03) The Early Stages :: Fotopic.Net

03) The Early Stages

8th June 2005

The baseboards and supporting legs were constructed by David Anderson in his garage.
They were first assemled in the loft at the home of Lee Davis.
A fellow modeller used Templot to design the pointwork. The pointwork geometry is complex to fit our gently sweeping curves into the cassettes we had planned for each end of the layout. Lee hand built the point work from flatbottom rail soldered to copperclad sleepers lightly glued to the Templot plan which in turn had been glued to a piece of glass.
Plain track was manufactured from Exactoscale sleepers and flatbottom rail. The time consuming task of sliding the sleepers on to the rail was completed by Roland Maddison.
The track was laid on the boards during one evening in July 2004 - 11 months before DEMU Showcase 2005.
The boards were taken one at a time to the home of Trevor Smith where Sommerfeld catenary was added to the two Metro tracks. The masts were positioned so that all contact wires ran in straight lines.

The legs.	Templot and Lee's first attempt at point making.	Adding the Sommerfeldt catenary.
Track detailing - each pandrol clip was added to the copper clad points with superglue.	Well, it was the correct gauge this morning.	The Sommerfeldt weights used to tension the catenary in the real world.
The point work ready for the first run.	Baseboards - prepared for first run.	The catenary wires are straight between posts just like the real thing.
Lee rerails Alan's VDA.	David's woodwork.	Peco detailing parts and plasticard were used to add further details to the pointwork.
Ballasting has been added to two tracks followed by some point detailing.