techniques

The Chopper

One of the most tedious parts of hand laying track is cutting sleepers to length. I get my sleeper stripwood in 2ft lengths, which then need to be chopped down to 15mm. The wood is quite strong, and it is quite a slow process to measure, cut, measure, cut, measure, cut. If only I had a machine to do it for me...

A plan is born...

So I decided to build an accurate chopping machine! I've seen commercial units, but really how hard can it be? I'd need blade that lifts up and down, a guide to keep things square, and another guide to set the length.

I sat down in front of Inventor and 30 mins later I had a machine all made up and chopping virtual sleepers:

I popped into town and picked up an M8 bolt, nut and washer set, some single edge razor blades, and a bit of w...

An engaging build, part 5

Continued from part 4...

An important occasion requires a celebratory train, so two carriages were duly ordered and shipped over to Utrainia, months prior to "the occasion". The carriages were prepared in top secret, first with a coat of deep maroon paint, which unfortunately came out more brown than maroon. Then it was time to name the carriages.

First of all some guidelines were added to the carriage with some masking tape. Then the decal letters were cut out and put in a dish of water to soak for a minute:

Each letter is the...

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.

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 ...

Rachel's Building gets a proper sign

When I was building "Rachel's Building" for Raparapa, I didn't have time to make a proper sign for the building front and instead just stuck on a sheet of paper!

Of course a girl like Rachel deserves a far better sign, so today I did something about it.

I started by making up a sign in Inkscape and then exporting it as a DXF file. I imported this into Meshcam and turned it into a 3d shape. I then converted it into some GCODE, a process that took about 10 minutes of pure number crunching.

Then I made up a small mold from some styrene and filled it with resin. I let this set, cleaned it up, and loaded it into my CNC machine. I set the origin to the corner, loaded in a 0.1mm engraving bit, and clicked GO.

...

Adding signals to the snow scene

Continued back story of my snow module...

I also poured the small lake/puddle using epoxy resin, heated slightly in a water bath to get it to flow better and let any bubbles escape. This was finished with some stippled matt varnish to give it a textured icy look. Not perfect, but ok from a few feet away.

Time to make up another batch of trees. My "endless" supply of sisal rope is quickly coming to an end!

Here is the module at the end of the evening:

Time to plant the other signal. I prepared it by gluing on t...