Tales from a mineral twig...

[Paul Willis]

Friday morning saw me rising bright and early, but not to do the usual thing of heading into my office in the City of London. No, I was off to collect a rental van for the day, and pointing it due west I headed off on a road trip along the M4, for yesterday I was White Van Man.

And three hours later, I arrived at my destination where I was greeted by Neil, a fellow Scalefour Society member. He showed me up to his loft, where the reason for my journey was kept. Half an hour of dismantling and heaving later, and the back of the hire van looked like this:

Collect 009 (Large).jpg

As Rolf Harris would say, "can you guess what it is yet...?"

Well, that dismantled layout in the back of the van was previously set up in Neil's loft, and it looked a lot more picturesque like this:

Collect 001 (Large).jpg

Collect 002 (Large).jpg

Detail of the far end, during the course of dismantling (although not in a Beeching style):

Collect 006 (Large).jpg

If it's starting to look familiar to you, then you may well be right...

I have just become the latest custodian of the Ulpha Light Railway

This was built by the Norwood MRC as an exhibition layout, and originally written up in an article in Rail Model Digest No. 3 which appeared in 1996. A few years later it was acquired by Neil, and he has kept it safe for the last five or six years, in excellent condition but not used a great deal operationally.

Last week, as a stepping stone to moving on to fulfilling his own plans to build his own layout, he listed it on Ebay, where it appeared very, very briefly. For as soon as I saw it (at about 6.10am...) then I thought that it (i) looked excellent and (ii) would be the perfect test track for stockbuilding. So after letting my wife wake up (!) and then asking for her agreement to take over part of her garage with it, at least in the short term - it's my car that's been kicked out onto the drive, not her motorbikes - I agreed to buy it.

There is only one small flaw... I'm a Great Eastern modeller, and this is resolutely set in Cumbria...

However, after getting it all back into working condition and checking it out thoroughly, I have plans to shift the location slightly. Preliminary enquiries have established that there were chalk quarries on the north-western side of Saffron Walden...

For now, it's putting it up in the garage and admiring the excellent craftsmanship. thank you Norwood MRC, and thank you Neil for allowing me the privilege of owning it.

Flymo

[Terry Bendall]

There is only one small flaw... I'm a Great Eastern modeller, and this is resolutely set in Cumbria...

Minor problem Flymo. Its only a small layout so it won't take long to build some stock. You could even build some diesels!! No doubt I shall receive an update on ownership for the layout data base soon Unfortunately Scaleforum this year is full as far as layouts are concerned but 2012 is another matter ... .

Terry Bendall

[David B]

Isn't there a space near the loos?

David

[Will L]

There is only one small flaw... I'm a Great Eastern modeller, and this is resolutely set in Cumbria... ... Preliminary enquiries have established that there were chalk quarries on the north-western side of Saffron Walden...
Flymo

Or Sudbury, about which we have chatted before. The station yard had a direct connection to the chalk pits on the other side of Cornard Road. Can'y say it looked a lot like your new layout but...


Will

[Mark Tatlow]

Its only a small layout so it won't take long to build some stock.

Surely Danny can loan you some?

[Paul Willis]

There is only one small flaw... I'm a Great Eastern modeller, and this is resolutely set in Cumbria...

Minor problem Flymo. Its only a small layout so it won't take long to build some stock. You could even build some diesels!! No doubt I shall receive an update on ownership for the layout data base soon Unfortunately Scaleforum this year is full as far as layouts are concerned but 2012 is another matter ... .

A quick and easy diesel conversion may well be on the cards as a test loco. That said, my Pug has been running in nicely on the rolling road this morning. Quite smooth in forward, less so in reverse. I'm *sure* that the quartering is spot on, and the chassis was checked on the Chassis2 jig, so I'm wondering if the crankpin throw on one wheel is off. It's the left front that it keeps lifting, so I'll investigate further...

A year and half to Scaleforum 2012? Hmmm... let me see how I get on with sussing out how this all works!

Having done a test erection in the garage yesterday, it needs a bit of work before it's going to be in a running state...

I have found a couple of dangling wires underneath that may, or may not, be involved in making it run. And the trestles are a wee bit difficult to get level so that it all connects properly.

But these are only signs of a twenty year old layout. Proved by the first exhibition sticker on the front dating from 1991...

I need to give it a good going over to understand how things fit together and work. It is very, very well designed. The trestle legs, for example, are fully adjustable, but the feet on the end have seized. Just little niggles to sort out, and then I'll be happy to start considering the cosmetics

Flymo

[Paul Willis]

Isn't there a space near the loos?

David

<Long Hard Stare>

Flymo

[Paul Willis]

There is only one small flaw... I'm a Great Eastern modeller, and this is resolutely set in Cumbria... ... Preliminary enquiries have established that there were chalk quarries on the north-western side of Saffron Walden...
Flymo

Or Sudbury, about which we have chatted before. The station yard had a direct connection to the chalk pits on the other side of Cornard Road. Can'y say it looked a lot like your new layout but...

Hi Will,

The nice thing about Saffron Walden is that the landscape around Audley End and the west of the town is rather hilly. That would fit nicely with the existing scenic contours of the layout. And as this is a twig off the end of a branch, where it is set doesn't matter too much.

What the future plans may have changed to be is to show the local town where the mineral branch comes in to a junction. That will give me opportunity again to do some town modelling, and build that brewery!

I need to put some thoughts into the fictional history of this layout now though, to determine why it is there, and what traffics would be plausible...

Flymo

[David B]

Apologies, Paul.

I am not familiar with either of the areas - where Cumbria or Saffron Walden - but I suppose the greatest difference is in the architecture. You have a few lineside structures to convert to the GE, but the (?is it a) mill is presumably built in a different material.

David

[dcockling]

Isn't there a space near the loos?

David

<Long Hard Stare>

Flymo

I think he means where I was sitting, with my membership table last year

All the Best
Danny

[Rustyrail]

What a lovely layout! Green with envy Flymo!

[Paul Willis]

What a lovely layout! Green with envy Flymo!

Thank you! I think that it's superb, and will respond well to "East-Anglicising".

Life has been a little too busy recently to do much modelling - the latest drama has been enforcing sanctions against Libya - so I've stripped it back down again and moved it to the back of my garage out of the way.

The medium term plan is to bring a baseboard at a time into my study, document the electrics on it (these will be my biggest challenge in understanding how it works, although they all seem to be complete) and produce a worklist of the tasks to get that board running again. I've already noticed that a few point blades have come adrift, and such like.

More updates when they happen...

Flymo

[Paul Willis]

An important part of the work that I want to do on Ulpha Light is to transform the scenery.

To fit is in with my GER modelling, I need to change the context from a limestone quarry in Cumbria to a chalk quarry near Saffron Walden. This isn't actually as large a task as it sounds, and after twenty or so years of life anyway the existing scenery is looking a little tired and would have needed refreshing anyway.

So yesterday I took advantage of the lovely early morning weather, got my bike out and rode around the countryside taking pictures of the landscape. I set out from home and took the back lanes to Saffron Walden, stopping to take pictures of modellable features. I wanted to concentrate on tree shapes, hedges and ground covering, and consciously avoided the ones affected by modern farming methods such as mechanised hedge cutting, or trees affected by road traffic. These are just some of the results:

Trees are big!

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Mixed colours and textures.

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An exception to the vegetation interest - a very modellable shed...

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And some of the chalky fields that I want to capture

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None of this will be modelled in the near future. However unless I wanted to wait until *next* April to do the research (and risk it being a rainy day!) then I had to get out there.

Flymo

[Paul Willis]

It's been a while since I looked at the Ulpha Light Railway. I tucked it away safely in the back of my garage (at the opposite end to the birdfood, so hopefully our resident woodland creatures don't mistake the scenery for a snack...) and have left it there until I feel that I can get the whole thing out and erect it for a couple of days.

However I have started work on the restoration of the infrastructure. When I first brought it home, and did a test erection in the garage, I had no end of trouble getting it levelled out. After a life of twenty years, even though each trestle leg was fitted with screw-adjustable feet, I found that they were dirty, corroded, jammed, or a combination of the three. Something needed to be done to make them workable again.

My first thought was just to replace them, so I had a quick look on the web. There are a number of suppliers out there, ranging from Screwfix to model railway specialists. But generally the price per leg was £3-4 for each foot, and I needed 16 of them. I didn't really want to pay around fifty quid if I could avoid it.

So on a sunny evening, I sat down and unscrewed them from the bottom of the trestles. That in itself took some time, as the screws had also suffered from time. Having got the feet off, I used spanners and a bit of brute force to separate them into separate components. The locking nuts were discarded, as I'd already got replacement stainless steel ones from Screwfix - strongly recommended for this sort of stuff.

To clean all the dirt and clag off them, I popped all of the feet, and the mounts, in my ultrasonic bath with plain water and gave them a few cycles. Then they went into a cooling oven (after dinner...) to dry them out thoroughly. After that, the restoration could begin.

For working on motorbikes, I have a set of taps and dies:

Feet 007.jpg

So I ran the feet through the dies to clean up the threads and get rid of residual gunge and corrosion. Now they are all back together, with new nuts, and a touch of grease on them, and I hope that they'll give many more years of service.

Feet 002.jpg

Next, onto the trestles themselves...

Flymo