jhb171achil

Absolutely superb!

In what part of Britain did class 31s operate most (in the blue era), and on what type of train?

That was very short lived and from memory had no catering car or first class, with 4 or 5 coaches.

Very realistic rust and weathering - how was this done?

I'm going to buck the trend! I actually like the background music...... and yet I'm watching a wildlife documentary right now with this intensely irritating huge swelling orchestral music in between every sentence the narrator utters. I find that so exceptionally annoying that I will only watch it with the sound off! But Barrow Street can do no wrong in my eyes....!

They weren't always - they had good and very comfortable seats when new. In the mid-1950s the ones on the Waterford & Tramore line had bus seats fitted, and during the 1960s i think that a few in the Dublin suburban area had these fitted too. By the 1970s they were vandalised internally within an inch of their lives, and instead of incinerating the morons who do this type of thing, CIE took out the seats and installed the plastic chairs. The other necessity was that due to lack of rolling stock, they wanted to increase standing capacity. The last time i travelled in one was to Howth in 1981. It was a very sad fall from a decade earlier, when I had travelled in an even more graffiti-covered one on NIR - but at least it still had its (ripped) seats! The seating in the AEC & BUT railcars was without doubt the best and most comfortable ever, in any Irish railcar. The modern NIR stock isn't too bad either, but you could sleep for ever in those old AEC / BUT cars!

Folks I am in the process of packing a large number of models into airtight plastic boxes for transport. Has anyone any idea where I might get inexpensive foam sheet - ideally of the sort you see in professional photographer's camera bags to hold lenses and so on, each hole carefully cut to the shape and size of what is going to go into it? I would need enough to pack about 100 x "0" gauge models. Thanks

Looks superb as always, Colm. The loco is a delight, but I was also interested in your account of cutting down 00 gauge coaches to make the NCC bogies. Those look remarkably convincing. The real thing was indeed much the same; scaled down standard gauge bodies.

Makes me wonder what is lurking in a certain old green box in the attic, with bits of old bogies and bodies and roofs and chassis!

The Bee's Knees!

Anything Irish among it all? If so I would be happy to give them a good home.

The UTA had in their later days a quite attractive station paint scheme of red, green and a stony light grey, which is what I presume you mean. Strangely, it seemed to have been used on the Derry Road and the NCC, but not on the GN main line or the Warrenpoint branch. There are pics showing it in Derek Young's very excellent book. Love the NCC cabin roof. In relation to your "side story" about the line's history, it may be a matter of pyre fantasy but I am always fascinated to hear of such stories behind fictitious layouts; I have a detailed one concocted for my own, attributing the survival of a remote small terminus like yours to sugar beet and a fortnightly delivery of fuel to an sdjacent bus depot, a la Westport Quay. So may I add a detail to yours; when my father was on the NCC, he arranged a trial of a GNR 2.4.2T on the branch for a while in 1947; utter sacrilege to the NCC men, of course, but an excuse for a model! Not so far-fetched; it was due to him that Bangor got some ex-GNR signal arms in the early 1960s! (Oh, here's me bus, gotta go.............!)

Mighty stuff!

Only finding this now. May I ask some questions? What scale is it - which track are you using? I was thinking of doing a small Indonesian-based model, using 12mm track and re-gauged H0 scale stuff. There are some wagons available which aren't unlike some that ran in Java, though I think carriages would need to be scratch built. There is a Brazilian form that makes several Brazilian diesel locos which are similar to PJKA CC201s. But any assistance you would have re. scales or the diesel loco shown above would be helpful.

I only ever saw 12 once, but nine a couple of times. A 12-car set of these things made you wonder what else was operating the rest of the railway that day! It was quite a spectacular sight......