glasgow show at the end of this month, so please avert your eyes if you don't care much for shiny steam engines.

Regional Identity

I recently added a page explaining more about the background to the decisions we made designing the Minffordd project - 10 Reasons Why - and one of them was about setting it in the period of the 1960s.

Mostly this was dictated by the historic availability of the locomotive fleet on the FR, but there was the happy coincidence that the decade also marked a very colourful period on the Cambrian Coast Line.

At the start of the 1960s the line was still under the control of the Western Region which, in common with others, still seemed to be a bit in denial about nationalisation.

It had conspired to bring back its beloved chocolate and cream carriage livery, at least on its headline named trains, such as the Cambrian Coast Express.

Now we've expanded the fiddle yard capacity we have the happy problem of needing more trains to fill the sidings, so we're exploiting that to justify the investment in a short rake of Bachmann Mk1 carriages which can be found for very reasonable prices on the second hand market.

It makes for quite a rainbow of train formations with other sets featuring grouping-period carriages in all-over maroon and crimson and cream livery, while the DMUs are in their classic green livery.

The chocolate and cream era didn't last long as the WR fell into line and went all-maroon after 1962, followed by the London Midland Region taking control of the Cambrian in 1963.

And, yes, we do know that Manors were only usually seen on the Aberystwyth portion of the CCE, leaving the Pwllheli section to something more mundane, but they did make appearances further up the coast from time to time, sometimes even on freight!

More to the point it's a lovely model - the Dapol version if you were curious - and I've always loved the white paint embellishments applied by Aberystwyth loco crews and cleaners.

And most importantly it's our train set!

A Layout Makes Work For Idle Hands

I spent a very agreeable couple of hours yesterday afternoon indulging in a little test running with Himself on Minffordd.

I'd arranged to stop by and inspect the completed fiddle yard extensions, and get some images of the newly-fettled Wickham Trolley which I posted yesterday.

It's already clear the auxiliary fiddle yards for the OO Cambrian section are going to have a transformative effect on how we can run the layout at exhibitions.

We'll be able to run a better variety of trains and keep almost all the rolling stock in circulation, rather than swapping about what is on the tracks and what is kept aside.

The other big impact is that it potentially creates a job for another operator - a fifth!

Because of the layout of the existing yard, and the way the new terminal sidings branch off only the outer of the loops, one operator could be running a DMU or a short freight, or shunting the yard, while their colleague is busying themselves moving around locos which have been released by departing trains and moving them onto empty stock in the lines at the other side, for example.

Meanwhile there's capacity for another three operators to be engaged in running the FR half of the layout, one at each of the fiddle yards at either end, and another positioned at the front keeping something shunting about on the narrow gauge tracks in the yard.

Let's just hope we can find enough skilled and enthusiastic operators who are willing to come along and run it with us.