Guy Rixon

The LCDR coach is an ancient model. I built the shell in 1988, finished it in 1990, and painted it in 1992. It's painted in some mix of humbrol colours. I may repaint this one. Since then, paint samples have come to light showing the purple lake was much bluer. The Precision enamel colour for SECR coaches reflects this, but I think it's too blue and I mix it with Indian Red to get a shade I like. More recently, I've tried to recapture that shade in acrylics (details a few pages past in this thread) and that's what you're seeing here. Interestingly, my acrylic mix was also a little too blue (IMHO), but the varnish has reddened the perceived shade. The lining and lettering also make it look lighter and redder.

Shiny; also verbose. The goldish colour of the lining is a good match to the goldish lettering. Roof paining, interior and glazing to do and then this one's finished.

Most resins take paint very well. Halfords' car primer from cans works fine. It's also possible to paint directly onto the clean resin, at least with acrylics. There might be issues with the more flexible kinds of resin, in the sense that the paint film might not be robust against flexing. But I have not tried these. In any case, sleepers wouldn't be flexing much.

Here's the same lining --- same pen, same paint --- on a more appropriate coach, and I think it's rather better. The coach is more appropriate first because it's an ex-SER vehicle, for which the livery is well suited, second because the underlying paint is smoother, so the lines have gone on better, and third because this is part of a train that matters to me. Thirty years I've been blocked on this lining. Thirty years. It's hard to express how liberating it is to be able to do this. FWIW, there is a further nuance to using the Moore pen. Before loading it, I sprayed through airbrush cleaner, then ran the pen on paper until no more solvent came through. Then I loaded it with paint, and I think a tiny film of the cleaning solvent stayed in and made the paint flow better. This is possibly related to the "add a drop of lighter fluid" folklore associated with these pens.

Last night, I lined a coach. Let me rephrase that: I LINED A COACH! This is a massive step forward for me, since all all previous lining attempts have been outright failures, or painfully slow and difficult. This run was not too hard and only took an hour or so. In truth, it's really not very good lining, but I will get better with practice and with better paint underneath. The tool is a Moore lining-pen. By itself, that is an expensive way to disappointment, as it needs near-perfect conditions to do anything useful. The enabling secrets are: use Precision "LNWR liining tan" enamel-paint, as it's a good, goldish colour; use fresh paint, unthinned; clean the pen with airbrush cleaner, as white spirit doesn't get it clean enough to work; when the pen finally does clog (it will), ignore the supplied cleaning-wire, which is too limp to do much, and poke it clean with a cutting broach; this is a brutal thing to do to a precision item, but seems to do no damage provided that the broach is pressed in and not twiddled.

No need to rush. I just wondered.

Nearly there. Just needs transfers, glazing, blanking of louvres, blackening of ironwork and greying of the roof. But it may have to go for a lie down in the display cabinet until the transfers become available. The buffers, lamps and Laycock vents are prints. I decided that the castings in the kit were too much trouble to clean up. The brake rigging around each wheel (which you can't see in this shot but you know what it looks like) is also a print. The push-rods from the Westinghouse cylinder were whittled from fret-waste, as cursory research suggested that they should be bars rather than round rods.

Is there an ETA for the transfers?

I've seen a few reports recently of modellers using turned tyres on printed wheel-centres. It's experimental, but as the art matures it could become more popular as a way of getting an exactly-correct pattern of wheel for a particular vehicle. People generally don't build their own motors as industry provides a wide range of suitable ones. Can't see that changing soon. But if it did, then custom-wound stuff would quickly become popular. Gears are an interesting case. Some clock-doctoring videos that I've been watching recently suggest that gear cutting is easy, but only if you have the right machine tools. If I were rich enough to spend a few thousands on those tools I'd do so, as I think it would be interesting and allows fine-tuning of a gear train for small models. But I could probably buy all the locos I'll ever need from from professional builders for the price of those tools.

It's on the RCH 1906 drawings too.

Once in January 2021 and once in February 2021.

Kirtley, possibly. MR practice? Probably not, as the general form of the wagons didn't change to MR norms. Opens still had high, elliptical ends. Brakes were still single-block on most wagons. The wheelbase was 3" greater than typical MR stock, and the new wagons were longer than MR contemporaries. The main change was from 8-ton loads to 10-ton*, for which the LCDR needed new springs and journals, hence different axleboxes, hence different axleguards (wider between the vertical legs), hence small differences in carpentry rippling out and hey, if we're changing all the templates for the chippies anyway, now's the time for that increase in internal capacity that we've been putting off. I think the opens got an extra plank in this round of changes, but I may have dreamt that. * Which is not to say that all the 8-ton wagons were retired in the '70s, or that the LCDR didn't built any 8-ton-rated stock at a later date; but the first of the heavier wagons came in then, IIRC.

There was an article recently in Invicta describing LCDR wagons of that period. Various decent drawings of such have been published. I think the union of SECR Soc. and HMRS archives might serve you quite well. The big problem is the lack of good photographs. IIRC, c.1875 is the period when the LCDR designs evolved dramatically, with changes in overall length, wheelbases, form of axleguards and probably churning most other details.

It went from about £8 to about £15 at the end of the Brexit transition, so absolutely down to Brexit. Whether the courier's costs have genuinely doubled due to Brexit is an open question. They may simply be taking more profit. But Brexit was clearly the trigger.

One of the problems with their shipping is that they are geared to the jewellery market, where the individual pieces are expensive and the shipping fees don't feel so bad. They need a super-economy shipping-mode for the cheaper products. If they were in the UK, I'd suggest just using Royal Mail, but my Dutch in-laws tell me that the Dutch postal-service is a bit rubbish.

I've ordered recently from Shapeways. No VAT was collected by the courier, nor were any extra invoices issued for it. Based on the price paid relative to the historical prices, I think they are including VAT in the sale price (as they are supposed to under UK and EU law), even though their web site now says zero VAT.

Yes indeed. I plan to add the backing to the louvres after the coat of varnish that seals the transfers. Adding the backing before varnishing risks a visible build-up of glop around the slats.

Edging towards completion. On the underframe, only the brake rigging and the buffers are left to do. The body can't be finished off until the transfers become available. I'll make the roof when the body is done, and that will discourage it from warping before it's fitted. The underframe is ... unkind to the builder. Too many loose components in the handbrake linkage when one fold-up part would do the job. Also, the long, lower footboard, as etched, doesn't fit over the axleboxes, lacking the usual cut-outs. I cut it down to the shorter form as seen here and in some photos of full-sized vans. The kit had whitemetal castings for the vacuum and Westinghouse connections. In modelling these parts there's always a choice between fixing them to the underframe, and leaving them vulnerable or fixing them to the body and having a visible gap where they meet the frame. For this van, I put them on the underframe and, of course, they broke off straight away. The replacements are brass castings from Branchlines and I need to order a pallet or two of these for future projects.

There is a product called "tin-plate bar" which is actually the ferrous stock from which the plate is rolled and later tinned. The long-square "pigs" may be that. I speculate that the elongated shape made it easier to handle in the rolling mill. One might think that it didn't get out much, going straight from the casting house to the rolls, but apparently it was sometimes cast at one works and used at another. Lysaght's, for example, cast the stuff in Lincolnshire and rolled it in South Wales.

The coach from the previous post now joined by the refurbished model of brake-3rd 272 (one I made earlier). The roof on the brake-3rd is not finished yet and yes, I will fix that warp. Two down, six to go.

Ask the collectors. I'm convinced that the bulk of the output goes to collection-minded customers, not to promote realism on layouts. And I don't know if a typical collector would like a rare model of a common thing more than a more-common model of an obscure thing. At the moment, the amount of accurate, pre-grouping, RTR stock is so small that almost anything is likely to sell. The bigger question is what would be preferred in 5 or 10 years time. That's a lot of models away.

One coach of the train has got as far as lettering. This is the 1897 strengthening 3rd from Set 7, which I'm going to portray in its 8-coach, post-1908 formation. The transfers are all HMRS pressfix. The running numbers are from the LNWR sheet. but the class numbers on the doors are from sheet 9 SR Maunsell Loco and Coach insignia with LSWR. These latter numbers are properly gilt and a better match than the bright-yellow "fairground ride" insignia from the SECR. I desperately need to weather down the black on the underframe.

Yep, I sympathise. How far can one go before the historical deltas are just too much? I have one of those issues concerning Metros, as it happens. I want a Metro to run some passenger services on a contrafactual line in London. It has to be a condenser or it can't do the work. I'd very much like a medium Metro, firstly because they look nicer and secondly because there is no kit for the large kind; but, in 1909, all six of the remaining, condensing Metros had large tanks. Can I justify retention of some medium Metros for this extra service, or would the GWR have kept more large ones in London?

I am no kind of expert on livestock, but I remember reading in MRJ that British Shorthorns were a common type in the first half of the 20th century. Also, searching for "Derbyshire cattle breeds" raises a reference to Blue Albion cattle which were a local breed. (The top hit is a Wikipedia page, but that has no images. Do the search yourself to get pictures of the recreated breed.)

From RCTS The Locomotives of the GWR, part 6, it seems that most medium metros were withdrawn before or during the 1930s. I see two that survived into the 1940s: 1498 built 1892, withdrawn 1944; 1499 built 1892, withdrawn 1946. Both were built with an S2 boiler (dome at front, round firebox) but received a B4 boiler (dome further back, Belpaire firebox) before 1930. I count eight Metros that survived nationalisation, all of them the large-tank variety. They were all withdrawn by the end of 1949.