ranuska

Building the funicular - part 1

My funicular is now finished and operating well, so I thought I'd go back and talk about how I made it.

Inspiration

Right from the start I knew I wanted a funicular for guests to Ranuska to get to their accommodation. Early on I discovered the Elevador da Bica in Lisbon, Portugal and was immediately drawn to its nice colour scheme and cute design:

However I struggled adapting the design to the 36º slope that mine would have to climb. Then one day while browsing my regular blogs I happened upon a post by Phil Parker from BRM (a great train magazine by the way) where he had discovered this wee cutie in someone's garden:

Funicular is GO!

An exciting milestone in Ranuska was reached tonight: the sanatorium funicular successfully completed a return journey from bottom to top, and back down again!

The Utrainia News Agency was on hand to capture the moment:

Still a few bugs to iron out, but a very exciting moment for all Ranuskan's. More details to follow...

Early morning in Ranuska

It's a national holiday today in Utrainia, and it just so happens I'm taking the break in Ranuska. I woke early today and went for a walk along the sea wall. There was a gentle sea breeze blowing and the cool winter air was quite refreshing, though not cold; it's never that cold in tropical Ranuska! Luckily I'd brought my camera with me, because as I strolled along, this lovely wee railcar rattled in to the funicular platform.

Yes, Ranuska is back in my sights again. I've made a couple of miniature saw horses which are perfect for sitting a module on while I work on it. They follow my usual design, just with stumpy legs and a sorter top. Turns out they also make great chairs!

Scenery for Ranuska

Work in Ranuska has been slowly ticking along, helped somewhat by the excellent modelling weather we've been having. Week after week of rain makes it quite nice to retire down to the garage after dinner and listen to the raindrops on the garage door as I quietly beaver away.

And beavering away I have been. Lots of scenery work has been done, in fact despite everything being in boxes I've been romping along on foresting Ranuska.

Rapid Forests

In the last update I had painted everything a good brown colour (Resene Sambuca). Next step is to slather on a good coating of PVA glue and start sticking down lumps of lichen. I'm lucky that I have dozens of containers of old lichen scraps lying around from previous scenes and railways, so I would just grab a handful and sprea...

Colouring Ranuska

Ranuska hasn't received a whole lot of attention lately, packing up the house has instead taken most of my weekend time. However I've managed to find a few hours here and there to keep advancing Ranuska.

Ballasting

With the faulty point repaired, I decided it was time to do some ballasting. I used my trusty chinchilla dust and tinted it grey. Then I sieved it through a tea strainer and applied it in the usual manner. It's nice and seems to look pretty good.

Retaining wall

Around the back of Ranuska there is a sea wall next to the track. I used some Tomix plastic retaining wall sheets that I joined into one long sheet and then painted concrete colour. A wash with some dilute dirty grey helped bring out some of the relief, though I think a heavier wash is sti...

Weekend progress on Ranuska

First on the workbench this weekend was to get one of the points operating correctly. It turns out that building very tight radius points that operate well is quite a difficult task.

One of my points is located right at the mouth of the tunnel, making it fiddly to work on. It's also quite a tight radius and I was having trouble with the wheels jumping off the track, so the engineering department was called in to take a look.

The foreman first decided to take off one of the point blades and grind it down to a sharper point. This went well until some of the grinding equipment (a piece of sandpaper) snagged the point and bent it into a U shape! Panel beating efforts were unsuccessful. So a new point blade was duly fabricated.

The foreman then noticed that the rebate in the outer track was too big and the point blade wasn't lining up correctly. The maintenance window was extended and the workers set about correcting this. First the rail was built up using solder and...