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Birth of a new module: Ranuska

There is much to celebrate here in Utrainia at the moment, be it the crowning of the Queen of Utrainia, the start of a new year, or first anniversary of the founding of Utrainia. And to celebrate, the citizens felt it was time that they had somewhere warm and sunny to go and bask, somewhere with a beach, and nice hotels, perhaps somewhere nice to eat, and naturally with good railway connections.

And so Ranuska is born, named in honour of the new Queen of Utrainia. It is a balloon shaped loop, a small peninsula of land surrounded on three sides by sea. Like many Soviet-era seaside towns, it has seen better days, however some of the old grandeur still remains. The tracks may be a little overgrown, and weeds are sprouting between the cobblestones, but that grand "communism will conquer all" attitude in their architecture is still there. The town is nearly tropical, which you may think is an oxymoron for the USSR, but I draw my inspiration from a real place:

Raparapa trackwork completed

Last time I talked about the Raparapa trackwork was back in November, when I posted a nice photo of the crossover I was building. Well since then much has been going on.

Soon after the trackwork had been constructed, the maintenance teams moved into Raparapa and quickly ripped out the old track.

It then sat like that for some time, as wedding planning took priority. However Rachel was a little dismayed that her beloved town of Raparapa no longer had a functioning railway station, and so time was found late in November to install the new trackwork.

First I cleaned out all the old ballast and carefully cut the rails to the right lengths:

Night time in Raparapa

Now that Raparapa has some lights, it's time to show them off!

Adding lights to buildings

Three weeks since my last update, however all is not quiet in Utrainia. Over Christmas lots of new items were acquired, among them a pair of rail-busses, a land rover, many dozens of people, and some buildings and building supplies. I look forward to adding these to the railway.

Before Christmas however, I spent some time adding lights to Raparapa. I wanted the buildings to be illuminated, but I wanted the buildings to still be removable. To achieve this I came up with a cunning scheme using little L brackets made from metal, and tiny wee disc magnets that attach onto plates. The brackets and plates look like this:

The L brackets attach onto the walls of the buildings a small distance off the floor level. The plates are on the ground, and the magnets go in between, making ...

Here come the Austrians!

A recent arrival in Utrainia is an immigrant from the Austrian Federal Railways, more commonly known as the Ã–BB. The model is produced by Roco, a European model maker based in Salzburg, Austria, and is of a class 1044 "universal" electric loco, suitable for both passenger and freight work. It was the most powerful electric loco in the world when it was introduced in 1976, putting out nearly 7,000 horsepower, and sprinting along at a top speed of 160km/h, hardly sluggish for 1976! It was the pride of the Ã–BB for many years, and now somehow it has found itself in Utrainia, after some astute monitoring of the second hand loco market by their CFO.

Not knowing anything about Salzburg I did a little research and besides being the birthplace of Mozart and the location for parts of the Sound of Music, it also boasts an amazing modern railway station and several other stan...

NS1100 Del Prado gains some couplings

A quick update on my Del Prado loco from the Netherlands (not Norway as I originally thought... they both start with N!)

We have couplings!

I differed from the original model here a little by attaching the buffer beams and couplings to the bogies, but apparently this is how the real locos did it too, so really, I'm making things more realistic! I did it this way as there just wasn't room to have them mounted to the body and still have the bogies rotate.

Fitting the couplings was easy enough, I just used my trusty razor saw to cut out a box, filed it to size, and fitted a coupling. A lump of styrene on the top helps secure things. Everything was glued together with Polyzap, since the coupler boxes are some kind of slipper engineering plastic and are hard to g...