New project, new platform...

So, I'm starting a new project, and on top of this, I'll be moving to a new blog. I seem to do strange things to most technical things, and I manage to mangle blogger fairly frequently. I found a service I seem to get on with, and which has a couple of nice little extra features as well. I've been blogging here and there for a few weeks, which is a bit wearing, but as it hasn't crashed yet, I'll be moving over there around Monday the 12th. If you subscribe to this blog -and remarkably a couple of tolerant souls do- you shouldn't notice anything different: in fact you should have got the last few updates from the new blog feed already. When you go there, however, you'll hopefully like the new look, and continue to be astounded at the addition of things like extra pages and other wonderfulness. I'm afraid it's unlikely to magically improve my writing, but at least it seems to be immune to my technology destroying tendencies...

There should be final entry on Westerooge before I go, so this is more of an advance warning. If you are one of the kind people who has a link to this blog, can you please change it to there?

In case you missed all the links above, then the place to go is almost the same as here: www.korschtal.wordpress.com

Nearly there...

Less than a week to go, but Westerooge is almost complete. The scenery is down and the track works- most of the time. It isn't as smooth as I'd like but better than I thought I'd manage, so that's not too bad. Even the bit that went wrong is working this time around. The remaining jobs are to repaint the overly vivid sky, (maybe with a representation of some houses in the distance, and the road continuing, but only if I'm feeling brave), add some bushes and a small 'shed' to hide the points switch, paint the black band on the lighthouse and maybe add a crossing sign. On the other hand, I do have a heck of a lot to do before we get on that train on Monday, so I'm not sure I'll even have five minutes to stick things together, and of course I now have a distraction: I want to just play trains...

Even the track join of doom works, most of the time...

Well, it can't always work...

So I started to make the scenery: newspaper all around and in between the rails. After everything had dried, on goes the diesel, and it ran fine except for one little section of track on the end of the sector plate. I suspect I broke a wire when building and painting the scenery. Off came the newspaper, and yes, there was the broken wire. It was a choice of digging up all the scenery until I exposed enough wire to cut back to, or running a fresh wire under the sector plate to power the line directly. I opted for the latter. So, in theory what I needed to do was de-solder the wires on the track, run the fresh wire into place, and resolder. What happened was that the soldering iron was too hot and heated the rails, melting the sleepers and eventually causing the whole lot to fall of in mangled mess.

Well, I wasn't totally happy with the way it was stuck down anyway, and at least on something so small, it isn't too much to replace. It still slows me down a bit though which isn't helpful when I'm so close to the deadline...

Railcar ideas- Class 650

Westerooge is currently a gooey mess: I've added some form to the basic board, especially around the lighthouse base and the track, and I've covered the lot with grass and other bits. I'm now hoping that it sticks to the baseboard and not to the track. I'll get back to you on that.

This weekend I had to go and pick someone up from the station in Metzingen, so naturally I went early to take a few pictures. Metzingen is a junction on the railway between Stuttgart and Tübingen: German railways are often rather picturesquely known by the places they run through rather than the places they connect, so this route is called the Neckar-Alb-Bahn, after a river and range of hills.

Most trains are class 143 locomotives hauling double deck stock and this blog already has lots of pictures of these, so I won't bore you with them, but I also got the chance to photograph a these railcars. DB calls them class 650, although the many private railways using them call them Regio-Shuttle's, the name given to them by Stadler, their maker. There is a branch line from Metzingen to Bad Urach (the Ermstalbahn, if you're taking notes) operated is DB ZugBus.

650 012-8, the rear of the pair seen above. Notice the buffers.

I've wanted to make a narrow gauge version of one of these for ages. RS1's have a fair bit of power and the ones with conventional buffers have been known to haul the odd freight wagon, which I imagine would make them popular with the accountants of the Körschtalbahn- especially as mixed trains are common on other modern narrow gauge lines. I could well see one of those pulling a couple of vans into the hills. The only problem is that they'd be hard to build: I think I could get away with having tinted glass, which would let me put a normal motor inside and avoid making loads of tiny seats, but The question is how I can find a way to make those angled window struts and compound curves on the ends work.

I'm open to ideas. In the meantime Westerooge will hopefully be a lot less gooey and I can post some pictures...

Dark art of the sector plate -2

It works...

After some fairly intense bodging, filing, soldering, and at least one length of mangled track, the first train on 'Westerooge' wobbled and lurched its way onto the sector plate this weekend. This in itself was good, but that it managed this without spilling itself onto the desk in an unpleasant mess was a real surprise.

In the event, the biggest problem wasn't the sector plate but the join with the scenic section I made last week: the rear track goes up dramatically as it approaches the edge. As I'd already managed to melt rails off their sleepers in a previous soldering attempt I went for the bodger option and filed down the top of the rail a bit so it doesn't make the train wobble quite so dramatically, and decided to ignore the rest.

Extensive 'testing' (playing) by daddy and eldest son have got most of the bugs out of the system, although although the mess van has a habit of clouting the side of the box file when I pull it out of the middle siding. Never mind: I can finally get on with the fun part: scenery.

And I've got two weeks to do it...

Active

I am still here, and working on Westerooge. However, during a coffee break last week I came across 'Behind the Water Tower' , which describes itself as “An Anglo-Polish railway blog” but which manages to squeeze in a lot of useful information on railways in general. Right now they are concentrating on the campaign to save the narrow gauge railway in Krosniewice which was running freight and passenger until it had the temerity to get in the way of a local politician's pet town centre redevelopment project, and had its operating licence summarily revoked. As the blog puts it:

"The Krosniewice Railway, one of the most interesting Polish narrow gauge railways - which operated regular passenger services and carried a substantial freight traffic - is closing because the Mayor of Krosniewice has teamed up with a property developer. Krosniewice Coucil is in the process of acquiring the railway land from PKP, the Polish State Railway Company, for transport purposes. But the Mayor is planning a big property development and the railway workshops are in her way. SKPL, the operator of the line, opposed the demolition of the workshops and, for their pains, have had their operator’s licence terminated by the Mayor."

Behind the water tower want us to join them in a letter-writing campaign to the local and national politicians responsible for the decision, pointing out that it would be better for the town to run the railway and reap the tourist income, and incidentally keep a useful transport link which will keep traffic off local roads. As this blog is partially based on the idea that narrow gauge railways can be a useful link in a modern transport network, I'm joining in. If you feel the desire to help, they have all the details that you would need like addresses for the Mayor, the Polish transport minister and others, and a sample letter to use as a basis.

Downsizing.

If you've been following my mutterings long enough, you'll know that I originally set out to make a modern narrow gauge line in the Black Forest in 1:43 scale, using 16.5mm (HO) track. In theory this scale is great for making making narrow gauge trains: you get hold of old HO/OO scale models: you take the top off, build your own slightly larger superstructure on the chassis, and you have a narrow gauge locomotive (and if you chose the right model, a body you can hack up for later projects as well) This is fine as far as it goes, but small HO/OO wheels can look a bit silly under a big locomotive, and with my grandiose designs, the Körschtalbahn's locomotives tend to be pretty big. (they are the same scale size as trains on the Zillertalbahn railway, although I don't think any of you believe me) One solution to this would be bigger chassis, from places like 'Hollywood Foundry'. Hopefully I'll be able to save up and get one soon, but until then I'll have to keep getting second hand models from places like Ebay or similar, so the wheel problem remains -especially with bogie chassis.

I reckon I've found a solution though. If I go down a bit in scale to 1:55, it brings everything down to a manageable size and things which are huge in the larger scale, suddenly look more reasonable, so I'm going to try building a couple of of 1:55 scale models and see how they turn out. 1:55 has been around for a very long time, and is often called "The Ffestiniog Scale" because it started with a series of kits from GEM based on the Ffestiniog and Talyllyn railways.

1:55 scale version: suddenly it fits...

Once I can play trains on 'Westerooge' I'll make a start on this Rhaetian Bahn-esque motor luggage van, a model I've wanted to make since my first attempts at scratchbuilding in the 1990's. I eventually gave up because it always looked terrible in 1:43 scale when squeezed on to a HO gauge chassis, but when I tried it out in 1:55 I found that it fits rather well. Running on HO track, this would scale up at about 3 feet or 914mm. This is a bit small for metre gauge, but there are a few 900mm gauge railways around Germany, and anyway, I'm not going to worry about it too much- for some reason it bothers me less than tiny wheels.

I've been dithering about this for a while- building 'Westerooge' was partly to gain some experience in 1:43 so I have something to compare the result with (and also as an excuse for procrastination), but I did join the 5,5mm Association a while back, and they haven't thrown me out yet, despite my lack of interest in all things Ffestiniog. They are running a competition to build a micro layout this year, which I may just enter when I come back from the UK...

What happened to the weekend?

Well, I was working most of it so there wasn't much time to work on 'Westerooge', but there were some compensations like this artwork created by one of the teenagers I work with for a project focusing on abuse and forgiveness...

Head of Steel

If I seem a bit excited today, its because a couple of nights ago I finally laid the track in the scenic section of 'Westerooge', making it not only the first model railway I've owned in the last 16 years, but also my first successful attempt at soldering in at least that time. I've decided I like variable temperature soldering irons.

I also moved into uncharted territory by using electrofrog points which have the advantage that they are live everywhere so your locomotives don't stall and embarrass you, but the disadvantage that if you don't wire them up the right way then they short-circuit the whole model and and embarrass you. After drilling a hole through the switch to take the brass rod, I wired it up to the track and turned the power on in the confident expectation of seeing the layout disappear behind a cloud of blue smoke. Remarkably, not only did that not happen, but the blue diesel moved, and in the right direction as well...

Point control and baseboard join: Not pretty, but it works...

So, having conquered this mountain, we can now start adding the ground cover and adding the bits and pieces that will hopefully make this look less like a box file and more like a model railway, and move onto the brave new world of the sector plate fiddle yard.

32 days to go.