One and a half more Wassen buildings

This is a house that is visible from afar that sits behind the corner turret-building (it probably has a nicer sounding name than that in real life) that was modeled last time. This is a foamboard core with thin card shutters glued on, windows drawn on, and a roof plonked on top. 

 And with a little paint:

It actually looks a bit like the real thing (although I declined to make the fancy roof dormer):

Later I added a base made of 'stone' for it to sit on.

Also, the little garage/stablehouse behind the Alte Post was added. And also visible here is the start of the Hotel Gerig that sits behind it:

Two more buildings - Volg and the Corner Turret.

I've slowly pottered on and built two more buildings over the past few days.

In the real town of Wassen, between the Hotel Alte Post and the Sustenpass road there are a string of buildings. My feeble memory thought there was only one (the handy Volg supermarket where one could grab a banana and a bar of chocolate for the days railfanning and a small bottle of wine or Champers for the evening's piccy-processing) but it turns out there are a string of five of them.... The Alte Post is just to the right of the Volg with a walkway between them.

Such a  pain there is very limited Google Streetview in Wassen. I'd only left space on the layout for the Volg, or at a pinch one and a half buildings, but as there is this rather tasty building on the Sustenpass corner (below),  that deserves to be included:

And that would leave me room for about 60% of the Volg.

And so with much mucking about, the following has emerged. I thought the corner turret might look a little silly in white so I made it yellow to stand out a little. It's all built on a slope because the road outside is on a grade. Artists licence applies in other areas as well...

The turret was made from a Tamiya wooden paintbrush - they are longer than they need to be :)   and have no taper to their wooden shaft. I whacked off the end, stuck it in a drill and applied sandpaper until it conformed to the right shape at both ends. A tiny thin strip of card went around the top to represent rain spouting or somesuch, and more paper was applied to fill in the bigger-than-needed hole in the roof shingles. Just looking at the prototype pic, I need to add a spike on top of it.

As usual things are a little wonky and skonky in places, and they certainly looks far better from across a large room than up close, but it's passable on the layout.

(p.s. none of the buildings in the foreground have been glued down so they all have random leans to them.  Not that I expect that to improve wildly when they are stuck down !

My old iPhone takes a pic at street level...

Model Modeling

While I had the big camera out,  a few pictures were staged on Wassen....

Re 4/4s with etched pantos, the lead one superdetailed, the others have been partially done.

Three Levels at Wassen

Peter Bertschi gets his shot at the Command Post (he was a rail photographer I met up here at this very spot in 2016)

Included for scale...

Scenicking through the Lockdown

With most of the world (including here) on Coronavirus lockdown, one might as well visit the train room to fill in an hour or two here and there.

Over the past few days I've made up some brass catenary masts for the middle level (finally!).

There are a few missing out of shot to the right but things are coming together and the layout is beginning to look more complete now. I placed my 1:300th PostBus on the road bridge for these pictures - it looked good in a forced-perspective-kinda-way until the upper level train was placed behind it!  

Interestingly, on the real Middle Meinreuss bridge, there have been two layouts of the masts in recent times. The bridge used to have two sets of masts spaced out on the main span, but since the bridge has had concrete walkways added, it has had one set in the centre. I didn't include the concrete walkways as they don't look quite as nice as the old style to my eye. 

Here is one of my prototype pics from August 2016 with the sticky-out concrete walkways (as not modeled!) and the posts in the centre of the span (as modeled!)

A tunnel portal has been installed at the left side of the middle level - my cliff face is necessarily steeper than the hill that the similarly shaped portal burrows into on the real planet Earth because it conceals the top level balloon loop.

And some trees have grown around and above it on the 'South Hill' tidying up this end of the layout a lot.

My tree supplies are running low though, so I need to pace myself...

The Re 460 pt 2

Finishing up the Re 460, I added some air hoses on my new lower chin, put a dab of red and white paint at the top of each hose to represent the operating cocks.

I also added a 'p' shaped fold of fine wire as a coupler and folded up some pantographs (remembering at the last second to put the 'up' one at the back). Yes, while the 460 originally had this style of panto, they have over the last decade or so been fitted with single arm top halves rather than the split arm  triangular style on most of the other stock that I had etched up.

Not too shabby. The white window blind is quite visible on the front-on pic. I suppose it should have been a slightly creamier colour.

While looking at these pictures taken with my 'proper' camera - as opposed to the pics from my 8 year old iPhone that usually populate these dispatches, some impressive details on Marklin's model revealed themselves. Not only is the correct name 'Säntis' clearly visible in the full sized pic under the driver's side window, but the Pininfarina logo is also in place on the other side.

Neither of these I've seen with my naked eye before, so I must say, well done Marklin, this is a far better model than I expected it to be.

At some stage I might fit some lead weight into the top of the body in the hope of going it a bit more grunt on the hills.

The Re 460

While I'm not mad about the prototype Re 460 - the skirted Pinnanfarina-designed body is a bit Mr-Blobby for my liking - you might recall me being pleasantly surprised with my purchase of an old second-hand one from the UK.

Upon getting it home, I promptly painted over the '2000' numbering on the nose to reflect the current livery as reflected above. The '2000' was added to the prototype for the same reasons it was to the Knight Industries Two Thousand: because it sounded all futuristic back in the days before the actual year 2000 rolled over.

The obvious things remaining to be tackled are:

• the round hole in the roof used for switching between track and panto power
• the massive pantographs
• the massive cutouts in the roof for the pantographs
• eliminating one coupler and adding a front headstock/plow

And after an hour or so, some progress was made. Alas I descended to bowels of the train room without my phone, so no in-progress pics... and a few of the 'before' state had to be stolen from the internet:

Some thin plastic was added to the roof to cover the hole and build up the areas around the panto a little.

A white sunshade was added inside (below), and a start made on building the lower front apron.

The next job will be to finish that lower chin off with some detail and stick some etched pantographs on top.

Yes the roof is a bit dark on these models but I'm not sure i would do a great job repainting it without making a mess of it...

As a reminder, this is what it looked like previously with the coupler in place:

Nothing to see here

I'm away in distant lands doing 'field research' again.

Alas, I was a long way from the real (and my model) Wassen, but here is a recent pic of a semi-topical Re 6/6 at St Saphorin just to prove that I'm still alive.

More on my Flickr (warning: it is mainly mainly RhB of late, a probable next project after Wassen)

My normal intermittent service here may resume in about three weeks.