Roof Ribs

I've described my technique for making styrene roofs before but some of you may appreciate seeing it again.

Generally speaking unless you have a piece of moulded plastic any roof made out of flat sheet forced into a curve is highly likely to sag in the middle where it is unsupported.

The solution we hit on is to start with a flat roof and add shaped ribs which support it along its length.

You can also see in the picture that I have prepared the roof skin - a piece of 15" sheet - which has triangular cut outs where the domed ends will be shaped with the help of Milliput.

What I will do when I come to fit it is attach one side with a very generous dose of solvent and wait for it to set firmly before turning it upside down and rocking it over and bonding the opposite edge, holding it down with very firm pressure for a few minutes until the skin stays stretched in position.

I'll post a post a picture of that when I've done it.

Playing Trains

As an Easter treat for the grandchildren Himself set up Dduallt in exhibition mode with the two fiddle yards on the back.

(Any suggestion that this was for the benefit of either of us is to be immediately discounted, naturally.)

We ran a very limited service - only 2 trains sets were taken out of the boxes - but it was lovely to have the layout up in a home setting for the first time in 25 years or so.

(And yes, the signalling does look rather odd in this shot)

Oh, and one more thing.

This is what happens when a 3 year old having his first go at operating a model railway isn't supervised closely enough!

Oops!

Flat Roof

With the carriage body sides joined together and a floor keeping the lower half in shape the obvious thing to so next is make something to so the same job at the top.

The way I build our carriages is generally to have a fixed roof and a removable floor, and within that is a false ceiling to give support to the fragile top of of the body.

What you see here is a three layer laminate.

The bottom layer is a neat fit inside the top of the body.  The middle one sits on top and at this stage is slightly over-sized.

Both of these are necessary parts of the structure of my roofs but the top layer is an additional one I've added this time to give it more rigidity and prevent it flexing when the roof skin is stretched over the top later on.

Dance Floor

At last the big day - or more accurately, night - where I can glue the bits of 121 together into a carriage-shaped box.

It always feels like a very significant moment in a carriage build, although there is a lot of work still ahead.

The first task was to add on the false frame behind and below the main body side.

The Tin Car bodies were mounted on ex-Isle of Man Railway frames which were very chunky affairs and are a key part of the 'look' of the carriages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can add sections to the bottom of the floor / chassis which fits up inside the body, or you can make them a fixed part of the body.

I've done both before and this time I opted for the latter.

You can also see from the picture the small blocks I've glued on ensure the body sits on the chassis to give the correct ride height.

With that done I could then bond the four bits together.

I've also cut out a blank floor / chassis  (Disco Car dance floor!) which is sitting inside the body - on top rather than underneath the mounting blocks - to help keep it square and straight.

Statement Of Intent

Himself appears to be serious about making a new fiddle yard / continuous run for Dduallt because he's invested in some wood.

There's none of your fancy-pants lightweight plywood construction around here - our base boards are virtually bomb-proof and built up on a solid foundation of best 2 x 1.

The nature of the challenge can be see in this photo of the back of the layout.

Until now the layout has operated with two independent yards with the upper one 7cm higher than the lower (Porthmadog) end and the whole assembly resembled a giant U shape.

What we're thinking at the moment is that we'll have a handful of loops which feed into the single track at either end.

According to my very basic calculations - and there's every chance these could be completely wrong - the gradient is 1 in 35 (7 cm gain in 250cm) which could prove interesting for Down trains which will have to climb back up the ramp again to get to the Blaenau end of the spiral!

Body Bits Ready

It won't be long before the bits of the Disco Carriage can be glued together into a body shell.

I took my time forming the doors at each end of the sides.

I used a template to try to ensure that the gap between the last window post and the main pillars at the corner was precisely the same distance because it is all to easy to end up with sides that are different lengths, leading to a rather squinty body.

The other thing to be really careful about is to ensure those pillars at the end are completely upright and not leaning in or out.

It is unmistakably a 'Tin Car' now.

Just before I glue it together I'll need to remind myself what height to set the floor at and fix some blocks on the back to achieve that.

Locating Houses

I wrote in the previous post about how Himself had wanted to have space to have one of the layouts up permanently while still being able to work on the other one.

While Dduallt is set up on one side of the railway room we're still able to put up segments of Bron Hebog to finish off the remaining scenic work.

The first job is to fix the location of the houses that I built for the Oberon Wood estate at the end of last year.

It's going to be a little tricky because there is a house missing - it goes in the space between the three houses on the left of the picture.

It's not like any of the other ones I've made so far - it's a strange half-bungalow, half-house design - and so it's tricky to estimate how much room to leave for it.

I don't have the plans for it but I'm hoping if I ask very nicely that the Artistic Director may be able to expedite work on it.