SR General Purpose Tank Locomotive

Bit of an impulsive purchase. I bid on the famous internet auction site for a "Graham Farish - N Gauge - SR General Purpose Tank Locomotive ' 2579 '" they appear quite regularly and can often be hand for about £20. From what I can work out the train would have been part of an n gauge Graham Farish starter kit but is not actually modelled to be any specific locomotive. I was attracted to it because to the non-concerning it looks a bit like a 0-6-0T G6, a tank engine which served the Thornycroft site during the period.

There was a bit of damage to the Tank loco, mainly with one of the buffers, and a screw holding the undercarriage were missing. The buffer was repaired with a spare we had and it soon looked as good as new, it took a little bit of fettling to get it to run, but after removing some carbon build up and giving it an oil, we managed to get it to run around the oval. Unfortunatly it would not run over our concrete filled track inside the yard due to the height of the wheel guides, obviously we could scrape out some of the faux concrete in the tracks, or replace the wheels - neither if which are a trival task. So, for the moment we will leave it as it is and actually source an n gauge G6 Kit and chassis (hoping it will have smaller wheel guides) this will also make it more 'real' as there is no r-t-r n gauge model on the market.

Ed

End of Phase 2

Phase 2 was about creating the groundworks for our Thornycroft Sidings layout. The photos below also show the buildings from phase 1 of the project. A back scene is work in progress and should prove an interesting subject to post here because of the novel design method being used.

The final Phase 3 of the project is about populating the scene with shrubs, tress, vehicles, people and factory materials laid about the yards.

This photo shows most of the layout area (scenic area about 4' x 3'). Maybe not as exciting as the usual low level magazine shots that make it look like the real thing - those will follow after phase 3 is complete.

And this is the aerial view of the real factory for comparison, except we have modelled the 1939 scene, which has some extra buildings to the 1928 view below.

  The Thornycrofts Motor Works, Basingstoke, 1928 - Britain from Above

Moonlit scene with building LED lights ablaze

There may be a delay in publishing more updates as we turn our attention to our Cliddesden layout in preparation for another exhibition outing (Details later).

David

Laying the turf around Thornycroft

As with Cliddesden, we used static grass to lay our turf around the Thornycroft site. Unlike Cliddesden where pretty much 85% of the board was grass, only the embankments at Thornycroft needed to be covered.

The embankments were made using polystyrene cut to shape, and then plaster-of-paris was laid over top. Once dried, watered down chocolate brown emulsion paint was applied to create the earth, and then using neat PVA and our home-made static grass applicator (warning it is not a toy) I started laying the turf using a mixture of different height grass and colours to create different effects.

The embankment down the road is mainly low grass with a mix of autumn and spring colours (later this will have shrubs and trees on top). The height gradually gets taller and starts to mix with lighter "dried" grass heading down the track to the crossing. After the crossing by the back of the wood store, the grass gets a bit patchy and "burnt". These effects add interest and realism to the model.

All in all it was a few ours work, and a few electric shocks (from the static grass applicator) to lay the turf.

Ed