Category Archives: Progress

June 2003

Here’s the progress in May and June together, as May was rather slow. Paul carried on cutting holes for switch motors and wiring the switches in the storage yard, and has now completed it. Steve carried on laying sidewalk and Ian carved a tunnel mouth, required to get the track off the LH end. Chris and Steve cut away some of the riverside wall as in the prototype and Chris planned out the bridge and built the buttresses. Chris (with Paul’s help) spent most of May and June building lighting gantries for the club layouts. Steve has been building the first store on Susquehanna St. from plasticard on a perspex frame. This will be the subject of a separate article shortly (it looks better in the pictures than in real life!).

April 2003

Chris has been reshaping Mount Pisgah as it abuts onto route 209, introducing more polystyrene shavings! Steve has started to lay sidewalk from 3mm MDF in Susquehanna Street. Ian and Chris have used brick plasticard on the river wall and Ian has added the capping stones to the wall at the side of route 209. Finally Paul has started to permanently lay and wire the staging-yard track.

Photos include Ian cutting capping stones from plastistrip and glueing them along the top of the retaining wall

March 2003

Chris has been smoothing off Mount Pisgah and it looks pretty good. Paul has repositioned the trackwork at the end of the staging yard to allow for stock on the westbound track to cross to the eastbound. Steve has started tracing photos of other buildings on his computer – Hooven Mercantile and the Navigation building – and card mock-ups of these have appeared. We have recently acquired a large number of freight stock items from a neighouring club (Chester) at a knock-down price. Finally, Ian has started work on building out a couple of the walls preparatory to adding the stone facing and has cut the culvert through the river wall. The photos below were taken on February 15th and the open night on April 4th.

Photos include a smooth Mount Pisgah, new track layout, new building mock-ups, new retaining walls and New rolling stock on the open night,

February 2003

Chris, Ian and Steve have been working on a permanent version of Mount Pisgah and have made a wonderful mess sawing up polystyrene sheets. Paul has been finishing Flagstaff Mountain and playing with the trackwork. Steve has continued tracing photos of Susquehanna Street on his computer and some new pages have been added to the website to provide access to them. We have all had a go at weathering our rolling stock and some of this can be seen in the photos. The photos below were taken on February 28th and the open night on March 7th.

Photos show Chris constructing a mountain, the staging yard finished and some weathered coal hoppers.

January 2003

Over Christmas Paul relaid the main lines and much of the yard track according to the Templot plans, leaving spaces for the pointwork (switches) except on the main lines which where temporarily laid through to allow us to run trains. Paul and Chris cut up the temporary Flagstaff mountain so that it could be permanently mounted – the gaps are over the baseboard joints. A tunnel has been introduced to allow the track to run off the modelled area at left. Steve started tracing photos of Susquehanna Street on his computer – using Adobe Photoshop to “straighten out” the images and PowerPoint to trace the outlines. Ian and Steve started to remount Mount Pisgah, starting with route 209 which has been built in plywood.

All photos were taken on the open night on Feb. 7th and include the special train consisting of stock supplied by Eugene Mones of Jim Thorpe.

December 2002

In December the track plan (plotted out in Templot software by Richard Oldfield) was finally delivered allowing us to finalise the location of the track and hence the buildings on the modelled section. More building mock-ups in cardboard were built – especially of the Hotel block as we got better town plans and some photos of the Central Hotel. We also found a good photo of the goods depot. Flagstaff mountain was started from expanded polystyrene sheet. Over Christmas Paul relaid the main lines and much of the yard track according to the plans, but this is not shown in the photos below.

November 2002

In November the staging yard trackwork was adjusted to allow all possible rolling stock (ie. a UP Big Boy!) to pass. ‘Droppers” were soldered to the track to provide power so that trains could be run round on Open Day (24th Nov). The detailed trackwork at the front is being planned for us by Richard Oldfield using Templot software – Last minute modifications were made following the provision of addtional track diagrams by Tom Biery. The locations of the streets were marked out, building mock-ups in cardboard were started and the first mountains were assembled. Trains ran well on the Open Day – note that this is only existing rolling stock and not what we hope to run eventually.

October 2002

In October the cork was laid and the trackwork was laid in the staging yard. This is the easier track as the switches are “Out of the box”. Despite the Merseyside Club exhibition at the end of October, the trackwork was continued round the front to provide running lines for the Open Day on 24th November. This will be replaced when the hand-built switches are ready. The locations for the buildings were provisionally mapped out.

August 2002

In August work continued on the baseboards. The trestle legs were adjusted and the horizontal supports for the boards were “unwarped”!   The boards are high by most standards to give a more realistic viewing height. Sadly, one of our members, Don, decided that he had to give more priority to his charity work and very amicably parted company with us.  Thanks Don for all your work on the room and the baseboards.