4. (Almost) finished something!

 Its such a rare event, so its well worth celebrating.

This little gem is the smallest building in the main block of the Mill. I think its designated as building number 2 in my plan.

The front elevation is done baring guttering and a downpipe. The roof needs ridge tiles.

The whole complex will be weathered in one hit to keep things uniform.

There's no side detail as it butts up to adjacent buildings, and the long rear sloping roof is guesswork based on one photograph. I haven't decided whether the rear face will be modelled yet, its unlikely to be visible.

The shell is plasticard, faced with thin cardboard and Scalescenes textures. This combination gives me the strength and workability that I feel I need for these structures.

3. Still thinking about the box

I have spent a lot of time working on fitting the layout into the available space, juggling the footprint to make it work. Even when you only have a tiny amount is space, this is a complex issue.

My current standard is a plastic box with an internal diameter of 70 x 27 cm. My trackplan fits this box, but the Mill doesn't! Its longer to the left when looking from the railway side, which is my viewing side. So I toyed for a while with upgrading to a Chrismas Tree Storage Box, which would give 120cm of length, but only 27cm deep. To be frank, I'm still tempted. I could make the fiddle yard, and probably the pelmet for lights etc, permanent - because its so tall.

I was about to write that sticking to the 70cm limit would mean I'd have to move the track plan to the right and make the first two turnouts off-scene. This would simplify the building and reduce the costs, keeping the three major constraints happy: Time, money, and space. 

I’m torn, so lets leave it there while I mull it over.

2. Even big things are small at this scale

Two-millimetre fine-scale is similar to N gauge, but 1:152 rather than 1:148 (N). This makes most things seem small, some of them very small, and some of them virtually invisible. I also model in 4mm scale and I think that my modeling brain is often stuck in this mode, because sometimes I feel like my 2mm creations are just too big, somethings just don't look right.

I've been drawing and building the plastic shells for Coales Mill for a good while now, starting with pencil sketches to demarcate the various component buildings and some basic details. These are makes with letters for each gable end and numbers for each building. The basic plan ends up looking like a set of profiles that an aircraft or ship modeler may use, a technique I remember seeing, and trying, for a model TSR2 in the old Airfix Magazine back in the 70’s I guess.

The central structure here, buildings 4, 5, and 6, got drawn out using a (then) free drawing tool on the iPad, and a printed template used for the plastic, yet some how the completed structure was just too big, so I ended up having to split all the parts and cut it back to size. 

Buildings 4 to 7 all too big

Buildings 4 to 6 reduced, 7 removed

A similar problem happened with buildings 2 and 3, except that it took me longer than it ought to have done to work out that the building was tapered along the back, and then I made it far too small.

I often think that modelling is the art of producing piles of ever smaller bits cut from larger sheets of card or plastic! Never throw them away, there will always be a need for smaller parts.

Buildings 2 and 3 nearly right

This is the scene tonight, getting closer.

I have also formulated a plan to get access to Templot via a remote connection to my steps-son’s PC on the iPad, so watch this space.

1. Starting yet another blog?

Welcome. 

Do I really need another blog? Maybe I do, anyway here we go….

On here there will be trains, mostly model trains, big (SM32) and small (2mm FS) and others in between.

Starting off with, and likely to be the early main focus of this blog, a layout currently known as Coales Mill Yard — a fledgling 2mm finescale working cameo.

Inspiration — A few months back I opened a magazine for a bit of a browse, Model Railway Journal (MRJ) 150 as it happens, and was struck by that feeling — the one that you know from previous experience — that the scene in the article in front of you cannot be ignored. 

This has happened before. Previously it led to a 7mm scale model of the Wantage Tramway terminus in its heyday, with baulk road made from aluminum rails and some scratch-built buildings. In this case the trigger was an article in British Railways Illustrated with pictures of the tramway disappearing between very adjacent buildings on both sides. Sadly this layout was eventually abandoned and dismantled before I got to run anything, a victim of circumstances.

The pictures in MRJ 150 were of Coales Mill in Newport Pagnell in the 1950/60 era, then a small town with an Aston Martin factory, now a part of the Milton Keynes conurbation with a motorway service station and sadly, no Aston Martin factory any more. The MRJ photos look to be taken at least a decade apart, but the core buildings are present in all of them, and it was these Victorian structures, variously sized and shaped, jammed together on the gentle curves of the sidings in front and Broad Street behind.

The layout — The photo shows my most advanced schema to date, its just 4 sheets of A4 paper sellotaped together with printed Finetrax templates glued on on and Easitrack plain tracks placed between them. The plastic shells of some of the Mill buildings also appear.

This all takes place on the kitchen table, and its too big for either the table or my standard safe storage which is a lidded plastic box used upside down like a cake cover. The layouts have to be stored on racking in the garage so they need to be damp proof. This has worked well so far with Greater Greygates, an EM trial run based around a Scalescenes shed, and mostly card and paper. 

To fit the box the plan needs to be shorter and, to fit the reality, the leftmost sidings should be gently curved. I'm hoping to do all this in Templot soon, which means a trip down memory lane back to Windows, so some cobwebs will have to be swept off an old PC from somewhere. I do just about everything else on an iPad these days.

That will do for starters, next time we’ll look at the Mill and examine how I managed to build part of it far too big. To answer my original question, this blog is partly for me. Its a form of diary, a log of work, thoughts, inspirations, and aspirations. You may enjoy it too. I hope so.

Thanks for looking in.

John

Future subjects:

The Mill

Layouts roundup

Stock review

Loco review