The Narrow Gauge One

[Tullygrainey]

This thread concerns my small O-16.5 narrow gauge industrial yard, 4ft x 2ft and part of a mineral line.

Among the things that sparked my interest in NG was a forum thread showing that, by applying some surgery and a change of scale to the humble Hornby 0-4-0 Pug, a 4mm saddletank engine could morph into a 7mm quarry loco. Then there was the stay in the Londonderry Arms Hotel in Carnlough with a chance to walk the old mineral railway line up from the harbour towards the quarries. More recently, rummaging around in the remnants of the iron ore workings above Cargan added to the mix.

Eventually I had a number of butchered modified ‘Smokey Joes’ in a drawer, all seeking a layout to run on. I imagined a quarry to quay scenario but extending the house out into the garden to accommodate it wasn’t an option. A smaller bit of the whole, with both quarry and quay off-scene, seemed more realistic - a yard where raw material arrives, is processed and despatched. And maybe a little NG passenger line slinking back and forward in the background?

What would the raw material  be? Limestone? ( Carnlough).  Iron Ore? (Cargan). Granite? (the Mournes though no railways involved there). Barley Sugar? (maybe not). At this point, conceptualising gave way to woodworking under the pressure to DO SOMETHING. Suffice to say that the question remains unresolved. On this layout, large chunks of  grey stuff arrive, are processed in a mill and depart as smaller chunks of grey stuff. And the layout still doesn’t have a name.

I’m starting this thread a bit late in the day since the layout is already fairly complete (I think we can all agree that no layout is ever truly ‘finished’). So, the pictures below show the state of play at the moment. I can talk further about how we got here if it’s of interest. Despite the influences, any resemblance to local prototypes is tenuous at best. 

Cheers, Alan

 

Meelmore brings stone from the quarries

 

[Galteemore]

Lovely work. Always enjoyed exploring the remains of these lines - nice to see this ‘imagineering’! 

[David Holman]

Superb buildings and scenery. The stock ain't half bad either - love that wooden wagon.

[Tullygrainey]

43 minutes ago, David Holman said:

love that wooden wagon.

Thank you David. Costa coffee stirrers

[jhb171achill]

This is a fascinating little layout. An excellent, original and unusual concept for such a thing. Like others, I am struck by the realism of the scenery. The whitewashed building with tin roof, and paint peeling off to show bare brick, with damp at the lower part of the walls, is particularly good. Also, the distressed look on anything wooden, be it buildings, supports for things outdoors, or rolling stock.

How did you do that whitewashed brick building?

The oul rusty portable diesel / oil engine? What's the origin of that?

[Mayner]

I like the use of different building materials from different periods, though my first thoughts were of the Welsh Narrow gauge places like Corris and Pendre Works on the Talyllyn very compact but a lot less uniform.

I like the simple self-contained? passenger line in the background in contrast to the more complicated shunting/shuffling movements around to loco shed and stone loading building.

I once operated a UK industrial Ironstone layout and sent out 'real stone' loads (Woodlands Scenic large ballast), challenging but great fun to operate at home and exhibitions

[murphaph]

This is spectacularly good. So much realism. The rusty corrugated roof is just spot on.

[Tullygrainey]

10 hours ago, jhb171achill said:

How did you do that whitewashed brick building?

The oul rusty portable diesel / oil engine? What's the origin of that?

Thanks JB, Most of the buildings are mounting card with embossed plastic cladding - brick, corrugated iron and stone from Slaters, Wills etc. Window frames are mostly card or paper stuck to clear plastic sheet. I use OHP laser print film for this. The engine shed is the one exception, being a balsa frame clad with coffee stirrers.

For me, weathering the buildings is the most enjoyable bit of the build but also the bit that often goes wrong! I never feel I'm quite in control of it . Still, most things are retrievable and with paint you can often just start again and there's a great sense of satisfaction when a building starts to 'live'.

To get the weathered whitewashed brick effect, I brush on a rough all-over coat of Titanium white artist's acrylic and then before it's quite hardened, use a fibreglass pencil to abrade the surface back to the the original colour in the relevant places. If you overdo it, you can always put more paint on and go again. The damp stains and rust marks are dry brushed on, again using artist's acrylics in suitably mixed shades of grot. I usually finish with a bit of weathering powder then a light dusting of acrylic matt varnish to seal everything. This also has the bonus of making the windows look in need of cleaning.

The yellow mill diesel is a Hornby 0-4-0 chassis with all the extraneous bits cut off and mounted underneath a scratch-built plastic card body. I'll post some pictures of the build for this and of some of the other oddities.

Regards, Alan

[Tullygrainey]

4 hours ago, Mayner said:

I like the use of different building materials from different periods, though my first thoughts were of the Welsh Narrow gauge places like Corris and Pendre Works on the Talyllyn very compact but a lot less uniform.

I like the simple self-contained? passenger line in the background in contrast to the more complicated shunting/shuffling movements around to loco shed and stone loading building.

I once operated a UK industrial Ironstone layout and sent out 'real stone' loads (Woodlands Scenic large ballast), challenging but great fun to operate at home and exhibitions

Many thanks Mayner. The Welsh slate quarry workings were certainly one of the influences for this. The passenger line is indeed self-contained. The shunting part of the layout is DCC but the passenger line is DC, controlled by a simple shuttle from BLOCKsignalling. It looks after itself at the back there, appearing and disappearing at regular intervals.

Your ironstone layout sounds interesting. I imagine real stone could be difficult to control

Cheers, Alan

[Patrick Davey]

Wow this is just superb - echoing everything said above and I love the small details such as the passenger line being on a slightly higher level and the stone/slate steps giving access with some rusted abandoned machinery beside!  Perfection!!!

Lots more please Alan!!!

[jhb171achill]

19 minutes ago, Patrick Davey said:Perfection!!!

Lots more please Alan!!!

Agreed!!

[Tullygrainey]

 

Ted is really making that sandwich last..

 

Mr & Mrs McQuillan wait for the 3.15 into town. He'll slip off to the bookies while she's at her mother's. That timetable is for the mainline, not this branch. And it's 5 years out of date..

 

Seen better days. Doubt if it'll start..

 

The toilet is hard to find around here.. and a disappointment when you do.

 

Is that Titanic's anchor chain?

 

[Tullygrainey]

14 hours ago, jhb171achill said:

The oul rusty portable diesel / oil engine? What's the origin of that?

Sorry JB, I think I misunderstood your question. The rusty mobile compressor is a white metal kit from S&D Models' Phoenix 43 range.

Alan

[scahalane]

Love this layout. Lots of stunning detail.

[Ironroad]

Excellent execution of an air of age and neglect with so many small details, simply fabulous

[David Holman]

It's the colours for me. A lovely muted palette, so subtle, so effective.

[Tullygrainey]

Thanks everyone for all the positive feedback. 

I have a fondness for modelling rusty metal (You guessed!) especially corrugated iron, so building this layout let me to do plenty of that. There’s endless variety to be had, from pristine - not a lot of that hereabouts - through peeling paint to heavy corrosion.

Halfords grey primer makes a good base coat, sometimes overcoated with Humbrol Metal Cote 27004 and polished a bit. I then use matt enamels, mostly Humbrol 70, 98, 100 & 110 with a bit of artist’s acrylic Raw Umber here and there and Humbrol weathering powder, Rust and Dk Brown. A stiff brush is useful for blending the colours on the surfaces and dusting weathering powder onto the wet paint adds texture as well as colour.

 

The mill building was my first experiment with using hairspray to produce a peeling paint effect. You may be familiar with the technique but if not...

First the base colour is applied (Halfords primer), then the rust colours are brushed on where needed, left to dry and then the whole thing coated with 3 or four generous layers of hair spray.

 

Next spray the top colour, in this case Humbrol acrylic Brunswick Green from a rattle can.

 

Finally, some warm water, an old toothbrush, a toothpick and some judicious scrubbing causes the hairspray to dissolve and lift the top coat.

 

I have a tendency towards making things too large in the first instance and the mill building eventually lost its top storey, like the station at Donaghadee 

Alan

 

 

 

[jhb171achill]

Excellent tutorial! The results are spectacular.

[2996 Victor]

Stunning work! And +1 on the tutorial - that's a brilliant technique.

Cheers,

Mark

[Tullygrainey]

Most of the buildings on this layout are mounting card shells covered with embossed plastic sheet but the workshop in the pics below is clad in scribed DAS modelling clay, a technique demonstrated to perfection by David Holman of this parish on his wonderful layouts. Thank you David for the inspiration.

Two things I learnt from this exercise:

1) Don’t skimp on the DAS. It doesn’t need much but I spread it too thinly in places with the result that the stones are too flat and 2-dimensional to look realistic.

2) Keep some photos to hand of the kind of masonry you’re trying to represent - not in order to slavishly copy it but to help keep you on track as regards shape and size when marking out and scribing. I found that it was very easy to end up with blocks having over-pointy corners, more like pillows than cut stone  Next one will be better!

 

This is one of the few buildings with any sort of internal detail but because of where it’s placed, you can’t really see into it 

Alan

 

[David Holman]

Looks pretty darned good to me! Sound advice too.

[Tullygrainey]

Apologies for the shaky camerawork

 

The locos here all started out as something else. Four are based on the Hornby 0-4-0 chassis, either with a new body or a hacked original, another started out as a Bachman Percy and there is an Electrotren 0-6-0 chassis powering a Smallbrook Studio resin body. All in all, the effect is diverse, idiosyncratic and a bit incoherent, partly because each one was a little learning exercise in itself and not necessarily related to the one before. I was more concerned with extending my modelling skills and exploring what was possible than reproducing a prototype or assembling a fleet.

This forum is full of fine examples of modelling which is historically and/or prototypically realistic and I have enormous respect for all of you who do that. It requires extra effort on every front to pursue that sort of accuracy and the results, however good (and there are wonderfully good things here),  are forever vulnerable to being held to account against the real thing. Fictitious flights of fancy are easier because there’s no reality to compare them unfavourably against. Or at least, excuses are easier to come by. 

So..., much as I love my disparate collection of motive power here, some prototypical accuracy probably wouldn’t go amiss and that ought to be a future project. But if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that this is some hitherto unknown corner of the North Antrim mineral industry, what sort of locos? Answers on a postcard... 

 

[jhb171achill]

1 hour ago, Tullygrainey said:

Apologies for the shaky camerawork

The locos here all started out as something else. Four are based on the Hornby 0-4-0 chassis, either with a new body or a hacked original, another started out as a Bachman Percy and there is an Electrotren 0-6-0 chassis powering a Smallbrook Studio resin body. All in all, the effect is diverse, idiosyncratic and a bit incoherent, partly because each one was a little learning exercise in itself and not necessarily related to the one before. I was more concerned with extending my modelling skills and exploring what was possible than reproducing a prototype or assembling a fleet.

This forum is full of fine examples of modelling which is historically and/or prototypically realistic and I have enormous respect for all of you who do that. It requires extra effort on every front to pursue that sort of accuracy and the results, however good (and there are wonderfully good things here),  are forever vulnerable to being held to account against the real thing. Fictitious flights of fancy are easier because there’s no reality to compare them unfavourably against. Or at least, excuses are easier to come by. 

So..., much as I love my disparate collection of motive power here, some prototypical accuracy probably wouldn’t go amiss and that ought to be a future project. But if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that this is some hitherto unknown corner of the North Antrim mineral industry, what sort of locos? Answers on a postcard... 

 

The sort of thing you've so expertly depicted could, if it really existed, have had just about any of those locos. Doubltess some sort of off-the-shelf Simplex would be high on the list. If steam, a little Peckett like the Larne Aluminium Works one.

[Tullygrainey]

Thanks JB, that's helpful. I like the idea of the Peckett and there's one in Cultra to be pored over, just down the road from me. I have to say I've never seen such a patched smokebox!

 

[David Holman]

Have long thought that 0n16.5 is a great way into scratchbuilding and it certainly got me going. Plenty of cheap chassis available for mechanisms (which run better too in the larger scale), while hacking bits of bodywork and adding things like a new cab or taller chimney are easy to do.

 Such models may be at the freelance end of the scale, but you learn a lot and techniques soon become refined enough to enable having a go at something closer to a particular prototype, or indeed building a loco kit.

 Most of all, it can be good fun and you end up with a fleet of individual models that do not come out of a box, but still look good and work well as Tullygrainy has shown here.

[Tullygrainey]

Some activity at the narrow gauge stone yard, somewhere in County Down/Antrim. Locomotives at work, including a recently arrived Peckett, already earning its keep bringing stone from the quarries and shuttling empties back.

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Tullygrainey
typo

[jhb171achill]

6 minutes ago, Tullygrainey said:

Some activity at the narrow gauge stone yard, somewhere in County Down/Antrim. Locomotives at work, including a recently arrived Peckett, already earning its keep bringing stone from the quarries and shuttling empties back.

 

 

OUTSTANDING stuff!!!

Edited September 7, 2023 by jhb171achill

[Tullygrainey]

Whoops. Sorry JB, not sure what's wrong. It's playing ok for me but that doesn't mean anything. It's an mp4 file

[Tullygrainey]

8 minutes ago, jhb171achill said:

OUTSTANDING stuff!!!

Ah, working now I think  

Thank you. The little Peckett runs like a sewing machine. I'm well pleased with it

[Flying Snail]

Its a fabulous scene, and the Peckett really looks at home there!

[jhb171achill]

1 hour ago, Tullygrainey said:

Whoops. Sorry JB, not sure what's wrong. It's playing ok for me but that doesn't mean anything. It's an mp4 file

It worked on a different computer, so was able to see it!

[Patrick Davey]

Simply sensational - jaw dropping stuff!!!

[Galteemore]

Fabulous. Could easily be Larne Aluminium or Carnlough Limestone

[David Holman]

Great to see the new loco at work!

[Murph]

Looks fantastic great work