Balkan Adventures

I've had a soft spot for the Yugoslav (JZ) 76cm lines for a long time, but until a few years ago information about them was hard to come by. This was a shame since they're just about the ideal narrow gauge modelling proposition, with:

• Literally hundreds of miles of prototype (it might be over a thousand - I haven't looked it up);
• Spectacular scenery and interesting rural locations;
• A huge variety of locomotives and stock, including lots of articulateds and even a few diesels;
• It's 76cm gauge so the gauge is exactly right for HOe, so no nasty compromises there;
• Most of their steam locomotives were inside framed, and hence candidates for kit bashing from N gauge chassis;
• It was built to the same standards and some of the same designs as the Austrian 76cm gauge lines so a lot of commercial stock can be kit bashed, adapted or used direct. They even used a few locomotives which are available as ready-to-run (the Roco HFB 0-6-0TT, the Liliput OBB U Class 0-6-2T and the Bemo Second World War HFB 0-6-0 diesel, and I'm sure there are others).

Recently the information situation has changed markedly with the appearance of:

1. Dave Sallery's website describing these lines, with a large number of excellent and easily accessible photos (i.e. they can be printed, scribbled on and scaled for one's own use - unfortunately drawings, especially of rolling stock, are still a rarity).
2. Keith Chester's book The Narrow Gauge Railways of Bosnia-Hercegovina and its follow-up Bosnia-Hercegovina: Narrow Gauge Album, available from Stenvalls or Camden. Neither of these is what you'd call cheap - but they're worth every penny.

My indecisive modelling self hasn't been able to resist this, so for some time I've been accumulating stock and doodling yet another project, and I'm now starting to make a little progress. The plan isn't very ambitious, and involves an area of about 50cm by 160cm in the Ikea Ivar shelving above my workbench and machine tools. Yes, I know Ivar as a baseboard isn't an original idea, and thanks for the inspiration to those who have used it already. The photos below show the location and a few bits of track laid out to see how things will look. I'll have to do some surgery on the shelves to remove some of those cross braces from the sight lines but I doubt that they're essential - what can possibly go wrong?
It's a convenient way to get a quick start but I acknowledge that it has drawbacks, especially in being obscured by the support legs. However it has a few bonuses:

• It can easily be exhibited as a free standing layout on a new set of legs (which are cheap, available in a couple of heights and can easily be butchered into other heights); 
• It's very solid;
• The shelf above can be used to support as sophisticated a lighting rig as required;
• I lends itself to the "proscenium arch" type of display;
• It's easily extendable.

The full extent of my new NG empire....

The unvarnished shelves are to be used as the baseboard substructure

My current thoughts are around a small station with a forestry branch, possibly just a single or double passing loop, with removable cassette fiddle yards at either end for what would undoubtedly be rare operating sessions. It's just about at eye level, which I think will be a useful motivator to get things looking right - I always think a lot of layouts look fine from a helicopter and then everything starts to go wrong when you get down to a realistic ground level view.

I've also made an attempt at butchering a Chivers OBB class 399 kit into a JZ class 83 0-8-2. So far this has really only involved removing the boiler details and then wondering what to do next - it's probably best not blogged yet unless anyone's really interested.

The most progress to date has been made on passenger coaches. The JZ had a wide variety of coaches, but fortunately many of these were blessed with the same cross section and window shapes as the now-antiquated Liliput bogie coach design, which they've sold in many colours for many years and is hence very easy to find on the secondhand market. The major problems are that the vestibule ends are a completely different shape (as it happens they're about the same as those on the Roco OBB bogie coaches, but paying £40+ each for those and then using just the ends seemed a bit wasteful - and the windows are the wrong shape), and so is the roof. As far as I can tell, a few JZ coaches had the same roof form as the OBB stock with the radiused edges, but most were a simple chord from one side to the other. The window size and spacing did vary on the JZ stock, but I reckon I can produce most variants by a simple cut-and-shut job. So I've been preparing a set of patterns to resin cast myself a few parts:

• A generic JZ-profile roof suitable for their longest coach;
• A roof end, reproducing the awkward half-dome shape;
• A vestibule with its tapered floor plan, mainly using bits chopped off a Liliput coach and reassembled.

The idea is the following process:

1. Hold the body in a wooden clamping block made for the purpose and sever the roof from the coach using a slitting saw in the milling machine;
2. Reinforce the body using 2mm acrylic for the roof and new inner ends;
3. Cut the old ends off;
4. Add the new ends;
5. Cut and shut the coach to whatever window configuration is required;
6. Cut down a roof casting to length (if necessary), adding the end half-dome.

The Liliput chassis requires some minor butchery but nothing compared to the body. The photos below show my progress to date. I'm hoping that it will become something like the coach in photo 5 on this page of Dave Sallery's site.

Roof master balanced on cut-down Liliput body

Vestibule, roof end and roof centre masters tried for size. The masters aren't finished and have just had their first coat of paint to detect bumps and holes better

With original Liliput chassis ,which requires work around the steps and ends

The modified coach with an original Liliput OBB coach from the same secondhand batch