Progress (or otherwise) on Jeff's new layout

One more, after adding a few more of the card bases to even up the increments of the slope of the terraced houses.

I had a little help from Toby, who just had to stick his nose in to see what I was doing. He insisted on holding the otehr end of the card as I was cutting, with his teeth and paws!!  

 

Latest arrivals on Newton Broadway are the three Motor Luggage Vans from Bachmann. They are in London & South East 'jaffa cake' livery, Post Office red livery and Network South East livery. The PO and NSE ones are actually the same van (68004) at slightly different times in its life, so the NSE one will be renumbered soon. At this point all are running on DC but I will be fitting decoders soon - I find the Lenz ones work particularly well with the Bachmann EMUs but if I don't have any of those, TCS EU621 decoders also work well.

With a view to the fact that I am hosting a BRMA meeting in August, I decided it was time to do a few improvements to the bridges and viaducts, as well as continuing work on the village roads and levels.

The viaducts at the end of the layout are only currently set up as 'dummies' to make them moderately presentable. They do not represent the final arrangement or appearance, either before or after this work as it stands. The whole lot is only lightly Blu-tacked into place and the lattice girders have no visible means of support (yet!).








The railway bridge at the other end of the station has also only had temporary girders and fittings previously and looked like it needed a central support structure as well. I have Blu-tacked some supporting girders into place to judge the effect and whether I think the girders look substantial enough. I do have some new Peco girder kits to use to replace the recycled ones that were previously there.






The village roads are being laid in card, with various infill pieces of expanded polystyrene being added or bits cut away so that things 'flow' more. It is tedious and time consuming, particularly waiting for glues to set before doing the next bit. At the time of the photos, I had one section still weighed down with locomotives and buses.







I will have to look at the car parking in the village: that AEC Merlin is going to have a tight squeeze getting past the parked mini and Austin Atlantic!

Just a few more pics continuing on from the previous post (and minus the locomotives in the road!)

This is much nearer what I had in mind for this bridge. There is still much to do but it's a start. The idea is to open up an area to be able to see the trains, while the arched viaduct section allows only glimpses as the trains pass. The inspiration comes from a rail over road bridge at Oxted, which combines a lattice section and brick arches, although its construction appears  little more complex than I am attempting - mine is intended to give the 'flavour' without taking me years to build!





The main deck is balsa wood, with Plastruct 'H' section girders, in turn supported by lattice girders made up from four of the Ratio Pratt Truss kits, intended for signal gantries.

Here are the results of my latest extravagance! New, simplified SECR livery 271 is towards the rear, while the previous issue with full lining 592 is on the nearer track. I really shouldn't have bought the second SECR one but I couldn't resist!








271 doesn't have all its fittings added yet, although I added a crew (probably slightly too modern). After running in on the rolling road on DC, it became smoother and the initial slight waddle from the front end reduced as it ran, so I fitted a Bachmann 36-557 decoder, which works OK but is a little 'chattery' - I didn't have any other 21-pin decoders in stock. I will change the decoder to something better later (I ordered some Lenz ones from Hattons).

I'm a little annoyed with myself, though, because I managed to knock the brake standard on the tender while I was fitting the decoder.

Some more work done this evening on the bridge supports and retaining walls. The brickwork is Vollmer embossed card which is actually intended for N scale, but I think looks right for OO.

There is much still to do, including some reinforcing around the bases of the walls and also at the joints between cards, probably using balsa wood. I can still lift the whole structure off the layout to get at the interior of the thing.

The Blu-Tack is holding things together while the PVA glue sets - wonderful stuff, Blu-Tack!! Once it is all dry and reasonably solid, I will repair and dress the corner joints and colour the card edges, before weathering it all down a bit.

And a couple more photos of the same thing, without the distrcting Blu-Tack blobs!

Here's another extravagance on my part, another for the showcase rather than the layout, although it runs as well as these Triang-Hornby types ever did. It is yet another Brush type 2 but this time in the electric blue livery white roof and lining. I always particularly liked this livery, fanciful as it was, and wish the real one had been so treated. As it was, D5578 was painted blue but with a blue roof and no lining … and unlike the earlier Triang model in blue, it also didn't sport the eggshell blue cab window surrounds either.





I actually paid a reasonable price from eBay, from a British trader. It was unboxed and I didn't really care whether it ran or not, plus the description made it sound in slightly worse condition than it is (which is good!), so it was a pleasant surprise to find it looked so good and ran perfectly (well, as perfectly as these motors ever did!).

Does anyone remember the 1970s when the "in" colour to slap onto everything that didn't move was Mission Brown (at least, here in Australia)? Well, I have just had flashbacks while slapping some Mission Brown paint onto Church Hill to tone down the stark whiteness in preparation for the BRMA meeting in less than two weeks from now. This is a stop-gap measure as the hill still needs some extra layers and shaping. The paint is an acrylic 'low sheen' finish but in the photos it is still quite wet.



​

As with the rest of the layout, there is still much to do before this area is really what I could call complete.

Like the shot through the bridge Jeff.

[user=31]sparky[/user] wrote:

Like the shot through the bridge Jeff.

so do I,you seem to making good progress Jeff,
:thumbs;-):cool:

Many thanks, guys.

The shot through the bridge does seem quite effective but is not normally viewable for humans, only cameras (or phone cameras) held at an awkward angle!!!

    

Some new additions to the rolling stock arrived a couple of days ago. I received the Hornby 1960s Brighton Belle centre coaches from Hattons and the motor coaches plus a BR blue 2 BIL unit from Rails.

The blue BIL has now entered service on my layout, with a Hattons decoder as per all my other BILs, and has been running as part of a six car formation (as a DCC advanced consist). Unit 2134 in green with the small yellow panels and first class yellow stripes added leads, with 2086 next (straight out of the box Hornby), with unit 2147 bringing up the rear. 2147 is the unit I renumbered from a second 2134, with full yellow ends and first class stripes added.






The new Belle, 3052, on my layout. I have yet to add headcodes and the roof boards. This one has been fitted with a Lenz Standard decoder. I'll have to do the same for my blue and grey 5 BEL unit, which currently has the factory-fitted Hornby decoder.




Also visible in the photos are 4 CEP unit 7126, class 25/3 D7368 on a transfer freight, and further back on the branch line, 2H unit 1115.

Ignore the wagons and LT panniers in the foreground on temporary tracks.

The new 5 BEL reminded me that I never got around to photographing the original blue and grey version I got last year.

Here it is, also posed for good measure with the new one in the second photo. I believe they did run with mixed liveries for a very short time, although the umber/cream units would all have had small yellow panels on their fronts by that time (1969). Since you can't see this in my photo, it looks perfectly reasonable as a formation of that time. Of course, what you cannot see in the photo is the fact that neither unit actually has any end couplings!!

Hi Jeff

For some reason (don't ask me why) the blue and grey livery just looks nicer

Ed

I always preferred the umber and cream for the Pullmans, myself.

The worst scheme of all was that applied to just a few Pullman coaches in the Golden Arrow; that was the reversed grey and blue scheme, which looked fine (to me) on more modern stock but was absolutely hideous and totally lacked sympathy for the old-style Pullman coaches. After that, at least BR applied some white lining and other sympathetic touches to the Belle and 'Arrer coaches.

Hi Jeff,
The layouts looking good.  Good progress there.
I think you should call in the Ghostbusters.  That Blu-tac is just the thing.  Very usefull stuff.
Mark

I set to work during school holidays to improve the roads in the village area. While there are a few lumps and bumps, edges to reinforce, and a rather sharp dip to sort out, plus improving a couple of the corners, I am rather pleased with the effect so far. So bear in mind there is still a bit more work to do (how many times have I used that line in this thread, now??) but it is still measurable progress too.














 The rough alignment for the level crossing is apparent in that second last photo.

A new arrival: I just couldn't resist and I knew I had to jump in quickly or potentially miss out altogether, so here is the freshly DCC'd Hornby NRM LSWR M7 0-4-4T. I did manage to knock one of the tank balance pipes off - these are just so delicate. I'll find a way to fix it later.

The other hassle was in fitting a suitable decoder. All of my other M7s have TCS DP2X-UK decoders but newer versions ae slightly larger and don't fit. I purchased a DCC Concepts Zen direct plug-in decoder but that was also too wide, so I had to wade through my spreadsheet list of all the decoders fitted to my stock to find another DP2X-UK decoder in a setting that could, perhaps, be changed to something else. I located one in my Hornby Schools, 924 St Lawrence. In dismantling that, further disasters manifested themselves in the handling: even though the decoder goes in the tender and that was easy to dismantle, I dislodged one of the cab rear handrails while separating the loco wires and plug from the tender. Then, after fitting a Lenz Standard+ decoder, reassembling the tender and gluing the handrail, the front bogie dropped off - the little plastic sleeve had detached itself from the spigot. That meant removing the chassis from the locomotive itself.

Anyway, eventually, both locomotives were able to be reprogrammed and tested. It is amazing how complicated it can become just trying to fit a suitable decoder in one locomotive!!






And an 'artistic' version of that second photo, where I have tried to age the photo a bit.