On with the show

 This past weekend I was agaian at Railex in Palmy. A great show with ideal weather (drizzly) and it was busy both days. Oddly, Cabbages flying circus was split up between the halls and it was me and Michael Gee in the usual spot. I only took 2 pictures and they were of the Scale rails Fremo setup. 20 metres between return loops.

 The module closest to the camera I would single out as the overhead trackage is something I have not seen anywhere else in the country (though I don't get out much).

On the work bench this show was the Johnson A. After a look at the bits I had I got stuck into the soldering. Mr G showed plenty of interest as he has not done much work in brass. I didn't take any work-in-progress shots but can report I did not swear once during the weekend (in front of a child anyway) even when provoked by trying to get the funnel in the right place for the 7th time.

Current progress. It looks like the real thing at least.

The tender looks a bit big but is close according to photos. I also discovered during the weekend that when soldering brass on a small scale like this a paper cup 1/2 full of water is very handy in that you can pitch the whole thing into it when things get a bit toasty. It also amuses the punters.

The Plan to power the beast had been to hide a small motor in the boiler.

However, despite my efforts it proved a bridge too far as the motor struggled turning over with even the slightest misalinement, and my meager engineering skills were not up to providing that surety. It also got really hot.

Plan B.

 Stick a bigger motor in the tender and hide the decoder in the cab roof.

Pain in the Nethers - Chassis Frustrations 2 - Steamers

DB makes a few poorly researched observations:

We NZ120 diesel modellers are pretty lucky, having a host of N scale chassis offerings that are a good-enough fit for most of our diesel locos. After a few months of pondering this Wb, I'm thinking steam is another matter!

Issues include:

• Driver size and spacing 
• Wheel arrangement 
• Cylinder location/connecting rods.
• Motion
• N scale vs our 1:120
• Power pickups and decoders

Driver size and spacing was well covered by Premier Duff in several posts. 

wheel diameter real equivalent loco classes

7.5mm 3 F
8mm 3'2" W, Wa, Wb, Wd
9mm 3'6" B, Ba, Bb
9.5mm 3'9" Wf, X
10mm 4' Ww, Aa, Q, U, Ub, Uc
11mm 4'4" A, Ab, Wab, K, Ka, Kb, J, Ja, Jb 

12mm 4'9" G

More here  Put the Kettle on , Steam pt 2 , Steam Part 3

I've noticed that many overseas steam prototypes, and thus models, have a larger gap between the two rearmost drivers (presumably to fit the firebox) whereas most of ours have consistently spaced drivers. Even my Alco Wb chassis has this 'feature' although its not too noticeable.

Because of N's 1:160 to 1:148 scale, the large drivers of racehorse overseas locos become reasonable for us to use in 1:120 on NZ's plodders.

While in theory, leading and trailing pony trucks can be subtly altered, this is easier said than done. 

At the front this is hampered by the cylinder location, which can't really be moved because of the valve gear.  This is an obvious fact that I hadn't even considered, so you usually can't replace a pony truck with a leading bogie, because there isn't enough space between the cylinders and the drivers (and the rods aren't long enough). Many of the models I've looked at online don't have the sort of room between the cylinders and the drivers we need - most of our locos have quite long connecting rods. This is partially exacerbated because they are in N rather than 1:120.

My Wb needs the leading pony truck moved forward, and a trailing one added. The pony truck that came with the model is a larger diameter than it should be but I have another smaller one off a Japanese steamer I may use, or I might just keep this one.

As for motion, other than our early inside framed locos and some later appearances of Baker valve gear, we were primarily in the Walschaerts camp for the bulk of our designs. My Wb should have inside valve gear, which means removing everything other than the main connecting rod and the distinctive Baldwin bowtie crosshead that my chassis does not have. A risky and painful operation given it is reasonably nicely modelled. I could leave the motion there, as I wouldn't have noticed before I started staring at Wb pics recently. 

Ebb-Fettler has a 3d printed Ba loco top, needing a fairly narrow chassis, which made me dig out a pair of Japanese 2-8-0s that I was once going to turn into 2-foot six narrow gauge Chinese C2s with much larger scale tops. But these 'chassi' happen to have their connecting rods joined to the third rather than second driver! I'd never noticed this before last week. looking at the C2, that's how they are attached. So a fail for the Ba, but a win for the C2.

My Wb donor engine was a tender loco (a Bachman Alco consolidation). The tender has plenty of room for the supplied chunky hard-wired decoder, but that won't fit it into my little tank engine, so will have to be replaced with an ancient Digitrax Z scale decoder. The Pacific that I hope to turn into an Ab also has a big roomy tender which houses a long decoder board and a matching long speaker enclosure. Both of which will have to be shortened, as our tenders tend to be much, much shorter than American ones as our axle loadings restricted how much water/coal/oil we could carry. Shortening the tender without breaking too much will be a problem for another day. An A's square tender might be a better bet than the Vanderbilt one of the Ab.

The other issue with the need to remove the tender for the Wb... is that I'll be ditching 2/3rds of my power pickups, with the badly-laid-track-conforming tender bogies being sacrificed for a rigid six-coupled loco with traction tires on the front axle. Those rubber bands may have to be be removed. As for the possibility of picking up power from pony trucks. That would require engineering well above my pay grade.

So summing up the biggest challenge with steam in NZ120 for one without a CNC milling station and scanning electron microscope: With the 'modular' design of diesel models in the past, it was possible to swap out bogies from other loco types for different wheel arrangements, axle spacings and wheelbases, and even lengthening a chassis is possible. People have made custom chassis for NZ120 railcars for example. See also my DI with its reversed SD40-2 bogies in a GP30 frame. With steam, there seem fewer 'natural fits' for NZ prototypes, and modifying a loco chassis seems much harder, especially as they are 'advancing' with sound, miniaturised components and less user-serviceable designs.  Or maybe its just a mental block plus my lack of experience with tiny wheeled kettles and micro-engineering.

So what chassis have other modellers used for NZ steamers, and what is your critical assessment of these in terms of fit, modifications needed, and performance? As with diesels, the limited runs that are produced these days probably make some of these old hens-teeth models real gems now. We could do with a steam loco chassis compendia like the diesel one referenced at the top of this...

Wb 2 - Bodywork and a pipe band

Db continues his Wibbledeebee:

Scalpel please, Nurse.

This might look a bit brutal, but was done for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't have much luck straightening out the warped side tanks. And second, I needed to make some space for a DCC decoder.

Below you might be able to see where I removed a fair bit of material on the underside of where the boiler and top of the side tanks join. There is also a lot more space inside the side tanks now.

Getting the band back together after a fall off the bench onto concrete separated the front end into four pieces (one still missing but replaced with styrene):

Part way through applying filler:

The body was then spray primed (nice) and brushpainted (yuck) with weathered black, which is a bit green for my liking. This was to ensure that there would be some paint on the parts that would be hard to get to after the pipes and things went on:

The distinctive Baldwin Wb 'curved gusset' between the top of the bunker and the cab was added, the air reservoirs under the cab, steps on the side of the rear bunker, and a toolbox. This 3D print has one on the front buffer beam, which I've only seen in one of these on a very old pic, but I quite like it. 

A mess of air pipes (the more the merrier!) handrails and some stays behind the cowcatchers completed things. The piping detail was done using this pic from the NZ Railway Observer as a guide, and a few other Wb pics stolen from the web.

And to close, a pic that illustrates my frustration with putting way too small coupler pockets into tough and brittle 3d prints. Its going to be a squeeze:

Elmer Lane 28 - Coal Bin

DB says:

Elmer Lane always seemed to have an old yellow La with coal on the stub tracks outside the Supervisor's office.

So mine does now too. This was one of a dozen La castings I got from someone (Rod Murgatroyd? Cross Creek?) that were the start of an undisclosed (and inelegant) Stone Train that I started putting together when I built the DI all those years ago. 

One of the wagons was de-limestoned (and what a surprise to find I'd buried a lead slug under there), its door was cut open, filled with coal and repainted. I suppose I expended about ten minutes on this. It's now permanently attached to Elmer Lane. 

Obviously needs more rust and fading, but that might look unprototypical...

Wb 1 - Wubbada Wubbada

In which DB contemplates his first steam loco model (this long-maturing blog entry was written in September 2024, had its genesis in late 2023, and is in mid-2025 almost ready to go...).

I have always been a diesel man, as that's what I've grew up with, but if there is one place I'd like to go back to in a time machine, it would be the West Coast in the late 1950s-1960s. A magnificent collection of ancient engines with jaunty little trains of four wheelers running through bush scenery and over rickety bridges to remote coal mines on wobbly branches to places with funny names like Blackball/Roa, Dunollie/Rapahoe/Rewanui, Conns Creek and so on.

When we decided to come back to NZ in 2015, I had visions of making a small Rewanui module to get back into NZ120. I bought a couple of Bachmann 2-6-0 locos in anticipation (underpinnings for a Wa and Ww maybe), and when we were in Wellington looking for a house, I started making a relatively awful Q hopper wagon on a Peco 10 foot chassis, but that was a very short-lived attempt to return to NZ120. After that, we were away for a while, and Swiss Z scale won my heart for a few years.

In October 2023, I came back to modelling after a few years off. Press-ganged into operating the massive 9mm layout at the Christchurch show, I spent the whole weekend running a small train around (and around and around) with a Wb. The loco was running backwards the whole time because only the headlight on the bunker end worked, and because it seemed to run better that way without derailing anyway. Both were handy excuses, because I secretly prefer the aesthetics of a tank loco or a Dsa running backwards. 

Delving further into the aesthetics of tank engines, I have always preferred the looks of the W, Wa and Ww, so have never paid much attention to Wb locos, but this big 9mm model won me over. The other train that was running for most of the time was an Ab with a couple of red wooden carriages and a matching car-van.

Elmer Lane 27 - Officer's Mess

 DB raises another building.

The last major building to be installed at the depot is labelled '32/33' at the bottom left of this previously-featured cropped image taken by Ian Coates from the Steam Inclined book. This was the loco crew's amenity block, with lunch room, lockers, lavs and showers. The building was extended over its life and survived into the 1980s.

The building was made using the methods previously detailed that have been employed with the others on the module, being an evergreen clapboard shell with chunky strips for eves, and (modified) brass etched Ratio British N scale windows, which are obviously a tad small. But the effect is OK I reckon.

The roof going on below. This is the same ancient but lovely Fidelis N scale corrugated iron used on the yellower-coloured office block on the other side of the depot. This time I scored a midline and chopped this into skinnier verticals and glued the sections on, rather than using one solid sheet. I'm not sure even I can tell the difference.

A test fitting, yes, the building should be located on a different angle, but this was intended to partially hide the shadow sidings behind:

Despite the orangey look in the picture above, the door and windows are a similar shade to the roundhouse windows. The next morning, the crew block and the larger stores building beside it had some weathering applied:

Odd angles mainly due to the wide angle phone lens. The crew building has an open back and hides the Digitrax autoreverser module featured in a previous entry, so this building will probably be glued down, whereas the roundhouse, stores and railcar shed are still removable. The Stores shed may lose the unprototypical lean-to out the back, or at least its roof, for better access to the Kato turntable controller underneath it. 

Elmer Lane 26 - Autoreverser test

 DB plugs onwards.

A return was made to the basement to see if I could get the remaining bits of the module any closer to finished.

The 'shadow' storage tracks out the back were laid in a fairly ugly manner. I used up some old code 80 points and track here, and lazily did not power the frogs (relying on the electrofrog wipers). Seems OK so far.  All rails were extended towards the 'north (the station) and a piece of PC board applied under them and wired up. I've also decided to extend the depot track at the 'back' (closest to the red fence) towards the camera so that it can be accessed from the rest of the layout. Previously it was only accessible from the turntable, which meant you couldn't store pairs of diesels there easily.  Its yet to ballasted at this end until the point is located just this side of the next module.

A Digitrax AR1 autoreverser was added onto the balloon loop to deal with the unfortunate physics of the "red wire becoming the black wire" as you go around the loop and back in the direction from whence you came. 

This works by having an isolated section in the loop that is powered from this device, which is (seemingly unsophisticatedly) a relay that works like a reversing switch.  As a train enters or departs this from either end of the isolated bit,  if a short is detected it tries flipping the polarity. This seems to work, and gets good reviews online. I picked it up when Acorn models in Christchurch had a sale on a while back. 

My original plan had a one metre length of flex track on the Hoki line (in front of the railcar shed) that would be powered by the autoreverser, but I recently decided to isolate the entire lump between the points at the far end of the storage sidings through to the points at what will be the Greymouth Station. This should be long enough to take the longest train (about three metres), and avoid the tiny probability that both ends of a one metre section could be bridged by metal wheels at the front and back of the train at once. Very unlikely given that most of my wheels are plastic anyway, but having said that, most of my vans have metal wheels, as does the Tranz, and that is longer than a metre. 

So, with that installed, it was time for a test. Out with the Multimeter and... shorts everywhere. I took off the remaining locos, checked for exposed wires touching underneath, isolated the autoreverser... Nope. 

Finally I decided I'd have to snip some wires to isolate a few segments to track down the error. Either on the new shadow tracks, which look fine, or on the roundhouse roads, which also look fine, or on the small bit of Greymouth platform/loop, which looked OK, but was now covered in light ballast, so I couldn't really tell. Snip. Action stations! I'll have to re-feed those two tracks later. I knew I should have been testing this all along....

Anyway, the module works, the turntable still works, and you can spin a loco or drive one onto the powered roundhouse tracks.

Pain in the Nethers - Chassis Frustrations -1a - Atlas

DB follows up - 

FYI here are the three versions of the Atlas SD7/9/24/35/etc. 

The 1990s Atlas/Kato one  - they still run well, but the motor had to be isolated to add a DCC chip:

The early 2000s edition was 'DCC friendly' with an isolated motor, and you could unscrew the chassis halves a little to pop out the light board for a DCC replacement. The negative with models of this era was maintaining good electrical connection between the frame and the decoder board (often requiring slim brass shims wedged into the four corners), and between the board and the motor. These models have quite slow speed motors from memory, which was a pain when running them with other locos, which why most of my other diesels have been modified with DCC speed changes to they will run with these slow DC/DBR/DA chassis:

The new one. Black speaker box under the board at right whether you want one or not, little piggyback board under the main board at the left end, joined with an E24 connector (DC here, but these can be replaced with a DCC or DCC+sound one):

On the plus side, while the bogies look identical to the older models (complete with now-redundant sticky-up copper tabs), tiny wires are now used with micro connectors to bring the power up to the board, rather than the old brass strips along the sides. I think the motor is also linked to board with wires, so I may end up throwing away the supplied board and hardwiring an orange decoder into those wires. Of note, the chassis isn't split frame anymore,

With the tiny wires, connectors and components one wouldn't want to drop this on the floor...

Pain in the Nethers - Chassis Frustrations -1

DB notes some N scale developments in recent decades:

I had the good fortune to be deposited into Aladdin's Cave a few weeks ago, but left feeling I like had been mugged, despite returning several desirable items from my shopping trolley back to the shelves.

This aisle is 95% N scale 'locos'. Dribble. ScaleTrains in the two shelves of red boxes at right that extend to the front of the shop, and more in the left distance behind the counters, which mainly contain layers and layers of Atlas/Kato/Intermountain models. With some rarer brands and steam in the counter closer to the front. Microtrains stuff and N containers are hanging on the wall at left, with some N and HO track further down.

The main item on the shopping list was a pair of SD9/7/35/26 to turn into DCs. All good, they had new 'DCC ready' Atlas SD9s for a reasonable US $90 all up, and I already have a bunch of leftover Digitrax decoders for Atlas locos from the last time I bought a few of these.

I then got suckered into buying a gorgeous ScaleTrains SP tunnel motor (with sound) at a ludicrous price. I didn't want sound, but this was the one only that was in the mid-late-90s configuration left, and I was already smitten at that stage. I also picked up a Canadian wide-body 'DCC ready' Dash 8 for a reasonable price, which looks lovely and is something different for the American fleet. I searched for ScaleTrains BNSF H2 Dash-9s among the hundreds of Scale Trains items but there was nothing sensible available.

After much wringing of hands, I decided to look more closely at a ridiculously-priced Paragon sound-equipped Pacific that looked like it might make a good Ab. I'm not really a steam dude, but could do with something pre-1980s to sit at Elmer Lane and tow those three red coaches along.

One of the sales guys asked if I wanted to test anything on their track before I left. Most diesels are pretty foolproof, but it made sense to check that the expensive, complicated and fiddly-looking Pacific worked. Onto the track it went.

It moved (as expected), but the sound! Phenomenal, loud, realistic! Mind blown. The first and last time I'd heard sound in N scale was 17 years ago, a pair of SD40-2s that sounded tinny and toylike with no bass, so other than for the novelty value of hooting the horn, the expense of sound seemed pointless... back then. 

After that, the Tunnel Motor might be worth a listen. Again, I had low hopes that were again shattered. Sooooo good! I double-checked there wasn't another mid-90s Tunnel Motor hiding at the back of their shelves.

Back down to earth upon returning home, I got inside the Atlas SD9s only to find that the chassis design has changed. My Digitrax Atlas decoders won't fit these new ones. Drat. Worse, they have a 'plain' DC circuit board that looks like something out of an iPhone which might be a challenge to solder a normal decoder onto, plus there is little piggyback for a tiny DC (the default) or DCC or Sound+DCC board that uses an E24 nano-socket. Whatever that is. The SD9s  (whether DC or DCC or sound+DCC) have a speaker built in.

In hindsight, had I known all this, at the very least I could have bought two matching E24 decoders while I had the ability to get them at US prices, or, now that I have heard that N Scale sound is far better than it used to be, plumped for sound equipped ones. Then I checked the prices and remembered why I went for the $90 DC units instead of the $175 DCC/sound ones (marked down from the $250 USD RRP each!!).  

Some thoughts on N scale market developments that seem to have occurred in the last 12-15 years. 

• The cost of N sound decoders is insane given that they look pretty similar componentwise to a DCC decoder. They are often $100 USD or more. 
• Many locos are being retooled for sound, so if you have a drawer of decoders that you bought 20 years ago for future loco purchases, they're probably not going to fit the new models. Dammit.
• Rather than having manufacturer/model specific decoder replacement boards, the industry is moving to decoder plugs. Unfortunately there are a proliferation of 'standard' miniscule decoder plugs in N at the moment (just pick ONE already!).
• I wonder if it is going to be harder to get non-sound/non-dcc locos in future, because the newest decoders can now automatically detect and switch to pure DC (non-DCC) operation, while still providing basic sound functions. As far as I could see, this shop had no steamers available that didn't have DCC/sound, so they were all very expensive. 
• All of the above is pushing up the prices of N scale locos. I'm grateful to have some Dash-8 chassis (plus decoders!) in stock for DXs, and a bunch of DCC-equipped SD40-2s that I could sacrifice into DFs. 
• Given the way the prices have escalated in recent years (and this is before potential new tariffs take hold) the older and plainer but still very good quality Atlas/Kato/etc stuff from 1990-2015 might become more "valuable" to NZ120 modellers. 

Upon returning home, I note GraFar has a new re-tooled British 08 model that is tempting for a DSA. Again, even the base DC edition comes with a speaker (sound-ready) whether you ever will need it or not, and costs from $322 NZD upwards. The prices on the DCC/Sound ones go up to $727 NZD! For a little 0-6-0 shunter! The top of which I'd throw away anyway! Crikey. 

More on Chassis Frustrations in an upcoming edition.

Elmer Lane 25 - Module End

 DB returns:

A little progress has been made in recent days at the north end of Elmer Lane. I finally made the decision to install the 'Greymouth platform-to-loop' turnout here. The original thought was to have this on the next module, thus keeping the 'Hokitika line' track, which runs in front of the depot and then circles around behind it, clean and clear of complications.

After a bit of measuring of my current, and extrapolating out to my 'desired' TranzAlpine, I reckon it might have been a bit tight. Moving the turnout onto this module probably gives me two extra car lengths if required. You can never have enough storage space.

Installing a turnout at this late stage also requires putting in a control rod after all the other tracks are well in place and ballasted. The rod runs just beneath the surface of the baseboard in a plastic tube and seems to work fine in tests, although I haven't attached the spdt switch to power the frog yet.

But I did cut a strip of copper-clad PCB, scored and drilled it in the right places, and attached it to the edge of the module. The platform road, loop and depot access track were then soldered down to it, and some feeder wires put in place. With the extra track, the track spacings are a little tighter than I like, but there is plenty of room in tests with my largest vehicles (SpaceRacer, GT, DM)

With that done, and the last of that track paint squeezed out to cover the new sections of rail, the last of the visible tracks could be ballasted.

The day ended with me 'pottering in the garden' to the west of the Hokitika line, planting a few trees, bushes and grasses.  While a few of us have bemoaned the closure of various 'local hobby shops', it seems that a slight salvation seems to have come with a resurgence in wargaming and kitmaking. There are now three or four gaming or art shops in Dunedin that now carry paints, glues, decalling supplies, tools and scenic materials. I've picked up a few packs of 'Gamer's Grass' recently. Its like the old Silflor tuft stuff, (I still have about 80% of that Silflor left) and Gamer's Grass available in a reasonable variety of realistic, plus a few fantasy shades, and different lengths too. Its a lot cheaper than Silflor used to be too, at between $12-15 Pacific Pesos for a section a little less than 20x10cm.

I like being able to mix the various shades and lengths in a given area. I believe you can make these blobby grasses yourself on a piece of wax paper if you have a static grass machine, but for the rest of us, the occasional visit to the hobby shop can't be beat.

I like using these tufts to make cabbage trees too, using old twigs, or in this case, bits of a Woodland Scenics brown plastic tree armature with bits of blobbygrass attached to the ends. As was learned on Moana many years ago. Four little cabbage trees were added, and here's the worst of them:

Elmer Lane 24 - Ssssssmokin! Topping the roundhouse with some stacks.

 DB puffs:

Ever since the roundhouse roof started to come together, I've been fearing making the smokestacks. It was always going to be tough to make 20 'matching' and relatively convincing stacks.  Hence they have been rightly left until last.  

The first lightbulb moment was procuring some square styrene while I was last in the big smoke. I settled on Evergreen 255 Styrene Square Tubing, which is almost 8mm across the outside faces. Looking at pictures and plans, the real stacks were 3-6, or track-guage wide, and with my roundhouse being slightly underscale, I figured this would be OK. 

The next thing that I wanted to do was to have an elevated square 'hat' on top, like the real thing. The next slightly dim bulb that went off was to use staples as supports. I suppose in hindsight I could/should have used a smaller square tube inside the grey outer, and painted it flat black. 

I managed to find some thin-crown staples at the Tool Shed (about a 7mm crown) that did the business. The wire gauge is a bit chunky, but when painted black it doesn't really matter. Although with a discount they cost me $13, the small packet contains 5000 staples. I used 40 here, so I can make another 124 roundhouses with my investment should I choose to. They will probably end up at a local op shop to give someone else an economic way to build roundhouse stacks. 

The first five test stacks went together pretty quickly. I cut one stack out of pre-painted square tubing (marked with black dots as 'the master') and used that to cut the base angles for the others. The staples were contact glued inside, with little sticks of styrene to keep a consistent height and approximate level-ness to the staple-tops. After the first dry run (below) it seems that not all my roundhouse roof sections are of even gradient (of course not!), and none were as steep as the plan I had originally built the roundhouse too!

So the laid-back five (above) had their bottoms filed down to make them stand a little more vertical and the master was similarly treated. 

The production line then started up. It took a few hours over a few visits last week, but eventually I had enough bits made up.

And painted, and weathered.

The flat caps on the real Elmer Lane were originally planned to be curved, and it has also gone through iterations of stacks over the years as they wore out and a few obviously burned out. 

If I divide the roundhouse into two halves, a 'front' end facing the turntable and a 'back' facing outwards, the plans and early pictures show two stacks per track out the back end, and two at the 'front' side for the first ten roads (counting from the shed boiler (left) end). This means a total of four stacks per track for the left ten tracks.

The other 8 roads had a single stack out he back, these were used for tender engines, with their smokeboxes facing the rear glass wall, as has been seen in most of the pictures taken inside the shed. The left ten tracks often had tank engines with their snouts facing the turntable, but these tracks were used for any engine type. The workshop extension had no stacks and troughs, fair enough, as locos out there would be cold.

Sometime after the 1950s, the ten 'left' tracks had their two front stacks reduced to one per track. When the roundhouse was largely demolished in the early 80s, four stalls were kept and these remained through the 1980s with no stacks.

This is a long-winded way for me to attempt to justify making as few stacks as possible. Despite owning no steam locos, my roundhouse is set in the late-steam era, so it will have one stack per road out the back, and five roads will have front stacks out front - the two washout roads next to the donkey boiler, and the three workshop tracks. I will probably relent and make three more for the front tracks, but this looks moderately convincing so far. 

Stack locations were measured (more or less), and marked with a dot of a Sharpie marker. The roof was then subtly weathered around the dots with a smudge of black from my old Tamiya Weathering Master. I've had these for 17 years now, and use bulk double-ended makeup applicators from the dollar shop to replace the original spongey thing that eventually rips itself up.

A few streaks of white and brown were also added, and the eaves had some weathering applied as well, while I was here. The painted and weathered stacks were then placed on the dots and arranged so the most 'vertical' and better looking examples were closer to the front, and any skewiff weirdos were further away from the viewing side.

The bottoms were then gently dabbed into a thin puddle of some PVA-like glue and placed on the roof. This certainly could have turned out worse.

Elmer Lane 23 - A little scenery...

DB exhales:

I've been working on a couple of model trainy things over the past week or so, but one relatively quick task that has been a long time coming, was to ballast the loopy track that does a short cameo as 'the Hokitika Branch' between Greymouth station and the roundhouse. This has now been done, as well as some basic scenicking either side of it.

I've ballasted back to where the truncated workshop sticks out the back of the roundhouse:

And now with a few more shrubs and grasses planted:

Some blobs of grassy stuff are still drying (hence the patches of light gluey colour) and there will likely be further plantings as the scenery progresses. At the moment, greenery and ballast have made it past the railcar shed. Soon I'll have to decide on putting a point in just beyond where the ballast ends to service the Greymouth platform. I fear if I leave it until the next module a loooong TranzAlpine won't be able to sit at the station. But that's a story for another day.

In the second pic you might have noticed there has been some prep work done on the 'staging/workshops' tracks behind the fence, and the preview of an upcoming post on some trial roundhouse smokestacks...

In the last two pictures are some coal wagons that have featured in posts over the past few months, and recently on the NZ Model Railway Guild website 

Elmer Lane 22 - More Roundhouse Doors

DB concludes the door odyssey:

Another hour in the basement today and I had finished the other 16 doors and assembled them into pairs. I made my own .040 x .010 strip out of sheet - it was a bit curvy and of variable width, but a bit of glue straightened it out. Nothing that a galloping racehorse would notice. 

And then some paint, and weathering and glue....

While the roundhouse was on the deck, it received the final hidden wall segment at the back of the workshop, a little reinforcement between the segments, and I painted the bottom centimetre of the interior legs a shade of light grey too, so the employees can see them in the dark. 

Elmer Lane 21 - Roundhouse doors

DB excretes the following words: 

Roundhouse doors, what a pain. There are so many of them. Why did nobody tell me this before?!

It seems the wooden doors on the real thing were re-clad with galvanised corrugated iron around 1959-60. Moisture between the wooden framing and wooden cladding had rotted out the covering, and it was felt the corrugations would allow more air to circulate and dry things out. It was noted in that particular paper that the doors were almost always kept open, and that jives with every photo that I have seen of the roundhouse. Maybe they were closed up in big storms.  

In going through my styrene library, I found some cheap(er) JTT sheets that I bought quite a while ago to do the roundhouse... before I forgot I'd bought them. Out they came and became doors, of which I need about thirty.

I started framing these out as I had done for the Railcar Shed, referring to prototype pics of the roundhouse. I thought I had ample .010x.060 styrene strip for the framing, but before I knew it, I'd run out at the halfway mark. Dammit.

And yes, EB, that is the same gunked up styrene glue that you failed to extract anything from. It has since made the store shed, railcar shed, and all those other little offices and sheds.... And its still going strong on the doors! 

The two colour pictures of the depot that I keep looking at (Steam Inclined and 

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)  both have the doors that faded/pinked shade of red oxide that matches the window casement frames, so I attempted to mix up a batch of that, and my natural impatience had the doors that I had made painted, weathered and installed within about an hour, rather than doing the more sensible option of waiting until the other doors were built and doing them all in one go. 

The 'weathering' consisted of Tamiya panel line detail (a product that I'm falling out of love with) and a cool bottle of AK 'Starship wash' that I picked up while shopping on Paraparaumu's Rodeo Drive with the Head Druff last week. I used this on some of my recent batch of LCs and like it a lot. I have another of their 'interior washes' (for plane models) that I have used on a lot of things, including the roundhouse, but its a bit green-tinted for general use. On the plus side, it has all these little blobs of grit and mess in it that sit wonderfully on models. The starship wash is more a thin sooty wash, but I'm starting to like it. I wish these Mig/Ammo/AK products were more readily available in the provinces. Some flat varnish should have been applied to these doors, but I'd glued them in place before the weathering had completely set.

In other news, with the roundhouse lifted off the depot module and up to my eyes to attach the doors, I finally got around to filling in a few gaps between the casement windows on the outside segment walls with pre-painted reddy-pink styrene strip. 

And touching up a few missing bits of paint. I pre-painted a lot of that stripwood, cut it and glued it together to make the roundhouse, so there were a few imperfect joins that have just received a few blobs of paint. I also painted under the eaves of the raised top-hat roof at the end closest to the public, not that many people will get down that low, and if they do they'll see all sorts of other flaws.

'Soot' was applied above each stall door (weathering powder), and then the whole front of the shed was Dullcoted to keep that all in place.  I was careful not to get any Dullcote on the roof, or any more on the windows. 

The vertical strips were weathered and then the pairs of doors attached to them.

You might also (barely) see the results of using some black 'Vallejo Pigment FX', which is basically finely ground 'pastels/chalk', on the roundhouse tracks and around the donkey boiler room to represent coal dust, oil, grease and other miscellaneous black stuff. I've put that around the main loco in/out/storage tracks as well and reckon it looks ok as a first cut. On the roundhouse tracks I've gone the further step of 'fixing' it in place with Isopropyl alcohol. I suppose we will see tomorrow if it has stuck! * Without fixin's, it will eventually fall off or blow away, as its an incredibly fine powder and doesn't seem to have any adhesive properties, unlike the old Bragdon weathering powders used above the doors.

Presumably the next blog post will be the big reveal as to whether I waited to procure more strip of the matching size to finish the other doors, or just went ahead with the wrong size. Oooo! Cliffhanger ending!  **

* it did!

** spoiler alert, yes I did figure out the obvious alternative....