Stanier 8F in ScaleSeven – Part 27: running in black

Posted on 30/12/2016 by admin

This is the stage at which realism becomes more possible. I have now painted the locomotive all over in matt black. I will then add numbers and lettering, before applying an all-over protective coat, then add weathering to make it more realistic.

As always, click to enlarge.

Here are some pictures in still and video format:

These are “Youtube” videos of the engine running on my test track.

To the educated eye there are some mistakes visible, even apart from the lack of number and lettering, but they aren’t too obvious, I hope.

There are no cab window frames or glass, some small parts remain the wrong colour (coupling hooks, etc). No coal in the tender.

There’s also no exhaust steam injector below the left of the cab (it fell off as I was preparing the loco for the video – curses!).

Christmas letter 2016

Posted on 26/12/2016 by admin

Each year we aim to send out a letter to all our friends, hoping to keep all up to date with what we have been up to over the year.

Dear All,

David’s Bit:

In a way this has been a year where we start the next major project – building the house that we want in Glenbrook. There is nothing wrong with the one where we live now, apart from the facts that it is a long way from the nearest decent shops, 4km from the railway station and a significant addition to the length of time Sue has to drive to get home, compared to the new plot of land, which is 50m from shops and restaurants in Glenbrook, 300m from Glenbrook Station and only about 200m from the main Western highway out to country NSW.

So this is what it looks like now.

It’s a fair-sized block of land, 50m x 20m, and flat enough to be relatively easy to build on. There are houses on three sides, but the front of the house is opposite a park. We actually bought it about 5 years ago, but have been waiting to get enough money together to build the new house.

Inevitably there have been problems with council, despite the fact that we are trying to make it an environmentally-conscious house, conserving water and heat, and we aren’t creating a modern monster. In fact I have always wanted to live in a stone-built house, so this will be a modern house made from sandstone, but with double-glazing throughout, solar tiles built into the rooftiles to make it energy self-sufficient as far as possible, and we will collect rainwater for flushing the lavatories, etc.

We aren’t “downsizing” though: it will have four bedrooms, two with their own bathrooms, a large open-plan living area, with a large covered balcony looking out onto the 15m x 20m back garden.

This is what it might look like (“might” because we are still negotiating with the Blue Mountains City Council about the 1½-storey garage. Actually this is important to me, because the upper level would have the only room into which Sue could not see as she walks past – important for ‘work in progress”, etc.

I had toyed with the idea of going for a glass-and-concrete modern architectural icon, but there were a few obstacles to this, I suspect: cost, the council (Glenbrook is a “living conservation zone”) and Sue. So sandstone it is (locally obtained, as will everything that we can get locally).

Travel? Well the others may talk more about it, but my sole-traveller journey was to the UK this year, where I attended the British Cardiac Society, but more importantly saw some of my friends, and climbed Helvellyn with John!

As you can see, I lost my sole on the way up Helvellyn ….

Sue’s Bit:

We have traveled a bit, Japan for skiing in January, with a side trip to Taipei.

Taiwan was very interesting, with some wonderful museums and galleries, and some lovely countryside.

India for a conference in March meant that we are keen to talk about the elephant in the room, because that’s exactly what we had shipped home: a ½m tall wood-and-camel-bone hand-painted elephant!

I went to Chicago which was fabulous for another conference in November, and to Perth in September. David went to the UK in June.

One of our best weekends was in Launceston with David and Andrea McKay and Carol Pollock. David and Andrea sail half the year and work half the year.

Work was tough as my colleague Josette Eris, aged 56 died in May. Jim Johnson who set up my practice died in July, and our secretary in Penrith had a stroke in March. It would be fair to say medical administrators are not my favourite people. I can sit in meetings with lots of people and very few actually have direct patient contact. Medical administrators speak a foreign language and appear to love the process not the outcome. I am lucky to have great medical colleagues both at the Mater and in Penrith. It is a privilege to be involved with some of my renal patients for over 20 years. I do a lot more obstetric medicine now and I love it.

Dad has spent quite a bit of time in hospital after a couple of falls. Mum has been quite amazing coping with all the upheaval. Dad has stopped driving.

Amy, our practice manager manages me very well and is having a much wanted baby next year. I am going to have to organise my own life and phone.

Now Nick and Andrew have flown the nest I spend more time with old uni and school friends and our local friends. We all try to multi task. All problems are solved with champagne. David and I will have been married 30 years next year.

Nick’s Bit:

As the year draws to a close the Christmas letter forces us all to consider the year that was since last sitting down to compose this yearly reflection. I am glad to note that this year I am at least sitting down on Christmas Eve to write my portion of the letter, rather than a few days post Christmas as was the case last year. 2016 has been another good year for the family and myself by all accounts.

Firstly considering my ongoing medical education, of which I am now more than half way! This year has presented itself with new challenges for me with my first ‘clinical year’. This meant I spent the year in the hospital following various teams around the hospital attempting to learn as much as possible ‘on the job’. This has very varied results depending on the interest of the team in teaching, some rotations were fantastic with opportunities to see patients on my own and assist in operations, however others somewhat less so. My interest in surgery continues to grow much to Mum and Dad’s dismay, and I have been elected as President of the Surgical Society for 2017, which should present me with a new challenge.

University also presented its share of amusement and socialisation through various parties, and two conferences across the year, one held in Townsville, the other a surgical conference in Brisbane. Both great experiences, with some focus on learning but mostly just having a good time.

To celebrate reaching the halfway point of our medical degree our year had our ‘Half-way Dinner’, which was a great night where I managed to win two awards, one the “Turk and JD award” for the two best friends with one of my friends Ali, and the other the “Family look-alike award” courtesy of Andrew.

I have continued to play plenty of sport including hockey and cricket, and I am pleased to report my replacement ACL has stood the test of a season of hockey, and our Ski trip in January. I continue to wear a knee brace when playing but this is probably more for peace of mind than any real functionality. I was also able to continue my success with the bat in cricket last season, ending up with the most runs for the club! A highlight was in the final batting batting as opener and lasting through the entire innings, with patience far greater than usually shown.

I hope you all have had an enjoyable year and enjoy the holiday period!

Nick

Andrew’s Bit:

2016 has been yet another eventful year for both myself and the Coulshed family as a whole – between the time spent on university, friends, family and extracurricular activities, this Christmas letter presents a rare opportunity to actually stop and think about everything that has happened!

Probably the most significant part of the year has been continuing my medical studies at UNSW. This has been pretty similar to 2015, continuing the daily lectures, practicals and tutorials. I am fairly relieved to have now finished most of the on-campus part of my degree, as I am going on to the much more interesting clinical studies next year.

What has changed, however, is my involvement in broader university life. This year, I have thrown myself quite enthusiastically at the various events and societies around campus, getting involved in educations such as the Medical Society, College House Committee, and Australian Medical Students Association. In doing so, I’ve had a fairly exciting time travelling to conferences and seminars around Australia, including to Townsville, Newcastle, Canberra and Melbourne.

I was also lucky enough to spend some time in Nepal at the start of the year, doing a 2 week placement at the Scheer Memorial Hospital in Banepa, then travelling around Kathmandu and Pokhara.

This included going Parahawking, which involves going paragliding whilst being guided by birds of prey, which you then feed in midair! Evidence is attached.

Back in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, my living conditions have stayed fairly similar, staying on in Fig Tree Hall for another year. However, this time I took a companion with me in the form of a Chinese Fighting Fish named Vodka, an 18^th birthday present from a school friend.

The fish was named as a reflection of my college’s no alcohol and no pets policy. Unfortunately, he managed to pass away just before my exams, and as such some of my study was postponed to hold his funeral on the college roof, which was one of the few sad moments of the year.

One success of the year was taking hockey back up again, as I had missed last season after dislocating my patella in O-week. This was a lot of fun, and playing with the university team presented another great way to avoid studying. I did manage to dislocate my patella again midway through the season, however, albeit during a break week at a party! Having done so twice before I was a bit sick of going to hospital, and managed to just relocate it myself and just go and see the GP the morning after.

There are a lot of other things I could mention, but I won’t bore with the details – safe to say I’ve spent far too much time having fun and meeting new people, and far too little in front of a desk. However, it’s been a successful year anyway, and I’m hoping 2017 will be the same!

Wishing everyone a happy holidays and a great new year – Andrew

So, from all of us:

Merry Christmas and we wish you all a Happy New Year

Glenbrook House progress (1)

Posted on 03/12/2016 by admin

Just a brief update in the ‘blog about the rebuilding.

Here is the site as it now stands …

The above was taken from approximately the same position as the picture of the old house.

Here is a view from the opposite corner of the block.

A bit different ……..

Also, just in passing, the dreaded asbestos was in the old pool!

That was an extra $7,000 to clear it up and dispose of it safely!

Politics, the EU and Nationalism

Posted on 30/11/2016 by admin

I don’t often feel the need or have the inclination to indulge in political commentary, but have read a couple of articles in the Economist over the past week which I want to share some thoughts from.

I have been watching what I regard as the tragedy of “Brexit” from afar. It really affects me minimally, now, but for someone in my equivalent position in the UK it has nothing but “negatives” really. However I can see why it has happened, and in my opinion those who think that the result can somehow be reversed are living in an alternative reality, because the fundamental reason for the “Leave” vote has not changed, and will not change in the short run.

In my opinion, the vote to leave is democracy at its best, even if I disagree with the verdict.

For years, possibly decades, the “elite” (whoever they are, and I would probably be counted as one, were I still living in England) have prospered, but the lower socio-economic classes have not. In my opinion, the Thatcherite “trickle-down effect” has been demonstrated to be a false illusion. Perhaps the economically-literate always knew it was such. What has really occurred is that those in finance and the upper echelons of industry have become proportionately more wealthy, whilst those at the bottom of the social ladder have seen no benefits, or certainly have seen themselves relatively disadvantaged. The riches earned by the “Bosses” have never been shared with the “Workers”.

On top of that certain politicians have seen career advantage to denigrate the European Union at every opportunity (Boris Johnson is the prime example of this). So it can surely be seen as little surprise when the less-well-off in British society are firstly resentful of being told how well the country is doing (when their wages are stagnant even as the directors of companies take multi-million pound bonuses); and also see the EU as a source of many of their woes.

Brexit will, I believe, be disastrous for England (if Scotland achieves independence, then they may get some benefit from the process). However those hurt dis-proportionally will be the well-off and middle-classes. The poor of England may see little difference – if they were struggling before, and additional struggle from Brexit may go unnoticed. They may obtain some satisfaction from the relative discomfiture of the elite classes, at least.

If you don’t think this can be true, click on this chart from the Economist and look at it.

It is from last weeks edition, and so reflects attitudes after all the negative publicity about Brexit that we have had recently.

My interpretation, in broad terms is this: the population still want all the advantages of EU membership, but without any of the obligations to countries poorer that the UK. If the referendum were re-held tomorrow, the result would be substantially unchanged. The EU is seen as responsible for the loss on manufacturing jobs and “blue collar” jobs in general, and even if finance-sector jobs have boomed, why should the population of Middlesborough/Liverpool/Glasgow care about that?

So unless Brexit can be shown to hurt the poor of England more than the rich, it is now inevitable.

The other article in the Economist was about globalisation, which is under significant attack by Trump and others. the chart below is interesting for a number of reasons.

Globalisation is not going to stop, when large countries like India and Indonesia want it to happen. Also, protectionism (a la Trump) is not so easy in the era of the internet, Amazon, Alibaba, etc.

A final thought. Look at the percentage of a population who believe that their country is the best in the world. I knew that the USA would come top (a mass delusion that their society has much, indeed anything, to recommend it). However I always thought that France would come high on this scale (we don’t meet many French immigrants – but perhaps it would be different in SE Asia, for instance). However France is very lowly-rated. So who is the next country after the USA to believe that their country is the best? It is Australia. The difference, of course, is that we are right.

Design for the new house in Glenbrook

Posted on 28/11/2016 by admin

Our dream house? Not quite. The council are interfering, apart from anything else.

This is the appearance as we want it to be:

However the council are concerned about the two-level garage part of the building, and so that may have to be reduced in height. I hope not, as that might mean we will lose the storage room above the garage – which is the only potential junk room, not immediately visible to Sue, in the house. All homes need a room to put things in “which might be useful” in the future.

These are the square-on aspects:

The block of land was attractive when we bought it because it is also flat, and is about 50m by 20m, so there is plenty of room. The house will be as environmentally-friendly as we can make it. Double-glazed, sealed to make it thermally efficient, rainwater-collecting into tanks and solar panels on the roof (ones can now be obtained to look just like roof tiles). It will be made in local sandstone, and we will try to use materials from as local a source as we can.

One of the good parts of having a flat block of land could be the garden railway. Would it be Gauge 1 (45mm track width) or Gauge 3 (63mm track width)?

Click on the images to enlarge (if you are interested ….), these are the ground and first-floor plans:

Ground floor: large living area, garage swung around so as not to dominate the facade of the house, downstairs bedroom, large deck outside a large sliding glass door.

Front entrance with view up to the second level.

Upper floor: three bedrooms. Room above the garage for suitcases, tools, etc.

Roof over the garage with “Velux” windows over the ~~train~~ ~~hobby~~ storage room.

Stanier 8F in ScaleSeven – Part 26: in Primer

Posted on 27/11/2016 by admin

Onto the painting! An exciting moment. I have put the metal primer on already.

Here are a couple of pictures of the loco. and tender together.

The chassis and wheels have been partially painted already.

There are some modellers who assemble the entire kit before even starting to paint it, but this means that you are forced to take apart some of the construction in order to paint awkward places like behind the wheels, and so I have chosen to do a limited amount of painting as I go through.

For undercoat I use some stuff found in Australia made by a car-paint firm call Hi-Tech, who make some really good primer called (surprise) “All-Surface Primer”. I’m sure there would be equivalents made elsewhere. Advantages are that it will stick to anything (I have to use a Stanley knife blade as a scraper to get it off the polished granite samples that we have from when we chose our benchtop in the kitchen) and that it is really thin and so easily applied by an airbrush.

I am going to have to slacken off the coupling between the tender and the locomotive, because at present there is too little movement side-to-side to allow the loco. to go around the somewhat tighter-than-realistic curves on my layout.

Property development.

Posted on 26/11/2016 by admin

Do you like this house?

About five years ago we bought this house, In Glenbrook (a village near to where we live now).

It had six bedrooms, a large kitchen, a tandem double garage and a swimming pool. However its main virtues were the fact that it stood on a 1000 square metre flat block of land, 50m from Glenbrook shops and restaurants, across from a public park and only 2-300m from the train station.

I trust you noticed the tense of those last few verbs, and I hope you didn’t like the house, because this is what it looks like today:
This is the start of a year-long process of rebuilding the house to our own liking. It will be a four-bedroom, sandstone house with solar panels built into the roof tiles, water-conservation plans, double-glazing throughout, thermal efficiency, top-class insulation all round. In many ways I accept that it is an incredible indulgence, but it should set us up well for our declining-mobility years!

I will provide instalments here as we go through the process.

Stanier 8F in ScaleSeven – Part 25: build finished, prior to painting.

Posted on 13/11/2016 by admin

I think most of the details are done, and I have put it all together.

These are some pictures taken on my new iPhone:

And others from the normal camera:

small-build-complete-02

So for the first time, it can run as a complete locomotive:

It doesn’t run smoothly because of electrical “shorting” between the front steps and the pony truck wheels at the from, when traversing the tight curves on my test track.

Protected: Just a couple of events ….

Posted on 22/10/2016 by admin

Stanier 8F in ScaleSeven – part 22: Mechanical lubricators and their pipes

Posted on 03/09/2016 by admin

I’m beginning to wonder just how obsessive/nerdy I can get.

On my recent visit to England (see John’s ‘blog), we travelled behind one of my beloved Stanier 8Fs on the Scarborough Spa Express. I took pictures of the engine, and noticed many details that would be useful for my model.

Amongst these were the mechanical lubricators and their pipes. They were all cleaned and nicely polished, and so were a quite prominent feature on the footplate of the locomotive. In working life they would probably have been grimy and not noticeable, I suppose, but now I had seen them, I felt I had to model them accurately.

The MOK kit comes with the two lubricators, but not with the pipes which go from them. So I had to somehow make the pipes from scratch. Stripping some mains cable I found multi-strand copper wire with which to make the pipes. Each strand was about 0.2mm thick, so approx. scale for a pipe 8-9mm across, which seemed about right. However, how to make them into the beautiful fan of pipework was not obvious, to say the least. I tried soldering the wires to the lubricator castings, but apart from clogging everything with solder, well you can imagine how successful that was. I then tried soldering the wire strands into ribbons six wires across, intending to use lower-melt solder to attach them to the lubricators. However I couldn’t solder the wires together over a short enough length then to make the elegant curved sections onto the castings. Lots of burnt fingers and strained eyes.

This is how I eventually did get something approximating to the desired appearance.

Click to enlarge.

First I found some thicker copper mains cable, and flattened a section out with a hammer, evening its edges up with a file.

Next I cut a small section of this cooper strip and folded it over the necessary number of strands of 0.2mm wire and hammered the folded copper strip together to hold the wire, applying a tiny amount of solder to keep it all fixed. Then I could bend the curves into the ends of 0.2mm wire and separate them to go up to the lubricators.

The one in between the two lubricators had to take ten wires/pipes, divided to go different directions, of course!

The fixing strips were then used to attach the pipes to the footplate, in a position so that the curved pipes are coming from the sides of the lubricators.

The other end of the multiple-wire constructions help to hold the curved ends in place when soldering, and can then be bent into shape to represent the lubricator lines as then do down or across the chassis – a few travel across to the other side over a chassis cross-member, and are visible from above.

Was it worth all the trouble? I don’t really know, but it is satisfying to have succeeded, so if the painting eventually makes it invisible, i may just have to be content with that.

The Coulshed Family Website

To keep us up to date!

Category Archives: 2016 Entries