Sunday 8 December 2019

Wagga Model Rail Exhibition and N Scale Rolling Stock

First of all, my apologies for a bit of belated post, as last month I ended up in a Hospital visit for some surgery which took me out of business for a couple of weeks. Thinking I could do a few things such as writing blogs and planning out future model rail projects amounts other things, I found just the simple things were a struggle to do during this time. However, on a positive note, one main health issue is now fully resolved and I have just about fully recovered and now getting back into railway modelling activities.

On the first weekend of November, I went down to Wagga with a few model rail friends to Support Rob P on his first showing of his N scale Exhibition Layout of Gunning. On the lead up to the event I got my 42's numbered and weathered (refer to my last blog for the work spent on the 42's), along with some passenger rolling stock and a few of my other locos and rolling stock. It certainly ended up being a great weekend. But first, I will do a summary on my construction my N Scale carriages.

4206 passing through Gunning

N Scale Passenger Carriages Kit Construction
All of the Carriages are Peter Boormans kits and over the last few months I have been gradually working on building up these kits.

There is not an awful lot needed to put these kits together, but I found on only two occasions that I needed to file back a couple of chassis to allow the body of the carriage to fit. The rest of it was to paint, glaze the window and fit the bogies.

Basically, painting of these models I found not to be much of a difficult task, but involved certainly a lot of time and effort in masking up for the different colour schemes.

Masking up of the carriage to get the yellow lining

Some of the carriages got painted with a silver roof with the navy dressing (navy dressing painted in Humbrol Mid Stone 225) and the carriages painted with the darker roof where applied with Model Masters Flat Black with a bit of dusting with the airbrush with Humbrol German Grey leaving behind a nice finish. The main Body of each carriage was painted in Raileys Indian Red paint. I used a Model Masters Yellow paint for the yellow lining.

One of the completed paint jobs

Once the Decals were applied, I finished the task of painting by clear coating each model with Testors Dull Coat.

Glazing was done just with clear styrene sheets, cut into strips and stuck into the model with Micro Sol Krysal Clear.

For the toilet window. Painted them in Tamyia white paint

When installing the bogies, on the instructions of these Kits, it states which type of Micro Trains bogies with couplers to acquire (as these are not supplied with the kits). I found that the recommendations for the 6 wheel bogie carriages was good (Micro-Trains 1018 Bogies), but for the FS, BS and BSR carriages I found that the carriages had very noticeable gap between them. After consulting with a few other model N scale railway modellers, I was pointed to the solution which was to acquire Kato N scale 11-035 bogies, cut off the coupler shaft and install Micro-Trans N Scale Universal Body Mount Short Shank Couplers (1015). After following this advise this, this ended up to the solution that had the desirable result.

 One carrige in the back row has the Micro-Trains 1017 Coupler and bogie set. The remainder were fitted with the body mounted Mirco-Tains 1015 couplers with Kato N Scale 11-035 bogies.

Making the modifications by cutting off the coupler shaft on the Kato N Scale 11-035 bogies and removing the the tab that the wiring for lighting would connect too on the power pick up. Wheel with the power pickups were then reinstalled ready to be mounted on the carriages.

The Kato bogies ran with no issues at all when tested.

Wagga Model Train Exhibition
This year one of my Model Rail Friends Robert, decided to exhibited his N Scale layout of Gunning, in which Wagga Exhibition Coordinator accepted his expression of interest. Fortunately for me, I was able to get the time off from work to do a trip with Robert and other supporting model rail friends to assist with the transportation, setup and the running of Gunning at the model Rail Show.

We arrived at the venue late Friday afternoon after taking a long drive from Sydney to where we setup and tested the layout and ensured that it was operating as expected. 

Robs Gunning N Scale Layout setup ready to go for the Wagga Exhibition

From looking around at the other exhibitions, having layouts such as Binalong, Stockinbingal, Yandys plus a few others had this Country Model Rail event to be setup to put on a decent show.

As the show commenced from the Saturday morning, from the moment when we started to run trains, we ended being busy answering a lot of inquires and receiving positive comments about Robs Gunning Layout. 

One thing to note, most of the models that ran on Gunning where kits or scratched built, many of them scratched built by Rob which makes it unique to the fact that there are not that many Layouts that run scratch built prototypical Locomotives and Rolling Stock at this volume at Exhibitions, which has some how placed my effort with the 42's and carriages to shame in a way.

Unfortunately, I took more video than photos, so do not have much decent photos to show. Perhaps I need to think on to starting up an YouTube channel in the near future.

4206 In the Fiddle yard of Gunning with a Robs scratched built N Car set in the back ground


In the end it was a fantastic weekend in which I hope to get involved with in 2020. Certainly was great to meet up with those of you that follow my blog that attended the Exhibition. Certainly good to know that not only people read my blog but have found out some of you became aware of Wagga Model Rail Exhibition event from my previous blog. Also was great to catch up with my other model rail friends that attended this exhibition.

From here now, the focus will be to get my HO Layout of Narellan completed.




4 comments:

  1. Hope you're feeling better now Peter, and thanks for sharing your expedition to the Wagga exhibition. Sounds like a great rural train show!

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    1. Thanks Phil, Certainly feeling better now. Wagga may not be a big show compared to some of the exhibitions in the City areas like in Sydney, but big enough to put on a decent show.

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  2. The semaphore signals at Gunning are not upper quadrant. Worked from the signal box they would be horizontal to indicate stop or lowered to indicate clear. Hope they are not glued in the upper position.

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    1. Bob, I have just checked my slides of Gunning taken in 1990, and whilst I didn't take pictures of all the signals, the two on the up and down mainlines on the sydney side of the station ARE upper quadrants. For a first outing, Gunning was a great layout. Always learning something new.

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