Thursday January 10th:

A bright idea!

The new layout has lots of lights, bufferstop lights, yard lights, yard towers and flashing amber lights on the depot vehicles. I wanted to light the six Portakabins I have but I didn't really fancy fiddling with small flush mounted LED's and soldering resistors but then I found the perfect solution courtesy of Express Models.

 

 

The first thing I did was put a bit of detail in the cabin this I think is a must if you are going to be able to see in it. I used some parts from the Preiser office equipment set Part No: 17184, you can see some desks, chairs, litter bin, telephone and some charts on the wall. I also added a figure again from the Preiser range.

This is what I used for the lighting its a circuit board strip of high intensity white LEDs for illuminating the interior of buildings such as loco sheds, workshops in fact any building. It can be cut into sections in multiples of 2 LEDs i.e. 2, 4, 8 or 12. Each section can be powered directly with just two wires available from Express Models here.

 

 

Here  I have used two LEDs and soldered the two wires to them, the LED's come on a board which has a self adhesive backing so they just stick onto the inside of the Portakabin roof as shown above.

 

 

The roof is now fitted with the wires exiting the Portakabin through a hole I have drilled in the base all you do then is connect to a 12v DC power supply.

 

 

Saturday January 5th:

Today John and I were guests at the Wirral Finescale railway modellers 'facility' where some of my locomotives and container trains had a chance to stretch their legs, so to speak. As my stock has never really gone around curves as all my layouts tend to be 'end to end' some teething problems were encountered with some couplings and after some tweaking and with some wheel cleaning on the locomotives we had two EWS intermodal container trains running faultlessly hauled by sound equipped 66's. My freightliner train which is made up of KTA pocket wagons and some FSA outers and a KFA 60ft container flat which were converted from Bachmann intermodal flats were unreliable on the curves so they will be fitted with longer Kadees.

Below are some pictures of my stock on Widnes Vine Yard taken by Dave Skipsey.

 

 

 

Below are some pictures of my stock on Widnes Vine Yard taken by John Humphries.

As well as pictures several short videos were made by Dave Skipsey and myself, here are a couple of mine.

A lineside view of 66247 and 66058 passing on intermodal trains.

Another view of 66247 and 66058 passing on intermodal trains.

And finally a  big thank you to Tim, Dave and Mike for their hospitality today.

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