Graham Hughes

Unless you are modelling a rack railway.

He won't need a motor as the track isn't long enough for the loco to go anywhere.

Have to think the bloke advertising a "00/TT 12.5mm gauge" loco built from an Airfix Schools kit has probably got that one in the right place though.

How do Hornby 00 Mark II carriages. 1 litre bottles of MEK, Corgi buses and a Chinese bone carving of "an elder man" get to be under rare gauges (whatever that means)?

I only just noticed that. it seems to have anything and everything in it that anybody wants to flog any gauge and none. I fail to see what Hornby 00 coaches and 5 litre tubs of MEK have got to do with rare gauges.

They were intended primarily for hauling coal trains from Parnik to Sofia. Parnik is only 20 miles from the capital which is presumably why tank locos were chosen, as the coal and water capacity of a tender is not required over the short distance. They were also used on heavy goods trains and as banking locos elsewhere.

Here's a video of the operation to go and collect the loco for restoration. The train of a blue and yellow electric loco, a red diesel and a lime green tender would be an unusual (and colourful) model. When they get 46.03 out of the shed it is behind another class 46, one of the German built 3-cylinder ones, and one of the earlier class 45 0-12-0Ts. Plenty of restoration potential yet.

The tank wagon is to supply water for the loco.

The first twelve were built in Poland and a further eight, with detail differences such as an outside framed bogie and smaller side tanks, were built by Schwartzkopff in Berlin. The front pony truck seems to be an odd set up connected to the leading set of driving wheels in a kind of bogie arrangement. I just had a thought, if they start using it on the steam service from Sofia to Bankya I am going to need to build one in TT gauge.

You could scratch-build the chassis with Mike Sharman "Flexichas" beams.

This newly restored beauty had its first run at the weekend after undergoing restoration. The whistle is rather impressive, as is the number of driving wheels for a tank loco.

No. the £3.5bn will be the share by population of the total cost of HS2. Your own estimate of costs has 10% of the total at around £3bn which is not that different.

So why did the UK government build the first High Speed Rail link speed up travel from the UK to France? Just because you want to govern your own affairs doesn't mean you want to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. Scotland will be paying £3.5 Billion in the form of the revenue which Westminster retains for "Strategic UK spending" for this rail line that not only won't come anywhere near Scotland but will, according the the KPMG study commissioned by the UK government when HS2 was announced, damage the Scottish economy to the tune £100miliion pa for Aberdeen and the North East and £66million pa for Glasgow, to quote the two examples I can recall from memory. Why did we need a rail Link to Glasgow Airport? You can get on the direct bus from outside the terminal to the door of Paisley Gilmour Street Station in a few minutes. I haven't been on it recently but it used to cost 50p. I thought this site was supposed to be non-political, yet it seems the all too predictable, ill-informed SNP-bashing and ignorantly depicting Scotland as being subsidised by England is allowed.

He's still got it on his website as the last loco kit left from his clear out.

Doesn't the 3mm Society shop have transfers suitable for the locos? For plans of buildings (and locos and rolling stock) the model railway magazines are a good source. Check the BRMNA Index and see what has been published, (although I am not sure how recently it has been updated) and watch out on ebay or somewhere like Magaizine Exchange for the issues with the drawings you want. (Or ask on here if anyone has them.)

This is a good one, from an advert for a Vespa scooter,

How about a working BMX park complete with stunts? Or you could reproduce the scene from the Paris-Roubaix race that is exercising so much opinion on another thread.

For all the improvements in rtr N gauge in recent years, when you look at that model side-on and see the lump of the chassis block and the peculiar angle of the coupling rods you can see the advantage of 2mm FS.

French Blues Worth watching just for his suit.

Look what I found online earlier. IMG_8952.jpg This one seems to be the same type as Glenlossie but with the addition of the full length running plate and splashers. I think The Balmenach one was close enough that I can use the basic dimensions of this drawing. Differences in measurements are going to be negligible in 2mm scale. I may be wrong about the Lincoln archives. What I was assuming to be the engine number on the drawings lists turn out when I look more closely just to be the archive drawing reference. They certainly have a GA listed for the replacement Glenlossie loco of 1924 and several detail drawings described as redrawn from originals of 1897. They only built four of these locos in 1897 so there's a good chance they would be the right ones for the Balmenach loco. It would really need someone to examine them to try and identify which locos are from which drawings, there doesn't seem to be any way to do this just from the archive lists.

Preiser do some 1:100 figures too, including a pack of 190 unpainted ones and some people riding bicycles.

That was the day before. They were only there for about ten minutes and I thought they had given up, but yesterday they were back for a double shift to make up. 6am to 8am. Anyway there was a bit of squawking and clattering at six this morning and then silence. The cap will keep the rain out as it closes off the top of the chimney completely. (No, I don't want to have a fire in the fireplace )

I hope my garden birds have gone now. A pair of crows trying to make a nest in the chimney pot of my bedroom chimney. 6 o'clock every morning they turned up, on the dot, and then for the next hour or more tried to build a nest which seemed to achieve nothing more than dropping sticks down the chimney. I have enough sticks in the fireplace, as well as a, thankfully disused, wasps nest they dislodged to have a fire for the evening. The effort they have put in collecting sticks and bringing them all the way from the wood just to have them all fall down the chimney is incredible but they were getting nowhere with the nest, unless they planned to fly down the chimney and lay their eggs on the pile at the bottom. This morning saw half an hour spent up a ladder fitting a cap to the chimney, so they are in for a surprise when they turn up at first light tomorrow.

Here's another very well modelled colliery layout.

Let's see if I can manage it first. It might end up that the Aveling and Porter is "away for repairs" and the distillery have "borrowed" a more conventional (and, quite co-incidentally, easier to build) loco to fill in.