Pola G 331745, G-Scale railway station accessories

This purchase was not planned. I was buying something else at ArsTecnica and I needed to hit €50 to get free shipping. Decided to pick this set for less than €22.

Pola G 331745 is a collection of small railway station accessories. The box the set comes in features a usual Pola G packaging. The set is small so the box is not big, either. It measures 12'' x 8''.

Looking at the front of the box it might be not so clear what's really included. The set features nine elements:

• a telephone box
• two benches
• an advertisement stand
• a ticket machine
• a post sign
• a standing mailbox
• a wall mailbox
• a wall clock

After opening the package we find a lot of colourful parts, even more colourful stickers and a manual. Everything is protected from damage with some filling paper. No glue is included.

The parts are pretty big and once you take them out you may get an impression that there's a lot to do here. But this is just an impression - this is really a "one evening" set.

The set includes two elements that support interior lighting installation. The needed components are unfortunately not included. I've decided to make my own using LED strips and custom selected resistors.

So this is the roof of my telephone box:

And this is the inside of my wall clock:

As stated before, it does not take long to assemble all the structures. Working very slowly, I needed around 3 hours to finish them all. I've skipped the installation of German-flavoured stickers, as they don't really fit my layout.

Here's the finished telephone box:

The advertisement stand (without stickers):

The two benches. Those are not very study and seem like they could be easily broken. I will have to install them out of the kids' reach.

The ticket machine (which - without the provided stickers - is just a generic vending machine):

The standing mailbox:

The wall mailbox and the post sign. Those elements do not require any gluing but just appliance of some stickers. One reason to complain here could be that the stickers did not really fit the plastic elements that well. They had to be extra cropped on top of what was already done at the factory.

And the wall clock:

I've made some "localized" stickers for the ticket machine and the advertisements stand. They look quite well. I wonder how I can make them weather proof now...

And here's the complete set. Looks very good to me!

And since I have installed the interior lighting right away, I have to share this one extra photo, too. Those accessories are going to look fantastic in the dark!

Conclusion:
It is a very basic set with some very easy to build elements. Those elements are however elementary and any layout can benefit from them. I enjoyed building those and can't wait to install them on my layout...

Pros:

• Very useful structures
• Easy to build
• Interior lighting ready
• Reasonable price

Cons:

• Lighting kits not included
• Glue not included
• Some elements very flimsy (the benches)
• Some stickers don't match the target area

Difficult installation of a vinyl grass mat [update]

Unfortunately only two weeks after I have installed the vinyl grass mat (described here), I've decided to tear it down. I was too unhappy with the results of my work...

I've found several problem with my installation:

• As already noted in the original post, the glue did not hold throughout the entire surface. There were bubbles of air here or there. Two weeks later there were even more such places. And when the rail track was placed on top of it, it was not flat at all...
• Any attempts to fix the 'air bubbles problem' failed. I also damaged the mat even more in the process. In the end it looked much worse than right after installation...
• I had to drill some holes through the layout and... this revealed how weakly the mat has attached itself to the wood. Drilling caused even more air bubbles to appear and made the surface very "wavy"...

So I decided to tear it down. This brought another surprise, since the removal of the mat did not require any force at all. The mat was barely glued to the wood at all...

I still don't know what I did wrong. The vinyl grass mat does appear to be a nice product. Seems however, that I completely failed to install it properly... :(

Cheap G-scale figures from Ebay

Every layout benefits from models of people which make it more 'alive'. And that's also true in the garden railroading. What's different in the G-scale however, is the very high price of a single human figure.

Those high prices are somehow justified. The models you buy are usually high quality with a lot of details. They're also expected to last outdoors. The price becomes an issue, when you need a lot of them.

That's when you start looking for an alternative and the easiest place to find one is of course Ebay. Ebay is full of cheap large scale people models. Some are sold for as little as $0.50 per piece but those do look bad in my opinion. There are however $1.50 figures which offer much more details and look acceptable in the photos shown by the sellers. I've decided to buy a 12-pack of those.

The seller was of course from China so I expected to wait around 4 weeks for delivery. To my surprise, the package arrived just one week later and was posted in Austria. I did not expect it to come in a nice box and that's exactly what it looked like.

The figures themselves were packed in plastic bags.

They seemed to look more or less like the merchandise I ordered. First impression - they're indeed not that bad...

I won't go into discussing the figures very deeply. I'll let the photos tell the story...


So they're quite detailed - they have eyes, eyebrows and some clothing details. The quality of painting is rather low - all models have 'funny eyes' and there are clear lacks in the finishing. Poor packaging also takes its toll - there are clear marks coming from the figures rubbing against teach other in the plastic bags. But other than that - I'd say they're worth their price!

So those figures are cheap. And yet, they're pretty good. How's that possible? Seems they're simply copies of products from other manufacturers. Copies that are probably not really legal, too.

Here's one of the figures I bought on Ebay and next to it: my expensive Preiser figure. They look like twins, don't they?

The similarities are obvious, yet, the cheap copy somehow manages to be noticeably smaller. The copy has also less details (eg. the cigarette is missing) and incomparably worse painting.

The face expression on the original is much, much better, too. The Preiser figure looks like a real human being, while the copy seems like a caricature.

Painting is so basic on the copy, that the manufacturer even decided not to cover the bottom of the figure at all. This is a sitting person, so it does not matter but it shows how badly they wanted to save money while making the cheap model.

***

What do I think about it? Ethical dilemma aside, I would not use the no-name figure in an exposed part of my layout. That might really destroy the realism of the scene. I could live with the poor painting and scratches from transport, but the 'funny eyes' are just too much for me.

On the other hand, those cheap models might be good fillers if you're low on money. They should look good enough in distant areas of the layout or inside the structures. I wonder whether they're weather resistant at all, though...

My plan was to use them inside my passenger cars. So here they're. And they end up looking pretty good in my opinion...

Difficult installation of a vinyl grass mat

A few months back I wrote an article about my second N-scale layout which I use as a base for my DCC experiments. This layout by definition was supposed to be just a test track, and therefore I was not planning to do any landscaping work there. However, with time I got tired of the rough look and that's when I created my very first backdrop. Unfortunately this improvement did nothing to the fact that the base of the layout was still just a piece of wood that did not look nice at all.

This is what it looked it like. An OSB-3 base with just some elevated road bed. What it needed next was at least some nice grass-looking surface.

I did use several different techniques to create grass before. And the one that had definitely the best effect/effort ratio involved gluing a pre-fabricated grass mat to the layout surface. That's what I decided to do now, too.

The mats I used before were all paper based with grass flocks of different lengths. They were great for permanent layouts where the track was attached to the surface, and the green elements were placed only between the tracks.

But here I had a test track on a non-permanent layout. And I did not want the rail track to be attached, I wanted to have it freely lying on the grass surface. A mat with flocks was not very good for that purpose. I needed something more flat.

That's when I found out about vinyl mats. Those are not very popular where I live and it was actually pretty difficult to buy one. But once it arrived, I immediately realized that it was exactly what I needed.

The mat I'm describing is a product from Woodland Scenics which is a very popular manufacturer in the US but not so much in Europe.

Since I knew nothing about vinyl mats, I had to gather some knowledge about how to apply it. I've learnt that a spray adhesive would be a proper solution in this case. Here's the one I was able to buy at a local store.

I wanted to get as flat surface as possible. But my layout already had some elevated elements and was simply not flat at all. I had two choices to go about it.

• I could have either glued the mat step by step working around the elevated parts and cutting holes as I proceeded
• Or I could have removed the elevated elements and applied the mat in one step

I've concluded that the latter was too much effort. That it would be very difficult to clean the base and make it really flat again. So I decided to go for the former idea. That might have been a huge mistake...

I've started working from one corner. I've assumed that both my layout and the mat were perfect rectangles and I just glued it at one end. Once it dried a little I started cutting the holes for the elevated areas.

This has been surprisingly easy and I was not noticing any real issues. That was the case right up until the end, when I realized that not everything I did in the process was perfect.

Problem #1 - as I was shaping the mat to accommodate the existing road bed, I was also changing its shape. The vinyl base is similar to rubber and what started as a perfect rectangle in the beginning was not one in the end. This made my final gluing step very difficult.

Problem #2 - I've noticed that in some areas the mat did not attach itself very well. There were clearly bubbles of air under it. If the mat was one continuous piece, I could just pick it up, add glue and fix it. But it wasn't and I could not risk tearing it by pulling it up. More on this issue later.

In the end I've managed to glue the entire mat and it looks pretty good from a distance.

And it looks even better with the backdrop mentioned before.

And for the most part it looks fantastic even up close.

But not everywhere. Here's one of the parts where the glue was either not applied properly or simply did not act very well.

That part is very difficult to fix. The gap is not only at the very edge but reaches far into the field. This means there's an empty space under the area where the rail track will go.

I had to do something about it. The only option I could see was cutting the mat and spraying some glue under it. This did not go well on the first try resulting in the following problem.

I've managed to fix it and it's better now. But unfortunately my actions revealed another issue which I did not predict.

A vinyl grass mat seems very sturdy but it's only an impression. It can get damaged easily either by:

• bending it
• pressing it a lot
• pressing it a little when your hand is dirty with glue

In all those cases the result is the same. The grass layer comes off and reveals the vinyl base.

The paper mats with grass flocks also get damaged when working with them but the negative effects are not that much visible. It would seem that one should be very careful with vinyl mats, even though they feel indestructible at first touch.

Summary

I can't say I'm happy with the results of my work. I'll keep it for now because it's not THAT bad but I expected the entire operation to be much simpler.

And all this does not really mean that I feel the product from Woodland Scenics is a bad one. On the contrary - I do believe it's a very good product. It's just that it should be applied on flat surfaces. And I complicated the entire process by attempting to install it with minimum effort in a rather difficult setting.

***

An extra note about the glue. I thought I could use a spray adhesive safely inside my apartment. That was a wrong assumption. This kind of glue:

• requires good ventilation, as it does not "smell" very healthy
• and - most importantly - it diffuses in all directions, meaning it will not only land on the target surface but also everywhere around it

Other than that, the so called "spray adhesive" seems to be a good solution for attaching vinyl to wood.

[Update] Please be sure to read my final notes here.

Garden lighthouse with a beacon light

Some time ago my family has bought me a wooden lighthouse for use on my garden layout. The building is not exactly G-scale but looks great and I'm going to be installing it as soon as the season starts. One thing it was missing is some kind of interior lighting that would make it look more real.

But it's of course not just a building but a lighthouse. It needs a beacon light. So the emitted light should be either spinning or blinking. Creating a rotating light source seemed complicated so I decided to go for one that would just switch on and off. This can be of course achieved by using a multi-vibrator circuit.

The basic one can be seen below. There's not much to be said about it. The frequency of blinking can be adjusted by using different values for resistors and capacitors. And I really think we have a full freedom of choice here. One thing I would be careful about is making sure that R1 and R2 resistors are always of higher values than R3 and R4.

But the basic circuit was not good enough for me. Most notably - I wanted a blinking light, but one with a nice fade in and fade out effects. Therefore I had to make some changes:

My circuit differs from the basic one in three areas:

• I removed one of the LEDs as I needed only one blinking light
• I've added a bridge rectifier at the input - the circuit needs a proper polarization and I just didn't want to worry about that when connecting the power supply
• For the nice fade in and fade out effects I added an extra capacitor parallel to the LED

I also wanted the blinking to be slow. I could have calculated the proper resistance and capacity from the formulas for that circuit but it was just easier to reach the goal by experimenting. So my final values for the elements are:

• R1 = R2 = 9.4 kΩ
• R3 = 860 Ω
• R4 = 110 Ω
• C1 = C2 = 470 uF
• C3 = 2200 uF

I also had to decide what my actual light source would be. I was thinking about using LED strips and somehow forming them into a spherical shape. But then I discovered those cheap light bulbs on Ebay.

They're LEDs so they don't take much power. They're cheap - $0.50 a piece. They're powered with 12V, so they're safe. And their connector (which is G4) fits pretty nicely into a standard PCB socket. So I ordered them...

Here's my first prototype for the beacon light. It took some experimenting to decide the right values for the elements, and this way of building the circuit was great for the first step. And it also allowed me to easily monitor the voltage on the light bulb. Now I know that I need to provide at least 16V at the input in order to have around 12V on the LEDs.

Once I was happy with the light output, I had to solder the circuit. As always - my creation does not look good but works as expected!

I had two more goals to achieve:

• I wanted to protect the circuitry from the bad weather. I didn't think it needed to be perfectly sealed, but some level of protection was desired.
• I wanted to make the light more diffused. The light the LED bulb was producing was "too direct" for me.

And here's my solution. A plastic container remaining from a dessert my daughters had. You could say I got it for free.

Here's my circuit installed inside the plastic box. My favourite hot glue proved to be useful, as always :)

More hot glue and the whole beacon light bulb is now attached to the base of the lighthouse. I'm starting to be proud of my creation at this step!

The lighthouse is closed. The light is lit. Looks good to me!

And it looks even better when moved outside. The photo was taken just before dusk. The light is not very strong but it was not meant to be - I do not want to disturb my neighbours' sleep.

I've also shot some short videos at different phases of my work. They show the frequency of the blinking as well as the fade in/out effect. Enjoy!