AdamsRadial

And also the removal of your beloved baulk road, since I believe the Minehead extension from Watchet was standard gauge. Certainly the platform spacings at Blue Anchor aren't BG, whereas Watchet's platform and good shed is definitely BG. You could always just do the track of the WSMR alongside the GWR line as a semi-derelict track, and you could even replicate the Angus train control trials on it if you wanted.

There is an occupation crossing between Watchet and Washford that has both gates and a cattle-creep through a substantial culvert beside it. I think it is where the Kentsford? crossing was on the WSMR which is immediately adjacent to the Minehead line and was the scene of the fatal head-on between the two Nielson box tanks. However, I don't know if occupation crossings fell into the same category as highways (or even if the gated crossing was there from the outset or added after BR closed the branch).

I don't think they would have achieved that much effect, the idea was to use the expansive effect of steam to resist the motion of the piston instead of assist it. Going back to the Shipton on Cherwell disaster, the book "Wheels to Disaster" which whilst primarily about this accident also relates some of the french disasters of similar natures and touches on the subsequent reluctance to run certain types of tender engines tender-first.

From the plaintive sounds of the whistle there can't have been much pressure left.

The screw at the back of the motor secures it to the chassis at the back, then there are lugs at the front of the motor, wiggling it gently from side to side should get them free. ETA sorry, I just realised I'm referring to the Triang L1, my advice is unlikely to be relevant to what I suspect is a Northern beast

It sounds like there's been mass slaughter of all the things I knew and loved. My attempts to repair the laptop on which I was slowly working away at the East Kent Railway have met yet another obstacle and so I'm slowly re-installing the backups on a tower on which I shall use TC3, but at the rate I'm going I shall have actual 00 models running well before any virtual ones run.

Scratching away at an old memory here, have you looked at the invisible signals on the DLS? Assuming your apparently one-piece mixed gauge track is actually two distinct lines in close proximity, you might be able to have invisible signals on one of the gauges and then chat by scripts to the visible signals?

I managed to get a small collet chuck to grip after rally tightening the thing up.

I'm also seeing delays of several minutes when trying to navigate the sub-forums. Oddly, I was able to access this area very quickly, it's the other forums of my main interests I can't get to load.

I've been looking for an opportunity to use the word "Behemoth" for some time, and today my ship came in.

I think it was only MSTS gave you fine control over the stock sounds.

Yes, they're not ideal for everything. You can sometimes heat-treat them to remove a lot of the spring by quenching them in a saline solution. Like TomParryHarry I try to make a virtue of re-using as much as I can of what is usually regarded as mere packaging. I'm a vegetarian myself but since my partner isn't and does like corned beef I try to persuade her to live of it because the tin cans it comes in are nice and flat and solder easily.

I've chopped up old umbrellas in the past for the metal sections, and you can often find useful bits in old car wiper-blades.

Not for the first time, I have a wonderful broad gauge map, I can't remember if it's Restormel or Turk's Castle, but in one of the TS10 or TS12 SPs all the Brunel viaduct splines collapsed, leaving the track broken on the terrain. It took me some fixing and was one of the issues that has made me reluctant to go to TaNE or anything post-2012.

On reflection I realised an O1 is not easy because the cab is the same width as the tender sides. That's a slightly more complicated hack. Looking more closely at your pictures I'm impressed with how little the motor body extends above the tender top, it's going to be quite easy to form a plastic coal mound around it without having the loco look like it's been prepped for a major cross-country run. ETA My purchased C-class just arrived and in browsing through the bitsa drawers I found an Airfix 4f loco chassis I'd totally forgotten I had. Sadly there's no tender drive, and the dean-goods tender drive unit has too great an axle spacing to fit the C tender body, so I'm going to try an old project, of converting the Airfix 4F loco chassis to direct drive.

A third option is the boss and gudgeon pin are offset outwards from the crosshead and piston rod centreline. I suppose there was a design struggle to try and fit larger diameter outside cylinders while keeping to the gauge restrictions. Putting the connecting rod on the outside of the coupling rod (as you must) means the cylinder centreline also moving outwards unless you start doing these clever tricks with extended rods allowing the connecting rod to be in line with the coupling rod. I found Mike Sharman's book of early LSWR locomotives and there is a small group of Joseph Beattie outside-cylinder designs where the same extended coupling rod appears.

If you rummage in the trees at the right spot around Luxborough road, the ruins of the station are still there, although if you didn't know there'd been one you'd never guess it from what's left.

That is an excellent conversion. I'm now wondering if I can convert one into a Wainright rebuild of the Stirling O class into an O1. I think it will have to be loco-driven as the tender is quite a bit narrower. I'v got a pair of Airfix 4F's but for sentimental reasons I can't chop them around, so it's going to be a chassis build for me.

That photo is in the David Baxter Victorian and Edwardian Locomotives book and I was able to view it under a bit more magnification. What appears to be bent/curved slide bars are in fact a trick of the shadows and grease? The slide bars seem to be fish-bellied above and below the straight guides, and those curves seem to be misleading the eye into thinking the entire slide bars are bent. What is also clearer under magnification is that the connecting rod is most likely forked around the coupling rod extension. This is the opposite of the Crewe/Allan practice on the outside framed locos where they initially forked the gudgeon-pin end of the connecting rod, but let it run on a normal style big-end on a crankpin on the single driver. I can't find any backing for my initial thoughts about platform clearance, Mac's Mangle was fouling the outside framing around the cylinders on some platforms (so it must have been the odd brick standing proud, as I'm sure the design would have paid attention to the loading gauge). They dropped outside framing quite quickly. The only Forrester/Hawkshaw type 2-4-0s showing this connecting rod arrangement don't appear until after Mac's Mangle was built, and then the practice stops by about 1860, with no comment as to why it was first adopted and then dropped. I've gone through Ahrons, Stretton, and Baxter and that's about all I can glean. A question for the planchette, maybe?

How about a stand of trees?

OK, interesting. Ahron's The British Steam Railway Locomotive P79-80 mentions platform clearance problems with an early 2-2-2, but not the Bloomers. It's not the book I need to find which had a lot more about the shuffling around of CME's. But, in direct relevance to the particular locomotive that started this train of thought (sorry), on P99 is a photo of a Beattie 2-4-0 showing exactly this arrangement of coupling-rod extending past the crank pin and the connecting rod pivot on a leading extension. The book I'm still hunting for might be the Hughes memoirs (Hardy ?Hughes? ) a senior officer of the LNWR who describes some of the set-tos between Chairman and CME, or it might be in the Aspinall history. At present most of my books are in boxes awaiting new shelves, the ones I kept out are typically not the ones needed to answer these sort of questions ETA still with Ahrons, p121 shows a photo of a Trevithick 2-4-0T with the same extension to the coupling rod, it seems to have been Crewe/Allen hallmark? P118 shows a Caledonian 2-4-0 with it as well. I'm thinking this is definitely the result of what was learned in 1849 by the experimental 2-2-2 that clobbered the platforms, as the other engines come after this.

I'll have to dig out the books, might take an afternoon.

Makes me think of Mac's Mangles - perhaps this was necessary to keep the cylinders away from the platform. Thinking about the thickness of a rod plus washers/bearing surfaces there'd be a couple of inches to be saved. I haven't found much specific detail about the platform clearance problems that Mac's Mangles were notorious for, but I'm guessing the problem was only evident on curved platforms ?

I've had similar experience when I was creating the East Kent Light Railway using OS Landform DEM height-mapped data (I'm not sure if it was pure shuttle mission stuff, I think it was the OS mix of contours and shuttle radar). Anyway, at Elvington Halt I found myself facing a veritable cliff where there should have been gently rolling landscape. After several weeks of head-scratching I sneaked away from the steel mill and rode around that area on a bicycle. At Elvington I found that Tilmanstone Colliery spoil heap had been bulldozed across a mile of countryside. There was indeed a veritable cliff, but it was dirty dark grey instead of milky white chalk. It still amuses me to this day. Good to see old TRS004 stuff still running in the modern trainz, by the way.

During the short period they ran them, the workman's trains to the (unauthorised) halt in Tilmanstone yard were probably the most-frequented coaches.