Victoria viaduct - latest picture

Victoria has a new home, courtesy of ABS Cases Company in London.
This is fellow 2mm modeller Alan (Midsomer Norton) Smith's business. See MRJ No 184 for Alan's layout article.

Alan has all manner of sophisticated machinery in his workshop to produce the goods, and excellent products they are too.
He has even produced a layout name board for us. See the photo.

Les of the Fence Houses team, was down south visiting his mother in Norfolk, and went on to Alan's place to collect not only Victoria's case, but some baseboard parts for his own planned layout of Hornsey Shed.

The case should keep Victoria nice and snug for her trip to the Oxford Expo next July. The other thirteen baseboards of the layout will not be getting the same VIP treatment as Victoria, but we hope to get them into a reasonable shape for viewing by the time of the show, Watch this space!

Bob.

As seen at the AGM 3/10/09

The Black 5 was shown running in this latest state, complete with quite a few of the lost wax castings added (some temporarily) to the loco and tender for the event.
Various other alternative lost wax boiler fittings will be supplied with the kit.
The white metal one piece smokebox / boiler / firebox casting (again fitted temporarily until properly 'fettled' and cleaned up) gives the weight missing from my 9F with it's resin cast boiler, and is noticeable in the running, seeing to give the impression of the mass and weight of a larger scale loco (or am I just imagining it!)
If I say so myself, the running on the day matched the look of the kit shown here.
The next build, probably the longer wheel base Ivatt type, will form the basis of the instructions, which I now need to complete to finally finish off this kit for The Association.
The riveted tender shown here has the cruciform type of axlebox covers. There are alternative Timkin type covers available for the kit.

Bob.

Easitrac Test Track

Just bringing the track standards upto date for the latest 9F photos.
My very rough (in terms of appearance) previous test track was doing 2mm no favours!
There's not much track on view here anyway, but it's better than the original (and now at least on a par with the Black 5 photos).

Bob.

Jake the peg........

"With his extra leg........"
Wanting to get the Black 5 test etch away late last year, and needing something to fill up the sheet, I managed to 'adjust' my NER lattice footbridge kit details to suit the specific variant sited at Fence Houses station.
This had an extra leg going down to road level at the adjacent crossing. The other two legs were at platform level.
I managed a 'dodge' on the original 'N' Fence Houses all those years ago by installing a plastic card leg to the George Allen kit then in use. This new etching shown here is as the prototype.
The photos show the unexpected progress managed at last weekends local Birtley exhibition demo stand. Even allowing for all the Q & A's which take place, the two day event allowed me to mark up another notch in the layout's progress.
Further progress is required to fit all the treads, but that will have to wait till the Black 5 is finished.

Bob.

The final baseboard

Baseboard 14 has just been completed. This is the last board to be made for the layout, and can be seen in place behind Victoria viaduct in the photo. The tracks on this board are the up and down colliery lines, which at this point are 35mm below the height of the main lines on the viaduct. The backscene (not in place on the photo) separates the viaduct from the colliery tracks, so these will not be seen in normal viewing mode at exhibitions (assuming we get an invite to one!)
Trackwork is now some 65% complete for the whole layout, with significant progress having been made lately, when compared to the previous 25 years! The regular Wednesday "Fence Houses" days have been a great boost. Thanks Les, David and Simon.
The introduction of Easitrac has not yet had it's full impact on F.H. as we have been re-wiring and fitting DCC components to boards previously started and conventionally wired for DC. However, the 'colliery' board, immediately north of the station board has been Easitrac fitted, and sufficient stocks now mean we anticipate completion of all trackwork by the end of 2009.
We have in fact stopped tracklaying in the southerly direction towards the station area for the time being, and have headed north and back over Victoria and onwards into the fiddle yards, the start of which can be seen in the lower foreground of the photo. The reason for the change in direction being that the plain copper clad and strip rail used here can be laid and completed whilst we are on building the etched chairplated pointwork configurations in and around the station areas.

Bob

Black 5 kit update

Just a few shots of work in progress on the first test build for those of you signed up the kits.
Most things on the etch (see previous posting) have worked fine but one or two didn't and have been redesigned to make things easier for the builder. Also now done are most of the casting masters for the various boiler fittings (but not yet the boilers themselves), although I've taken advantage of the second (hopefully the last) test etch, to include some more small items that will be incorporated in such things as the masters for the different types of top feed employed on these locos.

Bob.

Another end of year report (Black 5 kit this time)

Strictly speaking the Black 5 kits are of course The Associations project, so were not included in my previous posting. However, I have now agreed with the powers that be that we can release some photographic evidence of what we've been up to over the last year.
Firstly an apology from me for the delayed completion date, which was aimed provisionally for October just gone. I just got involved in too many etching contracts.
Anyway I'm now back on the modelling bench, having just received the first test etch for one of the loco variants, and the next two to three months should see my design and casting master production element complete. It will then be down to the etchers and casting manufacturers to come up with the goods, not to mention our heroic shop keeper(s) who will have to supply the other bits and parcel everything up etc.

All three tender types (3-605 (Riveted), 606 (Part Welded), 607 (Welded) have been designed and reached test build stage. The photo is of the riveted type.

The other photo is of the etch of the loco parts, some of which will not be present as etches in the kit, as the intention is to make them up for use as masters for casting purposes.

I hope this posting will please those of you who have placed orders with The Association, as we all look forward to a successful conclusion to the project.

Did you know........... I have a photo of a Black 5 hauled train in Newcastle Central, after arriving from Liverpool and substituting for a failed diesel.
So I will be able to use the trial build on Fence Houses after all!

Seasons greetings (again) to all.

Bob.

End of year report

Despite little being reported here over the last couple of months, the team have been beavering away on the 'Fence Houses' layout trackwork, wiring and fitting of Tortoise point motors. The latest board to be completed with these items is the 'colliery' board, which leads into the main station area, where some interesting pointwork formations will be required.
David and Simon are currently on with a couple of curved turnouts for the goods yard, and Les and yours truly have been engrossed with wiring and testing the DCC functions required (well Les has, I'm just the apprentice here).

Three of the boards (21ft) were recently set up for a local North East finescale group meeting (2mm to 7mm interests), and Mick pointed out how little impression my total stock made on the scene!
Even the sight of the 9F, pulling (amongst other items of stock) my four NER pre-grouping liveried coaches could not improve the view, and I have now acquired some more (BR) coaching stock for conversion to finescale.

Victoria was also on view in the garage, for some of the group attending the event who had not met her before, and to finish this last posting of the year, I thought this shot of her complete with Chris Mills's very nice builds of my 21t hopper kits would do very nicely.

Victoria is on her own in terms of finished scenery cladding to date, but I'm determined the layout will be joining her within the next 3 years. It's all getting quite exciting now, after all the 'planning' and daydreaming years since the 'N' gauge version.

All the very best to one and all for Christmas and the New Year.

Bob.

Addition To Price List

Some NER Mile Posts and Gradient Posts added to the Product / Price list.

REMEMBER to CLICK on the image for and ENLARGED version!

Have a break NOT a Kit Kat moment!

It's some 28 years since the original ('N' gauge) Fence Houses crew experienced the first 'Kit Kat' moment.
After a track laying session it was found we had a short circuit. Various tests failed to reveal the wiring fault, so we set about stripping out some of the sections and rewiring them.
Only after some hours did we find the cause. A foil wrapper from an earlier Kit Kat snack had been left lying on the track unnoticed!
Anything that has since happened, remotely resembling the above fiasco, has since been known as a Kit Kat moment (a bit like 'The dead penguin" story, but that's another NE group tale).

Last Thursday I had another Kit Kat moment.
Les had encouraged me to have a break from the Black five project for a few hours, and have a go at chipping my first DCC loco. We would then have something to control with my brand new Ecos ESU command station, as we'd already wired up the first few layout boards for DCC. For the test however, I thought I'd use an old short length test track I had handy.
Well the decoder was temporarily installed on the loco, with the wires left long till I was sure I'd wired it up correctly (it was my first after all).
With the loco in place on the track we turned on the power to program it. No response from the loco, nothing.
Head scratching and some humming and erring followed, but to no avail, till I looked at the terminals I had hooked the controller up to.

KIT KAT! I'd only connected them to a defunct set of screw heads that had once been used for the wires on an uncoupling magnet!
Once the wires were connected to the track terminals it actually worked!
So, 28 years on and we're still having (though more high tech) fun!

Well anyway, the 9F is now chipped and working. the first of the few, with more to follow.......... after the Black 5 gets finished that is!

Bob.