The Ghost In The Sleeper

Wooden railway sleepers don't last forever and often need replacing. The wood is of course still useable for other things. For example, it's not hard to find old sleepers used as fence posts. Such uses of old sleepers are easy to spot as, apart from their fairly standard size, you can usually see the impression left by the rail chair including holes where they were bolted down. Whilst you may see similar fences on model railways, how many modellers go to the trouble of modelling the ghost of the rail chair?

Whilst most people might not bother with such small details some people like to go the extra mile to make their models as lifelike as they can. One such person contacted me last year to ask if it would be possible to design a tool that would make it nice and easy to add these marks to 7mm to the foot scale sleepers.

The design work was relatively easy as I managed to track down a drawing for a rail chair (specifically a four bolt version used by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway) which I used to produce a 3D printed prototype on my resin printer. This was then tested using some of my son's Playdoh.

Of course the resin version is unlikely to hold up to repeated use being hammered into wooden sleepers, but having proved that the pattern it left seemed right, a little more work got me to a an easy to use tool that I could have 3D printed in brass.

Of course once the brass version arrived I couldn't resist giving it a go before posting it on to it's new home.

I think that looks pretty good, and as it takes just seconds to add the marks it's easy enough to quickly detail a large pile of sleepers ready to build a fence or maybe for an old siding where the rails have been removed. Given how many different ways old sleepers get used the possibilites are endless.

If you want to add rail chair details to your own 7mm scale model landscape then I've made the tool available to buy on Shapeways (see here).

While four bolt chairs were fairly common, I do have drawings for rail chairs from other companies which (given time) I'm intending to use to produce a set of tools, but in the meantime if you want a tool to produce the ghost of a specific comapnies rail chair let me know and I'll do my best to help.

A Sense of Scale

As the last few posts have hinted at I'm having some fun experimenting with 16mm scale modelling. I've started with something cheap to see if I like the scale or not; 16mm scale modelling can get expensive very very quickly if you are not careful. Playing with the parts of the locomotive I'm building still often doesn't really tell you much about the size of things relative to what I'm used to, other than it's bigger. Looking at models of people certainly gives you some sense of the difference in scale though, and really brings home just how much bigger 16mm scale really is.

In this photo we have seated figures in, from left to right, 4mm, 7mm, and 16mm to the foot scales; and yes I know the poor 7mm chap is missing his arms! 4mm is my usual modelling scale having grown up modelling in OO and more recently in OO9, although I've been slowly moving up to 7mm scale with the Clayton battery electric loco etc.

So what do I think about 16mm to the foot? Well it's most definitely a lot bigger than I'm used to, but just as with the jump from 4mm to 7mm I like the possibilities it opens up for adding more details. Although looking at that painted figure I might have to adapt some of my techniques as I'm not sure they all translate well from 4mm and 7mm up to the much bigger scale.

The Armless Eunuch

One of the things missing from my prototype Clayton build was a driver. Trying to find an appropriate figure proved more difficult than expected for two reasons. Firstly there isn't much space for a driver in the Clayton and secondly all the controls are on the right hand side of the driver which seems to differ from many other locos and so most driver figures have the left arm posed for controlling things not the right. The third problem was that all the photos I've seen of the loco in use show the driver in high-viz clothing so a an early 20th century tractor driver, for example, wasn't really going to fit the bill.

Fortunately while browsing around I came across the figures made by Andrew C Stadden which included a driver figure with his right arm out and in high-viz clothing so I ordered one.

When the figure arrived I was happily surprised to find that it actually comes with a choice of arms so that you can easily pose the drive with either arm bent or outstretched. Unfortunately his wide leg pose meant he wouldn't fit in the rather restricted driver area of the Clayton. Even bending the legs closer together didn't narrow him down far enough, so in the end I had to use a razor saw to castrate the poor bloke! The cut allowed me to force the legs closer together (the pewter the figure is cast in really doesn't bend well, so it takes some considerable force) and close enough for him to sit in position. I'll tidy up the wound with a bit of miliput when I add the arms, but I think he will work quite nicely. Even though he is quite heavy, he doesn't cause any problems in the original prototype model without the steel keeper plate so should be fine in the next build.

Little or Large?

When I blogged recently about the method I'd settled on for painting Yorkshire stone I pointed out that I'd accidentally bought 7mm scale plastikard as it "looked right". Well I've now picked up a sheet in 4mm scale and as you can see the stone are a lot smaller.

I'm actually worried that the 4mm stones are a little on the small size, but I think they'll do for the small single storey workshop I'm planning. The 7mm sheet still looks promising for the large factory building though, especially as it will be further from the viewer.

I'm slowly running out of excuses not to do some layout building so hopefully it shouldn't be too long before there is some sign of layout progress beyond a plain piece of MDF!

Yorkshire Stone

While I now have a track plan for 77 Box Lane I still haven't done any track laying or building construction, mostly as I keep getting distracted by the Welsh slate industry! I did get as far as doing some cobble experiments and I even used some scalescenes.com brick papers to build a small photographic diorama. While the wall looked pretty good on the diorama I came to the decision, when trying to use the same paper for a low wall, that the stones were a bit large and that the lack of relief might be a problem on such a narrow layout, but at the time I didn't have any better ideas, short of using DAS clay and scribing the stones by hand.

About a month or so ago, when browsing in my local model shop, I picked up a piece of Slater's embossed plastikard that looked like it might be a good alternative to the brick paper I'd been using, although at the time I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to paint it to look like Yorkshire stone so it got put to one side.

Fortunately two things then happened which have led me to an approach to painting the embossed sheet to look like Yorkshire stone that I'm fairly happy with. First up Iain went and wrote a blog post about the slate wagons I sent him. This in turn delayed Geoff from writing a blog post about his excellent Llangunllo layout. When he did write the delayed post he happened to mention that he'd used RailMatch concrete to colour the mortar course on the building he was painting. The second thing was that yesterday I painted a weathered example of my narrow gauge flat wagon and I decided that the colour wasn't that far away from dirty, smoke blackened Yorkshire stone.

Combining these two ideas led me to paint the embossed sheet as follows. Firstly I sprayed the sheet with a white primer as I found that the acrylics wouldn't stick to it very well. Once that had dried I painted the entire thing using the RailMatch concrete (#2422) to act as a base coat as well as to colour the mortar. I then dry brushed on khaki (Model Color 70.988) followed by brown sand (Model Color 70.876). This was then all toned down slightly with a thin black wash, before the final details were added by dry brushing with dark sand (Model Color 70.847) and black (Model Color 70.950) to simulate the dirty patches.

It was only when I'd finished painting this small sample that I noticed that, according to the sticker on the back, the sheet is for 7mm scale modelling not 4mm scale, oops. Given that I bought the sheet as the stones looked a similar size to those on the scalescenes.com brick paper this would explain why those stones looked too big. The stones on this sheet are actually slightly smaller than on the scalescenes.com sheet being about 3mm, so 9 inches, tall. The sheet might work for a large factory, but I'll try and pick up a 4mm sheet of the same stone effect and see if that looks a bit better sized for walls and small workshops, but at least this is progress... of a sort.