A Damn Good Fossick....

Am_Fet writes:

Well, Monday found me again in the wilds of Taranaki occupying the left seat of a few locomotives with hospitality and lunch provided by Drew. As I dont get up that way as often as I'd like, I decided that Monday was the day to spend some time in Patea photographing the old waterfront cool stores and trying hard to get the song "Poi E" out of my head....


Turned out that it was well worth the visit and an enjoyable hour was had by all (well, Drew and I) as we risked life and limb walking over end-of-life timber.


First stop was the compressor room that drove the refrigeration plant. Drew can remember it when it was full of equipment, but now regrettably only the main wheel remains on its pedestals (its about my height, BTW, so it aint small).


The cheese stores are massive reinforced concrete structures, and this is the view on the ground floor showing all the buttressing needed to stop the 2nd floor suddenly being at ground level....It was very eeiry walking through here, and Drew mentioned the local scroatlings used the area to abandon cars in.

After traversing an external staircase that looked none to stable, we emerged onto the upstairs loading bays for a view over the old wharf and the river.


From there, we wandered back out through a gaping hole in the other side of the building to find the worlds most perfect "railfan deckchair" spot. Might have to visit this again, methinks...


Our final stop was the old railway wharf further to the north which is in a similar state of dereliction to the cheese store wharf.


Although I was a bit ambivalent about the exploring when Drew first suggested it to me (I had been awake since 0300 that morning), I am very happy that I relented. I've now got enough photos and a new understanding of the place to help when I get around to building a layout based on the place (obviously not soon!)

For those with a similar love of industrial archeology, I've uploaded the whole collection to flickr here.

Undergubbins

The other night Fetler D'amatuer dropped off the mk1 4 wheeled underframe etchs. Naturally I had to have a crack at them with a soldering iron.

First up, as it comes....

'Wroowww'

While there are no instructions its all pretty straightforward. here we see it 1/2 way through. I've used Carrs solder paste which really makes things easy.

After a few more poor photos of various assembly stages, here is the final article with its predecessors. On the left is a Trackgang 10' underframe (modified slightly) and on the right is the good old Peco underframe. Total assembly time was about 45 minutes.


I've got a few suggestions that will be thrashed out (figuratively of course) this weekend.
However I'm still extremely happy with it

Broken River 3 - Some progress

DB reports on another adventure in the trainroom:

After that exciting Broken River prototype flyby in my last post, let's now return to 6 inches x 8 feet of sky-high reality.

Checking aroundabout where the Broken River left-end track should go to meet up with the yard points, I de-lifted the section down onto a set of drawers so that I could do some work on it.
The first item to be addressed was the join between the backscene panels, which are plywood sheets approx 4mm thick. I white-glued a small piece of the same material behind them and clamped this all together while it sets. I also ran some white glue down the join as a filler between the two pieces, although I expect that area of the backscene will be largely hidden by the middle tunnel in my group of three.

Recycled flextrack was then attached with the staplecannon and a few wagons were pushed over the joins to make sure everything was smooth. Being too lazy or incompetent to make my own track (and lets face it, for a layout at this height, why would I bother!) I cut the rails with pliers and then file any burrs off the tops, bottoms and the surfaces where the fishplates go (otherwise you end up fighting with them and don't get a great join). As I happen to be using code 55 Peco track - the one that has 'two webs'; the latter step means running a triangular file between the webs on each side of each rail.

I'm soldering about every second rail jointer (mainly because most of my old recycled track is two sections soldered together) and will be running copious wire jumpers to connect everything else to a thick bus wire running around the layout. Don't want things to be running erratically up in the sky.

DJ 3067 and DG 2376 run the first (unpowered, non-revenue) train of crusty old wagons to 'see how things will look'

Weekend meet

Well, since the question has been posed, I was thinking about starting at 10:30 ish to give out of towners time to get here. Lunch I'm not sure what will happen but we do own a small BBQ.

As for what is planned, not really that much. Some are planning to bring along a project, and Paekakariki will be available to those who have trains to run (well, even if its only 12' up and back). Oh, and they will need to be DCCed. The power supply seems to be quite grunty and could well fry anything else. Hopefully I'll have enough bits by Sunday to do a track making clinic of some sort. Marks model works will be around to supply assistance in the dark arts of whatever it is he does. Others I'm sure will be there to supply pithy and/or useless comments.

For those who want to come along, e-mail me and you can get the secret password (oh and the location). Remember admission is a model that you are either working on (and I think we will have some tables) or have recently finished. Only fair I think.

Tunnel Vision - Revisiting the Broken River Gorge

DB hopes that writing this will spur him into action:

I put a lump of wood up in the sky a while back before becoming distracted by other things, but now that it is winter here up in the Top Half of the planet (albeit the mildest I've ever seen) I need a few indoor projects to get on with. And I wouldn't mind seeing a train run around the room under it's own digital steam either...

The Midland Line is a spectacular piece of railway, with the segment between Springfield and Cragieburn, and more specificly, between the coastal abutments of the Pattersons Creek and Slovens Creek viaducts being the most dramatic. While the area around Staircase and the viaducts are all well known, the few tunnel-encrusted kilometres alongside Broken River are less so - probably due both to their inaccessibility and often being bathed in shadow or tricky light; making photography difficult.

Other than the familiar triple tunnels scene below of course. Unfortunately I couldn't conjure up a train at the time of taking the real picture (but I was tempted to photoshop in my new NZ120 DG nose).

So this is kinda what I'm going for in a representative fashion. Something akin to the second shot I would be very happy with: the tunnel 15-14-13 straight section.

I'd quite like some snow but it's not really in keeping with the rest of the layout. Maybe at the far left end there could be some dregs before going into the tunnel leading to the 'fiddle yard' behind it.

An overview

More cheap and cheerful buildings going up today. After looking at all the plans for the station (which seems to have been rebuilt more times than I've had hot dinners) I managed to work out the size of the main building. with the craft knife set to cut we were off and soon the building appeared. Glued up and on the platform it looked like this.

With the railcar parked next to it, it doesn't seem tall enough, so when I go back and build the real one I'll have to get it right. I was also worried that there would not be enough space on the platform for the station building. Its obvious from this that space will not be a problem.

As the last photos were a bit dark, here is one from the cold hard light of day looking down the whole layout.

Still to come are the houses and town at the far right, the hill close right, and the airail shed on the left.

And here's one of the loco depot showing the recently completed control panels.

'Note the H&S approved soldering iron hanger'

Now if I could just get the minions onto sorting out the turntable then I could get the rest of the track finished. I also will have to decide what to make the final fascia boards from. Ideally it would be 3 or 4mm ply, but I might have to settle for thin MDF (assuming I can get hold of some) of the same thickness. I can't really use card as it is easy to ding, and foam core board has the same problem.

Knocking things up

Well, with Convention just round the corner, things layout wise have taken a turn towards scenics. I've spent a bit of time in the last couple of days looking at building plans and working out just how I'm going to fit things in to areas that seemed perfectly fine, but are now just a bit small (the water tank area being one). Further to this, today I chopped up some perfectly good cardboard boxes to make some tatty landforms.


Its just there to give visitors next weekend a rough idea of what it will eventually look like. its only sitting there and will not be the final article. I'm not overly impressed with it as I now have nowhere to lean on the layout at the front when I'm working.

I'm tossing up whether or not to build some mock up buildings out of card to see how it looks, and what will fit into some of the areas which are a bit tight.

Ok, so a few beers later and we have a couple of buildings up.

First the goods shed opposite the station. Comments from the peanut galley have said that its not that important. However its one of the few buildings in this area and so it gets made. I followed the guild plans for the standard 20' by 30' shed, and the result was...

Too tall by quite a bit. knocking 5 feet off the bottom and its a much better fit.


Also for a first attempt, here is the loco shed in place. It will be useful to size and place the other buildings in the area relative to it.

So, we have a start on the pretty bits.
(sorry about the lighting, the lady of the house has borrowed the movable lighting for other more important jobs inside.)