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PatB

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Everything posted by PatB

  1. Interesting clerestory coach in the engineers' train. Any idea what it might be?
  2. PatB

    Dock Green

    I can sympathise with the friction saw job. I've got a toy Chinese one which gets occasional use but is avoided much of the time because of the noise, mess, sense of barely controlled danger and its tendency to shower everything within forty feet with a zillion particles of incandescent grit. Horrible, horrible thing. Easier than a hacksaw though.
  3. PatB

    Dock Green

    Florist's wire is generally soft iron/mild steel so it should stay in pretty much any shape you put it. Do bear in mind that any raw steel stored outside will have at least some rust on it. Even if it's treated with preservative, the coating inevitably gets scraped off in places. Should make for a tricky but rewarding weathering job to get the variety of finishes likely to be seen on the rack.
  4. PatB

    Dock Green

    What an excellent visual effect. As a resident of semi-rural Australia I'm something of a connoisseur of rusty corrugated iron (along with scabby asbestos cement sheets it was, until relatively recently, the primary building material here) and you've got it spot on.
  5. I was always under the impression that Bulleid's pacifics were specifically designed to be able to work down branch lines for exactly this reason.
  6. PatB

    Dock Green

    Fair enough. That's actually the opposite way round to my assumption but I'll happily defer to someone with specific knowledge of the subject.
  7. PatB

    Dock Green

    Hmm. Interesting. I've always assumed that the top would slope outwards towards the side which intruders would be trying to climb, it being harder to get around an overhang going up than coming down. Which way round the fence is would, I assume be dependent on who erected it. The industry, would, I suspect, be more interested in keeping intruders from the rail side out. I'm not sure why but I felt it would be more likely that the fence would be privately owned in this case as I tend not to think of railway fences being chain link until relatively recently. That's only based on limited observation and not hard historical fact though.
  8. PatB

    Dock Green

    Looking very good. I don't want to split hairs, but wouldn't it be more likely that the top of the fence would incline outwards? That's assuming that it would have been property of the industrial owner rather than the railway.
  9. Interesting that the brake van stove appears to be lit on what, if my memories of that summer are accurate, would have been a fine, warm August day.
  10. And that splendid combined water tank and (I assume) coaling stage.
  11. Thus illustrating that departmental duck shoving is neither new nor confined to the civil service.
  12. There is a wonderful quote in Geoffrey Freeman Allen's "Illustrated History of Railways in Britain", attributed to an anonymous LMS employee in the 1920s, which always makes me chuckle. It sums up the motive power approaches of the main English constituents of the LMS and goes thus: "At Derby the nice little engines were made pets of. They were housed in nice clean sheds and were very lightly loaded. At Horwich they had gone all scientific and talked in 'thous' although apparently some of their work was to the nearest half-inch. At Crewe they didn't care so long as their engines could rattle and roar along with a good paying load, which they usually did."
  13. PatB

    Dock Green

    The only real benefit I can see is in noise reduction. However, I see this as less of an issue on a shunting layout where wagons are shuffled around in short bursts at a scale 5-10 mph than it would be on a main line tailchaser with an A3 and ten heavy coaches roaring around for lengthy periods. Even then, though, I'm not really sure. 30 Years ago I was involved in building Somerset 0 Gauge Group's test track. There were two ovals of Bonds/Bassett-Lowke coarse scale track and one of Peco for the finescale (as it was in those days) boys. The coarse scale circuits were laid direct on the ply baseboards with the Peco on expanded polystyrene. I don't honestly remember the coarse scale circuits being offensively noisy, even with the seemingly all cast-iron locos and stock that many of our members favoured. Perhaps in a domestic environment it would have been a problem but in a noisy exhibition hall or on a club running day it never appeared to be an issue. I suppose it could be argued that cork takes pins but that falls down because any decent length of pin will go right through any sensible layer of cork into the substrate anyway. Besides, many plywoods are soft enough to take pins just as easily. Not all, though. Try it with Australian hoop pine ply and it'll end in tears. There might also be some small advantage if you want to recycle your baseboards. The cork layer provides a weak link so glued down components can be removed without ripping the surface off the board proper. But then you've got to clean all the shredded cork off anyway which is also an unattractive idea.
  14. PatB

    Dock Green

    That's a good point. Lightweight litter like paper or packing straw wouldn't be evenly or randomly distributed but would collect where it was carried by the wind and then trapped.
  15. Thanks. It was the lack of anything resembling a rocking beam which threw me. I'd think of that more as being partial springing but as long as it keeps all four wheels in contact with the rails it doesn't matter much.
  16. PatB

    Dock Green

    Oh, I only ever injure myself in proper imperial measurements, not your namby-pamby modern rubbish .
  17. How does the compensation work? I can't see it in the underside shots.
  18. PatB

    Dock Green

    Generally just far enough to leave a pool of inky blackness between lamps to make it more convenient to bark your shins on protruding bits of architecture.
  19. Shouldn't be. It's got no iron in it.
  20. Just as an aside, was it not Ladybank which should have been hauling the train which fell with the Tay Bridge? That's if I recall my "Red for Danger" correctly.
  21. Quite a bow in the sides of those wooden wagons. And was that an A4 we see passing early in the film? Presumably the station had been recently rebuilt under the Modernisation Plan.
  22. "Jane Scott, for genuine friends" if it's the same agency who had an ad in every issue of Railway Modeller for years. I'm not sure if I should be admitting that I remember .
  23. I approached my returning interest in small railways fairly carefully with MrsB, although I probably didn't need to. She's a professional artist and so is able to appreciate the attempt to create a scene in miniature, recognising the difference between Thomas performing endless small circles at 200 mph and a painstaking representation of the 5.45 down goods to Wibbleford Regis on 12th May 1954. She's also an accomplished jeweller and so is considerably more adept at small scale metalwork than I am. It's also helpful that I can scrounge things like weathering pastels, mounting card, small files and other tools off her when she's not looking .
  24. I have to disagree with the previous posters. As an afficionado of rural scrap piles, it's remarkable what can, or could 30 years ago, be found behind an English country garage. Whilst I never found a stack of old loco buffer beams, old oil engines, tractors and parts thereof were relatively common and some represented very large lumps of cast iron indeed which would have been of no earthly use in the repair of anything the garage was likely to encounter by the time I found it. Large, mysterious structures of crudely welded RSJ and angle were also fairly commonplace. So I'm fine with most of the scrap, apart, oddly enough, from the one obviously car bit amongst it. That wheel in the foreground looks a bit too 1980s cast ally to me. BTW, do I spy bits of a Triang 00 crane in there?
  25. Trains in films with non-functional continuous brakes are my personal technical bete-noir too. Those and road vehicle anachronisms.
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