Greymouth 3 - Rapido Progresso.

 DB speaking fluent Italian there:

Its been a belissimo week here, but the dungeon has been visited on a few cloudy days such as today. These visits have produced surprising progress. 

As the old saying goes, "If you spent as much time doing it, as you do thinking about it..." Well for once I've just gotten stuck in.

The first task involved getting that third road out from the platform and its attendant siding installed. This required modifying two old points to be fed at the frogs by a switch using methods described earlier. This didn't take as long as I remember, and the points went in quickly, with their point throw rods under the layout. This meant I could fix down the '4th access road' at Elmer Lane to the PCB at the edge of that module. 

Rails was quickly painted brown with a rail pen, and the sleepers weathered with a light grey wash. The 'modern' coal train was also tried on for size:

I then went mad and soldered up all the jumper wires to the tracks on top. 

Then I went madder and ballasted the whole thing in about 90 minutes, after adding a painted wooden 'platform', which looks a bit skinny. Its 25mm across, and it should be 30, but Greymouth's south end is cut away for car parking anyway. I'll probably double up the width of the north end when the station and attendant buildings go in.

I let that all set overnight. I'll not ballast the PCBs until its all been tested. Which I should have done by now, but that would have distracted me from the roll I was on.

This afternoon, I thought the platform colour was a bit dark (and quite bluey-grey) and was just about to repaint it, when I looked at some pics of the real thing, to see that it is even darker on top (asphalted I guess). So I taped off the edges using Tamiya masking tape guided by my eye, and then painted a darker 'German Grey" on top for the asphalt and leaving the sides and top edges 'concrete'. This came out OK, although probably a bit fancy.

Well. I couldn't stop there, so started building some platform verandahs. Greymouth has quite long ones at both ends of its station. I took an educated guess based on the space available and some other station and verandah plans as a guide to sizes and shapes.

The verandah poles were hastily added from H section styrene. These will not meet any textbook definition of 'vertical' so were painted dark grey to hide them. Two poles on each 30cm 'end' have steel spikes, which plug into holes on the platform.

The station has worn many paint schemes over the years. In the 1950s or 60s it looked almost orangey/bricky with white trim. The wood was repainted in a lightish green with white trim and a red roof in the mid 1960s for the very end of steam. The red roof was a patchwork of red and new silver corrugated roofing in the mid-70s and the station was light grey.

In the AC cars era, it was a fairly bright yellow, with white trim and a green roof. This yellow faded a bit over the years. In the dark blue TranzAlpine days and for the 1988 flood, the station was a light grey with dark red trim. 

The last train to use the wharf trackage left Riverside behind three blue DJs at the end of July 1989, although the station building was removed before the 88 flood (probably removed when the Rewanui passenger trains ended in October 1984). Only three tracks remained by the station by 1992, and the Warehouse was in place in the yard when the footbridge was removed in 2002 or 2003 

The station today is a cream colour with red trim.

Mine will be the light grey with bricky trim grey roof for something vague and subtle. 

Station to go in between:

Elmer Lane 29 - Sanding tower and bits

DB returns to shoo away the tumbleweeds:

A few projects have been quietly ticking away in the background over the last few weeks, so here is an update on a few.

I've been threatening to add a sanding tower to Elmer Lane for some time now, and I was under the misapprehension this could be knocked off quite quickly.

There was a bit of pondering of course. This is a fiddly structure, and being in the thick of the action, would be prone to being knocked. Styrene is my go to, so a top was assembled quickly, but this wouldn't be ideal for the legs.  I considered brass, and then finally settled on the steel wire I'd been using as point rodding. I was going to face this with some styrene H sections, but that made the legs look too chunky. 

The legs are splayed in both dimensions:

The real thing serves three through tracks off the turntable, but as I figured there would be all sorts of clearance issues around it, I decided to minimise the impact of this and make the third road a new dummy stub out of some ancient Micro Engineering code 40 track.

Installed. While there is plenty of clearance for a DM and SpaceRacer next door, not much will fit underneath it because of the legs on a curve. This may prove to be a pain. But then again, I'm not sure how much the turntable will be used in the real world, and besides, there are still the 'original' three roads that can be used, and steam locos can be sanded from one of them if they want to be. I could have moved it further from the table onto a straighter bit of track, but that would encroach on the 'diesels' end of the module. 

I need a sand cooking shed next.

In other news, as you can see from the two photo above, the crew quarters now has some crew chatting out the front. They seem to have shiny polyester suits from the 80s on here, so they might expect a rain of dullcote soon.

And some recycled (about 4 times) Atlas N scale poles have been planted beside the Hoki line.

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 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 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....

Off shopping

Last week, Darryl was in Welliington being a magazine magnate and so we arranged to meet up.

To make things easy from both directions we picked Waikanae on Friday for lunch. After a nice meal at Paraparaumu beach (during which I got part of my Linesider subscription back), we then went to look at the 2(!) local hobby shops. 

First up is Kapiti Hobbies, located 1 block back from the esplanard in the local pharmacy. The owner is a wargamer and so the models are geared towards that. An excellent selection of paints and weathering bits from a variety of manufacturers. Mr Bond was like a kid in a candy shop. "Ohhhh, they have that ... Oh and I've always wanted to try this...Ohh this looks neat too...And plastic...". In fact, its exactly how he is in a candy shop (or bakery).

The second, which I was only made aware of 2 hours previously is Mini-Kiwiland. This was a real eye-opener for me. a wide selection of models, paints and bits and scenery. and the postage is cheap too. I purchase a few

So how does "Gods waiting room" get 2 good hobby shops within 5km of each other, while Palmy gets 1, and Wellington gets none? In any case, Darryl made a sizable contribution to the local economy.

And a building update, I've added some driveways and paths to my railway houses.