Jump to content

cleanerg6e

Members
  • Posts

    1,206
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    11

Everything posted by cleanerg6e

  1. Well enough rabbiting on about droopy plants and cockatoos time to get back to railway construction,(were you all thinking "I wondered when he was going to get on with it). Alignment of boards and attachment to 4x2 timbers is undertaken with a small quick grip clamp (one each side where the boards meet) and when level two small right angle brackets are used to attach the boards to the 4x2 "T" pieces and yes I use the prepainted treated pine screws. In the photo below it shows a quick grip clamp posing as to how I did the above. You can also clearly see the brackets and the stainless steel hinges. The grey painted spacer was a cock up as it didn't fit the normal way with the cream paint to the outside and had to be turned around. Roy.
  2. On the previous post another reason for the covers on the boards is the heat of summer and why I don't run trains in the heat of summer. Another reason is the Sulpher Crested Cockatoos. These large wild parrot birds stood on the last railway on the rail joints and tried to pull the bonded wires off the rail joints with their beaks. The bonds wouldn't part company with the rails but they managed to rip the nickel silver rails from the plastic sleepers and I got fed up with putting in more sections of rail to replace the damaged pieces. You can look up Sulpher Crested Cockatoos on Wiki and see the damage they do. They also delight in pecking off flowers on plants. There is nothing I can do about it as they're a protected species. cleanerg6e.
  3. G'day IanR I really like that weathered 04. Did you know that we had 13 ROD's here in New South Wales. Some said that Bachmann should do an Australian ROD. If they did it would have to be HO scale with a few detail difference. Fluted buffer barrels on loco and tender. Round buffer heads with a small central hole on loco and tender. An original wheel smoke box door handle. Whistle moved to top front centre of cab roof. Very small headlight on front buffer beam with battery box on drivers side in front of smoke box saddle. A Westinghouse air compressor bracket on right side of smoke box. Engines were right hand drive. A small two digit number plate affixed to sides of cab GWR style. cleanerg6e.
  4. G'day from the dumb idiot down under. I managed to resize my photos in windows office picture manager and I now feel like a complete prat as to not being able to do it before. I'm highly embarrassed. Roy
  5. G'day Mick I too have a Devon Belle Observation Car and with all the Hornby Pullmans I've found that their locos had trouble pulling more than 5 mainly due to the pickups on the axles for the lighting. Over here we don't get a twilight like you do and I can only see the lights in operation for about 10 minutes. After that it's dark and you can only see the lights and nothing else. So I disconnected the pickups from the axle and now a Bullied Pacific will haul 10. Roy.
  6. Oh I see Mick. Well when I worked in the steam shed at the Lithgow Locomotive Depot. My favourite work mate was a Yorkshireman from Kirkstall near Leeds. Prior to coming to Australia he worked for Whitbreads the brewers, and worked in the cellars at their Kirkstall brewery which was on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Whitbreads wanted to expand the brewery onto the other side of the canal but it was a green field site and environmentally protected. The brewery shut in 1983 and Jimmy came "down under" to live in 1987. He and his wife went back to the UK for a visit in 1993. The protected green field site had been cleared and has multi storey units on it and the brewery has also been turned into unit housing.
  7. I have mentioned how hot it can get here in Australia. Do you have Hydrangea plants in the UK. If you do I have two photos of one that I have. It's more of a tree than a small plant even though I prune it hard every winter.
  8. G'day Ian, thanks for the compliment your too kind. My carpentry skills have only slightly improved over time although I try my best. It may seem that I'm building a proverbial aircraft carrier to only land tiny airfix planes on it. But at the moment it's the only way I can think of making a solid structure out of timber. I have mentioned safety once but can tell you I had an accident with an electric planer. I don't why but I touched the blade before it had stopped rotating and got a deep cut in one of my fingers. I soaked the finger in a bucket of cold water to get any little bits of wood out of the wound and then put my finger in some diluted Dettol antiseptic. God I don't know which was worse cutting the finger or the Dettol. A few days later my boss at work noticed my finger and asked why I didn't go to A&E at Nepean Hospital at Penrith. I told him I had no intentions of sitting in A&E for 12 hours only to have a nurse say to me "oh you've cut your finger". My reply would have been "how wonderful to have you here to tell us these things, if you hadn't I would never have known". Another reason the layout is so high off the ground is because I have a bad back due to my service on the railways over here and also not helped by recent events that I won't bore you with. I read before I started construction on my first attempt a book by Chris Hatton (nothing to do with Hatton's of Liverpool) and he said that a garden level railway, though very nice depends on the owners ability to "get down to it" not just for construction, but for operation and maintenance. As my length of run is around the 650m mark, all that way on my hands and knees, no thanks. But if you want your railway to blend into the garden your knees will just have to bare the sacrifice. I intend to plant large dense foliage shrubs so that the trains will disappear round a corner and out of site although not sound. I'll have no grass so nothing to mow and paths will be garden mulch as it more comfortable to stand on.
  9. All baseboards are glued and screwed together using the "no more nails" adhesive and special treat pine screws which are prepainted so they don't rust and contaminate the inside of the wood. The exterior plywood is painted "Scandinavian Grey".The two long thin pieces of timber painted grey are spaces to allow the white painted 4mm exterior plywood top to close on the board with track work in place. Both the spaces and the white tops are hinged to the boards using stainless steel hinges with stainless steel screws.In our summer it's usually far hotter than in the UK and days of above 40 degrees celsius are not uncommon. Putting your hand on the board without a top in 35 degree heat is a painful experience.
  10. Now we move onto baseboards. On my first attempt I used treated pine "railway sleepers" as they're called over here, which are 200mm wide and 50mm thick and came in lengths of 3m long. I thought they would be fine but once again they were a bad mistake and I couldn't have painted them as many still had sap oozing out of them even after the copper chrome arsenate treatment. I decided to make a frame similar to an inside layout but a lot more sturdier. I used treated pine 4x2 to make the frames and 15mm exterior plywood for the tops to fix the track to. In the photo below you can see the frame with polystyrene in the spaces to hopefully cut down on the booming effect. Polystyrene is very hard to obtain here but I managed to find a local person only 30 miles away who manufactures the product. The photo shows a completed baseboard with polystyrene and although painted on the surfaces exposed to the weather has received a wood treatment in between the frames. All paint used is Wattle Solar Guard acrylic, and is applied with a roller, (it's quicker).
  11. I had to find a different way of attaching the 4x2 pieces of treated timber to the 4x4 uprights and decided to use a "no more nails" exterior type adhesive. First I decided to test the manufactures claim that the glued joint would be stronger than the original wood. So I glued a scrap piece of 4x2 to a scrap piece of 4x4 and once dry and fixed to a concreted stirrup I belted it good and hard with a sledge hammer. Low and behold their claims were correct the 4x2 timber remained strongly bonded to the 4x4 which split right down the middle. In the photo below is how the 4x2 timber is now fixed to the 4x4 uprights, and although unpainted shows no sign of expansion and contraction problems, that the previous photo shows in the area around the bolts. You can see that the 4x2 wood is splitting.
  12. After drilling the 4x4 posts and attaching them to the galvanised stirrups I had to attached the 4x2 "T" pieces that would eventually take the boards that the track is fixed to. For my first effort I drilled (using the drill bench) two 12mm diameter holes in the 4x2 treated wood and fastened them to the 4x4 uprights. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but with the expansion and contraction of the 4x2 timber it proved to be a bad mistake. The photo below show the 4x2 timber as originally fixed to the 4x4 uprights.
  13. Yes I also don't look upon track cleaning as a chore Mick, as it a good way of finding if any of the track bonds have dropped off. Using the Dapol track cleaning wagon or the track cleaning tank wagon from DCC Supplies is OK but, unless you have telephoto zoom eyesight you cant see any irregularities in your permanent way. Such as dropped off bonds and rails out of alignment. Reading between the lines on some of your posted comments were you a driver for BR? I worked on the Railways here in Australia for 15 years. 2 as a driver and 13 as a steam cleaner. I couldn't take the unpredictable shift work of a driver. cleanerg6e.
  14. Has anyone ever wondered what signals are sent by the command station along the bus wires, up the feeders along the track and eventually to the decoders in your locos?. Well according to a Model Railroader book this is what happens every time you press a button on your throttle, Each packet of data is a stream of binary digits(ones and zeros) transmitted at a rate of approximately 8,000 bits per second. Each packet of data consists of four elements. 1.The first element is called the preamble. It's like an introduction to the decoder, alerting each decoder by saying,"Hey look, I'm a packet of data from the command station and I might be addressed to you." 2.The second element of each packet of data is the actual address byte, telling each decoder whether or not this particular packet of data is addressed to it. 3.The third element of data is the instruction byte, telling the decoder what to do with it's loco. Turn on or off lights, sound horn, increase or decrease speed etc. 4.The fourth element of data is the error detect byte, and is used to detect errors in the data, if they should occur. Since the signals travel along the track in a very electrically "noisy" environment, the error detect byte is essential for making sure that the decoder understands the address and instructions from the command station. The command station can transmit almost 8,000 packets of data per second along the rails of you layout. If there are five locos on you layout a single loco will receive approximately 40 packets of data per second and ten locos on you layout will receive 20 packets of data per second. The length of time it takes for each packet of data to travel along the rails is what makes DCC so successful. If a packet of data has been contaminated by noise (signals interference) while traveling along the rails to a decoder equipped loco, the next packet of data is merely a millisecond behind. I myself use NCE Procab 5amp wireless. cleanerg6e.
  15. I should say that my soil is a thin layer of dark brown surface soil and below that is quite dense clay. Here in Australia we have had a drought for ten years and the top layer of soil had become more or less sand. The clay part at the top was easy to dig yet 200mm down the rest was quite wet even though we had not had any good soaking rains. After concreting in the stirrups I needed to attach the 4x4 uprights and to drill the holes for the bolts I bought a drill bench for $75.00 or In UK money 30 pounds. It was the cheapest I could find and as long it drilled perfectly straight that's all I wanted.
  16. G'day Mick, please forgive me for not taking everyone's lifestyle into account. So I gather you are a night owl. As this is your forum that must make you the grand master. Does that also make you the big hoot? In the photo below is a stirrup concreted into the ground
  17. G'day IanR from wet and soggy Australia. So glad to read that your interested in my garden railway construction and I'll keep adding detail of the work in progress. Naturally being on the other side of the world when I'm awake you in the UK are all asleep and vice versa. Roy.
  18. My name is Roy and I'm currently constructing a high level outdoor railway to take OO gauge. The reason I call it an outdoor railway rather than a garden railway is because except up the top end of the garden the majority of the railway is well and truly above ground. The heights go from 900mm to 1.5m above the ground. I have lived in my house for 28 years and have longed to run my trains outside as the inside is too small to run 12 to 16 coach passenger trains or 60 wagon goods trains. My block of land has a slope on it which in model railway terms is very steep and it would preclude running the types of trains that I like. I have built an outdoor railway before but the weather and the wildlife got to it and progressively made it a shambles. I should also say the I live in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales Australia, and when friends heard that I was constructing an outdoor railway they naturally assumed it was either gauge 1 or larger. They told me "you can't have OO/HO outside, its impossible!". I asked them what problems they had encountered in trying to put a OO/HO line outdoors and was told,"oh, I've never tried but I know you can't do it". That was like a red rag to a bull and I was determined to have a OO line outside. I first bought a number of thick plant stakes to find the level for the permanent way and also bought a 2m length spirit level. I then started to dig holes in the ground to a depth of 600mm and I've dug 67 of them with nothing more sophisticated than a spade. I then concreted 450mm galvanised steel stirrups into the hole using an aggregate concrete mix obtainable in 20kg bags. NOTE: Always wear a dust mask and thick rubber gloves. NEVER put your bare hands into wet concrete because of it's alkali nature and don't breathe in the dust as it contains silica and won't do your lungs any good at all. Once the stirrups are set and dry in the concrete both vertically and horizontally I used treated 4x4 building timbers attached to the stirrups with galvanised nuts and bolts with spring washes. I bought a drill bench to drill the holes in the 4x4 timber which MUST be parallel and the bolts were tightened with the spirit level held to the post by a quick grip clamp. Below is a photo of one of the galvanised steel stirrups, which I purchased in bulk in boxes of ten from a large hardware super store. If you wish to know more about the construction of my outdoor railway please let me know in the forum.
  19. Hi Mick, I find that LGB track rubbers are also good. They're nice and large and easy to keep hold of and if your two running lines are basically even in height you can clean both lines at once. They have a small compartment inside them so can put smaller Peco or Hornby track rubbers in there and keep all your track cleaning rubbers together. I find Peco or Hornby rubbers unnecessary with the LGB rubber as it is brilliant on slightly tarnished track or really dirty track and has a good grit content. But the choice is yours. Roy.
  20. G'day Mick, I too have a class 40 in BR green (no yellow warning panel) D210 Empress of Britain. It is a fantastic hauler and it pulled 35 Bachmann MK1's. I was so excited I forgot to film it. I'll probably trade it in on the new class 40 when it appears as I can't swap the decoders over. The present one has a eight pin socket and the new one will have a 21 pin socket. I'll also do my class 45 at the same time. It currently has a 'Mr Sound Guy' Chip and is totally pathetic to put it mildly and it cost an absolute fortune to have it done by DCC Supplies and it was away from here for six months!. It was one of my first diesel locos I had done (pre computer internet days). Howes Models at the time had no class 45 sounds, they have now. Roy.
  21. Hi again Mick, after you stated how much your Black 5 weighed I thought I'd weigh mine loco only and on my kitchen scales it came to 200grams. As for gradients one of my you tube videos ( the one with the blue king running) I have "fake" gradients. Because my back yard is on a slope the eye is fooled and where the King class loco seems to be climbing away from the camera at the end of the video it's actually flat. The eye and camera are fooled because the hedge follows the lie of the land. One way in which to see if your locos particularly steam outline locos will climb a grade is before you start construction to lay a long piece of timber on a sloping part of ground and have your least powerful loco climb it. In my case that was Hornby's Lord of the Isles. If it runs up the plank OK, then progressively at coaches until the length of train you wish it to haul is achieved. That didn't happen with mine as I planned it to haul six and three coaches pulled it down the plank and had me racing to stop it before it ended up in the dirt. Even a Bullied rebuilt West Country would only JUST haul four coaches. The coaches I used for the test were Bachmann Mk1's as they are the heaviest R-T-R coaching stock that I have. On the subject of slipping I think you absolutely right, although apparently Roco have brought out a system whereby smoke can puff out of the chimney in time with the sounds from the sound chip. If I upload photos Mick can you resize them as they seem to in the region of 5 to 10 MB. Even if I upload zip file they are still very large. Roy.
  22. Hi Mick, your comment on adhesion of the Black 5 is spot as Hornby steam locos can be on the feather weight side. The new Hornby 28xx is only 349 grams in weight and apparently had trouble hauling 11 coaches on the Model Rail magazine test track. Trying to fit extra weight centrally in the loco can also be a problem. Sometimes there's very little if any room at all to put extra weight in the boiler. Bachmann uses a cast chassis which is much heavier and therefore their steam locos seem to have no trouble in the haulage stakes. My Pannier 7739 is a typical case. Some have said that the haulage capacity of the Bachmann A1 is poor. But then again no model steam loco is going to haul a 12 coach train up a 1 in 20 gradient. I doubt that the full size Tornado would haul 12 coaches up the Lickey Incline, even if it hit the bottom at Bromsgrove at 75mph. It may still slip to a stand half way up in dry weather. I think if you want to run long trains in the garden you CAN'T have any gradients at all because model locos have a harder job than the full size ones. The coaches and wagons are less free running. Curves are still sharper than on the real thing, the track is not as smooth and the wind can make hauling a long train very difficult especially a head on wind. I found that one out with my Bachmann G2A on 40 16 ton mineral wagons. The wind blew sufficiently hard enough to stop it dead although the wheels were still turning. Once the wind slackened off she went on her way. I've been told by Howes that sound is in sync with the wheels on a steam loco to about 40mph. After that the sound speed increases but not to match the wheel revolutions. At the present that's the limits of the technology. Also due to those same limits it's impossible to make a Bullied slip on starting. The only way to do it would be to hold the rear of the train thereby preventing the loco from gripping the rails on starting, and rapidly increase the speed of the throttle to get a prototypical slip. cheers, Roy
  23. Hi Mick, as a council worker 'Down Under' we don't have the same weather conditions. But when I was in the UK for the first time (in 2000) I was up in Northhamptonshire during a fuel blockade. It came about because at the time French farmers blockaded oil refineries in France to get the government to lower the excise on diesel. British farmers tried the same thing and the government said no. There was fuel for police cars, ambulances, and fire engines, but NOT for the emergency personnel to use in their cars in order for them to get to work. People became prisoners in their towns. Where I was staying in Oundle the chap next door put two stroke mower fuel into his diesel car, and guess what he stuffed it!. When we have had snow over here (in the upper mountains) it's just a light dusting and there's multiple crashes on the roads as people with AWD vehicles do 50mph in 30 mph zones of take corners at high dry road speed and end up on their roofs.
×
×
  • Create New...