Weekday Cross

Good luck with the build- I will follow this with interest as I have a hotel to build soon, too. If you are lucky, bus enthusiasts will have photos somewhere. Alternatively, aerial photos might help. As it is a relatively modern building, there could be plans in the local records or planning office - either of the original or modifications. There might even be old holiday brochures for Penzance in an archive somewhere. They usually had photos f the buildings. Anyway, isn't St Ruth a fictitious place? You can do what you like!

Instructions? What? You won't assemble them for me too?

Whatever its origins, I could do with a few for the garden over the winter.... Seriously, that is a fantastic model - well done!

Sorry - it really did look different to me to the one on the Hattons site - Mercig have obviously done a really good job and brought out the detail, I guess! You are very lucky to have such a well finished model! Sincere apologies!

Ok Lee, is this really the Dapol model? Comparing your model with the pics on the Hattons website, there seem to me to be quite a few detail differences. Apart from the loco number, the bogies, cabside windows, bogie steps, radiator grille and a number of other details don't look the same. No offence - I may be wrong. If it is the Dapol loco, please tell us how you made all the changes.

Hattons have them listed at £36, though not yet in stock

The perennial problem with LNER livery stock is identifying wooden panelled bodies as opposed to flush steel bodies, with lining to imitate the wooden panelling - much clearer to see in BR livery.

So who is going to keep it all clean and dusted when its finished? Magnificent modelling, all the same

The first Brush Type 2s (skinhead version) were certainly used on passenger trains to and from Liverpool Street in their early days - there is a shot of D5516 arriving with a train from Ely in 1958 in "The Early Years of London Diesels". EE Type 4s were certainly there by early 1959. NBL Type 2s were allocated to Stratford by mid-1959 and NBL Type 1s in 1958 (presumably for freight?). The BTH Type 1s appeared in November 1957.

Excellent photos of a superb layout!

Unfortunately, it is not always fun. Some apparently genuine callers are really after your personal information. One idea is to try to "sell" you something to get your credit card information. Offering a free mobile phone is one idea. Another trick is to pretend they have found out through a contact of yours that you probably have a dangerous trojan on your computer and they want to send you some software to repair it. This turns out to be a fishing program that finds out all your passwords etc. and sends them back to base. Another trick is to pretend to be doing some kind of consumer survey. They soften you up with innocent questions and then throw in occasional questions about your personal information - the kind of things you would use to access your bank account, like your mother's maiden name, your last school or your memorable date. This information can be sold on to people who will use it to access your bank account. Hopefully no one on this forum has been caught - but it pays to be very cautious and suspicious of any cold call, no matter what it might sound like.

If the brakes failed with a long heavy mineral train in tow, they could have ended up anywhere - including places that had no railway at all

How typical were the LMS locos though? - I always thought the coupled wheelbase, valve gear etc. were specific to the LMS. Wouldn't the ones BP designed themselves without the interference of the railway be very different?

That's what scenic breaks are for - take the wagons empty round through a scenic break immediately at the back of the screens and then push them back onto the scenic area through the screens as fulls, having cleverly filled them at the back of the layout - or even a different rake?

The headshunt would be very awkward to operate anyway - in real life, I suspect it would have been operated using fly shunting, or similar. You will need to watch the sharpness of the curves on the platform road - they might make coupling and uncoupling difficult.