All quiet on the western front - detailing the Heljan Western

Lots of modelling has been going on the last week.  I have made progress on a lot of projects, although the approach has been slightly scattershot, working on many different things.  One project that has been made some significant progress is the Heljan Western project.  The model is a second hand locomotive and for some reason it feels a lot less risky to take a tin of paints to second hand loco.  I was stumped for a long time on what on earth to do with the brake gear supplied with the model.  To be frank it is rubbish and requires some substantial work to get it looking ok and also usable on a workable model.

What a headache! - the brake gear attached to the Heljan chassis.

The first thing to do was reduce the length of the stretchers on the end of the brake rigging to fit into the bogie, so the brake shoes line up with the wheels (well almost line up anyhow!).  I drilled some new holes in the brake shoes and cut off the connecting plastic pipework supplied with the brake shoes.  Some brass rod was used to connect the brake gear together, using a straight length of 1.9cm between two right angle turns to fit into holes I had drilled into the brake shoes.  The brake gear was then aradited into place.

The pipe work has also been added to the front of the locomotive and a three link coupling was added, which has also been araldited to the buffer beam.  The standard method of using a spring to attach the coupling hook could not be used, due to it fouling the metal bar for the sprung buffers.  A lesson for next time will be to remove the original sprung buffers and replace with sprung buffers with an internal spring.  The wheels also had a good clean and it has had a test run around Potttington Quay, traversing all the point work without issue.

The body weathered and ready for reattachment to the chassis before final weathering.

The body work for the locomotive is shaping up, although some more weathering will be done when the body is reattached to the chassis, to try to blend it all together.  The next step is to paint the chassis details, such as pipework and brake gear and then attach the Howes ESU sound decoder, before reassembly and final weathering.  A long way to go, but I think this one is starting to come together.

Many different shade of white, faded blue and grime have been added to the bodyshell so far.

Pottington Quay - the quay wall

Today is the end of a lovely two weeks of holiday, which have literally flown by.  I had grand plans for the amount of modelling I would get done, and although I have made some progress it is not quite as much as I had hoped for.  However, the first parts of the quay wall for Pottington are starting to come together.  The quay wall is made from two components, an original stone quay wall and a more recent iron piled structure.  At the moment, both are not complete but sufficient progress has been made to take a couple of photographs with trains running, to get a feel for how the scene would look.

View from the mudflats as a short freight arrives on the 'goods line'.

It is definitely heading in the right direction and the estuary level view with the train above is looking about right, showing the trains above eye level.  There is an awful lot of painting to do on these structures to get them ready.  The two older sections of stone quay wall are built from DAS clay on a polystyrene backing. One of these has now been completed, although it warped slightly when it was drying.  This does not matter too much, as the baseboard level will be raised slightly with inter-tidal mudflats modelled on top.  I am going to cut a piece of foam board to model the mudflats on and put this against the quay wall.

A class 47 shunts spoil wagons while a class 37 picks up some goods van that have just been unloaded.

The pile driven iron quay front is very similar to the one now at Bideford and is the Faller kit.  This needs to be repainted before it is installed.  As shown in the photographs it is only placed on the baseboard and will be glued in place when it has been painted and the mudflats are finished.

Same shot slight higher showing the iron piled section of the quay wall.

Another feature of the layout is a disused goods shed that will have a web cam installed in it linked directly to a lap-top.  This will provide another way to view the layout and also from a different angle.  The goods shed is a slightly modified Wills kit and more progress has been made on this too.  However, it does need a bit of distressing with the airbrush just to blend it together and this is a project to finish this week.

Watch out for those planks from the roof - they look like they are about to fall off!!!  This good shed will have the web cam located in it, looking out of the window.  It was closed in the 1960s, but was not demolished.