Today on the WGLR

yb281 said:
so I built a new flatbed out of real wood and painted with preservative.
So where do the Durex Co. Ltd signs go? :bigsmile:
Okay, I know, they made bricks.
Still cracking stuff Mel, what do you do in your spare time? I wouldn't be able to keep up with this pace if paid! More power to your elbow :clap:
 
Excellent truck renovation, Mel.
One of those old Scammell 3-wheelers would really set the BR-period tone nicely, if they were available in a suitable scale (I remember my old Airfix kit!).

The expanding wagon collection is looking good too - are you approaching maximum storage capacity yet?!
 
First off. I love the ?market day? I cannot recall seeing it at full tilt before. It really has that total organized chaos feel about it that a working market has I could even smell it.

Second that Bedford looks great. When I looked at the GR item you mentioned it looked like a good option for your kind of inventiveness. Any chance of some before & during shots please.
ATB HMS
 
yb281 said:
Rhinochugger said:
yb281 said:
........... every item of stock in this short train has a different make of coupling.



Still, it's amazing what can be done with paper clips and short lengths of chain.

So is it any different to knotting sausages ? :rolf::rolf:
Yes mate, you don't need a pair of pliers for sausage knotting. :thumbup::thumbup:
Just fat sausage fingers....
 
oldoak said:
Second that Bedford looks great. When I looked at the GR item you mentioned it looked like a good option for your kind of inventiveness. Any chance of some before & during shots please.
ATB HMS
Many thanks. I seem to remember Ed telling me that this model is actually based on an Austin / Leyland design? The lorry behind it in the photo above is a Bedford, but that's built from an Emhar kit.

Anyhoo, I'm afraid I only took one photo of the renovation process and that was when it was in the primer stage.

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The first thing I did was to take it all apart by drilling out the 2 rivets that hold the cab in place, then I had to clean out the cab (and especially the glazing) where it had obviously spent a few years in a sand pit. I hacksawed the ends off the axles which allowed removal of the wheels and also allowed me to straighten the rear axle. The biggest problem with the cab was that one of the windscreen pillars was almost bent double where the roof had taken a proper hammering. In trying to straighten this, I broke the windscreen pillar, but I kept the 2 pieces, superglued them back together on a fillet of thin plasticard, straightened the cab roof and superglued the pillar back in place. As you can see from the photo, it turned out OK. The cab roof has still got a dent in it which I could have filled, but I think it makes it look as thought the lorry has seen some service.

Paint stripping was pretty labourious (I used old brake fluid), then (after a really good wash) it was primed and then painted before re-assembly.
 
Mel, whats the width of that Leyland cab?
I have got a red tipper triang lorry somewhere, if it the right scale you could have it for the postage
EDIT
Just went upstairs, it is not triang but a red steel bedford type by Wyn toy which I think was one of Woollies
This one is 5" wide see if I can get a pic
I expect that will work out to be too large a scale for you
 
Granitechops said:
Mel, whats the width of that Leyland cab?
I have got a red tipper triang lorry somewhere, if it the right scale you could have it for the postage
EDIT
Just went upstairs, it is not triang but a red steel bedford type by Wyn toy which I think was one of Woollies
This one is 5" wide see if I can get a pic
I expect that will work out to be too large a scale for you
PM sent.
 
Castle Halt has taken a bit of a beating recently, not that you could see it - having disappeared into a bit of a jungle. I decided that the main problem was trying to keep the 3 elements of the halt (fence, shelter and name board) all secured to the concrete block platform. So, I came up with the idea of gluing all 3 pieces together in one "lump" and therefore they all hold each other up.

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Meantime, back to Fred's rolling stock. I had originally intended to use all of them with my Accucraft wagons, but the cattle wagon and GWR horse box are a little smaller, so I tried them with my Hartland conversions (which I use most often) and they looked spot-on. As mentioned the other day, the only issue with this was the non compatibility of the chopper couplings I had fitted.

I wanted to couple the cattle wagon next to the loco (usual practice) so I fitted a loop made with brass rod, secured to the back of the buffer beam and fashioned into the shape of a hook and loop coupling so that engages with the loco coupling.

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I was given the choppers for this. I've no idea what make they are, but they work fine with the Accucraft version and are very floppy, so this one pushes out of the way when coupled to the hook and loop. The horse box has Accucraft couplings which include a hook, so I fitted a wire hook to the Hartland Cambrian Railways wagon and coupled them with some Bradbright chain. So now both of these vehicles can run with either the Hartlands and the Accucraft rake.

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Fred's cattle wagon is now fully loaded with calfs on a nice bed of straw (well, hay actually).

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Finally a few pics of the train showing how (hopefully) everything looks compatible behind No.4.

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Lovely looking cattle wagon Mel :bigsmile:
 
The desire to couple LGB type with chopper couplings is why I built my "converter" van. The chopper coupling fits with only the raised area on the headstock of the Hartland chassis (where you've put your hook) being filed off. I unintentionally put the coupling a fraction too high but it still works OK.
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flyingsignalman said:
The desire to couple LGB type with chopper couplings is why I built my "converter" van. The chopper coupling fits with only the raised area on the headstock of the Hartland chassis (where you've put your hook) being filed off. I unintentionally put the coupling a fraction too high but it still works OK.
Yes mate, I've got 2 converter wagons with much the same set up, a coal wagon for my Accucraft goods train and (yet another) horse box for the market day train featured a week ago. There's two reasons why I didn't do the same with the Hartland Cambrian wagon.
1 I didn't have a spare chopper coupling and
2 I wanted to keep the hoop coupling on the cambrian wagon so that I could continue to use it with the other Hartland stock.
 
Mel - some novel solutions there to coupling compatability :)

I absolutely adore No.4 and it's new paint scheme, she's lovely :) More more more please!
 
jameshilton said:
I absolutely adore No.4 and it's new paint scheme, she's lovely :) More more more please!
You and me both James. I was sat on the swing seat watching her trundle round yesterday and I thought to myself that taking the plunge and re-painting her was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
 
yb281 said:
flyingsignalman said:
The desire to couple LGB type with chopper couplings is why I built my "converter" van. The chopper coupling fits with only the raised area on the headstock of the Hartland chassis (where you've put your hook) being filed off. I unintentionally put the coupling a fraction too high but it still works OK.
Yes mate, I've got 2 converter wagons with much the same set up, a coal wagon for my Accucraft goods train and (yet another) horse box for the market day train featured a week ago. There's two reasons why I didn't do the same with the Hartland Cambrian wagon.
1 I didn't have a spare chopper coupling and
2 I wanted to keep the hoop coupling on the cambrian wagon so that I could continue to use it with the other Hartland stock.

Who would have thought that knotting sausages could be so complicated? :laugh::laugh::laugh:
 
One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while is to come up with some way of making decent looking ash ballast as seen in British engine shed and goods yard areas. I tried using sand fixed in place with dilute PVA and then painted with both poster paints and masonry paint once it had set. This looked pretty good ....... until the first really hard rain storm, after which it just looked like mucky sand while all the surrounding buildings were covered in black splashes of paint.

In the past I had covered a smallish area in ballast mixed with sand and poured a tin of old gloss paint over it. This took weeks to dry (luckily it didn't rain at that time), but it looked pretty good when it did. The only thing is I would need to find GALLONS of paint to do the interchange yard at Gooey and the standard gauge fiddle yard.

Then, last weekend, we were at a car boot sale and I managed to buy a tin of Wickes cement dye (black) for 50p. So this morning I made a mix of 3 parts sharp sand to 1 part cement, added the dye and plenty of water to make a really sloppy mix. I went for sharp sand as I didn't want the surface to be too smooth, but if you used ordinary builder's sand and smoothed it with a float, I reckon this method would be good for making tarmac.

I laid the sloppy mix and spread it out nice and smoothly, but instead of giving it a good final smooth, I ran the edge of the trowel over the surface lightly to rough it up a bit. After an hour or so, when the cement was still "green", I ran an old car over it to make some wheel tracks. Here are the results;

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I made a weighbridge outside the yard offices from a piece of Pola roofing with a wire netting safety barrier.

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I'm planning on getting a Modeltown coal yard building from Llanfair which will sit pretty much where the camera is here. The narrow gauge wagons sit on the "ramp" for convenient loading / unloading, either from lorries, or the standard gauge trucks behind.

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The ash ballast actually looks a lot rougher in the photos than it does in reality. Overall, I'm well chuffed with the way it's turned out. Just means I've got loads more to do now.
 
looks a bloody mess, get it tarmaced man!!:bigsmile::thumbup:
love it mell.. just right..
 
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