The Johnster

See my reply to you and Philipe in the main topic.  I can't see how Bullfrog Snot could be smeared even thinly on to a tyre without a groove for it to sit in without altering the wheel diameter and affecting both pickup running; I wouldn't reccomend it!  You might get away with a very thin coating on both wheels of a wheelset, and there is little to lose by trying as you can remove it if the experiment fails.

Thanks; it's exactly the look I was going for.  Kit from Scale Model Scenery, comes with ladders, cement mixer, a skip (too modern for me) and a shovel. 

Collieries do take up a lot of room, even South Wales ones on restricted valley floor sites, and despite the overwhelming bulk and 'presence' of Diamond Coal, mine is actually quite cramped, 3 sidings capable of taking 9 wagons (the longest train the layout can handle anyway) and two shorter ones, and Diamond can 'only' handle 3 wagons per road under the loader; twice that number would be more typical.  The weighbridge is on the approach road, which is not really an ideal place for it but there's no room anywhere else; it is assumed that it can be locked out of use while trains are shunted over it.  Wagons often have to be positioned on the loader roads during shunting.  I probably wouldn't have been able to find a site for it had the room not had the inglenook in that position, and even then the other buildings are up on the mountainside (not unprototypical for South Wales).

Diamond replaces a Faller 'Old Mine' kit, which looked much less British and had a bit of a 'Snow White and the Seven Persons Of Restricted Growth' feel to it, but The Squeeze, who is Polish and whose father is a Silesian miner, says it is typica6l of such buildings in her part of the world.  'Old Mine' took up more room and had only one loading road; Diamond is much better, and I have never regretted buying it.  If I had more room, I'd be going in for the Cornerstone Coke Ovens as well.

Which of course you can leave off or replace with a cast iron jobby.

Here for your perusal is Dimbath Deep Navigation no.2 (see how I've suggested the existence of an entire no.1 pit without having to model it), Britishified with NCB notices and neglect.  Note the half-built canteen and pithead baths in the background, severely mutilated Kitmaster 'modern shop with flat' kit with scaffolding, more Britishness as the NCB, formed in 1947, promised canteens and pithead baths are all it's collieries and built them during the early 50s. so this is a period 'pin' as well.  You will be relieved to hear that some tidying up has taken place since the photo was taken, though a colliery should be quite messy!  The chimney and water tank are now straightened...

Backstory (I like backstories) is that the pit was developed with government money during WW2 after a seam of particularly high quality low sulphur coking coal was opened up; the other colliery buildings pre-date this.  The tippler/loader is of course Walther's Cornerstone 'Diamond Coal' kit, steel frame corrugated sheeting, looking perfectly at home in South Wales with it's air of general neglect and poor quality wartime austerity paint job.  It is of course intended to represent an Appalachian 'level' or 'slope' drift mine, but a conveyor up from the headframe sorts that out.  Headframe is a DAPR 3D print, £28.

It's 'H0ness' is revealed in the stairways, and (if you want to rivet count) the doorways, but is not obvious or completely implausible.  It was a joy to build, Amercican quality, very little flash and everthing fitted perfectly.  IIRC I paid £48 new for it, cf Bachmann Scencraft Pithead for 5p short of £60 beer vouchers and that's before you think about tipplers, washeries, fan houses, boiler houses, pump rooms &c.  There's no comparison; Walther's are way ahead of the game in everthing except scale, and that doesn't matter as much as you'd think it would with these larger industrial buildings.  Absolutely the right choice for my colliery, two loading roads and the slack bin, brilliant, no connection happy customer.

The Squeeze is Polish, and all Polish schoolchildren in her day, still under communism, were taken to Auchwitz.  She went when she was 14 and will never forget it. 

The problem is that people who say it never happened are completly convinced of the conspiracy, and governments/government agencies in general but in the US in particular have not always behaved since WW2 in a way that has discouraged them.  The conspiracy theorists are never going to be persuaded otherwise, and while it isn't about this particular matter, we have seen in the US and Brazil that some of them are armed to the teeth and prepared to act on their delusional beliefs, manipulated by those of their ilk who have borrowed the group's collective brain cell and can exploit the foot soldiers for their own ends.  There's a massive untapped reservoir of racism, anti-semitism, envy of the more intelligent, and immigrant fear for these nutters to exploit.  Even if you showed them around the camps, they'd tell you you'd built them post-war as a sort of sick theme park.  Liberal democratic opinion is that the answer is education, and it is, but you can't educate pork, ultimately you can only slaughter it, which brings us all down to their level and is self-defeating. 

I feel strongly about this and am greatly troubled by it.  I have mental health problems and would have most certainly have been for the gas chambers myself in that place and time, and memory of the horror is the only thing that keeps it from recurring, mostly (but there've been genocides and death camps since WW2).  The United Nations, a body whose general prinicples I have believed in all my life, is proving increasingly ineffective and it's main sponsor, the US, has effectively abandoned it.  Where do we go now?  Ok I'm gonna be brown bread soon and it doesn't affect me, but I don't want that sort of world; I have my principles, even as a burnt corpse!  Thinking it won't happen again because our systems are effective in preventing it sounds to me like the best possible way to ensure that it happens again.

Looks pretty good to me.  Steel framed brick faced buildings like this became common in the UK and the rest of Europe as well as in the US from about the 1890s until the 1930s, so it has a 'suitability' head start. 

I have a Walther's Cornerstone 'Diamond Coal' tippler building as the main structure of my colliery, a steel framed asbestos sheet clad affair that sits quite comfortably in the scene.  Careful positioning and tracklaying has enabled me to put a siding through between the main building and the loader part, intended as a H0 roadway access to the slack bin in the kit, but which I can 'get away with' because American lorries are wide and British mineral wagons are narrow.  I like Walther's stuff, sensibly and cleverly proportioned to look big and be small (some of them look big because they are big. I have ambitions for the Coke Ovens, have you seen the size of that thing, never mind the blast furnaces and rolling mill), good uses of space.  British 00 kits or RTP for colliery and other industrial buildings are pathetically undernourished by comparison, and expensive to boot!

There are people in the world, mostly with a fairly predictable agenda, that are claiming that none of that ever happened.  Never forget; remembering is our only defence against it happening again, and it has, several times.

The 'unicycling lion' totem was appled to locos coming out of works through paint shops between 1949 and 1956, when the the 'ferret & dartboard totem was used.  As Redgate has said, the ferret & darboard was a proper heraldic device, and as such had to be approved by the College of Arms and obey the rules of heraldry, which are set by the College of Arms, an officially authorised body.  The rules are complex and cloaked in medieval High French, and one of them is that heraldic animals, including of course the lion on the ferret and dartboard, must face to the left of the device as viewed from the front. 

The unicycling lions, not a heraldic device but simply a logo, faced towards the front of the loco it was used on, be it tender or tank, and where there was doubt about which the front was, such as the LMS and LNER Beyer Garratts and the various diesels, electrics, and gas turbine, it faced towards the smokebox or whichever cab was nearest.  On multiple units it faced the nearest cab.

When the ferret & dartboard came into use, this practice continued, with the lion looking as far as possible as if it was facing the way it was going.  This contravened the College of Arms regulations, and once that august body became aware of the situation, it issued an order to the BRB to rectify the situation forthwith, or else.  As nobody wanted to be put in the Tower for painting a loco, the Board complied, replacing such lions as were facing to the right even if they were henceforward condemned to a life of going backwards. 

Duke of Gloucester was a high profile engine, and one would expect it to carry the latest livery most of the time.  To ascertain which totem(s) it's tender carried during 1957, right in the transition period, will need to be researched and as always the best information is dated photographs of good provenance.  Luckily the engine's uniqueness guaranteed a lot of attention from photographers.  According to Wikipedia, the BR1J tender was not provided until 1958, so the loco's original BR1E was still coupled to it in 1957.  The BRIJ tender would certainly have had it's lions correctly left-facing and conforming to the College of Arms' rules.

I cannot help wondering if all this directionist faffing about had any part to play in the double-arrow corporate identity logo, which sort of faces both ways at once.  We called it the 'arrows of indecision'.

Rule 1 grants you the inaleable right to excercise complete freedom on your layout, but with great freedom comes great responsibility.  Paradoxically, and to the dismay of the hippie generation, a basic framework of rules and methodology increases the amount of freedom that you can actually use (as opposed to the amount of freedom you can actually have), so that in practice you have more freedom not less.  Laws that prevent your being robbed, attacked, or murdered increase your freedom to carry on your life as you wish.  If there were no clefs, notation, pulse, and time signatures, music would be noise, because music is structured by definition, and noise is unstructured by definition. 

So, approaching running your trains and, indeed, buying them with these examples in mind, Rule 1 is your individual interpretation of the dichotomy that must exist between our desire for realism, our knowledge of what that is, our modelling ability, and the fact that what we are really dealing with is little electric toy mice.  You make your own satanic deal with it, and nobody else is owed an explanation of what that deal is; in fact it may be a moveable feast that you have never quantitatively examined yourself.  In my case it is inconsistent as well; I put proper lamps on my trains but am happy to run crude and basic Airfix A30 auto-trailers or cut'n'shut Triang clerestories, and only recently gave up on a Triang Hornby 2721, about as fundamentally inaccurate a model as has been produced after the Rovex Black Princess and shorty banana coaches.  After putting up with all sorts of anomalies on it for years and doing loads to work it up and improved the running, I finally decided I couldn't live with the overlong bunker.  My Rule 1 says the same as yours, but they are not the same, and this is as it should be.

Be careful of the Druids!