Copenhagen Fields and 2mm loco building with Tim Watson.
We guessed we were in for a treat and were not disappointed! Tim Watson brought the York Road section of Copenhagen Fields with him, complete with working lift and underground station lighting as well as all the busy detail of early 20th century London just north of Kings Cross station. He also brought some immaculate scratchbuilt models of LNER and GNR locos of a quality with which 4mm or 7mm modellers would have been more than happy.
Copenhagen Fields is a 2mm finescale layout built by the Model Railway Club in their headquarters in Keen House in London. It was designed in 1983 and construction started the following year, so is 41 years old (and still unfinished!). It followed the Chiltern Green & Luton Hoo layout which had been to lots of shows in the first 5 years of its life. It is named after Copenhagen Fields, an ancient pleasure spot for Londoners surrounding Copenhagen House until its demolishment to make way for the Caledonian Cattle Market in the 1850s. It was the site of three huge demonstrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. That is now in the middle of the layout. It is the fictional location of the Lady Killers film of 1955.
The layout is very large and is framed in tapered ‘Toblerone’ fascias which draw the eye to the model. Many of the shops on the layout are named after the modellers who worked on the layout. Trams run along Caledonian Road, drawn along by a hidden S gauge slave loco with a magnet beneath the road surface. The 1855 Caledonian Cattle Market is beautifully modelled. There is some ‘forced perspective’ with 2mm scale buildings in the foreground and some smaller scale towards the rear. The near buildings have a wealth of detail, while those further back are more of an impression with printed windows and fading colour to enhance the feeling of depth. The layout is 6 feet deep! Some of the buildings are cast in resin from hand carved pearwood patterns.
The trains are often very long and there is a great length of hidden storage track. This is ‘strip track’, two 6x2mm brass strips, screwed and glued to the baseboard 9.42mm apart. This track is ‘bombproof’, a great asset for an exhibition layout. The joints in the baseboards are high at the front and low at the back so they cannot be seen by the audience (a good idea for any scale). To help the long and heavy trains, the main lines are flat (the prototype is 1 in 100) but the goods lines are steeper as the trains tend to be lighter. The track is true to scale bullhead rail with chairs and copper clad sleepers; 2mm Association code 40 Easitrac is also utilised.
The back scene is 3’6” tall and looks fantastic with beautifully painted cloudy skies. This needs periodic touching up. At least a couple of iPads are set up with their cameras positioned by a small hole in the backscene so the operators can see what is going on (another transferable idea). Strong lights illuminate the layout and the backscene. Sections of the layout lift out for maintenance and there is a younger Club member known as the Ferret who is shoved underneath to get to the areas inaccessible to the older members!
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Tim is a master at 2mm loco construction and he shared many of his methods and techniques with us. His career is dentistry and this attention to tiny detail and extraordinary patience shows in his locos. Many have been running for decades, proving his methods work. He showed the stages of making a NE Raven pacific loco. The frames are fretted from fairly thick brass with no bearings. Where possible he uses 2mm Association wheels but in one example, he removed all but two opposite spokes and glued in plastikard spokes to achieve the correct number and then flooded it with super glue. He uses split frames, so no pickups. Quartering is done by eye!! Steel side rods are sweated to flat brass and drilled and filed in pairs. He uses something like a carpenter’s marking gauge to gouge out the flutes in the front of the side rods. The cutting part is a ground steel gramophone needle.
There is a motor and flywheel in the tender and a worm drive in the loco. A 10thou (0.25mm) steel shaft transmits the drive past the loco crew! To achieve the correct depth of valence, the footplate is brass the same thickness as the depth of the valence. It is silver soldered together, a process which should be more widely used and which results in a very strong joint. The front bogie is actually split in two, in effect making the loco a 2-2-6-2 rather than a 4-6-2. This aids getting round curves. To add a little weight, the boiler is solid brass with smokebox added, also from solid brass.
One technique we thought very useful was leaving a large ‘handle’ on small components to aid holding them while being filed and constructed. If a thinned ‘neck’ is filed, the component can be soldered in place with the handle still there to hold it and then snapped off afterwards. The smokebox wheel and dart handle brought gasps, sighs and hushed expletives from the assembled throng! They were so tiny and detailed. Tim uses watchmakers files and endodontic files and tungsten carbide drills with 3mm shanks. He makes everything tight and eases it as required to make it run.
It was a splendid evening and there is lots to read in back copies of Railway Modeller or MRJ and lots to see on the internet.
Nick Coppin.
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