All New Daleks

You may recall that I've been planning to make a small Dr. Who scene on the model railway involving Daleks.

So now I've got a large Dalek Death Squad ready for my model trains. You may remember this old post about our first shot at 3D printing small Daleks. Well things have moved on a lot since then!

Franc's mastered his 3D printing skills and found a way to make finer steps in the printing process to make an new and improved set of Daleks for me. I've been straining my eyes and using a binocular head mounted magnifier to paint them. Yes, it all sounds a bit freakish but the results are awesome.

Here's the raw material from Franc:

I then mount the individual units on the handle of a small hammer using blu-tack to paint them.

And here they are with the Tardis on my old MacBook.

Finally - the tramway has a road surface

I've finally completed (most of) the roadway on which the tram now runs. I have had to very tightly fit my home-made cobblestone paper to the tracks. You may recall that I had built up the roadway around the tracks using cork strips. I've now covered those with carefully cut paper.

The main issue was cutting to fit the curves. There's no way this can be done easily by hand. What to do?

Well, modern technology (and Franc Carter) to the rescue. I asked Franc to laser cut some guides to cut out the road surface curves. He kindly cut them to my spec out of MDF and I've used them to cut out curved sections from the cobblestone paper.

I reckon it looks excellent. Better than commercial tramway stuff! It fits really well and I reckon eooks pretty good even up close.

Some more photos and videos - added the Town.

A short video of my old tank engine on the layout

Looping around the innner track from the station and then up and crossing over to the middle track.

Coming in to the station.

A very quick update - protoype layout ready!!

Some track is now concealed behind the rams on the inner track.

For those of you who helped by reviewing my track plans, notice I have included extra points to allow both entry and exit from the outer loop.

An HDR photo of my Fleischmann tank engine near the station in the middle of the layout.

Tight Curves

I thought I ought to test how tight a curve I could make for a tram track. It turns out that I can easily get a 4 wheeler to run on a 5" curve. Anything smaller and the friction on the wheels causes reliability issues.

I tried 6", 5.5" and 4". It easily runs on 5.5".

Here's a video:

I've started using foam core heavily  for my test work and will probably be using this on the layout when prototyping the system. Final work will be done using cuts in the plywood base with timber supports, but maybe I'll just keep the foam core in place!

It's certainly stronger and lighter than cardboard, easier to cut and shape etc so will most certainly be used for the basis of landscaping.

I think that the track itself is about 4mm from base to rail top. I will be using an underlay under most of the track - most likely cork - but the tram will probably be different. The underlay is to absorb noise and form a good basis for ballast. With the tram tracks, I may use something like rubber matting used for lining kitchen drawers - it's a non-skid thing used to keep plates from banging about when drawers open. It's thin, absorbs vibration and is cheap.

I guess that means a 5mm foam core can be used for the road-base to line up with the rails? Anyway, that's getting a bit ahead of things.

Layout Option 1

Here's a new layout idea based  roughly on my previous one but extended quite a bit.

I contemplated building a helix to raise my track but did not have to - I got land, baby. I've rversed a few things - note that the inner track now goes up instead of the previous case where the outer track descended.

That inner track will now mostly be exposed and is also double height at 12cm above the deck - I'm planning a lovely viaduct for almost half the length of the layout.

The green section will be raised and all the track will actually run under it except for the tram (blue track).

The tram will be built using Tomix tram track which I will coat with textured cobblestone paper.

The town will be built along the tram line on the green section.

Would love your views, folks.

Here's a track manifest, for the record: