Guy Rixon

For plain brown paint on teak coaches, see the Met. dreadnoughts at Quainton Road. Definitely different to the imitation teak on the LNER coaches.

I read one one case (in Model railways illustrated IIRC) where vans were moved to a designated location when empty and sent out from there. This was early BR and the local shunters would separate out the ventilated and non-ventilated vans as needed.

I'm considering who built which parts of the infrastructure on the CC&EJR. In particular, who's maintaining the track and providing the signals. It's conceivable, at least to my wandering, phantasy'd mind, that the SE&CR look after the track and the L&NWR do the signals; or it could be the other way round. Or they could have drawn a line on the map, somewhere around Oxford Street, and taken half each of each area of endeavour. I'm assuming that the Met did the electrification and that the GWR are not involved in the civil engineering. It's possible that the designation of company responsible slightly affects the track plan and signalling plan. Opinions?

Yes, but yours identifies its location without consideration of railway anything, which is perhaps a greater feat. One of the "bijoux problemettes" with joint lines is which of the partners built which parts. If the signals and buildings are provided by different companies, as can easily be the case, then it can look a bit mongrel.

The SER also preferred the push-pull rigging for four-wheeled coaches and vans. They changed it to pull-pull rigging and a two-sided centre-crank as a special case for brake vans, where the connection from the handbrake was on the top arm of the crank and there wasn't room for a second pull-rod. Westinghouse brakes also needed push-rods, so there can't have been any fundamental objection to them. Where I've peered at LBSCR drawing on HMRS, the push-rods there seem to be joined to the brake-piston rods by pins, so that the push-rods are again able to pivot about a horizontal axis.

There was a suggestion earlier to include Fruit Van and Yeast Van. Perhaps this is no longer the plan?

That's true on the GN coach, where the rods connect to opposite sides of the centre crank. On the MR horsebox, however, both rods connect on the same side of the crank, so one of them is pushed.

I would draw everybody's attention to the lower pull-rod. It is almost horizontal and passes below the left-hand axle. C.f. the freelance coach where the rod comes up at a steep angle from the centre crank and engages above the axle. In my experience, it is much more common to have the rods as horizontal as possible.

The right-hand rod is a push-rod, not a pull-rod. This is necessary since the brake shaft rotates clockwise. In fact, you can see that the push-rod has significant vertical depth on the centre, to stiffen it.

IIRC, the GWR didn't use the Morton clutches for two-sided brakes until after grouping. They had single-sided brakes with one conventional lever (ad in the first photo), then the Thomas brake for either-side application (as in the third photo, which I think is another of Mikkel's models, one of my favourites), then the Dean/Churchward systems. The logic of all-red wagons on steel underframes is compelling, but I think they look better when off-black below the solebar. Black solebars under a red body look naff, I've tried it. Also: dirty black below solebar, or painted dark grey, foreshadowing the later, all-over colour?

If the handrails are made of sensible metal, it should be possible to blacken them chemically in situ. The bluing fluid can be sponged on and wiped off with a cotton bud. However, it would be tricky to spary them with fixative without affecting the rest of the body.

Finally, we have something that approximates a train. Lots to finish, needs two or three more coaches, and the engine is still 00, but victory is finally in sight. PS: the iPhone camera has a blue/purple cast and sucks the colour out of any subjects not under Californian sun. Sitting in the British sunshine today, these coaches look much redder.

The printed buffers are already bored for springs. No proper drilling is needed, just gentle twiddling of drill bits to ream out the bores. You need a 1.0 mm bit in the main bore and 0.5 mm (or 0.55 mm) in the bore for the tail. Effectively, one uses the spiral flutes of the drill bits to scrape the bores clean. It takes about 5 minutes for a set of 4. The sides of the axlebox cavities were designed as thin as possible so as to leave the most space for bearing movement. The buffer guides include a greater thickness of resin and are an inherently stronger shape; and the turned parts will stiffen and protect them. Conversely, I wouldn't expect printed buffer heads or rams to last very long. Consider turned heads and rams in plastic guides: I haven't heard of people braking those. If you have no waisted bearings, it's not too hard to file down the full-size bearings to fit. A 2 mm hole in a chunk of fret waste is a good way to hold them while filing. If you are fixing the axleboxes to the bearings, as with rocking axleguards, then you only need a little off the width to let the bearing enter the printed axlebox.

The axleboxes are designed to take waisted bearings without opening out. That's why they're so thin at the edges. They won't take full-width bearings without a fight.

I sell LNWR 7-ton axleboxes, with springs, on Shapeways. But perhaps you need castings rather than prints?

I had a mammoth lining session yesterday (mammoths are harder to fine-line than coaches). All four of the "new" coaches are now lined to the consistent, official standard of "meh, but I can't get it any better". I need to clean up some of the paintwork with a brush and can then varnish them tomorrow, at which point they should start to look presentable. What you see here so far matches the wartime livery of base coat and no lake coats, the debased form of the browner livery. The brushwork for cleaning up is because these four coaches are all built per the kit design, with the bodies soldered to the chassis. They had to be masked to paint a lake body over a black chassis and it did not go as well as I would have liked. My later-built coaches are modified to separate body from chassis and I now feel very good about the extra work this involved. Also, lining around commode handles is an absolute pig, and I'm glad that I left off the handles on most of the coaches. Better photos when there's next some sunlight on the bench. I wish my benighted iPhone camera worked better in dim light.

Try isopropanol. It's a common solvent for acrylic paints. My experience is that it softens acrylics even after they are supposedly cured. I don't know how much it would mess with the enamel paint. PS: if the satin vanish has gone cloudy it's because the matting agent is caked up instead of finely distributed. No amount of over-painting with good varnish can change that, even if it makes the surface shiny.

The point about the lake colours is that their pigments are precipitated dyes rather than than ground powders. The pigment particles in lakes are larger and sparser, giving the effect of tinted varnish rather than conventional paint. The reason for using lake colours is to get access to the cheaper and versatile aniline dyes, which are normally soluble dyestuffs.

Concerning loading points for animals, there were established droving routes for stock before the railways came, and some of these were quite long IIRC. Is it possible that animals were loaded at out-of-the-way places that happened to be where a droving route met a railway? I have no idea whether horses were led (presumably not driven) to market en masse by their breeders.

More importantly, the horse may kick if it objects to the box or to the ramp, and the company does not want passengers kicked straight through the booking office into the county court.

It's worth noting that the subject of the Bachmann coaches, the Trio-C sets, arrived c.1911 and wear the presumed, later livery that is thought to be darker and browner. The ex-LCDR coaches on the Bluebell Railway might also be considered to reflect this period. It's my 27' stock that's probably wrong for 1909. Given that I've messed around with history just to create the railway they run on, I feel comfortable with bringing the introduction of the livery forward by a year or so. By extension, the 27' coaches must be presumed to be recently painted and their roofs not yet greatly greyed. For later models after the 27' coaches I intend to seek a more crimson shade. The Grand Vitesse van shown here recently is most of the way there. When I have more time, I may try Precision GWR lake and see how that comes out; but it's a time-consuming experiment, as the subject has to be lined and varnished to get a proper assessment.

Re gentry, the territorial cavalry regiments were often called "yeomanry" --- we still have a Royal Yeomanry regiment who are now light armour --- and a yeoman was once a specific rank of gentry. AFAICS, a yeomanry regiment was code for "they're rich enough to provide their own horses".

The "new" coaches have taken the purple. It will look better (and redder) with some varnish on it, but I need to line first. The roofs are nearly done, but the one on the right hasn't quite finished curing and that on the brake-3rd doesn't fit around the birdcage. Apparently, one can't just cut a rectangular notch out of the semi-elliptical roof and expect it to fit. The section along the side of the birdcage is lower than that. Lowering the section is easy, but achieving a neat transition to the main roof is not. This went slightly wrong on the timber/paper/plastic roof I made for the other brake-3rd and now I can see why. Since I don't have constructional sections for this bit of the roof, nor photos, and since the profile of the brass may not be absolutely accurate to the drawings anyway, I shall just have to muddle around in CAD until I get something that looks OK. It may be that there's a slight step, of perhaps an inch or so, level with the front of the birdcage.

Further up the train, redness has been achieved. Two of these coaches are my juvenalia and two are rehomed from eBay. From left to right, SER 5-compartment third of 1897, bought on eBay two years back and now lightly refurbished. It wears a printed roof, which seems to be the way to go with these short coaches. They take 9.5 hours each to print, but adzing them out of raw materials takes a few hours each of labour and doesn't produce as neat a result. Second, another 3rd, model built by me in 1988, the first etched coach I ever built. Its roof is in the printer as I write. Third, an SER 4-compartment first or second of 1897 (same structure for the two classes, but different interior), also from eBay. This needed slightly more refurbishment as it came to me with damage to a body panel. "That'll buff out" said the redneck, and he's not wrong, but it took a few doses of filler and primer. Finally, an SE&CR, 2-compartment 3rd-brake of 1901. This is the updated diagram of the SER brake-3rd previously shown in this thread. It has a luggage compartment in place of one passenger compartment, and was lit electrically. It also has Spencer's patent, secondary suspension pads on J-hangers, which I printed as the kit didn't provide much. I built this model in 1990, and made enough of a hash of it that it was laid aside and used over the years for painting experiments. As of last night, it's been carved back into a useable state (you would wince at the brutality needed to square up the birdcage) and can be finished. All these will be painted to match the previous brake-3rd, despite the question mark over that livery. It's a formal set, full-sized coaches presumed to be painted at the same time, so they need to be the same colour. I'll attempt greater crimsonicity in the main-line stock to follow. The train needs at least one more 4-compartment coach, so that it can have all three classes; I have no kits for the 27' composites as Branchlines never made them. This is under construction. There should probably be three more of the 4-compartment coaches so that there are two coaches of each class plus the brakes, but that can wait while I built something else.

Also in model making, if the model parts be made for sale.