Sketchbook

For your entertainment and reading pleasure, (and because I haven’t posted in ages) here is a page from my sketch pad exploring ways to assemble “Little Wonder” This is an alternate way to work the project than the one actually assembled so far.
You can see the water tank area would be a solid block of styrene, laminated to the right size. With a differently constructed smokebox affixed to the front. I think I’m going to try this as this way would be more suited to my planned construction of The larger Geo. England Locomotives like Welsh Pony and Little Giant.
I also need to work on dropping the footplate. Even though it will only be a drop of about .5mm in this scale.

Why?

So, there are a couple of questions that probably need addressing before I go any further. They are both “Why”.
Why bother modelling such ridiculously small trains?
Why the Ffestiniog Railway?
Aswering the second question first, because that’s easiest. I have always loved the Ffestiniog, ever since my first trip on the line as a spotty impressionable teenager on our first family holiday to north Wales. We travelled on many of the Great Little Trains of Wales on that trip. Snowdon, Tal-y-Llyn, Vale of Rheidol, Welshpool and Llanfair to name but a few. But it was the Ffestiniog I fell in love with. Our first trip on the railway was behind the Alco “Mountaineer”. Then the trains only went as far as Dduallt then or “Doo-alt” as we called it, and were totally shocked when the guard called out “The-acht” or something like that. The Railway reached Blaenau Ffestiniog and I was a member of the Ffestiniog Railway Society for many years. But never got to volunteer. Then life got in the way and I probably didn’t even visit for as many as 15 years, until my wife and I decided to visit North Wales on one of our trips to the UK from America. The Railway had expanded, becoming instrumental in the development of the Welsh Highland Railway. We rode both. The Welsh Highland is stunning but the Ffestiniog still grabs my heart.
The FR has unique and beautiful locomotives, like the double Fairlies “Little Wonder” and ‘Merddin Emrys” as well as the England locos like ‘Prince” and “Princess”.  Constructing such distinctive locomotives in such a tiny scale as 1:305 would help to create a railway atmosphere. Otherwise ther would be a danger of just having coloured blobs of plastic circulating around the scenery.
As for the first point. Why model these small trains? I guess that comes down to wanting to push my model making skills and try new things. I dabbled with T gauge before and quite successfully. I even scratch built my own loco. I forget what it was now. It was a hopelessly over scale body on a Eishindo Bo-Bo chassis. It worked so I guess that was a win but the project I was working on stalled and I moved onto something else.
I feel that working in these small scales can help me develop different skill sets and problem solving processes. Take the side tanks on Little Wonder for example. If I were working in 4mm scale I’d cut styrene sheet to size and glue the pieces together. Here in 1:305 scale the side tanks are but a few millimeters in size. So it’s far easier to cut an appropriately sized section of styrene strip to the correct length and use that. Then these different ways of looking at things can lead me to finding different ways to solve problems in larger scales.
Well, that’s my theory anyway. Let’s see if it works.

Proof of concept

Having made bold claims about re-creating the Ffestiniog Railway in 1:305 scale I thought I’d better follow up my words with actions.

Here is a first view of my “proof of concept” model of the Ffestiniog railways first double Fairlie “Little Wonder”. 

Of course, you probably can’t make out too many details as that little white blob circulates the track, so try these tiny photos.

Refresher.

In case you had all forgotten about these tiny trains and their motive power here’s a refresher video I made a week or so ago now. That will give a bit of insight into what I have planned.

Waking up.

Coming back to this section of the internet, more experiments with Small Model Railways and trains powered by linear motors.
According to the blog I've been away for seven years and in that time things have changed. When I first dabbled with the IDL train linear motors there was only pre made ovals of track to be bought, and as much as I enjoyed the challenge of creating the trains. Well, the operation was severely limited.
 Now things are different, through Australian modeller Martin Kaselis and his work creating the Australian "Puffing Billy" line in 1:350 scale I have discovered that teeny trains have a range of sectional track! This means I could build a layout of a larger size and my own design.
 Martin is an extremely talented man who has designed his own sectional track system with the help of IDL motors and his Monbulk Creek Bridge layout is something to behold. When I saw this I was very inspired and immediately started to create schemes in my own head.
I have some plans of my own that I will reveal later as things develop. But for now take an internet stroll over to Martin's website and see what he's been up to, you can find it here 

Trains on film

The plan was to upload these short videos after the Granite City trainshow but somehow I never got around to it. So here 14 months late is some film of these very tiny trains working on the layout.

First night nerves

This is it.

Tomorrow my nano trains get their first showing at the Granite City Train show in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I hope it doesn't let me down. It works perfectly at the moment.

Hopefully before the weekend is out I will share with you my experiences and reactions of the viewers