The Waikikamukau Chronicles

Coupling Rods

2009-07-22T20:12:00.005+12:00

Got home on Friday after 2 weeks in Thailand, and promptly did nothing in the workshop for a few days because I was too tired, and it was too damn cold anyway.

I wanted to get the coupling rods sorted, which also meant figuring out the crossheads & piston rods. I had vague notions of making up some nickle-silver items, but the nylon bits from the same N-gauge chassis which provided the slidebars proved to be pretty close to exact scale, so I went with those.

Here's the relevant bits - the idea is that I'll glue the nylon T-shaped bit to the metal rod. The shape of the rod end holds the crosshead in place once it's on the slidebars.

Here's the completed rods. I tried using 2 types of Araldite to stick the bits together - the 15 minute version & the full strength version. They both failed miserably despite being placed in a warm hot water cylinder cupboard to dry. The nylon part fell off when attempting to fit the rod onto the loco. What did work was superglue - the gel version. This is something of a worry, as I'd always thought of Araldite as the adhesive to use when high strength was needed, or when nothing else would work.

I added a styrene valance to the footplate, then clipped the rods onto the crossheads & put the crankpins back in.

Seems to work O.K. The piston rod diameter is probably a bit skinny, but I can live with that.

Assembly Lines

2009-06-22T18:38:00.003+12:00

Having removed the wheels in order to paint the frames, it was a good time to add the counter-weights. A bit of styrene & 15 minute Araldite, and they were ready for a paint job:

The wheels were then refitted & gauged. The next step after painting the wheels was to try & "heavy up" the front bogie to keep it from bouncing off the rails every time it hit a bit of grit or dodgy track. I drilled out the holes in the PC board frames & used full-width lengths of brass tubing to act as bearings, soldered the radius bar to the main body of the bogie and finally glued a piece of lead between the axles. Here's the whole assembly as it looks now:

Note the springing between the bogie wheels. I had to thin down the sides of the bogie frames to get those in.
The little coiled spring you can see at the front of the chassis just touches the top of the bogie. This is further insurance against it bouncing around too much. It's .008 phos-bronze wire.

So with everything assembled again, here's the almost-complete chassis:

Still needs headstocks & a few other odds & ends, but you get the idea.

With the main chassis done it was time to start on the footplate & boiler. The footplate was a fairly straightforward affair made from a single piece of brass sheet. The necessary huge hole in the middle was done by drilling a series of 2mm holes around the outside of the marked area, and using a pair of cutters to nip out the webs between the holes. Once the waste was gone, I cleaned up the cut-out using a Dremel rotary file.

The smokebox is a piece of brass tubing, suitably cut & bent at the base where it joins the footplate, and the (very skeletal) boiler is another piece of tubing soldered into the smokebox & cut to fit around the motor. The lump behind the boiler representing the firebox is an old piece of cast lead weight from inside one of the TT locos from TradeMe and it's held in place with Araldite. All the white dribbly bits will be hidden by the bodywork .... hopefully. The weight was needed to bring the CG back between the driving wheels.

Looks ugly in the close-ups, don't it? Here it is fitted onto the chassis:

So at this point I'll be taking a break for a wee while. We have visitors coming next weekend, and then we're out of town for a couple of weeks. Hopefully there'll be more to report the weekend of July 18th.

Current Events

2009-06-14T19:29:00.002+12:00

On Wednesday the phos-bronze wire arrived from Tichy Trains. Very fast shipping, and very inexpensive compared with other U.S. vendors I've bought from in the past. I'll be using them again.

So - first off, the chassis was stripped down to allow easy fitting of the current collector PC board, and to have the outer surfaces of the frames painted black.
The collector wires were soldered to the copper tracks of the PC board, then the motor wires inserted from behind. The pictures do a better job of explaining it:

Above: Here's the bottom view. The brass plate immediately in front of the collector PC board is to hold the bogie radius bar in place

Above: The top view. The motor will hide all this when it's re-installed.

While the chassis was bare, I decided to figure out how to build & mount the cylinders & slidebars. This took a bit of headscratching, as all of the ideas I had up till now involved making up nickel-silver slidebars & soldering or gluing them into minute holes in the rear of the cylinders. I have a copy of "Making Model Locomotives in 4mm scale" by Guy Williams, and that's the method he recommends.
In the end, I did what I should have done in the first place, and that was to pillage my stock of TradeMe bits for ideas.
Some of the ways in which commercial manufacturers made slidebars are crude - to say the least, but on an N-gauge chassis I found what I was looking for. The slidebars are cast from nylon rather than plastic, and are in the form of a simple "L" shape with a pin to plug into a hole beside the cylinders. And they were exact scale size for the loco, too. Brilliant!

Rather than tax my patience by trying to make 2 identical cylinders, I decided to cast them. You can see the results below:

On the left is a tentative Westinghouse pump I've made to try & improve on the rather primitive ones I've done previously. The first cylinder casting is in the middle, and the master is on the right. The slidebars are at the back. Sorry about the slightly fuzzy picture, but lighting wasn't good on this one.

Here's a better shot of the resin cast cylinder with the slidebars in position. The castings still have to be properly cleaned up, and look a bit rough as yet.

I soldered a bit of threaded rod through the frame holes where the cylinders are to be mounted, and left it at that for the day.

Gearing Up

2009-06-06T23:42:00.004+12:00

The problem with making a gearbox for this particular chassis is that the motor has its mounting screw-holes on the rear of the case rather than the more usual front. Which meant that the motor mount was going to have to be in 2 parts - one to actually hold the motor in place and the other to correctly locate it relative to the idler gear.

I made the idler gearbox first from a piece of C-section brass channel, leaving a brass tongue long enough to slip down between the chassis rails & be soldered in place once I'd set up the working clearances between idler & final drive gear. The front bearing of the motor fits perfectly into a 4mm hole drilled in the channel, and is sufficiently flexible to allow the motor to be moved up & down to adjust optimum backlash between the worm & idler. 'Optimum backlash' is a technical term for "feed it voltage & adjust for sweetest running". The rear mounting plate is just a piece of shallow channel section drilled to match the motor mounting screws & soldered to the frames after adjusting as noted above. So here we have it - motor secured firmly, and running very freely:

The above shot illustrates maximum travel allowed from centre on the driven axle

Side view showing rear mounting plate. Motor angle is actually shallower than I allowed for originally, giving an additional 2mm working clearance between the top of the motor & the underside of the saddle tank.

The little piece of wire you can see soldered to the side of the gearbox just above the rear wheel is to stop the idler axle from making unscheduled appearances. The idler gear isn't fixed to the axle, but I will need to remove it if I should want to take out the gear at any time in future. Using a wire restraint seemed better than gluing the axle in place.

Looking good, and runs really smoothly. Now - when will that phos-bronze wire get here so I can make the current pickups?

Bogies I have known

2009-06-01T20:41:00.005+12:00

The bogie itself is a fairly simple construction as shown here:

The front bogie, or pony truck for those of you who prefer American terminology, is mostly just there for show in 1:87 scale. Even so, there are a couple of things to watch out for when making them. First, we need to prevent the situation where two wheels of the bogie on opposing sides touch the side of the bogie frame when going around a corner & cause a short circuit. I chose to avoid this by making the frames from a piece of printed circuit board. The second is to check what clearance is needed to allow for the bogie to clear the frames when rounding a corner. The problem is illustrated below:

This shot shows the clearance necessary to allow the bogie to clear the chassis on curves. It's about 0.7mm.

I'll make a radius bar to connect the bogie to a pivot point somewhere between the front drivers. A block of lead will be cast to fit into the channel section which holds the PC board frames apart, and maybe a piece of 0.008" (8 thou.) phosphor bronze wire as a loading spring once I receive it from Tichy Trains. Now to figure out how I'm going to keep the motor in place ...

Chassis-bashing

2009-05-31T18:20:00.003+12:00

As it's a long weekend and the Domestic Authorities hightailed it out of town for the day, I spent an unusually uninterrupted few hours in the workshop & managed to get the chassis aligned & on its wheels.

This involved:

Seperate the 2 frames & tack the axle bearings into place
Install frame spacers using temporary screws
Solder one side of both frame spacers to chassis frame. This leaves one frame able to be adjusted for best fit.
Put axles through both frames & fit wheels temporarily
Adjust loose frame until axles turn freely, then tighten spacer screws
Place chassis on glass & test for any diagonal rocking between wheel pairs
Use soldering iron to adjust bearings until all 4 driving wheels are resting on the glass
Test that both pairs of driving wheels still rotate freely
Solder loose frame to spacers. Chassis is now rigid
Test again on glass
Fit siderods & adjust until wheels run freely. This involved opening the siderod holes slightly larger than the 1.4mm crankpins required, but wasn't too much of a problem.

After all that, this is what the chassis looks like:

The top view showing top-hat style axle bearings in place:

And a trial setup with the bogie wheels I intend to use, showing why I had to open up the originally scale wheel-arches.

Next major tasks are the bogie frame & its pivot along with the motor/idler gearbox.

Getting Framed

2009-05-30T23:18:00.006+12:00

First stage in chassis construction is to figure out what the main frames actually look like from the diagram, and transfer the drawings onto brass. I measured the length of the frames, and cut 2 pieces of 0.6mm brass to that length, joining them with double-sided tape.
I used to solder frame pairs together, but found that the tape works just as well & is a lot less messy to clean up.

Then, I cut the frame shape from the photocopy of the plans, and stuck it to the brass blanks with another piece of double sided tape like this:

Then, a pleasant 20 minutes or so with a piercing saw and a couple of files resulted in the basic frames taking shape:

The pop marks you can see are for the frame spacers - which are the next task in the process. At this point I'll 'fess up to making the driving wheels 1.5mm closer together than they are on the plan. This is because I have a nice set of etched siderods from an old loco kit which I'm using on this project, and they are not quite 100% scale between centres. I figure the time & aggravation saved is worth the trade-off.

Oh Gee, A "G"

2009-05-26T20:18:00.004+12:00

I've put the "Fa" to one side for a little while as I'm going to try etching the valve gear rather than cutting each bit of it out of brass or nickle-silver. While I experiment with the processes detailed on Nigel Lawton's site, I decided to get started on another loco. Not because I really need one, as most lines of this size would have two at most, but because like most of us modellers it's a case of "the more, the merrier".

This time, I've decided to build an old "G" class loco as built by Black, Hawthorne back in 1874. The last of these disappeared from NZR service in 1919, but one or two of them lived on in private service for a good few years afterwards. This is how they looked in NZR service:

This one was in private hands - and well looked after, too:

Perhaps not the cutest of engines, but it does have a certain charm ....

The NZRLS produced a plan of these wee locos as part of their Cedric Green plan series. Here's a look at the side view:

So the first thing I needed to do was sort out what motor was going to fit, and what gear train was going to be used. I had a nice 3 pole motor looking for a use, as well as some likely looking gears from one of my TradeMe purchases. I worked out the ideal centre spacing between the gears to be 8mm, and did a quick mock-up on a copy of the plan to make sure everything would fit within the loco outline:

Looks feasible. Now on with the frames ....

Casting out wagons

2009-05-18T14:17:00.007+12:00

Well, the rebuilding & re-organisation of the workshop is done, and right on budget too. Mind you, the time taken was vastly longer than I anticipated because of Auckland's recently unreliable weather. I needed at least a day's fine weather to rip part of the old roof off the shed & replace it with translucent panelling, and I didn't get it for a while.

So now I have one work surface for marking out & cutting, one for assembly and one for finishing.

As promised, here's a look at the process I used to make one-piece castings of wagon bodies. The chassis will also be cast, but only the solebars & framing. The W-irons will be etched. And that will be another story - once I've got the process down pat.

Here's the original Triang wagon body:

Nice external detail, and even a bit of planking visible internally as well.

The first stage is to put the body upside down on a piece of 1/4" balsa wood with a spot of C/A to hold it in place. This is then placed (still inverted) inside an old plastic box I use for molding things in & casting rubber poured over the whole thing to a depth of about 1/4" over the top of the wagon base. When the piece of balsa is removed, here's what the 1st stage of the mold looks like:

The wagon body is left in the mold, given a light coating of mold release (alright, Vaseline) & the second pour is done to fill the mold level with the top. 4 pieces of brass tubing were poked in to create the small air vents at the corners. Here's the wagon body after demolding from the first pour - the brass tube is used to pour casting resin into the mold, then removed.

And this is the 2nd part of the mold on its own. You can see the faint detail of the internal planking.

So how did the castings come out? Not too bad, actually. Here's the first casting of the 6 I pulled in one evening. I painted it roughly to bring out the level of detail captured.

And a shot showing a bit more of the interior. The sprue is cut off level with the floor & will be hidden by whatever load gets installed later.

Next week - back to loco building.

A slight delay

2009-04-13T21:23:00.004+12:00

I've been making a casting mould for an "L" - type wagon. Well, almost. It's master is an old Triang TT body which happens to be an exact match for the "L" except that its sides are 6 planks high instead of 5. As this is my railway, that's close enough for now.

Photo's & description to come once I've finished remodelling the workshop. I've been able to negotiate additional space for the machine tool section of the workshop (drill press, Belt/disc sander, scroll saw & grinder) in the shed at the back of the garage and I'm in the process of setting up roofing panels, power & lighting at present.

When completed, it will mean I have a whole new 2m x 0.6m workbench surface to get cluttered with the detritus of model-making. Not a lot, you may say - but it will nearly double what I have to work on at present. True, there is another bench at one side of the garage, but it is so covered in electrical bits & pieces, test track, battery chargers, white metal casting equipment & resin containers that it' s more a repository than a work area. Funny how some people can make nice models in little more than a broom closet - I seem to accumulate a never ending quantity of materials & tools which demand more & more space. No pictures of this .. you really don't want to see the disaster area my workshop resembles at present

More Layout Musings

2009-02-26T19:44:00.006+13:00

I had a look through some old NZ Model Railway Journals the other day & found a station plan for a place called Waiau. It looked a nice size for a small layout, and offered some good operational possibilities. I modified it slightly as the main station yard in this plan:

What was originally a siding for stock wagons at Waiau has become a small branch serving a dock, and there's now a secondary branch line for a few industries. This should allow for a good variety of traffic for the railway.

The hidden line at the back of the layout will act as a fiddle yard. Trains run to & from there to simulate traffic from the world outside.

Minimum radius is 18" - almost a medium curve for HOn3.5. Grid squares are 100mm

Rivetting Stuff

2009-02-21T14:52:00.009+13:00

Making an Impression

I was asked about how I make those neat lines of rivet detail on the Fa. Here's my version of a precision rivetting machine. It's based around an old Dremel drill stand, but anything which gave you a decently rigid base would work just as well.

Here's the basic machine. The lump of brass which holds the punch in place is off an old industrial scale. The punch itself is a nail - suitably ground at one end.

This is a close up of the business end. The anvil is a piece of silver steel turned down at the end after a 0.3 mm hole has been drilled in it. The silver steel is then hardened in oil. The piece of brass rod beside the punch is to help in getting even spacing between rivets. The original idea was to use the diameter of the anvil to space the rivets, but I found I needed something more positive than just the "feel" of it.

Here it is in use. The material to be rivetted rests against the wooden back rail as it's guided over the anvil. The brass rod lines up with each impression & shows me when to hit the punch again. I use a small brass hammer to lightly tap the punch if I'm rivetting brass, but finger pressure works best on styrene. After I've rivetted a panel it gets trimmed to final size. Previous attempts to rivet panels cut to exact size have resulted in warped panels, as the process does deform the material a little if you make rivets close to the edges.

Here's what the end result looks like on a bit of brass sheet. Easier to see than white styrene.

And here's the loco with a bit more detail (side tank fillers, cab steps & valve gear access doors), plus the rear pony truck made & fitted

The Body Beautiful

2009-02-14T18:36:00.005+13:00

The Fa saga continues:

Been a bit busy of late, but managed to get the basic body shell made & mounted on the chassis. Construction is mostly o.5 mm styrene, except for the air tanks & associated piping which are brass tube & copper wire. The Kadee couplers look a bit over-scale, but they're the standard HO size so I'm prepared to live with that. Once it's finished & painted they'll look less intrusive.

Here's a couple of shots of the loco as it currently sits. Note the changed sand dome type & position from the earlier photos:

I'm not over-fond of real close-ups of these models, as they're supposed to appeal to the unaided eye. I should really get on with the valve gear next, but I keep going off on tangents to make various other bits which I'll need later. Maybe it's because I find making valve gear the most tedious part of the whole build process?

Further Progress

2009-01-19T21:44:00.008+13:00

Over the Xmas break, I managed to get the motor mounted as well as make the smokebox & boiler top. The rest of the boiler is hidden by the tanks, which will enable me to add lots of lead ballast. The first pic is of the chassis with the siderods, wheels, cylinders & slidebars in place. The crosshead is from one of the Tillig chassis I got off TradeMe. It's a bit over-scale, but looks good. The flywheel is an NWSL product I got from North Yard along with the wheels & motor. The bare chassis does run, and quite smoothly. I suspect that will change once the connecting rods & valve gear get made & fitted, though.

The next pic is the (very) minimal boiler fitted with domes & funnel in place. Domes, funnel, & cylinders are resin castings.

Slaving over a hot Loco

It's starting to look sort of loco-like. The supporting bracket for the slidebars is next, followed by the Walschaerts valve gear, and I'm not really looking forward to making it as the parts are so small.

On with the next one

2008-12-23T14:01:00.008+13:00

The "Fa" story starts

According to the Waikikamukau Branch's concocted corporate history, this loco was the first one to run on the line, and was purchased from the NZR.

I'm building it in "traditional" fashion - mostly brass, with dead frames rather than split axle pickup. Mainly because I only have basic machining facilities which probably won't handle making a split axle system using 2mm axles.

Here's progress so far... click on the photos to see them full size, but be warned - at the magnification shown by macro photography, they're not a pretty sight!

This photo shows the chassis with the smokebox in place. The side tanks will cover the gaping hole under the boiler & give lots of room for hiding the motor, lead weight, etc. The smokebox door is one of my resin castings.

Theis is the top view of the chassis. Note the grid divisions are 1cm in these shots. The huge worm comes from a Tillig loco, and allows me to drive all 3 pairs of driving wheels without depending on the side-rods to transmit power. Hopefully that will mean less fiddling about getting the chassis to run smoothly.

The obligatory side view. Painted black already, as it will be a right swine to paint it once the wheels are installed.

Bottom view. The copper PCB board is for soldering the current collector wires onto.

This photo shows the Tillig drive shaft in place. There's a reduction ratio between the 2 gears of about 1.5:1. Not sure what the overall gear ratio is at this stage.

Casting around

2008-12-22T21:39:00.013+13:00

With the prospect of making a few locos for the layout looming large, I could see the need to make multiples of things like domes, funnels, odd toolboxes, brake cylinders, etc. rather than make individual items for each loco in future. The picture above illustrates my first attempts at making some of these bits. The headlight looks better than the photo would suggest.

Here's the Baldwin almost finished and wearing castings for headlight, toolboxes, brake cylinders & injectors. The last 2 aren't very easily seen as they're under the back of the cab.

First attempts at resin casting

The resin system comes from Topmark, and is called Easycast. When fully cured, it's a hard white resin which picks up detail very nicely. Mold-making was surprisingly easy once I got the hang of where to put vents to let out trapped air in the castings. Vaseline makes a good mold release agent if you don't want to spring 30-odd bucks for the spray-on stuff.

Getting down & dirty - loco building starts

2008-12-16T21:35:00.004+13:00

Loco Building

TradeMe yielded a bunch of TT gauge steam loco chassis and a Beckmann 0-10-0 loco in pristine condition. This became the first sacrificial victim, losing its rearmost drivers & plastic body to become the basis of a 2-8-0 reminiscent of an NZR “T” or “O” class. It's not an exact replica because the wheels are slightly smaller than scale (9mm dia. as opposed to 10.5) and the Walschaerts gear is so nicely made I didn't have the heart to remove it. (This is my railway, after all). For $70.00 this was something of a bargain.

I also bought 6 more or less complete Rokal TT chassis from the same bloke. Mostly 0-6-0, but a couple of 0-6-2's as well as a tender. All with motors, so a good parts source if nothing else.

The Beckmann's motor came to the back of the cab (as did the boiler backhead on the “T” & “O”loco's), but there is also a small flywheel attached, and this meant I'd have to hide it somehow. I never thought I'd be grateful for the tender cabs fitted to several NZR locos in the '20's!

You can see from the pictures that the new loco body is made from a mixture of brass & styrene. I admit that it's not 100% scale, but I think it's definitely got the “feel” of a typical loco of the period. Westinghouse pump & domes are Cal-Scale details, everything else is my fault.

It's not finished yet, but it runs smoothly and is at least a promising start

Musings on layout design & standards

2008-12-04T10:51:00.002+13:00

Some general ramblings

With any model railway project, planning is probably almost as time consuming as actually building the damn thing. The Waikikamukau Branch was no exception, as I wanted the layout to be:

lightweight
easy to dismantle & setup
interesting to operate, allowing for tail-chasing as well as a bit of shunting.
reliable both mechanically & electrically (no DCC envisaged at this stage)
relatively inexpensive
representative of a private line with connection to the NZR, even if not absolutely to scale in some respects.

With that in mind, a bit of bogus history has to be invented to account for the line's presence. Being a branch line, it would only need a single track main line, and a fairly relaxed schedule.

Working through the available space & various layout possibilities, I decided on using 16” minimum radius curves. Sharp for HO, but less severe for HOn3.5.

Tillig produce nice quality flex track in HOm, as well as RH & LH points. I standardised on these, as they are readily available locally. No curved points, but that's not an issue at this stage.

I figured that the TradeMe chassis would make a good basis for a small stable of branch line locos which had been retired from mainline NZR use as more powerful engines became available. I could also use passenger stock, flat cars, and boxcars from the old WMR, as they were close to standard US practice & would be easier to kitbash. As it happens, Frateschi makes a range of rolling stock in HO which approximates the WMR stock quite well. This needs re-gauging to 12mm, but that should be the least of my worries.

4 wheel wagons will have to be scratchbuilt, unless I can find something which looks reasonably NZR-ish. I suspect I may have to acquire skills in resin casting to get sufficient stock of these.

As I don't envisage running more than 2 locos at once, some form of simple manual switched block control should work just fine. Yes, I know it's an antiquated system, but it's reliable if done properly, and seems to be robust in service.

Kadee couplers seem to be the way to go. Mainly as they are pretty much the only readily available after-market HO coupling system which is proven to work well. And because there are no NZR style couplers available for HO yet, as far as I can tell.

With the basic decisions made about equipment, and a basic rationale for the line's existence made up (more on that later), it was time to start building up the locomotive & rolling stock rosters, and to begin playing around with paper layout designs.

After much doodling, research & measuring, the proposed track plan looks like this:

It's based on a layout from “Branch Line Railways” by Michael Andress. The station is a compressed version of a typical small NZR through station. What I liked about this design is that it seemed to fulfill a lot of the criteria I mentioned earlier. It fits nicely onto a modular design, allows for continuous running as well as point-to-point operation, will be simple to wire up and not ridiculously expensive to build. Building the baseboards from Styrofoam should ensure that weight is kept down, and the minimum radius is 18”.

Looks good in theory – now let's see what happens in practice

Let the malarkey start ....

2008-12-02T23:30:00.000+13:00

The Waikikamukau Branch – a journey into HOn3.5

Experiences with scratchbuilding & layout construction

It would be nice to be able to cast some kind of rosy glow on the origins of this project – you know, “lifelong interest in model railways” .... “result of continual development” ..... “quest for the ideal” ... etc. But it was something a bit more prosaic which kicked off this model railway – an old, broken Tillig loco chassis which was given to me by a friend.

I'd dabbled in NZR modelling a couple of times before. For a few years in the mid to late 80's I was involved in Sn3.5, encouraged by Les Downey & the group of modellers who met at MOTAT regularly to chat & run trains. Lack of space & the birth of a child put paid to any prospect of layout building, so the whole stable was sold to finance other projects. About 15 years later, I discovered NZ120 & thought perhaps it would fit the bill, but found that I had trouble making such fiddly detail on steam locos. The old eyes tended to object at being asked to work with such small tolerances, so I gave it up & went flying indoor RC planes for a while.

The arrival of the loco chassis rekindled old memories, but I put it on the workshop shelf & left it. It nagged at me. I ignored it for a few weeks. The nagging got worse, so I picked it up & ran a ruler over it to see what possibilities it offered.

12mm gauge? A bit unusual, so I did a bit of research on the Internet. TT & HOm modelling immediately showed up, but it took me a bit longer to find that HO scale on 12mm track had a small following here in NZ under the guise of NZR HOn3.5.

This looked interesting – if a bit daunting. HO scale offered a wealth of products from different manufacturers, which meant that buildings, details, vehicles etc. were not going to be a problem. What about rolling stock & motive power, though? Especially given that I'm a devout steam fan, and am very fond of those early NZR locos up to about 1930. I had visions of slaving away over a hot soldering iron for months making up brass chassis & loco bodies, then having to make my own styrene moulds for carriages & wagons. A dodgy prospect, at best.

I haunted Trade Me for a few weeks – buying old copies of the Journal and a few reference works on NZR & WMR history. There were a few articles on HOn3.5, one of which mentioned the possibility of re-gauging HOn3 equipment to suit. So I looked, and found that a lot of the HOn3 stuff was brass, and very pricey. Kitset locos were cheaper, but not exactly lying about waiting to be picked up.

As it happened, TradeMe came to the rescue with a couple of auctions for a bunch of TT chassis from Rokal & Beckmann. I got 6 chassis - 4 of which seem usable. Should be enough to start with.

So I decided to take the proverbial plunge. This occasional blog is written in the hope of showing that if a bloke in his early 50's can do this on a comparative shoestring, then so can anyone who may be interested in something which fits between the more commonly modelled Sn3.5, and NZ120.

The Domestic Authorities chimed in to say that there was space in the front bedroom for a layout, as long as I could dismantle it when needed for guests. So I have space for a modular railway which can fit into an area 10' x 7 '. Given the number of HO layouts which can fit into an 8' x 4' space, this should work quite nicely.

And why Waikikamukau? Well, the place doesn't actually exist - it was invented by Billy T James to refer to any place way out back of beyond. That suits me perfectly - I can invent a branch line & populate it with equipment which may or may not have run on the NZR, though I'll try & keep it as prototypical as possible. For a start, I'll be using those chassis I got on TradeMe to make a few locos which (hopefully) run well with minimum fuss. These will resemble NZR prototypes, but probably won't be exact scale.