The Johnster

Bought back last November from the Bay of e, and a nice little runner for a week or so. Then it stopped, there was a bit of smoke, and a dead short; I thought I’d burned the motor out! The loco was a bit of a lightweight with not much haulage and I’d been adding ballast over the driving wheels and reckoned I’d overdone it and fouled the motor. Mea culpa, bit miffed with myself, put it aside until I was in a better mood. Anyway, I’ve been having a look at it the last two evenings, after buying some cheap can motors, one of which was to experimentally replace the original, which I think is an Anchoridge. The previous owner had made a tidy job of the chassis, which I suspect is a Comet but could be a Perseverance. Wheels & gears are Romford/Markits with proper 56xx balance weights, and the loco has rather nice turned sprung buffers. A brass motor cradle with a fold-up gearbox presumably came with the chassis kit. First hob was to check that the can motor would fit in the Mainline bodyshell, which it did nicely, then I started dismantling things to fit the new motor and isolate the short; I would have to make a new cradle for the can, with some sort of adjustment for meshing as the fold-up gearbox could not be used with it. Rods removed from the rear drivers (driven axle) and the grub slackened off on the drive cog, a wheelnut removed, wheel and a axle withdrawn from frame, which freed the old motor. Before removing the worm and binning it, I tested it; it ran perfectly! Ok, rethink. Best to re-install the original motor & gearbox, the can motor will no doubt come in handy for something else one day. Now all I had to do was find the short, and this took a couple of hours of headscratching before it was located, a pickup strip fouling on brake rodding. It’s a live chassis return pickup with the strip, stiff wire soldered to copperclad chassis cross-members, one end of one of which had detached itself and given the strip sufficient vertical movement to contact the brake rodding. So now I’ve got a working loco again! I’ll do a bit of working up of the ML bodyshell before it goes into service; I’ve already put real coal in the bunker and glazed the spectacle plate windows; it needs lamp irons, renumbering to a suitable Tondu candidate, a backhead, crew, and I think I can improve on the smokebox dart. Buffers are already done and I painted the faces black earlier, and for service on Cwmdimbath I’ll need NEM mounts. The Romford/Markits wheels need centre bosses to hide the split-head axle nuts and the axle ends. Livery is undecided at this stage, currently BR unicycling lion unlined black, which is fine but I don’t like the rather glossy ML finish. Proper copper-capped chimney and brass safety-valve cover would be nice as well. I love a story with a happy ending!

Nowhere near fat-bottomed enough for that!

Bought back last November from the Bay of e, and a nice little runner for a week or so. Then it stopped, there was a bit of smoke, and a dead short; I thought I’d burned the motor out! The loco was a bit of a lightweight with not much haulage and I’d been adding ballast over the driving wheels and reckoned I’d overdone it and fouled the motor. Mea culpa, bit miffed with myself, put it aside until I was in a better mood. Anyway, I’ve been having a look at it the last two evenings, after buying some cheap can motors, one of which was to experimentally replace the original, which I think is an Anchoridge. The previous owner had made a tidy job of the chassis, which I suspect is a Comet but could be a Perseverance. Wheels & gears are Romford/Markits with proper 56xx balance weights, and the loco has rather nice turned sprung buffers. A brass motor cradle with a fold-up gearbox presumably came with the chassis kit. First hob was to check that the can motor would fit in the Mainline bodyshell, which it did nicely, then I started dismantling things to fit the new motor and isolate the short; I would have to make a new cradle for the can, with some sort of adjustment for meshing as the fold-up gearbox could not be used with it. Rods removed from the rear drivers (driven axle) and the grub slackened off on the drive cog, a wheelnut removed, wheel and a axle withdrawn from frame, which freed the old motor. Before removing the worm and binning it, I tested it; it ran perfectly! Ok, rethink. Best to re-install the original motor & gearbox, the can motor will no doubt come in handy for something else one day. Now all I had to do was find the short, and this took a couple of hours of headscratching before it was located, a pickup strip fouling on brake rodding. It’s a live chassis return pickup with the strip, stiff wire soldered to copperclad chassis cross-members, one end of one of which had detached itself and given the strip sufficient vertical movement to contact the brake rodding. So now I’ve got a working loco again! I’ll do a bit of working up of the ML bodyshell before it goes into service; I’ve already put real coal in the bunker and glazed the spectacle plate windows; it needs lamp irons, renumbering to a suitable Tondu candidate, a backhead, crew, and I think I can improve on the smokebox dart. Buffers are already done and I painted the faces black earlier, and for service on Cwmdimbath I’ll need NEM mounts. The Romford/Markits wheels need centre bosses to hide the split-head axle nuts and the axle ends. Livery is undecided at this stage, currently BR unicycling lion unlined black, which is fine but I don’t like the rather glossy ML finish. Proper copper-capped chimney and brass safety-valve cover would be nice as well. I love a story with a happy ending!

Quite a fair way, I’d say…

I think the Country Code is a pretty good philosophy to live by. If you apply 'keep to the path, close the gate, dispose of your rubbish, and keep your dogs on a lead' to most situations in society, you won't go far wrong...

Charlie Marston's Salvage Yard illustrates why most scrappies cut locos as quickly as they could after they arrived; you had to cut and dispose to make room for the next delivery (despite the belief in certain quarters that rapid destruction of the locos was required as part of the tendering conditions with BR). This was certainly the practice at the Newport (Mon) yards, Cashmore's and Buttigieg's. The difference at Dai Woodham's was that he had the use of the 'field', for which he paid a rent to the BTDB, and could store locos, which he did because the steady flow of wagons were easier and more profitable to cut than locos. So he kept the locos back as what he called a 'banker', a reserve of work for his 'boys' against any period when the wagons dried up. It was fortuitous coincidence that this co-incided with the start of the preservation movement, which required a supply of locos in reasonable condition to work on. Barry locos rapidly developed a veneer of surface rust from the sea air and South Wales damp, but were in pretty good structural condition when most were purchased for preservation. Boilers were usually sound, being contructed very solidly as pressure containment vessels. Restorations were pretty heroic efforts, though, usually carried out by small numbers of people in spare time, fairly often in the open in appalling conditions with inadequate tools and funding. A BR workshop could probably have got most of them in main line running condition in a few weeks!

I like the idea of natural weathering on layouts. Scenic colours that fade over time blend better, wood which bleaches and ages naturally, that sort of thing. Wood needs to be left outside for long enough for it to bleach but the problem with this is that it is difficult to keep the stuff from being blown away in the next gale or pinched by nesting birdies, but worth the effort as it is very diffiuclt to get the correct 'look' by painting. For a while I used loose coal at my colliery and as wagon loads, which eventually proved to be too messy for a domestic environment and I now have card wagon fillers with coal glued to the tops, but it was a very useful way of weathering the buildings and the wagons.

So rare there's 30 of 'em this bloke can't get rid of!

Makes sense.

The 'Spud' or 'Black Beetle' used to perform this role, but seems to be difficult to obtain/out of production deze daze and 2h examples fetch inflated prices. Which would suggest that there is insufficient demand to make production viable (and this on a world-wide basis) but sufficient to boost the 2h market... I have long been of the view that Airfix-type simple plastic construction kits supplied with basic chassis components (bearings to insert in plastic frames, motor/gears, and metal axles wheels & motion) selling at between £50 and £100 for locos, around £25 for coaches, and £15 ball-park for wagons would be viable, but the trade doesn't agree or they'd be doing it, and they know more about the market than me! It would need to be 'all parts included', like the old K's kits, but hopefully with a better motor! The Churchward and derivate GW locos, with standardised boilers, cylinders, motion, &c, where different classes are created from different combinations of the standard components, might benefit from this approach.

The original M&S* Rovex set's stock had a simpler hook & loop type of coupling as well IIRC, whereas this set has the earliest form of tension-lock automatic. *'Loving tooled from chemical extrusions and designed by experts to go all bendy as soon as daylight gets anywhere near them, these are not just bananas; these are LMS plastic M&S bananas'...

It’s not a stock item, Rich, just a collection of bits from different manufacturers, Kato track and controller (which probably came from a set that the train was removed from) and a Dapol pannier with a Gresley coach, that some dealer has lying around and is trying to make a killing with. Not that the pricing practice you describe doesn’t exist and isn’t annoying…

My somewhat inexpert view is that multihulls are fine for smooth water use such as rivers, smaller lakes, coastal inshore &c, and as sailing craft are very effective and fast downwind. I am less convinced of their value in offshore/open sea situations, where they offer fast passages but are vulnerable to cancellation in heavy weather and seem even in moderate seaways to spend a lot of effort lurching about in a way that a monohull doesn't.

Trip to town sometime this week should see me supplied with some fresh Milliput for the joins and other filling jobs such as the holes in the ends for the tabs on the Triang roofs, then there will be a pause while I wait for pay day to order the bogies.

No. But it is many years since I used anything other than acrylic paint for this purpose, and in fact almost every other painting job on my layouts; what difference, if any, this makes I have no idea. Tarnishing seems to occur if there has been more than a couple of days between running sessions (the layout doesn't like being neglected and protests in this way), and I usually start off with a track-cleaning jag in these circmustances, but the layout is in a bedroom in the heated/ventilated part of my flat and this may also have a bearing on the situation. I had a loft layout in my teens and tarnishing seemed to be a very frequent occurrence on that, despite the rail sides not being painted.

Seems an odd definition of 'fantastic value for money for the beginner'; the beginner in eBay selling, perhaps. It is a train set in the sense that there is an oval of track, a loco, a coach, and the controllers needed to run the thing, but the loco is not in any way related to the coach and even the most basic and simple form of train cannot be recreated with it as there is no brake coach. I suppose if you are the sort of person who spends that much over the odds for a bunch of unconnected items such niceties do not bother you much... Not convinced about a 'project layout extension', assuming that to mean a project to extend one's layout. Arguably, if you were modelling ex-LNER or ex-GW some of the items might be of some use to you, but the track provided would result in a surplus of curved pieces for most projects! Or could the explanation possibly be that the seller is a Mendacious Chiseller on the lookout for the one born every minute. I know which of these alternatives my money's on... Have to say I'm rather enjoying a lot of this AI-generated nonsense, at least as a spectator sport, though. I work to the default principle that anyone using AI in this way is fundamentally dishonest and hiding behind the AI's vague and somewhat meaningless descriptions, and I don't make it a habit to deal with clearly dishonest people, so the presence of AI in a description is a sure-fire way of alerting me to the fact that the seller is a Chiseller of Mendactity and I will not be buying from him/her, and I would imagine that a fair proportion of potential customers feel the same way. It looks to me, therefore, that not only is this sort of AI description mendacious, it is also simply bad sales technique.

Downloaded free app to my phone, the range can be set, and it is set to 0-100. The first number generated is the percentatge chance of an event occuring during today's timetable; it is then up to me to decide whether it will or not. Then a further number decides what the event is from a list with allocated numbers (hot axle box on mineral train, wagon/van on mileage siding not unloaded, auto-gear on loco not working, &c). The third number delineates what time of day the incident takes place, and the fourth the actual working affected. Arbitrary decisions on further details are then made according to how much fun I want to have with it; a major snafu such as a fusible plug mishap will put the timetable for the branch out for the whole rest of the day, and in the 50s trains were not cancelled as readily as they are nowaday, the ethic was to keep the service running as best you could whatever the delay. Serious delays of the sort that affect manning and require relief crews to be found by Control are probably rare on shortish branch lines like Cwmdimbath, but on main line could have the phones running red hot in Control as diversionary routes were found, pilots and relief crews arranged, connections held and so on. For locomen, guards, and signalmen 12 hours rest was mandatory before they could book back on duty after their last shift, and this meant that manning problems might easily carry over into the following day. A landslip on the branch trapping a train behind it would be fun; the engine would need to be kept in steam and the crew relieved, possibly by taxi in the days before traincrew minibuses, at regular intervals, and possibly food arranged for them. I once got stranded on a Sunday ballast job that overran badly, and was sent a packed lunch from the Buffet at Cardiff Central, cold chicken portion, cheese roll, fresh apple, bottle of light ale.

🎵 'One wheel on my wagon but I'm still rollin' along'...🎶

Wasn't he the idiot specimen who some years ago reckoned that there was sufficient demand for passenger traffic between Swansea and Ilfracombe to justify a fast-cat (or was it a foil service), without apparently realising that the craft would not be able to access Ilfracombe at low tide, or am I thinking about another idiot specimen? He also suggested one between Cardiff and Bristol, where at least there is a traffic flow, with a 40-minute timing to compete with the train; how this was to be achieved using the lock at Cardiff Bay Barrage and hurtling up the Avon at low water, then negotiating the Cumberland Basin locks was a mystery to us all... Bloke's a fool.

She's got a point, though...

And those stops where the display is not always accurate. Ours sometimes show buses due that left two or three minutes ago and there are 'ghost' buses that never turn up, at least not in this dimension. The app is more accurate and the buses can be seen approaching, position updated every 30 seconds. You can also see the fleet number and how full it is; probably the app I use most when I am out and about.

Looks like he's getting revenge by peeing on your car!

Ok, so I've fitted out the cab thus; a tipup seat on the left hand side, handbrake standard centrally located, a cabinet on the rear wall (containing first aid kit, fire blanket, and similar brake van equipment), ladder & wrecking tools under seat, setter between centre and left windows. Yet to do; red painted spare screw coupling, hung on rear wall, and vacuum gauge, also rear wall. I've got some brass tube somewhere to cut a slice off for this, but can't put my hand on it now just. I have decided to bite the expensive bullet and order Stafford Road 3D print bogies.

I would suggest sealing with pva as a default if you are going to use the buildings outside in any case, rovex, and to seal the parts before assembly as well so as to prevent damp getting into the joins by capilliary action. Once that's done you won't have to worry about it any more even if it turns out later that sealing is not necessary...

To the extent that the raised lines on the tank for painting the lining on are reproduced. ISTR that there was one cast from CoT kit that had this wonderful scale feature as well...