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.

More Wickham Trolley Testing

 Our little standard gauge curiosity has been undergoing some test running on Minffordd.

It's coming up to two weeks since our sound-fitted Wickham trolley broke cover with a little video I posted on our other social media feeds of it having an initial test run on one of the club layouts.

It's certainly attracted a lot of attention with the clip having been played more than 50 thousand times on one site alone as I type this!

Although the chip and speaker were as effective as we'd hoped it was clear there were some mechanical tweaks needed.

Traction troubles

These ingenious Bachmann models have the drive hidden in the truck behind, but only one axle - the front - is powered.

On this first test we could see it was struggling to cope with anything beyond billiard-table level track, and on rising grade, on a curve, would slow to a halt with the wheel spinning, and indeed lifting itself up off the track.

Something that tiny is never going to be very heavy so the wheels on the geared axle are fitted with traction tyres, but Himself suspected perhaps this had lost some elasticity - and grip - over time.

The excellent Bachmann Spares website doesn't list traction tyres as an item, but you can buy replacements for the complete front axle, which we did, but replacing them is quite a tricky job because the drive train is packed in there like a watch mechanism!

The other thing we've done, taking a tip from discussion on a forum about these models, is use some lead sheet to make a 'tarpaulin cover' for the ballast load which adds a precious few grammes of mass but enough to keep that powered axle in contact with the rail.

The trolley has now run successfully around the layout, coping with the grades on the main line and also the ramp up into the exchange yard.

It's also had a Modelu crew fitted which will hopefully draw the eye and disguise where the speaker, chip and stay-alive have been hidden.

Here's a clip of it having a test run on Minffordd earlier today.

Cambrian Coast Icons - DMUs

It's well known that nostalgia is in the eye of the beholder.  

In whatever subject we are interested in there will be a period which dominates our memories, and I suspect for most of us that will have coincided with childhood, or when we first experienced whatever this thing is.

So for me, and the Cambrian Coast Line, it's the early to mid 1980s.

I don't think anyone could ever claim it was a golden age - far from it - but if you looked closely it was possible to see the relics of it, such as the last knockings of mechanical signalling.

It was, however, definitely a time when the Cambrian was on its uppers, with Barmouth Bridge closed to all except DMUs - and even then I can remember seeing them absolutely crawling across because of the severe speed restriction, probably moving not much faster than the marine worms were burrowing into the timbers!

I believe before this I can remember seeing a loco-hauled train once, or maybe twice.  A clear memory of a Class 25 with - I think - a breakdown crane at Barmouth station.

So, a young enthusiast on their summer holidays existed on a diet of DMUs, and bread and butter was definitely the Met-Cam class 101.

I always found them the most pleasing of the 1st generation designs on the eye. 

The nicely proportioned front windows in the driving cabs, no great lump of a headcode box above, the chrome window frames, and not being festooned with doors like the high-density suburban units.

So a 101 was always going to be one of the 'anchors' in our Cambrian stock list for Minffordd, and we've gone with the Bachmann version as opposed to the Lima / Hornby offering on account of their very smooth drive, although I am aware that a few proportions were overlooked when the body tooling was designed, but I can't say that I've ever really noticed.

One day I would like to find - or if I'm forced to, repaint - and example sporting the brand-new Rail Blue livery to illustrate the changing scene of our 1960s period, but they seem to be like hen's teeth to get hold of.

I do believe it is important to have variety on a layout, so much as I like the 101's I'm reluctant to run only them.

Our other DMU, then, is a Bachmann Class 108, which were less frequent on the Cambrian, although I have seen plenty of photo evidence.

Were we modelling the era of my childhood, in the 1980s, we could get away with a kaleidoscope of different units.

I can recall on summer Saturdays seeing a wide variety of units from Tyseley and Chester strung, quite often running horrendously late on account of having to pull up many times at the short halt platforms on the coast line.

The one design of unit I would really love to have for Minffordd would be the other one which really sticks in my mind from my younger years when I witnessed the last days of the Park Royal 103s.

Tim Green on Flickr

I would dearly love to see one of the manufacturers add this to their range, it's definitely top of my OO wish list!