Model Railways and Railway Related Things.

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Thanks Trogluddite. Haha. You can see why most of my time in the hobby is dreaming up ideas. I am quite a visual thinker and this really helps in my angle that I take in the hobby. After a lifetime of being involved with toy and then model trains of some description, I eventually got bored of following the commercialism side of collecting. I left a great railway job because I eventually burnt out and really needed out so I could recover as I became almost suicidal due to fatigue and lack of sleep etc. (It wasn't that we didn't have time to sleep but I couldn't sleep when I needed to if that makes sense?
Anyway. I left the railways and then everything happened so I had to survive on my savings... So no buying trains! I sat there in the new depressing circumstances thinking "There has to be another way!"
I then felt the Lord prompting me to look at a kit I had bought (I am a Christian). Now the kit was one of the rare "One off" buys which didn't make any other sense to buy other then I loved the look of it in the advert in the model railway magazine called the "Railway Modeller". Rather then sit there depressed, I made the decision to start to build it, after all, I already had a suitable donor locomotive to use which the kit is designed for. Oh gosh! I loved it! It was soo "Me". Full of character with my creative abilities shining through. Every person who builds these little things has their own take on how they make them and what livery or color they choose, so every one is unique to the builder that assembled them.
Here is my locomotive number 1 "Ruthy" which is the loco I built. It has actually gone through many improvements and modifications as I went along.


I added little coal bunkers during construction which are filled with liquid lead, which are tiny balls of lead and the top part has real crushed coal. The name and numberplates I made myself from aluminium drinks can cut to feed through one of the old label printing machines. The buffers are drawing pins shaped to act as buffer couplings with thw drop loops that go with them. I started off with the basic Hornby 0-4-0 chassis but then I had an idea. I ended up with a few days of effort getting everything to fit, with a metal chassis framework from a Triang 0-4-0 using modern Hornby 0-4-0 wheels, conrods, piston rods, axles, gears and motor. I needed to make my own pickups vua making a new underplate for the chassis out of PCB, and soldered thd pickups onto the PCB. The pickups aee made from strands of bicycle gear cable which do work but the loco needs a little runningnin if it has not been used for a while as the gear cables tarnish a little. I was told it would be better to use offcuts of thin guitar string instead. It works ok so I have not bothered to do this little upgrade. I was considering adding detail to the bufferbeams but when I went to add some home made vacuum pipes, I decided that I much preferred the uncluttered look as it seems to add more character!

I love Ruthy!! She is beautiful!

Thanks Teach51. You will probably like my Loco number 2 "Clöé". I have left the tension lock coupling loops on her for now as I still have a few waggons witn tension lock couplings.
She was made from a Smallbrook Studio kit designed to convert a Hornby "Percy" into 7mm narrow gauge.
I have added extra weight to her as she was a little light, and also the home made name and numberplates.
I have moved the position of the saftey valves as they were on the dome, but were prone to breaking. They look better next to the cab.

Oh yes, perfect sense. Since the earliest I can remember, I've had a wonky body-clock and a mind that just won't shut up when I want it to. Trying to work a set shift pattern, or going to school was I was younger, have always ended up with me absolutely exhausted. Clocking in after only 2-3 hours sleep is perfectly normal for me, and usually at least one day a week I'd go in after no sleep at all the night before.

Quite often folks don't believe me when I tell them, because they can't imagine functioning at all on that little sleep - I've no idea how I do it; I just always have because I felt like there was no choice. When people suggest for the thousandth time that I try their "foolproof remedy" (which 99.9% of the time, I've tried before), I quite often want to thump them!

When I have the luxury of being able to sleep whenever my brain feels like it, I settle into a refreshing 8-hours a night (or day!) rhythm quite happily - just that I'm in the Central USA time-zone rather than GMT! Insomnia and unusual sleep pattern like these are quite common in autistic people.


I always appreciate that kind of uniqueness. All of the pictures and photos on my walls were either made by me or by people that I know or knew personally, as were a few pieces of furniture. I love to see things in people's homes which have the individuality of being made by them or by local craftspeople, or were unusual finds in charity shops or car-boot sales, even if they're a bit rickety or care-worn. The same goes for people who make their own clothes, brew their own beer, make their own jam, keep an allotment, etc. I find a beauty in those things that just isn't there in even the most finely crafted mass-produced things, and they nearly always have far more interesting stories behind them.

Character is good. Mine have character as I do my own thing.

Loco number 3 "Marmite". A partial scratchbuild using a Hornby 0-4-0 saddletank as a base to build onto. Not quite finished as buffers have not been fitted yet. I like the buffers I make as they make a little buffer clashing sound if I knock them into each other.





You may just see the small details inside the cab. The pressure gauge was made from an old watch battery. The cab was made mainly from plasticard. The chimney is an old fountain pen cartridge.
The bufferbeams have been deepened ready for the central buffers to be fitted along with the drop bars.

I sometimes get ideas from unexpected places. For quite a while, in a shop in a local town (The second nearest town from here), in the toy section I saw these which I thought looked ripe for conversion... They were designed with childrens farmyards in mind. They are fairly simply constructed from wood.



Now I had made plenty of resin castings of the sides of axles. I put them alongside one of these boxes I had purchased and things looked rather promissing. I knew they would fit!



So with this in mind I got to work. An idea struck me that I could remove the two pieces of internal bracing, seperate the bottoms of the boxes and the central support, and make two little waggons from each single box.



Indeed. The new waggon matches in well with the other stock so all is good.



And... I get this many waggons from a single pack of boxes!



Now assembly commenced, and thoughts came as to what colour and how best to paint them. I happened to have black paint handy, but it was a bit glossy, and I wanted a weathered look, so to obtain this look, I painted the outsides and then squelched my fingers up and down repeatedly on the fresh new paint as it was drying, which gave me the weathered and battered effect I wanted to achieve. Some careful dry brush painting to obtain some numbers on the sides and I now have an interesing fleet of semi finished little waggons. Here are a few next to loco number 4 in its partially completed state (More on the loco later).



And here...(Hopefully the numbers are just visible which is the effect that I was hoping for)...



While I was at it I also numbered three more waggons I had made earlier to a slightly different design.... (I used larger numbers for them).



And I made a start to add couplings but I didn't get very far as yet... But I know they will be simple enough to finish off. Here is the one I have done so far...


And the couplings work like this...



There. Some simple ideas of how one can make a small fleet of waggons without spending too much money... I will say that the wheels are 10.5mm or slightly smaller with these little waggons. Most are 10.5mm. If a few have smaller wheels it is not by much.

My layout is going to have a small off scene area which is where I am going to be sorting out trains before they run onto the scenic part of the layout. To make this easier I came up with a plan. I had a 00 gauge Peco loco lift that I had bought many years ago when they first came out and I used the base of this and made a simple framework around it. I measured the widest coach and also I measured the height of what a brakevan would be with an extra viewing area above the roof. I found that wooden dowels slotted in the base quite well so I could take advantage of this when I made the frame. The result is something which I can put on top of a straight section of track, and drive a train through it while uncoupling the bit I wanted to remove, then I can pick it up and move it or turn it around through 180 degrees etc. It did take a bit of work with both the lift and locos as some locos cylinders didn't quite fit without slightly reducing their depth and width.
I now use this loco lift as a personal loading gauge for the stock on my little railway.

My grandfather collected Lionel trains and had a recess built into his wall for an elaborate train track display which he built over several decades. It had pot lighting and running water.

After he died, the trains disappeared and we have no idea who took them.

We don't get much in the way of Lionel in the UK. They are popular in the USA.

His collection was in California.

They were all steel construction. I wish I had appreciated them more as a child. I pretty much ignored them, except for enjoying the lights.

I sort of lament that I never got a Lionel train....my parents probably thought I'd break it or something.

My mother has been trying to find her dad's trains for years. We assume one of my uncles took them, but why wouldn't they say, or at least rebuild a display? I suppose someone sold them, but that's equally sad. It was his passion for 40+ years.

I have an old Hornby Dublo 3 rail collection. That is a mix between cast metal locos and tinplate track, coaches and wagons. Some later wagons had plastic bodies, though most were tinplate.

That sucks.....these sorts of things are worth preserving.

I once knew a Speech Language Pathologist who built a scale model train station with train in her backyard.

You may like this... Actually it is the same scale and gauge as I model in though USA 0n30 models can be purchased ready made. The British version (0-16.5) can only be purchased in kit foem or one has to scratchbuild.

Enjoy! (All the buildings etc are scratchbuilt in the youtube link. I was referring to some of the trains).


https://youtu.be/E0Ri269mopU

Thank you, MG. That brought back a lot of memories, and put a lump in my throat.

Rest in Peace, Grandpa George.