Ian Simpson

That looks very good, George! Yes, Bachmann's B&O coaches are ridiculously narrow! I think the actual coaches might have been slightly wider, but not a lot, if the replicas at the 1939 World's Fair in New York is anything to go by:

Interesting to see young men in the UK bucking the trend by becoming more (if more weakly) liberal as well. I hope the Conservative Party are proud of themselves.

That's a fascinating thought, Mikkel. It's only natural that new opportunities affect our modelling choices. At the moment a surprising number of the small band of British H0 modellers are buying Trix's new Flying Scotsman, which is an absolutely amazing model but has a matching price tag of around £500. I don't know one of them who models the East Coast main line. It will be interesting to see if this changes as a result of their purchases. If the product does end up driving your own modelling, I'm definitely looking forward to your mid-19th century layout!

Yes, the coaches do look especially nice! As an aside on the cost debate, I think this Budget Model Railways video is interesting. Mike Potter is arguing that we are returning to an earlier do-it-yourself approach to modelling, but with newer techniques and technologies: Although I personally wouldn't dismiss people who buy expensive and accurate models as "boring Bob" just because they have different priorities to me! I hope there will always be room for everyone in our hobby. Okay, that last sentence was a bit too sanctimonious to end on. So let's cheer ourselves up with the thought that craft modelling can be a revolutionary act against global capitalism :

Thanks, @Mikkel. I just took a cheap telescopic pick-up tool, like the ones at the top of the photo below, and bent the thin metal near the head through 90 degrees with a pair of pliers: I think they would be great for uncoupling three-link couplings, but absolutely useless for coupling them. A tiny disc magnet glued on the end of a thin piece of wood or plasticard might work, but would probably be too strong to leave the links coupled when it is removed? I love the new R-T-R early models, and I really hope we see some period layouts as a result. Given the small size of the prototypes, I think it would be possible to add these models to an H0 layout without too many problems, but the prices are a bit eye-watering. Of course they reflect the very high quality of the models, but I'm personally a big fan of cheap and cheerful. So not tempting for me personally, but I can definitely see the appeal and I'm delighted they are available to others who have an interest in the era! Rocket and Lion were only used for a few years on a short, fascinating and historically important northern English railway, so for purists they are a bit limited geographically. But they're fine for free-lance railways, so modellers don't have to restrict them to a single line between Liverpool and Manchester!

A couple of years ago I started using PECO 009 hook-and-loop couplers, as the buffer beams on 1840s models are much lower than the beams on more modern stock and the usual 00/H0 solutions don't work. Gluing the plastic shafts of PECO GR-101 couplers to the bottom of the beams worked okay, but I decided to try a more organised approach to coupling and uncoupling stock. I recently read that the 009 Society recommends setting narrow gauge couplers 6 mm above rail height, and I decided to experiment with this as a guideline. I found that PECO's GR-103 NEM brackets set the couplers at exactly the right height when they are glued to the underside of the Bachmann Prussia coaches. The height gauge in the photo below (made from 2 mm square strips of white plasticard) shows how the coupler hooks are 6 mm above rail height when PECO's GR-102 couplers are plugged into the NEM brackets: I didn't use the plastic hooks provided with these GR-102 couplers, because I wanted to use magnetic uncoupling. (Although it is possible to adapt them for magnetic uncoupling by gluing a piece of iron to the plastic dropper, I wanted the couplers to survive rough handling and exhibition conditions.) Instead I used the iron wire hooks supplied with PECO's GR-101 couplers, which swing around and uncouple nicely when they run over strong-but-tiny Neodymium disc magnets glued to the track sleepers: As a bonus, I found that a Poundland magnetic pick-up tool works as an uncoupling tool, allowing easy hand-in-the-sky uncoupling anywhere on the layout: It was the thought of exhibiting Tinories at the Wealden Railway Group's Steyning Exhibition on 10th March with dodgy couplers that made decide to improve the stock. So my next task it to bash some Bachmann Prussia carriages into some interesting carriages for the exhibition:

Thanks, Mike, you're absolutely right about the fore-carriage. It wouldn't be hard to add a very basic one to the model with a bit of plasticard. The Britzka article is fascinating, and I learned a lot reading it! I do like George's idea of an 1840s traffic jam - or just a queue of carriages outside a station. It's certainly possible to produce a bit of variety. One change to Nigel's model would be to fill in the side windows and remove the luggage rails on the roof to make a private carriage. I think it would also be possble to hacksaw off the top of the body to make an open carriage body, and just painting the top half of the body black would make it look more like a traditional stagecoach.

In the late 1830s & early 1840s railway carriages rapidly replaced stage coaches for long journeys. Trust Nigel Hill to reverse the trend by changing a railway carriage into a horse-drawn coach! He took a Bachmann 1830s Baltimore and Ohio carriage from the de Witt Clinton set and separated the metal body from its plastic chassis. Attaching white metal cart wheels from Langley Models with superglue turned the carriage body into a reasonable representation of an early 19th century stage coach: His ingenuity didn't stop there, because he then took the carriage chassis and added planked plasticard to make an 1830s flat wagon: (The figures in the photos are from Modelu's "Ragged Victorians" range.)

Ah, it wasn't U-shaped after all! It was a 7.9 mm square styrene tube. A wonderfully inspired idea from Mike Flemming in his "Simply Victorian" article (Railway Modeller, July 2014), designed for tender drive Singles:

Thanks, Matt, that's a very useful update! I'll have to explore the new J72.

It might be because the spur of plastic material between the rail ends is fairly soft (at least on PECO insulated fishplates). If the layout gets rough handling / gets moved a lot, the plastic can get knocked inside the rail, rather than staying within it, hence the derailments. It's easily corrected with a Stanley knife.

Seconded as long as it doesn't mean re-gauging the entire WNR!

Also, if you can get BBC Sounds, it's worth checking out his new "Call Jonathan Pie" podcasts. Very good value for your licence fee, even if they are based on the now-tired conceit of a comedian hosting a radio phone-in.

To be fair, Sunak was only following convention, which obviously includes the time-honoured tradition of holding one's nose and accepting some of the more dodgy names. After all, I'm old enough to remember Harold Wilson's final honours list. Fully understand the PM's reluctance to have by-elections at the moment, but I think I would have risked it to send Mad Nad Dorries to Another Place.

Robbie's Wagons has four Corrall variants, three 5-plank wagons (which I personally think look better on pre-Grouping branch layouts) and a 7-plank: http://www.robbiesrollingstock.co.uk/S_East.htm Really enjoying the blog, the layout is coming on nicely!