Gauge 3 locomotive

Posted on by

I have ‘blogged about this before but last weekend I took my locomotive to see an expert, and the results were good.

IMG_2061

[click on the link toy watch]

At first this Wawrick Allison was very uncertain about it, but as time went by he seemed more confident that it was OK, and so connected the locomotive up to compressed air, and made it go, as you can see from the video.  Complete with whistle!

This was quite a “moment” for me – after all it suggests that I didn’t waste $2.5k on scrap brass and steel!  There is still quite a lot of work to do, but it was a very good moment.

More developments on the wagon-building front, by the way, see below.

You can see from the link which I have posted, I had to have some assistance building my Woodbury Midland wagon.

http://www.westernthunder.co.uk/index.php?threads/information-and-help-please.8158/

I hadn’t found a scale drawing of the prototype to use. The wagon it quite wide (101mm = 7 foot 6 inch inside width at the top). I purchased a set of Mike Williams W-irons to do the stuff not provided by Woodbury, but these W-irons (which need to be up against the solebars if the leaf-springs are to be in line with the axle boxes), don’t allow the solebars to be just inside the side-pieces of the wagon sides. Yet this seems to be the pattern of most wagons. So, should the solebars be a few millimetres inside the wagon sides, or should I have the W-irons further apart, and up against the solebars in what seems to be the characteristic position of solebars looking at drawings of other wagons on the midland railway society website?
Also the Williams leafsprings mounted on the underneath of the solebars leave no movement for the axle boxes up and down in the W-irons. So should the W-irons be packed with something so that the axle boxes are held down lower, giving more room for up-and-down sprung movement?

RESOLUTION.  After asking on “Western Thunder”, I bought some balsa wood to thicken the sole bars, and 2mm thickness of balsa to lower the W-irons to the correct position.

These pictures show the progress.

 

 

 

Tasmania – Cradle Mountain

Posted on by

Last week we went to Tasmania.  Nick had never been there, and in a week off he wanted to go walking in the Cradle Mountain area.  His girlfriend was working and so Sue and I were able to take advantage of his organisational ability: he booked the flights to Hobart, the car hire and the accommodation!  All we had to do was turn up.

This is the sort of scenery we could anticipate

The Cradle Mountain Nation Park is a wonderful area: beautiful scenery, very few people, wonderful food available.

Even the wildlife is easy to find and see.  As you can tell, the wombats are not afraid of humans – somewhat to their detriment as there are many seen dead by the roadside.

Actually the park authorities do well to protect them.  Although cars are not prohibited, there is a free bus service to and from Dove Lake, and the cars cost extra to get into the park, so many people leave them at the park entrance.

We hoped to get to the summit of Cradle Mountain (although both Sue and I have been there before).

It is a very tough climb, especially the last section.

There are well-constructed boardwalks over much of the trails, to minimise tourist- mediated erosion.

 

Nick gave an excellent lesson to me in how good it is to be tall – he could reach relatively easily from one enormous boulder to the next, whereas for me it was a real struggle.

Sue had to wait for us about 80% of the way up, above the snow-line (it had snowed the previous weekend).

 

 

This is us on the way down, and Nick throwing a snowball!

 

 

 

 

 

Overall Tasmania was just wonderful – clean environment, beautiful country, wonderful walks and lovely food: we had no less than three memorable degustation-style meals whilst we were there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[double-click on any image to enlarge]

Mudgee

Posted on by

We have just spent the weekend in Mudgee, a little town about 3 hours drive from Glenbrook – over 200km. The above was the view from the house we shared with three other couples – local friends from home. The reason for this particular weekend was a sculpture exhibition at one of the Mudgee wineries.

It was very good, too, with several very impressive or amusing sculptures (or both, as you can possibly see).

Very good

The house we stayed in was very nice, and Mudgee has a lot to recommend it. Very prosperous in the times of a local gold-rush, it has a seriously impressive railway station, alas no longer in use.

.

Furthermore, it has an opera house !

For country NSW, this is quite something.

Cricket

Posted on by

Nick and I had a really good afternoon playing cricket today.

Nick is a much better batsman than I am of course, but we asked that we could open the innings for our team – that is to go in as the first two batsmen.

From my point of view it worked well

Nick and I scored 51 between us, in pursuit of the oppositions score of 78.  So far, so good.  At that point I had only scored 2, and Nick 45, but we seemed to be going well.  For me this is excellent.  I can hold one end whilst Nick gets on with what he’s good at: scoring runs.  The bowling was good, but clearly not that good – we were more than 15 overs in at this point.  

Then Nick was out: he cut behind square, a full-blooded meat-of-the-bat shot, but it went straight to a fielder and he was caught out.  I was out two overs later, unfortunately, and my team was all out for 73 !!!

So we lost.  Not what you would have expected at the point where we were 0-51. I think we are a good opening pair – it would be much better if I scored like Nick can do, but then we would be playing in a higher grade anyway.  I get to have a very good view of Nick’s batting and I can tell you it’s a pleasure to watch.  If we had just scored half-a-dozen more …. That’s cricket, at anyway that’s what it is in Ninth Grade!

Adelaide

Posted on by

We are in Adelaide at the moment, for Sue to attend a conference. I (David) have come along as an “accompanying person” – which is excellent. I don’t really have any commitments, although I did bring some work to do. Adelaide was the first “free” settlement by Europeans – meaning that convicts were not part of the settlement. Perhaps as a consequence, it is quite different in several respects, to Sydney or Melbourne.

For instance, in the main courts building there is this beautiful library, where Sue’s nephrology meeting held their conference dinner. Just like something from a grand university in the UK, I thought. The city itself is planned (on a square pattern) and there are many lovely old buildings. In Sydney and Melbourne the initial buildings were never grand (except a few private residences) and so Adelaide, counterintuitively, has better buildings from the times of early European settlement.

Sue and I also spent some time going into the countryside around Adelaide, which mostly is devoted either to good food, or good wine. This is the “Bird in Hand” winery, in the Adelaide Hill district.

This was taken in Lyndoch.  Actually taken on our last day in South Australia, when Sue and I went up to the Barossa Valley, where much of Australia’s best-known red wines are made, this area was like going through a (wealthy) area of the country in England – beautiful little villages with lovely farming land in-between. The only difference being the frequent characteristic vineyards. Apparently, though, we saw it at its best – green after recent rain, sunshine of early springtime – and later in the year it will be yellow and brown.

That was red wine country, this is white wine country – the Eden Vale. Just outside Adelaide itself.

Gauge 3 Woodbury wagon

Posted on by

This ‘blog may be updated as I build the wagon, but to start off with …

In gauge 3 I have found at least three companies make model wagons largely from wood. This is good, rather than using largely plastic, and I approve for all sorts of practical reasons, as well as ideological ones.

So this is my latest model, made by Woodbury wagons. It represents a Midland Railway “5-plank” open wagon, meaning that the sides were five planks high.

One of the peculiar things about the larger scale compared to 7mm/foot, is that some of the parts are smaller! If you look carefully at the second piece down from the top, on the centre of the side-piece of the wagon it a little pile of 1/32 inch rivets. These are used to model the rivets on the real wagon, and each one has to be inserted into a hole through the simulated “strapping” parts on the sides and ends of the wagon, as you can see in the picture – the model strapping is made from this strips of acrylic, with holes bored (actually laser-cut) where the rivets are to go.

The is a somewhat laborious task – each wagon will have over two hundred of the tiny pieces to put in place. It will look good in the end, I have no doubt.

Laser-cutting of the pieces has made this not just possible, but remarkably accurate and so easier- the holes in the strapping and the holes underneath in the plywood match up exactly. Very impressive. It takes an awful long time to do, however.

NEXT ENTRY

After laminating the sides together (each side and each end has two flat parts to laminate), the time comes to start putting it all together.

It looked good at first, but then I realised that one end had a minor mis-match with a 1mm step between the side and the end. One of the little-known virtues of Araldite is that it is somewhat heat-labile: by dipping the corner into boiling water the hardened glue softens and can be pulled apart. In stages the whole construction could be dismantled.

So I did that, however leaving the end pieces in place but removing and then repositioning the side, at the correct level. This is all made so much easier by the precise dimensions cut by laser, I suspect. So far, a very impressive kit indeed.

NEXT ENTRY

Now I can show the not-quite-complete body of the wagon. It has been a title bit of a struggle, but it has turned out almost perfectly square without too much trouble really.

NEXT ENTRY

I decided that next I should make the fasteners which keep the side-doors closed – a pin held in place with a loop of metal. Clearly these are prominent features but quite small, and not provided in the kit. So I decided to make them from 7mm-scale hand-rail pins and loops of brass wire made by wrapping a length of 0.5mm wire around a 2mm drill, then cutting the resulting spiral longitudinally to make a lot of loops (albeit with gaps in each loop).

Some fine soldering work and adding small lengths of straight wire produced the necessary fasteners:

Adding a small length of copper chain specially purchased

I think the end result looks good, and very realistic – which is the main idea, of course.

Local walks (2)

Posted on by

After the success of our previous walks we are off on another …

This time it was similar to the previous ones, in that we simply took the train from Glenbrook Station, six minutes walk from our front door, up four stops to Faulconbridge Station, then down into the bushland.

In this area of Australia the walks start at the top of the hill, and go down into the valleys. So we went down from Faulconbridge into Sassafrass Gully, a descent of about 260m.

We then walked along the valley, visiting Clarinda Falls before walking up the Wiggins Track to Springwood (200m ascent). Opposite the Station there’s a very nice teashop to spend a little while waiting for the train back to Glenbrook.

To give you an idea of what Springwood is like, this is the shop next to the cafe where we had coffee.

Local walks

Posted on by

Over the last few weekends we have done a couple of local walks which have been something of a revelation – because they are so close and easy to get to!

The first one is from the Nepean Lookout in the Blue Mountains National Park, the Glenbrook entrance to which is only a few hundred metres from our house. Admittedly the Nepean Lookout is half-an-house cycle ride into the Park (I’ve done it before, of course. We drove this time.)

Click to enlarge

We walked from the Nepean Lookout down to Erskine Creek. This is a tributary of the main river, and a beautiful spot. According to the signs, yabbies (small freshwater crayfish) and even platypus can be seen there [very occasionally, I suspect]. It was a truly lovely walk.

 

Then two weekends ago we did this walk. This was even easier to get to: we simply caught the train two stops up the mountain from Glenbrook Station (200m from our front door!). So we caught the train up to Winmalee Station and walked into the bush from there. We walked down the Florabella Pass for a couple of hours, through some lovely bushland, and ended up in Blaxland.

The walk involved a bit of up and down, but overall descent: the guidebook says the walk involves 330m descent and 280m climbing. It’s a little steep in parts, but really not too bad, and could be done in almost any conditions – it has been very dry recently, but even if we had a lot of rain, Florabella Creek is unlikely to make the walk impassable.

In many ways it’s the best ideologically sound day out – train two stops (to give you an idea, it is about as far as two stops on the London Underground). Then a simple route through a truly lovely valley, and end up at home!

There were some very interesting features to be seen on the walk, and see beautiful areas, like this pool in the forest.

There were also some examples of what I think are Bloodwood Trees

UK Holiday

Posted on by

I went over to England to go to the British Cardiac Society meeting.  There are multiple reasons for this, but primariIy it is a good general cardiac education meeting to keep me up to date, and it is held in Manchester, which is both easily accessible, and in the north of England.  This was to be a very short visit to the UK, for tedious reasons to do with hospital administration, but managed to have many of my core group of friends come to see me at the house in Cark owned by Mark and John.

   It is safe to say that we had an excellent extended weekend in the Lake District. John and I drove up to Cark from Manchester.  The first person to arrive after us was Dave Thomas, my longest-standing friend, as we have known each other since schooldays.  Our  first day walking was a relatively easy walk up Tom Gill to Tarn Hows.     

The next day [Friday] we decided to do a walk which I have never done, despite it being a walk “local” to my old stamping ground – we walked from the Walna Scar Road up Brown Pike and Buck Pike to Dow Crag, then over to The Old Man of Coniston.  Heaven knows how many times I have stood on the top of the Old Man, but I had never been up Dow Crag before, and never walked this path before.

It was a long walk, and an excellent test of my balance (still not quite back to normal after my bike accident) and my stamina (definitely not so good after two months “rest”).

That evening most of the remaining party arrived: Steve and Christine drove over from Sheffield, David and Amaryllis caught the train over from Leeds (they had been visiting their daughter Isobel, an “old” friend of ours – about contemporary with Nick and Andrew).

The next day [Saturday] was another “new” walk for me: almost unbelievably I had never climbed Pike of Blisco, which is a peak right in the middle of the Lakes – at the end of Crinkle Crags, up from Great Langdale. 

I am not sure why we/I had never climbed Pike of Blisco before, because it is a really good walk to do, with great views from the top. A great walk, but we were very tired by the end

L->R: Amaryllis, Steve, Christine, David

Charlotte and Andrew arrived that evening, and the party of ten was complete (fortunately Steve and Christine had arranged to sleep in a nearby cottage – Mark and John’s house has a maximum of two double beds and three singles, although in every other way it was perfect for the big group).

The following day [Sunday] we were restricted to flat walking by a number of factors, not least being my left knee, which becomes painful after repeated impacts, such as descending Pike of Blisco (!) so we did a couple of relatively gentle and local walks. 

The first was around the coastal margin of the Cartmel Peninsula, and then after lunch we walked up Ellerside to gain a lovely view over the whole peninsula [View over the Cartmel Peninsula 2 small.jpg copy].  The evening meal, cooked by Charlotte and myself was a meal reminiscent of the original Woodgate Weekends – entirely vegetarian, a little see-what-works, but delicious in the end.  A vegetable roast, and what started off to be a vegetable-and goat’s cheese pasta meal, but ended up as pasta without pasta, because I had prepared too many potatoes.  There you go.

I am pleased, in a way, to say that on occasions we were restricted in what we could do by lack of motor transport.  Several people made use of the fact that Mark and John’s house is 50m from Cark and Cartmel railway station.  So the next day [Monday] we caught the train from Cark to Silverdale station for our walk, which started off going through the bird reserve at Leighton Moss, then through Leighton Hall grounds.

The next day [Tuesday] was slightly sad in that people had to leave eventually and by today everyone bar the Coulshed brothers had gone.