Making awful look awesome

When installing the LED strip lighting on my bookshelf layout, I was left with the unavoidable decision to mount the transformer circuit on one of the outside end panels. While I promised myself that I would later look at disguising what was an awful-looking plastic eyesore, I just couldn't for the likes-of-me figure out how to do so. That's when I came across some antique NSW signal box plaques on eBay, and had the idea to simply turn what looked awful into an awesome-looking feature.

These antique NSWGR signal box lever plaques were a great find on eBay,

I bought 8 of these old NSW suburban signal box plaques and cleaned them up using a microfibre cloth dipped in soapy water, although I have to honest and say I have absolutely no idea of where in real life they would have been mounted. They could have come from a decommissioned signal box proper, or simply a suburban signal relay hut that you see lineside on the rails heading into Sydney. Apart from the obvious lettering for the down, up, local and suburban lines to Strathfield, the plaques are somewhat of a mystery to me. Approximately 10 cm long by 7 cm high, they are each constructed of a 3-ply plastic sheet with the numbers and letters each engraved deep into the surface.

On some of the edges the plastic had swollen, perhaps from being exposed to the weather, while the backs of each plaque had the remains of glue blobs from whatever surface they were once glued to and were a little bent from having been carefully removed. As such, they were impossible to fix to any surface with double-sided tape, (believe me I tried). I decided the best way to mount them onto my layout was to pre-drill holes in each corner, and fix them to the end panels of my layout using the same method I used when adding the old brass station name signs.

With the edges of the plaques in a delicate and somewhat fragile condition, I had to carefully drill each hole about 1 cm in from the corners, as drilling them any closer to the edges would have caused the swollen plastic edges to have disintegrated or crack when screwing them to the layout. There was just enough room for me to mount two plaques either side of the LED transformer box. I applied some clear silicone glue to the back of each one, and carefully screwed them to the end panel using some 12 mm brass screws. The glue provided a great leveling medium given the plaques were no longer dead-straight, while the brass screws provided just enough tension to secure them flush to the panel.

They make the ugly plastic transformer box for my LED lighting look like its all part of the show!

Having been worried about how I was going to mount these, (and dreading the thought of mutilating a historic railway artifact), I'm actually pleased with how the brass screws look. The ugly plastic transformer box from the LED strip lighting now looks like its part of a relay circuit for a miniature signal box.

Adding these signal box plaques to my model railway layout was a fun project and has also given me another interesting facet of railway history to research. Just where did these signal box plaques originate from? If anyone has any knowledge of what they may have been used to identify and where they would have been located, I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, I'm heading back to the garage to apply another coat of varnish to my next layout project.

See also; Replacing legs with panels and Safe and dust free!

Snacks for Operating Sessions

I recently decided to sort through a box of railway paraphernalia I had collected over the years in-between modelling projects. I'm very glad I did. For among the stash of clutter I discovered a CountryLink on-board service guide that I had.... um, somehow obtained from a trip on the XPT from Brisbane to Grafton back in 2007. Travelers may be familiar with the type of fold-out buffet car menu and on-board safety guide I am talking about. This one is now almost a decade old, an inside is a picture of the CountryLink Xplorer in the same livery that now operates on Philden. This got me to thinking, 'what if I simulated the on-board menu selection when operating my Xplorer just for fun?'

Page 2 of the CountryLink on-board service guide for the Xplorer and XPT train services.

For those who are curious, I have carefully scanned each of the four fold-out pages for you to reminisce over. After all, following the demise of the CountryLink brand in June 2013, it is now a piece of railway history.

Page 3 of the CountryLink on-board service guide for the Xplorer and XPT train services.

Apart from the no-smoking and alcohol policies that place this guide in the modern era, it is interesting to see that an on-board Pay Phone was heralded as a feature. Phone cards could be purchased on-board from the buffet car. These days, every child from the ages 11 and up seems to be carrying their own personal mobile phones. But anyway, to the most important part of this amazing treasure find, the on-board menu.

The on-board menu for the CountryLink XPT and Xplorer Buffet Cars, 1989-2007.

Apart from the usual staples that you would expect to find on a train, the XPT and Xplorer offers some fine examples of Australian cuisine, such as the meat pie with sauce, Anzac biscuits and a Cornish pastie. Although it must be noted that the Cornish pastie was only available on the Canberra, Armidale and Moree Xplorers only, so all you unfortunate XPT travelers sadly miss out on this ravishing delicacy. There were a number of differences I noticed between the XPT and Xplorer menus that baffle me. Notably, raisin toast is only available on XPT trains, as is/was the selection of plain toast with a choice of jams. But the menu item that leaves me completely flabbergasted, was the snack pack with wine; available on Canberra Xplorer services only. Now I know that Canberra is the nation's capital, and home to our mightily esteemed politicians, but why is a well-deserving farmer catching a train to Narrabri unable to indulge in the afternoon pleasure of a Chardy with a slice of Coon cheese on a cracker? To me it seems a bit unfair, perhaps almost Un-Australian. So, if I am to play the part of a rivet-counter and stick to the particulars of prototypical model railway operations, then my whole model railway is going to have to be re-themed to portray the Canberra Line. Because there's no way that at 3.30 pm in the afternoon that I am going to run my Xplorer without a glass of wine in my hand!

And yes, my 2 car Xplorer does feature an on-board Buffet Car.

See also; Running some CountryLink timetables

Lights, wiring, toasted marshmallows!

I hate wiring! To be perfectly honest I find it the least enjoyable aspect of model railroading. So exactly 12 months to the weekend since cutting the first piece of timber to commence construction of my bookshelf layout, I forced myself to wire the lights that would illuminate my model railway to be able to say that I essentially completed a model railroad layout within 12 months. What a disaster it turned out to be!

Using Wire Glue turned out to be much simpler than setting up a soldering iron.

A fellow model railroader from Brisbane by the name of Chaz Webber put me onto a product called Wire Glue. For a modeler whose soldering efforts often resemble award winning sculptures of abstract art, this turned out to be a positive start to what was supposed to be a positive weekend. Wire Glue is in a word, brilliant! I'll post a review on it at a later date, but for now let me say my soldering iron will forever be confined to the tool box in the garage!

I ended up melting the plastic coating from the tiny light pole wires using a match.

If you remember those cheap model train lamp posts I bought on eBay from China, you'll also remember how I went to a lot of effort to dress these up with station signs to add to my platform. The first problem I encountered with my weekend wiring project was the tiny wires that now dangled beneath my layout. No thicker than a strand of hair, it seemed the manufacturers saved money by leaving one strand of wire completely exposed, and the other dipped in the thinnest of red plastic coatings that to attempt to strip the wire ran the risk of breaking it altogether. No problem I thought, I'll just take out a match, and melt the bastard off. As it turned out, the problem was solved and I could now scrape the wire clean between my finger nails and splice it into position along the feeder wire I would run beneath my layout.

The Wire Glue applies over the wire join with a simple blob of paint.

For the interior lights to my buildings, I resisted the urge to once more buy the cheapest I could find on eBay, and this time ordered some 3 mm grain-of-wheat light bulbs through an online hobby store. These were much easier to strip back the coating from the wire and join to the 1.5 mm speaker wire I had bought from my local Bunnings Warehouse. Using the Wire Glue was as simple as thickly coating the join with a blob of the thick, black paint and waiting for it to dry.

I fed each light bulb wire through holes beneath the layout and joined them to the one feeder wire.

Having already drilled the holes beneath my layout to where the lights would feed up into the buildings, I began to join each leader wire into the feeder wire that would run the length of the layout using the 1.5 mm speaker wire I bought from Bunnings to my ancient control pack that would supply the power to the lights. So far things were progressing nicely.

I used Blue Tack to hold the lights in place for the Cement Plant.

To hold the lights into place inside each of the buildings, I used another simple method. The good-old Blue Tack. My reason being that if ever I need to replace a light bulb somewhere down the track, my buildings, (which are all removable), could simply be lifted up, the Blue Tack removed and the light bulb pushed back through the hole beneath the layout. A new light bulb can then be attached to the feeder wire, pushed back through the hole and Blue Tacked into place once more.

The model then sits in place over the light bulbs.

So I repeated this process with the Goods Shed....

I did the same with the Goods Shed.

....and the Railway Station building.

And the same for the Railway Station building, the light bulbs then pass through holes drilled into the floor.

Finally, I glued an end plug attachment to the end of my feeder wire at the point that plugs into my power pack. With the Wire Glue joins now dry and cured as per the instructions, I then thought to reinforce each join by covering them with electrical tape, and finally screwed some small hooks in place beneath the layout to keep all the wires hooked up in place so as to keep the appearance of my layout neat and tidy. Once night fell, it was time to plug the feeder wire plugs into the 12 volt D.C. socket on my old Hammant & Morgan Duette power pack to see how it looked. The lights all worked except for the Auscision Models CTC signal that was installed beside my main line. No problem I thought, I'll just try the 16 volt A.C. socket on the other side of my transformer pack. Instantly I had success. Not only was the CTC signal now up and running, but there seemed to be no difference with the light intensity of the 3 mm grain-of-wheat light bulbs that I had installed in each of my buildings. While the instructions that come with the Auscision Models signals say it is designed to work with 12 - 15 volt D.C., I guess my ancient H&M couldn't pump out to juice required on the 12 volt D.C. socket, and the 16 volt A.C. socket seemed to be working perfectly fine.

Using 2 light bulbs in the Cement Plant was perhaps a little overkill. I'm going to try removing 1.

My first impressions of the lighting effect in each of my buildings was mixed. The Faller Cement Works building I had carefully constructed and weathered over the past 12 months glowed like a roman candle. I put it down to the light coloured plastic components being a little too opaque. I'll definitely have to black-out the inside of the building at a later date.

I designed the Goods Shed platform to have cracks in the floor to let the light filter through.

My Model Train Buildings NSWGR G-2 Goods Shed on the other hand looked amazing. The cracks I had modeled on the floorboards of the goods shed were doing their job at letting just a few slithers of light shine down beneath the structure, while the sturdy laser-cut timber building doesn't require any black-out effect to subdue the lighting.

I am really pleased with how the waiting room stands out at my station....

My Model Train Buildings NSWGR A-4 Station Building also got the thumbs up! By installing 3 separate light bulbs into each compartment of the structure, the lighting makes each room appear well-lit, and really makes the passengers and posters in the waiting room stand out.

....but the lamp posts on the platform were too bright and later turned out to be a disaster altogether.

The lights along the station platform however were glowing a little too brightly for my liking. I only envisioned the domed heads of my station signposts giving a subdued lighting effect on my model, but here they were shining as brightly as the UFO from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

The view of the illuminated railway station before it all went horribly wrong.

From a distance, the station sign lamp posts were doing just as good a job of lighting up my layout as the LED strip lighting I had installed overhead, and the above photo actually shows my layout with the overhead LED lighting turned off! It was about this time while I was merrily walking back-and-forth with my camera to photograph the crowning achievement of 12 months of handiwork, that my wife interrupted me. "What's burning?" She asked as she walked over to inspect my layout. By now I could smell it too. A horrible burnt plastic smell now filled our apartment. I quickly unplugged my power pack and opened the window. I didn't take long to see what the problem was.

The burned out remains of the el'Cheapo eBay light poles.

The el'Cheapo Chinese light poles had melted! The white plastic heads on top of each of my station lamp posts had each swollen, sagged and come into contact with the light bulb inside, melting the top section of the black pole in the process. As you can see from these photos, the lamp posts now resemble giant toasted marshmallows on the top of a stick.

The station lamp post signs will now need to be cut back to just above the name board.

Things like this can be real discouraging, and it seems the old saying 'you get what you pay for' has come back to bite me on the ass on more time. While boasting in a past blog post that these neat light station sign lights had cost me less than 25 cents each to make, I'm now going to have to go back to the drawing board. Not only that, but that painful wiring job that I hate doing is going to have to be revisited one more time to remove the wiring joins for each of my marshmallow lamp posts, and re-join the replacement light posts into position. While the more traditional 3 mm grain-of-wheat light bulbs have held-up fine running from the 16 volt A.C. power socket, I'm guessing the power voltage had something to do with the melt-down of the $5 eBay specials. Still, I would like to have known if the lights would have had the same problem running on 12 volt D.C., or if they were just cheap garbage to begin with.

Thankfully the Auscision Models CTC signal is working perfectly fine on 16 volt A.C. power.

As for my Auscision Models CTC Signal, as you can see in the above photo, it seems to be working okay on 16 volt A.C. power. Having not been able to draw enough power to work on my 12 volt D.C. setting anyway, there is nothing more I can do but to closely monitor its performance on a setting that is slightly higher than what is recommended. For now, I'm going to leave the re-wiring project for another day. Even with the added benefit of using the Wire Glue, wiring a model railway is still not high on my 'fun list'. As for the station signs, I'm going to remove the wires and cut the poles off just above the sign name. The 3 station sign poles can then remain on the platform with their own unique story to tell.

So I'm now going to take this as my opportunity to install LED lamp posts, as they require a resistor to regulate the output to 3 volts anyway. For the few lamp posts that my layout requires, I should just be able to wire the resistor parallel rather than in a series. And I think I will also try rewiring the CTC signal direct to the 12 volt socket to see if that provides more direct power than linking it to the same feeder wire that powers the other lights. Just to be sure that I'm not causing any damage by running it long term on the 16 volt AC setting. The new LED lamp posts that I now have coming look more like a NSW station platform light anyway. One thing is for sure. Anything will look better than a toasted marshmallow!

See also; Really simple block wiring and Installing Auscision's CTC Signals