Ballasting as a spiritual experience

When I was in the shower after my squash match last Sunday, my Italian opponent delivered a lecture on the spiritual satisfaction he received from plastering. (At this point I think I will suspend the commenting facility on this blog.) Utilising an adjacent shower-head as a prop, he demonstrated how one repeatedly sprayed the plastered area. He explained how essential it was  to respect the materials. Timing was of the essence as one moved back and forth from one side to the other, first spreading, then smoothing then spraying and then repeating the cycle.

I've heard other people make similar claims about the joy they get from plastering.

Well, up until this point I have had very little pleasure from this model railway project- except for making purchases on the internet.

Certainly, I felt a degree of relief when I managed to install the DCC chip in my little Jouef loco and likewise when I mastered the electrics involved in getting a set of electro-frog points to work. But that was different. I most certainly did NOT enjoy the process of fitting the chip or wiring up the points. The end-result was satisfying, but the journey to arrive there was frustrating and frankly, boring.

Not so with ballasting. I hugely enjoy pouring on the iron ore, contouring it, checking that there are no loose grains fouling the surfaces of the lines and also, the end result. (This despite having been warned by several people that ballasting was the most tedious and time-consuming job in building a layout.)

Faced up to ballasting the points today.

Obviously, there are lots of places  where NO grains must be lodged eg in between the complex of rails or in the changing mechanism. As far as the latter is concerned, I sealed that with masking tape and will tackle it another day.

Two innovations: neither especially successful.

Decided to use a teaspoon to give me more control over distributing the ballast - it didn't.

And tried an eye-dropper to distribute the PVA (as opposed to the drinking straw). Certainly, it was easier to use the eye-dropper, but the glue tended to come out in blobs as opposed to little streams, and so consistency in coverage was more difficult to achieve.

The eye-dropper also created some interesting bubble effects - temporary ones, of course.

Nearly there.

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Stéphane Denève:

The French  conductor of the RSNO gives his farewell performance in Glasgow on 12th May. Have tickets for what should be a spectacular evening.

The centrepiece will be Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe - just a huge tone-poem in my opinion but delivered with massive instrumental and choral forces it should provide a tremendous visceral experience.

Philip Glass

Have ballasted another section of the test track, this time with medium grain iron ore from Woodland Scenics.

One comment: I like the medium grain ballast but notice that the edges of the sleepers are totally uncovered, unlike in this earlier attempt at ballasting with fine grain.

And a reminder of the real thing.

That last photo definitely confirms my view that medium grain is more realistic than fine grain - you can see each individual stone in real life whereas with fine grain the end result is more of a morass.


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Philip Glass: contemporary American composer of minimalistic classical music.

Have tried for many years to like and appreciate Philip Glass's work but have found it trivial and uninspiring.

In fact, I was just about to devote this blog to that conclusion while pointing out that Glass, himself, is a fascinating person when talking about his music, when I heard, today, his 1st Violin Concerto and his 5th String Quartet.

I actually like those pieces - there seems to be more meat in them.

If you want to know more about Philip Glass you can listen to Donald Macleod speaking to him and playing his music on Radio 3's excellent series "Composer of the Week".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01d7gm3

Glass on the left.

Ceramics and Shellac

Last night's task was to paint with shellac the sections of the clay facade that I wished to stand out in slight relief. Then with either a damp sponge or a wet brush actually wipe away the non-shellaced sections so that they recede - thus leaving the shellaced areas in relief. This procedure works because the shellac is resistant to water.

One paints on the shellac with a suitable sized paint brush and then leaves it for about 15 minutes to dry. One needs a large bowl of very warm (as warm as one can bear to touch) water to keep cleaning the sponge or brush in. Every 5 minutes or so one has to change the water as it gets saturated with the clay that one has removed.

The shellac protects the clay from the water.

Brushing away clay.

Sponging away the main window.

Unfortunately, when lifting up the facade at the end of the evening, it slipped and some of the little statues were knocked off. But, apparently, they can be stuck back on. Ceramics seems a fairly forgiving discipline.

Next week, the clay will be bone dry and after the tidying up of some rough edges and sticking the statues back on, it goes in the kiln!!!!!

May I once again praise our lecturer, Pauline. She is really an excellent teacher in every way. Very hard-working, encouraging and most importantly she facilitates honest and open discussion between herself and each of her very different students.

And here is  a painting of French shops by one of the students in the class, Sandra MacBeath. (I've shown this before on my blog but this is a larger image.)

 

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The Symphony:

Have concluded that the symphony, concerto or large choral works are the best forms of classical music to see performed live.

Whereas a CD or download can capture the solo piano or other small scale chamber pieces, only a live performance can convey the physical elements of large scale orchestral works. Furthermore, there is so much to watch when an orchestra plays: the conductor, the different instruments and the way the different sections of the orchestra come together.

With this in mind, may go to the City Halls tomorrow to see Donald Runnicles conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Brahms' Symphony no 1 and Schumann's 4th.

Installing trackside switch for points motor

Electrically operated points allow one to change their setting from a distance and on my final layout that is what will happen. The various switches will congregate on some kind of control panel which will be situated away from the layout itself.

But for now, I simply want to practise installing electrically operated points and so have located the switch  trackside.



The DPDT switch.



Located trackside.



Fairly poor diagram of the hole's outline.

The hole has to be wide enough to house the body of the switch and so I began the hole with a 3/4 inch drill. One then stops and drills the last part with a much smaller drill which allows the narrow cylinder of the switch to poke through to the surface.



View from beneath the board.





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Sandy Wright

Sandy Wright is a Scottish singer-song-writer who has been on the go for ages. I only came across him last year when someone gave me a CD on which his songs are performed by a variety of British  singers who presumably esteem him greatly.

It's a really excellent album.

1. Chris Wood - Beads & Feathers
2. Inge Thomson & Martin Green - Tears of the Sun
3. Karine Polwart & Corrina Hewat - Fourteen Hands
4. Kris Drever - Steel & Stone (Black Water)
5. Eddi Reader - My Shining Star
6. Sarah McFayden - Life’s Too Short
7. Heidi Talbot - Angel of Mercy
8. Dean Owens - Can’t Win Can’t Lose
9. Gramercy Arms & Mascott - In The Summertime
10. William Douglas - Little Bird
11. Roddy Woomble, Kris Drever & The Islanders - Stoned Again
12. Lori Watson - Silver Geese
13. Boo Hewerdine - All on a Summer’s Morning
14. Michelle Burke - Hey Mama
15. Mary Cullen - MacMaster/Hay

Heatshrink

Not very good at soldering. Leave far too big a blob of solder at the joint and don't have the patience to set up a framework for holding wires in place while they are being soldered and one is waiting for the solder to set.

As a result of some poor soldering a few weeks ago, some of the terminals to the points motor have been touching one another and causing short circuits. Tried to separate the terminals with small cuts of insulating tape but a) it looked messy and b) didn't actually work.

So, cut off the wires, slipped a tube of heatshrink over each of them, re-soldered them to the terminals and then used the hairdryer to shrink the rubber tubing around the wire-ends so insulating them from each other.

A length of heat shrink.

Hairdryer in use.

Much neater insulation of terminals.

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Bob Dylan: Superstar

Asked which celebrity he would have liked to have interviewed on his show more than any other, Michael Parkinson answered, "Bob Dylan".

Listening to Anna Ford being interviewed on Desert Island Discs today and bearing in mind the number of Prime Ministers, American film stars etc who have been on that show, it crossed my mind that one could never imagine Bob Dylan consenting to be interviewed - he seems too large a star.

Love him or loathe him, he has a cachet that hardly any other celebrity has.

The changing faces of Bob Dylan:

And finally, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in the film, "I'm not there".

More Experiments with Ballast

Here is a photograph of medium grain brown ballast on a section of the test track.

Despite what most enthusiasts say, I think this grade of grain looks more realistic than the fine grain ballast.

Not sure about the colour, though.

So, continuing the experiment with the various packets of ballast I purchased last week, I mixed some fine grain rust coloured (iron ore) ballast with fine grain brown ballast in the hope that the latter might tone down the very red rust grains.

Mixing was easy but the end result looked a bit "salt and peppery" to my eye. Nevertheless, I ballasted a short section of track abutting the section with the medium grain for comparison purposes.

Since, the set of points was hoving into view, I first covered its mechanism with masking tape to stop any wee grains fouling its innards.

I used an empty kitchen spray to soak the ballast with water prior to the PVA glue being applied - see earlier blog from last week for a description of this process. By the way, I poured the ballast direct from the packet - didn't bother using a pouring container: worked fine.

And below is  the end result seen next to the medium grain brown section. There is not a huge difference and so I've demarcated the two sections with a white arrow.

Conclusion:

I actually like the larger grain of medium vs fine and so will order from internet today a packet of medium grain iron ore ballast - I'm still minded to adopt the red finish of iron ore for the final layout.

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Sviatoslav Richter:

(1915 – 1997) was a Soviet pianist  widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

Downloaded from iTunes today two short Chopin Etudes played by Richter which I'd heard played on Radio 3 this morning.

The Etudes were from Chopin's Op 25 set of 12, namely, 11 and 12 and were absolutely explosive. I'm used to Boris Berezovsky playing them and wondered how the two pianists differed in their approach.

The answer lies in the word "explosive".

Two quotes by Richter from Wikipedia article.

On listening to Bach:   "It does no harm to listen to Bach from time to time, even if only from a hygienic standpoint."

On Scriabin:   "Scriabin isn't the sort of composer whom you'd regard as your daily bread, but is a heavy liqueur on which you can get drunk periodically, a poetical drug, a crystal that's easily broken."

Architecture and Music

This business of scale continues to baffle. In an earlier blog - 25th December, last year - I thought I had convinced myself that there was no problem and that one could place HO scale motor cars/buildings/trains/pedestrians etc next to one another and each item would seem to be of the same scale as every other item.

But look at this photograph of an HO scale Simca (I know it's HO scale because it says so on the chassis) next to a pair of HO scale Roco buffers (I know they're HO scale because it says so on the packet).

Or this one:

Surely, in real life, a car wouldn't be dwarfed by a set of buffers in the way this Simca is so dwarfed.

But if one looks at these two photos - most relevant ones I could find:

One can compare the width of a car with the width of the buffers on a wagon and then extrapolate to a comparison with static buffers.

So I positioned the car longitudinally on the track.

And I suppose everything is as it should be.

By the way, I love these little windowless model cars from France.

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Architecture and Music

The Gram Parsons biography is beginning to flag. Like lots of American biography it is far too packed with research. Parsons' family background was like that of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. Frankly, the biographer could have just written that sentence and I would have felt no less informed.

Nevertheless, the biographer does have a good turn of phrase and makes the occasional interesting observation. (Paradoxically, these observations are rarely backed up with any supporting research!)

One such observation was comparing music developing in the 50s and 60s in the Southern State where Gram Parsons grew up with that of the communities in the Appalachian mountains. The latter were made up of hundreds of isolated wooden homesteads where individuals would sit alone of an evening playing the fiddle on their porch. Gram's increasingly prosperous community was made up of detached houses each with a garage. These garages provided the crucial ingredient for the development of  beat groups - namely, a place to hang out and practice. The fact that the area was more densely populated with teenagers who lived within easy walking distance of each other was another pre-disposing factor.

And, I suppose the presence of mains electricity and prosperity also facilitated the development of electric music.