Saturday Film Club:

This is what YouTube should be for*. Interesting long-form videos on subjects that appeal to me. This time, the NTM digs some proper monorails out of the cabinets for a proper look. 

*also cat videos.

Time to get organised

 

The bank holiday has prompted me to do some sorting out of stuff. If I'm honest, I've been very lax, there hasn't been the time to get stuck into organising my life, and my enthusiasm for personal admin hasn't really been there for the last few months. 

All this means, an ever-increasing pile of clutter and chaos. 

My starting point was to put a picture I bought in Lisbon on the wall. This meant modifying both the hook it would hang on, and the loop on the back of the Ikea frame. 

One job that had been bugging me done, and with the burst of enthusiasm this gave me, I turned my attention to a box of "stuff" I acquired over a year ago when helping to clear out someone's modelling shed. It's a mixed box containing bits and pieces, all of which are not properly put away, or thrown away. 

At the bottom of the box were lots and lots of 45mm gauge metal wheels. 

Which would be good news if I hadn't bought four axles-worth of metal wheels to fit to a couple of superb wagon kits I've built for Garden Rail. Sorting things out a week earlier would have saved me over 30 quid...

Four axles on my Volkswagen

 

Now, this is starting to look like a car. The front suspension is bolted to the chassis, and a great big aluminium spindle is fitted. This will hold the body to the chassis, and also holds something called a "servo saver". 

This appears to be a metal ring that absorbs some of the movement between the servo and steering. According to stuff I've read online, this should stop me stripping the gears in the servo with either excessive steering input, or bump steering when the car hits a lump. 

To be honest, I'm still a little fuzzy about the details, but I followed the assembly instructions, another three-handed job, and will have a look at it in operation. I'm sure it will make sense then.

Warehouse Wednesday: Pitt Rivers Museum

OK, this is a bit left-field, but it's my blog, and I really enjoyed visiting this place. Anyway, a museum is just a posh warehouse for old stuff. 

Finding myself with a rare mid-week day off, I remembered a post on a friend's social media. It showed dinosaurs, in a very interesting building. With nothing better planned, and determined to have a toy train-free day, I hopped on a train (real ones don't count) to Oxford. 

The first lesson is to learn what the building you are aiming for looks like. That way, you don't rely on Google maps, and end up going in the back entrance, having walked past the front a couple of times. 

Inside, I started with the main hall, a stunning, light and airy space full of skeletons, wickerwork diseases, and other exhibits. To be honest, it's all a bit too much to take in, and I'll need to visit a few times to get the best from it all. What I can say, is that my friend's post was accurate, and the place is amazing. 

One surprise is how much taxidermy there is. Cabinets full of birds, all grouped to explain the different types - not morbid at all, and very interesting. 

Of course, there are dinosaurs, and I've never lost my child-like fascination with these beasts. I remember visiting the Natural History Museum in London, which this closely resembles, many times to see Dippy. 

The other large hall houses the Ethnography and Archaeology collections - which starts with an apology that most of the exhibits are in the collection as a result of being "acquired" by colonialists who descended on countries that were considered undeveloped. 

There are objects from around the world in this one room. Model boats stuck in my mind - I have a better idea how to sail a Polynesian dugout canoe with outriggers than I did before - to costumes, including an Inuit coat made of seal intestine. Not something you find in Primark!

Again, there is far too much for a single visit, but it is an amazing space. 

Finally, there was a separate exhibition of Hiwian quilting. Beautiful work, with such fascinating stories. 

I wandered around for a couple of hours, and left feeling a little dazed. But in a good way. 

Amazingly, the entrance is free, although they do ask for donations. I was happy to give, and will do so again on my next visit. Five minutes stroll from Oxford city centre, it's easy to get to. 

Visit the museum website for more details. 

A few more photos on Flickr.

And yes, there was cake. Courgette and lime. Very nice it was too.

Adventures in SBR land

 

One day, maybe soon, I want to get my garden railway up and running. The track has been clamped together, and the next stage is to ballast. 

But, we have been there before, and it took a lot of messing around to keep things tidy. So much so that the line fell into disuse. 

So, it's time for a new plan. Out goes the pea gravel. It's too large anyway. In comes potting grit. 

The advantages of the smaller, less regular stones, is that they should lock together better, and stay put. 

However, there are plants overhanging the line, and cleaning up their mess is another challenge. You can't brush leaves and laburnum blossoms away without removing the ballast. 

In the smaller scales, we glue ballast down with a 50:50 mix of PVA and water. Outdoors, the PVA would be attacked by frost, so the recommended way to fix stones is with Styrene Butadiene Rubber (SBR). It's basically a PVA alternative where greater weatherproofing is required. 

Anyway, I was in Wickes, buying some plumbing stuff, when I spotted a big bottle of the stuff on the shelf. Filled with a spirit of experimentation, I bought it. A couple of weeks later, I filled the bottom of an ice cream tub with grit, and poured some on. 

Left for four days on the garden table, it's set pretty solid. I can turn it upside down, and nothing comes out. The cardboard tub doesn't flex any more. I'm pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to find time to ballast the track around the tunnel mouth, the one place where is really mustn't move, and see how I go, and how far 5 litres goes.

G3 AGM haul - and a near miss

 

Now, I really don't need any more model trains, but the law states that when going to a show, you have to buy something. So, I bought the cheapest thing on the second-hand stall - a brass bucket. 

It's a really nice brass bucket too. One I'm sure I can find a use for on a 16mm scale steam engine. 

However, it could have been so different. I mentioned that I deliberately arrived late. Had I been there when the doors opened, this would have given me a problem. 

A Gauge 3, coal-fired Garratt. The industrial one. And, I'm told it was a runner. 

For £1500

Fortunately, and unsurprisingly, it was sold before I saw it. This is a very good thing, as I would have mithered a lot about this model.  

Pros: 

• It's my favourite standard gauge prototype. 
• £1500 is not a lot of money, for a lot of loco.
  
• I'll never have the chance to own such a thing again, and you mainly regret the things you don't do, or so they say.
• While a little scruffy, it looked great. 
• Coal firing is fashionable, and I own a bag of suitable Welsh nuggets. 

Cons: 

1. £1500 is a lot of money, to me at least. An awful lot to lash out on a whim. It would more than cover my Isle of Man trip planned for later this year.
2. I have nowhere to run such a thing, and don't even know of a G3 line of any length. 
3. Coal firing is tricky. I struggled to get coal into the firebox of a real loco, scale the hole down, and I'm really going to struggle. 
4. If there is a problem with it, I don't really have the skills to fix anything serious. 
5. I have enough model trains. More than enough.  

I'm honestly not sure what I would have done. As it was, I was third in the queue behind the buyer, and someone else I know who has quite a collection already, so I was probably saved the pondering. But ponder I certainly would have...

Gauge 3 Society AGM 2025

 

I've been a regular at the G3 AGM for a few years - with my Garden Rail hat on. This year was supposed to be something a bit different, a parade of locomotives to celebrate Rail 200. Excellent, some loco po*n for the readers, and if we need Rail 200 content, easy material that other magazines aren't likely to pick up. 

I arrived at noon, with the aim of having a quick look around, it's not a big event, some lunch, and then digging out the camera for the cavalcade. 

All this changed when I got in and spotted Littlecliff-on-Sea. 

This stunning layout is only 17 feet long, and was built in six months!

The level of detail is extraordinary, so much so that  I abandoned ideas of lunch, for a full photoshoot, a decision I don't regret. With another photo session booked in 20 minutes away later that day, food was a couple of bags of crisps, but you simply don't get the chance to see layouts this good very often. Look out for a full feature, hopefully later this year. 

After that, there was the parade outside. I dutifully photographed and filmed everything, which will be turned into a GR feature and a BRMTV segment in the next couple of months. A really wide range of locos took their turn on the track, from Rocket to a Class 66. 

For a minority scale, it's amazing the variety of locomotives on display. Where they all come from is a mystery to me, but the turnout was impressive. 

Saturday Fim Club: A double-sided monorail

What a shame this never came into fruition - a great ride, and potentially, an interesting model too.

Eastbourne Models van

 

A new addition to my collection of modelshop commissioned railway vehicles - Eastbourne Models Hobbies & Collectors shop. 

According to Ramsay's, this is one of 4950, produced in 1981. That's a big run for a small shop. I wonder if they have any left on the shelf? 

I can ask, because I was pleasently surprised to discover from the shop website, they are still open! 

At three hours drive away, I can't nip in for a look around, but if I can find a reason to be in the area, I definitely will! If any blog reader is familiar with the shop, please tell me how hard I need to find a good reason...

Front suspension

 

Back to the Baja, and a job that really needs at least three hands - assembling the front suspension. 

It actually looks a lot like the real car - I remember lugging a front beam for my campervan across a field many years ago, and being glad I did when the one on the van broke!

The tricky bit of the job here is working out what goes where. There aren't that many parts, but they are handed. The question is, when something is marked "left upper", does it mean left sitting in the car, or from the front? 

After a bit of puzzling over the diagrams, which impressively show some very odd-shaped parts in perspective,  I managed to get it all together. Logically, the curved projections on the arms should hit the round bit in the middle, but making that happen took a while, and was the point where I needed three hands to juggle the pieces!

One mystery, how long does it take for the thread locker to work? I managed to fit the dampers the wrong way up initially, or the right way as the instructions tell you, but was able to take things apart within a few minutes. 

The Range superglue - not rubbish!

I'm a bit of a snob about superglue. 

While many people boast about using something from the local market that costs tuppence-ha'penny a gallon, I've always preferred to use "proper" modelling glues. Ideally, Zap Green, which I've always found to work really well, sticking quickly, and filling little gaps

Once you open glue, it starts to go off, and when I started a project for Garden Rail that needed superglue, I quickly discovered the bottle of Zap on the shelf had gone off. It was stringy, and the joins really weren't setting. 

Now, I think I have some spare in storage, but decided that as I needed to nip out to the local shops, I'd see what The Range had in stock. 

I picked up a few candidates, including, for a just over a pound each, their own brand stuff. "How bad can it be?" I reasoned. 

Actually, it does the job very well. 10 second stick is promised, and that seems to be delivered. 

Best of all, there is a brushable glue, handy for lots of jobs, and rarer than it should be. Even Zap don't seem to make it any more, which is a real pity. 

Am I converted? Not quite, but perhaps I'm now less of a snob. 

Stamford Haul

 

I stuck gold at Stamford. Rooting around a box where the second-hand stall were just looking for a few pence donations, there were some plastic trees in a bag. I didn't want the trees, but the bag is a flimsy, small Beatties carrier - properly rare as viturally all of them will have been thrown away. OK, you can say they are probably still all in landfill, and will be for thousands of years, but that's too depressing a thought, and anyway, I'm not going to dig through a rubbish dump looking...

As well as the bag, I also scored a couple of the branded Hornby wagons for less than a fiver each. Not bad for Sunday morning, when the locusts had already enjoyed picking through it for a day...

While digging, I found a few packets of plastic details - tools, pallets, sacks and barrels, that are worth grabbing for pennies as they are always useful. The Gem kit cost a pound - and reminded me of the days when these were marketed as "Pound Packs"

The Kibri bufferstop is a buried type that offers a variety from the Peco version. A couple of Monty's Models figures came from Rich Wilson's charity clearout, and I'll always add these to the people pot, as they are superb models.

Finally, a little box too cheap to warrant opening. I know of the old Graham Farish buildings made up of plastic boxes, covered with stickers, but I don't think I've ever had a go. Well, now I can. I wonder if our N gaugers want a couple of houses?

Stamford Show 2025

 

Vegan cake! I tried some vegan chocolate cake - and you know what? It was OK. I still had a sausage bap for lunch later in the day though. 

Aside from cakes without dead animals in them, Stamford show is one of those local events that punches above its weight each year, and so well worth a visit. The day dawned sunny, but as this was just another nice Sunday, after several others, the show wasn't clobbered numberswise as it had been last year when their doors opened on the first nice weekend of the year. 

Thos that did attend found an impressive selection of layouts. I'm not going to pretend that I took photos of all of them, or that I'm bringing you all that I took (some are hidden for mag usage), but quite a few things caught my eye. 

A Clyde "Puffer" seems to have found its way to Porthllechan. Nicely done, and the finicular (is that the correct term for a goods lift) worked well too. 

Megsdorf is another layout from Norman Raven, whose layouts I've photographed for BRM in the past. The loco here caught my eye as it's unusual, and I'm pretty sure I have a DJH kit to build it in my stash somewhere. No, I have no idea how that happened. 

St Judes bay is rather nice. We're talking to them about a fuller pagazine feature, but when that happens, I always take a few shots to remind me of the model. 

Market Deeping clubs own  layout, Corsham is a nicely done N gauge model, and this little corner appealed to me. I don't suppose I'm the only visitor to take a photo looking under the bridge!

Providence Colliery is another I'd have signed up for a shoot, but it turns out the owner is a friend of Tony Wright, so he's going to do this. It's local to him too, always a bonus. 

If you like novelty micro layouts, and I do, then Moor Boxes, by Kevin Staden is up your street. Over a dozen boxfile based N gauge layouts, each one different from the next, showcased the builder's imagination and ingenuity. Unlike a lot of novelties, the modelling wasn't bad either. Some ideas for a future Phil project perhaps?

Finally, the Kwai Bridge, built by James Spence. OK, it's novely, and the plastic plants are clever, if a little garish, but nice to see something very different at a show. 

Events like Stamford are my answer to those who only go to the larger events, because the little ones aren't worth the effort. Not every layout was amazing, but most were pretty good, and more than worth the cost of admission. Market Deeping also make great efforts to entertain youngsters and get them to sample our hobby. 

And the cakes are pretty good too.

Tony's Trains at the Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre

 

My local(ish) model shop, Tony's Trains, is celebraiting it's 10th birthday this year. To this end, Tony organised a small exhibition at the Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre. I was promised cake, and toy trains, and real ones, so of course I went along. 

The centre isn't somewhere I've ever been before, and getting in is a little fiddly until you work out you have to go through the cafe. First impressions are good, everything looks very professional, especially the historical displays. 

The show was in the loco shed, and consisted of half-a-dozen small layouts, a trade stand (Tony's Trains) and displays from Bachmann and Accurascale - he'd pulled in a few favours to get these two there. 

I enjoyed the  layouts, and have even booked one for a future magazine shoot. 

Outside though, well that's where the fun started. There is a nice little narrow gauge railway, which runs around a sensory garden. 

The trains always seemed to have passengers, who were enjoying the ride. Mind you, the weather was suited to open coaches, perhaps the would be less popular on a wet and windy day!

The other bit of fun was "Driver for a Fiver" in the line's Barclay shunter. 

OK, the site isn't large, and you only got to bat up and down twice, so the total running time would be 5 minutes, but this loco can shift! None of the drivers seemed to be taking prisoners, and Tony encouraged them to make use of the regulator. 

Of course I had a go - it would be rude not to after all, and the money was going to a good cause, keeping the centre open. 

And cake. Well, lunch actually. A tuna melt that is worth travelling for, and a wide selection of tempting cakes to follow. 

A cracking day out. I want to go back again, just to do the historical stuff on quarry railways. Well, that and try more cake of course!

Visit the Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre website for full details.

Saturday Film Club: The Never-Realised Story of the Class 38

I'm fascinated by locomotives that never were, and here's one that never was, in my lifetime!

Dyna-Drive

 

I was all mysterious about the Lima Western I bought in Monday's post. Well, here's the reason. I bought it for the guts of the model. Inside is a Dyna-Drive unit. 

For most people, the first they heard of this system would have been in MRJ No.18, December 1987. Page 275 saw the mag look at the basics. I remember a little later (can't be sure exactly when) seeing it being demonstrated by Formil engineering at York. We were there with our Thomas the Tank layout, and towards the end of the day, I borrowed a loco to try out on the continuous run. 

What a revalation. In those days, pancake motors were the order of the day. We'd heard of fancy foreign diesels with their central motors and quality engineering, but we were British godamit, and engineering cost money, so it was many years before such novelties appeared on these shores. 

This loco though, it had momentum. It accelerated and slowed smoothly. And with the lid off, we could see honking great big flywheels. I didn't want to give it back...

With the body off, we start working our way along the loco, begining with a motor. In this system, it doesn't need to be a good one, although this is. Smoothness is provides later in the drivetrain. 

Next, the black lump is a centrifugal clutch. As the system speeds up, this transfers drive to the big brass flywheel, and then when the motor is off, disconnects. 

The flywheel here is a single lump, providing much of the 700g weight. In turn, it's connected to a quality gear tower, albeit still driving 'orrible Lima pizza cutter wheels. 

So, when you turn the power on, the clutch slowly kicks in, spinning up the flywheel, and driving the model along. Obviously, it takes time for the flywheel to reach full speed, so the loco gradually speeds up. And when the power is shut off, the flywheel keeps the model moving, gradually slowing down. 

I don't have a layout to test this on, and the only one at the club available is evil DCC, so here's it running on a rolling road. 

All this from a H&M controller from the 1960s, but that was the point. You didn't need a good controller, the loco took care of the smooth stuff. You might need to throw it into reverse to slow down, but that was part of the fun. 

Sadly, Dyna-Drive never really took off. Part of the problem was the price. The clutch alone in 1987 was £14.90, so a complete system would cost at least a couple of Lima diesels, and then you had to assemble it. Some people did try, as this downloadable article from the DOGA website shows. 

Nowadays, DCC and better mechanisms in model locomotives, have removed the need for all this equipment. You can programme stuff, and then rely on an electronic stayalive to get you over dirty track, rather than half a killogramme of rotating metal. I suspect I was the only person in the hall at Briston, who knew what the excellent Janes Trains had on their stand, and the only one daft enough to hand over money for it.

But, I am a happy customer. This might have been a technological deadend, but it's a fascinating one. 

Lights on, in the June issue of BRM

 

 

With the Andy-shaped hole in our team very much evident, my role has changed a bit for the time being. My only practical in the June issue is a simple lighting up of a Peco station lamp kit. The job made a lot easier by using a pre-wired nano LED!

I'm concentraiting more on the layout photography for the moment, and have shot three in this issue. 

Starting with N gauge, we have Smalldale Quarry. 

And then we have two OO layouts. Kinlochewe: 

followed by Steeple Bumpleigh: 

On BRM TV, for subscribers, I've put together a video showing just a few highlights from the recent Bristol show. 

There's also a tribute to Andy, in both words and pictures. We miss him a lot, and it's going to take some time for normal service to be resumed.

BRM is available from all good newsagents, or our online store at: www.world-of-railways.co.uk

Warehouse Wednesday: Stephenson Lift Bridge

An interesting freature at the Mountsorrel and Rothley Community Heritage Centre. This bridge was designed to get the reailway over a canal, without blocking navigation. 

You can read the full history on the Centre website. 

I'll admit to being a little bemused by this when I saw it in real life, but having read up on it, what a fascinating device - and very modelable too. You wouldn't even need motors, if simplicity was the aim. Four cords running down under a baseboard, would do the job. Whatever you did though, this would be a crowd-pleaser on an exhibition layout.

Putting a damper on it

 

Time for an interesting job on the Sand Scorcher - making up the dampers. 

Each tube is filled, to a step made in the inside, with special oil, and the piston (made up earlier) shoved in, with excess oil wiped away. 

I'll be honest, I'm not convinced by all this. I did it twice to ensure that the dampers ended up as two identical pairs, but with no experience, how much damping should they do? 

I've done a little research, and these are considered old-fashioned, so long term I might find out what the current state of the art is, and replace them. 

As usual, everything bolts into place perfectly. Another tip I read while digging around, was to mount the dampers upside down, to stop the oil dripping out. Does this make sense (I ask, because I know there are people with experience of this sort of thing reading these words)? If I'm wrong, swapping them over won't take very long at least.