More on Hales

Since the shots of the OO9 layout seem to have been well received here is a little bit more about the layout.

Hales was effectively three dioramas that could be assembled into a single layout.

This didn't happen very often because for most of its existence the station and fiddleyard were in my flat in Bracknell whilst the other two boards were in the house in Herefordshire.

Ah yes, the "fiddleyard." The first thing about it which is obvious from the plan was that it was in the middle of the layout. What you can't tell from the plan was that it was actually a Dapol turntable. With the short trains on the line this worked better than you might think.

The layout was very firmly set in the Welsh borders. The station was supposed to be a mix  of  Llanfair  on the W&LLR and the Tanat Valley. The other boards were more heavily influenced by Roy Link's Crowsnest Tramway and were intended to be a mineral extension.

Given my miserable rate of progress evident on this blog it will shock you to learn that, whilst construction of the three boards was spread out over some time, each of them took just a weekend to build. One reason for that was that I had all the bits and pieces readily to hand. The house in Herefordshire had a large workshop that had originally been used to make musical instruments - the mandolin played by Mike Oldfield on Tubular Bells was made there - and that certainly speeded things up compared to today when it can take me an hour to unpack the things I need for a half hour modelling session.

The other aid to rapid construction was that I was using techniques that I knew inside out. Perhaps its age but every time I come to do something now it is like I'm doing it for the first time again. In those days I would build a rake of OO9 wagon kits in an afternoon.

I also had the motivation of needing somewhere to run those lovely Paul Windle locos. They might not be up to finescale standards but at the time they were a revolutionary step forward. Using plasticard meant they were much crisper than the lumps of whitemetal we were used to, as evidenced by the Chivers Bagnall, and he managed to convert the Bachmann dock tank chassis into an effective outside framed chassis.

Passenger and freight stock was the usual selection of kits available on the market back then. not in any photos is the solitary coach, which was a Parkside Dundas VoR bogie coach, and the larger wagins which were mostly from the W&LLR.

The engine shed was scratch built, but the goods shed was the standard Wills store with an added canopy. The station building was, I think a Heljan kit but I've never been able to find another one since.

Scenery was dreadfully conventional and the only point worthy of mention is that across the whole layout I tried to use a very limited palette of colours. Track was Peco, the last time I used it before starting to build my own.

Sadly the locos got "lost" in one of my many house moves around 14 years ago, and the boards themselves ended up in a skip at around the same time.

Turning the Corner

My to do list and my in box both look awfully full at the moment . Someone has just sneaked a quick trip to Bangalore into my diary the week before my holiday and I suspect I should be panicking about it, as well as looking forward to the prospect of another week when I get to spend more than 24 hours in a plane.

On the other hand I finished off the bulk of my Australian work on a call in the early hours of this morning and it does feel as if an immense weight has been lifted off my shoulders. So much so that I can actually contemplate doing some modelling for the first time in months.

In the meantime I dug out some old photos of my OO9 layout. It is odd but having worked in OO9 for years I currently don't feel any desire to model in it again.

Project X

A recent comment on an old post reminded me that I have a few ideas in mind for what to do with the Apa box after I dismantle the current diorama.

Most of them involve trams in some form or another.

This Lisbon tram is sat on the track at the moment. Strictly speaking it is sat between the racks because it is a nominal 12mm gauge out of the box. I quite like trams in rural settings, or better still the locations where an urban line becomes a rural one. So my project X involves such a transition, and the X itself  is also an important part of my putative tram layout design.

Incidentally whilst I was writing this my eye was caught by a photo sticking out from one of my father's old tram books that I inherited.

I know it wasn't taken on his garden railway, although that did see the odd tram operate on it. It appears to be a commercially produced photograph taken in 1959

Foxton

For me there is always something appealing about the combination of narrow gauge railways and canals. So I when on a  bit of a whim I persuaded my wife that we should take a brief diversion to visit Foxton locks and the site of the old inclined plane I was pleased to come across this small cameo.

And a couple of shots of the locks and the site of the inclined plane

If Only I had an Armchair

I'm always conscious that at times this must come across as an armchair modeller's blog.  I salve my conscience by reminding myself that it would be nice to have the time to be an armchair modeler. In fact put me in an armchair at the moment and the only thing I'm likely to do is fall asleep.

I'm writing this in a bar in Melbourne.  I think it is Monday but to be honest the last ten days are a blur of cattle class travel, hotel rooms, meetings and presentations.  I lost my voice five days ago but the show goes on. It will be another four days before I see home again. Unfortunately the trip home involves around 40 hours without a bed.

On the other hand I'm having the time of my life.  I've just got off this vintage Melbourne tram. 

Yesterday I managed to persuade some of the leading minds of my industry that they wanted nothing better than to take a major detour so I could take a handful of pictures of the Puffing Billy. 

On Friday I delivered a speech in front of $200m worth of classic cars. 

I've even seen and filmed a platypus.

I've also talked the hind legs off several donkeys despite my loss of voice

This trip had been dominating my life for the last four months. It has taken a lot of planning by a lot of people and a lot of panicking by me that I've tried to hide from everyone else involved.  The pressure to get it right has been enormous and more than once I've suffered from imposter syndrome.

Carefully crafted PowerPoints have been thrown into the WPB at the last minute and replaced by improvised and impassioned talks designed to address the needs of the audience  and some how it has all come together.

Can you see where I'm going with this

Yep, it is a bit like building a layout.

Modelling the Mundane

Over in Llangunllo Geoff continues to make exciting progress. What always impresses me about his approach is the seemingly effortless way he captures those very mundane compositions  of everyday features. Reading the blog reveals , of course, that far from being effortless a lot of thought goes into it, and not just by Geoff but also from the commentators on his blog,

Something he mentioned in passing was getting  the phone box to look like a real one does from an equivalent distance. Having in my youth had romantic relationships with not one but two members of the  Letter Box Study Group I've always been conscious of how poorly such important items of street furniture are so often modeled. Geoff's comment though has had me looking at phone box with a different mindest. It is easy to spot what is wrong with a model phone box, but much harder to identify the trick to getting one to look believable. There are a lot of factors to take into account, especially around the colour and the glazing. I think I would probably use the EFE version as a starting point.

It also got me thinking about just how tough it is to convincingly capture other everyday objects.

Look at these two examples of fencing in our village for example, The wooden example is dilapidated, but not in a way that would forgive slapdash modelling. The second example has subtle colouring, but also how many people would  model those joins between handrail sections?

A Quick Diversion?

Life is busy and modelling is taking a back seat. Oh, you'd noticed?

On Summer evenings it is just too tempting to don the Lycra and jump on the bike, or else to grab the camera. Summer is also when clients decide that they desperately need my team's professional services. On top of those normal Summer distractions I've got a very busy ten days planned in Australia next month that I need to do a lot of preparation for. For instance I need to persuade a coach load of  Australian IT professionals that they want nothing more than to punctuate their planned tour of vineyards with a trip on the Puffing Billy.

Behind the scenes I'm doing a lot of thinking. No major changes of plan but I'm considering how I can get the maximum return for my efforts.

Meanwhile the original Apa diorama is sat on my desk with all its faults staring me in the face.

I suspect the time has come to admit Apa has served its purpose and needs to be replaced with another desktop project , this time in EM.

What I need at the moment is a quickly constructed model that will let me display the EM good stock I've been building, and my next versions of the Tanat Valley station buildings, which won't be needed for Upwold. Of course I could just cut out the OO track from Apa and replace it with EM, but if I'm going to use it primarily as a catalyst to focus on goods stock then I think I need a plan that will encourage me to do a little shunting, rather than  have an essentially static display.

A plan, in fact, rather like this one that I came up with last year  utilizing two micro traversers/sector plates/turntable butchered from a Peco loco lift and that could still fit in an Apa box.

If I use one of Tim Horn's slightly larger standard 3ft by 1ft laser-cut baseboards  I think I would be able to squeeze in a 4whl loco + 2 wagons traverser at one end and a loco + 1 wagon at the other. In an ideal world it would be nice to reproduce an Inglenook shunting puzzle. Possibly it can be done if I go for a 3-2-2 version. Unlike a traditional Inglenook though I want to make provision for a brakevan, and for the train arriving on set with the loco at the front.