LED Street lighting

I found recently on eBay someone selling 1:500 scale LED street lighting. It was direct from China so the price was super cheap. I thought I'd order some, well 30 of them, only £15 with free P+P!!! They arrived today and I have now installed 13 of them so far and I have to say I am very impressed. The only issues were that the angle of the street lights needed a bit of adjustment and they needed painting as the lamp covers are made of copper and it would look a bit weird leaving them as is. They run on 3v, so I nipped into poindland to grab whatever item used 2 AA or AAA batteries and nabbed it to get the battery housing out of it. Would've gone to Maplin but it was cheaper to walk to poundland than go all the way to Maplin just for a battery holder. After lots of soldering, its now done. Maybe at some point I'll work out how to hook it up to the USB 5v power supply already in the case and add a switch to it and maybe a variable power knob to make them a bit dimmer.

The lights as they come. Much closer to 1:400 scale than the 1:500 scale they're supposed to be.

Lights painted grey

Maybe they need dimming for exhibitions as they're not very photogenic at the moment

Pics from the Milton Keynes Exhibition and a new train added to my fleet

The layout and I attended the Milton Keynes Model Railway exhibition on the 14th of Feb. Nearly 3000 people came and it was very busy. I didn't even get a chance to see the 2nd hall. The day went well and there were plenty of people surprised and baffled by seeing T Gauge. Thank you MKMRS for inviting me. Doug Kightley, the bossman of the T Gauge forum joined me to help out and he brought down some of his Firth of Forth bridge project to show off too. The bits that he brought were very impressive.

We were in the Cafe area overlooking the main hall. Doug was busy assembling his bridge section

The view

The intended rolling stock for the day. Unfortunately the Network South East train decided to break on me and had to be replaced. The new DMU did great though.

The new DMU to my fleet. painted the day before the exhibition lol. Its a BR class 108 3d printed by shapeways . Exactly the sort of thing that used to go past my house on the Bedford to Bletchley Line.

A Section of Doug's Forth Bridge project.

And here's a video of the event, featuring Stratfield at the end :D

Painting Rusty Rails in T gauge

I've had a kick up the bum to do something to my layout as I've found out that I'm doing and exhibition in 2 weeks time apparently Aaaaahhhhhh!!!

I had started painting the rust on the rails but had only done about a third of the layout. Having this unfinished would look a bit naff, so I have to paint the rest now pronto. 

I'm using a size 0 brush with Humbrol Acrylic rust colour. The results are quite pleasing I think. The track was painted with grey and dark ink a long time ago.

The difference between unpainted and painted track.

New T Gauge Technical Details and FAQ pages on the blog.

I have added 2 new pages to the blog with information taken from the defunct T-Gauge.net website. The Technical details and FAQ pages have links to them under the main title at the top of this page.

Also, here is a pic of the cake my Mother made for my birthday. Look familiar?

Adding a backscene has made a big difference

I decided I didn't like the black background of the guitar case and decided the best way to fix this was with a backscene. Normally I'm quite dismissive of the concept because its very easy to have a background that doesn't fit very well. Either because of different colours, features not lining up, wrong style or just generally not feeling right. So I was a bit wary that I was going to make the layout look worse.

To my knowledge you can't buy printed backscenes in T scale. So my plan was to find a free one on the internet and scale it down until it looked right and print it off myself. My initial backscene sort of looked ok but it just didn't feel right. It had a river and a city centre with lots of buildings. So I went searching again and found another and printed that. I am very pleased with the outcome. It has greenery in the perfect spots for where my hills begin either side, its not distracting and the buildings fit very well with with my buildings directly in front of it. The only downside is there is a gravestone on the foreground which looks enormous to scale, so I'll have to hide it with trees or something. Either was I'm very happy with the result, it lightens the layout up nicely and gives a sense of depth.

The layout has had its first outing to an exhibition! The Silverfox DCC club exhibition in Milton Keynes

It was a bit of a last minute thing but I volunteered to take my guitar case to the exhibition about 2 weeks before it was due to happen and they managed to squeeze me in. So on the 16th of August I arrived for my first exhibition that I have exhibited at since I was about 17 (quite a few years ago). I was overwhelmed with the response. It was very popular. After working on it so long and being used to the tinyness its easy to forget how unusual it is. Because of the response, I have been reinvigorated to work on it further and I have plans for things to improve it (and I want more stock to run on it now lol).

The layout is now called Stratfield - and here's a video of it

The name Stratfield is a mixture of Strat (the guitar name) and Cranfield (a village where I grew up).