Finger Gauge

You may have noticed I’ve made a lot of posts on the blog recently. This wasn’t planned but I tend to post when I’m doing something I really enjoy. As doing wiring and benchwork are two of my favourite things I’m like a pig in mud at the moment, hence the posts 🙂

Many years ago a modelling friend of mine asked me how I managed to avoid bumps in my sub-roadbed. I replied “the finger gauge”. If you can feel a bump with the end of your index finger between one section of sub-roadbed and another then your trains will feel it too. As is the way with these things you will only discover the bump after the track is laid, scenery is in and you have some friends round to display your newly completed section of layout. Have you ever said to friends visiting your layout: “the trains ran perfectly over that section of track yesterday”? If you have (and I defy anyone to tell me they’ve never said something like this) then you haven’t paid sufficient attention to the finger gauge.

One of my absolute, non-negotiable rules is that when two pieces of ply (acting as sub-roadbed) butt up against each other there must be no discernible difference in the level of their top surface. If I can run my finger over the joint and not feel even the slightest bump then I’m happy. If I can’t do this then I bloody well keep fiddling and working till I can’t feel a bump. These bumps always, always, always transfer themselves up into the track and will affect running no matter what scale you’re working in. A layer of cork and flex track will not make the bump go away! This is true for both home layouts and portable ones.

In my experience you can’t rely on the thickness of ply to remain consistent between batches or even on a single sheet. A designated thickness is not an absolute, it’s merely an average. 12mm ply (1/2″ for those of us still in the imperial mind-set) is likely to sometimes be 12mm thick but the next sheet of 12mm ply may be 12.2mm thick, or 11.8mm thick. You can’t be sure and you should never, ever assume that all the sheets will be the same thickness or even that one sheet will be 12mm thick around its whole perimeter. A sheet might be 12mm thick at one end and 12.3mm thick at the other. That .3mm will cause you no end of problems if you ignore it and rely on the manufacturing tolerances to be perfect because sub-roadbed is secured down to a surface, thus making the underside the datum with the top surface left to reflect the differences in the nominal thickness of the material. This is ply I’m talking about, not MDF, but then I’ll never again use MDF a sub-roadbed after what happened on Queens Wharf.

If you look at the short length of curved ply I posted a photo of the other day you’ll see that it crosses a join between two sections of layout. I have spent the last couple of days getting the tools and materials I need to turn this length of ply into a section of sub-roadbed that I could cut and with no discernible bump across the joint. The problem with this part of the project was that it already had a ply scenery base down (the surface of what will become the water of the Hunter River and the stream that joins it at this point) and I didn’t want to go cutting holes into these pieces of ply. So this presented me with the situation where I couldn’t allow for slight differences in sub-roadbed thickness by adjusting a riser’s height (as per L girder or box frame benchwork). This short length of critical sub-roadbed would be held up by three small blocks of 3×1″ pine and to avoid bumps at the join these would need to be cut extremely accurately. The best way I know of to make such cuts is with a compound mitre saw with a nice, sharp blade. I happen to own just such a machine but it was 1 1/2 hours drive away in the garage at my partner’s home. So yesterday morning I made the trek over to pay her a visit, listen to her complain about work, say hello to the kids and headed back home after loading the saw into the boot of my car. Without telling me my 17-year-old step daughter appeared in the kitchen minus her beautiful, long blonde hair, having had it chopped to shoulder length. She ignored my devastated expression and complained that people were telling her the new do made her look younger. I thought “just wait a few years, that won’t be something you’ll complain about!” 🙂

This shot shows the new work in place but prior to being secured permanently in place. I’ve added in the two sections of MDF fascia I describe in the main text and the cut line and notch can be see where I’ve labelled them.

Today I got stuck into the good stuff after a trip to Bunnings in the morning to pick up some supplies. Because I’d installed the MDF fascia in this spot prior to final arrangements being settled I had cut the profile of the fascia in a way that didn’t suit the situation I’ve now settled on for the track crossing the layout joint. I wanted to fascia to rise up to just below the sub-roadbed and so the first item on the agenda was to cut two sections out of the original fascia and install two new sections that raised the profile. In doing my final checks I also realised that I’d cut things a little too fine on the inside of the curve and it hung over the edge of the layout right at the point of where the sections meet. I didn’t want to re-cut the curved ply at a larger radius and I couldn’t shift the river module over a centimeter easily so I decided to simply notch the sub-roadbed and disguise it with scenery. I can install a little fence or something here if I think this is a problem but I don’t mind the trains running that close to the edge: live dangerously I say. It would only be a problem if there was a bump in the sub-roadbed and I was going to make absolutely sure there wasn’t going to be one! 🙂 I also discovered that my original cut line for the join was out by a considerable margin (you can see the original line in the photo. It’s the light black line in front of the dashed line labelled “cut line”). I drew a new line and cut the curved ply into two sections so that the edges aligned with the layout edges.

I’ve included this photo without the roadbed to illustrate the pine blocks I cut today to hold the sub-roadbed in place. These will eventually be secured with short lengths of 1×1″ pine screwed into the ply surface of the river.

After a bit of measuring and fiddling about I managed to get three short pine blocks to sit in the spots they will eventually be placed in permanently to hold up the ply sub-roadbed. After I was happy with their length I cut the sub-roadbed and immediately the length of ply sitting on the plain river module dropped below the piece on the module with the scenery. Not only was it lower, it was ok at the far side and was dropping at the point nearest the fascia. So I’d discovered my ply river’s surface wasn’t absolutely flat and that there was a slight drop at one corner. This translated into a bump which would have eventually shown up as a difference in rail height on a curve, at the very edge of the layout and in possibly the most prominent spot in on the entire layout. I could foresee a loco plunging to a concrete floor at some point in the future. A cut another piece of pine, added about 2mm to its length and made the cut 1 degree from square. To my surprise this fixed the problem first go. These blocks are too short to safely adjust by cutting small slices off their length salami style so each adjustment to length required me to cut a new block.

The point I’m trying to make with this post is that I wasn’t surprised by this drop in the roadbed, in fact I’d have been really surprised if there hadn’t been a difference in height. You have to start with the assumption that things will not match up at critical spots like this and then plan with this in mind to get the level of your sub-roadbed as perfect as possible. If you assume perfection on the part of the raw materials that go into your layout the end result will be poor running.

Will things shift and move later and cause problems? Possibly, but I can say from experience that if you have a problem in the sub-roadbed that any shifting will only make this worse. Ignore these bumps at your peril. The idea is not to build layout modules that are so heavy and robust that nothing will move: the plan should be to build a layout where the inevitable shifts and changes are accounted for and accommodated. This is just good design practice, not rocket science. My layout sections are made from at least 4 different materials and these all have different rates of expansion and contraction with possible dire consequences. However in my experience the only time I’ve ever had real problems with track going out of alignment is when the rail couldn’t move a little along its length (on soldered points) or when I ignored bumps in the sub-roadbed. You need to design in and plan for the inevitable movement of your track, not try to build things so that you force the track to remain in place. It will move no matter how robust your framework.

My track is hand laid, I live in a sub tropical climate and the ends of the rail are not held in place with anything other than the track spikes I use to hold all my rail in place. No soldered pads, now brass screws and no built in provision for adjustment. I’ve had this layout for 5 years and there hasn’t been any movement in the rails that have adversely affected running. Don’t ignore the finger gauge.

Morpeth MkIV

I’ve been referring to this version of Morpeth as Mk IV to myself through such things as labelling the folder where the photos I’ve been taking have been stored on my computer. It’s far too complicated to outline the details of Mks I to III here. I’ve made reference to the earlier layouts and iterations of these layouts on this blog but I wouldn’t bother trying to hunt these posts out, that’s all ancient history now. What is worth mentioning is that I did a lot of work on Morpeth in the lead up to the Aus7 ExpO which was held in March 2014. I worked on the layout quite intensely in the lead up to that show and once I arrived back home the layout sat essentially untouched for a time before I decided to try installing it at home as a semi-permanent layout. I made some damaging changes to Morpeth Mk III to get it to fit and then personal circumstances led me to selling the house I as living in at the time. So these half-implemented plans went from being planned changes to planned damage. As a result of moving house I packed the layout in its dedicated trailer, towed that across the range of hills that separated me from my old home about 100km away and there it sat, inside the trailer while I built my Z20 class locomotive and put some rolling stock kits together.

Now you might ask why it’s taken me so long to start working on the layout again, especially as it was approximately 75% complete in March 2014. It would only have taken a good push along for another 12 to 18 months to get it “finished”. This is a very pertinent question. Perhaps the most important thing stopping me from pushing straight on with finishing Morpeth was the June 2009 issue of the Australian Model Railway Magazine magazine which has a very nice photo of my previous layout, Queens Wharf on is cover. I’m very proud of this cover as it was the first that featured a layout built by me, so proud in fact that a framed copy of it hangs on the wall above my workbench. Now while I’m proud of having my layout on the cover of what I consider to be Australia’s premier model railway magazine there is something that grates with me and it’s that at the time the photo was taken I didn’t own a steam locomotive that could be used in the photo. As such the 32 class steamer that does appear was borrowed from a friend. Now there’s nothing wrong with the 32 class (thanks for the loan Paul) and I actually don’t have a problem with someone else’s loco appearing on my layout in a photo on my first and hopefully not my last magazine cover. However I do have a problem with the fact that I hadn’t yet built a steamer of my own that could have been used. Not because I couldn’t build one but simply because there always seemed to be other things (both modelling and life things) to be getting on with. At the time the cover appeared I made a promise that no layout of mine would ever appear in public again without at least one steam loco built by yours truly gracing its rails. I had to make an exception for the Aus7 ExpO in 2014, it was initiated and organised by the O-scale modelling group I happen to be president of. 2002 was and my 19 class loco are the result of that resolution to build some steam locomotives.

So we get to 2014-2015 and I’m implementing a plan to install Morpeth at home as a “semi-permanent” layout and just after I chop 150mm off the end of one of the modules and rearrange a couple of the buildings’ locations personal circumstances lead me to come to a full stop! In the house move I also managed to drop a desk lamp on one of my buildings doing a pretty thorough job of rendering it back to its constituent components; some paint, a large decal and of a pile of plaster chips and dust.

I have a bit of a weakness for building kits and this is an “in progress” shot of the original brick building that sat on the bank at the rear of module 3. It started life as a Downtown Deco building marketed as Archie’s Bar. On my layout it first of all became a billboard for Rosella tomato sauce and then it became a pile of plaster chips after I dropped a desk lamp on it! After it was damaged I decided it couldn’t be saved and I tossed it in the bin.

This past few days I’ve reached a bit of a milestone in that I’ve managed to get back to where I’m not just fixing planned damage on Morpeth but actually starting to make some genuine progress toward finishing the layout and getting it ready for a public showing. One of the biggest changes I’ve been planning to make is to turn my train turntable from its original purpose into a 4th scenic module. This module appears on the plan I posted a couple of days ago and it consists of a 2mX600mm slab of river that will eventually hold a long wooden trestle up on which will sit a ship model I’ve had stored away for about 5 or 6 years and onto which I have been dying to get my hands!

This photo shows the train turntable in the process of being dismantled. I’ve already removed the table and other hardware and soon will move onto cutting down the sides and installing a solid table of 7mm plywood which will serve as the Hunter River’s surface.

The change of use for the module in the photo above is not that the turntable didn’t work, in fact anything but: it was a remarkable success. However it was big, unnecessarily big in fact, and required one full parking slot in the trailer that houses Morpeth. In thinking over what I wanted to do with the layout and what possible redesign work could be carried out on the train turntable, I made the decision that I could make better use of this module as a fully scenicked entity and that a new slimline train turntable could be made and fitted into one of the 100mm high utility slots at the bottom of the trailer rack. I have convinced myself that I can make the train turntable work in a slim form, all I have to do now is make it. That will happen further down the track.

Peter and Phil, two very hard-working friends of mine dropped by on Wednesday last week to give me a hand on re-purposing the turntable module. I was a little worried I wouldn’t get everything done in the two days I had available for this work but, with their help, we got the whole job done and even had time to dawdle over a cafe lunch. Thanks guys, I never would have finished this on my own.

The work was carried out at my partner’s home in her double garage as I don’t have the space to carry out such work in my abode. The only problem with working in her shed is that there’s no power or lights in the shed so taking decent photos is a bit of a challenge. The work went swimmingly and by the end of the day we were able to pack the new module back in the trailer ready to be hauled back over the range.

While you have to squint and squeeze your imagination really hard to see it this module will eventually come to represent the Hunter River. Module 3 can be seen in the background at right angles to the re-purposed turntable module.

Over the past couple of days since arriving home I got some wiring upgrades done on the station module before I packed it back in the trailer. This is the module with the Shell Depot on it that I posted about last week. While some track needed to have wires reattached I also wanted to cut some rail gaps and install some NCE BD20 block detectors that I plan to use in conjunction with an NCE Mini-panel to allow a couple of locomotives to shuttle back and forth on the layout. The plan for this is that I would like to be able to have the option to have something moving on the layout automatically to take the pressure off the operators at exhibitions. With block detectors and a bit of basic programming I should be able to have a small tank loco shuttling back and forward on the pier and a railmotor doing the same thing from the fiddle yard to the station. Spending 3 days moving trains back and forth on a fiddle yard to terminus layout gives you a new appreciation of tail-chasing layouts.

So today I swapped module 2 for module 3 in my workroom and got to work looking at what I needed to do to complete this module before I could move on and get to work on the pier and ship models, to say nothing of the yet to be built slimline train turntable.

I have been aware for the past 3 or 4 weeks, as this stage in the layout work approached that I would need to start by finding a replacement for the brick building that originally stood on the bank a the rear of module 3. I’ve decided that the Outback Model Co kit of the small country church would fit the bill. This photo shows a test of the kit in the same spot after a bit of judicious scenery “remodelling”.

I’ve lived all over the state of NSW in the past 30 years and I’ve seen at least 5 or 6 examples of the church that is represented by the Outback Model Co’s kit of St Agnes’ church. After taping together walls of the kit with low tack blue masking tape I plonked the resultant box in the space left by the previous building. It is perfectly sized for this small space: very Australian and very appropriate for this space.

This recently repainted church is just one example of the St Agnes’ kit produced by the Outback Model Co. It fits the site perfectly when this was made vacant by the damage to the previous building. This example is situated in Nevertire in central west of NSW.

A Z20 at Morpeth Station (Finally)!

I’ve been working on a Morpeth based theme for something like 16 years. The Z20 class tank locomotive was ubiquitous on this short branch line, in fact I know of only one photo that shows a different class of locomotive on the line and that was a C30, another tank locomotive of the NSWR that at a casual glance is a very similar looking locomotive. The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve been working on a series of layouts in a range of formats based on a branch line that essentially only had one class of locomotive that ran on it and for all those years I haven’t had a model of that class of loco. I do now. To put this into some sort of perspective, in that 16 years I’ve built two separate versions of the station building and platform you can see in this photo. This is number 2.

This the fist photo I’ve taken of my newly completed Z20 sitting at Morpeth station. The passengers have been waiting for 16 years for the train to arrive.

Now everyone brings to their modelling a different set of beliefs and principles when it comes to what they will and won’t run on their layouts: some people are happy to run just about anything that has wheels others won’t run a locomotive on a line that depicts a particular spot that never ran there on the prototype. Now I’m fairly flexible with what I’ll run on my layouts, as long as they’re the correct scale and are generally speaking of a NSWR origin (and not too ridiculously large) locomotives that never ran on the Morpeth line get a run and even those that weren’t even running till after the line was torn up might make an occasional appearance. However I do have one bug bear about prototype running that has caused me pause a few times over the years before I built 2002. Locomotives run on Morpeth that never ran to the real location however I’ve always felt less than comfortable with this without at least one example of the class that was synonymous with the line, namely the Z20 class. I consider this informed consent: I’m ok with the non-prototype locomotives running on the layout as long as I know they didn’t run there and that I also know what did and I have one example of that class running on the layout. Having 2002 is the fulfillment of a 16 year journey and having a photo of the loco in front of a station building made by myself with a station name board with the word Morpeth on it has resonance for me. This photo is my hobby.

This module has sat untouched for most of the past week as I’ve been busy with work and life but I managed to do some track laying tonight.

This photo shows the gap in the scenery where the engine shed once stood. I’ve installed a short length of track here to extend the siding and this is now wired up so I can move onto filling the gaps.

The hole in the scenery left by the relocation of the Morpeth engine shed sits on the front of the module in front of the station. I spent some time tonight wiring up the new length of track (just over 400mm long or 17″) and cleaning the track on the module and testing the loco. This is the first time in over three years that I’ve run a train on this section of the layout and the only work needed is to fill the holes in the scenery and lay down some new ground cover. After I’ve done this I’ll install a bit of fencing and some pipes and this siding will become a minimalist fuel siding. Once that work is done this module will be placed back in the trailer and out will come module 3 to take its place in my workroom. Module 3 is the scenic heart of the layout and it needs at least three new buildings, a lot more trees and shrubs added, a creek/river bed completed and a concrete culvert that leads onto a curved pier that runs onto a module that I haven’t actually built yet.

I’ve set in my mind that I’m going to offer to take this layout to an exhibition in Sydney or Brisbane in 2017 but it’s got to be finished before that happens. I’m pretty sure I can get the basic infrastructure done in time but the models take me a long while to build and the goods shed, while largely complete, needs a bit of work to get it where I want it. The new scenic module will be formed by the base freed up by recycling my train turntable module that I believe I can reproduce in a much slimmer form so it can sit in a small slot in the trailer which will allow me to build the pier as a fully completed unit with ship in situ. I plan to have the pier wired up and locomotives will run on it but at exhibitions I’ll utilize a shuttle module that will allow my Manning Wardle to shuffle back and forth on its own with a wagon or two in tow. I’ve also been thinking about how I can make the ship model rock up and down gently as it sits next to the pier and how I can light the module as it sticks out from the main layout at right angles, thus making a lighting rig that doesn’t intrude too much into the scene a real challenge. Lots to do…

This photo shows an early stage of construction on module #3. Things are much further along than what can be seen in this photo but I think this gives a good overall impression of the bones of this section of the layout. I”ll move back to working on it when I’ve filled the hole in the scenery on module #2. Looking at this photo I’ve remembered that brick building you can see behind the loco is a Downtown Deco structure that suffered a fatal accident when I was moving house the last time. A desk lamp fell on it from the top of my work bench so I’ll need to find a replacement for it when I come back and start to work on the module in a few weeks. Make that four buildings I have to construct…

New Fascia

After everything was in place I cut and shut a new section of mdf fascia.

Chopped End

This photo shows the work just after I had cut 150mm from the end of the module. I re-used the piece of pine from this location prior to the work commencing. It took a fairly stout heart to start cutting up my recently completed work.

Bridging Gaps

This photo shows the small sections of track I’ve installed to bridge the gaps created in the benchwork of QW by drawing the modules apart.

Not A Crop Circle

This photo shows a bit more of the destruction wrought on my layout. The engine shed needed to be in this spot anyway!

Queens Wharf Renovation

This photo gives a pretty clear idea of the changes I’ve made to the Queens Wharf end of the layout. A new photo backdrop will be installed on the MDF backboard eventually, when I can afford one 🙂

Queens Wharf Installed

In this photo you can see the two gaps in between the segments of QW that I will be filling with short lengths of track. The layout has been stored for something like 3 years. It was in reasonable shape but it does need a bit of a clean and a spruce up.

Hey Presto! Instant Layout!

Well it’s instant if you don’t count the decade I’ve been working on my layouts 🙂