The Layout is effectively FINISHED!!!!! Hurray!!

I've glued the final flock, trees and random fluff and the layout is now effectively finished! It took nearly a year (which was 99% procrastination on the project). I have learnt much about working with such small models. The idea seemed so easy in the beginning, it turned out to be a bit more of an effort. Mostly due to frustration with dealing with such small stuff, there's a sheep somewhere on my floor that I'll never find.

While I say its effectively finished, I do intend to carry on with small bits and bobs, like adding more cars and people and other finishing touches.

Without further ado, the interesting bit of the blog post, the pics:

List of T Gauge suppliers

I've made a page on the blog that lists the T Gauge suppliers I've found. There's a new bar at the top of the page with a link to the new Useful T Gauge Info page.

Fences and horses

New T Gauge Forum is up!

http://www.talkingtgauge.net

Go create an account there! NOW!

Water + printed roads = bad times

I've learnt to keep water away from my railway the hard way. I don't know when it happened but at some point I must have dripped water onto the road. Probably by moving a drink or the pot of water to clean brushes. I didn't find out until long afterwards and the ink had run horribly.

Lesson learnt: if its made of paper and/or printed then never let water get near it because it will go horribly wrong.

Unfortunate loss of the T-Gauge.net forum and the new Facebook replacement

I found out recently that the forum on t-gauge.net had closed due to problems with some disagreeable behaviour. I was quite sad when I found this out. I had visited the forum regularly and it was probably the best source of news and best place of discussion for the various people's projects and hard to find products. I rarely posted but I read what I could, it helped me find the stuff on Shapeways, which helped a lot as there aren't many British style buildings available.

Now, the good people from TGauge.com (the best supplier of T Gauge related products), have created a Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/TalkingTGauge/. The group started literally in the last few hours so there aren't many posts yet, but I'm hoping this turns into the new home of the T Gauge Community.

Long Live T Gauge!

1:450 scale fencing is REALLY SMALL!

I've managed to source some 1:450 scale fence, in the form of 1:450 scale japanese ship railing. Its not easy to get hold of though. The manufacturers website says that its on order. I managed to find this sheet of fence on eBay in Australia... took about 2 weeks to get here. It was made in Czech and sold in Australia to be sent to me in the UK..... all for a little sheet of etched metal.

That's 3.4km of fence!

I've got some of it painted and attached to the layout to see how it looks.

Buildings, signal box and crossing gates.

More progress

It's amazing how fast you can get things moving when you get motivated.

The 0-4-0 is part of another project to come. A 009 model of the Darjeeling Himalayan railway!

Random pic of random progress

Tiny tiny bridge painted

I painted my little brass footbridge today. It was only the 2nd time I've used my airbrush. Unfortunately some of the paint flaked off after spraying, I probably should have done 2 coats but I was worried about ruining it with too much paint. After a highlight and painting the steps and walkway it looks quite nice.

 

Just some random bits and bobs put together to see what it would be like.

Progress at last. Track laid.

I've laid all the track at last! Woo! Its all been glued down and some of the scenery level stuff has been put in too. Now I'm just using filler to mess with the edges of the track to make it look less like plasticy set track and more natural. The track is going to be painted anyway, so hopefully it won't look as hideous as it does now with bright white filler everywhere. 

I'm going to have to make a device to clean the track in the tunnels :S

One thing I'm struggling with at the moment and will have to fix somehow is the guitar case keeps flexing and warping. I'll have to put in cross beams or something. Its really awkward trying to get the baseboard of the layout.

Pics of progress:

Got the full HST now!

No real progress on the layout, got some more buildings from Shapeways and got the HST extension set Wooo!

I've managed to sort out a working Class 205 using the vinyls from tgauge.com. I found that the close coupling causes some major issues when going round the minimum radius curves, so I had to put back the original couplings.

New to the hobby, time to build a model railway!

I'm new to T Gauge. Well sort of new. I've been lurking on the T-Gauge.net forum for a while absorbing everything I can.

I'm a long time wargamer. I normally play warhammer 40k and have a blog for it here. So I have a degree of modelling experience, its just been many years since I touched model trains. And I've never tried anything quite so small. 1:450 scale is just insane! I like insane ideas though.

Well, I wanted to make a layout and I wanted it to be small and portable. So I decided on the smallest of the small that can still actually function. I decided to build a layout in a guitar case so that I would have something novel but portable and also capable of having a loop of track and an end to end stretch using the awesome sensors that come with the controller.


I have only just started the project. I have most of the materials I need to get the basics done and I now have the baseboard sorted and the guitar case stripped out.

Here are some pics.

 

Small enough to fit between a Space Marine's legs!

 

Now I'm just waiting for some bits from tgauge.com so I can attach the track and start planning around it.