Special Operating Notice

The Blackcloud Railways web presence has been rebuilt. The blog remains here on playingtrains.wordpress.com until such time as the site’s photo storage capacity is exhausted (probably some years off yet) but I have migrated the layout pages over to blackcloudrailways.wordpress.com where any future additions will also be found. The internal navigation for both websites is interlinked, so you should still be able to find your way around. If you require access to unlisted layouts the search facility in the sidebar here on Playing Trains may be of assistance. If you still cannot find what you’re looking for please get in touch be email (oscalemodeller@aol.co.uk)..

Back on track

After the recent turmoil created by replacing the carpet I reclaimed the front room on Wednesday and moved the furniture back out of the garage. I can see the layout again! Track and wheel cleaning are on the cards for the FCPyF so a much delayed operating session can take place. There is still some alien rolling stock and other bits and pieces that need removing from the layout first so the session will be next week at the earliest. The FCPyF is not the only thing in mind though, I have made some progress with Allt-Na-Ballt’s conversion from O9/On18 to OO9/HOe this morning as shown in the raw, unedited, video below. Still to do after the paint on the platform dries, glaze the ticket hut window, fit a door on the netty and glue the buildings in place.

On the topic of roundy roundy layouts, I have added some ballast weight to my SM32 RC diesel in the hope that it’ll be able to pull the skin off a rice pudding. The Hornby tinplate track is for a proposed garden railway at some time in the future. Even with new batteries she struggled with two skips in reverse and didn’t like the one foot radius curves at all when running forwards. I need some larger curved sections. Apologies for another unedited video, I just do not have the patience for farting about with the various on line editors that are available. This is a hobby, it’s meant to be fun.

Another pending project for when Allt-Na-Ballt’s conversion is finished is altering the off stage arrangements for Cognito to use cassettes instead of clamped on fiddlesticks. There is no shunting involved with Cognito but some of the rolling stock has missing couplers, the cheapest way of replacing these is to use magnets and paperclip wire. I may also replace some of the existing hooks and loops to get closer coupling within the trains.

Some new four wheeled coaches have been delivered this week, they will replace the CCS’s bogie stock. Cognito is wired for conventional operation but it should lend itself to puppetry, at least for stopping trains. A puppet rod can push the rear of the train on stage as far as the station, by which time the front of the train will be obscured by either the water tower or the goods shed so the rod can be attached to the loco and pull the train off stage.

The diesel loco in the photo above has been borrowed from the Sans Serriffe Railway and may take up residence on the Cahoots, Cognito And Sane. The CCS is a freelance railway so nobody can say the use of imported foreign locomotives like the British steam engine and the Italian diesel is out of keeping.

SDRM October 2026

Easy walking distance from Newton For Hyde railway station and Bee Line bus services from Hyde bus station.

Levelling up

I still have a garage full of displaced furniture but, after a fortnight, I desperately needed to do some laundry this morning so I rearranged stuff sufficiently to gain access to the washing machine. This also meant I could get to both ends of San Fernandez with enough room to manoeuvre while doing a long awaited civil engineering job. The baseboard for Veinte Veinte station and San Fernandez Junction has been lifted by about half an inch at each end and checked with a spirit level to ensure it is still sitting flat.

I then lifted the north end of Casablanca’s baseboard by half an inch and checked both San Fernandez Bridge (house doorway) and Casablanca station for being level. They were, almost perfectly so. Objective achieved! The south end of Casablanca is still at the same height as it was and the uphill slog now starts on Casablanca Crossing (garden doorway). The track is on a tangent across the bridge though so there’s less drag here. Until now there had been an uphill gradient against southbound trains through the curve at Casablanca. Some adjustments to the shims under the bridges were needed to align the rails perfectly, a minor job involving coffee stirrers and sticky tape.

While San Fernandez can be moved it is by no means portable. Casablanca station and both bridges are lift out sections. The south end of Casablanca Crossing joins onto fixed benchwork for the rest of the run. The line continues uphill to a summit at Colina Rosa, from there is down grade to Jones River then level for the remaining distance to Grande.

The photos don’t give much away. They were carefully aimed to hide the mayhem that is the rest of the garage. You seriously do not want to see the mess. I certainly don’t like looking at it. The seeming normality of No.85 with a southbound mixed is a welcome sight. However, today was the last chance for an August ops sesh and it ain’t going to happen. Hopefully next month will see the trains running a full timetable again.

On an unrelated topic, I have recently bought a batch of HO coach bogies, purely because the price was right and having no firm plans for them. These German narrow gauge coaches are interesting, note how the entrance vestibules are on the bogies instead of being part of the main chassis. This may be a feature worth modelling.

Resurrecting Cognito

I have still got a garage full of displaced furniture so no access to tools and workbench. This means there has been no further progress with converting Allt-Na-Ballt from On18 to OO9 and I’m getting quite p!ssed off with the carpet shop!

With time on my hands to browse eBay I have acquired a couple of Piko four wheeled coaches this evening. I am not sure how easily they can be dismantled for painting but I would like to finish them in the tarnished varnish applied to FCPyF coaches if possible.

They’ll be allocated to Cognito, there’s nothing like a few new items of rolling stock to bring fresh interest to old layouts. I am also planning to share some of the puppetry locomotives and railcars from Bodoni to further increase the variety of trains available for use on the micro layout.

When I can actually get some work done I want to modify Cognito slightly so it can utilise the standard cassettes used with the Ferronor micros instead of the existing clamp-on fiddlesticks which are just visible in the 2019 photo of the layout shown above.

Allt-Na-Ballt becomes Alta Nabout

Alt-Na-Ballt is moving from the West Highlands to Sierra Oculta where it will become Alta Nabout (working title), an intermediate station on the line from Arroyo Dublo to Quécarajo.

The cluster of buildings was originally a Ferrocarril Internacional station, absorbed into the FCPyF when the most of the FI system was abandoned.

What’s in a name? Alta Nabout obviously mimics Allt-Na-Ballt which, in turn, was chosen to sound a bit like out and about due to the layout’s partially hidden circle of track. Allt-Na-Ballt was so spelt to appear like a Scots Gaelic place name, Alta Nabout hopefully looks as if it’s Latino. Alta translates from Spanish as high but Nabout is dubious. The only reference I can find is an Arabic surname. Maybe the area was settled by a family of migrants from northern Morocco who arrived with the Spanish. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t need such in depth analysis.

Progress on this project may be slow at first, the garage is still a no go area due to displaced furniture and the new floor covering for the front room has been set back at least a week due to the carpet shop being short staffed.

All about Allt-Na-Ballt

This twenty inch diameter pizza usually resides in my living room. It is more of an ornament than a model railway and rarely sees any trains moving these days. Hold that thought for a while. The front room has been cleared while I get a new floor covering fitted so I have taken the opportunity to give Allt-Na-Ballt some TLC by brushing the dust and cobwebs off the scenery then repainting the waterfall and rapids.

Have you remembered that thought you were asked to hold? The footbridge is an adapted Hornby Dublo die cast model so it is nominally for OO even though it works well with On18 due to its coarse scale. If the bothy was to be replaced with a lineside hut made for OO the rest of the scenery is suitably vague to allow using the layout with OO9/HOe railcars. OO figures can be positioned using TackyWax to confirm the scale. The example shown below is an Airfix coal merchant’s office, I have a couple of Tri-ang huts that would also be suitable. Another option would be to use an early style Tri-ang waiting room and provide a paved “platform” area to make a proper narrow gauge station instead of it just being a shelter for p-way staff.

I have considered this before but this time I think it may actually happen. I like diesel railcars, and I have several in this scale.

Taper and paper

An early morning update on yesterday’s blog entry. I went for the matchsticks and tapered chassis option when beefing up the Playcraft hoppers.

The original details on the porches have been retained, the handrails and hopper door operating wheels are too low really but I suspect the vintage plastic wagons won’t take kindly to having glued joins prised apart. Apart from a repaint the only other work undertaken was the provision of wagon sheets (folded paper) to keep the payload dry.

The two new cars have been formed into a fourth set, the bogie hopper taken from one of the other sets has been replaced by two four-wheelers. I could have paired the smaller wagons with the new ones but I think they look better this way.

It takes three sets to operate the Cuarto/Grande mineral flow so one set will be kept in reserve and they’ll be rotated on and off the layout for variety. I have yet to see how the Playcraft couplers retained within the set cope with the reversals on the switchback. There’s a reason for this.

I am getting the carpet replaced in the front room. The garage is jammed full of furniture and books until the new floor covering is completed. I can hardly see the south end of the layout, let alone get to the controls in the corner between Grande and Pano Cucina.

There aren’t going to be any trains turning a wheel for several days, get a bus instead.

Winging it with Playcraft

I’m sure I have seen some of these hoppers converted from HO to On30 somewhere, I’ve been advised by email that it wasn’t where I thought it was and searching the NGRM forum is pointless due to Imgur’s blocking all UK access, resulting in a forum full of purple rectangles where the photos should be.

It looks as if I’m winging it with this then. I was hoping that “Cook’s Matches” would be long enough to widen the middle of the chassis while leaving the tapered ends and original steps as being original width but they’re just shy and would need a join between two pieces if used. However, if matches are used I can taper their ends to match the shape of the chassis.

The alternative is beefing up  the full length with coffee stirrers and adding full width verandas to lose the taper. I don’t want to alter the actual hopper bodies above solebar level other than fitting wagon sheets over them though.

Weather stopped play

I have cleared all surplus rolling stock off the layout and drawn up a draft operating sequence.

As yet to be tried out to check on the siding capacities and scheduled meetings before a full blown operations session can take place using the four newly completed diesel locomotives.

It has been a while since all three termini were clear of detritus from various modelling projects, not necessarily On30 related.

We are currently in a very unpleasant heatwave and the temperature in the garage makes it uncomfortable to spend any prolonged length of time on the railway so I have retreated to the cool of the kitchen.

But not before patching over the sound grilles and repainting the boiler of Echo locomotive No.1. If you’ve got a better memory than me you may recall it was four years ago when I had a pipe dream of building a garden railway for these two battery powered toy trains to run on.

As with so many of my plans it came to nothing in the end, the nearest I have got to a G scale 45mm gauge garden railway since then is SM32 in a window box, which was fun to build but hardly the same as a roundy roundy to watch trains trundling past!

That’s not to say it’ll never happen but until it does the two Echo locomotives will remain as static ornaments on a bedroom windowsill and my spade can stay under a pile of junk in the shed. I don’t do gardening.

After some email conversation I decided that maybe the Echo locomotives and plastic track are not really all that suitable for a garden railway, what would be better is the radio controlled SM32 loco in the photo of Syxtene Mill running on Hornby tinplate track (eBay photo above).