Seven Steamers

We’ve completed the loco line up for the show in Glasgow with the sound chipping of the 43XX which was a gift from the Engineering Consultant on the occasion of the layout’s debut last October.

These Churchward moguls probably aren’t the first class which comes to mind when you think of Cambrian steam but there’s plenty of photo evidence of them around the Porthmadog area in the 1960s.

It joins our existing ex-GWR allocation including the maid of all work, the Collett Goods, which is one of those in the stock box awaiting weathering.

Representative of the earliest years of our 1960s period is the Dukedog, a younger-than-it-looks class which was seeing out its final days.

This Bachmann model is limited by being rather light on its feet and can struggle a little with the gradients and drag on our tight curves, so loadings have to be managed carefully.

Making a rare foray up the coast line our iconic Cambrian engine, a Manor.

This period witnessed the changeover to the new Standard classes.

Our trio are made up of the Standard 4MT tender we featured a few days ago. 

The sole tank engine in our fleet, for now, is the 3MT.

And another needs-to-be-dirtied is the 2MT, not to be confused with its near relative the ex-LMS Ivatt design.

Small Can Be Beautiful

This weekend was a new experience for me, my first experience of an exhibition made up only of micro layouts, organised by one of our modeller friends here in the west of Scotland.

I have to confess that I've never been particularly sold on the concept of micro layouts, I've always thought I'd find them too limiting as a modeller - I like to be able to run a wide variety of trains and to have lots of operational options to stave off boredom - but being in a hall with nothing but micros I was impressed with how entertaining it all was.

What made this show a 'must attend' for me was the chance to see the N gauge version of a classic West Highland Extension scene, the Loch Nam Uamh viaduct, which is a magnificent piece of scenic modelling.

What I had not appreciated is that it is double-sided - effectively just an oval of track with a backscene in the middle and the opposite side is the girder bridge on the Oban line near Kilchurn Castle.

There was quite a bit of 009 interest as well, including a debut from a very promising young local modeller, Luca Jaconelli, who has branched out into narrow gauge inspired - so his Mum tells me - by our layouts, which is always lovely to hear.

There's a very Dinorwig feel about the multi-level gallery-style layout he was showing.

I was also very impressed by some of the visiting layouts from across the border, who showed a lot of commitment to come to Renfrewshire for one day, including this imagined west London scene at Greenford Broadway.

This show is clearly going from strength to strength, with ideas for expanding it next year, so if you have the opportunity to go along it comes with my recommendation.

Teak Freak

I'm very unusual, I freely admit it. 

I've always liked the original 'teak' livery on the FR's 'Barn' carriages, although, of course, it was nothing of the sort - more like 'Ronsealed Plywood'.

This affection probably stems from not being old enough to have actually seen one with my own eyes in this condition.

It's something you rarely see depicted in model form, so I hope it's something which will make Minffordd stand out as 009 modelling becomes ever more mainstream.

Carrying on as I did with Dduallt and Bron Hebog this set of four carriages were all scratch built in styrene.

I think my favourite of the set is the buffet car 14, which ran for a few years in this stripped back livery after initially entering FR service in the attractive green an ivory livery.

There is a lot of depth to the panelling on this carriage, and interesting details such as the ventilator hoods and the curves at the top of the main window frames.

Himself did a terrific job in his first goes at teak paint effect on these carriages, I love the way the doors look so much more weathered.

I would like to think that one day the FR heritage movement will reach the point where carriage 100 is recreated.

To me it seems just as much of a landmark moment in FR history as the appearance of the bug boxes or the first bogie carriages.

Information Station

There's one last piece of construction to complete on Minffordd ahead of the Model Rail Scotland show in Glasgow at the end of the month, and that is to fit an information panel for those who are curious to know precisely what it is they are looking at.

(We've learned the hard way that knowledge of perhaps the most famous of all narrow gauge railways is not something to make assumptions about in this part of the world....)

In a drive for economy Himself is adapting the panel which we built for Bron Hebog.

The fiddle yards on Minffordd are a few inches shorter than the panel, however, so a slice has been taken off the right-hand end, and there is also a section which needs to be removed to allow it to fit around one of the posts holding up the lighting canopy.

If Bron Hebog is ever taken out to a show again then we'd have a decision to make about whether to make a replacement, or just do without.

While he's taking care of the carpentry my task is to design a few panels to explain the whys, the wherefores and the how-we-did-its of Minffordd.

It will be obvious as soon as someone asks the classic question:  'Is this N gauge?'  (or variants of such) that clearly folk aren't bothering to read it.......

This Is Spinal Tender

More fiddle yard roads on Minffordd means room for more trains, which means we need more locomotives to haul them.

Now that's the definition of a virtuous circle for a railway modeller if ever I heard one!

So for the Model Rail Scotland show in a couple of weeks we're augmenting our fleet with another Cambrian stalwart, a Standard 4MT tender.

By happy coincidence it is a loco which spent around six months based at Machynlleth between 1962-63 so it no doubt passed through Minffordd many times.

This pre-loved Bachmann model arrived in Santa's sleigh a couple of months ago and has been waiting in the queue to be chipped and speaker fitted.

And what a speaker!

I'm still a complete novice about this DCC business so I rely on some expert friends who recommended what looks like some kind of miniaturised subwoofer which just about squeezes into the tender space.

My friend said it would be loud - he wasn't exaggerating.

That's probably no bad thing.

At the first two shows we've taken Minffordd to we've been positively deafened by DCC diesels on neighbouring layouts, with owners of whistling English Electric types who like to turn to volume up to 11.

Well, now we can play them at their own game if it happens again

Hoots Mon!

 There's juice loose about this hoose!

(OK, some of you may be too young to get the reference to the Wine Gums advert from the telly many decades ago.)

The pun is that Himself has decided that point motors are not what they used to be and decided to try fitting  some frog juicer units to improve the reliable switching of polarity on a couple of the key points in the fiddle yard on Minffordd.

Although the point blades went across OK we were relying on the switch on the motor unit to change the polarity on the frog, which was somethings a bit of a hit & miss affair.

This comes after a succession of failures in the fiddle yard on Bron Hebog where motors have failed on us, sometimes when the wire which moved the point blades has sheared, which is a really odd kind of failure.

We've keeping everything crossed that this will result in more reliable running for the show in Glasgow on a couple of weeks.

(Not) A Signal Box

Not so long ago I got into a minor dispute on a social media site with a correspondent who expressed the opinion that Minffordd looked like it was going to be quite a nice layout when it was finished.

"But it is finished!", I replied.

"How can it be?", they retorted. "There aren't any signals!"

I suppose the confusion is understandable because it looks like it's got a signal box, only it isn't.

Minffordd was in the middle of the block section between Porthmadog and Penrhyndeudraeth.

This small building is just a luxury ground frame to house the levers which control the points giving access to the exchange yard, which were unlocked by putting the section token into an intermediate instrument.

In common with the station building, which I described in this previous post, the ground frame cabin was scratch built.

I was given a big helping hand when a contact sent me a copy of the basic elevations of the various kinds of boxes found on the Cambrian.

This one at Minffordd was effectively a Dutton Type 4, which were typically found at crossings or some of the smaller passing stations, however I had to assume its dimensions were slightly larger because each of its sliding window units had 10 panes of glass, instead of just 8 featured in the drawing I had.

These window units were where I began the project.

I decided to make one set of window frames, fabricated from very thin styrene strip, and use them as a master from which I could cast copies in resin.

To give you an indication of how small they were this is a set positioned next to a UK 1 pence piece.

The smaller frame is around 10mm x 10mm.

Once enough of these had been cast they were placed within bigger frames, with them offset to allow for one to slide along behind the other.

Now I had all the window frames made I literally built the rest of the cabin around them.

This was also quite an involved process because the main part of the cabin was wooden, but it sat on a substantial brick base.

What I had to do was make it as a composite, using plain styrene sheet to get the shape of the sides and ends, and then fix the outer detail on top, using Slaters embossed brickwork sheet and moulded 'clapboard' from the Evergreen sheet range.

I also had to allow for vertical and horizonal strips to represent the outer framework.

Another challenge was how best to get the effect of the corrugated iron roof.

There are various products on the market, but some of them come as a very thick sheet, whereas the real material is so obviously thin.

So what I chose to use was the transparent glazing sheet from the Wills range, which I fixed onto plain pieces of sheet to act as the main roof structure.

There was one final challenge which was to find a way to replicate the ornate scallop design on the bargeboards.

This was as simple - and time-consuming - as shaping tiny pieces of styrene into semi-circles and gluing them on.

A lot of the detail, and the technique of the construction, isn't obvious when look at the completed cabin but I think it's a very pleasing little model, and one of my favourite things on the layout.

Go Anywhere Train

It occurred to me that despite having built up a large collection of Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland 009 stock over the last 30 years or so we have very few things which we use on all three of our layouts.

One of the exceptions is this delightful little consist.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have long regarded Britomart as the FR's most charming locomotive.

It arrived on the FR in 1965, having been bought by a group of FR staff and volunteers (some of whom read this blog) which puts it right in the era for our new Minffordd layout.

What makes Britomart almost unique among our fleet is that it has never changed colour.

Indeed, I understand it is still wearing the original coat of paint, resembling Great Northern Railway of Ireland blue, which it received when it came to the FR more than sixty years ago.

Unlike our England engines, Fairlies and Ladies which have changed colour, or some other aspect of their appearance, over the years it is perfectly correct whether it is running on Minffordd, Dduallt or Bron Hebog.

The vintage twin set 11 and 12 (I insist on calling them by those numbers!) are among the handful of inter-operable carriages we have in our collection because they have worn the green and ivory livery - or variations of it - in the 1960s but also now in the 21st Century.

Our latest incarnation of Britomart - for we have had three - is one of the super little Bachmann models which has had a DCC chip, speaker and stay alive crammed into it.

Four years ago the prototype for this conversion was given a chance to stretch its legs on Bron Hebog.

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.