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 

xxxx

)  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....

¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 3

DB perambules onwards in Spanish:

Glazing.... This was really hard. The easy bit was painting some clear styrene with Tamiya Smoke. 

The DM has two cabs of course. One of mine is at the, well lets call it the 'good end' which will have a driver and lead the trains, and the other is the crappy end, which will face the wagons. The bad end has a lovely coupler and a broken 3d-printed cab handrail that I knocked off somehow during the current commissioning process. The good end has all its handgrabs intact and a recycled coupler that is a bit gummed with glue, but as it is in the lead, it won't be used much anyway.

I glazed up the bad end first.

The side windows were cut to shape and some Microscale Kristal Klear (kringeworthy naming aside) which was dabbed on the inside, using whatever tiny holes remained available to prod a stick with a small blob of it around the inside. Tweezers then forced the glazing up into the inside through the little hole under the cab and attempted to place it in the right location without smearing too much Kristal Klear about on the visible glass face. Not an easy task.

The front piece was cut to the approximate size and shape by trial and error (not an easy task for my eyes against the black painted window frame background (so it might be easier to do this while the shell is still grey). This was also attached with Kristal Klear and a skinny black strip of styrene added between the two panes afterwards. I'll probably go over the edges of the glass in black later, although that might also be a recipe for disaster.

You may not be able to see it here, but before the glass went in, I painted the drivers desk (this had to be done via the side windows) and I also made up a little angled box for the console that sits to the driver's left.

An issue with glazing the DM is that the actual 'glass' in the real thing is a lot smaller than the black painted bits, especially with the tiny side windows and the front emergency exit window. I've brightened up the shadows in a picture of the real thing to show this:

Anyway. As for the good end. The sides were installed per the above process but the front left open at this stage. Lewis has hinted that a better and far cleverer glazing solution might be on the way.

A volunteer was then called from a box of 1:120 unpainted figures that date from my TranzAlpine AG van exploits, and painted up with the current KiwiRail 'uniform' of an orange fleece/jacket with white reflectorised stripes, and a black golf shirt underneath. 

Unfortunately our man had to meet with an unfortunate accident (link nsfw) to fit behind the desk with his arms sitting above it, but the less said about that the better. Because of the tight spaces inside, to add salt to the literal wound, he then had contact glue smeared on his lower torso and hands in an undignified manner before being ruthlessly forced through the front window at the end of a pair of tweezers.

The printed long hood sides have also been laid on with some sort of tacky white glue. One of the yellow bits bothered me enough (a bit too fluro/green) that I overlaid it with the cab paint. I think this is the side visible in all three pics below.  

The cabside numbers came from some N Scale Microscale BNSF decal sheets and the white reflector strips are from a Southern Pacific set, cut into chunks. I've not put these along the sides in the hope that a set of handrails will mysteriously appear in my mailbox in a month's time. Until then, this project will go into stasis.

¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 2

DB continúa...

The ugly close-ups department has heartlessly captured the following unpleasant pictures. You have to remember that even with my magnifying loupe, I'm basically poking around with the paintbrush by feel here and even with it on I still can't see this mess of the now-grey headstock details. 

More painting, and some couplers after they were added in the greatly-expanded coupler boxes:

Mounting... My old SD90MAC was retrieved. This is a loco that I've never really liked (although I do like the weathering effort on the top). It needed some pruning with the pair of cast metal ears filed down (circled in red)

The DM top had to have the four underskirts removed, plus I needed to remove two of the little 45-degree brace/angles right up inside the shell to make room for the taller end of the metal chassis :

And it then sits reasonably low with its couplers at the right height, again with my over-magentaed first-pass paper sides 'placed' on the body for an approximation of looks:

You'll see in the first (prototype) pic from the previous post that the real loco is a real low-rider, but getting the model lower without majorly messy surgery to thin the inside of the roof and side sills would be really tough. 

Additional under-details - pyramoidal sandboxes and an effort to 'lower' the toolboxes were added from white styrene below:

I'm a bit disappointed in how what started out as nice airbrushing job has turned into a bit of a blobby mess, but its unlikely many people will see it from this close anyway. 

I must also say that the pictures presented in the last two issues (#18 and #19) of The Linesider, that fine organ of Aotearoan ferro-equiology, have been invaluable in making progress so far.