“Hello;
I came upon a product some years back that might interest our fellow modelers. My ex-wife and I had ceramic shop.
Duncan, the ceramic paint maker has this product called mask-and-peel. It is a liquid rubber that can be brushed on. Do not use your good brushes!!
Take for an example, a tank car model. Brush the mask-and peel on both sides of the model, let dry, then apply tube glue, and press parts together.
After the glue dries peel off the rubber, and using a sharp blade carefully cut off the excess glue.
You now have a perfect joint, no filling or sanding needed.
TC”
“Al
I have found that some sprues from plastic frets holding say gutters etc are ideal for downpipes from a reasonable distance and the small tags look like fixing plates for the wall.
When you vacuum up ( through a net like stocking material) keep it as it is ideal for scrub land and barren ground often found near the line side
Regards
Steve M”
“Alastair,
Cleaning Lionel tubular track: Simple and cheap and easy, and you get to run the train to do it.
I think many of you guys make this problem way too hard.
First, there are two types of things you want to remove from your track. One is oil and grease. The other is corrosion.
Alcohol will not remove corrosion, but it will remove oil and grease.
I use about 3 folded paper towels attached to a car like a gondola and towed behind a loco like a 2353 to remove grease. It takes a little while, but I am running the train to do this.
To remove corrosion, I put the train on the track and run it.
After a few joyful hours of running the train, the track has a bright, shiny, very narrow stripe on the very top of the rails.
Why would I want to clean all the corrosion off of the rails? The real trains have corroded rails which have a shiny stripe on top.
This cleaning process has worked well for me for the last several years.
No longer am I trying to clean rusty track with a wire wheel. A lot of my track is old and somewhat corroded.
I have 125 pieces of 072 that is about 80 years old, and surprise, surprise, it is not shiny. It is corroded, but still works well.”
God Bless
Bruce”
“Hi Al,
I’ve been watching your stuff for a while now and thought maybe you’d like to see some of my videos made over the past few years of my layout.
It’s a composite representation of the Short North between Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales Australia using locomotives and rolling stock common on that 110 mile stretch between 1910-69.
In particular, I have re-created all the trains faithful to their consists at the time I was traveling as a kid up to see my grandparents on a variety of passenger trains during the 1950-65 period.
The attachment is actually of an early 4-4-0 12 class pulling end platform cars passing a TF class standard Consolidation class locomotive – the year would have been around 1915. If you’d like me to send more I have lots!
Best wishes and keep up the good work – I love English railways and used to have a layout earlier modelled on the LMS/GWR
Kind regards
Geoff”
Stunning work from Geoff. Big thanks to him for sharing.
That’s all for today folks.
Please do keep ’em coming.
And if today is the day you get started on your layout, the Beginner’s Guide is here.
Best
Al
PS Latest ebay cheat sheet is here.
PPS More HO scale train layouts here if that’s your thing.
