Evidence Has Just Come In...

Here are some photos of the new baseboards, taken inside the house. Click on them to view enlargements

The first shows the entire scenic section, from the public viewing side. The coaches on the middle board are Minitrix Gresleys. Were this the real Grimsby, you would be looking south. I would need a further board on the left to complete the full layout, as proposed on my plan shown last time. This would contain the junction where the main line splits into 2 separate routes. The chances of me getting this built for 2010 are slim, so I haven't bothered - at least for the moment.

Here is a longitudinal view. In terms of Grimsby, the Cleethorpes end would be nearest to the camera. The public viewing side is on the right.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that the ends of the boards are offcuts from the tops. Excluding "wings" the boards come to just under 6 sq ft.

The so called wings give the layout a total width of 15" - space I would probably fill with extra scenery after the GJLC in 2010. In the meantime, it would take me over the 9.42 sq ft limit.

The area to the right of the coaches will have to be extended slightly anyway, as I couldn't quite squeeze part of the main platform and the bay line into the 9" width of the baseboard top.


The final photo shows the centre board from the operator's side.

Originally, I was going to trim the height of the ends to match the main baseboards. In the end, I decided that the extra depth would be useful, for various reasons.

The wings will help to protect the controls during transit. They will also be used to attach legs, lighting etc.

Richard Lake

Baseboards, More Baseboards

Some entrants are boasting that they will win, or have already won the Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge. Not much chance for me then!

In order to achieve lasting fame, there's generally only one place to be, other than first - and it's not second or third. Just to give the judges a bit of encouragement, maybe I should call my new layout "Worstone" - that's Worst_one, by the way, not Wor_stone. Eddie the Eagle was definitely onto something!

Here is a report on the baseboards for the new layout, plus a few lines on my continued work on "Mount Royal". I wasn't going to publish anything for a while, but progress made this a good point to say something.

I apologise for the lack of photographs again. I was going to take the baseboards outside and photograph them this evening, but heavy showers made that near to impossible. Hopefully, I can add a few pictures next time.


Here is the plan, repeated from my last post.

Baseboards, More Baseboards
Project X seems to be progressing remarkably well, considering that I have very little spare time at the moment - and only decided to embark on this project in the last few weeks. Detailed planning proved to be very simple and straightforward, so I have now made a start on the baseboards.

I decided to try something very simple and low-tech, as the plywood construction I used for "Mount Royal" took a lot of time and effort to construct - not to mention the mess. There are no complicated shapes to worry about, this time around.

To be honest, the plywood I procured earlier in the year for "Mount Royal" was very poor. I went to my usual, quality timber merchant and chose the sheets carefully, but they quickly warped as soon as I got the stuff into the house. Even worse, some of the laminations started separating when I was constructing the boards. There had to be a better way!

The new layout breaks down neatly into 3 distinct sections, each about a metre long. The 2 end boards contain all the pointwork. The middle board is all plain track. As with "Mount Royal", I am planning to cantilever a bit of scenery off the sides, so the basic boards needed to be no more than 9" wide, at most. With such small boards, weight was not likely to be a problem, whatever likely form of construction I used.

Time was of the essence, so I decided on a very simple baseboard design. The trend seems to be to visit IKEA for baseboard inspiration these days. I decided to avoid the crush and visited my local Homebase instead. For the baseboard tops I chose laminated board, sold for shelving and furniture construction. This is nominally 225mm wide, 1750mm long and 18mm deep. The blurb on the packaging says that it is engineered for strength and stability. We shall have to see!

For the sides, I chose 18x70mm planed timber. With such a rigid top, the sides are largely required to protect the gubbins that goes underneath the baseboards. The main consideration here was to provide sufficient depth to protect Blue Point mechanisms, which are about 50mm deep. Also, the 18mm width of the the timber allows me to screw additional scenic modules to the outsides of the baseboards without any further support.

I left the 18x70 timber to acclimatise (warp!) for a few days after I bought it. I then only used the lengths that were still reasonably straight, for the main board members. To be fair though, most of it was still reasonably straight. I added off-cuts spanning the bottom of the side members to form a kind of open box girder. These should add stability, as well as providing a convenient way of holding the boards when I am carrying them around. Everything was screwed and glued with PVA adhesive.

I'm not sure that I am capable of building the relatively complex trackwork for the eastern baseboard in time for the Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge in 2010. Even so, it seemed to make sense to build all 3 scenic boards at the same time. These took no more than a few hours in total, excluding ritual tea breaks and other interruptions. The only really awkward part was cutting the tops to shape, as I had to rely on my trusty hand saw and lots of muscle-power. Cutting through an 18mm depth of timber required a lot of determination. It is very therapeutic though, or so I keep telling myself - a way of getting life's frustrations out of my system.

The top surface of the middle board is 225mm wide all the way along, but the outer boards taper towards the ends of the layout. In fact, the western board top is a mere 4" wide at the outer end. The end panels are wider than the baseboard tops, for stability and to help support the outer scenery.

The boards are very strong, if a little heavy for their size. They are perfectly acceptable in this instance, but I would hesitate to use this form of construction for significantly larger boards. I intend to cut a few large holes in the sides and ends to lighten them a little. The surfaces will then be lightly varnished, to try and keep the timber stable. I plan to use C&L baseboard dowels for baseboard alignment, if I can remember where I hid them.

The fiddle yard sections at either extreme of the layout will be very different in design and construction to the main boards. I plan to build these much later on.

The next stage is to start is some trackwork, I guess. I plan to begin with the pointwork at the western end of the layout. This will be my first experience of Fencehouses chair plate etches, so it will be very interesting to see how I get on.

Mount Royal
The main trackwork on the seafront board of the old layout has now been re-laid with Atlas code 55 flat-bottomed track and wired up. If anything, the new track looks slightly better than my original hand-built track. The rail "spikes" are far more consistent in appearance.

My intention is to represent very badly-maintained trackwork. I bravely and deliberately roughed the track up a bit before laying it. I also put random bits of thin card under the track when I stuck it down, to make the trains sway a little as they run along. The branch line is intentionally more dramatic in this respect than the main line.

Much to my relief, my few N gauge locos and stock seem to cope very well with the undulating trackbed, though Farish and Dapol wheelsets don't like the tight tolerances of the pointwork. It is a fascinating sight to see trains rocking along. This is something rarely seen in model form - at least when it is done deliberately. I would love to add tall grass and rampant weeds along the trackbed as well - but that would probably jam up all the gears and snag the various underframe components too.

Well, that's it until next time.

Richard Lake

Project X Revealed

Deciding on a new layout can be a nightmare, especially when you have no strong affiliation to one particular company or region. Fortunately, I thought out various options very thoroughly, before I came up with the idea of "Mount Royal" as my original entry for the Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge. Once I decided that I wanted to build a layout using Easitrac components instead, the choice for my new entry was obvious - at least to me.

Unfortunately, several friends have already bullied me into divulging to them what I now plan to build for the GJLC. As the secret is out, I may as well tell everyone!

My new choice is inspired by Grimsby Town station in the 1960s - a very compact, yet busy main line station, with good operational interest. The theory is to build a fictitious station, generally based on the Grimsby track plan. Unlike Grimsby though, my model will be in a cutting, so that convenient overbridges can hide much of the pointwork and signalling - which would therefore not need to be modelled at all. Originally, I rejected this concept because I didn't fancy building huge lengths of bullhead track. Now that Easitrac has arrived, that objection largely disappears.

Here is a plan of the concept - click on it for a larger view. Most of what you see in the overall plan would fit comfortably into the 9.42 sq ft of the Challenge. My idea is to build the western end first - with a mere 4 B8 points and a single slip. If things go really well (ever an optimist!), the eastern end can be added too. Off-limits, cassettes will be used to load and unload the trains.

There will be a number of cosmetic changes to enable the layout to better fit the Challenge. The sidings at the bottom of the plan will be moved much further east. The bay lines at the top of the plan will be reduced to one. Also, the track plan will be straightened out slightly to avoid having to build a couple of awkward, custom-built points.

The station buildings will be based on Chesterfield Central, rather than Grimsby. This will narrow the site down still further, as the main station building at Chesterfield was on an overbridge. Also, the overall roof will disappear. Basing the layout on this combination of 2 prototypes that I already know well should save an immense amount of time on research and speculation.

Stocking the layout will be moderately straightforward, as I can use my meagre collection of existing stock, enhanced by some excellent new models like the Farish class 37 and the forthcoming Class 108 DMU - at least for the short-term. In the longer term, I would probably want to extend the layout into a circle, for easier operation. That would take me over the GJLC's 9.42 sq ft limit though, so I can't do that until after 2010.

The only big issue, for now, is that I don't have a spare bedroom large enough to fit the layout into, at its full extent. In the past, I have always tried to build a layout that can stay up at home all the time. I am beginning to wonder if that's where I've been going wrong all these years, as trying to compress or bend a real station into a typical bedroom can lead to all sorts of problems, even in 2mm scale.

So, there we have it - a main line junction station in less space than many branch line termini.

As for "Mount Royal", I have lifted the 3 metres or so of existing hand-made track from the seafront board. I plan to re-lay the main lines with Atlas code 55 track, which is generally of good appearance - at least for a colonial-style layout. Using commercial track will save a huge amount of time, in the long-term. This makes it more feasible for me to build the 2 layouts in parallel - though my GJLC entry still has to take priority, of course.

Richard Lake

Project X

Following my trial of Easitrac plastic track bases, I was very impressed with how easy it now is to make 2mm scale bullhead track - and how good it looks, too. For anyone who has not seen all the details you will find them HERE

Bullhead is no good for my Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge (GJLC) layout, "Mount Royal", which has to be built with flat-bottomed track. This gives many of my rivals a huge competitive advantage. As a result, I have decided to build a small British layout for the GJLC, instead. I haven't taken this decision lightly, but I do think it's for the best.

I really like the concept of "Mount Royal", so it will continue to be built, but purely for my own pleasure - and at a much slower pace than before. "Mount Royal" always felt like a quart in a pint pot, as I desperately tried to keep it within the GJLC's 9.42 square foot limit. With that restriction removed, I feel far more comfortable about building it.

The new layout is specifically designed for the GJLC. It was very marginally my second choice, after "Mount Royal". The arrival of Easitrac has dramatically swung things in its favour though. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a name yet, but that's not really a priority - I'll call it "Project X" for the time being. It is a fictitious location, but based very heavily on real places. Very few other entrants have revealed anything about their layouts so far, so I don't feel a huge obligation to reveal all just yet!

Baseboards are to be started very soon, once I have finalised the shape of the scenery beyond the railway boundary. I already have the parts to make most of the trackwork. Pointwork still has to be built the old-fashioned way of course, so I am utilising Fencehouses etched parts on copper-clad sleepers - and trying to keep the number of points to a minimum. I will rely heavily on converted commercial models for the stock.

I'm glad I got that lot off my chest! I will furnish more details about the layout in due course.

Richard Lake

Easi Come, Easi Go...

Incredibly, 2 people commented on the intended demise of this Blog - and here was me suspecting that no one read it any more! Maybe those who are maintaining a cloak of silence about their GJLC entries should let us all know what they are up to, as there is obviously an audience out there craving for news and ideas!

I have decided to delete all the old stuff, as promised, as most of it is either old news or even totally irrelevant now. I will keep the Blog open though, for occasional, short updates on my GJLC entry.

Easitrac
At the moment I'm trying out some of the Easitrac plastic sleeper bases. I must join in the warm congratulations to the team for introducing this wonderful product - and I don't say that lightly. When I think how long it has taken me to build just a few metres of soldered track for Mount Royal, the huge advantage of a reliable, good looking, quick way of producing track is obvious. Well done, chaps - and don't take too long with the point bases, please!

The only problem for me, is that Mount Royal really has to be built with flat-bottomed rail. Bullhead track is a British phenomenon - not appropriate for colonial railways at all, as far as I am aware.

I think a long bout of head-scratching is on the way....

Richard Lake