Dave John

That really does improve the whole scene, your tree making is excellent. Good use of magnets.

A couple of darker pictures to show the lighting. I think I got it about right, these would be nowhere near as bright as modern stock. They look ok to the eye, but I found it difficult to photograph. Gives an idea anyway. And another just or fun.

It has taken me longer to build these than it took St Rollox. So, a few pictures and a bit of video of the rake in service. A bit of video, they move quite well. All things considered I have found this to be an interesting build. There have been challenges which meant that I had to develop techniques to overcome what I know to be my modelling weaknesses. I use the phrase “messing about on the bench” quite a lot but that is the part of modelmaking that I really enjoy.

If its any help I found the Halfords Burgundy red to be a bit redder than the vauxhall burgandy red I sprayed my rake of GCS with. To my eye ( though thats not really all that accurate ) the Ford burgundy red is a bit too purply for Midland red. However I do know that the undercoat colour influences it, so might look right. Mind you I'm not the best at painting, and we all see colour a bit differently.

Spring steel wire is not the easiest thing to solder. As above, acid flux and pre tin it. I use Bakers fluid too. I now tend to buy guitar strings for 9 thou spring steel wire . Spring steel but plated with I think nickel. They are much easier to solder and are more resistant to rusting.

All good advice, another tip. Acquire a fine kitchen sieve, about 6-8 inch diameter. When washing flux off or cleaning put them in the sieve then run water or clean over them. If there is a dry joint and a wee bit falls off it gets caught in the sieve rather than vanishing down the plughole. Don't ask me how I know.....

Er, so turn tracking off ?

Hmm. Advertising is part of the modern world. The internet is a transport system, it transports data, our computers and the sites we visit are the stations, airports, bus shelters of the internet. Look at those, they are covered in adverts, so why would the internet be any different? The revenue goes into the pot, overall costs are reduced. To be brutally honest that is the way the world works these days. Now, many internet sites give users the option to give a bit of cash and the ads go away . Never happens elsewhere, are the local bus company going to remove all their ads if a few folk offer a bit of money? nope. So the options are there. If I could afford it I might go gold, but for now I'll put up with the ads and support RMweb that way. All I actually see is an ad for world of railways and a bit of video which goes away if I click X . ( though tbh I have to laugh at the car show one. Really I'd be gawking at the lassie not some naff motor car .... Oh and look carefully, there are some trains in the one with the ship ..... ) So Andy, 20 odd pages of hassle, I just feel I should just throw in a bit of support for you running a seriously tough site, if ads are needed to pay for it all then so be it.

A while back I fixed a real life jointed on site one that went askew with a lot of duct tape and a couple of cans of squirty foam. Still leaked a bit, but it was only going to be there a couple of years . Looks good to me.

Heh, Flemings left hand rule for motors, right hand rule for generators tbg. It's funny, some things stick in the mind. I can't remember what day it is sometimes, and I forget names of folk I have been introduced to two minutes ago. I can however remember my mothers Co-op dividend number from before they started giving out stamps. I would add a dim old git emoji , but I can't find that either ......

Actually all my locos run the wrong way too. After 30 + years of building stuff I had a go at converting a bachman O4 to the version hired in by the Caledonian in 1919, converting it to my version of EM while I was at it. I managed to get it to run quite happily, but was surprised to find it ran in the opposite direction from all the rest. Did I change all the rest ? Nope, just the O4. Not really a problem since my stuff won't run on anything other than my layout. Anyway, modelling the Caledonian I almost feel obliged to do everything in the opposite way to everyone else. Which it might be argued is part of the fun of modelling the Caledonian.

Heh, well, Compound the triang/Hornby versions have been battered into shape by dedicated modellers over the years. However I see they go on ebay for more than I'm building these for. I thought about it in the past and decided that getting it right from the start was actually the simpler option. Cheers Mikkel. There is a photo in the carriage book that shows them, but it is from an oblique angle and has a bit of reflection on it. So I scanned it in and messed about in Affinity for a while but couldn't get it to look right. So I hit the net, lion rampant with laurel leaves sinister. Oddly the best that came up was actually a crochet pattern. Really. So I threw that into Affinity and messed about. After a lot of changes it ended up as the image you see there, printed out on matte photo paper and stuck behind the glazed window. So if anyone is making some GCS I'd happily send them the print file. all 18.4 MB of it ......

Nicely detailed Mikkel, I think the light weathering brings out the detail. Good research behind them too.

It has often been said that the camera is the harshest critic. I tend to agree with that so I thought I would post a couple of photos of completed sides to see how they look in the context of the layout before going ahead with the other two. So, here we are. Diagram 96 all third, compartment side. Diagram 94 composite, corridor side. Those look reasonable to me, apart from the dust. Getting there.

I have used the 51L flywheels with the mitsumi motors. I fit them to the extended shaft at the front of the motor. https://www.wizardmodels.ltd/?s=flywheel&post_type=product&title=1&excerpt=1&content=1&categories=1&attributes=1&tags=0&sku=1&orderby=date-DESC&ixwps=1