Tuesday Train #196

Last week I posted a picture of a Southwest Trains EMU taking me back to London from Swanage. This week, a picture of why I was there, the Swanage Railway’s 25th Anniversary Gala in September 2004. Ex-British Railways 4MT 800787 and M7 30053 double head out of Swanage heading north making a smoky departure beneath a stone road bridge by the locomotive shops.

Quick Layout Progress/Status Update

I just wanted to write a quick update. I’m fine and working away on the layout or layout related projects, and even some projects that have nothing at all to do with trains. I just haven’t been sitting down to write about it. I’ve still been taking pictures, and hopefully at some point will catch up, but I just haven’t had the motivation to spend more time on the computer at home at my workbench after spending my whole work day here. I’ve been motivated to use the workbench time doing what it was meant for, making models. I realized my last few posts have mostly been Tuesday Train railfan shots, and I’ve lined up those until the end of June as I’m not out railfanning at the moment (but I’ve found some great stuff in boxes of old pictures I’ve now scanned to make up for that!).

I hope those who read my blog are well, and are finding ways to keep busy with whatever lets you unwind as we continue in varying degrees of lockdown to hopefully stay healthy and safe.

As proof of progress, a couple of pictures below of the resin cast manhole and storm drain covers being painted. The first of these are now installed in the roads on the layout, and I’ve got enough pre-painted to do all the roads, so I just need to find a night to get motivated and start the next chunk of road paving!

Resin cast manhole and storm drain covers taped down to a sheet of cardboard to be pre-shaded before installing in the roads.

Tuesday Train #195

A Southwest Trains Clas 442 EMU (Electric Multiple Unit) seen heading west from London at Wareham on the south coast. I took this after a visit to the Swanage Railway waiting on my train to take me back into London on a vacation. I took two weeks in 2004 as my first vacation after starting work after university in 2003. I travelled England visiting railways and museums from the south coast to the Yorkshire Moors, all by public transit and staying in cheap hostels. I miss those days, I can’t travel like that anymore!! I need a real bed these days!

Finding Things that Didn’t work

So, working from home means I’m working at my day job from my modelling workbench. It’s not all bad, though it poses different challenges when you need a break from work, or when you get frustrated at something you are working on having your distraction at your finger tips instead of having to stick at the work and get things done.

In any event, last week while sitting and working, I heard a popping sound from the layout behind me, the way the sun comes in through the skylight it only catches a small part of the layout as it works its way around the room, but it turns out, that it was more than enough in the concentrated heat box the suns path creates (which passes right over where I’m sitting and working from about 12:30-2:30 causing a great risk of desk naps) to cause the No More Nails adhesive holding the fascia on to fail!

Well that ain’t right….

In theory it’s an easy fix, do a better job of putting more of the adhesive in place and press the styrene fasica back into place. We will see if it holds this time! Certainly not a big problem, but the heat change with the sun is far greater than the normal climate variances and how fast things heat and cool in the layout room. I suspect anywhere not directly in the suns path will be ok, but we shall see in the course of time.

Tuesday Train #194

An oldie from my first digital Camera. A Canadian Pacific freight crossing the Grand River in Cambridge in 2003.

Every now and then…

You write something believing it to be the truth, only to find your memory really really sucks.

In a recent post, I said:

I’ve been using a modified technique for ballasting, based on something I learned from my friend Trevor Marshall, and using thinned Weldbond Glue (why in 20 years of modelling has no one ever told me how much better this is than normal white glue before now!!).

Then, I was searching for a photograph of something else in a box of pictures, and came across a photo of my old “layout” from my high school and early university days. I don’t know the exact date, just that it’s pre May-2000 as that’s when I moved out of the house for the first time to move to Toronto for a Co-op Placement, and my parents moved out of the house and this layout was torn down for good while I was working in Toronto that summer.

Would you look at that, a bottle of Weldbond on the end of the layout next to my workbench…

So yeah, turns out I just have no clue what I have and haven’t done! Also, yeah, I have no idea what this layout was trying to do at the time! Other than the Lima Class 156, Hornby HST, Tri-ang 2-6-2T at the front, and Tri-ang Transcontinental coaches by the Weldbond, everything in this picture is gone from my collection.

In the interest of fairness, this photograph is of the peninsula extension of my first layout, a 4×8 plywood pacific seen below that served from around 1989-2000 and from Chatham Ontario to Dartmouth Nova Scotia and back to Waterloo Ontario.

The Plywood Pacific in earlier guises in Chatham and Waterloo, love that chandelier layout lighting I had! I’m pretty sure it had a circular fluorescent tube in it!

Its always nice to look back a little, which is what I was doing when I found the first picture today and had that “huh, I have used Weldbond before? Who knew?” moment!