Guy Rixon

The last leg of the meat haul to Smithfield was over the Metropolitan railway (inner circle), so the main-line engines were exchanged for condensing tank-engines. The 633 class (0-6-0T) were the mainstay, with Metro 2-4-0T filling in. When the early engines wore out, some time in the 20th century, condensing pannier-tanks were built. I think that the exchange was made at Acton. At any rate, all the special brake vans for the Smithfield traffic were allocated there. Smithfield GWR was a depot for general goods, IIRC, and Smithfield was (is?) a market for more than just meat. Therefore, a train to Smithfield might include wagons other than meat vans. In particular, vans for other perishables, such the various diagrams of fruit vans might go there. This might imply that a train conveying meat vans to Acton, for forwarding to Smithfield, would include other traffic. Or it might be that the meat trains were all meat vans and the other traffics were marshalled in at Acton.

This is true in most cases, but you have the advantage that if you talk said enthusiasts into designing things for you, those items remains available on Shapeways indefinitely. They don't disappear when an individual retires. Further, if the drawing time for an item is not too much, an enthusiast may draw up a new product pro bono, with no need to work out a business case. I've done this a couple of times.

You've done well with the paint on the D305. I've always found Precision Paints awkward to apply with a brush. For the large M R lettering, I recommend the Fox Transfers sheet. Much easier than Methfix.

I have a small shop on Shapeways selling printed fittings for rolling stock. Currently, all the available models are buffer guides for producing sprung buffers, in 4mm and H0 scale, but I plan to add other fittings like axleboxes and springs. The shop is at https://www.shapeways.com/shops/guyrixon . Buffers available at time of writing are: SER/SECR wagon (3 rib) LCDR wagon (4 rib) LNWR wagon (3 rib; 4 different lengths of guide) LNWR wagon (self-contained) Cambrian wagon (with and without wooden pads) SER coach (3 rib) These are all prints I needed for my own models, but I'm open to suggestions for other subjects.

I suspect it's 60cm gauge rounded off to the nearest half-inch. 60cm is now, and ever has been, a popular gauge for mine railways.

My jig for building coaches, for when I want to fit the sides and ends to an internal framework instead of fixing the interior to a monocoque. It's M4 studding with nuts to hold the partitions in place; . One full turn of a nut moves a partition by 0.7mm, so fine setting is possible.

LNER wagon-grey is darker than LMS grey but not as dark as GWR grey. Anything between these two will look plausible. Phoenix Paints P66 is the one if you're buying, but you can probably just mix LMS grey with some black. I understand the blue used on the containers was the same blue used for engineering-department stock such as cranes. Phoenix P70.

LCDR buffers are now up on Shapeways: https://www.shapeways.com/product/DWZ8THJJZ/lcdr-buffer-guides-for-wagons-x20-4mm-scale. This is a beta product until I've had a chance to test print it and time for anybody to challenge the scale fidelity.

Is that likely with injection-moulding tools? I thought they were good for millions of shots, and I doubt railway kits ever got into the hundreds of thousands.

IIUC, CooperCraft are able to produce etched products from the existing masks, might be able to produce whitemetal castings from existing moulds (if the owner can work out which mould does what, and if the moulds are not worn out) and cannot produce any injection moulded parts because the single, specially-adapted moulding machine is broken. Production of etched and cast parts is presumably contracted out, so would depend on the business having enough capital to place an order.

Ok OK, I'll see what I can do. I don't have component drawings for these, but can get quite close from photos and the overall drawings of wagons.

Hi Pete, I'm glad that the buffers worked out for you. In fact, they're to an SER/SECR pattern, so could appear on an ex-LCDR wagon in SECR ownership. The LCDR used, I think, 4-ribbed buffers. If you plan to do more LCDR wagons then I could draw some more-nearly correct buffers for you.

The GNR wagon-buffers look excellent, many thanks for those. I have two questions about the buffers. First, what distance are you allowing between the buffing face and the back of the bore for the spring (since this affects the spring rate)? Second, where the buffer bores need to be opened out, what are the inside and outside diameters as printed?

Eileen's Emporium sell gun blue. They have it either in a jar - suits the cotton-bud technique - or in a pen. By my experience, it doesn't work on some steels. It won't blacken the tyres on Exactoscale wheels, for instance (I think they may be made of stainless steel).

I doubt it. IIRC, British copyright lasts for 70 years after the author's death. Anybody got a biography for Mr. Gray?

Slag travelling in open wagons - i.e. not the powdered product - is possibly going for use as roadstone. There was a slag-to-tarmacadam plant at Frodingham in the 1930s, and it's probably still in operation, although nowadays the stone would probably be shipped without the bitumen. Therefore, any material that represents fine-screen stone would do it. One would have to find out the colour when it is not covered in tar.

If you mean the Ratio kits of GWR 4-wheel coaches, then the replacement chassis was by Mainly Trains so now presumed discontinued. Bill Bedford does suspension suitable for these kits, IIRC, and that includes some brake shoes and hangers, but not all the brake rigging or other underframe fittings.

I use a set of ball-ended tools to rub down the transfers, the balls being a few millimetres in diameter. Structurally, they're small, ball-ended embossing tools, but those are relatively are expensive. Mine were sold as "dotting" tools for nail art, like these on ebay, for a tiny fraction of the price.

With the Roxey etched couplings, why not solder the links to the central section? If you want your coupling either to hang down or to be taught between vehicles - simulating screwed up - then it doesn't need to flex.

For coach footboards, you could try the following recipe. 1. Make the actual boards from plastic card. The full-size boards were probably 1" or 1.5" thick, so 0.020" styrene would be close. The upstand at the back of the lower board will stiffen it nicely. 2. Make the vertical part of the brackets from 0.5mm straight brass wire. The top of the bracket would be forged to a flat plate, for bolting to the solebar. You can simulate this by squeezing with pliers. 3. Make the horizontal part of the brackets from thinner wire. Twist the wire around the uprights and then splay out the tails where they go under the board to represent the "crows feet" brackets of the full-sized coach. 4. Either solder the crows feet to the uprights or, if you don't feel like soldering, glue them with cyanoacrylate. Glue the boards to the crows feet and also to the vertical part of the brackets. 5. Check that the assembly is square and, when satisfied, glue to the solebars using cyanoacrylate again. I'd recommend discarding any assemblies that are nearly but not quite right, as they eye is very good at spotting any irregularity.

Looks good. I notice that you didn't include the rebate for the glazing when you made your partitions. Are you planning a different method of glazing?

As an exhibition viewer, I find shunting interesting only if it seems purposeful. If I see a train setting down loaded wagons and picking up obviously empty (or back-loaded) wagons, that's fine. If I can see, or infer, the freight being moved, and the particular location in the yard where certain freight is handled, that fine too. However, if I see wagons put at random in sidings, that's boring. And if I see wagons set into sidings and then immediately fetched out and taken away (because it's a micro layout and there's only room for half a train of stock), then that's pretty boring too; even if I can infer that the wagons arrived unloaded and were later taken away full (or loaded and returned empty), it's still unsatisfying. It plays better, for me, if another train moves while the loads from the first are handled. This is hard to do on a tiny layout. My personal answer to this is a shunting "plank" where one end is the front of an urban goods-warehouse: the body of the warehouse is part of the fiddle-yard. The warehouse can swallow, and remove from the yard standage, a raft of wagons while I sort and position the next raft inbound, or deal with some outbound wagons. If I want intensive movements, I can put more wagons into the warehouse than it could really hold; viewers won't notice unless they hang around and "count cards" (and if you do that at a casino, you get asked to leave ).

I vote for any of SECR H, D, E, (ex-SER) Q, Q1, (ex-SER) R, O or O1 - provided that they are done in SECR livery, preferably full Wainwright lining and brasswork. Those are the classes I personally could run, but there are also the ex-LCDR classes. From the Bachmann experience with the C class, anything in full livery will sell quite well and the H at least can be reissued in simplified Wainwright livery, Maunsell wartime livery, two SR liveries and BR black.

It glows in the dark! Must be one of those sent to work the Cumbrian Coast line after nationalization.

Hi Eddie, delay is no problem, as my alternative is scratchbuilding, so extremely slow. Price might be an issue. Up to £15 a body they'd be attractive; above £25 I'd probably prefer to build from scratch. I suspect Shapeways' volume-based pricing is going to be awkward here. Printing bodies as a kit might be a way round that. I may upload some dummy models to see what prices come out. BTW, I have CADs for the SER 3-ribbed buffers in 4mm scale. If anybody is interested, I could do a 2mm-scale version. Cheers, Guy