The 3-6 ZA Wagon

 DB says:

As soon as Mr Holden's 3-foot-6 Emporium listed the ZA wagon a year ago, I snapped up a pair, but they have sat in my pile of yet-to-be-started projects on the bench since.

These are perhaps the best 3D prints I have received. 

I'm usually a fettler and adjuster when it comes to procured items, but for this I basically applied some paint and stuck some bogies under it. 

Two sections of the below-the-belt trusses were a bit wobbly, so they got replaced. There was also some bowing of the sides in places, so on this, I've tried simply gluing a plate across the bottom to see if that holds things together, clamped while setting. I also buzzed off the underends to give space for the couplers attached to the Microtrains bogies.

Nicely proportioned, this, and some great detail in the roof and side ribs. 

I added the little white door handles (six per side) to add a little spice, and the yellow plate for the numbers. Note the quite accurate (to my eye) variations in the roof and door ribs, door detail, and detail below the bottom door rails too. There is a little strata visible under the scanning electron microscope, but its not noticeable from normal viewing distances.

Few dramas here. It will probably need a little weight, and a some weathering will come.

If you were ever wanting to get a 3d print, this should be it, firstly the detail is great, secondly these wagons were all over the place from the mid 70s until the early 2000s, and lastly, these are almost impossible to make convincingly yourself!

Little Coal Wagons - LCs 2

 DB continues from last time:

After painting the 10 new LCs brown, all manner of weathering was applied with various colours and shades of washes.  The intent being to make the 10 wagons look 'uniform but all different'. Some a little redder, a few a little yellower, a few a little greyer, a few a little blacker and so on. A few patches of fresh repair paint here and there, a few blobs of rust, and so on. Where the effects were a bit strong, I went back and mellowed it a little. I may do more of that, and will dullcote the whole lot to take any remaining sheen off.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that these Trackgang LC side and end castings are just superb. Fine, crisp detail without any casting flaws and no noticeable flash. Whoever made these masters deserves some quiet applause. Next time I'll get Russell to assemble them for me  :)

As a finishing touch, black patches for 'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' stencilling were added above the yellow number patches on the new LC wagons, most of my other 'nice' LCs (a few can remain in a general goods train or join the coal train if needed) and all my 'less-nice' old scungy castings. Those ugly old fellas are a bit sub-par, but smuggling a few of them into a long train to make up numbers might not be noticed. And they're a bit of NZ120 history! 

Annoyingly, I went through a few photo books after painting the black squares, and found that those  'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' patches are probably a bit 'late 80s' for my liking, and not all the wagons on the trains had them anyway! D'oh.  So I painted over the patches on two of the new wagons and some of the old ones with body colour brown. 

As I don't have the ability to print white on my Alps printer at the moment, I made up a simple spreadsheet like so and printed it on white decal paper with a laser printer: 

This came out better than expected, and once I had my production line process sorted, it was quite therapeutic to add these decals to about 20 wagons. If there was any white showing at the cut edges of the decals it was touched up with black paint later on.

Then a set of wagon numbers was made up for the new wagons (and a ton of my old wagons) and printed on clear decal sheet. Most of these are actually real TMS numbers, but some were made up - its not as if I can read them unaided anyway!

To clarify, I can read, I just can't see.

And as an aside, here is a comparison of various sample LC models I have, starting with three embarassing survivors of the old bog casting factory from about 1992. For some reason I've hung onto about 15 of these well-travelled models. The masters were made with plastic sides and stripwood for the bodyside ribs, as this was before Plastruct rods were freely available. The four (very subtle, barely visible) 'bumps' on the sides (for internal rope lashing on the prototypes) were blobs of PVA! I made two masters as the first RTV mould broke up after a while, and the second one had integral little rectangular knobs underneath to hold the Peco couplers down. Note the bottom model in the pic is on a stretched 10-foot Peco chassis, the middle one on a Fleishman chassis with unusual metal wheels, and the top one on the usual 15-foot Peco. The Flashfix bondo bog stuff was often hard to get into the nooks and crannies of the rubber moulds and bits have broken off in the subsequent 30 years. Rather than being a 'proper' two piece mould, I remember forcing triangular pieces of rubber down into the top of the poured Flashfix to 'remove' material from inside the walls where I wanted the coal to be. Fortunately, the bog was easy to carve as it went off, so one could further thin the walls and open up that space for the coal. As usual, the two foot rule (perhaps even extended to "nobody should look at these from less than a four foot radius), will be vigorously enforced...

Next up below are two similar but different models, and I'm not sure where they came from. Note that the lower one doesn't have the lashing bumps, and its a very crisp casting. They might have been purchased from Rod Murgatroyd, or Rhys, or was it Cross Creek that made a few tops? The one that I've added a ridgepole to is modelled as an LB, with spoked wheels stolen from a 10-foot Peco chassis. Technically its the only one that can legally have the round Peco axlebox, although some LCs received roller bearings in their later years.  The door detail is nicely done on this, but the oversized lumps on the sides are a bit hard to decal and paint around. Maybe I even made these myself. I must go back through the blog as a memory stirrer.

And then three-foot-six 3D prints, some of the details being more chunky in nature, but being one piece, they certainly go together easily! The top one has a strata line, and the lower one I've (incorrectly!) modified the upper doors. I must check these, but I think I removed some underframe/sill material to have the tops sit lower on the Peco chassis. 

And lastly six of the ten "new" Trackgang bodies on Peco chassis that this series of postings is about. Nice fine crisp detail. 

Next we will give them a shot of Dulcote, add a few little details and, plop some coal in.

Little coal wagons - LCs

 DB says:

Back in the Otaki to Cass era, Rhys and I had a really cool four wheeled coal train of about 35 LCs. These were all cast jobs, with mine being a little rough to say the least, being my first foray into casting with automotive bog and homemade masters and RTV moulds.  I still have about 15 of these somewhat embarrassing specimens that are almost 35 years old now. Of course, back then, the CB hoppers were only a few years old, so the long trains of little four wheelers were still fresh in the mind and pretty groovy. And they still are.

Some months ago, I noticed that Russell Trackgang had some LC tops available, so I bought 10 for a very reasonable price. These have sat in my pile of unstarted projects for many months, but in early October we had a big rainstorm that necessitated a round-the-clock flood watch in the basement,  so I decided to knock these together.  While I'd always planned to just have a few highsiders to put into an 80s goods train, the idea of a west coast coal train raised its head. 

With my poor history of assembling whitemetal models, I decided to be clever this time by sticking a side and an end together with 'superglue gel' around a 90 degree wooden end, then I'd simply link these pairs up. Pretty soon I had all twenty corners assembled with minimal fuss. Unfortunately only about two were actually at 90 degrees, so when I stuck them together, 90% of the them were wonky. Many were broken apart and reset, many ended up as four sides on the floor or stuck to fingers. I eventually got them together.

Then I found upon returning to the project that most of these had badly meeting corners, or were rhomboid in shape, or didn't have parallel walls, or did not sit flat, so I was only able to put a floor and chassis into one of the 10!

The others got broken apart, cleaned of glue, and a new strategy attempted, whereby I cut a set of plastic floors to size, then glued a side to this it at 90 degrees, then an end (usually finding my side wasn't at 90 degrees when finding the end would go on crooked) but I eventually managed to encircle the floors with sides and ends. This took about two months of periodic effort, with pauses to replenish my swear words reservoir and unstick fingers, walls, and regain mental composure after 'completed' tops would collapse in a pile of superglue while tweaking them.

Eventually all 10 were assembled and reinforced with contact glue (woohoo!) , and Peco underframes were prepared. You'll note that the floors are relatively high up - after looking at a few prototype pics and a plan, I think its a flaw of most of my previous models that the wagon tops don't sit low enough on the chassis.

One wagon was prepared to go next to the locos by having a Microtrains coupler:

Time for some primer:

And some paint. After a visit to the local bike shop to see what they had in stock I settled on the reddish-brown Tamiya XF-9 Hull Red as the base colour. 

Studholme 11 - more trackwork

 DB says:

'The schedule' allowed a few hours back on the Studholme modules today. 

It has now been more than a year since I started this, further cementing the blog's status as holder of the Guinness record for longest-average-elapsed-time module builds (thanks also to Paekakariki and Waihao Forks). Clearly long gone are those youthful days of blitzkrieging up a module in a week.

Its been a warm 10 days down here on The Mainland, and a kink revealed itself upon my arrival. Half a mm of rail was taken out of that track and the thing reconnected. All the other tracks seem fine, as a little space was allowed for this in the rail joints.

Some manual point controls have been added to the points on the Waimate Branch (backdrop) side of the layout. 

The three 'mainline' points at either end of the module set will be the most used, so are being made DCC friendly (whatever that means) and each is controlled by a slide switch discretely mounted at the side of the layout, via piano wire.

The four other points on the branch side are 'as-is' Peco points, controlled by more of this chunky piano wire and covered with some oversized tubing in a most agricultural fashion. speaking of agricultural, I see the code 55 Waimate Junction Y here still has some code 80 tails soldered onto it from its last use! They remain in place as the only code 80 on the modules!!

The three points on the other side (east side with access to the goods shed and fruit siding) are as-is with no remote control at this stage. I doubt they'll be used much, but if they are, I suppose I could work them with some actuating wire under the module.

So track has today been fixed down right up to the three south end mainline points, which I still need to make DCC-friendly. The coal/seed siding was also spaced further out as it looked a little close to the others. Darryl P suggested extending the coal/seed siding to serve stockyards there, which might be feasible. I certainly want to have the Studholme Hotel modelled as a flat, and the stockyards should/could be to the south of this, and a good way of fitting something small into the thin gap between the branch's curved point and the backdrop. We shall see.

The 2010s-era 17-wagon coal train was laid out on the loop to check sizing. As predicted, the loop is about 10cm short, so I'll have to drop a wagon if I want the train completely ensconced, although a train this length would be fine in reality, as it's in and clear clear of the mainline for crossings, and an oncoming shorter train can safely run into the siding (closer to the camera in the pic above), although some shuffling of the coalie for-and-aft might be required to let the shorter train out. In hindsight I should have positioned the mainline points out closer to the ends of the module set, but its a bit hard to move them now.

Studholme 10 - Cutting the cords.

DB follows on after a pause - this post has been in draft form, occasionally appended to, for the past six weeks. 

The Studholme module build has been a bit drawn out and higglety pigglety with all manner of things occurring out of the ideal sequence. Here is an attempt to get things back into a more sensible order of operations.  

Its always a good idea to paint the trackbed/scenery so if any ballast falls off there won't be white primer showing through from underneath, so this was done, as was filling in the remaining holes in the baseboard framing with foamboard. 

After these pictures, the track centrelines, obliterated by that recent application of grey paint, were redrawn.  

So finally things are at the state they should have been before any track was laid many months ago! Now feels like a good time to put down more track and start soldering it down across the PCB joins. 

As the old bomb disposal line goes: "Cut the green wire...." Snip. "But first, cut the red wire." A clever tip I picked up from somewhere was to loosen the module joining nuts a little, then place a very thin sliver of cardboard or plastic between the modules and loosely tighten everything up before the track is soldered down and cut. Then after cutting, remove the card and tighten things up to remove the Dremel-cutting-wheel-sized gap between the rail ends left from making the track cut. 

Its also quite hard to cut the track vertical because the Dremel's fat motor body is a much larger diameter than the cutting wheel. You are often left with a V shaped cut. 

Fortunately, the second-hand Dremel that I have (its a Fuller one actually) came with one of those flexi shaft extenders which has a thin endpiece you hold onto, so this makes it a little easier. 

Other approaches: 

I suppose a jeweller's saw could be used if you had the track up on a decent embankment or a really thin wooden module end.

You could also simply butt cut sections of track together and stick them down, but I figured with my module mounting pins providing a reliable location during module mating (ooo, err), tracks that are soldered across the join before cutting should all line up perfectly every time. 

As an aside, a few subtle changes and liberties have been taken with the Studholme track plan for 'model operational' reasons.

The real place had, to the east side (to the 'right' of the picture below), a main, loop, goods loop/shed road, and a loop around that goods shed that I remember being used for fresh fruit. The Froot Loop as American cereal makers might say.

On the model, I've decided to move the goods shed 'east' one track, so that gives me a main, loop, another loop, and then the goods shed. That means I'll be able to practically have four decent sized trains crossing here (including the west 'island loop')without having to run through the goods shed (which was previously, per prototype, on the long eastern goods loop) or loop around the fruit track.  I've left one stub siding in to represent that fruit track, so a Z could be parked there. I doubt that this or the goods shed little loop would ever be used much in operations, but they do have reasonable large radius points for looks.

I made some subtle changes to my plans for the west (left) side too, with a siding that will have the wagon turntable into a seed store, and the coal merchant. This leaves a runaround loop beside the island platform for Waimate branch operations. I've also included electrical breaks so the 'Waimate branch' can be run using the DCC controllers being used for the rest of the layout, or by a separate (perhaps DC) controller. The track on the west side has two switchable and isolatable 'blocks' ... so... 

• the island loop can be used by the main DCC feed for mainline crossings, while a branchline train comes into the runaround loop. 
• or the whole island loop (right down to the far end) can be used for a Waimate branch train to come in, run around and shunt (including accessing the near end of the island loop)
• or a mainline DCC goods could drop off wagons into the far tail of the island line for the Branch loco to pick up.
• or the whole thing could be run by the DCC controller so that a mainline train could shunt the coal/seed siding.

I did consider having another point off the waimate branch to serve the stock yards, but decided against putting another point there. There's not much room, but perhaps a few fake rails might be laid in the grass there and a sheep wagon plopped on them.

Seen from the other (north) end:

So there we have it. Some progress at last. 

Next, some more work on the points (three mainline points still need to be attached at the south end, plus the Waimate branch Y and curved point), some wiring, and after that (finally) the fun can start.

Christchurch Big Train Show visit

DB is barely holding the fort while Dandruff-San visits the far east.

The Christchurch Big Train Show was last weekend. There were plenty of layouts, stalls and chat to be had, so myself and a fellow modeller from Oamaru ended up staying four hours and we both had our wallets lightened by the cunning salespeople and their shiny trinklets.  

And wow! There was some unexpected (unexpected by me!) NZ120 presence there, with Ian Perry, who lives near Kaikoura, showing his model of scenes that are, unsurprisingly, from near Kaikoura. 

Rolling stock was from Trackgang, and all airbrushed - some of the most 'professional' looking finishes I've seen in NZ120. This all ran perfectly (even with multiple tracks across angled module joins) and looked great, with the scenes and bridges being great representations of either actual scenes, or of the general feel of the place. 

Ian and his wife spent a lot of time traveling around NZ in their caravan, and most of this was built during their journeys!

He had a Faller car or two running around as well to add to the interest. 

'Kaikoura' looked great,  ran flawlessly, and was the well-deserved winner of 'layout of the show'. The recabbed DGs didn't hurt either, although there was a TMS red DF there as well...

Regular S scale attendee 'One Track Minds' were there with some lovely models, although some of my favourite modules from last year were not in the layout this time.  This simple one below has nice undulation and shows that a module doesn't need to be in any way complex to be very effective.

Many of the locos on this layout had some superb sounds. The sounds for the DGs were recorded by Peter Ross when the DTG's DG 772 was undergoing load bank testing. A video may appear below if Blogger will publish it:

There were plenty of other US and European layouts and trains in S, HO, N, 009, Z and G, but I didn't end up taking many more pics.

Something that did catch my eye on local purveyor Ironhorse Hobbies' table were these 'ready to run' modules intended to jump start some local OO/HO modular efforts.  There are no legs for these yet, so you'd have to make your own.

I might be tempted to pick one or two up (sans HO track, and locating magnets in the ends) to try out as an add on to Studholme.  Especially as they are considering offering various lengths (these are 300mm x 560mm), and 'curved' and 'drop' versions so you could model a river or undulating scenery if you get bored with  modeling the Canterbury Plains in flat rectangles of land.

In a similar vein, the NZ Model Railway guild just reviewed some laser cut modules from Hamilton-based Craftmaster. Theose may be lighter (being made of thinner plywood) and fancier but I'm rarely passing Hamilton, and I expect postage might be painful. Review of Craftmaster modules

For those of us who are challenged by being located in the Mainland Island may find it easier to arrange (info@ironhorsehobbies.co.nz) to pick one of these "IHH-Trak" modules up from Ironhorse ones if they were passing Christchurch. I'm going to drop ironhorse an email to see what the go is.

An update of sorts

Theres been a bit of radio silence from La Casa Dandruff over the last couple of months. I was made redundant at the end of July (becase the Pharamaceutical industry doesn't need research scientists according to the ICE bean counters). 

Now theres a few of you that might point out that this seems to be a dream come true. I'm finding its not. a couple of hours a night modeling relaxing from a stressful job is quite nice. When theres no job, no stress and infinite time, one tends to drift somewhat. I'm still in the 5 stages of grief, but they all seem to be piling in at the same time. Plus theres a current dearth of scince jobs in this country, and I'm down to single figures for retirement which never bodes well. I got asked at a support appointment "so what do you see as your dream job". My reply was "I've just been fired from it." I suppose I could try Bunnings given I already know exactly where everything is located in their stores. A plus is that the lady of the house is currently enjoying having a "Homme d'Maison"

So tomorrow the lady of the house and I are off to Japan for 3 weeks (planned in March and a break for both of us will be nice). I hope to come back somewhat healed and releaxed as its time to find a new career.

Studholme 9 - tracking it down

 DB says:

Studholme took a pause while life got in the way again, and also because of yet another mental block: how should one affix the track at the ends? My initial intention (and implementation) was to glue it down with contact glue, and the ballast glue would further lock things in place - as it seems unlikely that this will be dismantled or set up that often. 

Or would it? There would be nothing worse than showing up at an exhibition to find the track had been banged up. 

So I thought for a few weeks about soldering each rail to a brass screw and eventually decided to use the old PCB method, even though its a bit ugly. I still have one little rectangle of PCB left over from Otaki (!), but fortunately Jaycar still sells this stuff.

So let the next round of trials and tribulations commence. The first challenge is to cut the big square of PCB into more useful strips of the stuff. I vaguely remember scoring this in the past with a Stanley knife (a million times) and then snapping it off. I think Rhys said this stuff isn't great to power-saw because of the dust.

With the help of a few C clamps and some bits of wood I was able to snap off a few sections about 1 cm wide. A few some strips were then prepared for the first module join to be tackled, and the plastic flextrack sleepers cut away. This was challenging as I'd already glued the track down on this module end, and its always more fun on code 80 Peco track due to the way the lower half of the rail it set into the plastic sleepers. In addition, the PCB is slightly thicker than it should be, but I'm not going to let that bother me. In fact I liked the little undulations as the trains moved through Otaki.

I held the strips up to the track layout and marked the length and where I'd drill and countersink screw holes to fix them to the modules, and cut shallow insulation gaps through the copper with a razor saw.

And then screwed them down...

The near ones were subsequently removed and the holes countersunk a little deeper to hide the screw heads more. I hope ballast will cover the rest - I'm sure I did a worse job on Otaki.  Note the cardboard slivers between the modules in the above pic, we'll come back to them in the next issue.

This post was supposed to end with the joins all soldered up complete and cut, but this has been weeks in the making already, so I'll leave the soldering for now and get this posted. 

The final thing I did today though was to fill all the screw holes and paint the fascia. I went down to Mitre 10 looking for the Resene 'Bokara grey' recommended in the NZ120 Fremo specs and found two test pots, but that's $12 for 120 mls of paint. That won't last long. I then remembered we had some Friars Grey left over from roofing jobs. When I got home I also found we had some non-roofing interior paint in a similar shade so decided to use that instead. Its obviously a slightly different shade to Bokara, but I decided to waste that $12 on coffee and a scone tomorrow instead.

Will give it a second coat tomorrow. 

Turning CBs into coal wagons

DB says:

So excited was I at the rapid progress made in coaling up the CWs that a return visit was made to the dungeon to do the same with the CBs. 

All the CBs had thin card false floors fitted a dozen years or more ago, which were of various degrees of coal-tightness, but the gaps were easily plugged with dollops of PVA. One had been topped with an experimental application of builders expanding insulation foam, but that was a bit of a disaster as it takes some practice to tell how much - or more correctly, how little - needs to be added as it keeps growing for some time after you squirt it into place. This was largely cut away with minimal damage to the wagon.

Those cross braces between the hungry boards were an inspired decision many years ago, as they look pretty neat with coal across them.

While on a roll, I painted the CE, CW and CB Microtrains copper-coloured brakehoses, touched up any chips and scratches accumulated in the last decade, greyed up the CW bogies to match the other wagons, put an additional bit of panel wash weathering onto the CWs and considered a few other improvements. 

So that's 17 wagons for a decent coal train from 2005-2013, which covers the Tranz Rail blue through black, through Toll through KiwiRail period - dated from when the CWs got hungry boards until their demise. I think the red non-chuted DXs were probably gone off the coal trains by 2005 unless in use as an uphill leader through the tunnel as non chuted leaders on the eastbounds were still allowed then? A few more CEs and CBs instead of the CWs and the train would work up to the present time. 

Turning CWs into coal wagons

 DB says:

Ah returning from the madness, I decide to give myself a day off. And as I haven't done any modeling for a while I decided to treat myself to a visit to the dungeon and tackle a quick and easy win if I could find one on the to-do pile.

Since I'd had some fun with CE coal hopper recently, I thought I might put some coal in my CWs, which are stil unfinished 15 years later...

Out they came. These are fairly light, but are weighted at the bottom, and as they are multi-piece castings, they have a nice smooth rectangular hole inside that would suit the false coal-floor which I'd never gotten around to doing..

A few strips of styrene were cut and contact glued inside.

Then 6 false floors were cut to approx the right size and fettled as necessary. Only one of these wagons has any bowing in the sides which is pretty good after all this time. Coal was then sprinkled on and stuck in place (the same overchunky Peco stuff used in the CEs as I haven't gotten around to crushing any of it up into a finer grade). 

Not bad for an hour's work. One of these days they'll get some better numbers and their Microtrains orange brake hoses painted black. I think the bowed one is bottom-left in the pic above, but accentuated by the phone's wide angle lens.

By the way, I still have a bunch of spare CW parts (15 sides and 13 ends) that I'm unlikely to ever use, so if anyone wanted to donate a tenner for postage you could make up six or seven of these unfine wagons for yourself.