ranuska

Ranuska tunnel taking shape

Ranuska has been slowly ticking along. The tunnel has been the focus of my attention lately.

First port of call was to get the track into place. Thanks to my chopper I quickly made up the sleepers. A few test fits later and I glued the track down for good with 24 hour Araldite – 24 hours so that I had some time to get everything lined up before the glue went off. Once that was set I attacked the track with dark gray undercoat.

Now I had the track sorted, it was time to get the tunnel into place.

Before I put the tunnel walls in place, I need to line the inside of the tunnel. I did this with some well-expired Scultamold, that it turns out never set. I also added some small wood brackets to mount the tunnel to.

Ranuska trackwork finished?

After yesterday's amazing effort, I was pretty sure I could knock off the rest of the trackwork today. And indeed I did.

First up was laying the regular track between points; this wasn't too complicated, just a bit fiddly making the outer and inner loops an even gauge. Once that was done I set about laying the inner rails around the beach area:

These are slightly smaller rails that sit inside the regular track. I will fill between the tracks with DAS and scribe in cobblestones. By having the smaller rails on the inside I won't have to worry about keeping the DAS out of the flangeways, and it'll look more like tram track too.

Once that was done, I did an electrical test. This showed up numerous shorts. Each one had to be tracked down and fixed. After half an hour of f...

Ranuska trackwork

Work continues on Ranuska, albeit rather slowly. Somehow the entire week just disappeared in a cloud of work. Yesterday however I managed to squeeze in half an hour to battle once again with Templot; against all odds however I managed to achieve the right combinations of hot keys to get my reverse transition curves all lined up, the spacing between sidings consistent, and the forth turnout into the right place.

Then I printed out the track plan on 9 sheets of paper, stuck them together, and started filing point blades.

Today I got well stuck into it, and by the end of the day I had soldered up four turnouts, and a good deal of the track in between too! I've not run out of blank PCB to mill into sleepers, so that will complicate things somewhat. Perhaps it's an omen, a subtle suggestion that I should instead clean the garage tomorrow, since I spent half an hour searching high and low for my track gauge in there today.

Anyway, here is the current state of the trac...

A tunnel for Ranuska

Around the end of the  Ranuska peninsula, the track passes under a mountain and skirts quite close to the coastline. When the engineers were building the track, they had to dig through a lot of loose rock, and had problems with the hillside above. Since the tunnel was so close to the surface, the engineers built up a brick and concrete lining where the tunnel broke through. The resulting tunnel has become something of an icon for the area.

So here is the area where my tunnel will go, with the sanatorium perched above. It is so close to the edge that a tunnel would just look silly, but I want a tunnel. While surfing for ideas I came across the Cinque Terre in Italy, which is a rugged patch of coast line along the Italian Riviera. I found some great looking stone structures that were half tunnel, half rock shelters, so I decided to copy that.

A quick workbench update

With the lack of communication you may think nothing is happening in Utrainia, but that isn't quite the case. As usual I have a few pots on the boil.

First of all, a new arrival! A little wee tram recently turned up in a box from Japan, and delightful it sure is. As usual for Utainia, the international theme continues, and this tram is no exception. It is a German tram, gifted to Hiroshima after the war. Now it is running in the vaguely New Zealand setting of Raparapa, passing British and American cars, while French trains scream past on the other track.

I have also been playing with a halogen bulb for photography, which emulates the strong shadows of daylight very nicely.

Meanwhile, a huge truckload of our stuff from Christchurch arrived; amongst it is the best new ...

Ranuska progress

Today marks one month and one day of marriage, and so to celebrate a national holiday was declared for all citizens. Much was achieved today on several of the projects I currently have on the go.

Druzhba Sanatorium

Exciting progress has been made here. I have been busy casting and cleaning up the window assemblies, as for some reason each casting tends to include a few rather visible air bubbles, requiring quite a bit of cleaning up and filling. I've been working away on that when I have time, and today I had enough to move onto the next stage: assembling it.

I started by designing a cutting template for the floor, to ensure everything was correctly angled and formed a smooth circle. Autodesk Inventor made short work of that. Once I'd cut out the pattern in styrene I set about arranging the window assemblies. Luckily it all went to plan and soon I was looking at this: