Andy Hayter

Pleased to say that our snow is disappearing almost as quickly as it came. About half disappeared yesterday - and has filled all of the empty water butts that were set out just before the snow came. The rest is now melting fast.

Snow today. From nothing this morning; I have just ventured out for the first time today to do the nightly rounds of emptying cat litter trays and filling food dishes and the drifts in places are crutch deep.

Ah but I have an ongoing project* in the house. Winter does tend to make the modelling room a tad cold so I have management authorisation to bring small projects into the house. * More of that elsewhere later when a bit more progress has been made.

15 Degrees you say! Here it has snowed from around 08:00 onwards. 20 - 30 cm now with, in places, quite a lot of drifting. I am not even thinking of venturing out to cross to the grange and model floor.

I agree but if you build layouts for public exhibition then outside approval is also required, so it is a bit more complex than your one liner.

I despair of the "People who only xxx are not proper modellers" arguments. The problem is that those who shout such negative (against others) comments do not realise that there is a whole spectrum of modelling and I am almost certain that they are not at the pinnacle of the I am much better/purer than you mountain. To illustrate You are not a proper modeller because: You only run rtr out of the box. You only make minimal changes to rtr items - number and name changes. You don't build kits. You don't scratch build anything; You run on non-scale track. You are using EM and not P4 (other scale combinations are available in almost all scales). You have not modelled a real location. You have truncated your real location. You have not done your proper research. That loco could never have pulled that piece of stock. (Oh actually I don't have a layout but I do know what is right and wrong.) So where do you sit on that spectrum? Me? 00 gauge. Have kit and scratch built stock but am not afraid to use rtr. Happily scratch building infrastructure but at the same time will buy in components such as window, doors, textured sheets etc..

Ah yes. To misquote Kilgore, "I love the smell of Molybdenum Sulphide in the morning."

As a pre-war GCR modeller the only reference I can find for GCR dark wagon grey is on the Precision paints web site. As shown above it is much lighter and some sources indeed suggest LMS wagon grey as good match, so your suggestion is a good one. With very limited access to Precision paints, I use Tamiya XF-66 light grey.

But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale

No No No. The gentleman was Mr Mohs. If you were to put an apostrophe it would be Mohs's - but we don't. I don't understand the rules for these things but it is Mohs scale for hardness, the Beaufort scale for wind strength, the Richter scale for earthquake strength, Fujita scale for tornados but for example Newton's laws of motion.

It's Mohs harness scale Tony. No apostrophe, since the inventor is Fredrick Mohs.

"To be a sport, I think that an activity needs to meet these three criteria: 1. It must be competitive in that there is the potential for victory or loss. The competing to be carried out by persons acting individually or in teams. It may also be carried out by individuals to compare their performance against a personal best. 2. It must contain a physical element requiring strenuous/developed muscular effort i.e. raises the heart rate, increases breathing or generates a sweat. This does not have to be a whole-body effort, but may be confined to part of the body. 3. It requires an element of developed/developing skill." Since Mountaineering has just been mentioned, I will throw is potholing alongside it. Criteria 2 and 3 certainly apply with both but the potential for victory or loss? Victory perhaps against the objective to climb/descend your target and I suppose you could caveat that with "without loss of life"

@lezz01 I don't think you need the "2" in 2-Butanone. There is only one configuration for a ketone bond on a 4 carbon chain. So Butanone covers the molecule. Sorry very off topic.

Unless this is a model sold solely on pre-orders*, manufacturers already have a good idea of expressions of interest versus actual sales. I think you read too much into this. What is clear is that for more esoteric models, buying blind is becoming more and more the norm. So far I have been lucky (?) and have picked up quite a number of models that would otherwise not have been produced * In which case I would expect cancellation rather than delay.

Beware of presuming. The quirks of British advertising law means that "something based" only means the majority of the ingredients are "something". The rest could be very different. In fact the only non plant based ingredients seems to be salt and acidity regulator (which might just be plant based but I doubt it) but some of the ingredients are highly processed. Tomatoes (81%), Water, Fermented Soy, Modified Cornflour, Sugar, Rapeseed Oil, Salt, Acidity Regulator - Citric Acid, Spice Extract, Herb Extract

I think it got horribly expensive.

Yes full set of standards issued under the NEM norms. The problem is they are centred on German railway history and sometimes they coincide with other country's development and often they don't get to a close match.

The pitched roof is typical of those from the mid 20th century FS Italian wagons. This one from Roco is similar but not identical: https://www.reynaulds.com/products/Roco/56066.aspx I have expanded the view and think I can make out FS at the end of the third row up on the markings at the far end.

Try that during the safety briefing on an airliner and see where it gets you.

Just a few thoughts based on the observations above - and also assuming that the weathering effect has the same cause in all of the observed occasions . I have never seen this effect on any of my layouts. Track on the scenic side is painted to represent rusting but track in fiddle yards is left au naturelle. The comment about cleaning the crud off with HP sauce points very strongly to oxidation. Incidentally tomato ketchup is more commonly used to remove such corrosion but to each his own taste. Nickel Silver does not normally oxidise even if its components of copper, nickel and perhaps zinc does have metals that are fairly reactive. So why should track in the garden or in a summerhouse show corrosion. Boxes of track stored in shops for perhaps months or years before being stored at home for longer do not show any signs of this. It then occurred to me that by soldering our electrical connections to the nickel silver, we create a situation where electrolytic corrosion can occur. This is where 2 metals or alloys in contact with one another, when also in contact with water create an electric cell where the more reactive metals corrode. The less reactive metal is protected. This is used in galvanising corrugated iron sheets, where the zinc coating corrodes over time but protects the mild steel sheet. So where that leads me is that lead/tin solder is less reactive than copper and zinc in the nickel silver. All you now need is water to create the electrical circuit to allow electrolytic corrosion to occur. The garden is obviously open to rain and a summerhouse with wide temperature ranges could well provoke a degree of condensation on the metal track. It will be a slow process so a single dousing in water (eg when ballasting with PVA) would not in itself be enough to create the effect. That would explain why I have never seen this effect If this is correct, then layouts in uninsulated lofts should exhibit the same darkening of the rails. As to sleepers breaking up - this is almost certainly uv degradation of the plastic base. PECO used to claim that their track was resistant but this is resistant not guaranteed to last forever.

Or of a friend, who left our organisation for a (friendly) rival. In doing so he raised the average IQ of both organisations.

I apologise Tony. I thought your comments related to those models brought to you for repair, not those selected (randomly or specifically) for review.

In fairness Tony, you will not be looking at a representative sample. People (at least those here who know your preferences) are not going to bring you their perfectly running but ordinary rtr models. You get the lame, halt and badly built ones. Now of course in a perfect world no rtr model would run badly or have bits missing or dropping off. However, you see a self selecting sample of these failures.

Seems so. From Wiki: History[edit] The bitter orange spread from Southeast Asia via India and Iran to the Islamic world as early as 700 C.E.[7] The bitter orange was introduced to Spain in the 10th century by the Moors.[8][9] It was introduced to Florida and the Bahamas from Spain,[3] and wild trees are found near small streams in generally secluded and wooded areas.

I would be surprised if they didn't ship by boat. Airfreight over that distance is going to cost around $6US/kg so adding $12 to that 2kg bag! It is a bit different from shipping say green beans from Kenya to Europe - half the distance so half the cost divided over 5 x 200gm packs so perhaps 45p per 200gm pack