David Holman

May have said this before, but even so worth repeating. Fine details and big layouts don't always go together, but they do here!

Have used Alphagraphix kits many times as a basis for buildings. Rarely make them up as intended - the card is fairly thin - but all the printed details are great time savers. Personally not sure about ready to plant buildings. Firstly they are expensive, especially when home made card buildings effectively cost pennies. Second, while clearly very attractive, they do not give your layout any originality. Third and the key one for me, is that making your own buildings is the easiest way into scratch building. Tools needed are minimal - steel rule, pencil and craft knife. Assemble with PVA or uhu. Cereal packets are a free source of card, but an A1 sheet of mounting board is not expensive either. Start with something simple, that just has four sides and a roof. Nothing wrong with downloading brick paper, slate roof sheets etc to get something completed quickly, plus there are plenty of good books out there to get you started. Most of all you end up with a model that is uniquely yours and unlike locos and rolling stock, only has to sit there and look pretty. A few hours work is all that is needed for a simple building and you can spend what you've saved on something more difficult to make. Have fun.

Nice. VERY nice!

Same problem with Hattons A3 and A4. £750 is a decent price for RTR Pacific in 0 gauge, but eight coaches for it to haul will cost a couple of grand. That said, if you have ever made a coach, either kit or scratch, then you know how much work is involved, so £200 for a brass coach is actually good value.

The Really Useful Box Company have various sized offerings which are pretty robust and stack nicely too. I've also used A4 box files to good effect. A bit of work with card spacers, fixed with a hot glue gun is ok even for 7mm scale wagons. Plus you can get five of them in a large supermarket heavy duty carrier bag.

Subtle, understated, quality.

Looks like it will be a very fine model indeed.

Christmas Projects As mentioned previously, I like to have some modelling to do over Christmas, because [unless you lie Soaps or Reality TV] there ain't a lot going on the gogglebox. The first couple of pictures show some experiments with conifers. My thinking is Belmullet needs a few to act as wind breaks, not least around the turntable. The area looks pretty treeless on Google Earth, so a few planted trees won't come amiss. The ideas are straight out of Gordon's second book on trees and the models are built around some tapered dowel, with the structures made from either industrial floor cleaning pad or kitchen scouring pads. The latter, being thinner, are easier to work with, but unless you are a part time flamenco guitarist, your fingers will be sore afterwards! Basically you cut a series of circles, tease the material out, make a hole in the centre and then mount them on the dowel, fixing with PVA. The final touch is to use a puffer bottle to squirt on dark green, short, static fibres. Not entirely convinced and want to have a go with rubberised horse hair, which should give a less dense appearance, enabling the earlier versions to go at the back. The other two pictures show work so far on a Midland Great Western combined water tower and coal stage - the fortress type. It is based on a photo in Jonathan Beaumont's excellent book 'Rails to Achill Island' [p130]. There is also a nice engineer's drawing of a water tank earlier in the book. At first, I didn't realise how big it was going to be, but so far, it seems to fit the space I've allocated alright. The shell is foam board, covered with watercolour paper to eventually represent a rendered finish, as per Achill. However, it also needed a lot of brick reinforcing on the corners and around the door and window. This has been made using scribed DAS clay. The trick is to first put on a thin layer of PVA and then 'thumb' the DAS onto that to about 1mm thick. Leave to dry, then sand smooth before starting the scribing. Fiddly? you bet, but very satisfying and it means the mortar lines are easily carried around any corners. The tank is 80thou/2mm plastic sheet, though there is still a fair bit to add here, plus the sliding doors of course. Likewise the louvres on the round window are a pain to make in my experience, but it has come together nicely so far.

Whether an individual or combined effort, it looks the business!

As it is 12L, suggest not, JB. A fine looking model, with some very neat soldering too.

Excellent! One aspect of small layouts is being able to go to town on the details. In a big scene track is something n lost, but here it really matters. Hard to think those sleepers are copper clad and not wood.

A layout that is clearly very much enjoyed - exactly how it should be! Splendid stuff.

What's happening in February then???(:

Always nice to see updates on this splendid project.

Double slip to single Apart from being viewed from the opposite side, the main change in turning Arigna Town to Belmullet is the addition of an on scene branch, going to the harbour. This was intended to be reached via a single slip & though I commissioned said piece from Marcway, when it arrived, I found they'd actually built me a double. This was duly installed, but I must confess that I wasn't entirely happy with the scenario, for several reasons: A double slip isn't really necessary, as all the required moves can be covered by a single A double slip would require additional signals & though these would be ground signals, or even just point indicators, there isn't really the room to site them The tie bars on the double slip need a fair old shove to move them, something I was not convinced the servos I'm using would be up to on a long term basis. So, have been brooding on this for a while, until redemption appeared in the latest edition of Railway Modeller, where a full page advert for the new Peco Code 75 diamond crossing, double and single slips nicely showed the differences between a double and single. Looking at the Marcway track, it soon became apparent that its construction would make conversion fairly simple, not least because the point blades pivoted on ordinary rail joiners, so removing two pairs was a simple matter of unsoldering the blades from the tie bars and lifting them away. The other work involved cutting away the curved stock rail and then using it to make a new, angled stock rail instead. This was also helped by the short angled section itself being joined to adjacent parts by rail joiners. Finally, a long check rail was made and all the pieces soldered in place. The whole lot only took me about half an hour - which only goes to show that a bit of forward planning can actually pay dividends once in a while! I then spent another half hour tidying up the sleepers and also some of the wiring, where I can only think I was more interested in making sure there was power to the track, rather than the wiring looking neat as well. The ballasting took much longer and still requires more work. Never my favourite pastime, but one of those jobs that, for me, has to be done properly for the track to look right. Now that Christmas is coming up fast, I then decided I needed a project that could be worked on in the lounge, rather than the workshop, as the former might seem a bit anti-social over the festive period, while I will definitely need something to keep me amused while others in the house are watching the usual rubbish on offer on the TV... Hence the last picture shows the mock up I made this afternoon of a water tower & coal stage, based on the one shown on p130 of 'Rails to Achill', by JHB of this parish. It is made of foam board, the thick walls of the prototype meaning I've had to use double thickness. The plan is to cover it in water colour paper, to represent the rendered finish, with scribed DAS clay for the brick corners - hopefully a minimum of tools and a tray on my knees will be all I need.

Slightly unusual that the wooden wagon is a three plank? My impression is that Irish opens tended to have an even number of planks, while in Britain, they were mostly odd - 1, 3, 5, 7.

Baseboard 3 Generally, when I am building layouts, after doing general work like track laying and wiring, I like to concentrate on one board at a time. When I was working full time as a teacher/headteacher/leadership advisor, I used to reckon one 4' x 2' board would take me about a year to complete. Since retiring, things have speeded up a little, though my wife and I often wonder how we ever found time to go to work! Anyway, Baseboard 3 is the section holding the loco shed, turntable, distillery, signal box and harbour branch. The first three are all new models and required a fair bit of time. Since then, with the aid of a static grass machine and books by Gordon Gravett, scenic work has proceeded apace - including the addition of a Scot's pine. The latter is straight out of Gordon's second tree book [conifers], although I've used Woodlands Scenics conifer mesh instead of static grass fibres for the foliage. The idea is that the tree's somewhat open canopy will help hide the exit of the mainline into the fiddle yard. Most of the ground cover has been done now, except for the sub-board on which the loco shed sits. I want to enter this in my local club's competition, so it will not be fixed to the layout until the end of January. Final detailing will need to wait a bit too - adding figures and other small details, until I've been to the Stevenage show [with Fintonagh], in mid January, when hopefully I'll be able to buy some bits and pieces having missed the Reading Trade Show earlier this month. The next steps will be to improve the joint between baseboards 2 and 3 [bit of an earthquake crack at the moment], then get busy with the next board, a key feature of which will be the water tank and 'fortress' coal stage.

I believe he sold the boiler to a local laundry for £100, the tractor cost him £5! He did still have to convert it though.

Indeed, I like to offer a choice! Plus there is also Forbes bar outside the station. The common thread here being you only get an establishment named after you if you are dead...

Suggest the following: First, have a tidy up, no disrespect here, my model area gets like this too, so a clean up is always a good idea. Second, clean all track and wheels (meths, or lighter fluid better than anything abrasive), so stock runs well. Third, think about what you want from the layout. Eg, give a purpose to each siding, such as general goods, oil tanks, timber, minerals or whatever. With purpose for each siding, you can then make up an in coming train and shunt the wagons accordingly, with the outgoing train made up of wagons they are replacing. Having a card for each wagon that you can shuffle and draw out enough for each train can be fun too. Finally, allocate one siding just for sorting, otherwise everything will jam up very quickly.

Giles is rather good and a master of stage lighting, which is his day job. The lorry in the picture is radio controlled, one of several on his layout, along with working gantry cranes too. As for weathering, for anyone not sure, suggest the way forward is to use weathering powders. While they will need some sort of fixative spray, to prevent the effect being rubbed off by handling, in the short term, if you don't like it, then the weathering can be easily cleaned off with damp cotton buds.

Baseboard 3, with the loco shed, is pretty much blocked in now, though a fair bit of fine detailing remains however. Work over the last couple of days includes: Liberal use of chinchilla dust to create the cess alongside the tracks More chinchilla dust mixed with with Polyfilla to do the ground in front of the distillery Polyfilla, then fine scenic crumb and static grass to do the rest of the ground cover around the signal box and along the front edge of the baseboard. This afternoon, spent an enjoyable hour or so adding more fine crumb and postiche to create weeds and brambles on this new area. A five bar gate to separate the harbour branch from the station. This was mostly made from a mix of 100 x 60 and 80 x 60 micro strip. The main focus though has been turning to the trees. The scots pine - intended to help mask the exit to the fiddle yard - has been given two coats of bark mix [still needs at least one more], while four pieces of dowel have been tapered in the drill to make some conifer trunks. Two of these are underway, using Gordon's book on the subject, while my fingers are currently smarting from separating an industrial floor scouring pad into layers for the foliage.

Code 75 track and the low viewing angle really pays off in these photos. Well ballasted and weathered track certainly adds to the realism too. Nice one.

Slowly adding details and refining some of the scenics. I spend as much time staring at the layout from various angles as I do actually modelling, it seems! The long grass and weeds between the shed and the turntable have been given some brambles. Dead easy to do - a tuft of postiche, sprayed with fixative and then sprinkled with fine crumb is all that is needed. A few brambles have also grown up around the buffer stop by the shed. Have since given the ground around the signal box the static grass treatment too. There is a robust fence around the cabin now, it is recycled from Arigna's cattle dock, but seems to look the part. Meanwhile, the distillery building has been set into the ground and some more work done on the harbour branch track, including two gate posts - again ex Arigna, this time the level crossing. I see the harbour branch as a private siding, lightly laid, that is awaiting a working horse [!]. Lark and/or the G2 will cover the duties for now... You might also be able to spot the start of a scots pine. Straight out of the Gravett book on conifers, it is based on a piece of 12mm dowel and thin wire. More on this later, as it develops.

There is a one minute video from Peco on YouTube. Seems simple enough - there fixing points to glue to the underside of the TT and the motor is fixed to them. It's a stepper motor, supposed to be very quiet and operated by push to make switches, one for each direction. £65 - reasonable value, I suppose, though the Kitwood Hill motor was being sold for a tenner and the Freezinghall one about twenty.