Silver Sidelines

Ten days of continuous sunshine - must be a record for the west of Scotland.   However the rains have set in again so back to normal and time for another platform update. In my previous Blog entries I touched upon basic platform construction and gave some pointers as to the sizes of paving stones.   This entry contains some reminders on techniques for marking out the paving. Work commenced with a nice simple island platform with ‘parallel’ sides.   First I marked out two lines with a steel straight edge parallel with the platform edges to delineate the edge paving.   Then using a woodworkers set square pressed against the platform edge I marked out all the edge paving.   The edge stones were nominally 4ft by 3ft (16 x 12 mm) - obviously ‘flag stones’ from the north of England.   With the edges complete attention was then focused on the internal paving.   Again it was a straightforward exercise pressing the set square against the platfo...

The gales and hailstones continue so luckily no gardening.   There has been plenty of time to progress the platform paving. My previous layouts were made from chipboard and I used the off cuts to form the platform bases which were then surfaced with 3mm plywood. The current layout is built with ½ inch MDF and again the off cuts have been utilised for the platform bases.   This time I chose to use 5mm balsa wood for the surfacing.   This gives me a top of rail to platform surface height of 12mm for my code 100 Peco Streamline track.   The balsa surface is held in place with counter sunk steel pins, whilst the platform sides are covered with brick or stone paper. As a teenager I can remember being very impressed by a railway modeller who had scribed individual paving stones.   The whole platform was given a uniform colour wash and then individual paving stones were picked out with different tones. Life is very short and I do ...

The list of jobs to do is endless but finishing off the platforms must come near the top. This could be quite a long task but first what size to make the paving?   The British Standard suggests that paving stones should preferably be 900 x 600, 750 x 600 or 600 x 600 (mm).   However my layout represents the late 1950s, early 1960s, long before metrication.   In those days, and for some considerable time after, the standard size of paving stone was 3ft x 2ft equivalent to 12mm x 8mm in 00 scale.   Perhaps not surprisingly this is the size modeled by Superquick for their station platforms. However the 3ft x 2ft pressed concrete slab is relatively modern and a lot of railway platforms constructed in the 1800s will have used natural stone, probably York Stone in the north of England or maybe Purbeck or Cotswold stone in the south of England.    The decision to standardize on 3ft x 2ft for the new concrete paving seems to be based upon the commonly...