Origins
It started with a Triang Jinty, three coaches and seven wagons my father found early in 2000 in a
box. I fondly remembered playing with them as a child and even then they seemed to me to be
the perfect size. I’m still trying to work out how they could have gone missing for nearly 40 years
but it was great to see them again. By coincidence, at the time of the find, I had been thinking
about fulfilling a long-held ambition by building a model railway, inspired by a visit to the
permanent exhibition in York, and was trying to decide between OO and N, which seemed to
be the only realistic options.
But I didn’t really have room to do justice to OO, and N looked a bit fiddly. That TT find looked perfect - however, there was no track, no station, in fact nothing apart from the stock. Maybe I should put them in a showcase and leave it at that. Still, I thought, I can’t be the only person in the world with the remnants of a Triang TT train set, maybe there are some enthusiasts I can contact over the internet. It didn’t take long to find the 3mm Society’s website and to get a few reassuring replies from some of its members. It seemed that just about everything I needed for a 3mm layout was available without involving too much scratch-building. So I did end up deciding between OO and N – I went for something exactly in the middle!
Baseboard and Layout
It was going to have to be small and simple (just like me really), but I wanted enough room for
two continuous loops, a station, an engine shed, and some sidings for a bit of shunting. There
would be some kind of village or town backdrop. 
The baseboard measures about 5ft x 3ft, made from three equal sized pieces of chipboard I
found in the garage belonging an old wardrobe, laid side by side and screwed together using
three pieces of 2 by 1 lengthwise (also to hand in the garage), with cork sheet from my model
shop stuck on top with Evo-Stick and painted with mid-brown emulsion (from that garage). I cut
V-shaped grooves into the 2 by 1 every so often, as advised by the experts, for wiring. There are
no legs, it simply rests on a desk in what we aptly call our play room.
The layout is a double oval with sidings on the inside and a spur on the outside. There are ten
sets of points, two of which allow crossover from one loop to the other.
Track
I used Society track. Threading the rails through the sleeper bases was not the most pleasureable
of tasks and I ended up with sore thumbs, but my nine-year-old daughter gamely helped and
we got the job done over three or four short bursts. I decided to go for Peco HOm points, which
fitted to the track quite well despite the slightly different cross section. I opted for Peco after
buying 3SMR points and baulking at the wiring involved. The downside was that I had to shave bits off the Peco plastic check rails
so my Triang stock would run. Also the sleepers look slightly heavy compared with the rest of the
track, but not too bad when ballasted.
Laying the track was the most traumatic part of the whole thing, what with getting the curves right (more or less - I found I had to make lots of cuts in the sleeper joints, and flex the rails quite a bit to make them retain their ‘bend’ and avoid dog-legs) and mucking about with N gauge fishplates as recommended by the Society. The bottoms of the Peco points are actually wider than those of the Society rails and I had to chamfer them. Eventually I switched to bigger OO- style fishplates which according to the Peco catalogue are right for their points - much better. In fact they fit the Society track better than the Peco. I bought a track cutter, which was indispensable. The track was placed with drawing pins, then stuck down at intervals with PVA over the sleepers, pending ballasting. No track pins were used. I used dark brown acrylic paint to weather the rails – I found this a chore, so I did the visible side only.
Ballasting was quite fun but the grey Javis chippings I used turned a sort of grey-green after the dilute PVA had set. And of course I got some of the points jammed up with grit and glue and had to free them up to get the electrical contacts working again.
The final job on the track, one of the last on the whole layout, was to install uncouplers at strategic points. I made these out of transparent flexible plastic packaging material and glued them into slits cut in the ballast. They are hardly visible and work very well.
Wiring
Wiring is minimal – there are three feeds, one on each loop and one for the spur in the sidings,
using a twin controller. I did this before ballasting, soldering the wire underneath the rails and
passing it down through holes in the baseboard.
I make use of the self-isolating nature of the Peco points to prevent unwanted movement of locos in the sidings, but when everything else was more or less finished I decided I wanted to isolate the station area to allow more flexible movement elsewhere. This meant drilling holes through the ballast and soldering more wire, this time to the sides of the rails, but after a bit of touching up it’s hardly noticeable. I used small push-button switches from my local hardware shop to turn the isolated sections on and off.
Scenics
The buildings are all Bilteezi. I just about went for the works here - dairy, Georgian houses, row of
shops, tunnel, engine shed, country station, and signal box. They are hardly the last word in
realism but they are certainly cheap and look quite good with a bit of weathering – and without
them I don’t think I would have even started, since having to scratch-build everything would have put me off. I have played around with the names of the Bilteezi traders – thus we have Messrs. Curdle and
Churn running the dairy, W. Irons the blacksmith, the Pricey and Posh Department Store, Boot
and Lacey footwear, I. Shearem Hairdresser, and the Frog and Fishplate Hotel. I made the new
signs using MS-Word, printed them out onto plain paper using an inkjet printer and simply cut
them out and stuck them over the existing ones.
The backscene is a piece of hardboard the length of the baseboard and 9" high (guess where I
found it??), painted with sky. I then applied white paint with a sponge for the clouds. To this I
stuck scanned photos from a book about Yorkshire, with the Bilteezi shops, houses and dairy in
front. The backscene hides the rear of the loops, and has a hole at either end to let the trains
through, one of them being fronted by the tunnel, the other being partly hidden by the dairy.
I scratch-built the platforms, footbridge and level crossing ramps from thick artist's mount card, painted with poster paint or enamel and weathered with pastels, rubbed in with brush or finger. With 3mm you can’t really get away altogether without scratch-building but once I’d started I found it really easy (though I already had piles of card, the paints and the pastels so I didn’t have a big shopping list – but these things are easy to get hold of anyway and not expensive). The brickwork around the platforms is from a scanned and reduced photo of real bricks. The crossing gates are taken from a Triang crossing supplied by Terry Smallpeice.
The roads are painted with poster paint and weathered with pastels. I used Javis scatter materials for the fields and the hill over the tunnel, which is made from expanded polystyrene covered with filler. There are a couple of Triang signals from Terry with Society ladders added, and a coal staithes which I scratch-built from Wills OO sheets.
There are two Woodland Scenics treees, and a park with a scratch-built swing and roundabout. There is a small pond, this is simply bluish-green paint covered with two coats of Humbrol gloss varnish.
The people are from the Society. I cut their bases off and got most of them to stand on their own two feet. The awkward ones I stuck to small squares of transparent plastic covered with matt varnish.
Engines and Stock
Engines: I have a Jinty, Castle (both Triang) and 94XX (white metal kit on a Triang chassis). The
Castle and 94XX were supplied by Terry.
Coaches: Two Triang BR Main Line, and one Kitmaster, which like the Triang ones has survived nearly 40 years, albeit a bit battered. With the aid of a few bits and pieces from Society colleagues, I have restored it to reasonable condition.
Wagons: The original seven miscellaneous Triang wagons have been supplemented by a Society 24-ton coal wagon kit, and three scratch-built GW milk wagons supplied by Terry, along with two Triang milk tankers to add to the one I had already. This means that the dairy is generously served by six wagons – two for each cow in the adjacent field.
Conclusions
The last ten months or so have certainly taught me a lot about model railways. To an extent I’ve
done things the hard way by going for 3mm first off and I have of course made many mistakes.
The ballast is not as even as I would have wanted. I didn’t take enough care with the curves and
track spacing so that with certain combinations of stock, collisions and derailments are possible.
With a bit more patience and experience, I would have stuck with the 3SMR points – but Terry
bought them off me so the mistake wasn’t too costly. When I do my next layout, I will take the
plunge and get some more.
I have been very pleased with the Society products I’ve bought and the help provided by the
members. But to me, a gap in the product range is simple building kits. There are quite a few
small firms doing locos and stock, but for buildings we have to rely on the adequate but limited
Bilteezi range or scratch-building.
There are various odds and ends to tie up to complete the layout (e.g. add a water tower and loading gauge, and increase the population). But I’ve proved to myself that it’s possible to build a realistic layout in what I consider to be the ideal model railway scale. As and when I get round to building another layout, I see no reason not to go for 3mm again. I was pleasantly surprised at how cheaply it can be done. I’ve had lots of fun into the bargain, and have made the electronic acquaintance of a great bunch of 3mm-ers, whose help has been indispensable.
Rod Shaw, March 2001
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