For the past few weeks I've been spending the odd evening here and there adding to my son's OO gauge railway. I originally put it flat on the baseboard (6' x 3' MDF) as it's laid out now, but a couple of weeks ago added inclines to the bridge to lift it up and painted on a road and brown earth areas. The loco works building and the station brige are pre-cut card buildings from a local model shop, the station platform and building are Hornby, the Esso garage and a few small buildings came with some track I got off eBay last year. The tunnel is made up of sheet polystyrene covered with paper mache and plastic brick faced arches at each end.



Last weekend I foolishly told him I could make him signal lights rather than buying them (£20 for a single signal plus another £5 - £10 for the switch for it was far too much!) and picked up a pack of LEDs and resistors, wire, a couple of DPDT switches, and a small plastic box to mount them in. With some swearing, burning, a little help from my Dremel and a lot of tinkering the layout gained a pair of signals - green/orange on the entry to the station, and green/red on the exit. A single switch controls both signals at once (so either yellow + red, or green + green) and as it's a DPDT I still have terminals free to be able to isolate a section of track when it's red if he decides later that he wants the train to stop automatically on a red. I've got another switch and plenty of wire and LEDs left to build another pair of signals for the other station track, and I might pick up a SPST switch and use it with some of the white LEDs from the pack to add streetlights. Power for the LEDs comes from a spare Netgear router 12V DC power supply I had kicking around, much simpler than building a rectifier to use the 16V AC accessory output from the Hornby controller.



On Wednesday I said to him "you haven't got many buildings, how about a house for people to live in". Around 15 minutes later after finding a free printable building online (here) I realised my error when I had to print out 20 pages of colour templates, mount most of them to card (used up 3 cereal boxes), and then spent 3 evenings and this morning building the house. The detail is nuts - the windowsills were all separate, and doors and windows are recessed, the roof tiles were in strips that overlapped, and has the option of coal sheds or bathroom conversions on the rear parts. While it was a lot of work to put together it was fun, and the end result makes the layout look a little less bare.



Next job is to add fencing between the road and station area (which also need disabled parking spaces added as per instructions from my son) and around the houses, add foam blocks under the track incline at the left side behind the loco building so that the track isn't hovering in mid air, arched bridge fronts over the road where it goes under the track either side of the bridge, ballast on all the track (might use building sand it's around 1/100 the cost!), flock and scatter all over the place, and then finally grass where the earth is still visible. Once that's all complete I've got a pack of EZ Water to pour onto the blue area at the back to make it look more like water, will need to get a strip of clear plastic glued across the back edge first though to keep it on the board and off the floor.

Way to go!
Must be great to join your son in a hobby, and it's coming along great!
The cardstock building looks incredible, and my respect for your work went up a few notches after I read your detailed building notes!!
How many xacto blades did you go through building that monstrosity?
Only problem is, I look at it and immediately start to figure out deployment zones and lines of fire!

Don't use builders sand for ballast, it has salt in it. You can get a guge tud of woodland scenics ballast for about the £10 mark that should do this and then some.

What you want to do now is to play Flames of War (or other ww2 or modern rules) in 20mm and use the railway as the battlefield...

If you don't mind spending a bit more, then Metcalfe model houses and buildings are very nice and pretty easy to put together.

The shed and bridge are Superquick, which is similar to Metcalfe but a little cheaper. As to sand, I'd forgotten about salt. I'll keep looking for the woodland scenics tub, the local model shops only do the small bags.

TW, I used a craft knife with break off blades, used 4 little blades in total. Would probaby have been about the same for xacto blades. Also damn glad of the magnetic cutting mat my wife has, as the magnetic metal rule sticks to it well and helps to stop the paper/card from shifting. The house is a little skewed due to warping in the double thick card sections, but I managed to adjust the facing walls to fit so that it's not noticeable unless you get a straight edge onto it. As to joining my son, he makes me build and then he runs the train around, he's not old enough to get into the modelling side yet. I've got another card model to build yet - a line side signal box (here) that he spotted while we were searching around for free models,

The baseboard itself is actually a bit of a mess. It's made up of some spare MDF sheets I had kicking around cut down to fit 6' x 3' originally so it could fit under a single bed, although now the bed has another folding bed under it there's no way it'll go under. It's 4 pieces of 12mm MDF (two 3' x 2', two 2' x 1') laid in a C shape (the smaller pieces laid side by side to make a 2' x 2' square, with the 1' x 1' cutout being the water area) with a couple of sheets of 6' x 1.5' 4mm thick screwed on from the underside. I've then added a couple of 2' x 1' cross section 6' long pieces of pine along the underside that help to both keep the whole thing straight and to stop it sliding on the small table it's placed on (the table fits just snugly between the two). The back corners are cut off at 45 degree angles to fit into the bay window. Next time I build a board I'll do it properly, this was only intended to be temporary but it's turning out to be a more permanent fixture for a while.

I've also kept the roads and scenery simple, as otherwise it'd take far too long and my son isn't old enough to want an accurate scale full setup yet (phew!). Hence the straight roads, small car park, matchstick fence and jetty, and lichen hedges.

The wiring for the signals runs under the front edge with each signal having 4 wires (pos and neg for each LED that run into choc blocks either side, with a pair of wires running from the from the first signal to the second, and then a signal common return wire running from the second signal back to the switch box to another choc block that is connected to the DC adapter. The positive side of the DC in is wired to the choc block, and in turn is connected to a 820ohm resistor which then connects to the switch - this stops the 12V killing the LEDs. Adding the second pair of signals will use another 820ohm resistor, switch, and LEDs wired in parallel, using the same single return feed wire. Using choc blocks instead of soldering means I can easily move things around or replace pieces, although I might look at using some PCB instead as it'll use up less space. Adding any lights would only require adding a single wire to a resistor + switch, and then onto the LEDs and back on the same return wire. I've picked up a lot from digging around on Google, and having some black plasticard in my bits box plus some black straws helped too

I haven't got any FoW yet, can't afford to start yet another game. I might have to look out for some WW2 military trains though when he's a few years older and I build a bigger layout in the garage Although I wonder how much an O scale setup might run to with futuristic trains for a 40k layout ...

FDor ballast these are what you want:

http://www.anticsonline.co.uk/871_1_1040040.html

Change the car park to a graveyard to be 90% more Gomez addams for the pileups..
http://www.tektonten.blogspot.com/2008/ ... eyard.html
(a nice link as it links to 3 different papercraft resources.)

Awesome work..when I get back to P+M I have (ever since I ceased P+Ming) to start incorporating maplins LEDs into stuff.

I'd love to have the room for a train layout. Sadly lack of space and funds prevent me. It's hellishly expensive for engines and rolling stock. makes GW look better value...

You're not wrong there. The two engines my son has came with 3 wagons each and were about £30 each for the boxes brand new, one steam and one diesel. Looking around last week at the locos in the model shop I almost fell over when I saw a diesel engine almost identical to my son's, but in a different livery and DCC rather than DC, for £170 .... and the cheapest locos seemed to be around the £70 mark. I know the ones I bought last year are the most basic sets that Hornby do, but it's a hell of price jump.

Being a railway series fan, i looked at the official Hornby versions of the engines. I've seen them in the flesh so to speak and quite frankly they look like cheap molded plastic with basic paint job on top. Theprice though....holy shit...

I just looked at the locos with sound page - £287!!! And that's not even a limited edition :O

These are the sets I bought for him:

http://www.hornby.com/shop/train-packs/ ... ight-pack/

http://www.hornby.com/shop/train-packs/ ... ight-pack/

The only problem with the diesel is that the wheels are large and close together which makes it prone to derailing on corners.

The cheap Hornby stuff is the old lima range and replaced/older Hornbys. You would be amazed how much better it looks with an ink wash and a bit of weathering to tone down the colours though.

The expensive Hornby/Bachmann/Heljan stuff is not toy railways, or model railways but finescale, with all advantages/disadvantages that brings (more accurate but detail parts are more fragile).

Midrange and top end railway modelling is not fo the faint hearted in the wallet dept.

However places like:

http://www.hattons.co.uk/

and

http://railsofsheffield.com/default.aspx

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Rails-Of-Sheffield

Can help if you keep an eye on the bargain and clearance sections.

My brother-in-law Mark just built himself a new shed to house his train collection. 26mx12m and 2 storeys tall.
Has a mezzanine level for his club meets and room enough for ALL of his trains (including his ride-ons.).

Nice work on the layouts, btw.
Hornby CAN be expensive (Mark has spent more in the last 20 years on his trains than I have on wargaming. He spends more in a year than I do - but he also goes to collectors meetings and gatherings. Yes, he also collects meccano [proper, old style stuff).

If I can afford it in a few years time, and my son is still interested in trains, then I'll look at replacing his playhouse (basically a low 2m x 2m shed with windows) with a larger shed for building train layouts. I've got plenty of room in the garden for it, although not quite as large as your brother-in-laws (I could just about squeeze in a 10m x 30m using the play area and the grass, and 10m x 40m if I tore out the decking, but getting planning permission could be a problem ), maybe go to around 4m x 6m or so.

That's some time off, but if I get the garage cleared then I could set up a board in there as well as lighting pretty easily, and enough space to have say a 1m x 5m board that he can then build up, and that would allow him to run modern trains too - his current track has corners using radius 1 curves so long carriages (of which he has 1 that I picked up in a bargain sale) tend to overhang quite a bit. With a longer board he could get away with running a long train end to end and not worry about needing loops.

Worryingly I've spent more time on this (and World of Tanks, should be able to get my first tier 6 tank tonight, woo!) than 40k in the past few months ...

Spack wrote:If I can afford it in a few years time, and my son is still interested in trains, then I'll look at replacing his playhouse (basically a low 2m x 2m shed with windows) with a larger shed for building train layouts.
....
Worryingly I've spent more time on this than 40k in the past few months ...

I was going to say.. giant hobby shed by owner admin of 40k sites is not going to use it for 40k...ohh how this site has lost its grimdark heart ( at least your still postin )