bécasse

Faced with a similar problem (albeit in HOe rather than 2FS), I borrowed an idea from Tortoise point motors and had the basic point operating system at a low level and then transferred the actual normal-reverse movement to the point blades by means of a vertical lever pivoted approximately at its mid point. In fact I took a further leaf out of Tortoise's book by making the lever from suitably stiff spring wire with the pivot just a hole in a piece of horizontally mounted brass (the hole needs to be just a tad greater diameter than the wire to allow movement but not excess movement). The system works brilliantly and is remarkably easy to make and set up, the most difficult task is choosing a piece of wire with the right stiffness for the vertical distance.

When we were building Bembridge half-a-century-plus ago we had full-plate prints of three more or less contemporary Aerofilms aerial photographs which showed the station (and a limited amount of its surrounds). I used to sellotape them up on a window so that they were effectively back-lit and then carefully worked my way around them using a botanist's magnifying eyeglass. It was astounding just how much information could be picked up with this technique and it contributed greatly to the accuracy of the final model. Those prints came from full-plate glass negatives loaded in a camera with a top-notch professional camera but even with much more mundane photography it is often surprising how much extra one can learn if only one looks carefully - and the more one does it, the more one learns to avoid the pitfalls.

The GNR was a very early adopter of yellow arms for distant signals, starting before the Great War, whereas elsewhere the conversion didn't take place until the mid/late-1920s. There was one fundamental difference in the painting scheme of these distant arms - the stripe was vertical (instead of being a chevron) and it was white on the front face of the arm rather than the black that later became standard. I realise that CF is effectively set in the very early 1930s, albeit with some "elasticity", but it would rather nice to see those distant arms painted in GNR style which could just about have lasted to the turn of the decade. Painting a vertical stripe would be easier too!

The Southern Railway wartime equivalent of The Grove was Deepdene House near Dorking (which remained in use for many years after the war as a railway accounting centre) and that lent its name to the telegraphic code DEEPDENE for trains conveying VIPs other than Heads of State. Although it was a long while after the war that one attended courses and the like at The Grove, the classroom huts around the garden still sported their wartime camouflage paint.

Never use actual steel wool for foliage or other scenic effects on a model railway, the synthetic stuff is OK though. The trees on our P4 Bembridge layout built over half-a-century ago used steel wool as the base for the foliage, but while it looked good we were having to continually clear away the "beards" (actually tiny fragments of the steel wool) that grew on the locos' motors each day.

A very typical GWR train, no two carriages the same, modellers please note!

In 1964 I worked as a vacation student at a Consulting Engineers based in Westminster (as many were at the time). They specialised in work associated with road traffic, indeed I was taken on to help with traffic counts, and their two major clients were the Greater London Council and the Department of Transport. I was therefore somewhat puzzled by continued comments from engineers to the effect that they were just popping over to Marples Ridgeway for a couple of hours to discuss something they were working on. Eventually the penny dropped and I realised that they were actually heading to the DoT in Marsham Street which they thought of as being a branch office of Marples Ridgeway. Interestingly, the lads weren't a bunch of radicals and probably some at least voted Conservative, and yet they clearly considered the DoT to be furthering the commercial interests of its Minister. Once his moral values became public knowledge it is clear that they were right.

They worked the Cardiff-Bristol-Portsmouth/Brighton services too.

Powdered lock graphite in a small plastic puffer bottle can be a very effective long-lasting lubricant for model locos and one that I use extensively. There may be occasions when it doesn't do the trick and a liquid lubricant is required but in my experience they are few and far between.

It is always good to know that one of my drawings has proved useful. That point lever at Witney was carefully measured up almost sixty years ago!

I really think that it was more to do with the fact that relatively few open wagons moved between the two countries at any period. There were some very weird "pooled" open wagons circulating in England including some without any doors - they had always been emptied on a tippler by their previous owner.

The "fleet" of pooled open wagons gradually got totally mixed up although choke points on the national network (between England and Scotland for example) slowed and localised the process to some extent. By the early 1950s when a goodly proportion of ex-PO wagons was still in use and their fading liveries were still partially discernible, a train delivering household coal to south London would include wagons that had originally come from all over the place but ex-Scottish wagons were rare.

The doorway of the tool shed was central in the end with a narrow panel either side and, as has been said, there were no windows. Lamp huts, of whatever design, always had a "SMOKING PROHIBITED" sign on the door and ventilation was provided, typically by replacing one window pane with perforated zinc sheet. Although these prefabricated Exmouth Junction concrete designs were Southern Railway, possibly intended to reduce the amount of steel reinforcing used at a time of severe steel shortage, few, if any, actually appeared out and about prior to the 1948 nationalisation, so they shouldn't be used on any Southern Railway layout. The general station storage hut was the concrete building used as a lamp hut in prewar SR days, I have added a drawing below.

That was my understanding too but, many decades ago, I was led to believe that the men on the ground saw no practical difference between the twenty B4s and the five K14s from the moment the K14s were delivered, and they probably called the whole lot something like "dock motors" - I think I actually knew once what the actual vernacular was but have forgotten since and it might well have been different for those locos allocated to the Southampton Dock company. Certainly work seems to have been shared reasonably indiscriminately between the two groups.

Here is a view of a 1959 Southern Region installation at Sheerness, it is a slight oddity as the point is a wide-to-gauge trap (on a passenger line!) but doubtless Phil will tell us if there are obvious differences with the standard installation.

Because they were soon reclassified as B4s and seem to have been used indiscriminately with the earlier locos - and, of course, the boilers, the most obvious distinguishing feature of the K14s, sometimes got swapped with those on other locos (or new builds) on overhaul. Having mentioned 94 and 103 earlier as being Adams locos that spent some time with tapered buffers and the smaller size buffing heads during the pre-WWII SR era, I note that both those locos were then allocated to Bournemouth shed to work on the Poole Quay tramway, however there is a well-known Stanhope Baker photo of 93 alongside the Custom House there in 1951 with the large buffing heads so there can't actually have been a positive reason for the relevant locos having small buffing heads pre-war. The shot concerned is out of copyright so I have attached a scan of sufficient of the front of the loco to enable a reasonable estimate of the buffing head size to be made.

Can I suggest that wooden-bodied slab-sided vehicles such as Fruit Ds and Southern U-vans were painted crimson on both sides and ends (but had never been lined) whereas NPCS vehicles that were more akin to passenger-carrying vehicles in their appearance were painted crimson (originally lined), or occasionally crimson and cream, on their sides and black on their ends. That is certainly what my memory suggests and would have been logical in treating the former of vehicles as akin to wagons (which were, of course, treated in the same way all round) albeit in crimson rather than brown/bauxite.

Looking further I still can't find any quoted buffer head dimension but I have noticed that the five so-called K14 locos that were built in 1908 with Drummond boilers and numerous detail differences from the earlier twenty Adams locos, originally had tapered buffers with a smaller buffing head, the earlier locos having had substantial parallel buffers with the larger buffing head. There were then changes over the years with some swapping of buffers and in due course (most of?/all of?) the tapered buffers acquired the larger buffing heads. There is a drawing of 103, the last of the original Adams locos, in late-1920s condition by the late Colin Binnie which shows tapered buffers with the smaller head. I knew Colin well and he was a very careful draughtsman, so he must have had some evidence for his depiction and certainly 94, which was another Adams loco, had such buffers and buffer heads in early SR days; however 102, built alongside 103, certainly had the parallel buffers and large buffing heads, probably throughout its life. I doubt whether any of the locos which worked in Southampton Docks (and which bore names rather than their numbers) ever had the small buffing heads and I haven't been able to find any evidence that any of the locos that survived into BR days had anything other than the large buffing heads even if they were fitted with tapered buffers. It should be added that the B4 class were an absolute minefield in terms of variations, not only were there numerous variations within the class as built but those variations seems to have been added to every time they were shopped.

I can't quickly find a note of the actual diameter of the buffer heads but they are marginally larger, perhaps by 1" top and bottom, than the total depth of the buffer plank. A quick glance at photos of Dapol's models suggests that they got it right on the O gauge model but that they are undersized on the OO gauge one.

That was my first thought too.

In stealing the track plan from Ashburton you have also stolen its Achille's Heel for use as the basis for a model railway, namely a kickback siding that can only be shunted by horse (interesting in any scale let alone 2mm) or hand.

I suspect that the general use of roof boards ceased around the same time as the new corporate image was adopted in the mid-1960s. The spread of 25kV overhead electrification would also have discouraged their use (although BR MkI stock carried them below the cantrail and not on the roof, of course).

Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland, the map below shows what the boundaries were in 1876 before the railway arrived. The property numbers (eg 5622) were the same before and after.

I think that the answer to that lies in the long 1 in 100 gradient down on to the Somerset Levels which eased through Pylle station but was otherwise long and continuous. Presumably when the Lime Works sidings were shunted the only vehicle left on the running line was the well-screwed-down brake with the rest of the train (which quite possibly had a further brake tailing its formation) left in relative safety at Pylle. Incidentally getting up and down mixed up for this route is commonplace, it does help to remember that it was built from the Highbridge end.

Very sad.