ianmianmianm

Not and never have been a TT modeller but I have variously looked at 1:120 scale with N gauge track for a European metre gauge prototype (finding scenics a challenge) and then settled on 1:87 scale with 12mm gauge track instead (better scenics, chassis challenges). I did see a TT 120 layout at the weekend (operating an A4, and a French diesel I think) and my main interest is in the use of the chassis. Economically, could Hornby have propped up the economic potential of the full RTR products by making the chassis available? Or even gone into this with some partnering of experienced 3D print producers to help develop 3rd party ranges that use some of the Hornby chassis (even selecting Hornby's choices with a strong influence on the potential to partner up). I am sure they spoke at length with Peco and Gaugemadter on the outset of this. I know little to nothing about the commercial aspects of this but have used many many 9mm Kato tram chassis and feel sure the profits from selling these far outweigh the sales of actual Kato trams. FInally - if I am diving into a new layout or project, you aren't going to get me buying a loco with nothing for it to drag. Even in cottage industry niche metre gauge Portuguese we've managed to get our supplier providing carriages and loco in the same year.....

I'm going to need to do something on my layout at the two spots indicated by the blue arrows. They are 3-point turn locations for the radio controlled bus and car respectively. Along the rest of the route there are buildings and foliage that will stop them going over the edge, but here I will probably need to pin some 1cm tall acrylic from packaging as a crash barrier. They may be come the smallest ever perspex fronts on a layout.....

I would right now love to be able to go on holiday there, only because I have yet to be able to find anywhere in London that can do decent Trinidadian rotis and Doubles as well as Singh's in Grand Cayman (the signs on the building are from a different Singh's though). I am ramping up the railcar fleet at the moment.... One I am working on is this one which is from two American schoolbuses spliced back to back with the front snout removed from each. I was going to cannibalise four in total (bought at £4 each) to create something 2-car, then realised how much these actually sell for on ebay, so am hoping the untouched pair sell on there in which case if the price is achieved it will fund cost of the whole conversion. This currently sits on a Kato 4 wheel chassis, a la Park Royal Railbus, and looks reasonable but I might try and find a Bo-Bo of the right length if I see one cheap. At the moment it's the only 2-axle railcar on the roster. The splicing went a bit wrong but a Class 58 diesel grille on each side hides the bodge. The Tomytec 2 car unit is a repaint of these: A better pic below on the old South American layout. The original is a single bubble car with a flat ended non-driving trailer, but the ends of each car unclip so if one end of each is swapped over, you end up with 2 identical cars. The single car is a repaint of one of these: it's in British Racing Green as a suggestion of an "old" livery. The Tomytec railcars are lovely models, and a single car can just about be gotten including motorised clip-in chassis for under £60 from Plaza Japan or Hobysearch. The paint compatibility seems to be variable - the cream with red stripe happily takes an overspray without stripping, but the light blue on the 2-car was not happy to be painted on at all. The Nohab is one of two bodies I bought for a Portuguese HOm layout. I am not totally happy with the shallow roof profile for that model so decided to move one across to this project. I have an old Kato bogie chassis for it to run on which is rather rubbish so looking to track down an N gauge Budd railcar or a Greenmax chassis for it. I am going to complete the fleet with a couple of articulated "Walker" type units from Tebee. Now that Tom is selling as digital downloads, it's better value than buying through Shapeways as , I've bought the print files and will use 2 driving cars and a central power/van car for each, but have these printed in the UK. This will sit on a Kato 109 chassis and just needs some Peco or Roco coach bogies to complete. As I already had three Kato 109s and coach bogies, this was the cheapest way to grow the fleet up to having 5 or 6 units to run, without spending too much more cash.

A bit of a necropost on this. I did see a front barrier system made using cardboard posting tubes. The plastic ends were glued onto the front and spray painted black. The tubes, painted a bright white, simply plugged onto these and had holes in the end through which the rope ran. Totally plug and play, 20 seconds to set up, and when removed the plug pieces were not noticeable.

So I feel rather intimidated posting my layout here seeing some of the well recognised names on here and also the achievements of some of the novices too, and among the threads of layouts I have followed for many years/ This effort was built in a few weeks, and is scenically 4 feet long, but here goes. I have been modelling since the 1980s but have been living between the UK and various overseas jobs since 2013. In most cases, modelling continued while abroad but layouts didn't make it home to the UK. I have never really got into narrow gauge until 2019 when I decided to have a try at building something small and ultra-portable while I was living in Bermuda. A couple of attempts at small OO9 and freelance lines were made, and I was then diverted into making an N gauge diorama of the Bermuda Railway and an N gauge Underground layout. Ultimately it came time for me to return to blighty and the OO9 affair, lovely as it was, it was the least progressed and was scrapped. But I found myself with a couple of railcars and a loco or two which came home. The N gauge layouts, incidentally, each being 21cm by 160cm, were designed to fit in Really useful boxes and came home in two 80cm x 30cm x 30cm holdalls holding 2 boards each. Aviation security at Bermuda LF Wade had no idea what was in the boxes so needless to say I had to go through and open them and scan them all after they'd been checked in. So I'm left with these railcars and a few buildings and bits, and come 2023 I am back in mainland UK again. I tried a couple of micro layout ideas with a South American twist but just couldn't get them to feel right. A house move last year led to them being scrapped but shortly after this, I was able to pick up a 4ft x 15 inch baseboard with a beautiful curved backscene. I wasn't looking for one but it was incredibly cheap and the seller was next door to my employer's head office where I had to visit anyway. So I picked it up one morning and loaded it into my Smart for Two (with just enough room to see the wing mirror and most of the passenger window. And then it promptly sat on its end in the hallway, unused for 10 months. During this time I'd added the odd OO9 item and had also been inspired by Rob Rossington's "Turtle Bay" and Charles Insley's "Fort Whiting". Earlier this month a massive mojo-flash hit. I decided I would have a crack at doing something British and island colonial and see if I could get the feeling a bit more right. Since 2016 I've lived in Malta, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands and in the early 2000s travelled to Gibraltar for work several times a year so surely I could try and recreate some of that vibe of being in Britain and not in Britain at the same time? Last year I also acquired a couple of 1:87 scale radio control road vehicles - a car and a bus, and with the railcars I had being Japanese Tomytec ones at 1:80, and a conversion of a Nohab Portuguese Metre Gauge bodyshell at 1:87, I estabished a rough scale protocol for the layout. Stock would be to HOe scale in either 1:87 or 1:80, although OO scale will be allowed if the prototype loading gauge was small. The layout would include minimal track, with signs of a rationalised track plan and be set in the 1970s or 1980s. Road vehicles were going to need to match the working RC ones at 1:87, so using American and European HO vehicles and some of the few British HO cars made as well. On a few islands, UK and USA car models do mix freely, and on the layout it's not immediately clear if the road are LHT or RHT. Buildings were a bit more of a challenge - I played around with some US outline buildings and also some more Spanish/Latin types but in the end used predominantly OO scale buildings which I already had, and a few second hand purchases. Star finds are the Dapol flat roof shop and flat (I will need to work on that at some point as I am not sure a flat roof works in hurricane territory) which is the Indian Trinidad Roti shop. The Skaledale cricket pavilion is Mis Lilly's Jerk shack. A Fair Price models house acts as an insurance office (I am least happy with this one and its days are numbered) and a couple of faourites are a swapmeet Pola bungalow that has been Caribbeanised (that was £2) and the bottom of an Artitec apartment building facade (I trod on the top half accidentally) which became the police station frontage. Road fixtures and fittings are mainly HO but there is some OO in there - I plan to replace those phone boxes and the post box at some point. So here it is - a really enjoyable build, taking OO9 in a slightly different direction, even if I am allowed to call it OO9. My next couple of builds will be stricter to real railways with accurate stock. But it's been great fun scavenging the bits for this layout, and learning to drive the radio controlled road vehicles takes the place of the loss of shunting.

Thanks for the reply Michael! The Defender goes into the mix. The commercial range from Carson is in 1:87 and not all of them am I rebodying - it's just that the range is quite narrow and some of it is a bit too specific (a Herbie 53 VW Beetle for example). I made a decision to keep all road vehicles, static and moving, to HO scale as they all interact and so it would be quite noticeable as they would appear next to each other. Stock on the layout is generally HOe but with some OO9 but in these cases it seems to work because of the loading gauge, and perhaps because the models themselves are bigger. However when it comes to the smaller road cars, it's too jarring (I already tried out some OO Oxfords just to see what it looks like). I did find that there is a Brekina FIat 238 which might be a good match. Now it's a case of finding one that is cheap enough to take apart and try out, or one that's in a physical shop so I can take my Type 2 along for a direct comparison. Cheers - Ian

Sorry this is so very niche; I tried Google but it's a difficult one to find search terms for. Does anyone know of a commercial vehicle (van or minibus) which has a wheelbase of around 94 or 95 inches. I'd like to rebody a Carson 1:87 VW Type 2 T1 which is an RTR product and is radio controlled, to a different vehicle for variety and a bit more realism. I am working in HO anyway so no concerns about the scale difference. I know the Type 2 was also done for the faller system so maybe this rings a bell with anyone who has done the work using that. (I wouldn't be able to use OO gauge models as I am working in 1:87 so that rules out all the Oxfords). Here's the potential donor vehicle

I just finished a micro layout which is 4 x 16 inches. The track plan is literally a tuning fork, partly because a chunk of the layout space is intended for working road vehicles; but also the majority of my buildings are full depth with ultralow relief on the backscene for any buildings there (instead of flat pictures) and only 2 low relief buildings out of a total of 10, and these being on the ends. It's the first time I have built anything in this way and I find it much more immersive than previous thin layouts.

Just another comment on this - the VW Beetle arrived today and that is a sheer joy to drive and use. It could be run on the smallest of layouts. There is (obvs) no sound but there are working lights and you can 4-point turn it in a space of about 4 inches. It'll probably do a U-ey in around the same space as well. The best thing for me is that it can be driven very very slowly which gets me past the issues I have traditionally always had with the Faller system.

I don't know how easy the chassis would be to do..... to be able to stay true to protoype to, if you were motorising it, but the narrow-gaugeness of it allows more space into the body I suppose. I would myself veer toward the "inspired-by" option as otherwise it may be so frustrating to try and keep true, that you might never get it done. Also going freelance allows for modelling of another train and you then get to come up with some crazy concoctions for that. Scenic break wise, some trees might well do it - not just at the actual exit point, but also strategically in the foreground. Ive also previously used a cluster of trees but with a piece of black card placed within the cluster to hide all light or visibility coming through, which becomes completely unnoticeable. And with there being so much 1:64 scale road vehicles available (if you went to Sn3 1/2) there might be a suitable road vehicle that could do the job, if you wanted to put it in an odd position then model the vehicle as broken down or burnt out perhaps??? This could be a good view blocker if repainted https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/386698101016?epid=26062464881&itmmeta=01HRZFX1WTTR803PNR2816HBHY&hash=item5a0900c118:g:C6sAAOSwjtlktXZv&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA4FAsU7Ls7ftt3lXSNY3Dib7DVr7jSyUrSWQCtYyCrExAt%2FT7TZa70f39xn%2B1wMSG06avN3HlgCpDjY5DSBep0zVWqqXe0dmjp8YouPUSHy4Cw4qEW7rA5jdnrmrB4N8OU%2F25QX3G8TH5aQRzjQo4M3IJ1aYNvH8pY0MLmlQfF%2Fd8AWfxBUqdvofYv1u7tPlHa4l%2FawAOtzhzU%2Bc4eCuuU189i8XOTHyUhj5vQiAFJSNBbHs%2F3aDc7oISCadppOJytQYbrIehYMzgHx1qP2wxRqIbJ31PvC4CCV3BstJ4EU9m|tkp%3ABk9SR_Ke9O_HYw for example.

Model railway police you say....... On a serious note, wasn't there an exhibition recently with two layouts, one in N and one in O, of the same station (Abngdon maybe) ?

That Honduras railway looks immensely modellable. It would lend itself to those Scale Model Scenery wrapping paper box size boards and you could just keep adding more boards onto the end as you built more shacks! Maybe doing it at Standard Gauge to use the Bachmann model although there appear to be every permutation of Wickham trolley HERE: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace?type=product&q=wickham-trolley to mate to an appropriate chassis. £100 worth of Redutex sheets and some plasticard should be enough to get going. My effort was really from having the railcars spare from other aborted projects. For some background, I have lived in Malta, Bermuda, Grand Cayman, Alderney (where we had a train of Wickhams which stood in for the tube train) and done a lot of work in Gibraltar. So I have tried for a bit of atmosphere without picking a protoype specifically. An island location appeals obviously but I also wondered about continental Caribbean countries like Belize or Guyana especially the former having only gaining independence in the 1980s. I initially tried doing something based on a more Hispanic protoype but found I couldn't get it quite right. Since taking the pictures I've settled on a ficitious island called "Great Brac". Choosing HO for the layout was totally based on the scale of the RC models by Carson, which I didn't really want to take apart and rebody. Luckily the coach is not obviously handed from the outside although the steering wheel is on the left, but as I say, LH and RH vehicles mix freely in some islands. I wanted a handful of "British Territory" features like the phone box and some police cars; and luckily they are available in HO. I've already got stock for the Bermuda Railway in N - almost all the passenger stock is available from Shapeways as accurate bodyshells although I would probably suggest OO instead of N because of chassis considerations. This will almost defitinely be an "uber micro" - almost working diarama and a rebuild of one I did before (see photo). It's a really easy to research protoype because there is a superb dedicated website and two books in print. Many of the station buildings are still standing and can be seen on Google maps. Other projects with stock and buildings already in hand are Portugese HOm, Spanish HOm, London DLR and tube among others.

I wanted to come back again on this thread at the risk of a bit of self-promoting of my project. I've just spent 17 days building a layout which I have loosely placed on a fictitious island that is either a current or former UK Overseas Territory (AKA colony) and is set in the 1980s. It's a very simple tuning fork track plan, but a key scenic feature of it is an open roadway area where I am using a radio controlled bus and car that will come into the station yard and each able to reverse and turn round. It about 4 frrt by 15 inches. This project has literally thrown on its head the way the layout needs to be designed because structures, scenics, trees and telegraph poles, as well as track plan, have to allow the right amount of turning space for the road vehicles - it's not as precise as a buried-wire based system, but the bus is fun to drive and can be driven very slowly. It also has working lights and sound on board. The bus and car models are HO scale which has meant I needed to set some pathways as to what scale I use for stock and other accessories. This in itself meant blending HO and OO buildings, while sticking to HO for figures, vehicles and stock. Being a supposed British territory, I managed to locate an HO scale Rover P6 police car, and ford transit, and the prototype allows me to mix some of the HO scale American Oxford diecast vehicles with more European models - as happens a lot on islands close to the US. At the moment the only aberration is the OO scale british phone box - I am witing to see how I feel about that one but it could always be replaced by a Brawa HO one if needed. Stock on the layout is in European and Japanese HO scale but the randomness of narrow gauge loading gauges might allow others to be tried out. I've really really enjoyed building this as it's an unusual prototype, its been fun to research what's available out there (not to mention the endorphine of finding what you need on Ebay). Blending the building styles without it looking like a kid'd train set has also been a challenge and almost all the buildings were cheap exhibition finds of between 50p and £9 which have had reworked roofs, repaints or been decorated with signs researched on the net. I've also lived and worked in 3 UKOT locations as well as Malta, so being able to If it ever makes it to an exhibition then I'd hope it would provoke discussion and be a break from all those diesel depots.... or maybe it might be too abstract for some tiny minds to cope with....

The plot thickens again! https://thewarleyshow.co.uk/

Massive necropost here. I bought the blue bus last year which I really like although the sound is just the engline turnover so while being ideal if it's idling, sounds naff in motion. Driving speed can be fine tuned to a slower more realistic speed with the controller on a flat surface and using 2 fingers to pinch the lever. The headlights are lovely and the model itself is beautifully decorated, with the interior visible. You would struggle to take this apart and adapt it to any other model, at the price it's not bad value as it comes in cheaper than the faller system and can be retro-added. I really enjoyed driving this into a yard, turning it round by 3-point turn, idling and exiting. The reason I am necroposting now is that, while the other vehicles in the range other than the buses had been a bit useless in terms of general non-gimmicky prototypes, there are some VW Beetles on the near horizon which will have some applications for everyday use.

Yes it is the same one but has been dismantled. It was a shelf arrangement so the first pic is a through station just before the fiddle yard and the second pic is the terminus. It's a freelance imagination of a former colonial island line somewhere where there is British and Spanish linguistic influence. I was also based in Grand Cayman for a little while and was very taken with how the American sourced and British sourced cars all trotted along together on the roads as well. The beige building is the back of a 50 year old Airfix/Dapol garage bought for 20p at a show because the front was broken. It reminds me of the supermarket on the island of Tristan Da Cunha!

I haven't fully read the thread so forgive me if I am repeating. Basically like some other responders, I tend to like things which are a bit unusual and quirky. I find that repeats of the same trope (the 6 ft depot layout for example), or just seeing the same layout again and again at shows (currently happening a bit in the South East) can be a turn off. I have modelled on and off for 40 years now, and, healthily for my mind, but less so for my bank balance, my affiliations wax and wane. I spent a very long time yearning after a combined tube and train layout - wanting the mainline element to be SR focussed led to a good few expeditions to shops to see if kitbuilt EMUS were for sale. Right now I am mostly working with 3 prototypes - the railway in Bermuda in N gauge (I made a small diorama when I lived in Bermuda and walked the old trackbed daily). I am also playing around with the DLR and Underground in N gauge - but the forthcoming Revolution Class 313s will change the emphasis of that. And I have a little freelance island/colonial side hustle in OO9, inspired by Rob Rossington's Turtle Bay. At shows I can easily be distracted by a small micro layout that is well built and again the "Pempoul Effect" kicks in. I avoid the same foreign layout themes that pop up (Swiss metre gauge layouts, German big tailchasers, and those noisy American logging affairs). My favourites of late being: - Rossiter Rise (though I was less fond of the Earls Court predecessor) - Nove Mesto (sp?) - though I also really like Alan's Rheidol layout that he has just done, though I am not fond of Welsh NG - Campo De Leste (1980s Portugal) - Gouttieres (SNCF, one track, lots of trees) Here's a couple of my own efforts, though these are now packed away and awaiting the time to build something better.

A really lovely show, sooooooo crowded but well done on achieving that to the club. As well as the layouts and stands, some cracking displays of standing in front of layouts blocking the view while chatting to yer mates and not looking at the layout, and also the lesser spotted cut in right in front of someone with walking difficulties only to then stand stop still and dither to ensure the person you cut in front of now can't get past.......

I do note that Key Model World has a wider model show running at the NEC in April to which they have invited the Warley MRC; it's a bit of a shame that they couldn't have pitched into the existing Warley show at year end to make it more of a joint venture - in the way that IMREX eventually led to Ally Pally. I know the Key venture isn't just railways and I am sure there are all sorts of good reasons why that collaboration hasn't happened. It's just a shame that we now have most of the bigger shows in a 2-month window early in the year with really Stafford and Manch at the end of the year, assuming GETS still happens as well perhaps.

I'm a rare visitor here and a hopeless modeller. But looking at this, as you are going hell for leather, is there any scope for replicating the seat moquette? Even if that means just printing some pattern shapes on paper and gluing them on the seats?? Thank you!

To be fair, Crossrail took 48 years to open.

Mike - does this mean the new bus no longer automatically restarts once it has stopped. IE do you have to flick the swithc to get it moving again??

Does anyone happen to have an email address for them please? The phone isn't answered and neither are messages on the website contact form. Thanks

I can't find any pics or clips of this, but in the Alien Nation TV series, Gary Graham's character had an O gauge tailchaser in his LA loft apartment.

,