Northroader

Ticks all the boxes.

If you’re after ideas for a small industrial layout, you can do something boxfile size, which keep costs right down, trackwork and rolling stock, but give you some operating fun, until you want to upsize, or maybe build another. Useful ideas in here: https://micromodelrailwaydispatch.com A good example by a fine modeller on this site:

It’s nice in the engine room of one of those when it’s going top lick. Besides the engines, you’ve got stuff like cardan shafts rattling round. Reminds me, my hearing aid batteries are getting down.

Well, thank you for that, such a long time ago now. Me, expurgated in a model book! It did go quite well, I suppose the weak link was the sector table, my attempt to save space on the runaround. They could be found in real railway usage, in practice I found the sliding end made it very stiff to move with a loco sitting on top. The other drawback was really you needed to line the table up with whichever road you were shunting on, or sooner or later you’d get a wagon down in the pit. I moved on to a traverser table, three roads on the table which slid under the platform on one side or the other, so the pit was always covered. The table being mounted on a couple of drawer runners facing upwards, the ball runners making for a really smooth operation. The whole lot had.quite tidy, believable look. These days I seem to moved towards “off stage” runrounds, even shorter layouts.

OK, give me a bit of time to fix some wiring in, and you’re on. No DCC here, mind, we’re Primitive Fundamentalists.

Hours running, five minutes shunting, (and that’s it) and an hour back. Good use of your time? Still ,you’re quite welcome, it’s all in a state of flux at present. (It always is, though) Do you ever get to the place in Gloucester? Maybe call by then.

There’s a bit more been done on the line. I wanted to join the station unit of the baseboard to the fiddle yard piece, to get something that’s well aligned and giving a flat surface. The two units dimensions were off what you could do with a single sheet of foamboard, but Ive been splicing it to get a better single unit. I’m in my eighties, and building baseboards from 10mm foamboard suits me fine, as all I need is a Stanley knife and a pot of PVAbond, so I can go on kicking the can down the road for a bit longer. The layout is in an unheated extension to the house, so there’s a close season approaching when you need to bring the PVAbond into the warm house, and stop gluing over the winter months. So here’s a sketch of the layout size now, and what the underside splice looks like: It’s a bit shorter than it was, the two tracks in the station cut back a bit. The layout is faced with some 4mm ply, and there’s ply pads where the screws go through to attach the backscene support. The tracks in the station are laid on 4mm cork tiles, and the cassette has a 4mm ply base, so it all lines up. The tracks are stuck down with some Evostik. There’s stiffening strips along the sides of the cassette, and a hook screwed into each corner to help handling it. Here’s some views, with a closeup of the join, with a track gauge. Now I just need to make something with wheels to go on it.

My only bogie coach was done with a hardwood roof and the coach weighs far more than it should. Balsa sounds a sensible approach, would it have helped to face it with a few layers of paper to get a smooth run? Anyways up, the sides look good, and the paint job is lovely. Glad to hear the bogies contributed to the success. Me, I’m sticking to four and six wheelers.

https://m.ok.ru/video/1583025359470

They were Alco built in America for British Steel at Margam in South Wales.

Bob, pay more attention.

You’ll be needing another track on the front of your diorama then?

Put “NCC” on the tender, and folks will be none the wiser.

You are reaching true enlightenment.

Cooking foil does it for me.

I’ve heard of Cheops, which dysentery was Maslow?

I’d be inclined to ditch the right hand crossover, just a straight entry into the back siding from the fiddle yard through just one point out of the loop? On due consideration, you would lose the private siding aspect, so maybe not, perhaps something like Ruyton Road, plus the engine shed? https://www.rmweb.co.uk/forums/topic/154530-ruyton-road-revisited-what-to-do-with-an-old-classic/ sorry, I always think Iain Rice added at least one more point than necessary, now that Whitley could lose a siding, and keep it all compact and less points, and… (why don’t you just shut up, Bob?)

And you can get close ups in colour of the old green scheme here.

You could get the blue and red on Mark 1s as well. The story goes there was this derailment up Ebbw Vale steel works. Some 100ton bogie oil tanks broke loose and went out of the end of the siding. They were loaded with 3500’ oil which was being warmed up for discharge, and one of the pipes underneath got knocked off, and all the b***** oil ran out and set. When it’s cold it’s thicker than tar, very black and very sticky. There was a blizzard going on, so it got covered in snow. The breakdown gang got the tanks back on the line, by which time oilskins, boots, were completely f*****, and the inside of the two coaches (old bow ends) ruined. so we got two mark ones in the wagon shop, strip out, mess, riding, tool, and packing store conversion. No drawings, you just wing it. To finish off we just painted out the grey upper panels, and did them red, as an arty hand book “the corporate image of BR” said that was the scheme for service vehicles. Once they were seen out and about at Canton the people at Derby Tech centre complained we had taken their livery, and we should have done them plain red, but red and blue was how they stayed.

Very good pieces of research, well done.

Sorry to see Brookhall Mill go, I think it appealed to me for its compact nature, and also you captured a very GNR look to the scene. Also admire your confidence of setting a timetable for your modelling, and on your capable output it looks quite achievable. NCC narrow gauge here we come!

No real engineering tolerances here, it’s really what you can lay your hands on at a show. Pick up a bit of rod, or small tube, and slide it in and out of a bigger piece, trying not to have a suggestive leer as you’re doing it, to find a sliding fit, not force. I think the rod in the picture was Slaters .050” brass, and the tube is around 3mm outside diameter, but do check the fit. The rod ends up slighted cocked over, with rounded end, and will transfer the electrics as well, which will simplify the job.

I like using cork tiles 3mm thick, a foot square, with an adhesive back. They come from Wickes builders merchants. I think the EU has a thing about cork products, they’re not so common these days. At board joins the track is soldered onto a wide piece of copper clad glass fibre strip, with a securing screw in the middle (where the cladding is filed away.) There’s a thin ply packing strip underneath to make up the level with the cork underlay. If the track is fixed securely at both ends of the board like this, you must allow for expansion due to temperature change along the track, somewhere along its length on the board. The track locates across the join using lengths of brass tube soldered on the outside of the rail web, with a brass rod having a sliding fit in the tube soldered inside the tubes on one side or the other of the join. (there’s no securing screw in the picture, as the track is glued down on a 10mm foamboard baseboard)

I would be inclined to hang my hat on the backscene. Those big grey hills shrouded in cloud, a stretch of calm sea, a rocky foreshore with some drystone walls, just like what appears in your photographs. Have that behind, and folks will say that’s Fenit, however you juggle the trackwork. Keep it simple, bare minimum for what you want to operate, don’t worry too much about how long things are on the full size job, and how many sidings there should be.

Presume your models are 00, 4mm scale, 16.5mm gauge? Had a look through here for ideas? https://micromodelrailwaydispatch.com (Maybe an Irish take on Portmahomack, issue 3?)