Previous Posts

The birthday garden shed

It was my birthday earlier this month, which meant a trip down to Christchurch to see family. Naturally the thought of spending a week away from my modelling bench terrifies me, so I stuffed a few bare essentials and some styrene strips into the suitcase, hoping to get a few days modelling in while down there.

Fresh on my mind was a great post about scratchbuilding some delightful OO scale garden sheds from cardboard and paper, and while down in Christchurch I bought some assorted 1960s Model Railroader magazines. While the adverts have aged ("Millionaire's house, $2.49"), the actual articles are still gold. The first magazine I opened had a 10 page E.L.Moore article, full of plans and inspiration. Each issue has a "dollar model" article ideal for scratch building.

NS 1100 gets a new motor

My Del Prado plastic magazine-loco kitbashing continues...

A long while ago I bought a bunch of motors on eBay, with the intention of using them for various loco motorisation projects. Most were quite small, however one was big and beefy with good low speed characteristics, and I thought that would be ideal for re-motorising my Del Prado NS 1100 loco.

I had previously used a not-very-amazing Life-Like motor and chassis to power the model, however the Life-Like motor was showing its age. It's bit, open sided, and only 3 pole, so it just didn't give the kind of low-speed performance I wanted from my model. Here is what it looked like:

Now for some reason I decided to replace the motor yesterday. First problem is that the repl...

Breda LRV - Painting and weights

Work continues on my Breda LRV project...

With the sides made and the chassis mostly done, attention turned to detailing the bodies. I needed some rooftop detail, and since the roofs are what you normally see of model trains, I wanted something reasonably detailed. Knowing I couldn't make anything that detailed from scratch, I turned to my parts box to see what I could scrounge:

The grey bit on the rear shell is a small air conditioning spare part from a US loco. The black bit is a winterisation hatch from another American loco. The smaller cream part is a chopped down casting of a roof top air conditioner from a series 24 Japanese coach, while the two large cream parts are duplicated A/C units from a Japanese Yamanote line train...

Railways in Europe - Part 2: Italy

My journey through Europe continues, this time in Italy...

Mrs A had promised me that I'd see many more trains in Italy, and she wasn't wrong. As we drove up the country and across to Naples, we passed many tracks, and at a depressingly bland truck stop on the highway, high speed ETR trains whizzed by every couple of minutes. However it wasn't until we got to Rome that I spied much in the way of trains.

Our hotel was just up the road from Termini railway station, which had trams, local trains, long distance trains, high speed trains, metro, and tram-trains!

I rode the metro home one day, and while fast and easy, I can't be as complimentary towards the state of their rolling stock:

After taking a few photos on the platform ...

Breda LRV - Body, bogies and chassis

I can't remember the reason, but a while back I decided to make a model of a Breda LRV, from the San Francisco Muni light rail network. I rode on one of these when I first visited America, from underground out to the beach. They are an interesting vehicle, running on both underground subway-style lines, and running on the street.

So they have unusual features for a train, like indicators and side mirrors. They also have a high level floor for subway platforms, yet once they emerge into daylight and start running on the street, steps down to street level magically appear inside the doors.

Railways in Europe - Part 1: Greece

Please excuse the cobwebs, I was over in Europe for three weeks with Mrs A and 21 smelly teenagers on a Greek/Roman history field trip. While mostly history related, I did manage to sneak in some sly railfanning here and there.

Our trip started in Athens, Greece. Not a whole lot to see in Greece, railways wise. The national rail network (OSE, for Hellenic Railways Organisation) is in a bit of a sorry state, and the country's geography isn't the most railway-friendly so many of the lines meander. That said, apparently they have the fifth largest (by length) railway network in the EU. Between government cuts, creative accounting, and a mix of rail gauges, things for OSE are pretty dire. In many ways they are the poster-child of the Greek financial crisis, as OSE's annual debt interest payments alone are three times what it earns in revenue! Quite how one turns the tables on that situation I have no idea.

My introduction to European r...