Fits and starts

If you've read the few sentences directly under the heading photo you'll realise that this blog is focussed on why things happen rather than how things happen. Nothing succeeds in pumping up the motivation like a bit of success, conversely failure can spark off a downward spiral. Both phenomena have conspired to scupper recent progress on Morfa. The good news is that I appear to be developing mild competency in the business of resin casting, so far the subjects tackled have been narrow gauge in nature. Sticking with the small railway theme I've also been very pleased with the way my whimsical essay in 009 is turning out. For me this is good, but looking at Morfa in isolation it's led to a concentration of efforts in the successful areas. 

Compounding this is a failure with my first attempt at the Abertafol embankment. I was attempting to replicate stone with Das clay over card formers. I'm off the opinion that the card wasn't beefy enough and the Das not applied thickly enough as when scribing stonework I quickly hit the card sub layer which gave a fluffy look to the pointing. 

It's not all doom and gloom as I scored a result with a zero cost conversion of a four pound, Hatchette part work, carriage to EM gauge and in my favoured blue and grey livery. 

It's successes like this in different spheres of the layouts development that keep me plugging away at the problems until a satisfactory conclusion is reached.

Practicalities and fantasy

It's obvious that Morfa's scenery is at an early stage of development. I prefer to get all the nasty, functional, nuts and bolts jobs out of the way before making things pretty. Though simple in nature Morfa is a pretty big train set, being an 18' x 12' kidney shape.Previously all my other layouts could be grouped under the category of 'micro'. It's the sheer extra work, coupled with interests which veer off target, that has been responsible for the basics taking 'till now to reach completion. The last phase of work has seen the branch line which penetrates the backscene finished, the points made operational and the wiring completed. Here's a sketch of the station area which should explain what's in front and what's to the rear of the backscene, and how it fits with the geographical reality.

Here's what really happens once the model world fades from 3-D to 2-D behind an artfully placed clump of trees.

If we zoom in it's possible to see better the workings off stage.

However to keep up the lie that my version of Morfa is real it's necessary to also hold in ones mind the earlier plan.

Borrowing

Generally I believe that backscenes are good, unfortunately the shape, size and orientation of Morfa mean that only two and a bit sides are covered by them. A good proportion of the layout can be viewed from both inside the squished oval shape and from outside. Looking out on the bits devoid of backscene one has to filter out the rest of my playroom clutter, but looking in I hoped to be able to borrow the backscene from the far side of the layout. Take a look at the photo, it shows how the principle works.

The train is a foot or so away from the camera, the backscene about fourteen feet. In an ideal world I'd have used the whole height available to me, but practicalities forced a two foot high backscene, leading to the letterbox cropping of the shot. However the mind is a wonderful thing and when watching trains pass here, the white wall above the backscene fades out.

Friendship 2

Though they may not know it there's much of my friends in Morfa. Earlier I've credited them as a motivating force, but they have an influence that goes far beyond this. Good company and conversation set off so many ideas, many of which have made it into the model or will at a later date. Friends also populate the altered reality that is Morfa. Many of the manifestations exist only in my mind, as things to do once the layouts scenery develops, some are works in progress, just one nears completion. 

You may remember Jones Motors of Arthog pictured some time ago. As the layout is close to the stage where I can get on with the scenery proper, I thought it would be fun to build the garage scene as a module which would be set in scene when the landforms go down. Jones Motors (in my mind) is run by a friend of the same name who works in the trade and has the cross of  Imp enthusiasm to bear. He's a natural salesman, I can imagine the world being his lobster, his word being his euro-bond.

Perfectionism versus Character

‘If you can’t say anything nice then don’t say anything at all’ goes the saying. Other strategies are available; amongst the most common is the use of ‘characterful’ to describe work that may fall short of what the viewer would expect. There is in our hobby an unspoken undercurrent of encouragement, or pressure, to raise one’s game.  More detail, more accuracy, sharper model making is the name of the game. I’m pretty convinced that these goals are the wrong ones. 

There are some model makers at the very top end of the skull and ability range who produce stuff close to perfection that leaves me cold. Even if exquisitely painted and weathered these paragons somehow mange to be devoid of life, while the imperfect lives and breathes. I’ve spent some time wondering why this should be so, my intuition (ok guesswork) tells me that it’s something to do with approach; the models being planned, measured, practised and crafted with nothing left to chance. The best materials and tools are brought to bear; skills are honed in attempt to guarantee success. 

Real life isn’t like that, imperfections abound. Even engineers accept imperfection in the tolerances specified and permitted, and that’s before nature wreaks havoc in its attempt to reclaim its own. There’s a randomness about the real world that perfectionism in a model fights against. Sterility lies not too far down the honed and perfected route. Real life, character and atmosphere are found in allowing the happy accident to flourish. Embrace the unplanned that adds to the model, take chances and remember it’s the art rather than the engineering that impresses.

Friendship

It's easy to deduce from the frequency of postings that stagnation had settled on Morfa. Whilst in essence this was correct I had completed the woodwork for the staging sidings over the summer, a not hugely demanding shelf bracketed out from the layout edge behind the high ground of Barmouth and Abertafol. A half-hearted start had been made on the entry pointwork, a left, right and diamond combo. As a consequence of such indolence the layout itself had been co-opted to serve as shelf and storage, until an e-mail fixed up visits from friends on two successive weekends. For the first visit I concentrated on tidying up, all that should not have been on the layout was put away and the rails cleaned.

Unfortunately what had till then run reliably well, started to stutter and fail. I was disappointed and resolved to sort out as much as I could before the next weekend. Realising that temporarily tacked down track can't be properly fettled, I took to adjusting, sticking and ballasting the Abertafol curve. While the pva went off, the entry pointwork to the staging sidings was finished, gapped and had its tie bars fitted.

By the second weekend reliability returned along with my motivation. In the weeks since, the remaining staging siding points have been built and will be shortly fitted. very little of the temporary tracks remain, just a yard or so to the bridge and the bridge itself. Completion of the dull but necessary parts of the layout lie tantalisingly close. Better stop typing and start track laying.

The hills are alive ...

Pictures being worth a thousand words this should tell you pretty much all you need to know about what I've been up to the last couple of days. What it won't say is how close to disaster the whole thing came. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with backscenes. I prefer to paint them, it gives a more coherent look having all parts of the layout made by the same hands but there's ever present possibility of unintended cock up snookering the whole show. At least the other difficult bits can be assembled as discrete units away from the trainset, only being applied if all is well. Backscenes are a bit too 'do or die' to allow for a happily relaxed approach.

Busy, busy, busy

Sunday; rush of blood to the head or a rare bout of enhanced work ethic and the backscene has had its unsatisfactory shade of blue covered up with two coats of white emulsion that will act as an undercoat for a warm cloudless cobalt blue sky. I have a thing about clouds on backscenes, they rarely convince partly because not everybody is a Constable and  partly because backscenes allow one to see a greater sweep of sky than real life and even with clouds well spaced out the backscene appears to have too many. The thirty foot sweep of sky backing onto Morfa would only exacerbate this problem. I've also completed all the fascia and finished painting it grey. Tidied up the layout a treat. 

A bridge too far

Well, hasn't winter just flown by? If you were to take a peek in my railway room you could be forgiven for thinking that not much had happened. You'd be both right and wrong. Trains still circulate, the scenery remains unstarted let alone unfinished and there's still an amount of 6mm square timber strip and coffee stirrers strewn about the place. However dissatisfaction with the Mk1 'proper' bridge deck set in and a Mk2 has been constructed to take its place. At present I'm part way through assembling all the timber piers from the aforementioned stripwood and stirrers. It's made a long process by having to wait for the PVA glue to dry on one side before I can remove the pier from its jig, flip it over and stick the reverse side together. There's a further wait for this side to dry before I can load up the jig again.

I have also been distracted by the delights of the Darjeeling Steam Tramway.

 Photos of stripwood and coffee stirrers are dull, so have a screen capture of the sort of stuff that keeps me motivated.

It lives!

Huge glee; after many years of poor performance I've  finally got something respectable from my Park Royal dmu. Taking out sideways slop in the wheelsets and adding some to the gear mesh seems to have done the trick. Here's a snap of it trundling round this morning.

Time Machine

Elsewhere on the net I've been rambling on about time passing and the loss of the familiar. It may just be an attack of common or garden nostalgia but I'm drawn to the sweet sadness of the long gone. Here's a terrific video that I've found on youtube. It's a stretch of line that's very familiar to me these days, and one that I have memories of from the period shown. It lacks sound, and I'd love to hear a Sulzer being worked properly hard again, so choose some appropriate music and wallow in the past.

In praise of Airfix

I love the Airfix railway series of kits; there's something elementally right about them that lends realism far beyond their face value. Perhaps it's because they subliminally transport one back to the days of Ladybird books (Tootles the Taxi anyone?), scabby knees and the Corona pop lorry. In the sixties they were as clichéd as a Superquick goods shed, today I reckon they are undervalued gems. At the recent Corris show I got hold of four quids worth of Dapol retro loveliness in the shape of the bungalow kit. it's place on Morfa will be as the toll cottage at the Barmouth end of the bridge. Here's where I've got up to with it.

 

 

 

Lots of nothing

I've been fiddling with the video function of my camera recently. The results haven't been very good but they do show better than stills what Morfa is about, and that's space. Most layouts that we see make busy places, where there's much railway interest, their focus. Morfa is really about the landscape and a single line winding through it.

The bodge is dead, long live the bodge

In the previous entry I mentioned the supposedly temporary bridge; well it lasted for five months or so. It was three carefully matched piles of magazines that the flexitrack sat on top of. Though a joyously quick fix that allowed trains to whiz round, it really looked a mess and so with an hour to spare, a big cardboard box and a glue gun I knocked up a better temporary structure one evening last week. Here it is.

Building Bridges

This last week, after months of pondering the problem, I plucked up the necessary amount of courage and took the first step to rid Morfa of the temporary lash up that allows me to run trains round and round in circles. It's taken this time to work out how I'll construct the Cambrian style trestle bridge on a curve that will be the stand in for the real Barmouth bridge. I've had the materials to hand for a while, the easy bit as drawings and articles specify the timber sections  required; arranging them on a curve and to be sufficiently robust has been the challenge. To date I've printed out a template to construct the decking on followed by cutting the transverse timbers to size and staining them to a suitable shade of grey.

Photos of paper templates, chipboard and cut down coffee stirrers aren't that exciting, so by way of compensation here's a totally unrelated pic of the Pwllheli - York  mail train heading into Morfa.

Death of the Exhibition ?

Many years ago if you were a bit of a show off and wanted to let the world know what you'd been up to in your spare time, then there were two options, get into print or take your models to an exhibition. These days there's an easier way, and you're looking at it. However the interweb would be nothing without pictures and the digital camera both compliments the net and expands the ease with which one can get into the model press as well.

My simple, relatively cheap and frankly outmoded compact digital camera allows me to mount both a show and tell campaign here and produce photos of a good enough quality to be accepted for publication in the modelling press. I don't fool myself that my images are as good as those taken by the regular magazine staff photographers but they do allow step by step workbench shots to be undertaken, also living in the sticks many hours from anywhere would make for a long day for the paid snapper. Now to get a usable shot may take many attempts, I'm always in awe of the few shots the professionals take and the high success rate they achieve, but doing it digitally encourages one to keep bashing away till the results please.

 

Very good but what about the exhibition I hear you ask. Well, big layouts and exhibitions are a bit of a pain. Building a big layout so it can be broken down into manageable chunks takes far more time and a bit more money than constructing it in one unmovable piece. With the digital age giving easing the sharing of ones endeavours will we see a tail off layouts being made available for shows? Small layouts though easier to transport still become more complex when built to do so, and then we get into the sheer hard work that attending an exhibition can be. Though it's undoubtedly enjoyable when aggregated out, the frayed tempers, the stress when the toys go 'tech' and the last day's unseemly scrum to get out through the door do make me wonder if some wouldn't prefer to stay at home and just post photos and videos online.

What will the next ten years bring, will we see a decline in the number of exhibitions? Well I think I detect a growing number of big layouts built for home use only. Morfa would be a bugger to build in transportable format, hugely expensive to take on the road and potentially disappointing as many of it's best viewing angles are from inside the operating well.

Scattergun

Morfa will be a long time coming; when one man tries to fill a big space with hand built models it's inevitable. Reading the railway press it would seem that most layouts are tackled in layers, beginning with the baseboards, working one's way through track, wiring, landscape, coming to a conclusion with with buildings and details. I've an idea that when looked at by the time and motion men this would probably be judged  the most efficient/fastest method. Morfa could daunt if tackled this way, and many of the creative choices stifled at an unnecessarily early stage. I've deliberately gone scattergun, bringing to completion many of the small component parts that will go to make up the whole without much care about their chronological necessity. I therefore find myself with half finished 'proper' track, jury rigged wiring, baseboards lacking the front profile sections, yet some completed structures and road vehicles. By breaking the workload down into manageable chunks measurable progress can be greater than the glacial pace of the whole .....

Transit van (detailed and repainted Trackside) and garage (converted Airfix kit)

MGB (repainted and detailed Cararama) and lock up shop (scratchbuilt in plasticard).

.... but I mainly do this because it pleases me.

Playing trains

Morfa is intended to be a long term project. I've always estimated that it will keep me amused and busy building for about twenty years. I suppose that as I started construction three and bit years ago that leaves another seventeen to go. I had thought that the main circuit would take another year or more to finish; hand building track with individual sleepers results in slow progress. However thanks to the efforts of friends who pitched in with staple gun and a box of flexitrack off-cuts and misshapes the circuit was completed two weekends ago. It is of course a temporary fix, and proper track will replace the ugly bodge we created but for now it's huge fun to see trains circling round.

Inspiration, here and now.

Though it's always interesting to work out how one got where one is, it's also good to take a look at the current influences. One thing that I keep going back to watch is this you tube clip of loco hauled summer Saturday trains on the Cambrian main line between Machynlleth and Welshpool.

It's not just the internet that inspires, I'm fortunate to live twenty miles or forty minutes away from Morfa Mawddach so trips to the area are frequently possible. One of my current favourite views of Morfa is from the terminus of the Fairbourne Railway on the sand spit sticking out into the Mawddach estuary.

In the begining.

It's likely that like most things in life our tastes in model railways started to develop at an early age. I know most move on from ready to run trains whizzing round the carpet, though there's still something captivating about tin plate rattling away on scenery free bare boards. I'm also fairly sure that it's not just the obvious that influences what we choose to make models of. Looking just at the real railway or the modelling press can only lead to an incomplete picture, at best a railway centric vision of the real world at worst something disconnected from the other realities of life.

It's hard to tease out the exact starting point that Morfa originates from, but in general terms it's strongly influenced by childhood family holidays to north and mid Wales. That it's a Sulzer stronghold probably owes a lot to watching class 24s splutter away in the sidings at Penmaenmawr as they walloped mineral wagons and hoppers about. Though Penmaenmawr was the most frequented holiday destination the Cardigan bay resorts of Barmouth, Tywyn and Aberystwyth also featured. I carry some half remembered magical memories of  journeys over Talerddig, the ramshackle halts at Abertafol and Dyffryn, the cool of the slate caverns at Pensarn and having the freedom at fourteen of being able to go out on my own with a rail rover and explore all this fascinating and enchanting world.