Thanks TrCO! And I will look forward to your progress on Kit-Bashing. Good luck on making that first cut... but you might want to remember - 'first cut is the deepest' See ya soon buddy.
Let there be light! Well, I received a parcel this Friday (and I surely hope this is the last one for quite some time as it's already a deep hole in my pocket). What did this parcel contain? among other things, this: This is a Brawa flood light that did cost me around 24 dollars! But I am not complaining even a bit - it's worth that money. EXTREMELY good finish, great detailing, to the scale, The flood light heads can be swiveled to any horizontal and vertical angle desired (!!!!), and yes, the light is just perfect! And the most surprising part? It's not Made in Germany like my previous Brawa lights - it's Made in China! Frankly, this is the best 'Made in China' product I have ever seen! And just hope all my future Chinese products are of this quality. This stuff comes with a removable base, basically fits to the 'female' piece perfectly (I know that DID sound wrong, but that's exactly how they say it!) The next images will give you clear idea: Now, I could not resisting doing a temporary installation on the layout. I dug two holes, one for this and another for my other Brawa long mast light. Also, arranges for some light in Betelgeuse. This how it looked, just with these three lights:
AMAZING! I just stumbled upon your thread and went through every page (and your blog as well) and am just blown away. I'm building a layout very similar to yours, except that mine is based on Northern New Jersey (same basic time period, 60s/70s) with a fictitious railroad in fictitious locations. And due to budgetary concerns, I'll be scratch-building and kitbashing a lot. Anyway, keep up the good work and I'll be following along!
Thanks Matt... Great that you liked the project. Given our themes and era being so similar, we could have actually taken modular approach and work as a team to build a relatively larger railroad if weren't on the opposite sides of the world! I would be excited to see your progress as well. In terms of scratch-building and kit-bashing, let me know if you need any help... I prepare custom made cardboard kits on request...
You know, your location is fictitious anyway, it'd be pretty easy to make it something near Port Elizabeth, NJ. Would hook up quite nicely to the PW&NJ! :tb-biggrin: As for scratchbuilding, I think I'll be using your step-by-step build photos of the tugboat to build something for my river and lift-bridge area. I'd originally planned a car float for near there, but scrapped that for a proper engine facility in the limited space I've got to work with. Also, due to my limited budget and good supply of building materials, I'll be scratchbuilding/kitbashing most of my structures. I've got the historical society in the small town in NJ that I'm basing my town on getting me some photos of the buildings from the time periods I'm modeling so I've got something to start with. Anyway, I see by the blog that you've got the "water" painted and the dock walls installed. They came out great! Once I get things going, I'll be posting updates and photos to my blog here on TrainBoard.
Right... I am yet to update that here... will post it right now... As for scratchbuilding, I'll be glad if my older posts are of any help... please let me know if you require anything further on those. I'm sure NJ would be a exciting to model... will look forward to your progress... Thanks Jay... glad you liked it...
Cardboard Plate Girder! Well, the steel bridge was pending for quite a few days now. So last week I started with the rest of the detailing after being annoyed by the fact that I haven't even touched the layout for a few weeks. Now, the task was not tough, just irritatingly repetitive that requires a lot of patience. I mentioned that I didn't have enough plate girders from the ME kit to cover the entire bridge section and I had to make it out of cardboard. So I did cut two thin and long strips (9mm wide) and a whole lot of 1mm X 9mm thin cardboard strips. Then just started gluing them! How? This is how: As you can understand from the pictures, these are a little 'heavy duty' plate girder bridges (it was impossible to replicate the ME kit dimension in cardboard anyway). That kind of suits the curved and overtly inclined scenario (and as much as I have researched, makes perfect sense from engineering perspective too). So now the bridge is complete and 'contract' has been given to my wife for painting it! And definitely like all contractors - she is late! (Don't tell her that, she's going to kill me...)
Black Water Bay! Finally! We started with the sea, painted it black... then used thin foam strip to cover the ever-irritating view of wood and foam mix that I looked at for last over 6 months in place of the dock wall. This foam (otherwise known as thermocol) is also going to be the support of my 'real' dock wall!
Detailing of the port! Now what is the real dock wall? That is the scalescenes.com kit T016. And yes, some amazing kit they have devised! Everything's online, buy it - they will email you the link, download the files, print it (no limit of how many you can print), paste it on suggested cardboard, cut it, paste again the different pieces and there you go... you have a 'A class' paper model with complete (and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed) paper model with just the perfect weathering! And yes, it comes with detailed instruction. I bought some of their other kits also - details of which I will describe later. Oh! by the way, T016 comes with three different options for dock walls - concrete, brick and stone - I chose all three! Concrete for main port section, brick for boat yard and stone for my old coal transfer facility. Does the above paragraph sound like cakewalk? if so then the next one won't be - after all it's me, how can it be so easy! My port wall is nearly 1.7 time taller than the kit (1 inch). So I printed it in it's original size, scanned it at best quality, re-sized it in photo editing software, taken a bunch of trial prints, re-sized again... changed the stair-case design... and after a lot of other additional brainstorming, head-scratching and like, this is what I came up with: Now, I gotta complete the whole port detailing in the coming 4th of July vacation. To end with today, a photo of Sirius: Water looks good, eh?
Really like that weathering on the seawall. That's really paper? The stairs is a thoughtful touch: breaks up curve in nice way without drawing too much attention to itself. Water looks good too, but darn if that's not the cleanest harbour I've ever seen! Flotsam! Jetsam! Seagulls! The body of the guy who didn't make his bookie's payments! Great start, though. And the ships are fab! Looking forward to more!
Thanks guys... I am hoping that the water will actually look even better, when it's actually completed = but that's quite a few more months from now - after all other work is done and I move to my new apartment. I am hoping to finish the rest of the wall in next 3 days - with a little bit of hard work, may be the much of the top surface as well... wish me luck... Yes, that's paper. scalescene kits are really good... worth the money... but hell it requires patience! The dredgers just made it's last sweep... By the the time the port is operational, I bet we'll have our fair share of (many more than) unwanted and expected 'little and big floating stuff'
Re: Detailing of the port - Contnd. The concrete wall for the main port is all done... I have used a different style of stairs for the ones inside the cove - straight up and no breaks! I know the photos are not of the best quality... sorry about that... screwed up the lighting... will post better pictures later...
Re: Detailing of the port - Contnd. Next I have to finish the walls of the boat yard and the coal transfer portal - the vacation have actually been really frustrating given the amount of time I had to spend doing everything else but modeling... And I am pretty sure, I will be not even close to what I had actually planned to achieve... damn!
Restoring Bascule back to Glory! Well, in case you haven't noticed, you cannot spot my favorite Bascule bridge any of the layout photos since March. The reason is, It was all pretty damaged and literally broken to pieces due to my negligence. The bridge had a couple of temporary lifting lever mounted and back in March while I was working on another part of the layout, I applied some huge pressure on it (totally unnoticed at that moment) that actually broke the counterweight support completely , bent the counterweight truss and mostly all the mechanical links. Not to mention that I was devastated! Well, by the end of last vacation, I decided to repair it and put it back on the layout since I was missing it too much, and without it the port had lost its character significantly! First thing, fixing the counterweight truss. The problem was that it was so badly screwed up (basically one side totally broken) it wouldn't have been possible to just glue the light wood structure and bring it back to it's original strength. So I decided to drill small holes and use wire support along with superglue to hold the structure. Also, I repaired the links: Then the leaf, and most importantly managing the electrical connections. Previously it was a press on touch connection using copper plates at the end of the bridge - so basically when the bridge used to be lifted there was no connection to the rails. The main reason was that I didn't want to run wires all along to the movable part and solder it in a very visible and difficult to access area. But given all the old alignments are now gone, I decided to go straight forward solder those wires right away, because without proper alignment, having good electrical connection and reliability is impossible. Then I had to link the leaf to the counterweight structure. So I redesigned the links and kept it simply one piece of styrene, secured tightly on the leaf using glue and pin.
Next step was to istall the bridge on the layout and run the wires down and connect to the block: Still the misalignment was pretty concerning on the other side of the bridge where it meshes with the mainline. So I had make a chair and shoes to adjust the alignment:
