Chris Densham

So last year's Christmas present becomes this years?!

I've just had exactly the same with a sheet of Slaters 4mm brick. This has been stored in a cupboard so not exposed to light, and from memory is about 3 years old. Very brittle, if you try to bend it then it just snaps in two. Fortunately it's the last sheet I've got. All the plain plasticard seems fine.

I couldn't understand why I had problems with the Peco switches when they are such a simple arrangement. Suffice to say I found that simply unclipping them (taking them apart) and bending the copper connector to a greater degree of bend ( technical term!) and clipping back together solved the problem.

Another very satisfied customer. Ordered a gear box that arrived very swiftly. Then I managed to crush one of the axle bushes trying to get too snug a fit. I emailed High Level and a replacement (plus spare, they know me too well) arrived the next day FOC. Thank you for outstanding service.

Once again superb service. Wizard is now my "go to" for supplies. Ordered on Bank Holiday Monday and order arrived on Wednesday. Outstanding!

Thanks Mike.

Great photograph! A question not to do with the locomotive but the general scene. The huge pile on the left hand side, is that coal? If so, for the loco?

Another thumbs up to Wizard. Ordered on Tuesday and delivered today. Now all I've got to do is put it all together!

I'm looking for a couple of large containers of Carrs Ash Ballast. Anyone got any left over from a project?!

I remember reading Peter Denny in RM say that he rarely had a full day off each week with the different duties the job required. But within most days there's was an odd hour or two here and there which he could devote to the railway. He concluded that he felt he acheieved more this way than devoting a whole day to Buckingham.

Thanks, some really interesting ideas here. I'm sure there were no cassettes around when it was first drawn. I'll have to do some measuring up and see what the possibilities might be. I'm looking at a total max available length of about 17 feet, with 10 feet set aside for the scenic part, which will allow for an occasional six coach train but mainly 5 coach suburban with tank engines/small tender engines, with an available engine in the spur to take the coaches out as the next train. (As described by CJF). I'm not keen on three way points, got one on the current BLT and vowed never to use one again. Most of the time it works ok with most of the stock, but even with a lot of tweaking I'm not really confident in it which is a great shame as it's a great space saver.

Gentlemen, thanks for your replies. I'm planning steam age, LNER just prior to WW2. As David says using a traverser is complicated by the positioning of the tracks being on the far side of the baseboard not in the middle. As the layout will be against the wall this is a no-go, as is a train turntable. Looks like I'll stick with the cassettes.

I'm planning to build a version of the classic CJ Freezer Minories plan (the one with the good facilities) in the near future. I'm currently building/modifying/purchasing the necessary stock. I followed recent threads on this topic with interest but I'm still slightly confused by the fiddle yard arrangements. The plans and some of the excellent layouts around the theme have a standard ladder arrangement of tracks, i.e. both tracks leaving the scenic section are split into a number of tracks via some points. If, as I assume, the tracks arriving in the station have the lower one as arrival and the upper departure and are not bi-directional how do you use the fiddleyard? To put it another way, any train leaving the station from whichever platform can via the crossovers, depart on the "correct" line. The train will then arrive in the upper set of tracks in the fiddleyard. In order to return to the station on the correct line it needs to be in the lower set of tracks. Unless you have yet further crossovers at the start of the fiddle yard you will have to manually transfer the whole train to the lower set of tracks. Am I missing something here. I'd rather have a standard ladder arrangement but could use cassettes as do on my current BLT?