Budgie

Here's something to keep my interest going

I've been thinking about removable covers. Double track formation width in OO is 100 mm.The recycled plastic boards I'm thinking of using are 140 mm. wide. My layout is mainly straight, except for the dogbone-style ends.I've got some offcuts of plastic guttering lying around from when I had the gutters on the house sorted out. These are between 110 and 115 mm. across, and half-round/semicircular. You can also get "square-line" guttering (which isn't square!), which might be better. Both B&Q and Screwfix are offering 18m. of this stuff for £38. I'm thinking about hinging them to the boards, so they can be raised out of the way and keep flowers, etc out of the way as well. To stop the hinges and fixings rusting solid, I'm thinking of using brass or stainless steel. Obviously, before deciding on buying in bulk I shall have to try some more experiments.

Nice. I haven't seen moving-frog points modelled before.

That sounds like a challenge. I shall have to get mine going and see what I can do.

Parts of the railway have been in place for the past fifteen years, and are now showing their age. I am also showing my age and would rather spend less time on maintenance and more on playing. So I am changing the layout. The fiddle-yard will now be at the bottom of the garden, because I have had a large shed put in down there, and the old fiddle-yard will convert to a single plain track with a passing loop. The main line will be reduced from four to two tracks, and I am going to use recycled plastic for the parts of the trackbase that need renewing. What I am going to do is install some kind of barrier all along the layout, to keep the flowers and trees (and especially dead leaves) away from the track. I've been looking at fruit cages, but what I could really do with for supports is something shaped like a lower-case f, that will support itself on the ground, rise up and be screwed to the baseboard supports, then continue upwards and curve forwards over the track at a reasonable height. Currently the layout is a continuous double-track dogbone, 113 yards round. That's just under 5 scale miles. I don't expect that distance to change, although, as mentioned above, it will be reduced from double-track to single-track dogbone. What I want to do in due course is automate it, so I can set it going, sit back and enjoy it. I've got a load of Heathcote Electronics IRDASC-4 modules ready to install for 4-aspect colour-light signals, and I'm going to get some other electronics for train detection. More to follow.

Up until now I've used track nails to fix my track to the wood base. However, whenever I've wanted to make alterations to the layout I've had problems, because removing the track pins after a few years is a nightmare, as a result of the action of the sun's ultra-violet rays making the sleepers brittle. When it comes time to lift the track the sleeper base breaks, which means that that length of track can't be reused without cutting out the bad bits. What I really want to try is screws, so I can screw the track down, which should not give so many problems when lifting it. I've been searching on the internet for someone who can supply small screws for some considerable time. What I'm looking for is a screw that's the size of a track pin. Some hopes, you may think. Well, after a lot of looking, I've found a place that can supply No. 0 x 3/8" pan-head self-tapping screws (that's 1.5 mm diameter x 9.5 mm long) that require a size 00 Phillips cross-head jeweller's screwdriver, so I bought 500 to try them. I've started using them on the relaying of Fiddler's Yard on my layout, and I shall post some pictures in due course. If you want to see what they offer, go to http://www.modelfixings.co.uk/''>http://www.modelfixings.co.uk/'>http://www.modelfixings.co.uk/

Southern Pride do a kit of the 4TC for £78.50. In my experience their kits are not too difficult to assemble.

I wanted a proper name for the railway. My first thought was “The Bacheham Valley Railway” (Bacheham is what Beckenham is called in the Domesday Book), but after thinking about that for a while I decided that it is not on. So I started thinking about other names that Beckenham had in the past, such as Becceham (Beckenham was known as Becceham in the Textus Roffensis; this name is reflected in the Old Beccehmians rugby club). But eventually I came up with “Beckingham and South Wales”. The modern Beckingham is the name of two villages: (a) in Lincolnshire 6 miles east of Newark, and (b) in Nottinghamshire 2 miles west of Gainsborough. It is also an older spelling of Beckenham according to one of my local history books, and it is one of the misspellings of Beckenham that I have seen on mail addressed to me in the past. It is also a conflation of Beckenham and Bellingham, which is another district of London a couple of miles away. There is a history of confusion between the spellings Beckenham and Beckingham as shown by several entries on the world-wide web. I grew up in south-east London, and went to secondary school in the 1960s by train and bus. That is why you will see many BR(SR) electric multiple units on the BSW, and many RFs, RTs, RTLs and RTWs on the roads and waiting outside the stations for the passengers. My mother's parents lived in south Wales, and we used to visit them for four weeks at a time during July and August every year, from the mid-1950s onwards, which is why you will see a lot of GWR 0-6-2Ts pulling trains of mineral wagons. It also explains why I am building a whole lot of Comet Collett non-gangwayed coaches, because the 0-6-2Ts pulled these before DMUs took over in the early 1960s. Not only was (and probably still is) there lots of coal in south Wales, but there was lots of iron ore there too. Put these two together and you have the start of the industrial revolution, which spread out all over the world. So it's not surprising that I have developed an interest in coal and iron ore in both north America and Australia, any you will see trains from both of these continents on the BSW. I am also interested in the occasional "never-wozzer", for example the 2-10-2T that the GWR thought about for use on the iron ore trains up to Ebbw Vale (it was to be a bigger version of the 72xx 2-8-2T and would probably have derailed wherever it went more than the 2-8-2T did) and the BR Standard 8F 2-8-2 (91xxx number series, if you were wondering where that went) that was abandoned when the modernisation plan caused all new steam locomotive designs to be abandoned. I don't know if I'll build any of these, but if I do, don't be at all surprised. That's enough for the moment. More to follow.

This is as far as I've got with the TVR goods brake van

That's a shame. I was going to prepare a list of the tools that you need, and then tell you to follow the instructions that come with the kit and you should be OK. It's not as hard as people think. The most difficult thing is actually starting the job. They're coming along slowly. Today I cut some 1mm x 0.5mm brass strip into four 7mm lengths and soldered them to the sides of the brake van I'm building. That was enough for today.

You're right, Mick, but there's an awful lot of stuff that's not available RTR, and that's where kits come into their own. I always said that my layout represented an impression of the railways I grew up with, which was why I was not too bothered about the compromises inherent in OO, and the fact that Bachmann suburbans stood in for other types of non-gangwayed coaches. But now I've decided that since SR EMUs (that I travelled to and from school on) have become available RTR, I want to run trains from the Taff Vale Railway pre-grouping (as used by my maternal grandparents) and also trains that ran on ex-Taff Vale metals during the 1950s and early 1960s (as used by me on holiday), so I have to build my own. What I end up with will still be an impression of the railway in those days; it'll just be a tad more accurate. TrainGeekBoy, there are a couple of preliminary questions: What's your patience like? If you are trying to attach something to what you have built so far, and for the tenth time you fail to do so, what do you do? Do you know when to give up for the moment and come back next time? What's your soldering like? I don't mean the sort of soldering used for wiring up the layout, or for building electronic circuits, but the sort required to join two pieces of brass sheet together, or to attach one piece to another without a previous piece falling off. You might find http://www.finescale.org.uk/images/stories/pdfs/ds002.pdf and http://www.finescale.org.uk/images/stories/pdfs/ds003.pdf useful. Best wishes

Now we are going through a period of absolutely awful weather in the U.K. (rain, wind, below 10 degrees C, and now snow) I have decided use the free time that this gives me to build a few etched kits to try to make the trains on my layout more interesting. I am currently in the throes of building the following GWR A42 intermediate autocoach (Comet kit W18) Taff Vale Railway 10-ton brake van (Dragon models) and the following is in the pipeline Chassis kit for Finecast Taff Vale Railway U1 0-6-2 I shall post some pictures in a few days' time if people are interested.

I went for a garden railway because although I've got a big house none of the rooms is big enough for a railway, and there's no attic because it was built as three rooms for the servants (!). Rather than hibernating, I've started building some etched kits. This isn't the thread to talk about those, however, and I don't know how interested people may be for me to start a thread.