Researching for a layout

When thinking of a new layout i often sit and look through various sources of information for a long while before even beginning to produce a trackplan. This is one aspect of the hobby which really appeals to me, and one that can take up a lot of time.

In a way this has been going on for Port na Cailliche for around 7 years. That may seem like a long time, but i've been modelling the same line with layouts based on the stations at Invercloy and Dunbracken as well as this one when it's built. Consequently i had to do some research for the two previous layouts and there were plenty of ideas which couldn't be incoroporated into these for various reasons. These ideas which couldn't be used have been floating in my head, and remain in the scrapbook i draw all my ideas in - incidentally this is a VERY good idea, whenever i have a thought for a layout i jot it down no matter how small it is. You'll never remember everything and this is an easy way to look back through your ideas.

The main source of information for research is books, for this layout i've been using various sorts of books from landscape photography of the Highlands and Islands to a historic photo book of the Isle of Arran.

Books on Scottish railways have obviously been very useful, particularly those on the Campbletown & Macrihanish Railway, and the Lochaber Railway being the main narrow gauge systems in Scotland. However books on the West Highland line (and indeed riding on it) have been useful, as well as Highland Railway books, and even books on class 37s- often used in the Highlands!

Because this line is more similar to the Irish 3' gauge lines than the Welsh narrow gauge i've got several books on Irish lines, one particularly useful one is 'Irish Narrow Gauge in Colour' by Norman Johnson. Also books on specific subjects like the Clyde Puffer are particularly useful.

Mention of the Clyde Puffer brings me onto another source of information; Videos of the BBC tv series 'Para Handy', this is a comedy series based on the wiriting of Neil Munro about a rather mischevious puffer crew. These videos contain some brilliant detail shots of puffers, quays, bits of coastline and scenery. All very useful for a layout where 95% of the front of the layout is water!!

Photos and memories from family holidays are of course also incoroporated into the layout plan, both places or buildings that mean something to me, and places that simply struck me as a particularly nice scene to replicate. Of course seeing things first hand is the best way to look into an area for a layout, and part of the reason i've chosen Scotland is because of many fond memories of family holidays when i was younger.

Finally there are a few websites i'll mention which have been useful. I linked to some specific photos on various websites which will be incorportated into the layout in one of my first posts, but there are some websites which cover large areas that are a very useful resource.

Firstly geograph - this is a site which allows you to select a specific geographical area on a map of the UK and then view pictures which have been uploaded to the site of that area.

Another site in the same manner as this is flickr, though photos on here tend to be more artistic it is worth having a look at the map section and doing as you would with geograph, or searching for more specific subjects.

Ports and harbours of the UK has been a good source of information on all sorts of small jetties and fishing ports in the Highlands of Scotland. Again based around a map of the UK it makes it very easy to find pictures of the area you're looking for.

Finally, if there's still areas of the trackplan that i've not managed to fill after all that then i just try and make up plausible scenery and scenes from what i've seen in all the other material - after all it is a freelance layout!

Further scale thoughts

I've pretty much made up my mind as to which scale to use. It's been decided by one fact - N gauge chassis when scaled up to 1:64 are nearly all too short to be of use. I don't feel i'm in a position at the moment to scratchbuild chassis so i'm going to stick to 009.

In addition to this i've already got 3 Backwoods Miniatures kits in 009 which will be a loss if i swithed to S. Another issue is that i've also already got several buildings from the old layout so these would be useless on a S scale layout (unless having some forced perspective), as would the etches for the trestle bridge that i've bought.

I do have an idea for another layout i'd like to do long in the future, i have a feeling i know what scale that one could be...

One aspect that appealed of S scale was the increased level of detail, but i'm going to work as hard as i can to try and fit as much fine detail onto PnC. I'm not intending this to be a 2/3 year project - it's a long term one, the layout i've always wanted to build so why rush? So i'll have plenty of time to fit the detail in.

So there you have it... 009 it is for now.

Contemplating a different scale...

As PnC is a way off being constructed at the moment this blog is mainly documenting my thoughts before building the layout during the planning stage, therefore all sorts of things are going round my head at the moment.

One thought which has recently appeared is that of scale. I've always been a 009 man because of space restrictions and the fact that my 009 was part of an already existing 00 layout to begin with. However i've always liked larger scales, and in particular 0-16.5 and the other 7mm scales. Now, PnC would be absolutely huge in 7mm scale, but there is a compromise.

I first saw S scale when watching the Paul Scoles scenery DVDs i mentioned in an earlier blog. S Scale is 1:64 which equates to 4.8 mm to the foot as opposed to the 4mm to the foot 0f 009. Whilst this is not a substantial difference it does seem to improve things visually. 009 stock can often seem small to me (admittedly my stock is generally larger tank engines so this might not apply), and Sn3 stock seems rather nice and chunky looking.

A good compromise would be to use S scale for the layout, and to have 9mm gauge track which would represent a shade under 1' 11" gauge track - almost spot on for most UK based narrow gauge systems. This would still allow me to use 9mm gauge chassis for the locos (albeit adapted with new cylinders etc) to make my life easier. I was planning on scratchbuilding a lot of the layout to make sure that it was easilt recogniseable as a Parkside Dundas suchandsuch so the lack of any kits doesn't particularly bother me.

It's certainly something to consider, the major downside i can see is that the overall size difference between 4mm and S is around 19%, this will have quite an impact on the size of the trackplan i've developed for PnC. If i want to keep this then it will have to grow somewhat - potentially a problem if we move in the future.

S scale does look attractive, and will certainly be considered for future layouts, but i can see it's limitations for this layout. Having said that it would be different, and would certainly prove a challenge!! There seem to be absolutely no S scale narrow gauge layouts set in the UK, so this could be an interesting niche to explore at some point.

I'm planning on knocking up an S scale diorama to test out the theory some time to see how it compares to 009. I expect 009 will remain the scale of choice for PnC because of the size of the layout, and the proportion of the baseboards i can leave purely to scenery without any track, not to mention the availability of lineside details. These would reduce with S scale (something i want to avoid). A nice thought, but perhaps something for the future.

The Origin of the Layout

The idea for Port na Cailliche came from my original layout Invercloy which was supposed to be a terminus at one end of a ficticious West Highland narrow gauge line. I enjoy reading about people's layout's when they've made a ficticious history to accompany them and use this to justify and describe certain aspects of the layout. The one that particularly springs to mind is the Craig & Mertonford Railway by P.D. Hancock where he created a ficticious history of the line for pertty much every aspect of it. Another that has also interested me to read about is Ted Polet's Craigcorrie & Dunalastair Railway, this has been a huge inspiration to me and has been very interesting to see develop over the time that i have been a member of the 009 Society.

These two layouts got me thinking about the origin for the railway that would operate through Invercloy. I can up with some ficticious names for Scottish towns and villages to have stations based in, and these were then used to form the company name (the Ardaig Bay Joint Railway Company). Two stations on this line have been modelled so far, Invercloy which was never finished, and still remains in that state, and Dunbracken which is currently under construction. Dunbracken is based on an ironing board and is a very basic layout.

Dunbracken was built as a learning exercise for Port na Cailliche, i always wanted to build a bigger layout, but at the time didn't think my modelling skill would be good enough to undertake such a task. Hence the building of a small layout as a learning exercise, and being the first layout that i've built entirely on my own i'm very pleased with it. There are several aspects which i had not tried or used before that i wanted to have experienced before i decided to use them on PnC, these included Rock castings, making water, DCC, building a ship and generally improving my ability with creating decent scenery. Not a small list, so i thought that a new layout was worthwhile, especially if it was small.

Back to the basis of the layout... The ABJR was formed from two separate companies, the Glencloy Light Railway Company, and the Ardaig Bay Railway Company. The GLR ran from Invercloy to Ramasaig, with a small branch to Dunbracken, while the ABR ran from Port na Cailliche to Ardaig where it connected with the Highland Railway. The ABR claimed the majority of the title of the new Joint Companie's monicker due to their higher level of fiscal solvency than the GLR. The locals often commented that if the two hadn't merged then they thought the GLR would have closed long before it did.

Both lines were separated by a small range of mountains in the centre of the headland which they both ran along either side of.

At some point in their history the two companies decided to merge and constructed a line through the glen of the mountain range to connect to each other. At one end of these glens sat Port na Cailliche, so this is actually a junction station, but the line up the glen joins some distance out of the station (so this may feature on a future extension).

Due to the two initial lines running along the coast they were blessed with fairly easy gradients, and therefore could afford the use of smaller sized locomotives, however with the construction of the line linking the two along the glens so more potent motive power was required. This was provided in the form of large tank engines and a small group of tender locos, and even a garratt for heavy mineral trains.

This operation effectively created two eras for these lines, one of independence, and one of operation as the joint line. During the time of the jont company stock still mainly operated over the lines it was originally used on, but occassionally it would be required to venture further afield on the rest of the system. The larger stock bought by the joint company could be operated over the whole system, though it seldom saw use on the Dunbracken branch due to the size of the terminus at Dunbracken.

Of course this is all fiction, but it gives reason for the ficticious town of Port na Cailliche to have a station like the one i'm proposing to build for this layout. I find knowing the sort of line you are portraying helps to decide things like the stock, how well maintained it should be (also dependent on the era you've modelled), how to operate it and many other things. I've found it quite enjoyable coming up with this little history for the line and will expand on it bit by bit, if you're interested in writing a history for your line then Ted Polet wrote an interesting article on doing so which appears in the Modeller Book of Narrow Gauge, and is well worth a read.

Port na Cailliche was chosen as the site for the larger layout as i thought it would be an ideal place to indulge my love of scenery, sited on the coast with a glen approaching the sea, rocky outcrops, a town and plenty of water. Plus being at one end of the joint line it would have seen all sorts of the stock operating so would allow me to build up a varied collection of locos and rolling stock.

Hopefully one day i'll have enough room to add the extension with the junction on it, but i've got enough work now finishing Dunbracken and with the plans for the 4 boards of this!

A rainy holiday miles away from Scotland proves fruitful!

Might sound like a strange title for a blog post, but... i've just returned from visiting my mum (who lives on the edge of Dartmoor) for a week and a bit's holiday. Unfortunately it rained a lot so we couldn't go and do as much as we'd planned for the time we were there, but it had it's bonusses, my girlfriend read a book she's been wanting to for ages, and i finalised the trackplan for the layout, and looked through lots of my old railway books!!

Whilst I had intended originally to have the layout on a much sharper curve, from talking to other narrow gauge modellers about my ideas i've decided to smooth it out and have a much gentler curve for the trackwork. To accomodate this i've had to ease the shape of the layout away from an L shape to what might be likened to a banana shape. The idea is that the fiddle yard end of the layout sits some distance away from the barrier at an exhibition (while being close enough to see all the details!), and it then curves and comes to a stop at the station end much closer to the barrier.

I also went to Plymouth model railway exhibition, whilst there wasn't anything particularly inspiring there from a narrow gauge point of view, i bought a few bits and pieces which will be useful. As i said before i'm planning on building a new body on the Roco loco that i bought recently, this will be freelance, but a 2-6-2T which is very much inspired by the Ballymena & Larne compund locos built by Beyer Peacock (albeit with smaller wheels and outside frames). More details will follow on this in subsequent blog posts.

Finally, i visited a friend who has leant me two superb DVDs, those on Scenery techniques produced by Paul Scoles. They are superb and cover all sorts of scenic techniques in an easy to follow and well explained manner.

Source: www.paulscoles.com

Paul uses dirt for covering his scenic hard shell, and applies this dry to the slopes of the hard shell, lets it settle whilst gravity does it's work and then wets it and glues it in place. This provides as natural an 'earth' as possible in my mind, where the material has settled to the angle which it would in real life (ok, so grain sizes are slightly different which will have an impact, but it's sieved beforehand so it's nice and fine). Examples of Paul's scenery techniques are visible on the galleries of his Pelcian Bay Railway & Navigation Company.

This is something i might consider for PnC, but i'm not entirely sure as yet, it could potentially add a LOT of weight to the boards, but it does look very good...

Another layout that's got me thinking!

Whilst on a visit to a local model shop at the weekend I picked up a copy of the April 2008 Continental Modeller which i obviously missed first time around. In it there's an article on a French layout named Pempoul (metre gauge in 1:50 scale) built by Gordon and Maggie Gravett. The scenery on Pempoul is fantastic, i had seen pictures before, and when i saw the article that explained some of the Gravett's methods i had to buy it!

Some pics of Pempoul on these sites:
Crawley MRS
World Rail Fans
RMweb

I've just noticed it's going to be at ExpoNG (Swanley) later this year so will be able to take it all in then!

Two things in particular stand out for me, firstly the grass. This is done using a Noch Grasmaster which electrostatically charges the flock powder so that it stands on end when dropped into some adhesive on the layout, the difference between this and the old puffer bottle for flock is quite noticable. This looks particularly good for representing fine grass, but i think for the more moorland areas i'll stick to longer carpet underlay to achieve the more rough look.

The only thing putting me off getting a Grasmaster for PnC is the £100+ price tag... some experimenting with a balloon and something to rub it on before i go down the Noch path i think!

The other thing that struck me about Pempoul was the colouring and the fact that it's so subdued. Layouts with bright colours on stick out like a sore thumb, both vegetation, buildings and other scenic items need to appear more subtly coloured. After all they are being viewed at well over several hundred scale feet away most of the time so they should appear in model form as they do in real life over this sort of distance, not how they do when viewed up close.

Upon realising this i looked back through my modelling books and found a useful introduction to colour in Dave Frary's How to Build Realistic Model Railroad Scenery. However i feel that this is an area that military modellers generally achieve much better results than railway modellers, so i will be looking at this source for more information.

Pempoul has also made me think about baseboard construction, it's boards are 4 and 9mm ply around an extruded polystyrene core. Extruded polystyrene is not the white polysytrene used typically for packaging in the UK, but the coloure foam you can get for housing insulation (amongst other thigs). An example of it in use on a layout is this shot of the latest section of County Gate under construction by John de Fraysinnet.

Whether this approach will be lighter than the initial thought of ply and foamboard formers i'm not sure, but i believe it will be infinitely stronger due to it's more solid construction. The only area i can see being an issue is mounting the point motors, this could be done by having cross braces etc. where these are needed and mounting them on these. American modellers use this material much more than us in the UK, i'll try and find some info on mounting point motors from some US sites.

Hopefully i can find out more about the construction of Pempoul's boards at Swanley.

And a brief update on the Roco... it's been run in for about 5 hours now, and it will run soooo smoothly and will crawl round my circular test track even when controlled by my old H&M clipper, so it will be 10 times better when hooked up to DCC!

Improved running

One 009 myth that i'm keen to dispell in the operating of this layout is that the running is poor. With the quality of mechanisms nowadays it is possible to obtain very small gauge locos which will run smoothly. Unfortunately at present 009 isn't that well served for ready to run prototypical chassis, with the 009 modeller having to rely on converted N gauge chassis (often inside framed), etched brass kits or using HOe mechanisms.

Roco 0-6-0 tender loco source: http://www.roco.com/

I have just bought one of the latter, a Roco 0-6-0 tender loco (shown above) which has outside frames, brass flywheel and complex valve gear, therefore something prototypical and suitably large for a railway in the Scottish Higlands can hopefully be built on it.

I'm not 100% sure what will be built on this, but it is likely to be either an entirely freelance loco, or a standard design from either Hunslet, Hudswell Clarke or Manning Wardle reproduced from the reproduction Catalgues i've got from Plateway Press. At present the thinking is to produce a large tank loco (2-6-2T or similar) and use the tender for another project at a later date.

John de Frayssinet has sucessfully used these chassis under his Manning Wardle and "Russell" Backwoods Miniatures kit based locomotives on County Gate, so if all goes well with this one then i might buy some more and make a small loco stud of 3 or 4 locos out of them.

The running is extremely smooth, and will give a much more prototypical feel than the stock which earned 009 it's undeserved reputation amongst other modellers all those years ago. Hopefully the running can even be improved upon slightly by the addition of a Zimo DCC decoder which will allow me to limit the top speed and give more fine control of the speed of the loco. More on this once the loco has arrived.

For other wheel arrangements i shall be looking into using several sources of loco chassis, the first being converted Japanese N gauge locos (Tomix, Kato, Micro Ace etc) with dummy outside frames, all these run superbly, much smoother than European N gauge stock.

Converting a Hollywood Foundry Bullant to outside framed is another option, as done by Steve Fulljames in his Fairlight Works blog. Due to the size of the motor unit it will have to be housed in a saddle tank of some description, but i've found quite an attractive one that used to run in Borneo which was produced by Manning Wardle.

And finally by producing my own etched chassis and having a go at using these as a base for more complex locos if nothing else is suitable, of course with this method running properties are down to the construction which is an area that i feel i need to develop a little at present.

Update - i've just received the loco, i' m VERY impressed with it. Straight out of the box it runs smoothly and steadily. It will get down to some impressively low speeds out of the box too! Now just to finish running it in and to fit my decoder to it.