Well after being inspired by a clinic at last nights train club meeting on layout planning, I decided to start planning out my town a bit more seriously. Its one thing to have building kits, another to build them, and another to actually decide where they go! The town, I suppose, could be classed as being of medium size and covers an area of 77cm* 91cm (but an extension is planned for the future!). I finally cut the town board to size today. This will eventually be screwed and glued on the area of the layout where the town will go, but I hope it will be easier to lay the tram rail (when it arrives) and the cobble stones and such like stuff before it is put in. Once I had started drawing it all out using the kids felt pens (blue line tram track centre line, brown is the curbing, red is the buildings outline) I had a my little helper Brianna decide to come and help me and get in the photo’s. The dark grey plastic building base is the station building footprint. Between the Tram line and the fire station will be a road and a park. I like the look of the Brawa screen saver. There are some benefits to having young children, they have plastecine, which is most useful for putting up tramway poles. To give myself a bit of an idea of how it will ultimately look, some of the photos have the kit boxes in them. The outcome, well, I need to buy more houses, and at a rate of 1 kit completed per month (wishful thinking!) it should take just under two years to complete the town! But, now that I have planned it out, I may be more motivated spend time building the kits. John

Just a small addition. After I had posted the one above and had dinner, I suddenly thought, all the pictures I have taken are from the side that you will never see! This is the view that you will see when it is on the layout. The tramway poles get sunk by 3cm’s so they are looking a bit “high” at the moment. When I was referring to the Brawa screensaver it is the one for lights, but I will not put in as many different types of lights in as Brawa have. Some etched brass fencing around the park, some static grass, and I might even splash out and get some etched brass trees (http://themodeltreeshop.co.uk/index.html) Has anyone purchased any trees from these people? John

I've been meaning to comment on the blue houses. Lovely rich colour. I was wondering about how you chose that.

Well, it’s a short story. I went down to the local hardware store to but a compressor, but they only had one for EUR450. I thought that was a bit expensive (went to another hardware store and got one for EUR50!). At the first hardware store they had a special on Dulux house paint test pots, buy one get one free (In the thoughts of SWMBO, bargain). At EUR3 for 250ml’s its great value, so I bought a range of colours, one of which was a colour called true blue. Now this was a lot darker that the blue that Faller had moulded the kit (130413) in but I thought it was to light anyway. After hand painting some patches with the blue, I then sprayed the entire thing blue. A quick dust with black sprayed on it and that was the result. A blue building with streaks just like the real things (I hope!). As for the fire station, I am using a colour called Dalmatian for the white bits and Bird Seed for the stone work and again over sprayed with a dusting of black. The roof will be slate grey. Who says you have to use model paints! John

So it is now just over six months since I started posting updates as to my progress on the layout. As a medium, this is a great forum to do so. So what have I achieved over the last six months: :? I have built a lot of trees, but there are still more to be built. :? I have done some more static grassing, but there is still more to be done. :D I have built my hidden storage yard. :D I have finally planned out my town. :? I have started building the structures for the town, but there are still more to be built. :lol: I have got a new locomotive (Percy does not count!), but there are two other locomotives on back order. :lol: I have got two new passenger coaches, but there are more wagons on back order. :) I have found a supplier of prototypical tram rail, and it should be here soon. :oops: The layout was included on a layout tour, and people seemed generally impressed with it. But the biggest bonus of posting semi regular updates, is that I can look back and actually see what I have done so far. Sometimes progress leaps ahead, and you do not realise just how much you have achieved. People have commented here favourably as to how good what I am doing is. This is great motivation to continue. The layout is getting less running this year, but work on the layout has increased. :shock: This has to be a good thing, as it is starting to become a model railway, as opposed to some track that model trains run on, not that there is anything wrong with this approach. Most of all I have achieved a greater amount of enjoyment in doing it, and that what it is all about. John

Imageshack was not working for me yesterday so I was unable to post this without the pictures. It is back up today so here goes. I needed to raise the level of the town by 12mm and this was going to cause a bit of a problem with the mounting of the tramway poles. I decided that some drastic action was required and have cut a couple of holes out of the existing bench work. One bonus of these holes is that you can see the SVT 137 in its storage road. The original pictures of the poles in plastercine made me wonder how they would look when mounted. As can be seen there is quite a difference in the height between the mounted and the un-mounted poles. One pleasing aspect is that it looks like that at their correct height the poles will look good in relation to the height of the buildings. You can also see some initial planning as to the heights of the road and footpath. I can not start cutting and sticking anything down until the tram rail arrives. John

John, By way of variety, maybe you could attach some of the tram catenary direct to the houses. This is usually done in built up areas.

Hi Alan, I have thought about this, and may do it eventually in the town extension (sad that this part of the town isn’t even built and I have already thought about an extension to it!). My concern would be how anchor the cross spans to the buildings on either side of the street. Maybe inserting a block of wood into the middle of the houses and attaching the cross span to that would work. My major concern though is how much extra flex this would add to the catenary wire itself. I hope to one day have a working tram on it, but one step at a time. I am probably going down to Christchurch in September so will take some time out and have a look at the trams down there (http://www.tram.co.nz/). If memory serves me correctly, part of it does have the cross spans attached to buildings. John

Imageshack was not working for me yesterday John, what size are the photo's you put up on imageshack ? When trying to put up photo's on the forum, I only get the size shown on your topics, even when the orginal is tuned to approx 0,75 / 1,0 Mb. They do not open like your's to a larger size as your's when clicking it. Original size is 3,5 Mb Am I doing something wrong ? Jacq

Hi Jacq, Well that is a good question. Someone :evil: had changed the resolution on the camera to VGA mode so the last lot of pictures were about 100k. Previously the pictures have been about 2 meg. Sorry that’s about as technical as I get with digital cameras :oops: I think I just had a sign-on error. The link would not open the web page, but I was able to open image shack at their site. Most strange. John

I have had a pretty random thought. I need/want a town scene as a backdrop to my town. The blue sky looks ok, but some more houses in the back of it would be nice. But my talents as an artist do not quite go that far. Given that the kits I am using have pictures of the building at about 80-100% on the front and about 25% of the kit on the back of the boxes that they come in, has anyone played around with cutting them out, mounting then on a board cut to the appropriate shape and stick them behind the last row of houses? John

John--even better than using the kit boxes, scan the kit parts themself. http://www.worldrailfans.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7277&highlight=mockup

At my local train clubs last committee meeting, we discussed how to make better use of the club rooms on non club nights. Being the ever keen person that I am, I suggested that I could start holding kit building clinics, i.e. I will start building some of my building kits at these non club nights. People can watch, ask questions, bring their own kits and start building them So last night I took a kit down and started building it. 4 ½ hours later I had completed about 75% of it. The roof and interior details still need to be done, but it is getting there. It was great, no interruptions, just quality time with me, a compressor, air brush, paint, glue and a kit. Based on this progress, it may not take 20 months to build the town. The last two pictures show where it will eventually sit in the town. One word of caution however, this is a pretty simple kit, so may not be representative as to how long some these buildings will take to build. The airbrush saves a huge amount of time! I really should get my act together and finish the fire station! John

Well, I am a very happy :D modeller today. My tram rail arrived. Now it is not quite what I was expecting, but that is not a problem, But I am so pleased that I had not started building my road yet. The height of the rail is only about .6mm :shock: , and my road covering is about 1.5mm, but that is easy to solve/fix. :8) The down side is that I am off to Sydney for a week on Sunday, so probably will not be able to do a lot with it over the next couple of weeks. But it is here. :D John

Well, I took the town board to the train club last night and started laying the tram rail. I had done a bit preparation work over the last few weeks and had laid the sub-roadbed. Although it is not in the exact place, it is close enough for my purposes, and ultimately the sub road-bed will not be seen once the road surface is cut and in place. This is how the track comes from proto 87 stores (http://www.proto87.com/). Note that I have used some of the curves already. One set of the curves gives you 180º of curvature (I only need 90º at the moment) and the straights give you 40 cm’s. They are well formed and easy to use and cut, so I am very happy with the quality of the track. Best of all I can cut it to how I want. I have never laid track before so it has been a pretty steep learning curve, but it isn’t as hard as I thought. I can see that buying the track gauge was the best investment that I made. I have used super glue to glue the sub-roadbed to the town board and the rail to the sub-roadbed and occasionally my fingers to the various bits! It was a reasonably successful night and I got the outer rail laid. It is a grotty day in Wellington today, so I hope to finish laying the track and start laying the road surface. I have made some mistakes: I had one of my solder joints fail and was able to fix it, but melted part of the curb! I probably should not have glued the curb down until the road surface was laid, but we will as to whether this is an issue once I start laying road surface and see if this ends up to be a problem. If it is, I will rip up the curbing and relay it. Overall it has been a lot of fun, and now this much is done, I can finally see that it is going to work