Guy Rixon

Knives: I depend on three kinds. Collet knife with pointy blade for general work. Collet knife with chisel blade for cutting tabs on etches, and also for cleaning surfaces, e.g. of stray solder. Scalpel with 11P blade (the extra-pointy kind) for fine work, particularly when cutting card, paper and transfers. The two collet knives get used in stone-axe mode, so it's not worth getting best-quality blades. I get cheap blades off Amazon and change them often. Small pliers: you can pay a lot for posh, box-jointed pliers, but I've been using mid-priced, lap-jointed pliers for ever and have no problems. When you buy them, check that they are accurately ground and the jaws grip evenly (try will it grip a bank note evenly), and that there is not excessive play in the joint; nothing else much matters. I have a perfectly good set of tiny pliers that cost £1.50 from a thrift store. Small snips or side cutters: there seem to be three price-bands: posh, such as Xuron; mid-priced, around £12, such as CK; and worthless trash. I get the CK ones and they do very well. If you need to cut hard wire and such, Stanley sell a set of big snips rated to cut aircraft control-cable, and these I like as they cut neatly. Other things: glass-fibre scratch brushes; get lots of refills if you build etched kits! set of pin chucks and range of small drill-bits; buy good quality; small engineer's square and rules in 6" and 12" sizes; callipers for measuring, either vernier, dial or digital; something to scribe and something to centre-pop; etc. (and it's a lot of etc.) Quality in drill bits is a sore point recently, as there is a huge range of quality, with most concentrated in the "worse than worthless" band. If you want guaranteed good bits for drilling metal, buy them from Eileen's and live with the cost. There are suppliers on-line that will sell you packs of 10 or so bits for the price of one from Eileen's and sometimes this is great but sometimes they are unbelievably bad. From one outlet, I had two packs of decent bits; one where no cutting edge had been ground on; one made of such bad metal that I could bend the bits between my fingers and they stayed bent; and one with the point ground 50% off-centre. It's not really worth the gamble. If you do end up with partly-sharpened drills, they may be OK for drilling polystyrene.

Soldering iron: if budget is tight, get an Antex XS25, which is a temperature-limited (not "controlled") 25W iron, with the Antex stand. Very good for the price. But I think you'll do much better with a basic soldering-station, i.e. an iron of about 50W rating, with a dial to set the nominal temperature. A few years back, I upgraded from an XS25 to a cheapo soldering station from Maplins, about £40 at the prices the day. My soldering results immediately improved a lot. Further, I was then able to solder whitemetal without disasters. If you can afford a station of better quality with about 75W power, then that would be worth it. Files: +1 for Vallorbe, which you will probably have to get from a jewellers' supplier, but you don't have to got that far up the quality ladder. The decent files that Squires sell (can't remember the make) do very well. The one I use most is about 8" by 1" broad by 1/8" thick, very fine cut and the thin edges are safe edges. Coarser cut files aren't much use for brass work, although I sometime use one for brutalising castings. I don't see the point in diamond "files" in soft-metal work; maybe they're useful for ceramics or for fitting hardened steel. Actual steel files and abrasive papers do the job for me. The diamond files I've seen on stands are too uneven in their surface to use easily. Screwdrivers: do you really need posh ones for doctoring locos? I've got a set I paid (IIRC) £3.50 for about 8 years ago and they do find for screws down to 12 BA. I can see that you might need best quality for the tiniest screws in watchmaking, but most model mechanisms have bigger fasteners.

If it's in ROD livery, rather than just being an ROD type, is it not more likely seen in France and Belgium? I wasn't aware that the ROD actually operated the trains on British railways, at least outside their own installations.

I'm sure I've seen the Dent name on some station clocks. I think the family firm got quite large in later generations. There are a couple of long-case Dent clocks where I work, adjusted to sideral rate.

OK, given that the strip is in segments and positioned by multiple offsets, I'll assume that a constant radius curve unless somebody knows a different figure was used.

Rain-strips on coaches: what kind of curve should they have? And how, on the full-sized coaches, were they positioned? I'm printing some roofs and need to commit geometry to model the rain-strips. So far, I've drawn my rain-strips as segments of a circle and that looks OK, but I suspect that the reality was more subtle. A segment of a circle is right if they were laid out with a trammel, but the radius is vast --- I ended up with 200 scale feet for a short coach --- and there wouldn't be room in a typical carriage shop to trammel that. I suppose that it could be done outside, with one man holding the end of a rope trammel somewhere in the next post-code. My guess for fitting rain-strips is this: gaffer goes up onto the roof with a yardstick and chalks one mark for the centre of the strip and one for each end. Rest of the fitters heave the strip up onto the roof and screw down its centre. Then they bend down the ends to the marks and screw down those. Finally, they put in the rest of the screws to keep it flat to the roof. I think that gives a catenary curve rather than a circular arc. Of course, a rain-strip might have to be made in sections, 60-foot long timber being hard to come by, and that changes the procedure; but perhaps the strip was assembled before fitting? Anybody know for certain how it was done?

It depends on what you mean by "block train". Were there fixed sets of wagons that shuttled between one loading point (i.e. one colliery) and one (industrial) customer? Rarely, but it did happen, where the customer could handle a whole trainload: think power stations and the larger gasworks; maybe steelworks. This was called "circuit working". It was where you'd find the more specialized PO wagons such as high-capacity hoppers. Circuit-working stock was non-pool and at least one owner tried to claim that it was exempt from government requisition in wartime (he lost the case IIRC). Were there cases where entire trainloads went ad hoc to the same destination? Yes, where the customer was a factor and the destination was a port, especially if the coal was for export and the ship was large. Large colliers needed multiple trains to fill them. Was it typical to see a whole train of wagons identical apart from numbers? No, not typical at all. Apart from circuit working (wagons owned by customer) , this would be less likely than a mix of wagons. Were there entire trains of just coal, run between marshalling points? Yes, commonly. And in these trains, I would expect to see cuts of similar wagons, usually factor's or colliery wagons travelling together. But it would be unlikely that all the wagons in the train came from the same colliery.

Further to that, railway companies often bought coal from factors, not direct from individual collieries (IIUC). If the factors were bringing the coal in by ship, it would be factors' wagons delivering to the running sheds, not colliery wagons.

Roof details on electrically-lit vans: very unclear. The only drawing I found on on HMRS doesn't show any such, but I suspect that there were still vents at least. The 27' coaches of this period apparently had external conduits, of rectangular section, for the lighting wiring. On the 27' coaches, there was allegedly one conduit down each side of the centreline alongside the lamps, then a diagonal conduit to the end of the roof, below which the wiring ran down the end to the switch-box, and then down again below the switch to the headstock. I'm not sure why there were wires each side of the lamps, but I think it was to do with only having half of them switched on during the daytime: two separate feeds from the switch, the latter being the off/half/full kind. For the early-style switch-box and end wiring, see my thread about 27' coaches on the S4 forum, William Barter posted a useful photo part-way down page 1. The later style of switch-box had a little roof over it, possibly to keep the rain out. It's not clear to me that a PBV would have had an external switch. I'd expect the switch to be in the guards compartment. But I have no evidence either way. I would guess that the 32' PBVs with end lookouts had similar fittings to these centre-observatory kinds, and one of those is preserved. Maybe we can find a photo of its roof. PS: arc-roof PBV very nice indeed and I'd like a print when you're ready to sell them. I already have one of the elliptical-roof kind.

What is a typical thickness for a brake hanger when it is a single, iron bar bolted to the face of the wooden block? It's not marked on any drawings I have.

From Gould, some details of the 6-wheeled , elliptical-roofed, 3rd-brakes. They are almost certainly nos. 461-495 of 1896 and 1897, since every other 6-wheeled brake of the SER had a single-arc roof. The SER built the first 15 in 1896 and Oldbury RC&W built the rest in 1897. The Ashford batch had steel underframes (Foxes patent pressed-steel) and this may affect the appearance of the headstocks. Mr. Gould says "the Oldbury batch was generally similar", which is worryingly vague. Nos. 461 and 462 later became slip coaches, the latter by 1901 and the former by 1908. No. 461 was altered to have lavatories, replacing one compartment, but these were removed in 1911. Nos. 465 and 488 were alerted to 2nd/3rd composite brakes in 1911. Nos. 465, 470, 473, 475, 481, 486, 488 and 494 were changed to electric light (from gas, presumably) "at various dates between 1897 and 1920". No photos of these coaches in Gould. There is a distant photo of one of the earlier, arc-roof kind. PS: having posted the above, I open up my unbuilt, Branchlines kit for one of these coaches and find that it comes with a side of uncertainty. "...but two of the three G.A.'s available show, in one case (962) a wooden underframe, lamp brackets on the guard's end and a birdcage 8' 5 3/8" long whereas in another drawing (973) shows a steel underframe, fixed gas tail lamps and a birdcage only 5' 3" long. Both have the later, Wainwright style of panelling. With no information to tie one form to a number series one can only presume that the older batch had the older features and the later batch the modern ones, although it is significant that the 1897 4-wheelers had wooden underframes and fixed gas tail lamps; obviously a transition period!" So the CAD is going to have to adapt to match its birdcage length I guess. Note also that the lower footboards may have been shortened in later years from the full-length as in the current CAD. They would have been cut back to run just under the guard's door ,,,and if you think that's a PITA to get right, the arc-roof brake-3rds are even more uncertain.

Re SE(C)R PBV: I didn't find my copy of Gould, nor did I find the instructions from the Branchlines kit of this vehicle which have historical notes. I did find the errata to those instructions, which confirms some details between batches. SECR-32ft-PBV-errata.pdf The drawing and photo in the Harris book on NPCS confirm oil lamps for the early batch built by the SECR. The builder's photo also shows the SER pattern of axleboxes, like the render I posted earlier in this thread. There's a drawing on HMRS that shows no lamp tops (implying electric lights) and the later, squarer form of axleboxes favoured by the SECR. Therefore one should be careful in choosing numbers. PS: found my Gould! Combining Mr. Gould's notes with the Branchlines errata, it seems that the SER 6-wheeled, 32' PBVs all had arc roofs. The SER design carried over to the SECR was the one with side lookouts at each end and no roof observatory. Mr. Gould states that 32' PBVs with roof observatories were build by Cravens for the SECR in 1901 and 1902, SECR numbers 588-605, to drawing number 1542. All were dual-braked and electrically lit. He goes on to say "In March 1903 ten were ordered from ... Hurst Nelson ... delivered between July and September 1903 and numbered 681-690." There's a picture of number 682 in Harris, and it definitely has oil lamps and lacks Westinghouse hoses. Mr. Gould also lists 20 vans built by Cravens and 20 by Metropolitan RC&W in 1905 to body drawing 1542A (note change of drawing number from early batch; what changed?) and had wooden underframes with flitched solebars. Finally, the SECR built some themselves: five in 1905 and 22 between 1907 and 1909. The latter series are thought to be the ones with different arrangements of side lookouts and guards doors. TLDR: Woko, your CAD looks good in all visible details for the Hurst-Nelson series nos 681-690, but probably not quite right for all the others.

The only place where I've ever seen a V-hanger made of solid plate was under a goods brake. It must have been extremely heavy and I think they were using it as part of the ballast.

Two sets of safety loops are needed: for the brake yokes and for the pull rods. The loops around the pull rods would be narrow U-shapes splaying out at the top where they're bolted to the longitudinals. For the safety of the yokes, two arrangements are possible. First, two trapezoidal straps can enclose both yokes, on strap on each side. Second, each yoke can be guarded by a pair of forged rods, shaped like inverted question-marks, one next to each wheel. I'm not sure that the cross shaft should be moved up as much as indicated. The drawings I have on hand (which are for SER perversions, but still) show the shaft set about a shaft diameter (i.e. 3") above the axle centre-line. If you do move it up, the cylinder should also be moved up, as the crank to the vacuum piston-rod is already at about the right angle. One of your brake yokes looks weird. They should have the same, triangular shape, but you have one short triangle and one long triangle. This is because both yokes have been extended to meet the we-don't-know-what-it's-called lever in the middle. You should have rods coming from the centre of each yoke to attach to this lever, and those rods will be very different lengths. If you look at the graphic I posted above you'll see how it's done. If the coaches follow LSWR design-patterns, then the brake yokes are mutant. Rather than being simple triangles, they have an extra member along the centreline: i.e. the rod attached to the point of the triangle passes through the triangle and attaches halfway along its back member. Presumably this was to add strength, but I've not seen any other railway bother with it. The tumbler can also be called the centre crank. PS: please fix the brake blocks. As drawn, they look worn many inches beyond scrapping size and the nice chap from the BoT will be terribly upset. If you added an annular sector, perhaps 2" thick radially, on the wheel side of what is currently there, then they would look better. But I think the blocks for brake-fitted stock were very uniform between railways, so perhaps we can sort you out with some better geometry. I have some drawn for my SER coaches that I can send you, if we can agree on file formats; also similar for LNWR fitted wagons.

Mikkel, this is most welcome information and I shall be copying your techniques closely. There are plane trees at the bottom of Agar street, and I would like similar trees in my contrafactual Agar Square of 1909.

Correct, but the only aspect of this bearing on the visible bits is that the vertical supports --- which I think might be called pendulum links --- would typically be parallel-sided plates, not tapering brackets as drawn. 2" x 0.5" section is typical. They'd also be cranked outward at their top ends to meet the brackets on the longitudinals, but that detail is above the solebars and hidden. V hangers varied greatly in size. The SER used massive parts here, with a relatively small opening-angle, similar to the ones on your drawing. More typical coaches had lighter sections in the hangers and a wider angle in the V. BTW, if you want something prototypical but a little quirky, you could have push-pull brakes as on the SER. But then you'd have the brake shaft offset towards one axle. The tips of the trunnions supporting the vacuum cylinder often showed below the solebars. You might care to add these. Also, where are your safety loops? Are you to add these from wire, for strength?

Perfectly functional as drawn. Two points might bear further consideration. In the top drawing, there's a V-hanger for the brake shaft against the nearer solebar, but the vacuum cylinder is closer to the further solebar. I'd expect to see a V-hanger against the solebar nearest to the cylinder and the other as near the centreline as it can get without fouling the centre crank. In the bottom drawing, the pull rod to the right-hand axle goes up at a sharp angle to engage the lever above the axle. This is sometimes used --- LNWR fitted wagons were like that --- but other railways might bring the rod out near horizontal and engage the lever below the axle. Like this: ...which is how the SER did it for coaches with handbrakes. Note that on both axles here there is rigging running under the axle, trapping the wheelset. This is awkward to model, unless one makes the brake assemblies as separate parts to be added after the wheels.

How does platform 3 work in the new plan? I can't see how you make a running move into the platform; is it only for departures? The station seems to have lines paired by direction on the left and lines paired by use on the right which is unexpected.

Some details of the SE&CR handbrake linkage. This is the typical fitting. The handbrake linkage is the long, vertical assembly seen above the left-hand buffer in this shot. It's a vertical shaft turned by bevel gears visible at the top, just below the alarm gear. Those gears are turned by the handbrake wheel which is on mounted on the inside of the end of the coach. It's positioned where the guard car operate it while looking out of the roof observatory. At the bottom of the vertical rod there's a screw that pulls on the horizontal arm of a crank, and the other arm of that crank pulls on a rod that's linked to the centre crank of the brake rigging. This is a different coach and shows the gear more clearly, particularly the bit at the bottom. What you can see in this shot is the stirrup that links the screw on the vertical rod to the crank. The crank itself has one arm horizontal, poking out from under the headstock and pinned to the bottom of the stirrup. The other arm is vertical and points down to the track from the pivot. Because this is a slip coach, the guard is expected to work the handbrake while standing at the slip controls, so the handbrake wheel is mounted lower down and the vertical shaft is shorter. However, everything else looks to be fairly standard. It's a decent picture of the electrical switch-gear and the alarm gear, too. This and the previous photo are scanned from Gould. Finally, a drawing showing the position of the handbrake fittings on non-slip coaches. This is taken from Coutanche and scanned on a flat-bed scanner, so it should be possible to pick off dimensions and positions of things. Information on the PBV to follow, when I've found the right books and papers.

For completeness (and then I really need to drop this issue), David Gould lists the following liveries in his book Bogies Carriages of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway. SER up to amalgamation: crimson lake. SECR 1899 to 1901: crimson lake lower panels and mouldings, faux teak upper panels. SECR 1901 to c.1910: 'rich purple lake fine-lined in gold'. That is in quotation marks in Gould, but he doesn't say whom he's quoting. Mr. Gould goes on to say that the 'rich purple lake' appears to be the same as the SER lake. SECR c.1910 to 1916: a light maroon or red-brown shade with gold lining. SECR 1916 onward: umber brown, said to be indistinguishable from that used by the LB&SCR. So I now suspect that the colour I've used is the 1910-1916 shade, This is really, really annoying, enough so that I might just nudge the layout period by one year so that I can claim the new livery. Or I can just weep.

Just a thought: does anybody have the painting specifications for Edwardian MR coaches, or for the GWR coaches in their lake livery? There is a possibility that the number of crimson lake coats varies between the railways and this changed the appearance of a nominally-identical colour.

The PBV with the observatory in the centre was, from memory, a late-SER design which the SECR reordered in its early years. There were, IIRC, at least three batches, of which one had the guard's door and the side lookouts swapped round. There's a branchlines kit for these with some background information, and they're also covered in the earlier book by David Gould. I will try to dig out the information. I'm not sure if the oil lamps are correct; I think at least one batch was electrically lit as built. The brake-3rd looks good. It would be useful to know which version is intended as there were several batches. It seems to be missing the handbrake linkage on the brake end, which is highly distinctive for SER and SECR coaches. AFAIK, it's the same linkage as on the bogie brakes, so you should have some photos already.

Just to add a little more fuel to the fire, here's part of the painting spec for a PBV bought by the SER in 1898. "...another coat of lead colour, one of lake brown, two coats of best crimson lake, and one of best body varnish; ..." And for a similar PBV bought by the SECR in 1899. "...another coat of lead colour ... one coat of lake brown, and two coats of best crimson lake, after which ... one coat of best body varnish." This typed specification originally specified grained, imitation teak for the upper panels, but was amended in handwriting to the above colours for all the body. So apart from the ephemeral silliness of mixed lake and teak livery, the spec. didn't change when the Management Committee first took control. Also, it definitely calls for crimson lake rather than purple, adding a quantum of support to the idea that the purple colour was the later brown without the lake coat. Damn.

I'm looking at a painting by my wife of a sunset on a beach. It was painted from a photo that she took. There are three versions of the colours: what I remember from that holiday back in 2008; what the camera recorded and what she painted. The memory and the painting are both more vivid than the photo. In general, artists tend to paint colours that look appealing more often than they paint exact renditions. I like the purple lake, but the crimson lake of the MR is showier and more appealing to most. It makes for a nicer postcard. It would also be interesting to know where the postcards were coloured. If the colourist was familiar with MR trains they might well have assumed that the SECR colour was the same. ...and I've just looked at my model in strong sunlight (it was overcast when I took the last photo). Much redder now, not the iPhone camera can capture that very well.

First, what Jol said. Second, the purple colour appears differently according to the incident light. This is true for modern versions of the colour, as on certain coaches of the Bluebell Railway, and for the models. It can appear very brown, very blue, or fairly red depending on the sunlight. Third, I was at an SECR Soc meeting, at Keen House, when one of the paint samples was displayed. It was extremely purple and caused much surprise. Finally, there is folklore that the colour evolved as the painting techniques changed. I wouldn't call it evidence, as I don't know where people got it from, but: there might have been a change in the quality of the painting (number of coats, etc.) after the Management Committee took over; there might have been a change to a different colour of paint, one that was inherently redder, c.1911; there was probably a major change somewhere between 1912 and 1915 where the top layers of varnish were left off, exposing the brown undercoat; the kit instructions describe this as leaving the blue out of the finish. So there is at least a chance that the purple-brown colour, and the paint sample, is the post-1912 undercoat and is just wrong for 1905 or 1909, and that the postcard is correct. I doubt we shall ever know.