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I am thinking to myself (and writing out loud here), there must have been a brief period at the beginning of the age of the car, when the roads were too poor to allow long-distance deliveries and the traffic was too new for the railways to have suitable CCTs. A time when car importers as well as manufacturers needed to move cars by rail, and had to use whatever wagons the railway already had. This would tally with the Daimlers in the 3-plank wagons above. - Richard.

The use of rope and not chain here to tie down a customer's vehicle is useful for many periods. - Richard.

A ploughing engine would set the scene nicely, it would be more specific than a traction engine. Perhaps a specimen of an engine for shows had been moved from GWR territory to central Essex ... I could start to look for a 7mm kit. - Richard.

A local agricultural show sounds a marvellous idea. Thanks. I can set the show in 1908, when the Hydra was brand new. - Richard.

Afraid not. I am writing the history and building the stock before I build a layout. I think this will help me build a better layout. The history (which depicts a fictional railway set in a real location) is evolving as new details come to light. At the moment I am imagining modelling the railway as it was in 1893, a few years after it opened, in 1908, when the Bentall's car production was underway, and 1913, when the line was lifted. My connection with Heybridge is, I had a contract for engineering work there about 15 years ago and nowadays I do voluntary work there. My main sources are the book by the late Beryl Claydon, "In and Around Heybridge in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" and Grace's Guide. I "missed" Bentalls - they had closed before I visited the town. I have no photographs of the back of the works beside the navigation, and so I may end up improvising something completely imaginery, with a representation of the four-storey warehouse (this is going to be turned into flats) to close off the end of the model. - Richard.

My conclusion is, U-POL number 8 primer is good on brass, solder, steel, Milliput (the green one) and the plastic centres of Slater's wheels. Conversely - when wet, the primer dissolves many model paints - it worked like paint stripper on my spray turntable. The first coat of primer (yesterday) was a bit thin on the interior and showed up some flaws, mostly solder blobs: Today I cleaned these up and added another coat above the underframe: I think this will stay put well on the model. Thanks for the ideas posted above. - Richard.

I think I need to separate the "car" and the "inter-company working". The car could be an imported one, perhaps being purchased secondhand and moved by rail to its new owner. I have a model Renault AX of 1908. I accept (a bit reluctantly) that while a veteran car on a lowmac style wagon might make for a bit of spectacle on the layout it wouldn't have a likely prototype. A car sheeted over would be easier to make if rather anonymous. The model car might be better simply posed on the ground not on a wagon. The modelling of inter-company workings is helpful because I am only just setting out in building wagons from kits (eight built so far) and this widens the range of kits for me to try. I have ordered up the Hydra, and whilst a bit out of place it will help me to planning and run a layout until I can make something a bit more suitable. The load could be an item of industrial machinery or foundry equipment. This would fit with the setting of the layout, which features E H Bentall of Heybridge, agricultural engineers and one of Britain's earliest car builders. They operated a small foundry. Such a load would be easier to build than a traction engine, and I could claim the item had come from somewhere in GWR territory. To justify the use of the Hydra. I want to study the whole article on 'foreign' wagons but I am still on page 1. I would have never found this article, if I had seen the title in passing I would have guessed it was about ferry wagons :-) - Richard.

Hi Mike. I was rather thinking of the GWR Hydra wagon to diagram G19 when I made my post, because Connoisseur Models do a kit. And I want to try building one of these for my layout set in the middle of Essex, a fictional railway connected to GER metals. So it sounds as though such a wagon could make an appearance on my layout from time to time, suitably loaded and to be returned empty and promptly. - Richard.

Supposing (because this example is useful to me) someone in the East of England ordered up a motor car from a supplier in Bristol in around 1910. A journey beginning with the Great Western Railway and ending with the Great Eastern Railway. Might we expect the motor car to travel on the same wagon throughout its journey? I am looking for excuses to include a better variety of wagons on my layout. Maybe some loads were transhipped part way on their journeys, and others were not. Many thanks. - Richard.

My etch primer is now three hours old. I think, the combination of primer over Milliput on brass is going to be fine but I will wait until tomorrow to try some abrasion e.g. fine wet and dry paper. Especially where the primer is showing up the Milliput to be a bit excessive. - Richard.

I have more experience of Milliput than brass or U-POL no.8, so I opted to put the Milliput on first. After this set, it cleaned up from the brass almost too easily, as though it did not really bond beyond some stiction; but it has stayed put where I really wanted it, like between the solebars and their ends/buffer heads. Perhaps, the only things which really stick to brass are solder, Araldite, and cyanoacrylate; and of course the right primer. I tried U-POL no.8 on a piece of brass fret a few weeks ago and it has bonded very well ... I can scrape it off with abrasive paper but not a finger nail. The same primer is now on my tender truck, I will wait until tomorrow to see how well it has adhered to the Milliput. - Richard.

I have built a tender truck from one of Jim Mcgeown's kits and there are some obvious gaps needing filling, especially where the buffers/solebars meet the ends of the wagon. I am tempted to give the model a coat of U-POL #8 etching primer and use this to find all the flaws, then fill them with Milliput, then prime again with ordinary Halfords grey primer. Please, does this sound sensible or would it be better to do the filler before adding any primer? I really don't have a clue - this is only my second brass kit. Many thanks, Richard.

I measured the wheels and wheelbase of a Roco V60 a while ago and decided this was good for a Teddy Bear. I still haven't worked out whether the motor will fit inside a body shell, so I left the model off the list. A Teddy Bear would be a useful model :-) - Richard.

30 mm (8 ft 7 in) is good for British outline models with thin plastic- or brass-walled bodies. - Richard.

Do not worry about threats of redundancies; rather, see them as a prompt to look for fresh opportunities. I worked for a major electronics company for 21 years. They had a round of redundancies for 19 of those years and I used to worry myself sick. I finally quit and got a four-hour leaving interview for my trouble, aka a grilling on why I was leaving. There is nothing left of the place now, and looking back I reckon the company was being deliberately managed to make it fail in a sort of slow, run down and controlled way. I chose self-employment and this brought food to my table along with a far better level of self-esteem. All you need to do is to do your best and don't take the mickey (just charge the market rate), and you will get repeat business. It is not difficult and when you sacrifice (say) one Saturday a month to do the books it doesn't hurt. Rather, you never ask for annual leave, but go out into the fresh air when you feel like it. - Richard.

During the last five weeks (being the period since the site came back) I have received three requests to reload illustrations - three for posts and none for my blog. I have responded to these within a day or so. This has given me a sense of proportion of how important these things really are. Yes I would like to see my blog looking a bit more coherent but I have set myself a reasonably proportionate deadline to sort things out there - the end of November. I'll deal with it after the clocks go back. I built a plastic wagon kit while the site was down and then my first ever brass wagon kit since the site came back. I am happy with both of them. Yes I care about defects in my posts online, but I have stopped worrying about them. - Richard.

I don't have any experience at all, but I still feel a need to write something! For a semi-permanent layout I would simply add some more ballast and allow it to break away when I moved the layout. Perhaps keep a jam jar of spare ballast so you are prepared for the occasion. - Richard.

It may be, I ought to be using a higher pressure. 20psi is suggested for the artist's style air brushes with 0.2 or 0.3mm jets. The jet on the Humbrol air brush is about 0.5 or 0.6 mm diameter. I will try 25 or 30 next time, see what happens. I like the look of this technique: https://youtu.be/lCKZ_fo4eW0 In fact this video could sell me a better single-action brush, because the critical (visible) painting I want to do at the moment is large flat areas on new models and repaints. This is how I have been putting on paint, but my wagon got four passes of top coat not eight or ten. So I may have been a bit mean with the coverage. If the paint is wet enough then it will sit on the surface and not form runs. - Richard.

I used a flat brush about 10mm wide for the Vallejo paint on the planks on my wagon. I put three drops of paint onto a palette but this could have been a scrap of styrene. I loaded the brush maybe 1/4 full and started a couple of planks from one end, brushing the paint out along the planks here and working the paint into the bristles at the same time. When the brush had paint along half its length I could reload it, do some more planks and "cut in" to neaten up the ends and do the first two planks with neat edges. I think the main thing was, I pressed quite hard on the brush to spread the paint as far and as thinly as I could. This was very nearly enough over the grey primer, but I added a second coat the same way to remove the blotchiness. The Vallejo paint seems to have a very dense, fine pigment. It covered really well. My brush has an orange handle and on this is printed, "6 AK interactive". I think the primer is important. It seems to be essential to get Tamiya to flow onto a surface properly and stay put, it helps all of the paints I have tried. These are the usual brands like Revell, Humbrol and Railmatch, not specialist paints. I have been building 7mm scale wagons since last Autumn, trying to do one a month. This is my seventh. I have an idea for a small layout set in the 1890s through to about 1910. This NER Lomac is technically a bit modern (1913) but it was a good choice for a first brass kit needing soldering together. - Richard.

Here are two views of the same end of my wagon project: This is a 7mm scale kit by Jim Mcgeown. I could not cope with this level of detail in H0 or 4mm! The grey is Railmatch enamel applied using my Humbrol single-action airbrush. The brown is Vallejo acrylic applied by brush but this is too out of focus to make much judgement. The spot mark on one buffer is dust on my camera sensor. I am happy enough with this to let it harden overnight and install the couplings and buffer heads tomorrow. This is my first time of using Vallejo paint. It has given me a very good first impression, it just seemed to flow out of the brush and went on really easily. The primer under all of this is U-pol no.8 etch primer bought from Halfords. This primer is sold for use on aluminium and galvanised steel. It seems to bond itself well to brass, by this I mean I could not scrape it off using my finger nail after 24 hours. The bare spot above the coupler plate is where I scraped away some excess solder using a scalpel. - Richard.

I have watched a few of his videos today. I can't help admiring how he pours paint and thinner from one container to another and mixes it up and never spills a drop. I am consuming old newpapers throughout the process. I would have never guessed to look at such a channel but all the important instructions and advice are there. I now know, my Humbrol "miniature spray gun" is technically an airbrush: a single-action, externally-mixed one. At the moment it is proving extremely useful. I am only on my second wagon with it but the finish seems rather good. Doubtless I will look back on these first efforts in a few year's time and curse not getting a better airbrush sooner, but at the moment things look happy. I now know, there are three variables I can play with. The consistency of the paint, the pressure from the compressor, and the distance from the job. This is two more than with a rattle can! I am using a small industrial compressor rated at 90psi and a regulator bought on eBay. Sensible pressures seem to be around 20psi, a bit lower for closer work and a bit more for working further away. I will post a photo later, after the latest coat has dried a bit. - Richard.

Ian thank you so much for putting back the missing photos. Perhaps I can distract you from your ballasting? I dislike the task so much only one of my basenboards baseboard in the last 6+ years has been done. I am painting my second wagon with my budget Humbrol spray gun. It seems to me, Humbrol and Revell enamels work when diluted about one part thinner to two parts paint, while Railmatch enamel needs roughly equal quantities of thinner and paint. Does this this sound about right to you? I ran this past the proprietor of a model shop who was aghast and told me this was far too much thinner. But the result seems to dry off quckly enough, and cover the job in a couple of coats. - Richard.

In the early sunshine earlier this week. - Richard.

Harry has just sensed my finger to be a source of nutritional content. I told him this was naughty and he shrunk his head down between his shoulders and shuffled around to face into the corner. He just cannot find the border between play nips and full-on bites, and I just cannot learn. - Richard.

Here is Harry, no decorum at all. - Richard.