Garden Railway Forum

Does all this use of vinegar result in your wagons being a little smelly? I like the smell of vinegar on chips but not necessarily if it's omni-present in the hobby room!

Keith S:79693 wrote:Does all this use of vinegar result in your wagons being a little smelly? I like the smell of vinegar on chips but not necessarily if it's omni-present in the hobby room!

I'm not sure of the chemistry but there's certainly a sulpherous smell in the air when the vinegar's applied to the iron filings... I've got a cold at the moment but I gave my wagons as big a sniff as I was able (got very odd looks from the kids) and couldn't detect a vinegary whiff. But perhaps they're like creosoted sleepers and will only release their aroma under the blazing sun of a high summer's day, in which case in August the afternoon goods is going to smell like a chip shop...

Pair them with a smokey bacon brake van, and all will be well....

Hi all,

Having finished Van 2 I fancied trying to complete my Ffestiniog rake - for now, that is, I've got plans for another couple of bugboxes, Van 4 or 5, etc etc. The original plan was to save for a Triassic kit for carriage 15/16, but running my WHR stock over the first section of my new garden line was enough to make me realise that something that long just isn't going to work for me at the moment. So I needed a stop gap (until I'm hugely wealthy and can buy a small estate), which is where this IP kit comes in.

The idea is that I'll "Ffest" it up, with modifications to the balconies and a coat of green paint. I've already started by moving the bogies inwards, and raising the corresponding sections of floor, a feature of the real things. The two end compartments have reduced headroom as a result - in the inner ones the raised section ends under the seats so it's not an issue. For that reason one of these will be designated first class - the two third class compartments that adjoin each other have had the partition reduced in height to create a longer saloon as per (some of?) the originals.

I did have plans to mess about with it further, adding a tumblehome to make it a "bowsider" and altering the panelling so that the door handles sit in the right place. When I opened the kit I found that the wood was thicker than I'd envisaged, so I've dropped those ideas in favoutr of an easy life.

I think the finished carriage will become "number 14" - the original was a 4-wheeler but I'll rewrite history so it becomes a prototype for the later carriages 15-20 instead. It would make a sort of sense that such a vehicle would be shorter than those that followed I guess...

Cheers all,

Andrew.

Hello again,

"No 14", my Ffestification of an IP kit, is coming together relatively quickly (for me), and is almost ready for painting. The photo shows the altered balcony, with the step added, a new bufferbeam and railing, vac pipes etc, also modifications to the end compartment where the floor is higher - I've changed the beading on the door to suit. The next jobs are a little more priming, a few more details, and then a coat or two of paint...

Cheers,

Andrew.

Great piece of work That's coming along really nicely!

Lovely, what are the vacuume pipe and standards made from?

Hello again,

Glad you like it chaps. I gave it a test run earlier in the week and it seems a little more sensitive than my other vehicles. It kept derailing on one curve, but I the track there if only very roughly laid so far, so I think I can cure that with a little work with a spirit level and some packing. I was concerned that it might suffer from buffer locking because the bogies are quite a distance in from the ends (and not as per IP's instructions) - I wonder whether that could effect its road-holding ability?

Mr B, the vacuum pipes and standards use my usual method of Wilkinsons garden wire for the pipe and a length of curtain wire (the springy stuff for net curtains) for the hose.  Mine don't connect and the garden wire runs right through the sprung bit, but I pinched the idea from working (well, not in the DVLR sense) ones featured in SMT about 20 years ago.

I generally add a little ring of biro inner near the top of the standard to give the impression of a bit more detail and add just a little chunkiness. The garden wire is slightly underscale I think, should be a little thicker, but it bends to shape beautifully enabling me to recreate prototypical pipe-runs. It's difficult to make it completely straight, but to me that's a good thing as real pipework often seems to feature little kinks here and there. There seem to be varying thicknessess of curtain wire available, not all will fit over the wire... Where necessary I fix the whole thing to the carriage body with little split pins (mine came from Screwfix) - you can see one near the bottom of the bufferbeam doing a reasonable job of looking like it's supposed to be there.  The best bit about all of this is the cost - with this method you could do an entire carriage fleet for roughly the cost of a single pair of ready made pipes.

Cheers,

Andrew.

Hello!

I decided to give myself a break from carriage-building and make a pair of slate wagons:



Yes, I know that's only one - I lost the bits for the other one and so completion will have to wait until I find them again... There's nothing terribly remarkable about it, it's just a standard Binnie kit, but I was very pleased to discover the delights of lead fishing weights. The lead is so soft and malleable that the weights (which cost just 50p each) can be bashed into shape with a club hammer and sawn with a hacksaw. I used two weights to fill the space beneath the floor - the completed model is surprisingly heavy as a result.




In 25 years of garden railway-ing it's never felt quite right that I've not owned a slate wagon (even if my previous line was set in Kent!) - I intend that there'll be many more to follow this one...

All the best,

Andrew.

Good morning,

My Ffestified IP carriage is moving forwards slowly, with the exterior almost complete. Here it is sitting in the sunshine this morning... Transfers, light weathering and varnish next, then glazing and the interior, although with the recently improved weather that'll all take a back seat to extending the railway...

Cheers,

Andrew.

Very nice Andrew
that's going to be a cracker when it's finished!

I somehow missed your slate wagon - sometimes the little "alerts" to the left of new thread entries don't work properly

Anyhow, at first I thought you'd scratchbuilt it, so eagerly dived into the description (I'm looking for a tip for making the "bobbins"!! ).
Obviously I was a little disappointed to find that it was a Binnie kit, but at the same time, that's a compliment to your build since at first glance it doesn't LOOK like a Binnie kit!
Nice one

Narrow Minded:84281 wrote:
I somehow missed your slate wagon - sometimes the little "alerts" to the left of new thread entries don't work properly

Anyhow, at first I thought you'd scratchbuilt it, so eagerly dived into the description (I'm looking for a tip for making the "bobbins"!! ).
Obviously I was a little disappointed to find that it was a Binnie kit, but at the same time, that's a compliment to your build since at first glance it doesn't LOOK like a Binnie kit!
Nice one

Hello again,

Ah, sorry to disappoint re it not being a scratchbuild, I thought it would probably take forever... How about making bobbins from various little beads of the sort they sell in craft shops for necklace making? If you drilled the ends of the slats they could could be held in place with thin rods running down through both bobbins and slats into the floor. Thinking about it I may end up doing that myself because I've somehow lost the upper body parts for my second wagon. Of course they'll turn up as soon as I've finished building replacements...

I guess scratchbuilding the smaller typers of slate wagon is essential when you're on 45mm? It occurred to me recently that it might be worth their while for one of the resin kit companies to produce a version of the Ffestiniog 3 steel ton slate wagon. They were wider than the 2 ton ones which the Coopercraft and Binnie kits are based on, so they could be made to run on 45mm as well as 32mm, could be quite a market for them I should think...

Good luck with your bobbins (?!!),

Andrew.

Having waited three years for a decent summer so I could do some serious tracklaying it went and got far too hot to be digging holes and mixing concrete. So I retreated indoors and got stuck into a model of the WHR Gladstone Car that I've been working on for a while now.

It's a "scrimpbuild" - part scratchbuilt, part old Imp kit. I acquired the latter at a very good price but found that actually I wanted to change quite a lot about it - lowering the ride height so the coupling sat in the right place, changing sides and ends so that it could be individually matchboarded to match my other WHR/FR vehicles, replacing the interior screens with new ones that didn't look they'd been chewed out of a sheet of ply by a small child etc etc.

So here's where I'm at so far...



It's not quite as accurate or elegant as I'd like, somewhat chunkier than the real thing in places, but it'll do. The red oxide is just a primer, but it's not too far from the top coat I plan to use, a slightly more sober version of the "vermilion" (orange-red, like bufferbeams) that Boyd describes. That comes next, then just a little weathering and some varnish, and then I'll have to tackle the interior. Possibly including a ghostly version of Gladstone himself...

Cheers,

Andrew.

Hello,

Recent weeks have seen some progress with the (WH)WHR slate wagon fleet - it's quadrupled in size to a magnificent, errr, four!

The initial Binnie wagon has been joined by a second and I've also purchased and constructed two of Mat Peacock's pvmr 3D-printed kits for the FR 3 ton wagon.

So here's the current rake, awaiting a load:



Cheers,

Andrew

Lovely, must get round to buying some of these myself

Hello again,

Glad you like the slate trucks laalratty.

I've almost finished "Number 14", my Ffestified IP coach. The interior's complete now, just the roof to go, should be finished soon...

Here's the latest progress...



The figures used to be Star Trek and Captain Scarlet figures, not perfect 20s passengers (that's a very 70s haircut that young woman's sporting!) but since the carriage's whole complement of 4 people cost less tan one commercial 16mm figure I'm not complaining - and you can't see much through a compartment window anyway...

Cheers,

Andrew.

While the (WH)WHR's Permanent Way team were testing the latest extension yesterday the Carriage and Wagon staff were putting the finishing touches to Carriage 14. Or, more accurately, while I was in the garden playing trains, the new carriage was wrapped in a pair of tights I'd pinched from my daughter, an attempt to clamp the roof in place while the glue dried... Once I'd unwrapped it again it looked like this:



As mentioned further up the thread, this IP kit has had various modifications to enable it to stand in for the familiar FfR bogie composites in my Ffestiniog rake. "Number 14" was actually a 4-wheeler, but in my alternate history it was built before numbers 15-20 as a prototype. One day, when I'm fabulously wealthy and have a huge garden to match my spectacular bank balance, I'll build a "proper" model (or six), but for now this will do. I think it gives the right sort of impression, particularly from this angle:

 

Must dig out the lamp-tops that are lost in the depths of my "train cupboard" to finish the job properly...

Cheers all,

Andrew.

Excellent job....they look wonderful together.

Nice colour scheme too!

I need more passenger stock so I'm more than envious now.

Looking very sharp

I like it alot Very interesting comparing two different directions comming out from the same IP-coach (I´m meaning my own atempt in another thread: Making changes to an IP coach)
Regards Michael