Gauge O wagon and some O14 in Hornby Magazine

A bit of a departure for Hornby Magazine in June - I've built a Slaters kit for a 7mm scale wagon. It makes a change from the 4mm stuff and hopefully shows that the larger scales are accessible to average model makers.

I picked a pretty wagon since that's what will initially tempt people to have a go. You start with something attractive as a little bit of fun and before you know it, you're hooked and spending every penny you earn on O gauge. You have been warned.

Elsewhere, in staff projects, my O14 test track gets an airing along with a much larger than life size photograph. I mentioned a possible Groudle Glen project at the end in the vain hope someone has a Saltford Models "Polar Bear" kit they don't want.

Best of all, there is an index for the last years magazines in the back and I get my very own section ! You have no idea how stupidly pleased I am with this...

Hornby Magazine Website.

Last lap - The chassis and wheels of the platform wagon received a quick coat of rust colour. The "wooden" top some dark earth and dry brush with gunmetal. Once dry the whole wagon was washed over with "underframe grime". Finishing touches were some dark brown weathering powers dabbed randomly around.

I appreciate that this isn't the greatest paint job in the world. Some people would spend forever working in dozens of colours and produce a truly staggering effect. I don't have the skill, time of commitment for this and anyway, I think in the context of a layout you probably get 80% of the effect for 50% of the effort. For the moment, this is enough for me.

So, at the end of the project (yes, I finished one !), did I enjoy it ?

Certainly. This was a tenner very well spent. There were a few frustrations along the way but only because I'd never spiked track before. For a relatively small price I had quite a lot of fun out of this. Even if you never fancy doing anything similar again, it's still a fun diversion.

Will there be another O14 project ?

Possibly. I see a couple of options:

• The Groudle Glen Railway. For a start I think the line acquired a McEwan Pratt Baguley as seen in the opening credits of "Hi De Hi" last year and KB Scale do a kit for that. There's also a "Wren" lined up for the future. Neither are "proper" Groudle locos but they would be a start. The electric locos would be a relatively easy scratchbuild too. The steam stuff still presents a challenge though. Now if anyone has a Saltford Models 7mm scale whitemetal kit for "Polar Bear" stashed away and would be interested in a sensible offer for it...
• In the future I plan an On30 model. Part of this will involve a high level line between two mine buildings and this would be smashing in 14mm gauge. Best of all, the wagon kits are available off the shelf. Now this is a definite possibility ! Watch this space.

Platform wagon

Nice little kit this. Instructions are are provided but essentially you insert the bearings into the sideframes, stick these to the sides of the "hoop" and tut the wheels in. Then glue the wooden top in place and fit a couple of parts for the loop couplings.

The wheels are very nice but the design, a Hudson 4 hole apparently, reminds me of a rather ugly set of hubcaps available for Ford Escorts in the early 1990's. If the Dagenham designers were influenced by the good people working in Leeds design studios then it's a pity for them that the results look better under a narrow gauge wagon than on an XR3i. In model form the quality is excellent with nice consistent back to back measurements.

To be honest there are so few parts there isn't much to say. The bearings go in well and need no glue to retain them. The only niggle was that the axles seemed a touch too long to me and I had to use the same technique employed building Backwoods Miniatures wagons, putting the axles in place and grabbing them between both sides simultaneously. That way if there is any need to splay the sides slightly then it will be the same on both sides. Mind you, with the parts in place I can't see anything not vertical so perhaps it's just me. At the very least the chassis trundled up and down the track nicely enough.

The top simply glues into place with care being taken to make sure it is central. There aren't any obvious guides but it's not a problem to do this by eye. Throughout the job, I've used Revell Contacta cement followed by Mek Pak.

Finally some nice little mouldings are put on at the coupling end followed by a bit of wire and at one end, a flat metal loop.

The finished model needs weight as it is very light, but there's room under the platform for this. Painting will be fun, presumably these things were once new but I've not seen many photos of this state !

O14 wagon parts

The taster kit comes with a little bag containing the parts for a simple wagon. Or at least it should have done. When I opened the bag I discovered that a packing error had left me without the chassis hoop and sideframes. Disappointing.
Never mind, I thought, a quick e-mail should be enough to sort this out and so I fired one off before going to work.

By lunchtime I had had a reply apologising and promising the missing parts would be sent out. 48 hours later a jiffy bag had arrived with the extra sprue.

This is what I call amazing customer service.

Being pragmatic, I accept that a business based on supplying parts for people building model railways in an unusual scale/gauge combination is at best a "cottage industry". We aren't talking about a global giant like Toyota here, but a couple of people knocking out kits from a shed. They aren't going to become rich doing this - the KB Scale car park will be empty of Ferrari's and Bentley's I suspect. Mistakes happen in all the best businesses, it's how they are dealt with that makes the difference.

As it was, the response was far faster than I had expected. If sorting things out had taken a couple of weeks I wouldn't have worried. It's a model railway, not lifesaving surgery after all.

Now there are people reading this who think that the response I got is the least I should have expected. I think we've been conditioned by the ever faster pace of web services such as Amazon to expect delivery tomorrow. Not in 28 days but now ! And if we don't get it we'll be on the web forums slagging off the unfortunate trader who has "let me down". Remember the early days of eBay ? Payment by cheque, goods sent when this cleared. The whole deal took a couple of weeks. Now the auction is over, payment usually means Paypal and if the item isn't on the doorstep the next morning feedback is along the lines of, "RUBISH SELLER.TWO SLOW,I HATE THEM Z-----".

Well, not from me. KB Scale's service has swayed me toward O14 even more. I've only bought a wagon and a bit of track but they are tempting me towards more. On this basis I'd certainly heartily recomend them to anyone.

KB Scale website

Mud, glorious mud

This is looking better. The tea leaf ballast has been given some patch coatings of fine sawdust (leftovers from sanding a wooden floor) pressed into place and then flooded with PVA.

Once dry it is painted with Humbrol earth colour (right hand side in the photo) and the results look pretty good to me - quite a bit like the track has been laid in soft soil which has turned to mud at some point. OK, this would be time consuming to do, as well as consuming a lot of tea and sawdust, but on this small section of railway track it seems to work. A bit of research could persuade me to use a lighter earth mix if the soil in the locality was a particular colour but this is only a test track so it doesn't matter.

Tea leaves

Even though this is just a test track, I still feel it should be ballasted. Looking through various books it wasn't easy to find photos of industrial track as opposed to the bucolic country lines. I suppose that the temporary nature of these little railways combined with staff not interested in the demands of the camera toting enthusiasts mean less pictures for us modellers to gawp at.

Those that I did find didn't show much. Real lines were granite ballasted and the texture shows up. Industrial concerns seemed just to be smooth. At a guess, the main constituent of trackbed was mud and dirt. How to replicate this is another problem. Even the articles in Narrow Gauge and Industrial didn't seem much help as the subject was glossed over.

My attempts started with sawdust but this didn't seem to have any texture at all when prodded into place. Next up I considered real ash (we have a coal fire) but aside from the supply being a bit light in these warm spring days, it's horrible stuff to work with - one of the reasons steam vanished from BR tracks !

Digging around in my scenic supply I found some dried tea leaves. In this case the contents of teabags emptied out onto a tray and dried in the oven. Thinking "Nothing ventured, nothing gained", I sprinkled and prodded these into place and then applied dilute PVA with a dash of washing up liquid via a pipette.

The result looks worryingly too much like a bed of leaves. I think I need a bit of plaster or sawdust to take away some of the texture and then some paint as the tea is a bit brown.

Painted track

No problem with painting the O14 track. Those metal sleepers would have pretty quickly acquired a nice patina of rust as would the rail side. Since I've never seen bright rusty track this was followed with a weak wash of Precision "Underframe Dirt" and a spot of Humbrol Gunmetal around the fishplates to represent oil.

Less successful was an attempt to dab some weathering powders on to give the sleepers a bit of rust texture as well as colour. In my enthusiasm, I tried this before the paint had dried (I also took the photo too early, hence the shiny bits) and the result was more smudge than I wanted. That said, it IS a nice mucky smudge and since it's powder in wet paint, it won't fall off in a hurry !

The rail head was cleaned up with a screwdriver followed by a DOGA track rubber before the rust colour had hardened - it's a real pig to do later and results in giving in to temptation to use emery cloth with the resultant scratching.

Fishplates

With two o14 track panels fixed to my bit of wood, I need to do a bit of electrical work. While this isn't a layout proper, just in case I decide to have a crack at a locomotive, there had better be some continuity from one end to the other.

A smart person would tin the bottom of the ends of the rails before spiking it to the sleepers and then attach droppers that go through the baseboard and join each rail to it's neighbour electrically. In OO I just solder the rails to each other but these joins can break if there temperature changes and the rails expand and contract. With PCB track, this isn't a big problem, but when the rail can move in chairs or spikes, it might be.

Needless to say I didn't do things properly, my electrics rely on solder smeared on the underside of the rail with a hot iron and some Carrs Red label flux. Once cool I had to use a square ended file to clean out the solder that had oozed up the sides.

Finally, the supplied cosmetic plastic fishplates were fitted with a touch of superglue. This all looks very nice although I should have a left a tiny gap between the rail ends for expansion as the prototype does. I'll just have to blame learner plate layers.

Sticking and spiking

Time for a plan B. Actually, time to go and read some instructions but this is my blog so you'll not be surprised to see I go for plan B. Since I can't spike the rail to the sleepers as accurately as I'd like there needs to be an alternative method.

Luckily there's no need for any original thinking, just do what I do with etched kits - tack the part be fitted in place and then fix it properly.

So, it came to pass that the rail was super glued to the sleepers. Best results are obtained using Zap-a-Gap which fixes the two nicely rather than a brushable Loctite which doesn't. Pity as the brush makes it easier to apply but when the rail falls off at the slightest touch convenience is outweighed by results. Mind you, a few drops applied from the Zap bottle seem OK and take long enough to grab that some deft work with the track gauge is possible.

Once dry, spiking becomes easy. The spike heads still have to be altered but at least the rail stays put. I've also discovered the spikes can go in at 90 degrees to the intended orientation and then rotate one past the rail head buy using a pair of very pointed pliers. If the top is still too long it just doesn't get turned all the way around.

The results are much better than before. One rail is arrow straight and the other isn't too bad either. I still don't fancy doing an entire layout this way - the Groudle project will, if it ever happens, be based on copper clad track but then it does have wooden sleepers so this will look fine.

Quite how you get the trackwork accurate enough for point work is still a bit of a mystery for me, although not as much as how you spike an entire layout without going crazy. I suspect that laying sleepers on tape alows for a tiny bit of lateral movement so perhaps glue is better after all.

Never mind, next I have to join the sections together.

Spiking

All the O14 sleepers have holes moulded in them for the spikes intended to hold the rail. The theory is that you place the rail between the holes and push a spike down each side so it grips the base securely. This is how the prototype does it in many parts of the world - notably in early American railroads - as well as many narrow gauge lines.

Theory is fine but give it to someone as cack-handed as me and bad things can happen.

First up, the head of the rail is 0.9mm wide and the base 1.7mm. By my calculations that leaves 0.6mm of visible base if you look from the top of the rail. Therefore the horizontal gripping bit of the spike needs to be 0.5mm wide. This assumes vertical spiking which the moulded holes encourage.

The supplied spikes have to be trimmed back according to the instructions so I diligently snipped them back a bit (before you say it, Peco spikes are no better as the top is the same and the spike a lot longer) although without any great precision. I'm not using my best snips for this and only the big 'uns would go through the metal anyway.

Then I held the rail in place and pushed the spikes in with some small pliers. They are good and sharp puncturing the sleeper and wood without any great difficulty. Sadly without any great accuracy either as the photo shows:



Narrow gauge track might be a bit wobbly on the prototype but if this carries on, the gauge will be all over the place. Never mind, this is a learning expereince and I have another idea.

Sleepers

First up - fix the sleepers to the baseboard. In the instructions, Sundeala is recommended as it will accept pushing in the spikes that hold the rail down easily and without recourse to a hammer. I'm not building a layout, just a test track, so a piece of pine was chopped to length. It's a little harder than Sundeala but more likely to remain flat over time. Anyway, I didn't have anything else to hand.

The sleepers are very nice mouldings of Hudson pattern cast iron prototypes. KB Scale specialise in industrial railways and those lines were often laid and re-laid as the construction project or mine workings required. Temporary railway lines are something we rarely see nowadays (the channel tunnel was the last one I know of, but please feel free to correct me) and the cast iron sleeper was more robust than its wooden counterpart and therefore better suited to this use and abuse.

Yet again, I ignored the instructions when they suggested using plastic solvent to fix the sleepers to the "board". I prefer double sided sticky tape for this job. OK, the track isn't going to be lifted in the same way as you do when building PCB track - the spikes mean once laid it will be firmly nailed to the baseboard !

Sleeper spacing is suggested in the instructions. The kit allows two track panels to be made up and ensures you get something prototypical. I held the plan against my bit of wood and marked the centres in pencil then put the tape down and finally the sleepers. If the spacing is a bit off, well I don't suppose the real thing was perfect.

O14 test track

I buy projects on whims sometimes. That's why after reading a review in Narrow Gauge and Industrial Magazine, I bought a test kit for some O14 track and a wagon from KB Scale. For a tenner, I couldn't go far wrong and it certainly looked interesting.

The kit arrives in a small clear plastic box and contains rail, plastic sleepers, spikes, fishplates, a wagon kit, instructions, track gauge and finally an "I love O14" badge ! That's pretty good value for money in my opinion and just the sort of thing to encourage modellers to try a new scale. Once you have unpacked it, you have no choice but to start building as you'll never work out how to get this quart back into the pint pot.

Actually this project isn't entirely pointless - my favourite railway is the Groudle Glen on the Isle of Man. As a 2ft gauge line, it could be very nicely modelled in 7mm scale using O14 equipment. That's if I could cram the motors into the tiny locos. And work out where to get the midget wheels from - the pony wheels would only be 5.25mm in diameter !