Dungrange

Well that's a bit more than I was hoping for. I suspect that in a lot of cases Rapido won't have that much detail and the livery as modelled may be based on a single photograph taken in 19xx. When the livery first came into service or was replaced isn't necessarily relevant to painting a model, so I wouldn't expect Rapido to research that, but information that says 'based on a photograph from circa 19xx' would be useful - especially for those of us who don't possess a vast library of PO wagons books. That's really useful, as it at least rules out one of the retailer specific models I was looking at as being 'too modern'. Thankfully none of the ones I've pre-ordered from the main range and still to collect from my local retailer are so marked. That doesn't mean they're definitely right for my period, but it's a start.

You could always invest in a Peco track gauge SL336 - https://peco-uk.com/products/6-way-gauge?variant=7435677499426 The Amazon website (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peco-SL-336-6ft-Way-Gauge/dp/B002QVNAQC) gives the track centre to centre dimensions as 18+9=27mm for streamline and 26+9=37mm for set track spacing. The absolute minimum you could probably get away with would therefore be ~135mm (~5.3'').

There is one on E-bay - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166710557351 Looks like most retailers have sold out from a quick Google search.

Yes, the wagons were around from 1907, but that doesn't mean that the liveries that Rapido have applied date from that period. Some are Edwardian period liveries, but others seem to definitely be post-Grouping. I just can't tell which are which.

Can anyone advise which of these are in pre-grouping liveries?

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Does anyone know if this model of the Forth Bridge in T Gauge still exists?

And it looks like it achieves that. No I agree with you, but since it doesn't really detract from the overall scene, it's probably not worth criticising. What could be done to improve it? Probably lowering the two girders either side of the track so that more of each girder is below rail level. However, that would leave very little space between the water surface and the underside of the girder, which could look just as strange. Perhaps the stream shouldn't be so wide: the narrower the stream, the smaller the cross section of the beams under the track would have to be (assuming they run parallel with the track).

Good, because I'm not sure what you are actually asking. Going by the title of the thread, I'd say "how long is a piece of string?" The height between rail head and a stream passing under the track could be anywhere between 2m and 200m, so near enough 2cm to 2m in H0 scale. The choice is really what captures the essence of what you're trying to model - ie what looks right. Use blocks of wood or whatever you have to hand with a piece of track on top to try and decide what looks best or captures what you are imagining. Off the shelf, yes, but some of these providers will do custom jobs if you can provide a detailed drawing of what you want. It doesn't need to be in CAD, but you will need to give all the dimensions and custom work will obviously cost more. The alternative is to just buy a standard flat top kit and then cut away parts of the baseboard to allow your stream to be modelled. Most of these baseboards have a depth of around 100mm, which is so you can mount Tortoise point motors etc under the track. However, you obviously wouldn't be fitting point motors under a stream. Where you've cut out the top (and therefore weakened the structure), you could fit additional ply on the underside under your stream. How well this would work would depend on how much of the board you were looking to cut away. Maybe an alternative would be to use these upside down. You could then make a track-bed to be fitted to what would normally be the underside of the board and you just profile the upside down front edge to achieve what you want.

I think the point is more that the £20's don't need to tie up in any way at all. They don't even need to be in the same ballpark. Just because Vehicle Excise Duty draws in £X Million to central government funds doesn't mean £X Million has to be spend on roads. It won't be if a community outreach centre for retired insect lovers of Scunthorpe were to be considered a bigger vote winner than spending the money on road maintenance. The government could hike 'road tax' (either Vehicle Excise Duty or Fuel Duty) and spend the money on free rail travel if it so desired. Is this "rail tax" voluntary? If the railway were to become free to everyone who pays this tax, then my first question would be how many people would actually pay? Of the 31 million income tax payers, some will make 500 trips per annum (two trips per day, five days per week, 50 weeks of the year) and others perhaps just a handful of trips. Some won't travel by rail at all because there is no rail line between the places they travel between. Whilst a £600 flat annual fare would represent exceptional value for some regular travellers, it probably doesn't represent good value for many occasional users. Obviously, as you contract the number of people willing to pay a voluntary tax, your tax rate would have to rise to meet your fixed costs. If only half of income tax payers were to sign up for your "rail tax", then the rate would have to be double your indicative value. The only way for that not to happen would be to make it compulsory that all income tax payers pay, but that's really no different to increasing the rate of income tax and allocating a proportion of that to subsidising the rail network (which is effectively the current situation). The other point is of course that the same source shows rail industry expenditure as £25 billion per annum. That is the cost of running the existing level of service provision. If everyone who pays the "rail tax" were to start making more journeys by rail (because the marginal cost of each additional journey has dropped to zero) then the cost of running the railway will increase and therefore the cost of your "rail tax" would have to increase as well. If everyone were to make twice as many journeys, then you'd need twice as many trains and twice as many drivers so twice the cost. That would therefore mean doubling your "rail tax". If only half of income tax payers were signed up to your "rail tax", then you'd need to quadruple the rate. Extra travellers could probably be accommodated on many Scottish rural routes without significant infrastructure upgrades, but obviously there are large parts of the network that are capacity constrained (either line or terminal capacity) and the cost of that new infrastructure would also have to be met from your "rail tax", as what you are proposing at the moment really just covers the day to day operating costs, not the cost of adding an extra pair of lines to the West Coast Mainline and extra Platforms at London Euston or wherever people want to travel for free just because they've paid your "rail tax". Once you set it at a level that provides for increase capacity (both network and services) you're talking about a lot more money, which would probably tend towards the current cost of a rail pass. That is, purchasing a rail pass like the Spirit of Scotland is effectively the closest equivalent to your 'rail tax'. For £189 you can have eight days unlimited travel over fifteen consecutive days. https://www.scotrail.co.uk/tickets/combined-tickets-travel-passes/spirit-of-scotland Sadly, I think your calculations are overly simplistic and not very realistic - a bit like the initial suggestion for a new railway line to serve Fort William.

I think that's a wider issue with regards misunderstanding about taxation. There are also people who will tell you that National Insurance pays for state pensions and the NHS - again, it doesn't: the money raised just goes into the general taxation pot for the government of the day to use as it sees fit. Vehicle Excise Duty is a tax that is paid if you want to own a car and use it on the public road network, but it doesn't just pay for road maintenance and could be regarded as a 'sin tax' in the same manner as duty on cigarettes, alcohol etc. How road maintenance is paid for depends on who owns the road. If it's a local authority road, then it will be paid for from Council Tax (and therefore paid by Council Tax payers irrespective of whether they own a car or not), albeit some local authority funding comes from national government payments, which will have come from the big pot of money that includes all forms of taxation (Income Tax, National Insurance, VAT, Fuel Duty, Vehicle Excise Duty etc).

I agree and that's a major problem with the promotion of transport schemes in general. In the past there has been a bias towards road based schemes because they are easier to present an economic case for. A lot of road schemes have been shown to generate economic benefits that exceed the cost of construction, which means that they ultimately get built. However, these nearly always assume a continual increase in traffic, so an increasing number of people will benefit and of course that also means that the counterfactual scenario is greater congestion than we have today. The Scottish Government are now targeting a reduction in car use to meet NetZero (a desired 20% reduction in car kilometres by 2030) and therefore when taking account of negative traffic growth forecasts, many road schemes which previously indicated they were value for money can no longer demonstrate that. Bus and rail schemes have historically been more difficult to promote because the economic case has been less easy to demonstrate. In the case of bus, bus priority schemes generate benefits for bus passengers, but they also tend to hinder general traffic flow. Therefore it's difficult to design a scheme where the benefits to bus users minus the dis-benefits to other road users minus the cost still produces a strong economic case: it usually doesn't. In the case of rail schemes, rail patronage forecasts tend to be less bullish than road based travel despite passenger numbers on the rail network increasing over the two decades pre-COVID-19. It's also more difficult to justify rail freight infrastructure because it tends to be trainloads or nothing and there is often no long term commitment to a rail freight flow, whereas for road based freight, it's simply assumed that if the road is built, it will be used. Clearly, there are a lot of other factors like carbon, ecology, etc which should be given more weight than the numbers output from a Cost Benefit Analysis Report. Where the burden of taxation should fall is a slightly different matter and if I were Chancellor of the Exchequer, I'd be making massive changes to the way in which the government taxes the electorate, but that's straying from whether a proposal for new rail infrastructure is viable / affordable, into the world of politics.

I can't see it happening - it would be too expensive to build with too little patronage to justify the cost. The HSTs and DMUs will all be gone within the next decade, so as a proposal it would need to be considered in the context of the next generation of stock, where all passenger services will either be Electric Multiple Units (EMUs), Battery Electric Multiple Units (BEMUs) or Hydrogen powered. Glasgow to Aberdeen / Inverness services will almost certainly be EMUs or BEMUs depending on how much of each route has overhead wires erected before the existing stock needs to be replaced. However, I'm not aware of any plans for overhead on the West Highland line. These services (ie the current ones to Oban, Fort William and Mallaig) are likely to either be hydrogen powered or BEMUs depending on the advancement of these technologies and which one appears most promising when the investment decision needs to be made. There may therefore be operational issues if there was a desire to run a hydrogen powered unit for Fort William in multiple with an EMU for say Inverness as the two units would presumably have quite different operating characteristics. That's less of an issue with the current set-up as the Oban and Fort William trains are likely to be the same class of unit, so could continue to operate as they currently do. Would it help with connecting freight from Fort William (Corpach) to the rest of the network? If it was electrified then yes, but otherwise, I suspect that freight on the West Highland will simply die off under the de-carbonisation agenda, because I'm not convinced that either hydrogen or battery technologies provide the power necessary to move freight on non-electrified lines over significant distances.

Try from page 35, when people started to receive the WCRC models.

According to Wikipedia, that's correct. They're apparently 800 m (2600 ft) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Folkestone_Terminal. In 00 that would make them 10.5 m or 34' in length. Interestingly, the platforms at Beauly are even shorter than I thought. In 00 they'd be just 8 inches long, so clearly the answer to the original question is somewhere between these two extremes (assuming 1:76 scale).

Just make sure that the rail heads line up at your join through packing if necessary.

Technically your contract is with the seller on E-bay, not the manufacturer (ie Hornby), so it's up to the retailer that you purchase from to get any missing parts from Hornby (or give you a refund). If they are a reputable trader, then they will do that for you - if they're selling dodgy stock, then obviously they won't. Caveat emptor is a Latin phrase that translates to "let the buyer beware." It refers to a buyer's responsibility for due diligence before purchase, which means that it is up to you to decide which retailers you consider to be reputable or are willing to take a chance on before you buy. The answer to your question is therefore 'yes'. Obviously if your E-bay seller has shrugged their shoulders and said 'not my problem mate' and you've decided you still want to keep the model, then you need to find an alternative coupling from elsewhere, but sorting out replacements for you isn't technically Hornby's problem. My impression is that Hornby don't really keep many spares, although I'd expect them to have a few for warranty repairs (ie models returned through their official stockists). Obviously if they don't have many spares to cover such repairs and they are not being sold as a spare part, then I can understand the position that Hornby have taken.

No idea about the Accurascale Deltic, but my experience with the Accurascale 37 is similar to your description of the Bachmann version. On the club's analogue layout, the loco moved before the engine sounds started up and it clearly draws more current that most analogue only locomotives. Testing out a double headed 37 (both Accurascale DCC Sound) and I couldn't get the train to move. That said, it's not just the locomotive you need to consider, but what DC controller you're using. You can't use the DCC Sound on analogue if you use feedback controller. We have some of the Gaugemaster versions (the black ones) in the club: they're no use. Of the other handheld controllers we have in the club, the ones that we use with the O Gauge worked best, but I'm not sure who makes them. They were able to get the Class 37 moving quicker than the Gaugemaster version would. I'd agree with others though, don't bother going for DCC Sound if you're committed to analogue.

Whatever looks best with the trains you plan to run. If you scale down platforms on the real railway, you'll get anything between 18" and 24'.

Not really a surprise when trying to compress what is a large station into a small space. That plan is definitely in the category of 'inspired by Salisbury' rather than a model that is faithful to the actual station, but it does show what can be achieved in a relatively small space. If @Peak wants to include more, or improve the authenticity, then more space is required, which comes back to the original question.

That's up to you. If you need 100' to model it to scale and you only have 15' then you need to define the least interesting 85% to cut out.

Me!!!

At least Paddington could be fitted in a smaller space. An eight foot wide baseboard to model everything between Eastbourne Terrace and the canal and it would only need to be 18 foot long to capture everything between Praed Street and Bishop's Bridge Road. Obviously there would need to be a fiddle yard as well, but at least a model of Paddington would be smaller than Salisbury, even if I don't think it would be that interesting to operate and too much of the track would be hidden by the overall roof.

Which of course adds substantially to the cost of building such a large station (and the time taken to build it). Which obviously raises the question - why Salisbury? Unless @Peak is a music mogul with a very large property and a few million in the bank, bits of the prototype will have to be missed out. Defining the appeal of Salisbury would help to determine where the compromises should be made.

It depends on the direction you're looking. 😀 If this were to be an exhibition layout, then given the curve through the station, I'd be tempted to model it with the Cathedral being behind the viewer, the station at the front of the layout and the Traction Motive Depot to the rear. However, if this was to be a permanent 'home' layout constructed around the walls of a barn, then I'd exaggerate the natural curve such that it could be bent round the walls, in which case the operator and viewer would be inside the curve. In that case, the station would be behind the TMD and the Cathedral behind that. As you note, if the cathedral were close to the station, it would be a massive building with the spires reaching to the ceiling of an average room. Thankfully it's far enough away that a bit of forced perspective would permit something smaller to be painted on the backscene. I'm not all that convinced that it's particularly prominent from railway infrastructure anyway. Looking at Google Streetview there always seem to be a building or tree blocking sight of the Cathedral.