Amberley Listermania!

This weekend Amberley held it's annual railway gala event. I was there yesterday, taking my turn manning the 009 society stand. This year the theme was "Listermania", with visiting locos taking the total number of Lister's present to 12, along with some road versions and a few miniature replicas too.

Sadly the model railway exhibition has become a little stale, looking very similar every year. However there are some super and less often seen models to be found.

But with the sun shining and the 2' gauge line running trains to maximum capacity, outside was the place to be!

That's my son on the left, busy with his new camera. In fact I think he took more photos than I did, and rather good ones too. While I was manning the stand inside he was watching the "parade" of locos.

We had a few interested folk visit the 009 society stand, the scale still generating a high level of interest, and it's nice to chat to a few folks just getting started in the scale. So an enjoyable day!

Lots more photos here if you'd like to see more!

Coventry Transport Museum

We had a family visit to the Coventry Transport Museum the other day - an interesting place and lots of visual interest for the kids. Not just rooms full of old cars lined up like some retro car park, the displays generally had some story to tell. One of the rooms covering local manufacturing included this Lister Autotruck, which reminded me of the Lister loco I built a couple of years back. This was designed as a self-powered factory trolley, but the loco and the vehicle shared the same design of engine and bonnet. 

I guess from it's condition and having probably spent more of it's life indoors (inside a factory) than a loco would have, that this example probably wears it's original paint, meaning I think I got the colour about right. I never noticed the orange strips on others though, I wonder if they were original?

One room featured transport toys, and whereas most of the museum featured vehicles that had links to the local area, or at least were historically significant, the displays in the toy section seemed much more random. One case included Egger and Lilliput HOe coaches amongst UK OO and continental HO trains .... odd!

Landswood Park - More photos and it's own page

Landswood Park now has it's own page, which you can find from the links on the right. While I am at it here are some more photos which have come out rather well.

You probably won't be surprised that after such intense activity in preparing two layouts for EXPO, I'm enjoying a rest from modelling. However there is another reason too, we're having a new kitchen fitted and suffering the upheaval that goes with that, not least that both layouts are in storage! And while I am not fitting the kitchen myself, there are plenty of associated DIY jobs to keep me busy...

Lister Painted

Recent distractions and a family holiday means that progress has been slow the past few weeks, but I have used the warmer weather to do some spray painting in the garage. This has been followed up with some evenings with the brushes, and finally I have the Lister painted.

I started with an Etch primer from Precision paints, the green is from the Halfords enamel range which seems a good match for the Lister dark green so far as I can tell. Having said that most colour pictures I can find of Listers are post-preservation, so I don't really know the authentic colour! Details were picked out with enamels, and a well thinned wash of dirty brown applied and wiped off, to tone down the shiny green and give a careworn appearance. Some weathering powers, plus rust orange applied to panel edges with a cocktail stick, and coat of Testors Dullcote matt varnish complete the job.

I'm quite pleased with the result, which hopefully gives the impression of a working tool, without being over-distressed. The geezer at the controls has come out OK too. Just need to hide that screw, add some couplings, and re-attach a couple of details that have come loose when re-assembling. After scraping off some paint from between the chassis block and footplate to allow the electrons to reach the motor, it still works too!

Detailing the Lister

So here is the finished article, with all the details added, cleaned up and ready for painting. All I need to do now is find a suitable primer, normally Halfords' works for me, but I am not sure it is best for brass?

Assembly has used a mixture of methods. I have soldered where I could - for example the bonnet assembly, sand pipes, lifting rings, driver's seat and sanding levers. However the mass of the footplate assembly has made soldering practically impossible for my 25W iron, and also I didn't want other parts coming un-soldered while I soldered new ones on! So most of the details have stuck in place with superglue or epoxy.



















The gearstick used a pin from the wife's sewing kit, a little filing made the head more rounded. This seemed easier than filing a handrail knob to a ball shape as suggested in the instructions. I hadn't fitted the clutch pedal at the time of the photos, having checked some photos and where the driver's foot will go I can glue it in place before painting.



















The holes in the buffer beam weights for the couplings can be seen, the buffer/coupler casting has been mounted about 1/2mm high to clear the couplings. The mis-casting of the sideframes has been rectified with a little filler, although from normal angles it was barely visible.

The Lister Chassis

Having assembled the frames to the footplate it is time to add the electrical pickups and assemble the chassis. The pickups are made from phosphor bronze wire, and on one side of the chassis block they are soldered directly to the block, thus making the whole loco live. The other side (shown) has the pickups soldered to a small piece of PCB (there is sellotape behind the pickups too, to prevent shorts).

This PCB has to be connected to the motor - which is mounted above the footplate - with a piece of fine wire. However that means un-soldering the wire from the motor every time the chassis is removed from the body, making lubrication and cleaning pickups a pain. My solution was to make a brass contact from the PCB on the chassis, which acts on another small PCB contact under the footplate, and that is connected to the motor. Thus electrical contacts between chassis and motor are made as the body is assembled, hopefully the photos make this clear.

The underside of the footplate, the PCB contact and black wire to the motor can be seen at the top. The holes under the bufferbeam weights are to locate the microtrains couplers. The sand-pipes have been soldered into the sand boxes.

The chassis assembled, the motor will be hidden under the bonnet. The black wire on the near side goes through the footplate to the PCB contact seen above, the bare wire simply connects the motor to the body electrically.

Initial running tests revealed a problem, there was a mechanical lurch every inch or so. This was probably a gear mesh issue, but I couldn't fix it. However David Janes at KBScale offered to take a look, and it has just returned working perfectly (that kind of service seems to be typical of Dave). It now runs very smoothly and very, very slowly. The gearing of this model is 196:1 via the double worm drive, meaning the motor is screaming away but the motion of the loco is realistically slow.

As well as posting a number of useful pictures, CF sent me this useful link, which includes a copy of the 1933 instruction book. Apparently the top speed of these locos was 5mph! I'm glad I only have a box file, anything larger and that speed could become tedious!

The Lister Build begins

So with track made, laid and wired, and a couple of wagons to experiment with couplings (and set their height), it is time to start on the big Christmas pressie, the Lister RT locomotive.

Now my wife might not be that impressed with it, preferring the steam locos as produced by Paul Windle, and she has a point that it isn't the prettiest loco ever made! However to me these little industrials have bags of character. For starters the fact that it looks like a lawnmower, and far too small to be motorised! In fact a lawnmower isn't so different, Lister were making factory tugs like this, a useful tool in pre-forklift days, when some customers asked for a version to be put on rails and the Rail Truck variant came about in 1928. Ideal for lightly constructed lines they were popular for peat bogs and factories, and I think it would have been an ideal loco for a farm/estate railway.

In the box are a good clear set of instructions, lots of black tissue paper containing shiny brass parts, an etch, bags of wire and other parts, and the ready-assembled milled brass chassis. More on the chassis later ...

Most of the kit is made up from lost-wax brass castings. Here are the castings for the mainframes, buffer beams and ballast weights, and the footplate (upside down). As can be seen there is a considerable amount of metal to be removed from the casting process including those arches on the frames, which also show some slight mis-moulding along the top edge where they chamfer to fit the footplate. Nothing a spot of filler won't fix later, but the crisp detail of the cast parts is superb.

As a result I have spent a lot of time lately in the garage at the bottom of the garden hunched over a mini-drill with a cutting disk. The instructions suggest a piercing saw and a file, but I'm impatient! The frames and footplate required some serious fettling to get a good fit but it is worth the effort. A number of holes for details have had to be drilled out too, which is slow as brass is very hard! (well, I usually work with plastic or whitemetal!).

The biggest challenge so far has been opening out the ballast weights to make pockets to mount the couplings. Fortunately they are hollowed out at the rear, but there was still a large amount of metal to remove. I drilled two adjacent holes and opened them out to form an oblong, squaring out with a file, a slow job.

The instructions suggest using a mini blow-torch to solder the frames to the footplate but I don't have one, I'd burn myself if I did, and my 25W iron would never heat up this mass of metal sufficiently for a good soldered join. So I have used 5 minute epoxy ("Araldite" or in this case the B&Q equivalent!) which has the advantage of giving me enough time to adjust to ensure all is square. I assembled one side and end, then the others when hard, blu-tak is very handy here! In this photo the holes for the couplers can be seen, along with the vertical hole for a wire pin to secure them.

Here are some of the lost-wax cast details along with the etched parts used to make up the bonnet. Bending that bonnet piece took a while but I am pretty pleased with the result. More soon ...