September 2019 meeting

On a lovely sunny day, Alisdair, Simon, Graham, Andy and Alistair met at Jim's house in Biggar for a session aimed at getting Sauchenford ready for its next and possibly last outing (Model Rail Scotland in February).

The layout and its support structure are stored on the west and east coasts of Scotland respectively, and the legs had been altered since last time we erected the layout, so this was a chance to check that the support was adequate and could be quickly erected.

The support is in two parts and is based on Dexion angle rescued by Andy from a skip, with wooden legs which fold more or less flush for transit. In fact there are two sets of legs, a shorter set for working on the layout and a longer set for shows. Today the shorter set was in place. Bolts with wing nuts are used to hold everything up. First the legs were swung out and secured on the two sections:

Next they were bolted together (the Dexion makes it easy to shorten or lengthen the platform as required): 

With the support ready, the fiddle yards were brought out - they are now stored for transit with their modesty boards bolted in place - and the two parts separated:

and finally the scenic section was placed between them:

So far so good, and we moved on to discuss progress with personal projects.

Jim, as usual, has not been idle in the past month, and had a couple of interesting new etches for us to look at. One is a track cleaner etch imitating his hand-filed version, developed as a result of a discussion on RMWeb:

The tool is designed to burnish the track rather than abrade it, so it does not really wear much in use, nor is the track damaged. On the other hand, it is very good at removing gobs of glue or ballast which has stuck to the rail side ... and it can be used through crossings without removing the paint from check and wing rail surfaces. A handy little thing.

Another novelty was a new version of his signal wire pulley stakes, this time designed so that mere mortals might have a chance of assembling it. The etch is designed as two halves which fold over into alignment, to be sweated together.

Simon has been progressing with his LNER 10T fish van fleet, from Foxhunter body kits, and had brought the proof to show us.

He had made a nifty tool to thin the van roofs to something nearer to scale: a piece of wooden dowel of roughly the right diameter with wet-and-dry paper secured to it, to make a large round sanding stick:

All this description of modelling activity was quite stressful for the Edinburgh contingent, so we stopped for a spot of lunch in the sunshine.

Once we had polished off the ham sandwiches and hot soup (in spite of the sun and 20-degree heat, pullovers and jackets were sported: warm days are treated with suspicion north of the Border), we were joined by Mick Simpson, who had wangled an afternoon off from grandparenting, and we went back indoors for the Short Talk. This time we were to hear about scenic techniques for grass, trees and bushes, from Jim who is in the process of working up the scenery on Kirkallanmuir (which, as a reminder, is his home layout based on a Clydesdale mining village set in Caledonian days).

Jim has formed the scenic areas of the layout from a shell of expanded polystyrene profile blocks at intervals, covered with strips of newspaper and a mush of chopped-up cardboard egg-boxes, covered with a base layer of green paint. Grass is added using the often-described static applicator technique - it was nonetheless instructive to see it demonstrated.

The area to be grassed is masked off with pages from the Lanark Gazette:

The applicator was bought commercially but looks suspiciously like a combination of an electric fly-swatter and a metal kitchen sieve. Jim didn't mention specifically where he'd obtained his, but a similar-looking one is available on eBay at a price which makes it hardly worth the trouble of building your own. The earth wire is secured to a nearby part of the layout with a drawing pin, and the sieve is filled with a small amount of 2mm grass fibres.

Next, a quick squirt of cheap sticky hairspray is applied to the masked area:

and the sieve is gently shaken to distribute the fibres. It takes a minute or two to shake even a small amount of fibres onto the layout, and they need to be applied quite densely.

 Jim follows the initial 2mm fibre application with 1mm fibres, and also varies the colours, finishing with "patchy dead grass". An internet search (or a browse of the scenic stalls at shows) will reveal plenty of suppliers and colour choices.

Next Jim moved on to discuss trees. In his garden can be found a few Sedum plants, commonly known as stonecrop.

The dead heads of these can be harvested in winter and dried:

then the flowers can be detached, leaving thin twigs which form the basis for model trees. On their own, the heads may be a little sparse, so extra "branches" can be inserted by carefully slitting a twig with a scalpel and opening out slightly with a small screwdriver before splicing in another twig, fixing it with white PVA. If the lower trunk is not thick enough, fine wire can be added to bulk it out.

The bare structure can now be planted on the layout in holes made by a screwdriver or piece of stiff wire. It's better to plan ahead to build woodland areas entirely from expanded-polystyrene blocks since this holds the tree in place much better than a thin skin scenic skin.

The base of the tree is given a light coat of dried tea-leaves harvested from a used teabag:

Next, PVA is dabbed onto the branches, then little tufts of foliage (Jim uses Woodland Scenics foliage net in Light Green and Dark Green shades) are added one by one to give a convincing cover.

Bushes can be created using little pieces of lichen harvested from trees (Jim picked his up when visiting the wets coast of Scotland). These are sprayed with hairspray, dipped in old-fashioned scenic flock powder, then added to the layout.

The end result is pretty convincing and, once completed across the whole layout, should make Kirkallanmuir a poster-child for climate change activism. Oh, wait, it's a colliery layout. Never mind ...

After that scenic tour-de-force we returned to Sauchenford, cleaning the track and testing stock.

We started with out-of-the-box conversions of Dapol Type 2 diesels before moving to shorter-wheelbase locos:

Quite a long day but we got through a lot. Another testing session will take place at next month's meeting, which will be in Edinburgh. Thanks from all of us to Jim for his hospitality and scenic musings.

August 2019 meeting

Summer holidays and a spate of SWMBO orders reduced our strength for this month's meeting. Jim, Andy, and Graham met at Simon's house in the douce Southside of Glasgow. Roy of the Grampian area group also dropped in to collect a second footbridge for "Dunallander" from Jim, but there are no photos due to Andy's wee detour through the wrong suburb of Glasgow on our way to the meeting. No matter, Jim has written it all up on RMWeb. Dunallander itself, now looking very impressive with Mike Rasmussen's buildings, will make its first public appearance at the forthcoming Aberdeen show at the end of October.

By the time we'd finished our first cup of coffee it was almost noon, so ... bacon rolls (with Southside tomato slices) and cake came out. After we'd polished that off we staggered up two flights of stairs to the Railway Room.

Simon is now getting into his stride with his vision for a 2mm West Highland Mallaig Extension empire. He's planned this as a series of modules with standard interfaces between baseboards, with Mallaig terminus at one end and a fiddle yard at the other, with the potential for different elements to be extracted and exhibited. The concept sketch looks a wee bit like it saw the light of day after a heavy session in the pub rather than an Iain Rice-style reverie. Simon's not saying ...

The Glenfinnan station board has been partly completed, using 4mm poplar and eucalyptus ply procured from a local timber merchant rather than a DIY shed. This has been used with softwood-block spacers to form the side beams of the board, with a ply skin added below rather on top of the boards. The trackbed will be a separate shaped piece of ply on risers, with lightweight scenic infill. The cross-bracing pieces slot into further softwood blocks which have a 4mm slot routed into them - a nice, neat job which makes for a very tidy appearance. The only difficulty encountered in construction was finding enough clamps to hold the whole lot together.

A Templot plan has been produced on top of scans of original large-scale plans from the ever-helpful National Records of Scotland; this has been used to produce the track profile boards. It looks rather impressive with a decent length train in position. None of us had realised that the prototype platforms at Glenfinnan are so short! Outside of summer, passenger loadings would rarely have reached this length, although the present-day "Jacobite" steam train comprises 5 or 6 B.R. Mk1's as far as I recall.

The next board to be built will be Glenfinnan Viaduct, to scale ... the scope for Harry Potter jokes and red-liveried Halls will no doubt keep future blogs well supplied with material.

Simon is also progressing with point construction, on a separate Templot plan copy taped to a small board. The Laurie Adams chairs are currently the cause of much effort and we discussed recent progress on tools to speed this up.

Jim had brought his Jubilee tank project with him so we could see progress. The chassis has all the compensation beams in place and looked impressive. (The front axle is a temporary one to keep the beams from becoming distorted through handling). It turns smoothly driven by a pin-chuck turning the motor axle, and under battery DC power. The loco will be controlled by a CT DCX76z DCC chip with keep-alive capacitors. The next stage in construction is to add the exterior cosmetic frames.

Jim spent his time working on the keep-alive capacitor unit, made up of surface-mount components. Andy meantime was repairing a point tiebar on his test-track, and Graham was working on the bodies for a batch of LNER fish vans (the things that look like chocolate bars in the plastic tub).

The next meeting will be in at Jim's in Biggar on 21 September (later in the month than usual), with plans to work on Sauchenford ahead of its intended exposure at Model Rail in Glasgow next February.

July 2019 meeting

Our July meeting took place a week earlier than usual. Andy, Jim, Alisdair and Alistair met at Graham's house in Edinburgh. One subject of discussion was last weekend's Perth exhibition put on by the Scottish Model Engineering Trust, where the FCAG (pictured, Jim and Nigel) manned the 2mmSA's Further North roadshow.

 

Thanks to the Perth club for inviting us. We enjoyed the show which had a subtly different flavour this year, with a diverse range of prototypes and scales and a consistent standard of layouts.

But back to our July meeting. The Short Talk was by Jim, expounding on how to file up turnout switches and crossings with jigs. Or at least, that was his original intention, but he ended up talking us through the whole Watt Way of turnout construction.

Jim has written up his methods extensively in the 2mmSA magazine, and the Association's Track book (available to non-members for online purchase here) is another valuable reference. I won't give more than a summary here. It's well worth reading (or re-reading) Jim's articles mentioned below. (The magazine archive is available to Association members on a USB stick as part P-109 from Shop 1).

Jim models late-1890s Caledonian Railway practice, so bullhead rail, interlaced timbering and loose-heeled switches are the order of the day. His article in the August 2012 magazine covered the construction process. He lays out the turnout on a Templot plan, starting with the four interlaced sleepers in each road of the crossing which carry the crossing itself and the check rails. The tip of the crossing's point rail must sit on a main road timber so this is positioned first, then the others added. Next, the two close-spaced timbers which anchor the switches (at the opposite end of the closure rails from the crossing) are positioned. Then interlaced timbers are laid by eye between these two, starting with a sleeper on the main road and proceeding towards the crossing. (Templot can produce a template showing these by shoving timbers, but this lengthy process is not really necessary in 2mm scale).

The switch rails are aligned with the closure rails with little fishplates made from copper shim, bent into a "U" formed in a jig (slot sawed in a piece of brass strip of rail thickness). The fishplate must be no longer than the space between two sleepers. It is threaded onto the switch rail and squeezed gently into the rail web using tweezers, then slid along so it projects half-way off the rail end and soldered. The fishplate can then be slipped onto the closure rail, but is not soldered: it is prevented from falling out by the tiebar mechanism which holds the switch rails in place vertically and horizontally.

Jim's tiebar design was written up in the December 2008 magazine. The tiebar is formed in two parts from wire bent up in a small jig made from a sandwich of three brass plates, one with sawcuts of precise widths and depths to receive the wire at various stages of bending, the other two on either side to stop the wire moving from a vertical plane. Very easy to make with hand tools and very effective. We were shown the jig and the wires.

 

Once installed the tiebar looks very neat, and the arrangements under the baseboard are equally straightforward. In his demonstration model shown here Jim deliberately left the through-baseboard pivot exposed so it can be seen, but on a layout this would be hidden by a ballasted slip of paper with a slit for the wires, which then look very much like a prototype tiebar.

Jim also described his memory wire point actuators, which have the advantage of silent operation compared to solenoids or servos. The February 2013 magazine gives further details. 

Switch rails and crossing point and splice rails are filed up from bullhead rail using a Geoff Jones hinge jig. Jim described how he made the 0.030" brass profile plates in the August 2012 magazine. The hinge is steel. He showed us the jig.

Jim's original ballast recipe was 1:1:3 Cascamite:Plaster-of-Paris:fine sand, with poster paint added for colouring. There was some doubt whether Cascamite (a powdered-resin wood glue) is still available, but a quick check on trhe Internet shows several sources online. More recently Jim has used crushed cat litter. If this is done carefully, the cat can be straightened out and re-used.

At that point we paused for a feed. Bacon rolls, cake, tea and coffee were consumed, then it was back to work. Andy was fiddling with wagons on his test track while Jim progressed with the second footbridge for the Grampian area group's Dunallander layout - he received the bridge columns at the Perth show from Roy Bremner, fresh from his lathe. Turning the thin columns required a bit of experimentation but ultimately Roy got the knack of it.

Alisdair was working on adjusting the Electra couplings on his stock for consistent operation, so had brought along his portable test-track/cameo Aye for that purpose. The two parts bolt together for transit:

then are separated: 

and joined using flight-case over-centre catches. Very neat.

 

After much tweaking of couplings and noting down of wagon numbers "Not to Go" with defects, Alisdair pronounced himself satisfied. The loco assigned to the coupling test duty was his Caley "Jumbo", 57232:

Graham contemplated his LNER fish van chassis collection, which has been growing at the rate of three or four chassis a month. At some point, buffers, wheels, couplings and paint will be required. And the bodies (Foxhunter kits) of course!

The August meeting will probably be in the West, with details to be sent out by Alisdair as usual once venue and date are confirmed.