Minffordd Update: Every Gram Counts

We're hurtling towards the end of the basic landscaping of the Minffordd layout with the fitting of the plywood formers for the field area in the middle and the area to the north-east of the Cambrian station.

They've also had the chicken wire fixed on top which will be covered in due course with mod-roc plaster bandage and then a brushed-on coat of plaster.

Yes, this is very old school and not especially lightweight, hence Himself's token effort to save a few vital grams by drilling holes in the plywood.

He tells he it was done mostly for my amusement.

The area behind the station is rather dead space, but we wanted the boards to be symmetrical so it will be simpler to fix one above the other when transporting it, so we're stuck with it.

Minffordd Update: Mock Ups & Mod-Roc

A start is being made on the scenery proper, now most of the track laying is complete and some basic wiring for testing purposes has been installed.

Creating the buildings from scratch will be one of my main contributions to the project and I'm going to start with those on the standard gauge Cambrian platform.

As the project has developed we've become a little more flexible about the time period for the layout.

To begin with I was being quite strict that 1967 would be the bottom end of the scale, but in that year the very nice station building had recently been torn down and replaced with a bus shelter-type structure, which is rather dull, to say the least.

So I think we're going to bend out time frame a little and include a dilapidated station building along with the signal box.

My first challenge has been to guesstimate the dimensions of the station. 

I have been kindly provided with some drawings for the Dutton signal boxes on the Cambrian, 

The one at Minffordd appears to be an enlarged version of the Number 4 design, and I've got enough to go on to be confident enough with that, but the main building is a another matter.

I haven't come across any drawings yet, or even a so much as a picture taken from a straight-on position, so I'm having to extrapolate from shots taken at three-quarters.

After some experimenting with alternative size structures I've knocked up a couple from a cardboard taken from a redundant shoe box and I think it'll do the job.

Over on the other corner Himself has begun forming the cuttings in traditional style using chicken wire covered in mod-roc.

It feels like another of those great leaps forward to start seeing the outline of a landscape appearing on the wooden framework.

We're Done

Big projects rarely end with a bang, and so it is with model railway layouts.

Himself has declared construction of Bron Hebog is finished with the insertion of a series of brass speed restriction signs in the appropriate places around the layout.

Like Frank Sinatra I suspect that it's not actually over, and in time we'll no doubt find a few scenic improvements to make.

For example, the temporary toilet blocks at the pedestrian entrance to the station are something he keeps mentioning I need to have a go at.

But for now, at least, that's it signed off.

Next stop is the Perth show in around seven weeks time.

Tree Max

Himself has been planting more trees around Bron Hebog and he swears these are going to be the last!

We're probably still nowhere near the actual amount of vertical foliage to be found around Beddgelert, but we don't want to hide the trains from view too much, and besides which he finds them really tedious to make.

Just like real trees you never actually notice them growing, it just sort of happens over time.

It's only when you look back at the layout as it was first exhibited at its full size that you realise how bare it used to look.

Spring Planting

Himself has switched to scenic work and put up the central section of Bron Hebog.

Over the winter he made up another batch of trees but it’s only now he’s got around to placing them on the layout.

Some have been planted around the Cwm Cloch lane bridge.

Others have been dotted in the area of the S bend in the middle.

Trees are not his favourite job but there’s probably a few more still to be made.

Hurricane Hebog

It looks like some devastating storm has hit Beddgelert, but these are, in fact, some new trees ready for planting around the S bend.

In real life the vegetation is a lot thicker around this area, but we do want people to actually see the trains on the layout.

The other issue is that we need to be careful that adding more trees doesn’t upset the very close tolerances when the boards are stacked face-to-face for storage and transporting.

Review Of The Year - Part 2

April

By this point my Bro Madog kit-bash had got to the point where the body had been assembled and was ready to be primed.

The main change to the carriage was creating the toplight windows by cutting out solid plastic and inserting new pillars and a top rail.

I was pleased that you really couldn't see the join.

Himself was tackling the biggest outstanding scenery job which was lining the walls of Cutting Mawr.

Some of it was done with genuine pieces of Welsh rock, although most were copies I'd cast in resin.

He also set about fitting a basic backscene to hide the goings-on in the fiddle yards from view.

May

I had started work on a second WHHR vehicle for a new rake, and again it involved a kit bash.

The ex-VoR brake van has changed a lot from the version with matchboard sides which is made by Dundas.

What I decided on was using the chassis and the very bottom section of the body (showing the frames) and making the rest out of styrene.

It was coming along well.

Himself had done a quite remarkable job with the gold leaf lining on a second vintage carriage - this time number 15.

And I was busy starting work on yet along superbarn, this time casting the parts for what would become 120.

June

This was a very big month for us as we took Bron Hebog out on the road for the first time in a couple of years - and what a road trip it was, all the way to Norfolk for a one day show!

The Dad's Army section of the museum building is certainly up there as one of the more unusual venues we've exhibited at, but they looked after us very well indeed all weekend.

It'd got the WHHR brake van ready to the point where it had been painted in BR blue, just like the real one, to wind everyone up.

Unfortunately I had yet to get my hands on some of the famous double arrow transfers to complete the look.

We'd had a few issues with track alignments during the show. It was nothing major but it's still and irritation when you're exhibiting, so Himself decided to invest in some additional  measures after we'd returned home.

These precision engineering dowels don't come cheap, but hopefully it will be money well spent.

Master Of Disguise

Efforts to continue fettling the board joints have been thwarted by the freak heatwave on the Costa del Clyde this week.

To make sure that everything's correct at the Porthmadog end Himself ideally needs to erect the whole layout, but the garage is not big enough.

He reckons it might be possible by poking the southern end out beyond the garage doors but the heat has been so intense that were he to try doing so we'd probably end up with buckled rails, just like those which have been stopping the full sized trains running at times this week.

So instead he's been getting on with another little task, to try and disguise the board joint which runs the length of the layout and across the fields above the station.

One way of doing this is with a strategically placed wall.

For our stone walls we use the plaster castings by Ten Commandments, and the one here is in the condition them come in the packet before they are painted.

We're also having to do some spot re-turfing after a little bit of damagae was sustained dismantling the layout at Bressingham last month.

Welsh Weather

So in the end we poked around in the collection of old paint cans, as you do, and thought we'd give this a try.

I think it'll do the job for now.

It's very neutral and to my eye at least gives the impression of a dull, overcast day.

(Not that you ever get many of those in the top left hand corner, of course....)

Scene But Not Seen

Himself has finished the woodwork for the backscene.

That was the easy bit!

The difficult bit is deciding how to decorate it and I don't mind admitting that we're both in a bit of a quandary.

What sort of colour or effect should we be going for?

Any advice or suggestions are most welcome because the situation here, frankly, is that one of us is colour blind and the other hasn't progressed much in the artistic department from drawing stick men in playschool.

There's the potential to ruin with some very subtle scenic work on the layout with a backscene that sticks out like a sore thumb.

Hmmmmm.

Talking Turf

A little more scenic work has been done on the last bit of the housing estate scene.

I guess Himself must have wrapped up warm before heading into the garage because my post last week about the weather getting milder appears to have been classic case of speaking too soon given what we've just been through!

The areas around these two houses are quite complicated with a mix of lawn, tarmac, slate waste and gravel to represent.

There are still quite a lot of small details to add, such as fencing, sheds and even a playhouse.

Speaking of which, if we're being completely accurate the bungalow should really have a hot tub on the patio if we're being completely authentic.

Should we?

Out Of Hibernation

It would be foolish to declare the end of winter is in sight but we've enjoyed a comparatively warm spell on the Costa del Clyde in recent days, warm enough, in fact, for Himself to venture into the garage and resume work on the estate scene.

He has started work on landscaping around the final two bungalows (mostly) at the front of the layout, with the aid of some plaster.

The area towards the bottom of the picture above (in front of the conservatory) will be grassed over as the garden.

On the other side - facing the operators, so the bit most folk don't see - are the front entrances to the houses which will be mostly gravel or paving.

How much more gets done, and how soon, is very much in the hands of the weather systems I suspect, but Himself has plenty to keep him busy indoors and outdoors right now.

School Of Rock

One of the major jobs left on Bron Hebog is to complete the rock faces of Cutting Mawr.

As long-term followers of our layouts will know, up until now we've been in the habit of using real Welsh rock as a scenic material, but that does have consequences for the weight of the layouts (and the poor team who have to carry them in and out of venues when we're exhibiting).

So Himself has decided that the time as come to experiment a little.

We still believe that nothing has an authentic texture quite like the real thing so he has set me the challenge of seeing whether I can replicate a few pieces in resin.

This should be easy enough, although I'm going to go through a job lot of RTV silicone and a fair bit of resin too.

The challenge for him will then be to paint them to make them look realistic.

Bored!

Himself has been working on some more trees and tells me he's already bored after only half a dozen of them!

That's something he's going to have to learn to live with because there are an awful lot of them still to make to go around he layout.

A good number of them will need to be planted on the top of the tunnel to represent the small wood there.

He's also joined the two boards either side of Goat Tunnel together to blend the gardens behind the houses into the rest of the scene.

Please forgive the slightly blurred picture, Himself's phone is clearly not as smart as it thinks it is.

Tried And Trusted

Our approach to scenery is reassuringly traditional and our favourite way of creating bumply and lumpy ground it's the tried and trusted method of chicken wire covered with Mod Roc and then plaster.

With the houses fixed in position Himself has moved on to creating the landscape behind them.

There is a big step in the land immediately behind the houses which is represented here by the pieces of wood you can see, which also act as the anchor point for the staples which fix the wire in position.

In the picture below, taken a couple of days later, you can see the area now with its coat of plaster brushed on.

The next stage will be plant it with very hairy long grass.

Post Haste

I popped in on Himself over the weekend to see how he's getting on - not that I'm checking up on him, you understand.

Progress on lining out 150 has stalled.

(It's the kind of job you have to be in the mood for.)

However, the fence line is extending nicely on Bron Hebog.

As well as the trackside fencing there also also some around the farm to be installed.

You may recall I mentioned there is an awkward section on the S bend which straddles a board joint.

This means there is a run of four posts which sit on their own on a corner - I wonder how long they'll last?

That section of fence continues along the front edge of the board to its rear, where the track is doubling-back towards Rhyd Ddu once again.

The brown space in the foreground is where the ruined barn goes - and making that is going to be one of my priorities in 2017.

String 'Em Up

Himself has been carrying on with the fence installation around the S bend, all the while muttering that he takes pity on the contractors who had to do it for real all the way down from Rhyd Ddu to Porthmadog on Phase 4.

You'll notice that due to the location of the board joint the fence line on the upper side of the line, in the middle of the picture, will have to be broken with a stand-alone section on the other board.

As you can imagine these fence posts are going to be very vulnerable to knocks when putting and taking down the layout, or even shifting the boards around in storage.

So Himself has cunningly strengthened the ends ones by securing them in position up against a length of piano wire. (He never throws useful things away even when retired!)

What's not so smart is that he's also realised that when the fence line marches up over the high edges of Cutting Mawr the board will most likely no longer fit in the face-to-face storage racks.

So fine were the tolerances that those couple of centimetres will make all the difference.

Fence Line Advances

Himself is going through a spell of multi-tasking.

As well as painting the Observation Car 150 and upgrading the bogies of some of the older carriages he has also been spending some time in the garage inserting more fence posts on the layout.

The section he's working on at the moment is the middle section of the S bend.

In order to put more of this, the central part of Bron Hebog, together Dduallt has been taken down for now.

It's more than 6 months that it has been up and running in the garage and I'm struggling to think of any occasion where it has ever been put up for more that 4 days continuously.

In fact it's probably the first time since 1989 that we've had an actual layout to run, which is when we moved from a house where there was a large OO layout in the loft.

That's rather a long wait.

The Wire

Himself's been getting on very well with the fences.

The first section to be tackled - at the back of the layout on the run down past Bron Hebog Crossing - has had the posts painted and some representation of the wire added.

We do this by running fine cotton thread between the posts, wrapping it once around each before carrying on down the line, repeating it three times.

The real fencing has both horizontal an vertical wires which form a square pattern but we're not about to attempt that, so we've gone for the same method we used on Dduallt.

Marching On

If there is any job more boring that ballasting on a layout could fence post installation be a contender?

Himself has continued working his way along the layout drilling and inserting fragments of cocktail sticks.

Unfortunately for him this is only a fraction of the distance he's going to have to cover all around the S bend.

He's also taken a diversion down the road from the top crossing (called Bron Hebog) and past the farm house to the lower crossing.

It's a nice view, isn't it, if you can ignore the spray cans on the shelves in the background.