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t-b-g

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t-b-g last won the day on November 26 2011

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  1. And the prize for the worst thread drift in RMWeb history goes to.........
  2. I agree that the crimson livery looks very smart indeed. I have just been having another look at the photo of 828. To me, it looks as if there is no discernable lining on the tanks and bunker but I could convince myself that there is lining on the boiler band just in front of the tanks. I could also convince myself that the cab sides might have a black border, with the possibility of an orange line between the border and the main colour. When you get colours like dark red, brown and orange on photos of that age, it can be really tricky to tell the apart.
  3. The loco doesn't look quite as dark as the carriage behind it but the carriage that appears behind the bunker looks the same sort of shade as the loco. So I am wondering if the carriage at the front end is crimson lake but the loco and the carriage at the rear are chocolate brown?
  4. Retford has SMP plain track but some of the Buckingham locos catch the inside of the chairs with their flanges. I wonder whether the flange profile in the 1940s/1950s was deeper, or if wear on the wheel treads has made the flanges deeper than they were when new? That is certainly the case on the only loco I have measured, which has the very rare Romford 20.5mm diameter wheels but was built with 21mm ones. Either way, they bump along on the plain track.
  5. Many thanks. I had spotted those but I wasn't sure if they would be the correct size for the carriages. The waist panels are quite small! Doh! Just spotted the sizes are shown on the website! Next time I visit my friend I will measure the carriages and see if they will fit.
  6. It was very loosely! The other end of the line was based on Henley on Thames and a train running at a scale 60mph took about 12 minutes to get from one end to the other. There were a total of 12 stations on the layout, large and small. It required around 200 locos to work the timetable. With that amount of layout to build, plenty of corners were well and truly cut.
  7. Either the lines go on to a fiddle yard or reversing loop to allow the trains to be returned, or they go on to a larger railway system (like the one I illustrated above), with perhaps another terminus station at the other end.
  8. A friend of mine built a layout based loosely on Paddington many years ago. He didn't call it Paddington as it was very much modified to fit the location. He sadly passed away before it was properly finished but I did take this snap of it in an "under construction" state.
  9. I agree entirely. I always thought " Half term at Ditchling Green" was a wonderfully evocative title for a layout. As was "The little long drag". I have never been creative enough to come up with anything that good!
  10. Hello Tony. I do remember it well. I saw it a couple of times, at York and elsewhere. I couldn't have told you whether it had working coal loading or not. It didn't make that much of an impression on me. Tom's experience would be another reason for not bothering with such things on a model. For a short while, in the late 1970s, I worked at the Orgreave coke works. I have never seen anything on a model that comes even close to the experience of seeing their hoppers working close up. The whole area around the hoppers was caked in a thick layer of dust, which when wet became the most horrible black slimy sludge! Yet I have seen models of such facilities with relatively clean ballasted track.
  11. I have rarely been convinced by attempts to have working loading and unloading facilities. Most hopper systems involve lots of noise and great clouds of dust, which you just don't get on models. Plus, you often have a scene where the figures are in static poses, when in real life they would be moving around. The best we can really do is to create a scene that looks realistic when photographed. When it is a moving 3D scene, we need lots of imagination to complete the gaps in the movement. The loading, unloading and movement of people in my imagination works just fine. Making one part of the action really happen without the other parts doesn't convince me, although I can be impressed by the work done to make it happen.
  12. Seeing the mentions of Buckingham reminds me that I have wondered about producing an exhibition layout based on one of the earlier versions of the layout. Probably either the double or single track version of the Mk 2 layout. The real Buckingham is not ever going to be taken to an exhibition as it is too fragile to move. It would need a couple of days setting up time to repair all the soldered joints that would break when the boards were lifted, as they twisted and flexed. Yet it would be good to share the locos and stock with a wider audience, so building a replica, perhaps using "old school" methods, Merco printed brickpaper and such, would be an interesting exercise. I hadn't even considered what I might call such a layout. It would have to have "Buckingham" in the name, so perhaps "Buckingham Mk 2", or even "Two tracks to Buckingham" as per the title of the Denny article in Railway Modeller all those years ago. I do think that there is a bit of a difference in philosophy between a modeller building a layout of a real place that has already been done by somebody else and a modeller building a duplicate of a fictional place. One is re-using a location. The other is re-using somebody else's creation.
  13. Each coal wagon has two bodies that fit on the same underframe. At the start of the sequence, empty coal wagons are scattered all over the layout. Between then and when the coal empties run, the wagons are collected together by the pilots at Buckingham and Grandborough and the train, starting at Buckingham, collects the empties from Grandborough and heads "north" to the fiddle yard. Once there, the bodies are swapped for the full loads. They then work back and get split up. At the end of the sequence, one of the tasks to carry out before the next day is to swap the full bodies for the empty one. So the body swaps are not done on scene during the normal running. There would be a further complication in that some wagons would go to Leighton Buzzard but that still isn't connected to the rest of the layout yet, so 6 wagons remain at Grandborough, rather than 3 there and 3 at Leighton Buzzard.
  14. On Buckingham, we have a Director's Saloon, which would normally be seen once in a blue moon. In the timetable it appears daily. Peter Denny told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that one of the Directors was having an "illicit relationship" with a barmaid at the Swan at Leighton Buzzard, which explains the daily visits and a stay at LB of a few hours before the return trip. On another matter, which has been discussed many times before, that of shunting vs. running trains through, I took this snap of the marshalling yard at Grandborough Junction yesterday, during our weekly running session. From the left, we have a down stopping passenger, calling at Platform 3 on it's way to Buckingham. Then we have the daily London to Buckingham goods, which has been reformed, having dropped off wagons for Grandborough and Leighton Buzzard and had some wagons for Buckingham from the other two stations added, using the coloured dots on the solebars as a guide. The loco will shortly come off shed and take it to Buckingham. In the next siding are six coal empties. Three would have come from LB, two from GJ goods yard plus an empty loco coal wagon from the loco depot. A train from Buckingham will collect these and head "up north" to return later with a loaded coal train, which will be distributed around the layout. The next siding has the wagons dropped from the goods train for GJ, which would be worked to GJ goods yard by the pilot between trains on the main line and the last one has the wagons dropped for LB. The pilot has been very busy doing all this while a succession of passenger trains either stop at GJ or rattle through non stop. That, to me, is what operating a layout is all about. To maintain my interest, I need a variety of types of train and movement. Repeating the same thing time and time again bores me very quickly.
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