Hornby: The Collector. Damems in 00.

So, as I alluded to in the Christmas/New Years post, I've been busy moving house over the winter. Not too busy to make things, but far too busy to post about them. Given I've picked up a few regular gigs in the intervening period, I thought I better start posting on here again. First up, a project mostly completed over the summer (alongside packing up the house) for the Hornby Collectors Club; Damems in 00.

Damems was my local station, until we moved (the shot above with the 101 in the snow was actually the last photography session on the line before we moved).

Back during the plague times (that some of my various editors insist not be referred to these days) I decided to ease the boredom of the post-home-schooling afternoons by writing some layout planning articles for Railway Modeller Magazine. Damems seemed a logical start, as it was a place that -lockdowns permitting- I could actually visit.

Some very basic 1:1 planning underway, to get an idea of sizes.

Anyway, the piece got published, was well-received, and after a suitable gap I came back to it when needing material for the Hornby Collectors Club.  This time, I thought I'd actually build one of the layout plans I'd proposed.

Back to the basic planning again.

Reclaimed MDF board, set-track, and landscaping from foam packing material, card, and papier-mache.

Scenics underway, with cobbled sheets of unknown provenance, and Airfix level crossing, and green scatter as a base layer.

Buildings... obviously, this being a Hornby article, it was going to need to use all Hornby buildings or parts, and the article was aimed at the (relative) beginner. I hasten to point out that this rather poorly built example of the 90's Town & Country range "Bell Inn" wasn't my doing, it was bought off eBay in this condition to be a parts donor.

Stripped of parts, and the walls and so on re-fashioned to look a bit more like the real Damems stationmasters house.

For render, I used thin sandpaper.

The station building itself used more of the bits from the Bell Inn, and some MDF, but this time faced in scribed card for the planks.  Both of the above being completed during a holiday away, to the amusement of precisely none of the family who had to put up with me working in the evenings on the table in the caravan.

Back in T'North, and shooting outside on the drive. Not terrific, given it was early evening (typically at the weekends it had rained heavily and I was up against the deadline, so fitting in the shoot after work).

Not long after, I decided to punt the layout towards British Railway Modelling magazine, who picked it up, requiring a re-shoot. This had to be fit-in after the move though, and was a bit tricky (again, weather). In the end I shot the pics in the basement, using some borrowed studio lights. It was also a bit of a scrabble for figures, details, and trains, as I wasn't sure where the boxes with them all in were.

The article in the Collectors Club magazine, and hopefully shortly it will be in BRM too.

At the same time as I was doing this, I was working on yet another piece for the Collectors Club to try and bank some articles before the move. More on that soon.

Garden Railway Saturday; the first 32mm loco.

As mentioned in the previous GRS post, the plan is for a smaller garden railway at the new house. 32mm gauge this time instead of 45mm. To test the feasibility of it (bearing in mind this build was from last summer, when the move was on the cards but not finalised) we acquired a few items of stock.

So, the first loco. An I.P Engineering "Dan/Danny", based on an O&K Shunter, and effectively a modern version of a budget Fendyke Locomotive Works model originally released in the 1990's.  That Fendyke model really appealed to me as a 12 year old, and had I the budget to buy more than the catalogue, it might have marked my entry into garden railway modelling some 25 years early.

I always wanted one, and this kit was as close as I was going to get, so I bought it as my Christmas pressie to myself at the end of 2023, and finally got around to building it in the summer so we'd have something to trundle around the test-track when we eventually moved house. 

First thoughts... it's a minor one, but this is a bit of a weakly-designed kit in places. As an ex-Product Design Technician, I'm not keen on butt-joints for materials, particularly on pieces that need to be square, strong, and secure.

Relief-detailing was also lacking, being mainly engraved representations of the rivets, and some thin card panels for the engine doors. Though there were some rather lovely white-metal castings for the axleboxes and chassis weights, as well as representations of the controls and starting rod.

The thin MDF was given a coat of sanding-sealer, and I went a bit mad adding relief details to the model, principally some (probably too chunky and overscale) rivets, from gem stickers designed for mobile phone cases. Some nail heads formed doorknobs, the chimney was a spare part from a Warhammer tank I was building at the same time, and the fuel filler-cap was a rivet with paper-clip metal hinges.

For the livery, I wanted basically the Fendyke loco I fell in love with back in the mid-1990's, so black frames, grey roof, dark green gloss body, and hazard stripes.

My loco, with the original article. Mine has a few differences, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

I made a light weathering pass of the model, before gloss-varnishing it.

Shooting on location in Wales in the summer; I wanted some beauty shots of the loco, and lacked a garden railway on which to photograph it at this stage.

And in the mag, effectively marking the start of the new saga.

 

Garden Railway Saturday; Beeching comes to town...

So, as the blog wheezes back into life; a little update on the garden railway.

This was a 45mm line at the in-laws house, which was built to a budget, and which suffered more delays in construction than HS2. It had to be completely dug-up and lifted, then re-laid, multiple times due to problems with the pipework under the garden needing to be dealt with.

So come Spring 2024, and the aftermath of the winter storms, the railway died for good. The collapse of a fence panel, subsequent tramping of the railway when we tried to fix the fence, and then impending arrival of scaffolding to fix the roof led to us deciding to throw in the towel.

Despite how good the railway had been starting to look, it was taking a lot of work to get trains to run reliably given the track kept getting walked on. It wouldn't survive being lifted and rebuilt yet again, so the decision was taken to scrap the whole damned thing, and sell off almost every train, all the track, and return the garden to being a garden.

This was an issue however, as after over a decade of trying, I'd picked up a regular gig writing for Garden Rail Magazine. Purists might therefore point out that one of the things you need, in order to write monthly for a garden railway modelling magazine, is a garden railway.

Happily, this all coincided with us deciding to move house, and we realised there'd be space for a new line (smaller of course) at the new place, so not all was lost, and it also means I can continue Garden Railway Saturday here on the blog...

Hornby: The Collector. A Trading Estate Railway in 00 Scale

Playing catch-up on old projects, where the blogging got sidelined by the house move. This was a project for Hornby, for the Collectors Club.  I was going through a bit of a layout design phase, re-visiting projects I'd done in the Lockdowns for Railway Modeller, though in a bit more detail and with added model making.

Pensnett, in Dudley, West Mids, is home to a large trading estate of the 'tin shed' variety. Back in the 60's it had an internal railway line, which had been trimmed back to a coal yard/delivery point for bottled water by the time I was growing up in the 1990's. I thought I'd do a re-imagining of it as if the original internal network had survived into the early 1990's.

For real-world inspiration, I turned to the Balm Road Branch of the preserved Middleton Railway in Leeds...

...and the old Workington Docks lines.

All that's left of the original line at Pensnett is the preserved, plinthed shunter (a couple of the other locomotives survive as well elsewhere).

The idea was a simple couple of dioramas, one for a corner of the layout, one for the exchange sidings with British Rail. Scrap materials for the scenics, and for the buildings I planned to use the old Town and Country range Hornby sold in the late 80's/early 90's. This was meant to be a 'moving on from the trainset' type scheme, so I thought I wouldn't modify the buildings too much.

Foamboard scenery, with some packing foam for the landforms.

Ballast was the foam underlay that Hornby used to sell (for environmental reasons, I gather that this is being phased out these days, but I had a load leftover from previous shoots.

The road surfaces and building surrounds were sprayed with textured paint, though in hindsight it was too coarse a texture. Sculpted filler for the other landforms.

Another glamorous photoshoot on the drive...

I was using models effectively straight out of the box; I'd acquired one of the recently-released Ruston 88ds models (to represent the real one once at Pensnett), but couldn't bring myself to repaint the rather nice Rowntrees livery just for this project.

It is, if anything, too nice and modern a model for the lo-fi 90's-era stock and buildings.

Ditto for the Sentinel.

Some properly retro models used for the exchange sidings scenes. An old Class 25...

...and one of the shunters I kit-bashed from the Barclays for the £100 Layout build.

It was a project with a lot of compromises, and I could have done with some buildings on the backscene, so it wasn't quite so flat and open. But it did the job, and planted the idea for a related project for a later article (more on that coming soon).

A trip to an Exhibition; Keighley MRS Show, March 2025

Well, better get back into this blogging malarkey, as I've picked up a new regular gig for another mag. And I gather the industry is all about The Socials and such now.

To be honest winter has been pretty knackering, but that's down to juggling projects with the Day Job and the house move. This was the first exhibition I'd been to in about a year. Usual venue, Harden Garden Centre.

OK this was undoubtedly my favourite layout at the show, though heaven knows I don't need yet another scale to work in.

There seemed to be fewer layouts there compared to prior years, but what was on show was excellent quality, and there was a good buzz about the place on the Saturday morning.

Oh look, the Day Job meets the Side Hustle. In fact, the day before the show I'd been assisting with cardio training and CPR.

I could have spent hours in front of this one; I've seen this layout in mags and online, and it was great to finally see it. So many details, so much movement crammed in- very impressive.

Yellow Land Rover. Family in-joke there.

So, does this mark a return to regular blogging?  Should do; plenty of projects on the go, and we're in the process of setting up a workshop (as opposed to one end of a kitchen table at the old house).