England In Scotland

Model Rail Scotland returned at the weekend after a two year pandemic-enforced break, and it brought home to me how 4mm narrow gauge modelling has burst into the mainstream while we've been away.

On trade stands of the 'box shifters' around the giant exhibtion hall in the SEC I kept coming across Bachmann Double Fairlies among all the 00 and N gauge products, and of course the latest version of 'Merddin Emrys' was prominent on the company's own display along with the unpainted samples of the Quarry Hunslets.

The Peco stand, naturally, featured the Small England which we are expecting in the shops imminently.

While a senior figure from Peco was admiring Bron Hebog during the show I remarked to him that they were more than welcome to liberate one of those samples from their display case and bring it over to the layout to show it in an authentic setting.

This was something Accurascale were doing with their brand new Class 55 Deltic models, depositing them on a number of the 00 layouts around the show, which seemed like a pretty smart marketing move to me.

Towards the end of the Sunday (when there were barely any visitors left in the hall.....) the man from Peco returned holding a model of Prince, and so for the first time we - and they - got to see how it performs 'in the wild'.

And the verdict is that I was impressed.

And I'll admit I was wrong to scoff at those traction tyres.

The Bachman Fairlie struggled in the back-to-back test against our Backwoods brass models - as you would expect - but the hard truth is that even with our lightest, styrene-built, carriages it can't pull a prototypical load for a Fairlie up the bank on Bron Hebog.

We hooked the Peco England onto our Victorian set, which includes three brass bogie carriages - a load which would test the Bachmann Fairlie to the limit - and it strolled up the grade with no hint of slip.

Not only that, but it ran very smoothly.  

There was no hint of a stutter on any points or board joints, and it was very controllable.

This was very pleasing because my previous experience of using Kato power, in our KMX Tamper and the Parry People Mover, is that they are very flighty and hard to control, and geared much too high.

It's also been our experience so far running the Bachmann locomotives, that although they run beautifully smoothly they are very sensitive to gradient.

They slow as soon as they start up a hill and are liable to run away on descent unless you are quick to throttle back.

One of the - justifiable - criticisms of the Peco product is that it is not DCC ready out of the box, you will need to get your soldering iron out and re-engineer the model yourself.   

In terms of how it looks, the finish is very shiny, and I would want to calm it down with a satin varnish, for sure.

And there are still those other things that disappoint, like the slide bars which are nothing at all like the prototype, and having a one-size-fits-all nameplate moulding on the tanks which stands out a mile on the Prince version.

So a big thumbs up for the chassis, but I wish they'd just tried a little harder on the body and not settled for the compromises that have been made.

And I still don't know what they were thinking of showing off those dreadful engineering prototypes a few years ago - some things are best left behind closed doors.

Rush Job

It wasn't part of the plan, but a very productive couple of hours at the weekend saw me put the finishing touches to my prototype FR intrastructure well wagon.

These bits included links cut out of a chain to represent the lashing rings on the deck and some brass wire bent to look something like the pipework around the brake cylinder on the Caernarfon end bogie.

At which point I had a very bad thought - I wonder if there's still to give it a lick of paint in time for Model Rail Scotland?  

Himself indicated he was up for the challenge, and so here it is with a rapidly applied interim livery in the infrastructure department's rather drab olive green livery.

At this point the wagon has been test run around the track at my house but has yet to be tried out on Bron Hebog itself.

So whether or not it will play a part in any of the train formations, or just be a static feature in the siding at Beddgelert station, will depend on how it runs when we get the layout set up tonight....

Last Of The Bowsiders

Having cleaned every wheel on ever item of rolling stock ahead of Model Rail Scotland this weekend - and, no, he didn't count them -  Himself has been engaging in a spot of interior painting.

These are the seat units for bowsider 18 which will slot into the Worsley bodyshell.

The body itself has had the door ventilator hoods added, and the grab handles as well.

This carriage also has fake lamp pots on the roof in its Victorian condition, so I've cast a quartet of those to be fixed onto the roof.

Breeding Buildings

There's not a tremendous amount to report this time.

As far as I know Himself is working through the mountain of wheel cleaning and final checks ahead of setting up at Model Rail Scotland a week from now.

Having finished my marathon casting session to restock Light Railway Stores with wagon kits, I've spend a few enjoyable evenings making up the Meltcalfe building kits my youngest received for his birthday to pep up the 'test track'.

Not only are these really well designed and solid, they are also very adaptable, and much fun can be had kit-bashing.

I've turned the 'small factory' kit into a trio of low relief buildings, slimming down the single storey unit to fit the gap between the folding baseboard and the shelf it rests on, and slicing the mill-style three storey building into two.

On the other side of the circle I've fused two arched bridge kits to create a structure which has given the Engineering Consultant kittens.

I plead Grandfather Rights.

This was all a pleasant change from the casting, but I fear I will be getting the resin out sooner than I anticipated because it appears nearly all the new stock sold out within 48 hours of delivery, which is a blessing and a curse.

That will be what I've had to get on with after we return from Model Rail Scotland.

I still can't get my head around the fact we'll be exhibiting again in 7 days time. 

It's been so long since the last show we took a layout to, because of the pandemic, and it feels strangely unreal and distant still, something that creeps up on you in a rush rather like Christmas does..

I also must confess that I am still mildly cheesed off that Bron Hebog did not merit a mention the long preview article for the show in Hornby Magazine.

It sounds a little big headed, I accept, but I would have hoped by now the layout would have enough of a reputation that it might have been included in what was quite a long list of layouts appearing at the show, especially since the editorial team at the magazine got in contact with us more than a year ago expressing an interest in featuring the layout in their publication.

Tamper Tinkering

Himself is getting very bored of wheel cleaning!

And the bad news is he's only halfway through scraping all the crud off the tyres of the carriage fleet ahead of Model Rail Scotland later this month.

It's worth doing, however, because there's no point cleaning the loco wheels and the track only to leave a fresh mucky trail on the rails with every train that passes.

Whilst testing the locomotives he noticed the KMX tamper wasn't picking up on the front axle of the trailing bogie.

This turned into one of those jobs that snowballed, when wires had to be soldered back into place - and were also pulled out of the connecting plugs - which was all necessary after cleaving the Kato shorty chassis in half to power this unusual contraption.

I've found that it's never performed as well as I might have hoped.

The gearing is so high that it is very flighty, and I've often wondered it it would benefit from having a resistor grafted on to calm it down a bit?

Contact with the rails isn't helped by one of the powered bogie axles being fitted with a traction tyre, which is quite unnecessary for something which is so light and doesn't have to haul anything.

The Parry People Mover is also very speedy, but is rather more reliable as it uses the four wheel tram chassis, but the lack of controllability of these Kato chassis does make me wonder how it is they became so popular for shoving under any number of 3D printed loco bodies?

The answer, I suppose, is simply because they're cheap.

Limited Clearance

There's not much to report on the narrow gauge front today.

I'm busily casting a batch of the full range of resin wagon kits for Light Railway Stores - which is going to take at least the rest of this week - and Himself is fully occupied servicing all the locos and ploughing his way through a long stretch of wheel cleaning on all the rolling stock ahead of Model Rail Scotland in a few weeks time.

In the meantime, it was my son's birthday at the weekend and among his presents were a couple of Metcalfe arched bridges which are part of the plan for the 'test track' so I've been having a little play with them to see if we can make them fit where we'd intended them to go.

OO in a confined space certainly challenges the kinematic envelope, and to position these bridges on one of the 2nd radius curves - spanning three standard gauge tracks and the narrow gauge circuit - inevitably mean's Ffestiniog-style clearances against the side walls.

There's a respectable amount of daylight when the Mark 1's pass through but the real test will be when I borrow a Mark 3 from Himself and see whether that will squeeze through...