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Ingatestone Autumn Update: There is some good modelling happening
Gus Paul
23rd October 2017
3 minutes
After a long summer with all the boards of Ingatestone up in the MRC workshop, a lot of progress has been made on both track and scenic elements.
The scenic crew has been hard at work on the platforms, and after their recent trip through the paint shop when they are added to the layout you suddenly begin to see a station! We’ll need to remove them again at a later date to install the platform lighting.
Eric Sainte has been making progress on the 1880’s up side station building:
Because this building is going to sit on the viewing side of the layout, Eric has opened up the main doors so we can see in and through which means young and not so young viewers will be able to see the trains passing by through the doors as if you were really entering the station! Next up for Eric is the interior and roof parts.
Another major component of the layout is going to be the overhead catenary, which because of the history of the line there are a variety of different styles of masts and gantries all the way back to the original style erected during the 1950s electrification of the Great Eastern.
Inspired by the recent field trip, Tony Rees has put together notes and sketches of each mast to be made:
Tony has taken on the job of being Ingatestone’s very own HOPS (High Output Plant System), and luckily he is proving much more efficient than Network Rail!
All the masts and gantries are being made with brass ‘H’ section and here’s Tony’s cutting list ready for assembly:
The tubular sections are effectively the piles the uprights will sit in, which will both support the uprights in a solid base and allow us to quickly remove the gantries when we need to work on the boards without risking damaging the gantries:
The bottom of the gantries are carefully tapered to fit through the bases as we can see from this under side view:
And here is the first finished gantry which looks fantastic!
In other parts of the layout we are continuing to install the Cobalt digital point motors – Ingatestone only has 4 points but we want to be able to control all the routing from the control panel we are sharing with Putnam.
In addition James has create a control bus line with old computer network Cat 5 cables to be able to link all the signals together.
As noted before, Ingatestone is sharing Putnam’s impressive fiddle yard and with it being up recently, Tom has been able to put together some initial plans on the formations we will be running when the layout is in “display mode”. We will have a mixture of EMUs, intercity trains, inter modal freight and engineering trains. We might even see a heritage Hook Continental make an appearance. More on this to come…
We are meeting Mondays and most Thursdays usually one or two of the group are in, new members are always welcome to pop in and lend a hand. As Chris Ibbotson has noticed – there is a lot of nice modelling happening right now!
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