October, 2008

What's this all about?

27 October, 2008

Li'l Lines is a site devoted to narrow gauge model railroading. It's a hobby I used to be involved in and am now reactivating (gives me something to do with my hands other than code stuff into a computer).

Originally the site was hosted on another domain and covered the history of my model railroads along with a couple of articles. One of those artices will be retained.

This site is going to have a somewhat different empasis and will concentrate on my recent model making projects and the like.

Where do you start?
Well, usually in an arm chair and have a good think about the whole thing. I'm limited in space, do not want to spend inordinate amounts of money and not entirely sure exactly what I want to do on this. I have boxes of old bits from years ago that have been sitting in the back of a cupboard and about 15 years worth of Narrow Gauge Gazettes from back then too. Then there's time, something of a precious commodity when you're a web developer running a hosting server for clients, a free scripts site and a blog software site. I've actually done more on this website than I have any model making.

So after a few weeks of messing about I decided the best thing is to have a place to begin - that is physically. My studio is small (about 100 square feet - 10x10). The computers are on one side of the room and the rest was just sitting there full of stuff gathering dust - until about a week ago. Now I have a set of shelves (about 9x1 feet) with a table coming out of the middle. Once that was up, things began to take shape in my mind.

I'm looking at a 9 foot by 15 inch shelf type layout that combines elements of micro model railroading and full size. What's the micro bit you may ask? Um, oh, try small and then shrink it. A good overview of that can be found at http://carendt.us/, a site which specifically deals with this subject. There are some good ideas there and I can see a few that I could use. So what I'm going to end up with is a shelf layout with some micro elements thrown in. I like building stuff from scratch and getting the kind of detail as seen in Constable's paintings. For me this is a sort of art form and I have to discipline myself to not rip it all to pieces and start something new once a project is done (like I used to).

That's about as far as I've got at this stage.

Initially I've put up an old article from the first Li'l Lines site on how to Disassemble a Bachmann 0n30 Porter. It's still relevant and should be helpful to those who want to do a decent paint job on their loco.