Rail200 - platform and canopy

Operation will be more interesting with passenger trains to bring staff and visitors to the hospital, so a suitable "station" was needed. Now, Whittingham hospital had a somewhat grand station with a substantial train shed, and Calderstones hospital had a temporary wooden station with canopy for the mainline ambulance trains during WW1. I thought my layout might be more interesting if the platform had a canopy, but something rather more humble. After a bit of browsing what was available, I thought the best starting point was the venerable Kitmaster/Dapol/Airfix platform canopy kit. The mouldings are dated 1959 so it has been around a while, but other than a little flash it's still a perfectly good kit.

Rather than build as intended with two girders under the middle part of the frame, I used one under the far edge (which required removing and moving the downward brackets), the near edge simply has a strip of plastic as it will sit on a brick wall.

The roof itself is as per the instructions, except I filled in the end half-panels with plain plastic sheet as this looks better, and can hide the end of the glazing better.

The four pillars in the kit are intended for platform mounting, but I need to support the far edge of the canopy from the ground beyond the track, and one pillar for each of the five roof trusses seemed logical. For strength I decided to use brass, and happened to have tube in stock in two sizes that fit one inside the other, plus a slightly larger plastic tube. I made them up with the larger section forming a wider base, topped with a slice of the wider plastic tube and with another short section of plastic tube below, leaving about 12mm of the thinner brass tube to fit into holes in the baseboard. Short lengths of the plastic tube were also cut and glued under the girder under the canopy, forming sockets for the pillars to fit into.

1.5mm holes were drilled into the baseboard after careful measuring. I realised I needed to make the pillars removable - I'll need to remove the canopy to relay the track and insert a point later - yet all would have to be firmly fixed in place. I found paperclip wire was a tight fit into the tube, so inserted a length in each (they get progressively longer thinking this might make them easier to fit into place one at a time). The idea is the soft iron wire can be bent over under the baseboard holding the pillars in place. 3mm lengths of the plastic tube were cut and inserted into the foamboard making a solid spacer to the ply, and fixed in place surrounded by PVA glue.

For the near side I made up a brick wall with more of the Wills arched windows in the style of the other buildings, I decided three looked better than two. Although the wall was simple enough to build it proved complicated since every dimension seemed to depend on another - the width of the canopy, height of the wall, width of the platform, clearances to the train and gap to the pillars... 

The canopy would also need to be fixed to the wall and yet removable when needed. The plastic strip sits on top of the wall, I added another strip at 90 degrees which protrudes down the inside of the wall locating it side to side. A couple of holes were then drilled through the inner strip and the brick wall and paperclip wire "pins" pushed in to secure the roof down. I'm hoping these can be held in place with a blob of glue or some tape, allowing them to be pulled out when needed. 

Once I'd got all the dimensions sorted the rest of the platform was made up from more Wills sheets. The Ratio fencing (including sloped section) was found in the bits box and fitted, this leaves the view a bit more open than a brick wall would have (and there's plenty of brick!). The platform is deliberately narrow, but at a scale 10' wide (or about 9' inside the fence) it's plenty wide enough for the expected traffic, and as you can see it can hold a couple of 4 or 6 wheel coaches and a loco. The canopy seems to fit in well, it's not too large, looks more interesting than an open platform, and is effective at hiding the hole in the sky at the left end.

A view from the yard side that won't normally be seen, which is a shame as it looks rather good from this side! This has taken somewhat longer than I'd thought, interrupted by a family holiday and the Pevensey show, but I think the result was worth it. 

Pevensey Bay MRC exhibition

Yesterday I took Hexworthy to the Pevensey Bay Model Railway Club exhibition, held in Eastbourne. 

The layout mostly performed well, the odd coupling glitch aside. Thanks to Tim Sanderson for helping out, and providing a Tal-y-llyn train. Here are a few of the other layouts.

Somewhere in France (Peter Capon) was the only other 009 layout, based on the trench railways of WW1 it portrayed the different areas behind the front. 

Mertonford Summer 1983 (HO) by Andrew Knights. 

Swingate Crossing (OO) by Jonathon Austin is a model of  a place on the Hellingly Hospital Railway, of particular interest given my current hospital-railway project.

Frittenden Road (O) by Andy Chant depicts a Colonel Stephens style light railway.

Not sure which OO layout this is but may have been St Mellion by Southwark & District MRC, a nicely modelled Clyde Puffer style boat, although it could do with being tied up!

Rhiw (OO) by Chris Ford and Nigel Hill. 

Hexworthy will be out again in a couple of weeks at the Chatham show, maybe see you there!

Rail200 - hospital buildings

More progress with the buildings. Having completed the engine shed, at the other end of the layout I wanted to represent the hospital utility buildings, a stores/goods inwards and a boiler house/bunker. The cereal-packet mock-ups have helped check the overall size and placement, and decide the key dimensions. 

As with the engine shed, Wills building sheets are the main material including more from the Craftsman engine shed kit, although brickwork and arched windows are from extra packs. I hadn't realised the Craftsman kit had stretcher bond brickwork, but the additional pack of arched windows and extra brickwork I'd bought were English bond. No, I don't suppose anyone will notice, but I'll try and stick to the same bond for any building!

The usual techniques are used - score and snap straight cuts, drill and fretsaw out windows and curves, and use a big file to square or chamfer ends. Not forgetting to nick the courses into the exposed edges at windows and raised brickwork.

Thanks to the mock-up, it wasn't too hard to mark and cut out the pieces like a jigsaw.

With the parts assembled, including raised brick trim and arches, the façade starts to take on the character of a Victorian municipal building. I've also added a goods platform to the front. The upstairs windows used those in the arched windows set, the ground floor has doors made from planked plastic and a window from a Dornplas set.

The height restriction left little choice for the roof. No space for any kind of pitched slate roof, but a flat roof didn't seem right. I had just enough space for a very shallow pitch metal covered roof, lead perhaps, which was simply made from plastic sheet, microstrip seams, and rod ridge. Brick capping comes from the Wills building details set. Note the off-cuts bracing the corners and the black plastic floor to hold the shape. 

In place on the layout, showing how the door is just large enough for a railway wagon, with the goods platform outside. Next up, the boiler house, which thanks to the location against the backscene, only has two walls...

There's another arched window, a big door to use the Craftsman engine shed doors, and to add a bit of interest, a circular vent in the gable. You'd think just 2 walls makes it easy, but there's so little holding it together at the corner it was quite tricky to assemble, and there's not much holding it square!

The roof would have been really difficult without the mock-up, which I could take measurements from. The result is a reasonably neat fit against the backscene. Balancing it on the two walls is a bit tricky...

Together on the layout the buildings have different shapes and sizes to make them more interesting, but share a common style. I'm pleased with how the buildings have progressed so far, they can absorb a lot of time and will be a key aspect of the layout, using the Wills sheets and arched windows has enabled reasonably rapid progress. A few details remain (downpipes, fitting of doors) and of course they have all yet to be painted. 

Track painting

Painting track is a bit of a tedious job but makes the world of difference to the realism of the layout. Fortunately, this is a very small layout - albeit rather packed with track.

Although I often use acrylics these days, I used enamels for the rail sides, I think they're likely to stick better and be harder wearing. The colour of rails can vary but they tend to be a dirty brown with an orangey-red tint, but rarely orange, as they are coated with a mix of deep rust, brake dust, and dirt thrown up from the ground and ballast. Here I mixed Humbrol colours in a small jar, with just a drop of thinners to help the mix flow. The brush is run along the rail sides coating both the rail and the rail fixings on the sleepers, including points but not where blades meet stock rails.

The 3-way point had the rails diverging to the disconnected route painted on their tops too, to reflect them being out-of-use. Excess paint is wiped of the rail top with kitchen towel, and when dry, a fibreglass stick is used to properly clean the rail head. 

The shiny sleepers need toning down too. Sleepers seem to be a grey-brown colour, so I mixed cheap artists acrylics - white with a drop of black and brown for a pale grey-brown. I used a cheap stiff flat brush - meant for kids, but even a 4-year old would find this one poor quality - filled with paint but with the excess wiped off on the palette. It's not dry brushing, which takes ages, but using a stippling motion angled towards the rails I applied the paint lightly. This leaves some of darker brown plastic showing through and the grain effect is highlighted, and allows the paint to be pushed around the rail fixing leaving that rusty brown. You can see from the paint left on the board surface the light stippled application. This proved to be relatively quick and quite effective.

While working on the track I cut away some sleepers from within the engine shed, and cut out the 3mm foamboard within it, to give the impression of an inspection pit. This was painted dark grey-black to make it look deeper than it is, along with the gaps between the sleepers where they will be under a floor so white doesn't show in the flangeways. 

Wessex NG Modellers Open Day 2025

Yesterday the Wessex Narrow Gauge Modellers held an open day, a rather smaller affair than the Narrow Gauge South exhibition held by the same group on "even" years. However, the community hall venue had two rooms allowing a good number of 009 (and HOe/HOn30) layouts as well as the 009 Society sales stand and a trader. It was also an appropriate location for a community of like-minded modellers to meet, with lots of chatting going on.

The first layout I saw was Nic Arthur's Bowcombe. I've liked all of Nic's layouts and this one is no exception. The subtle scenery and detailing create an atmospheric scene.

Back to the 70's by Tim Ticknell takes an old Cyril Freezer "rabbit warren" track plan and makes it work while looking natural and plausible, and unmistakably Welsh. I love it. 

David Marshall helped his grandson Daniel to build Harringford, he said the Inglenook track plan was partly influenced by Loctern Quay. It reminds me of my son's layout Slugworth, built when he was 11, which also used adapted Metcalf kits. Viewers were invited to have a go at the shunting puzzle.

Saith Ar Hugain by Christopher Payne is built in a plastic storage box, and shows a delightful layout can be built in a very small space and easily stored.

Wissey Creek by Stuart Reeve captures the Fens with a lovely composition. 

Julian Evison's Selborne, which was built as part of a group modular scheme, but is cleverly designed to work just as well as a standalone layout.

Richard William's Gemto: Ikkehavn is a quirky layout set on an island between Denmark and Norway. Richard demonstrated that like my layout Hexworthy, despite having just four points, the layout can hold four trains...

East Quay by John Niblett

A couple of modules of the "Freem009" modular layout by the Wessex NG modellers.

Devil's Bridge by Andy Cundick, the well-known prototype modelled in the early 1900s.

Kaninchenbau is a computer-controlled slice of the Alps by Iain Morrison. Since the trains move apparently at random, I was quite lucky to capture 5 in one shot!

A great day out and I do hope it is repeated in future. 

Rail200 - Buildings in progress

In my trip to Gaugemaster to get the track for the layout, I also picked up the Wills double road engine shed kit. Well, it's called a "Craftsman kit", what you get is a pile of sheet material and some plans... really it's more of a "scratch-aid" kit. 

From another perspective, it's quite good value when you look at the quantity of Wills building materials you get. Those arched windows with the (almost) cut-out walls are nice, and there are useful details such as shed doors. I don't want to build a double-road saw-tooth roof engine shed, but the materials can be used for different buildings in a similar style...

So I built an engine shed. Single-road and with a pitched roof, but the side walls use the arched window openings and the same panelled wall as the kit, I used the plans as a guide for dimensions. The kit windows and doors will be fitted after painting. The pitched roof with off-set door is a nod to the shed at Whittingham hospital.

I opted for a corrugated iron roof rather than the slates in the kit, partly because the Whittingham shed had a replacement roof in wiggly tin, and partly because it will add a bit of variation between potentially similar building styles. The vent chimneys are from the kit, although they are provided as essentially a strip of plastic with some faint cut marks so it wouldn't have been much more work to scratch build them. 

The far end wall is just a sheet of black plastic as it will be against the backscene. The rear wall is slightly longer than the front, and the roof ends at a slight angle to meet the backscene. 

Here it is in place on the layout. The offset door minimises the wiggle needed in the track on approach, while allowing space for a workbench. Ending against the backscene suggests that it could be longer, and the track could pass through into a fiddle yard in due course. The shed is about ready for painting, perhaps it could do with gutters and downpipes and I've yet to work out how to fit the doors. 

At the other end of the layout, cereal packet engineering has been adopted to plan the buildings. In the corner will be a boiler house or power house, with a siding into it for coal wagons. While it will be a similar style to the engine shed, I plan to change the details so it doesn't look like another engine shed. To the left of it I imagine part of the hospital buildings, or perhaps an outbuilding, used for "goods inwards", storage, or a workshop, it will have a small unloading platform in front of it as well as a siding entering it. It might end up looking like a generic industrial building, and it's difficult to do much given the constrained width and height. In the foreground is the placeholder for the small platform for staff and visitors, I'm still not quite sure what this will look like. 

A top view shows how the buildings will frame the scene and create the "courtyard" effect, yet not crowd the scene or hide too much track. I'm still seeking inspiration for the middle background, other than rising ground and a few trees.