James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

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manna
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by manna »

G'Day Gents

Nice looking bridge. :D

manna
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James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

Thanks! It will be even better when I've got the abutments in.
williewhizz
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by williewhizz »

James, there certainly were several proposals looking to break the Midland monopoly to and through the Mansfield area in the 1890s and 1900s by various promoters that pre-dated the 'actual' Mansfield Railway, including from (what became) the GC itself, and your scenario is certainly as plausible as some of them!

Best of luck with this. I am, shall we say, an 'occasional' viewer of your very interesting thread, and it did inspire me last summer to modify an old Mainline ex-LMS carriage into a BR-era approximation of a GC one with panelled lower sides. Keep on keeping-on.
Reading_Steiner
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by Reading_Steiner »

Nice work, I really like your buildings, especially the train station itself!

But my favourite part is the fact that you've explained how you did that... Would you mind if I used your tricks for my projects? They're not necessarily train-related, but hey, model making is model making.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

williewhizz wrote: Thu Dec 06, 2018 6:18 pm James, there certainly were several proposals looking to break the Midland monopoly to and through the Mansfield area in the 1890s and 1900s by various promoters that pre-dated the 'actual' Mansfield Railway, including from (what became) the GC itself, and your scenario is certainly as plausible as some of them!

Best of luck with this. I am, shall we say, an 'occasional' viewer of your very interesting thread, and it did inspire me last summer to modify an old Mainline ex-LMS carriage into a BR-era approximation of a GC one with panelled lower sides. Keep on keeping-on.
Thank you! Those particular carriages are on my to-do list for further improvement eventually. Good, better, best, as I believe the poem goes.
Reading_Steiner wrote: Thu Dec 06, 2018 6:27 pm Nice work, I really like your buildings, especially the train station itself!

But my favourite part is the fact that you've explained how you did that... Would you mind if I used your tricks for my projects? They're not necessarily train-related, but hey, model making is model making.
Of course! Feel free to have a go.
Reading_Steiner
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by Reading_Steiner »

Okay, thanks a lot! I may get into railroad modelling next year, and if I do pick it up, I'll use your methods and post the result here!
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

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Two of the more tedious jobs ticked off; the flagstones to the platforms and the ballasting. Flagstones were cut from paper and laid individually; the ballasting was granite chippings fixed down with dilute PVA. I'll try, once it has dried out, to sort out the worst of the untidyness (thought it looks worse in the photos than in the flesh). I might have to go back over in some areas as the glue washed the ballast away and created small bald patches.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

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I've been working on some rolling stock.... specifically converting some more Dapol cattle wagon kits into something approaching the GCR large cattle wagon design. I now have five of these finished and a sixth about half done.

On the rolling stock front, once the sixth cattle wagon is finished I'll be building a GWR Python van (to run as part of a parcels train), a pair of GCR covered vans, and a run of five Gloucester 7-plank wagons representing some of the coal wagons the GCR hired.

Work on Cremorne for Pittance since the last update has been largely composed of building the cutting sides. Right now there's a thin plaster skim drying out on top of a sub-base of paper work lattice and papier-mache, in turn laid out over corrugated card formers. Once the plaster has dried out- later this afternoon- I'll be cutting down the side shuttering flush with the cutting top and then laying out more lattice work/ papier-mache to tie the top of the cutting and the sides of the diorama together, eventually to be topped off with another thin plaster skim and then cosmetic work can again proceed with the toe walls and grass scatter.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

Image

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That is my completed GCR cattle train. It is also the current state of play with Cremorne for Pittance- the intention for this weekend is to continue with the retaining and toe walls.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

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What has happened this morning (whilst glue, plaster, paint and so on is drying) is I found an old Railway Modeller article about constructing an engineers' train. Cogs began turning. Wagons were dug out. It will need a lot of work but I think I have something I can work with.

- Mess van. Hornby 4-wheel carriage, to be converted.
- Tool van. Ditto.
- Double bolster. Ratio kit to be rehabilitated.
- Pair of dropside ballast wagons. Ditto.
- Ballast hopper. Hornby wagon to be slightly altered.
- Ballast brake. Triang wagon to be converted.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

add some Modelling for the moment has had to become a purely weekend hobby, so my rate of progress has tailed off. However, I have been looking at some ballast dropsides which started life as Ratio kits and this is the result.... I had to add some (what would you call them?) bash protectors? to the lower sides, and represent the canvas lagging around the axle boxes (I used paper for this) but then it was a simple repainting job. I've got two of these.

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Yesterday I managed to finish the painting for the ballast dropsides, task for today will be to apply transfers and varnish preparatory to next weekend, weathering and loading.

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Then started looking at the toe walls. I had a long think about these and how to build them and what I wanted them to look like. I decided eventually to use 10mm balsa as a basis and, because this would already impinge somewhat onto the platform width, argue that the necessary bracing/ pilasters would be be built back into the cutting side rather than out onto the platforms. This made actually building them a little bit quicker and easier but I think in an ideal world I would have liked to model pilasters to add some interest to what is otherwise just a long boring wall.

Obviously there is an issue at the moment with a bit of a gap at the bottom, what I'm planning to do is to lay a little more ballast onto the platform surfaces and build up a shoulder to bed the walls down into.

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Overall it is starting to look encouragingly close to what I had in mind. The next step with these walls will be to paint and weather the brickwork, then bed them down into the ballast, then look at the copings.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

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Urgh. The light isn't great today. What I hope you can see though is that the ballast dropsides have had the transfers applied and then varnished. So so far as they are concerned now, the plan is to weather them and add a ballast load and then-they're done.

Whilst the toolbox was out it was a choice between packing all the tools away and bringing down my drawing equipment, or cracking on with something else. Like I say, the light wasn't great and the tools were already to hand, so the ballast hopper was brought down and started. This started life as a Hornby NE loco coal hopper wagon, so who knows what the prototype is... like the majority of my rolling stock this one is just a facsimile or charicature of proper GCR stock, it looks right at a glance but the details aren't quite right and- well if I were building a perfect model all I will say is I wouldn't start here to get there. Anyway.

First step was to separate the body and chassis, then remove the tiebars between the axle boxes and the tension lock couplings.

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Then move onto the bodywork. Firstly use a fibreglass pen to remove the NE and loco coal markings, then shave off the moulded handrails and the strapping to the ends of the hopper with a scalpel. Then use a file to remove a few lines of rivets. Then use the scalpel again to remove the moulding cheeks on the inside of the hoppers, down amongst the underframes where Hornby thought they wouldn't be seen.

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Then wash off the fibreglass dust and leave it to dry overnight.

Moving on to Cremorne for Pittance. I'd had some shredded cardboard soaking since last weekend, so most of the water was drained off and then the cardboard broken up further in my fingertips. Then some watered down PVA was mixed in with the remaining water and the whole lot well mixed, before it was balled up into little malleable chunks and plastered along the back edge of the tall retaining wall. The objective being to build up the ground level to the level of the retaining wall coping.

Imager

Something like that.

At this point, with the mulch used up, I still had a bit of water/PVA mix so I took some more shredded card and soaked it in the PVA for a few minutes and then laid it along the tops of the toe walls, to tie them back into the cutting sides.

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So that fingers crossed when I do reach the point of adding soil and grass, there won't be a gap where the cutting finishes before the wall starts.

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Finally extra ballast was laid on the platform surfaces and banked up around the base of the toe walls to seemingly bed the masonry down properly into the platforms.

Quite a bit squeezed into two hours work I think. Tomorrow- I can't do anything with CfP because it will still be wet, so I will start looking at drawing up Red Lion Square's station building.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

I've pretty much lost my weeknight modelling time as I started a new job; or so I thought. In actual fact this last week I have found that I can squeeze in about 20 minutes or so an evening, if I am lucky. So; about an hour and a half's worth of modelling, plus about 20 hours of Humbrol drying time, and I have a roughly half-finished GCR ballast hopper. The starting point was a Hornby NE loco coal hopper; it's not an exact match for a GCR ballast hopper but the differences are subtle enough for me to overlook. I'll just say that if I were going for a true-to-prototype model I wouldn't be starting from here.

Image

So my plans for my modelling time this weekend are to try to finish this hopper, build the last of the retaining walls for my photoplank, maybe get some soil colour down on the cutting sides, and carry on with the scale drawings for my main station building.
Paul_sterling
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by Paul_sterling »

Hi James,

That is an interesting way of building up the landscape. Can I ask, the card you've used, is it normal cardboard box/packing card, or serial box type?

Thanks, Paul.
James Harrison
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Re: James' workbench- ex-GC locos and stock in OO

Post by James Harrison »

It's a mixture of every type of card to be found in the house to be honest. The profiles that the landscape is built up from is corrugated card. On top of that I used normal foolscap paper which was cut into strips and woven together. On top of that I went back to card and this time I used whatever I could. Toilet and kitchen roll tubes mostly, I found that if you cut the tube down the diagonal joint you get a rhombus shape and then if you carefully delaminate the card you can get two or three rhomboids from the one tube. Delaminating the card makes it thin enough that when you wet it (I saturated mine in a bowl of water) it flattens back out. Then just lay it over the scenery and douse with diluted PVA. Delaminated corrugated card is good too- take the inner and outer layers off and then you can gently tug the corrugated bit back flattish, and all three bits are good to use, once saturated. I haven't tried the denser cardboard packaging yet- the cardboard envelopes that Amazon and the like send merchandise in- but I suspect that won't really be suitable for landscaping, except maybe as profiles. It strikes me as being probably difficult to delaminate and too thick to be easily malleable when wet.
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