Wednesday 4 June 2014

A West Country Diversion

The genesis of this project can be seen in my post on the Wealden Area Group blog

The Challenge
To summarise briefly - back in early 2013 Richard Benn realised he had been a member of the 2mm Association for almost ten years, and had yet to finish a layout, so set himself the target of completing one for the end of April 2013. That would be about two and a half year's membership for me, so I joined in the challenge by setting myself a suitably scaled down target of getting one quarter of a test track finished by then.

The Idea
In order for me to get it to Uckfield, it needed to be highly portable, so I went with the "layout in a boxfile" concept - though it inevitably expanded to become "layout in two or three boxfiles".

Nigel Ashton had earlier given me a nice scratch-built stone goods shed, so I was looking for somewhere suitable as a prototype to use this. The stock available from my main project narrowed the choice down to Edwardian GWR (fortunately this matched the goods shed too).






The initial intention was for a simple shunting plank, a goods yard comprising two or three sidings. Unfortunately, I was unable to find much prototype information, either photographs or track plans, for a simple goods yard.






Milverton?
After a wander through various West Country stations I discovered Milverton which had a suitable simple track plan, with goods shed and signal box adjacent to the passenger platform, making for a compact layout.

The station buildings at Milverton were described as being "similar to Bampton", and having a plan for the Bampton buildings, but not for Milverton, I started making Bampton station buildings, using styrene sheet, with stone embossed styrene for the outer shell.



Perhaps Not
Further research revealed a few problems:


  • Milverton station buildings were built in brick, not stone
  • Even without the brick v stone problem, the layout of the buildings was actually significantly different between the two, other than the "H" shape which seems to have been widely used in the area
  • Milverton used facing points for entry to the goods yard, which was going to draw complaints that it was "wrong".
  • So I changed my plans and decided to go with Bampton for the station layout, rather than Milverton - rather larger than my original plans, but an interesting project.

    Bampton
    Bampton was towards the north end of the Bristol and Exeter line between Taunton and Exeter, via Tiverton, known as the Exe Valley line. Passenger traffic was a fairly light service using 0-4-2 tanks (initially 517 class, latterly 4800/1400) and a few carriages - four or six wheelers in early years, autotrailers in later years. Apart from the usual general goods traffic, Bampton was the source of some other significant freight flows:


  • There was a fairly substantial complex of limestone quarries nearby, together with a lime-burning site, linked by a horse-drawn narrow-gauge railway. So there would be coal imports (probably from South Wales, but possibly from North Somerset), and export of limestone and of slaked lime.
  • In October each year wild ponies on Exmoor were rounded up and sold at Bampton Fair, generating lots of traffic as these ponies were transported to their new homes in cattle wagons.


  • Building it
    It's a long time since I built anything large in styrene sheet, and I was surprised at how much it warped in the construction process (at least that's my excuse for why nothing ever quite lined up as it should). Apart from that, construction went fairly smoothly. The other significant problem was that Bampton had large expanses of glass in the conservatory-style waiting room across the front of the station building and in the greenhouse at the side, and none of my selection of glues was entirely successful in sticking these in place.


    Whilst it wasn't actually ready for the target date of end of April, the first baseboard was sufficiently complete for a trip to the Wealden Area Group's May 2013 meeting. No backscene yet, but the platforms were in place, using fine sandpaper to represent the surface, track laid, wired and ballasted (though some of it came loose in transit and needs replacing), and most of the necessary stone walls and grassy areas were looking reasonably presentable.



    What Next?
    Lots of details to add, such as the elaborate B&E bargeboards for the station buildings, the statuary and low hedges for the station garden, a few bushes/trees/lamps and some fencing for the platforms.

    And the next baseboard section will need a couple of turnouts and a crossover (should be a single slip, but I'm not convinced that's really of much benefit) to provide access to the goods yard, cattle dock etc on the third and fourth baseboards.

    Sunday 1 June 2014

    3d printed GWR wagons

    My perverse liking for modelling Edwardian-era GWR in 2mm Fine Scale is shared by Ian Smith, who designed a few wagons for 3d printing a while ago. These were made available on Shapeways, and I bought a couple (W2 medium-size cattle wagons, which filled a hole in my existing range/plans). They are designed to work with separate etched W-iron units (2-312) which I hadn't used previously, so I tried to modify them to fit onto a conventional chassis by narrowing the solebars slightly. This was not a success - I made no progress in filing away the surplus material, but it was too fragile in the area where I was holding the body and various pieces splintered and fell off....

    I put this project on one side (along with many others), and moved onto other things.

    Recently a change of policy at Shapeways has removed these items from sale to third parties - purportedly they can't be guaranteed to print properly. So Ian has now put on a shopkeeper's hat, and is accepting orders for wagons which he then gets printed for himself and distributes to would-be purchasers.

    The main demand has been for cattle wagons - as well as the W2 medium Ian provides models for the W3 small and W1/W5 large varieties. In addition, an outside-framed goods van and outside-framed brake van are available. There are also some experimental springs and axleboxes, but they can't yet be reliably printed.

    I decided to have another try at these, and negotiated delivery (via St Ruth at Epsom and Ewell Exhibition) of 6 large cattle wagons, 2 vans and a brake van (the latter being received by Ian from Shapeways the day before he set off for the show). I already have a scratchbuilt W3, and they were relatively rare so I don't think I need another (specially one which would show up the inadequacies of my own).


    The 3d printing process appears to suit these models fairly well - large flat surfaces tend to suffer from "banding", depending on the alignment of the model in the printer, and these have no such surfaces, so the problem doesn't occur. On the other hand, it would be much easier to clean and sand such surfaces ...


    There are various suggestions for cleaning the surplus wax from the models - what worked for me was repeated runs through an ultrasonic cleaner, followed by brisk brushing with a toothbrush.

    I patched up the broken sides of the cattle wagon, with the fallback plan of hiding it under a tarpaulin (probably as carrying fruit) and started with it and a van for my first two. The main challenge with these models is constructing suitable underframe details. As I had made up a lot of 2-330 underframes for 4-plank opens and iron minks, all with single-sided brakes, I had plenty of spares to provide brake shoes, levers, v-hangers etc. The other two models, large cattle wagon and brake van, have a longer wheelbase, so will probably need brake gear from an 11 foot wheelbase chassis.

    There have been reports of painting difficulties for this material ("Frosted Ultra Detail", or "FUD"), indicating that the paint "never dries". There may be some justification for these reports, as I found the paint did seem very slow to dry, but it did dry eventually.

    My interpretation of the GWR livery timescale is that freight wagons switched from red to grey about 1904, and my layout is set around 1905, so nearly all my freight stock will be in the red livery. I am currently using Precision Paints buffer beam red to represent it, over a Halfords red primer, but will probably experiment with a few variations to represent older/faded wagons. Prior to 1904 (and the switch to grey livery?) when 25 inch "G" and "W" appeared, the lettering was 5 inch "G.W.R", which could be either painted on the side or on a cast plate. I prefer the cast plate approach, as it's fairly easy to represent with computer printing onto ordinary paper, but I am unclear on the background colour for it - my assumption was black, with white lettering, but the current edition of Great Western Way suggests that it was probably the same colour as the wagon side. A good reason to procrastinate a bit longer before finishing the wagons.

    Interior of the cattle wagons would be liberally lime-washed, the practice lasting until about Grouping, and some of this would have probably dribbled down the outside of the wagon.

    There will be a few challenges with the brake van - extra footboards for the underframe, handrails to add to the sides, and decision whether to use the existing body material (unpainted) as rather dirty windows or to cut out and glaze some proper windows.