Atlantic's works: Portable layout update

[Atlantic 3279]

I hope that I am now past the "fiddling around with unsatisfactory parts and home-grown corrections" to this kit.
My efforts on friday evening and yesterday sorted out some remaining niggles. After detaching the trial-fitted etched W-iron units I drilled out the pilot holes to take 2mm shouldered bearing cups, soldering these in place and giving the W-iron faces a tinning at the same time ready for later fixing of the cosmetic whitemetal outer axleguards. I then positioned the units back on the floor of the van, with end axles in situ so as to get the width correctly set, and firstly tack-soldered then fully soldered them in place once I was convinced that all was okay. I was by this stage convinced that the brake hangers and shoes were alarmigly and impractically fragile, so having straightened them all up I applied some reinforcement. This was in the form of six pieces of 0.45 mm brass wire, each bent to a staple shape, and soldered across the top of the rear face of each W with the "legs" of the staple soldered down the backs of the brake arms - but not all the way down to the shoe.
This made the brakes more robust but they were still not as strong as I felt they needed to be, nor were they in line with the wheels, but I had another job to do before access became restricted.
The middle wheelset was then fitted. I made this "fully floating" to suit curved track and to avoid any see-sawing of the van on undulating track. It might have been sufficient to simply have oversize axle holes or vertically elongated ones for the middle wheelset, leaving the un-loaded wheels to trundle aimlessly along, but I would have been most annoyed had I then had derailments of the middle wheelset or visibly non-rotation of the spoked wheels at times! I threfore put the middle wheels on a short axle to suit inside bearings, and suspended it in the looped ends of a couple of lengths of nickel silver wire, soldered to the van floor and adjusted to give a light sprung load on the wheels.
I then went back to the brakes, bending the reinforced arms inwards, bending the shoes back to the vertical, and soldering in some more 0.45 mm cross wires to both lock the shoes in adjustent and to suggest the existence of brake yokes.
Before at last being able to jubilantly fit the whitemetal axleguards to make the thing start to look like a railway vehicle, I soldered on the four upper steboards while access from below was still good. Positioning these "perfectly" almost on outer edge of the undersides of the solebars and holding them in place with self-grip tweasers while reaching for the soldering tackle was tricky, but gave a satisfyingly neat result.
Four of the cast axleguards (of course) had axle holes almost filled by excess whitemetal, and the two that had holes didn't have them big enough, so all had to be drilled out to go over the bearing cups, then AT LONG LAST I was able to attach them with lowmelt, aligning them as best I could with the non matching etched Ws....
Pictures follow in next post:

[Atlantic 3279]

At least the overlying stepboards and the black paint on the finished item should hide the mismatch between the inner and outer Ws.

[Atlantic 3279]

My hopes that I was done with fiddling around were slightly premature, as I realised shortly afterwards that I hadn't fitted the tie-rods between the bases of the W-irons. I really don't see why they were not etched in as part of the main W-iron unit anyway, and if not, why they were provided as two separate pieces per side instead of one long strip that would be easy to get convincingly straight. I had to solder these on behind the W-iron lower corners, keeping them in place with an aluminium hairgrip, avoiding melting or disturbing the axlebox casting on the outside of the W-iron, and trying not to contaminate my freshly applied 145 deg solder with lowmelt sneeking round from the other side.
That achieved, I also got all of the body strapping and other ovelays on, pre-tinning these before removal from the fret. No tears involved in that process really, just a lot of car to get positions just so with no movement during soldering.......
Still to fit handrails, lamp irons, lower stepboards, vac pipes and (when I get some) the right buffers, plus of course the roof. Definitely on the home-straight now.

[Atlantic 3279]

And three steps to make and fit to the end that has the grab rails for roof access - no such steps provided in the kit. I may manage to post a progress photo later today.

[Atlantic 3279]

With underframe tie bars, body detail overlays (including kerb rails, which were not difficult, and end lamp doors) plus a temporary card roof fitted for sake of appearance. Holes also drilled out ready for handrails and couplings - some of the etched holes weren't big enough, some had been blocked by solder or inner layers of brass, others were not in quite the right place according to my judgement. There is still some solder to clean off or smooth out.

Even if the images of these vans in "old Tatlow" do not show any suggestion of rainstrips actually ON the roof, I think there is a definite suggestion of gutters/rainstrips on the EDGES of the roofs. I'd be interested to know whether others agree/disagree.

Also, I now notice that Steve Banks' text form his RM construction article refers to the items on the roof adjacent to the chimney as "residual lamp fittings". I was working on the possibility that there was a square-ish hatch, panel or maybe even a skylight next to the chimney, then a round or rounded flat ventilator. Should I instead be thinking in terms of a means of introducing and ventilating an oil lamp?

[2512silverfox]

I am fairly certain that there would have been a roof mounted oil lamp on these vans since the usual internal lighting via the inward light from the fixed riding or side lamps was not in evidence here. The GC used a swiveling lamp on the veranda which rotated outwards when in use and would not have shown light inside. I think Talow (the original) shows this.

[Atlantic 3279]

A logical reason and explanation, thank you. Dare I ask whether, when you prepared your drawing in 1967, you had any more information regarding the appearance of the roof fittings than is provided by the side and end elevations reproduced in old Tatlow? I've been scouring books for photographs, with little return for the effort so far. David Jackson's "J. G Robinson, a Lifetime's Work" contains a picture (page 117, from the NRM collection) of the works yard at Dukinfield. I suspect it might just contain a sufficient view of the roof fittings were it a proper large photographic print from the original plate negative, but the small "dotty" book print is hopeless for the purpose. I wonder if a better version of the same image, or something else suitable, appears elsewhere, or whether an approach to the NRM is the only alternative to inspired guesswork on the model?

[Atlantic 3279]

For anybody still in doubt, it is now official, I AM mad! I spent ages yesterday fixing the final fiddly/flimsy details onto the GC brake van. Buffers are still required, and (I hope) better details for the roof including a grab rail at the "steps" end of the van plus a better chimney than the supplied w/m casting which appears in these pictures. Liquid flux and 145deg solder were not much help for securing handrails internally in awkward places, the flux sizzling into oblivion before the iron had heated the job and transferred any solder to the rear stub of the handrail. Paste/grease flux stayed where it was wanted and made life so much easier! The provided lamp irons actually folded up into fairly good representations of the two types fitted to these vans, once I had sorted out which ones were which, but positioning those just-so and keeping them still whilst soldering them on was awkward, with no "break off later" waste portion provided as a handle. I had a brief go at representing the swing-out brackets for the riding lamps but came to my senses for one of those rare moments and abandoned the struggle. Some riding lamps stuck on after painting, with "implied" brackets will do. The small upper stepboards should, I think, in reality be carried on the same spindly brackets as the lowers, but for strength I had soldered them directly to the base of the solebars, and was then able to inconspicuously solder the brackets for the lowers (with tops turned outwards) to the underside of the upper boards. The lower boards themselves are also soldered to the faces of the axleboxes to add a bit more robustness. Adding the end body steps was reasonably easy, bending up pieces of waste brass strip, soldering in situ with plenty of waste length attached as a handle, then cropping off to length when satisfied with position. Although less detailed than whitemetal castings, wire-wound brass vac pipes seemed the best bet given the need to bend them up into the exotic S shapes and still have something neat and robust at the end of the excercise.

[Atlantic 3279]

Other views:

[Atlantic 3279]

I managed to do most of the upgrade work on the first of my Hornby NE F10 fridge vans yesterday, pictures will follow, as will the work on the H & B van in due course. I'm still waiting for better buffers for the GC brake, having failed to find these in stock at the Doncaster show, where I did nonetheless get the rest of the wagon fittings that I expect to need. I also forced open the huge lock on my wallet and paid up for a copy of "super Tatlow", volume 1. Having briefly looked through it first, it had struck me just how much invaluable information, presumably gleaned from a lifetime's research it contained, and in that context the not inconsiderable price seemed well justified.
As I discovered on this forum a few months ago that one or two of us appear to now consider that any critical comment about others' modelling efforts or show organisation is morally illegal, I'd better be careful about what I say regarding Doncaster show. On the positive side I thought the show was spacious, varied, and well provided with LNER/Eastern Region layouts. On the other hand, I couldn't help at least "noticing" that in most cases the Eastern layout owners were surprisingly willing to put their nice layouts on public display with out-of-scale Bachmann Toad D / Toad E brake vans evident, moulded handrails and all. Even the big famous layout had these, along with lovingly improved Bachmann A4 models still with huge gaps between loco and tender, similarly improved old Hornby A3s with no attention given to reducing the overly tall top of the old tender-drive tender body, and more than a few other departures from best practice for the keen eyed observer to spot.
The layouts still make an impressive sight of course, but with a little more attention to detail could be even better. Am I simply becoming too observant and too critical I wonder?

[Atlantic 3279]

GC brake van roof, some details now added, but not the greatest photo. Also a means of keeping the correct even curvature of the roof without reliance soleley on the plastic-to-metal glue bond at the eaves: I added a loose ceiling to the van body, with some ledges on its lower edges to keep it rigidly in place, then filed its top edges down to a taper to match the roof line set by the van inner and outer ends. It was then simply a matter of solvent-bonding the plastic roof to the plastic ceiling and keeping it pressed down evenly until the bond firmed-up.

[Atlantic 3279]

North Eastern F10 fridge vans:

I mentioned previously the problem of excess height of the Hornby 1986/87 NE ventilated refrigerator van compared to the actual diagram F10, and I had looked at the apparent ease with which new axle holes could be drilled to lower the ride. Well, erm....it's just as well that I didn't dive straight in at that stage, as on subsequently measuring up the "scale" drawing in Tatlow vol2 and comparing with stated dimensions, I discovered that it was printed to scale horizontally but was about a millimetre short vertically. On re-comparing fanatically with the Hornby model I decided that the height to solebar was just about right, the height of the body sides was also about right, and that the main source of any remaining error was the thick roof moulding. These vans were quite tall for their era anyway, taller than standard goods, fish, fruit vans etc in order to accommodate the insulation AND a decent load space, so I could have used this as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the excessive height, but I decided to try to tackle the problem. See below.

[Atlantic 3279]

A new thin plastikard or brass roof would be one answer to the problem, and will be the best method if and when I turn one of this vans into a 1930s "downgraded to fish traffic" version without ice hatches. The moulded roof however has some very nice detail on the ice hatches themselves, the retaining chains for the lids when removed for filling, and the brackets for the end grab-rails. I've managed to save these nice features. This involved careful and laborious use of a file on the straight edges of the roof, and a scraper on the curved ends, to thin down the underside of the moulding, and then some attention to the tops of the van sides/ends to make the roof fit more snugly. The top edges of the ends were particularly bad, sloping up from the outside face toward the inner one, instead of being square cut. I went round all the top edges with a file to make them slope downwards slightly toward the interior of the van, so that the roof when refitted sits down tight on the outermost parts of the van faces. As a result the roof top is now about a millimetre lower than it was, and the visible roof edges (especially the ends) look a bit better:

[Atlantic 3279]

As you can see, I have also cleaned off the moulded grab rails, leaving the bracket detail intact, and have drilled the brackets to accept brass wire. Additionally, the chunky couplings have been chopped off and Smith's sprung hooks fitted instead, along with new full length NE pattern fitted-stock 4 bolt buffers by 51L. The timber solebars and headstocks have been painted white, after removal of the wrongly placed NE builder's plate and some excess bolt-heads. The body has been stripped back to white in "superstrip" which took off the erroneous lettering as well as my weathering (mucky varnish). I left the roof mucky fearing photo-white-out if I cleaned it. So far, I'm planning to leave alone the moulded plastic ladders, and wrongly raised panels of louvres on the ends.

[Atlantic 3279]

The rest of the work is best seen with the van turned over. I've fitted new metal spoked wheels, a main brass wire cross-shaft for the braking system, a plastic lever linking this to the vacuum (?) cylinder, and a basic wire suggestion of the yokes for the brake arms/shoes. I've also done some trimming and carving around the handbrake levers, opening up more daylight behind them, and on the side where there should be no reversing cam I have removed a strange feature that Hornby moulded near the bottom of the V hanger face - almost an upside down reversing cam arrngement and clearly pure nonsense! You may be able to see in this view that I had to cut a long slot in the inner underframe moulding behind the headstock to accommodate the rear of each Smith's sprung coupling hook.
It is hard to see in ANY of my photos, but I have also altered the bottoms of the W-iron and axlebox mouldings, removing the unrealistic tab that projected down from the base of the axlebox and the ridiculous "outward-projecting square loop" that formed a slot for this tab at the base of the W. The moulded keeper strip from that loop is now stuck back on where it should be, in the same plane as the rest of the W-iron.
I still have to add vac pipes, air pipes if still fitted in the late thirties, maybe steam heat through pipes, and screw couplings.

It took a fair old while to plan and do this work on this first van, but I hope that dealing with two others will be rather easier and quicker now that I know what to do, and what NOT to do.