Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Something a little bit bigger.

A while ago I blogged about working on some rolling stock for the Fell Museum in Featherstone. Since then, its taken up space on one of my work surface but not much else. Yesterday some pictures were circulated that indicate that the scenery bit of the layout is at the finishing end of getting on. Freshly armed with a new enthusiasm to 'not be last to the party', I started. I had decided to replace the collection of 4 wheeled wagons with something a bit more period accurate. First up was a standard La1. I rescaled the plan for 1:100 which was what my memory told me was the right scale. Banging the old plasticard together and we got to this.

'Hmmmmmm'

On the left, we have the NZ120 La, in the middle the 1:00 La and on the right a Lc of indeterminate scale. The La looks very narrow gauge. Running the measuring stick along the rest of the various bits give various ratios from 1:105 to 1:110. Its like stepping back 25 years to our young days of rubber banding scales. Now normally I would say 'stuff it, lets build everything from scratch', but in this case there is a stack of well made stock that I could never replicate, including a very nice 47' car/van. so, back to the drawing board we go.
(If anyone wants a plasticard la top in 1:100 scale, give me a yell, I've got one going cheap...)

I also managed to fit in some work on Paekakariki, completely the Air rail siding. Not much, but its just ticking things off. There are few jobs I want to get done before I get back to being behind at work next week.

2 comments:

Ben Scaro said...

3mmn3 1/2? it's one of the plausible but unused modelling scale/gauge combinations. 3mm narrow gaugers tend to use 9mm track for 3' and metre gauge prototypes, but for 3'6" it would be more accurate to use 10.5mm track. wheels might become a bit of an issue, depending on diameters required.

i've scratched my head about whether it would be a better scale for some time, but i did a very basic mock up - coach sides and ends to the dimension of the biggest rolling stock item I'd be modelling -to 3mm scale and it was getting almost to HO scale. The ex standard gauge coaches used on south australian narrow gauge lines were pretty big.

Anonymous said...

"The La looks very narrow gauge."

Yip, everything built at 1:100 to 1:110 becomes extremely narrow gauge when put on 9mm track.

cheers
0-4-4-0T