Sand and Sea

For the two small beaches on Tredinnick Creek, photos of real beaches on the Camel Estuary were studied. During my last ramble in the area I hadn't specifically set out to photograph them, but luckily one photo gave me all I needed.  If you click it, you'll get a larger image.  Notice that, in the distance, the bracken comes right down to the sand; nearer the camera there is exposed rock, and on both the beach slopes quite steeply towards the water - far more than on beaches that face the ocean.

I roughly formed the rocks from bits of polystyrene ceiling tile, which I then covered in Polyfilla.  While this was still quite wet, rock strata was formed using an old tooth brush then, when dry, I gave it a couple of coats of light grey acrylic paint.  Finally, bits of the 'rock' were picked out in a darker grey.

The beach is simply a sheet of plastic card, set at an angle and sprinkled with fine sand from Portreath Beach.  Very dilute grey paint was washed over it to tone down the colour, so that it looked more like muddy estuary sand, rather than the golden sands of Portreath. In the photo it looks rather too coarse, but that's not so noticeable on the model.

To create the creek itself, the baseboard surface was first painted black, then the water colours built up by dabbing on and blending black, cerulean blue and white acrylic paint.  About a dozen coats of Mod Podge were then applied, allowing 24 hours between each so that they dried properly.  Finally, the whole lot was sealed with clear varnish.

Incidentally, I'd never heard of Mod Podge before seeing a 'how to do it' video on YouTube (since deleted).  However, like so much these days, the stuff is easily obtained from eBay.  There are several different sorts, though, so make sure you get the 'Gloss-Lustre' variety.

Bridge over Tredinnick Creek

Just before the line enters St Petrock Station it crosses Tredinnick Creek on two girder bridges.  Having spent a long time building track, then installing and wiring point motors, I thought it would be fun to tackle some scenery for a change and get this section near(ish) to completion.

Photos of the bridge over Little Petherick Creek on the Padstow branch were studied carefully.  It's a well-photographed spot, especially since it became part of the Camel Trail, but I thought it best to pop one of my own photos in here  Whilst my model wasn't intended to be a copy, I wanted to get the 'feel' of the place - especially those metal cylinders that support the structure in mid-stream.

I started by building a couple of Dapol girder bridge kits.  These were being sold by Airfix when I was a kid (which was a long time ago) and have stood the test of time quite well.  However, the trusses on the top are like nothing I've ever seen and are surely structurally unsound.  Perhaps they were made that way to clear the old Tri-ang overhead wire system. I replaced them with trusses from the Plastruct range but didn't have enough to finish the job.  My local model shop has promised to have new stocks in January.

The supporting cylinders were made from 22mm plastic tubing - somewhat undersize as the originals were 8ft in diameter (=32mm in 4mm/ft scale).  I couldn't get anything suitable from my model shop, so bought a length of plastic pipe from the local DIY shop. Though doubtless perfect for plumbing, I quickly discovered that it's made from plastic that can't be glued with modellers' polystyrene cement, so I had to wrap each cylinder with thin plasticard, held in place with Evo-stik. The bits between the cylinders are Plastruct again.

Photos of Little Petherick bridge in operational days show boarding down the middle of the track.  There were also safety rails to keep trains on the bridge in the event of a derailment; in my version these are lengths of flat-bottomed rail, mounted upside down on C&L chairs. I think they help to give the bridge a nice chunky appearance.  Finally, the old bridge had handrails to guard the workers from falling in the drink.

Building turnouts

St Petrock station throat

I've been building my own turnouts for decades - more time consuming than buying them, but much cheaper and (most importantly) they can be designed to fit my track plan, rather than the track plan being adjusted to fit (say) PECO's designs.

Over the years I've experimented with various methods.  Soldering rails to EMGS rivets, set in plywood sleepers, resulted in some very nice pointwork, and certainly nothing looks more like wooden sleepers that strips of real wood. More recently, I tried C&L plastic chairs and sleepers. These produced far-and-away the best looking turnouts, but I found that I needed to strengthen the crossing (frog) with a copper-clad sleeper, and the whole assembly was the very devil to adjust after gluing if I didn't get everything spot-on first time.

So for St Petrock I've reverted to the first method I ever tried - soldering the rails to copper-clad sleepers.  I usually start by lightly gluing a photocopied template (B6 and B7 are my favourites), overlaying with strips of double-sided sticky tape and then cutting the sleepers to size and sticking them to the tape.  After that, it's a relatively simple job to cut, file and solder the rails in place, guided by a couple of roller gauges.

The nail is not a permanent feature!

To my mind, the key to successful turnout construction is getting the rails at the crossing point perfectly in line, which I do with two sleeper strips (see photo).  After that, it matters little if the rest of the turnout is nearer a B7½ than a B7, or the curved stock rail doesn't quite follow the official contour.  It'll work.  If the spirit moves, I can always add cosmetic chairs later, but I was heartened to discover that even Geoff Kent got his chair-less copper-clad turnouts on Blakeney past the eagle-eyed editor of the Model Railay Journal (No.65, 1993, page 209).  Mind you, when you can construct buildings to his standard, who's going to worry about a few absent chairs... or even (it would seem) a Britannia running into a north-Norwich country terminus?  Really!

Thanks to my little brother - who now earns his living designing turnouts in 12 inches to the foot scale - I have a large quantity of phosphor bronze rail and decided to use it for the check rails, to hint at the rusty colour of the real ones.  I realize that the wing rails should be a similar colour, but you're not supposed to notice that.  Hopefully, once the sleepers have been painted, you won't notice either where I've ground away the copper.  To avoid a gigantic short circuit, such things are necessary - one of the disadvantages of copper-clad construction.

That just leaves some method of operating the turnout, which can be the subject of a future post.

A firm foundation

The vertical section of each L-girder is a length of 3in x 1in
planed timber, to which is screwed and glued a length of
2in x 1in.  The wiring goes to the control panel  and will
eventually be tidied up, though there's a lot more to
come yet.

St Petrock's baseboards are constructed using the L-girder principle, which is well described elsewhere on the Internet, so I won't go into much detail here.  L-girder construction is often used to create an open top in which scenery can be lower, as well as higher, than the track base.

The station area at St Petrock, however, is basically flat, but I still favoured L-girders as they form immensely strong baseboards that don't need closely-spaced legs to support them.  My baseboard legs are 7 feet apart, leaving plenty of under-baseboard space for a folding double bed, a freezer, two nests of file drawers and all the clutter that inevitably finds its home in my railway room, whilst still leaving space for me to crawl around installing wiring and turnout controls.  The whole thing is overlaid with ½ inch chipboard or MDF, much of which was salvaged from an old wardrobe.

Track Layout

It took me ages to settle on a track plan for St Petrock.  I started by trying to fit a station, a junction and a china clay branch into my railway room, but couldn't do it to my satisfaction. Eventually, whilst thumbing through old Model Railway Journals for inspiration, I found Geoff Kent's Blakeney (No.66, 1993) and realized that one reasonably large station along two sides of the room would have plenty of operating potential, together with the uncluttered look of a small town terminus.  By the time I'd made a mirror image of it, then hacked it about to fit a smaller space, the resemblance had faded a bit, but hopefully you can see the similarity.

As the project progresses, things will doubtless change a bit, but my early impressions are that it's going to be rather satisfying to operate.