A word about Scratchbuiding

I’m pretty certain that many railway modellers are put off the thought of scratch building wagons and locomotives because they think its too difficult. I know I was for many a year. It wasn’t until I started in Gn15 that I took up scratch building seriously.

I have to admit my fears were unfounded. It is a lot easier than I ever expected to be. Gn15 is a great scale to begin your scratch building as the parts you are going to model are big. Not hugely big. But a nice easy size to see and cut and hold.

Planning ahead is highly recommended. Research your prototype. Find photographs and drawings work out what size the parts of your model need to be. Try to think how it might go together. It will all help in the long run.

The important think to remember is to make the job as easy as possible for yourself. If your wagon underframe calls for some styrene 6.4mm wide, go out and buy some, don’t try to cut it exactly. You will need several pieces for a wagon so go to your local hobby shop and get some 6.4mm styrene strip and while you’re at it get any other bits of styrene you might need too. Styrene strip isn’t expensive, it will last you quite a while and your models will look better for having been made of materials that are consistently accurately sized.

Accurate cutting is the key. If your parts are cut accurately then they will go together accurately and the model will assemble easily. An invaluable aid to accurate cutting, to my mind, is the Northwest Shortlines “Chopper” there are three different types available . I used number two. The chopper is basically a guillotine for cutting styrene and wood. You can set a stop for the length of material you require. Butt your material up to the stop and chop away. Need 20 pieces 12.5mm long? No problem. Set the stop to 12.5mm and chop away. Every piece is the correct size.

Perhaps you might also consider a binocular magnifier of some sort. Anything to make the job easier. Half a millimeter is pretty easy to find on a ruler but one heck of a lot easier with a binocular magnifier. What about if you want a quarter of a mil or three-quarters? Darn sight easier with a binocular magnifier. Suppose you work in “old money” (thats inches) you need 19/24ths of an inch. Really easy to count all those tiny lines on a ruler with a magnifier. Not everyone uses one. But I think they make the job a lot easier.

There you go the keys to scratchbuilding.

1. Planning, and

2. Accurate cutting of the parts

Really there’s not much more to it than that, there really isn’t. Its exactly the same procedures I adopt for my T scale models. If it works in T and it works for G then it must be right.

Heywood wagons

A selection of Heywood wagons all made around the Bachamnn "troublesome truck" chassis

Spurred on by the success of the construction of “Effie” I decided to make a train for her to haul. The Mark Smithers book comes with a full selection of drawings for pretty much all of Sir Arthurs’ stock. So reserach was not a problem. Plenty of plans, plenty of photographs. Easy, peasy lemon squeezy…

The donor chassis for these wagons was the “Troublesome truck” from the Bachmann “Thomas the Tank Engine” range Basically its a standard RCH (Railway Clearing House) design coal wagon. Whose wheelbase when scaled up to 1/2″ scale is so close to the wheelbase of the later Heywood design it’s scary. I’ve bought a good half dozen of these wagons and converted them all to Gn15 Heywood wagons.

Construction of these held no real problems. The Bachmann truck body was thrown away. Meeting a not dissimilar fate to the troublesome trucks in the Thomas the tank engine story. Then a new floor and underframe was added out of styrene. The wagon bodies, (that were removable on the prototype and also my models,) were  made from styrene with handles from bent up from paperclips. Surprisingly my construction methods were so accurate that each body will fit on any chassis.

The end vehicle in the photo, the Duffield Bank Brake, is pretty much the same as the other wagons. The body is just a bit more complex but it’s still just sections of styrene sheet and strip cut to size and stuck together. To be honest I’m surprised how easy it was.

There we are a complete train for Effie to haul.

Effie

Effie, my first scratchbuilt steam loco

As I progressed with my Whinny Lane layout (to be described later) I decided that having a go at building a steam loco model would be a good idea. I had recently discovered the works of Sir Arthur Heywood and had become captivated by his designs. I purchased a copy of Mark Smithers excellent book on him and his 15″ gauge railways. The book is filled with drawings and photographs and no self respecting 15″ gauge railway modeller should be without the book to my mind. Sir Arthus first 15″ gauge locomotive was called Effie and I decided that my first model steamer in Gn15 would be Effie too. The body was built on the chassis of a Hornby “Percy” from their Thomas the tank engine range. The body is all styrene sheet. The boiler is styrene wrapped around a section of 25mm diameter plastic pipe. Using soime “contacts” in the Gn15 world I managed to obtain some pre-production parts of an Effie kit. Namely the chimney, dome and levers and backhead details. The nameplates were some slaters lettering that I hapenned to have to hand. The body is a simple push fit onto the donor chassis and fits rather tightly.

All in all I am still rather pleased with this model. Sure if I was to make it today it would be to a higher standard of finish. But for a first effort at scratch building a steam loco, you can’t beat it.

Tenwr Mine

Tenwr mine was one of “those ideas”. I was just hit by the need to build a layout. A small layout. Nothing special. I woke up one morning (sounds like a blues song coming on…) with a layout building itch I needed to scratch. I had the day off work and it was raining. So the stars really had aligned for the project.

As I started the project I had no idea how things would unfold. I just found an offcut of pink foam of which I had plenty. and set to just placing track on it. I set up some lengths of track and points and eventually found an arrangement I liked and for some reason decided that a mine location would be an appropriate location considering the small size of the baseboard. It could  be closed in quite effectively with high walls and pipework and all that kind of stuff.

I was off. Voom. Ten hours later – (Tenwr – geddit?) I had a layout of sorts. It worked perfectly I could run my sidelines Gnat and some converted Gnomy skips and tip wagons to my hearts content. All good fun.

BUT. Big But. Later, as I was building Whinny Lane, I added a roof to the Gnat and it wouldn’t run under the bridge to exit this layout. At that moment I had no other locomotives so I had a layout I couldn’t use. So rather than build a loco, which on reflection might well have been the sensible thing to do. I trashed the layout. Simple as that.

“Off  to the bin with you”. I didn’t feel any regret. It was another step in my learning about layout building. Enjoy the pictures.

This was the loading shed

and the tipping facility

G, O, HO and N scale brick sheets are used here to force the perspective

Tipping. The gnomy skip tips on Jeff Saxton beckets stuck to a Sidelines chassis

A nice view. The cables and piping were sections of styrene rod and tube

The Railcar

The other vehicle constructed specifically for the A.V.Lt. Rly. was the railcar. It was kicked into action from a challlenge from Carl Arendt (not the only challenge we’ve ever had I add) Steve Bennett had sent Carl a photograph of a railcar kit  he was putting into production in his 09 range of models. It was loosely based on an Irish prototype and Carl challenged me to a race to build a Gn15 model. Carl’s model was a little different to mine which was a pretty straight copy of the kit. Simple construction methods ensued as it is no more than a styrene box placed on top of a Bachmann “Happy Holidays” trolley car chassis. The most important lesson I learned during the construction of this model was the importance of weighting everything correctly. To start with the thing wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. But by trial and error with the weights. I managed to get a very nice running vehicle indeed. It still sits in my Gn15 stockbox to this day.

Everyones (and I do mean everyone) favourite shot of the railcar

Railcar at the "works" perhaps it has brought everyone to work?

The Rapier

Ransomes and Rapier to be exact. Was the first Gn15 locomotive I built from drawings supplied by Carl Arendt. Its a very basic plasticard construction on a Model Power Porter Hustler chassis. It was the first loco body I completed and ran as a working loco, in any scale. There was lots of things in the construction of it that were totally new to me. The grilles, the axle boxes, louvres, etc etc. I got a great deal of help from Steve Bennett of Sidelines during the construction, for which I will be forever greatful. But the part that I was most pleased with was the bending up of the handbrake wheel that I bent from some styrene rod

you can make out the handbrake wheel in this shot

front three quarter view of the Rapier

For as neat as the little loco is. It perfectly illustrates one of the compromises of Gn15. This is a model of a 2’6″ gauge prototype. Yet I have it running on 15″ gauge track. So the axle boxes stand well clear of the wheels. A fact I could have done something about if I’d realised at the time. Never mind. It was a valuable learning lesson. As for the model it met with an unfortunate accident during a spring cleaning one year.

The Apple Valley Light Railway

My first Gn15 layout was the Apple Valley Light Railway. The original plan was concocted for a competition on the small layout design group on Yahoo! It was a unique design centered on a hidden “lazy susan” traintable that in addition to lining up with all the tracks on the layout could also be switched out to change trains.

First "appleworks" trackplan

It seems like an idea I’d had for years and taken for granted people were considering revolutionary (excuse the pun). The design won the competition and I figured that it would be a good idea to build something based around the lazy susan technology to prove the concept. this then was the first “Apple Valley Light Railway”

The Apple Valley Light Railway - as built

The concept was also featured in Kalmbach’s Model Railroad Planning 2004 with the original plan and photographs of the built layout. Constructionally the layout used PECO crazy track. The baseboard was 2″ thick pink insulation foam. Which in the end lead to the demise of the layout.

At the time pink foam was being touted as the next great baseboard material light, easy to work and dimensionally stable. It was everything a woodworking numpty like myself could ask for. I flew through construction cut the foam, laid the track added the scenic contours, covered them with plaster bandage and threw down all types of scatter material in a matter of weeks. The layout was really looking great. Then one day, as I placed some wagons on the track for an operating session they began to run towards the centre of the layout. It turns out that as the plaster bandage had set and dried out it had shrunk and pulled the ends of the layout inwards resulting in a bowed layout. The ends of the layout were a good 1″ higher than the middle. Clearly this was no good. So sooner than try to flatten it somehow I opted to scrap the layout and build something else. So enjoy these photographs.

view along the layout

This layout is only 4' long

the railcar by the works building

The Rapier shunts a wagon into the works building

The Rapier at work again

In the beGnining…

It was several years ago now. I was surfing the internet looking for model railway related websites for inspiration to build a layout and I happened across Carl Arendts’ description of his Squarefoot estate railway. A Gn15 layout in under 1 square foot. I was absolutely capitvated by the layout not only for its small size. But also for this (then) new scale of Gn15 using 00/H0 mechanisms with G scale to represent 15″ gauge miniature railways. As an apartment dweller at the time small layouts were the way to go and having made contact with Carl and learned more of his “micro layout” philosophy. I started planning small layouts in Gn15 and building some Gn15 stock ready for whatever I ended up constructing.

Then my wife and I bought a house, complete with model railway room. I could start building a layout. More details of the layouts will follow later. But the first layout was built, then a second, then a third… I was also building stock at the same time. Gn15 had really bitten. I was founder member of the Gn15 forum “the Gnatterbox” amongst other things. After A few years I hit my Gn15 peak – the layout you see the picture of at the top of this page. “Purespring Watercress”. The layout was featured in the magazine “Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review” and achieved a certain celebrity in the Gn15 world (a poster on the Gnatterbox once described “the Purespring effect”). Which was great, yet a curse too. How could I follow it? I couldn’t. Three years later I still can’t. So for the moment I’ve quit Gn15 and diverted my model making efforts towards other scales. Will I return to Gn15? I don’t know. Gn15 taught me a lot. I developed skills that I never knew that I had. Skills that I have been able to adapt to the other scales I’m working in now.  But for the moment Gn15 doesn’t grab my attention the way it used to. So let’s crack on and chart my path through Gn15. I’ll try and post about all the layouts and models that I’ve built. Let me tell you there is a lot to go through, even some unfinished projects too. I’ll try to post quite regularly, so keep checking back.

The past starts now…

Many, many years ago I received a Hornby Freightmaster train set for Christmas. I could have been about 11 years old. But it is now so long ago that I can’t remember. That train set had a huge impact on me and I’ve been interested in Model railways ever since.

When I say interested in model railways. I really do mean “model railways”. The whole lot standard gauge, narrow gauge, broad gauge. Every possible scale G, 0, oo, Ho, TT, N, Z, T. I have built or at least started layouts in all the scales. At this moment in time I have layouts in Gn15, Ho and T with a P4 layout in the offing.

I’ve probably been most sucessful in GN15. Certainly most prolific.This blog will be used to chronicle those Gn15 layouts I built in the past few years.