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JULY 2019 UPDATE
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HYWEL THOMAS *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
KIER HARDY *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
PETE JOHNSON *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
This month work has focussed on the plant yard towards the front of the layout. The side wall of
the main shed featured a few months back and next up was the boundary wall. I wanted to try and
create the very glass-topped walls that were very evocative of the 1970s - rather nasty but an
effective deterrent to trespassers and, I imagine, illegal nowadays! Here’s the start of it -
mixed stone and brick with cement capping and the glass made from transparent page dividers.
This shows the finished wall attached to the heavily modified and extended Wills Tin Church kit
- I’ve always wanted an excuse to get one of these! It represents a shed that has been stripped
of cladding on one side for use as a covered maintenance area for plant machinery. The porch and
lean-to have been incorporated into the main shed building.
A close up of the two buildings showing how the ex-church is supported by just the beams on
one side. The lean-to has been extended with a few courses of new bricks and some steps to
the door. The concrete surface beneath the remains of the church has been made from thinly
rolled DAS clay, broken up when dry.
Here we’ve moved around a bit and are looking into the two levels of the main shed building.
An externally fitted roller shutter door provides security for the valuable machines that will
one day lurk within. I need to paint the edges of that asbestos roof!
A view into the shed, appearing longer than it actually is due to a pair of mirrors behind
each bay. There is very little interior detail as once the dozer and the scraper are parked
inside there isn’t actually very much room left. They’re big machines! The line to the spoil
tip (where the machines work) runs past the shed hence the Lamprey parked up.
Looking the other way the line squeezes past the old part-demolished office and crosses the
road into the yard. Who knows when the remains of the building will be removed!
Finally an overhead view showing the relationship between the plant yard and the rest of the
layout. The old tin church roof has been extended with an extra row of corrugated iron. There’s
still too many spoil wagons littering the yard.
A Class 74 Electro-Diesel has been on the Hornsey wish list for some time now, so having
acquired a Hornby Class 71 electric loco at a bargain price, the conversion process can be
repeated some 50 years after these ten locomotives were rebuilt at Crewe Works. It would be
difficult to do the conversion from scratch, especially when the Silver Fox resin body is
nicely produced and should save a lot of work. The resin cabs appear to have a much larger
A-pillar section and are flatter across the front, so the Hornby cabs will be cut from the
Class 71 body and grafted onto the Silver Fox body section.
A start has been made on the Hornby bogie modifications, which involves removing everything between
the axleguards. Class 71 bogie shown on the left before cutting out and removal of the shoe gear,
with the one on the right ready for detail work to begin to turn it into a Class 74 version.
The SF resin bogie sideframes appear to lack depth on the lower detail around the retractable
shoegear, so rather than graft them onto the Hornby bogies, this detail has been scratchbuilt
from styrene instead.
More parts including the bolster assembly and shoe gear made from plastic sections and
brass wire. The mass of cables have been unplugged and shaved off the sideframes, and
this small detail can be applied after everything else has been built and tested.
Turning to the bodyshell, a diamond tipped burr has been used in a minidrill to remove
all the internal protrusions and make it a nice fit onto the die-cast chassis. The capacitors
which are mounted on the circuit board (see inset) foul the thick resin ceiling, so further
surgery is required if the circuit board is to be retained. With no requirement for DCC
control, the circuit board has been discarded and the loco will be hardwired between the
electrical pickups and the motor with a simple suppresion circuit instead. It goes without
saying that the removal of material by this method is very messy and dusty - usual safety
precautions recommended in a well ventilated area.
The cabs were cut along the door recess to form the joint onto the resin body section,
keeping the hybrid bodyshell the same length for a good fit onto the chassis. The cabs have
a 0.5mm plinth added to the bottom so they match the height of the body with the cantrail
lining up with the top of the door frame. After the plinths had been shaved down to the
same thickness on the sides and front, they were tacked onto the resin body with superglue.
Once happy with the alignment, some thin stepped brass sheet pieces were formed to provide
a good splint, then placed in position on a bed of epoxy resin inside the roof area.
The grills were masked off to protect the fine detail and prevent them clogging up with paint,
then the bodyshell primed and spray painted blue from a Railmatch rattlecan. Once dry, the grills
were given a thin wash of black, but the result just looked like plain black panels on the
bodyside. The decision was made to cut them out and replace with some fine mesh from the
Barchetta automotive modelling range.
The smaller grills with vertical slats (one each side and the same size as the windows) have also
been cut out, and replaced with some parts of the horizontal bodyside grills from the Class 71.
This view shows some of the surgery carried out to the chassis around the bufferbeam area, with
the angled valence filed to shape before finishing with filler. It's apparent on the Hornby
model that the chassis block protrudes into the cab corridor, so to provide a good clear view
through the door windows to the other side, a section of the block has been removed using a hacksaw,
plus a little bit extra so that the area behind the doors can be plated for additional body strength
if required.
With the chassis block finished, attention has now turned to decorating the bodyshell. Due to the
fragile nature of the mesh grills, these will be some of the last parts to be fitted.
The coal and coke hopper kits pictured a few months ago have seen the basic liveries applied
and the first stage of weathering completed. TOPS coded wagons are something of a rarity on
the layout, as it limits their use across different time periods, but this HTV (from the
Parkside kit) would have been re-bodied in the mid 1970s and so mostly run with the three
letter code applied.
For use in the same era is this re-bodied HTO, already freckled by rust spots after only a
year or two in use.
More heavily rusted, after a mid-life repaint and addition of the ‘HOP 21’ branding, is this
un-rebuilt hopper. For this kind of weathering those grotty old brushes with the bristles
gone stiff are just the job.
Coke hoppers tended to suffer badly with rust due to the acidity of the load – the appearance
of this, and the following models, are based on a photo taken in 1965. The steelwork of this
bauxite liveried, vacuum-piped, example shows the affects, while the wooden planking of the
top raves remains in a better state.
This unfitted grey example must have had a mid-life repaint to judge by the generally better
condition and ‘COKE’ brand, but rusting is beginning to get a toehold.
A more typical heavily rusted example. Again the raves are unrusted, (being wood) but will be
weathered with grime colour at the next stage.
Pictures of the solid-side type in their mid-life condition have been harder to come by, but
rust provoked by the welded bodyside stanchions seems to have been a common feature. All these
hopper models will have general grime colours added to the underframes and in the bodywork
framing corners as the next stage.
Kit-built Class 14 ‘D9502’ has had the rebuilt mechanism painted and refitted and is now ready
for a return to service. Gibson wheels and a High Level gearbox have been used in the rebuild.
Another existing model that has seen improvements is Airfix/Lima Class 31 ’31 279’ based on how
it appeared when seen at March depot in the summer of 1976. Fresh glazing and etched wipers have
been fitted along with new headcodes, allocation stickers, and coupling code markings, making
it ready for use in late 1970s sequences on the layout.
