Figure 1 - Igor (No. 2) with a goods train. Goods stock is a mixture of Peco and Slimrails kits, with a few earlier scratch built wagons based on HO/OO underframes. Wagon loads are easily added and removed during operating sessions.

 

7mm narrow gauge loco collection started as an escape from PC – Prototypical Correctness. There is something extremely satisfying about modelling for the sheer joy of it, without worrying if something in the detail isn’t exactly correct. The narrow gauge world is so varied everything, however bizarre, has a prototype somewhere. The change of scale from 4mm shook up my sense of scale as well which is a very useful exercise for any modeller, and the My benefit of a larger scale for my “maturing” eye sight needs not even to be mentioned.

First cab off the rank, or rather first loco out of the shed, was Thor, a very simple resin kit running on the infamous Smokey Joe chassis. It didn’t look too bad. It even ran. It ran better than I expected when I DCCed it. I was hooked.

 

The next loco, Igor, was entirely scratch built in styrene running on a very reliable Bachmann American 0-6-0 saddle tank switcher chassis. He was followed by Yin, a Bachmann On30 gas-mechanical, suitably anglicised using the excellent Backwoods Miniatures dress-up kit. Why Yin? Because his identical twin Yang awaits conversion in the bottom drawer. What else could they be called? A couple of more dramatic reworkings of ready to run bodies followed. The stable was growing. I was hooked.

 

But therein lay the problem. I am not a collector, and this small collection was sitting on a shelf. They needed a small layout for exercise, and that, dear reader, brings us to Richmond Bridge.

 

Any layout design had to present great modelling opportunities, allow some form of prototypical operation, and should be easy to take to shows if necessary. Space limitations at home meant it should be small, and if it was small it would be easy to transport and quick to set up at shows. From the operational perspective a simple end-to-end shunting layout would be fine, but I did recognise, from painful experience, that an end-to-end is hard work at shows. You have to perform constantly to keep the audience engaged, and ideal crew size can be quite ridiculous for the size of layout involved. You could have someone operating the layout, someone setting up in the fiddleyard, someone chatting to the audience, and inevitably someone on a loo break, getting coffee or just wandering around. It’s all too much. Better then to have some continuous running capability.

 

I settled on a single scenic module 1300mm long (the length of the load space in my hatchback) and a similarly sized fiddle yard to provide end-to-end operations at home, ie shunting the odd wagon about. For continuous running at shows the fiddleyard could be repositioned at the back of the layout, connected by two semicircular sections. With a radius of about 400mm for these connections, the minimum I dared even if it is narrow gauge with small locos, the result was still quite compact, fitting into a 1200mm by 2300mm exhibition space.

 

Where and when would the layout be set? I’ve always been stuck with the mid 1930s, and a small town or village would emphasise the modelling of buildings rather than landscape, another preference of mine. There was a recurrent mantra during our last wander through the UK, in quaint Cornish fishing villages, picturesque townships clinging to the Yorkshire coast, and in the mountains of northern Wales… “I’ve got to model this place!” But which particular place? We now laughingly describe Richmond Bridge as being set on the Cornwall/Yorkshire/Wales border. Richmond Bridge is also sprinkled with a few not so subtle references to my newly adopted state of Tasmania. Did I mention escaping from PC?

 

Figure 2 - General overview. The scenic portion of the layout fits on a single 1300mm by 550mm board, with a four road fiddleyard attaching to the left hand side for end-to-end operation.

 

Peco O16.5 Code 100 narrow gauge track is used in the scenic areas, appropriately weathered and ballasted, with OO/HO elsewhere. The compact scene forces some compromises on pointwork. Peco O16.5 narrow gauge points are used where they fit comfortably, but for tighter locations I opted to use Peco Setrack OO/HO points, resleepered to match the look of the other trackwork. In retrospect the daunting task of learning to hand lay pointwork would probably have been less trouble than this sleeper surgery. Peco’s “SL501 Conversion Sleepers” look more like a problem than a solution. Internet searches for other resleepering attempts revealed little to inspire. The best example was from the late Dave Balcombe, sadly no longer available on line.

 

The approach involves removing alternate sleepers, choosing targets carefully to avoid weakening the structure unnecessarily, then adding plastic strips to the sides (and perhaps ends) of each remaining sleeper to increase its apparent size. Problems arise in trying to glue anything reliably to the existing sleepers. Light bulbs went on when I realised I could exploit the slight difference in sleeper height between HO and O16.5 track, gluing the additional strips to a thin 0.5mm styrene sheet under the points rather than to the irregular surfaces of the original sleepers themselves.

 

The mad mix of electrofrog and insulfrog points hasn’t presented any operational problems so far.

 

While on the subject of points, I still have in the bottom drawer half a dozen unused Peco point motors. I left them there because in the same bottom drawer I happened to find a previously untouched Modratec 6 Lever Frame Kit (non-interlocking) that I accidentally bought at a show years ago, together with all the bits for wire-in-tube control of my points. If you haven’t come across Modratec (modratec.com) before, try reading Graeme Lewis’s “Modratec Lever Frame – or Why Harold Fanshawe is a Genius” in TCH 147. My implementation was simple compared with what Graeme describes. There is no interlocking, and points are controlled directly by wire in tube, rather than electrically. Graeme misses one little thing in his article… the immensely satisfying physicality of using a mechanical lever frame. No disembodied pressing of a button, but rather the deliberate physical action of moving the lever, with the accompanying gentle scraping sound of brass on brass. I can hear you laughing at that, but try it and you’ll see what I mean.

 

I’ve built and kit-bashed quite a few Scalescenes (scalescenes.com) buildings in OO in the past. If you haven’t come across these wonderful downloadable cardboard kits before read Frank Kohek’s article “Card Buildings” in TCH 148. Unfortunately Scalescenes didn’t offer full kits in O, only a selection of construction papers, and even those appear to have been withdrawn after a website upgrade late last year. So for Richmond Bridge I was planning to try something new, the full masochistic experience of individual cardboard bricks and tiles, with DAS covered cardboard stonework.

 

Figure 3 - The plaque on the bridge bears an uncanny resemblance to one on a similarly named bridge in Tasmania.

 

 

Since there’d be quite a few buildings and life is short, I intended to mock up the buildings of Richmond Bridge first, using the Scalescenes papers I had previously collected, and scaling up various components plundered from the OO kits. Then the real construction would commence. That was the plan. It didn’t happen. Somehow I got lost in the Scalescenes world again, and the buildings you see on Richmond Bridge are all Scalescenes based. Maybe next time. At least the problem of selecting a location was solved by the variety of honey coloured stone papers I had available. Perhaps now Cornwall, Yorkshire and North Wales meet the Cotswolds.

 

Figure 4 - To convert an HO/OO Setrack point to narrow gauge O16.5 simply take an unmodified point (A), prune alternate sleepers carefully to avoid weakening the structure (B), fit styrene strips to widen remaining sleepers, but gluing to a 0.5mm sheet, not the sleepers themselves (C), superglue the point into the resulting construction (D), and add a little paint (E).

 

 

While the scaling up of 4mm designs to 7mm worked in general, some adaptation was necessary. Scalescenes designs often cleverly use cardboard thickness as a visible design feature, for example in the thickness of a window opening or the width of a down pipe. Scaling up to 7mm produced some substantial sandwiches of cardboard, some approaching a centimetre in thickness. That gets very heavy. The solution was to substitute foamcore where possible, which dropped weight significantly without really compromising strength.

 

Figure 5 - Yin (No. 3) shunts the coal siding.

 

 

Despite my lapse with the buildings, there were still opportunities to explore new materials. One of my current inspirations is the blog of very talented (and amusing) bespoke model maker Iain Robinson. He writes a lot on technique and materials, and it was here that I first came across mention of Foamex, as a competitor to more traditional DAS on cardboard. There’s an interesting posting at iainrobinsonmodels.blogspot.com. Maybe I should get out more, but I’d never heard of it before. While that particular name doesn’t mean much in Australia, I did find 3mm foamed PVC sheet readily available at a certain nationwide hardware store. Its smooth surface is easily, and permanently, scribed and textured, making it ideal for stonework. It now paves the streets of Richmond Bridge. Any scribing project does require a degree of patience. Hand scribing something in excess of 8000 individual setts for those streets definitely tested mine. Given the material is PVC, gluing could be a challenge. I experimented with contact adhesives and Gorilla Glue successfully.

 

For a small single board layout lighting is relatively straight forward. A pelmet sits across the front of the layout, supported by the side panels. I’ve used two 7W LED slimline cabinet lights behind this, providing soft even light across the layout. I chose neutral white lights (4000°K), but in retrospect would go for something even warmer.

 

So what’s for the future at Richmond Bridge?  Back to where it all started, the loco building programme will continue with a couple of white metal kits still waiting in the bottom drawer. My computerised system for generating random load lists for operating sessions needs to be re-established. And longer term, when I look at those semicircular sections that connect the scenic module to the fiddle yard in the continuous running mode, I wonder if I could replace one with another scenic module… perhaps open countryside… and a small curved viaduct… nothing too ambitious… Glenfinnan springs to mind.

 

Figure 6 - Station Lane with the doctor’s car outside number three. Doris must be feeling poorly again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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