In my last post I mentioned an experimental Association conversion kit for the Farish 9400 loco that had never made it to market. I had some left-over etches courtesy of Bill Blackburn and planned to use them to convert my own 9400 which was running like Long John Silver after too much grog as a result of my earlier botched efforts. Well yesterday I got it running and here it is:

It's a bit raw at the moment and a lot less forgiving of track imperfections than my Jinty, and its all-metal gears make a hell of a racket at full chat, but the Jinty got better over a few months of use and I'm hoping this one will too. Now it's back to landscaping the layout, once I've got the carbs back on the MG.

PS. If I paint a face on that capacitor, do you think it will fool anyone?

My inability to work successfully with wood led me to search for something more in keeping with my limited skills.  Foam Board is a light weight board that is used extensively for promotional signs. It consists of a dense foam layer sandwiched between two layers of card . It is both light and strong and can be cut with a knife and a straight edge.

It also has some downsides: The lightness of the board means it is susceptible to damage and in its unpainted state it dislikes water (something I have already found out for myself).

The harbour board.

The maximum length of foam board I could readily obtain was 1016mm so I decided to make this the length of each board. Using the computer I calculated that six boards 6 inches wide arranged as 6 sides of a decagon would just come in within the layout spec.  However lack of storage for this many boards together with the prospect of completing them by 2010 resulted in the plan being scaled down to just three boards with the prospect of adding more at a later date if space permits.

The boards are designed in two sections: The main board on which the layout is built and the fascia that covers it and will contain the lighting and backscene. The two are simply held together with bulldog clips - more than adequate for foam board. The removable fascia allows easy access to the layout when working on it.

The under side of the harbour board.

The side and cross pieces are glued together but also screwed to keep them attached while the glue dries. To the top of this is added a solid foam board layer which is held solely by glue.

One difficulty I had was with the end pieces of each board which had to be angled at 18 degrees. In the end I copped out and used some 2 x 1 timber cut with a mitre saw to the required angle. The timber also allowed me to use pattern maker's dowels for alignment of the boards.

The fascia showing the gap at the end where it straddles to main board.

Here are some photos of the small layout that I started work on several years ago as a toe-in-the-water exercise. I've very little modelling exerience of any sort, apart from helping my father with his model railway in the 1960s and a bit of simple model-making when I worked in an architect's office in the 1970s. I retired last year, and finally blew the dust off the layout just before I came to our first meeting.

The whole layout is 120x30cm on a rather over-engineered timber, MDF and particle board base which I'm not sure I'd use again. However it does have the advantage that I can dribble solder all over the back of it and bash it with hammers without doing any damage.

The goods yard area (above) is almost finished. However, there's a lot still to be done on the whole right-hand end of the layout, especially the area around the station building (below), which is based loosely on Kingscote station on the Bluebell line. It doesn't look quite this ropey in reality, by the way; flash seems to magnify every little blemish!

Final picture above is of the Association wagon kit I've built, and my first loco - a scratch-built Jinty body on a Bob Jones chassis kit. Next project is to re-convert a Farish 94xx that I did myself right at the beginning, but this time using an Association coversion kit for the 94xx that never actually made it to market, kindly supplied as a one-off by Bill Blackburn. Then I guess I need to finish that station area, and think about scratch-building some LB&SCR carriages and maybe a Terrier loco. By that time I ought to have enough experience to plan a more ambitious layout.

Oh yes!

The newest area group in the Association has decided it would be fun to write about what we are doing for the benefit (or amusement) of others.

I am building a small layout for the Golden Jubilee Layout Challenge. The base boards have been built from foam board and I am close to completing the track for the first of the three boards.

This is the track plan:

The layout depicts the Isle of Selmesey Railway in its earliest days when it was merely a goods line that ran from the port at Inchaven to the Town of Michelford.