Yarravalleymodeller

Yes, and your first point of call to find those sites is probably a sniff around and a look at what sites the results google spits out come from. Then as you say once you gain some familiarity with the regular likely places you can check them first then go looking further if needed. Point being it isn't quite the 6 month research assignment to the archives It's made out to be, it's just a pleasant afternoon with a cuppa and some understanding of how to go about it. It is a model review mind, not saying you could research the model this way to produce it, but it will put you in a good place to say if there are any glaring errors or not.

But, and this is basically the case for 99% of things you see produced ready to run, there are readily available data sheets online that will tell you what the wheel spacing should be. I struggle to think of any thing produced that would come up against much issue to finding its wheel spacing listed online with a very very good chance of being able to be cross referenced and established to be good information.

Realistically you don't even need to go to the NRM, there's this thing called google images, seriously stuffed with plenty of images to get a very reasonable understanding of what you are looking at on the desk vs what existed at a given time. The idea that owning the model also makes the review any better is... interesting when you delve into how it might effect your perceptions of value of that model... every model you buy kinda devalues any use you may have for every other model you own. We only have so much track, so much time, if you buy literally more models than you can enjoy within those two limitations then your opinion of any of them and the value of them begins to suffer consciously or subconsciously. What value has it once a certain point is passed beyond a thing to review. It's sentimental value is limited to your familiarity and emotional investment in the real thing or some connection born of a past experience with a previous iteration of it and from here it just slides into a review mired in the fact you paid for it, not improved by the fact you paid for it. There becomes a subconscious or concious imperative to maximise the return on any information you trade with you viewer in exchange for their viewing your review that comes at the expense of maximising the information exchanged in that transaction because that is just further effort put into something that rather than representing a more ethereal emotional value is now just an item you need to make your investment back on. The modeller, be it someone from P4 or someone playing with it on a loop of track experiences an utterly different construct of value to the person buying it just to make their money back on it. The end result is usually a review where an undue weight is placed on cost, a lack of valuable information is present, and the transaction becomes one devoid of much use mainly because the person purchased the model.

You need not necessarily know everything as a base point only have a good understanding of how to go about finding pertinent information of which there is thanks to this interconnected web of devices we are on now an even greater ease than ever of finding. Thankfully the model its self also affords you chances to find things more easily: it ran in this livery, okay so what time period, okay so find photographs within that time frame, okay now play spot the difference. It is perhaps naive to think that anyone knows everything there is to know about anything and thus the question shouldn't be how much does the person know when we come to assess the value of their opinion it should be how much willingness and effort do they put in to know as much as they reasonably can given what information is likely available which as above is what the French would term a sh*t load. And we are not talking about secondary source information we are talking primary source photographs you can cross reference to assure the date is correct in all but a few cases for most major classes and major railways for the majority of periods and subject matters covered by ready to run items.(this is as far as locomotives go, obviously carriages and wagons... not so much because people tended not to run around taking pictures of specific wagons or carriages)

Measurement is an interesting thing. To someone who isn't particularly up to scratch on measurement methods and the faults that can develope along the way by getting one step here or there wrong in order to come to that final piece of measured information any measurement is a good measurement. The length of the piece of string comes to mind, how interested and invested the person personally is in knowing the length of the piece of string will dictate how much scrutiny they place on the measurement of the piece of string and this allows for some placement of different levels of expert in the length of string at different points on the spectrum of potential consumers of the information regarding the length of the piece of string. You can easily end up with a situation where someone with no interest in furthering the knowledge of the length of the piece of string sets up business providing the length of the piece of string to people who may not openly wish to know the length of the piece of string and will happily settle to know this version of the length of the piece of string and get stuck here to the detriment of their progression of knowledge of the length of the piece of string and to the great benefit of this provider of string related data who then also feels no need to improve their knowledge of the piece of string or their output on the piece of string. This new entrant to the piece of string measurement data market unwittingly creates a situation where they hold back the human potential that might be unleased, sorry, unstrung by furthering peoples understanding of the length of the piece of string which has a knock on effect moving up the market for data on the length of a piece of string where returns deminish at the top due to ever decreasing upward mobility of new seekers of more accurate data on the length of a piece of string creating a downward pressure to reduce data on the length of a piece of string into simpler forms that serve this less interested less mobile market which creates a situation where good data becomes a scarce resource over data that says what the market wants to hear. We suffer stagnation, we see people strung up for highlighting this by people strung along by it. Can I say one more word, string. 🤣

I shall have to report this post for misinformation, we all know the earth is a flat dinner plate full of yummy human morsels held up by a 5 armed waiter named Duncan in the restraunt Evolutionary Eats located on the planet Vennms. A very special restaurant where you may order one of the best primordial soups on offer and await the delights that evolve as it travels to your table.

Sometimes the strangest things bring the mojo back after a christmas period of trying times with inlaws and excessive work load. Today I visited the bank to adjust a loan agreement, you'll ask yourself how this could possibly be a source of that mind set we seek for modelling, well back in 2021 I took out the loan in question. The staff member who handled this eventually got us chatting so much that I let slip the reason for the loan was to cover some costs around the loss of my little boy Theo. We wound up having quite the conversation in which she shared that she too had experienced similar in the past. It was probably the most helpful visit to a bank I've ever had, an emotional pick me up and a loan approval.😅 Back to today, different branch, different town, waltz in to conduct my business and who is the staff member handling loans but the same person. We go through the business of what I need and chatter away as we do, informing her of my wonderful daughters existence and talking all things related to that. Eventually she informs me that today would in fact have been the 22nd birthday of her little one had they made it and how my popping up randomly with some good news turned her day around. A very odd day indeed but one that has left me feeling rather calm. Get home, candle lit for her little one, and I could honestly go do some modelling were it not for householdy tasks to do. Here's to her little Sophie... 22 today.

Perhaps you need to use this place to its fullest. Rekindle the love of the build by building something and showing it off here. You'll find people asking questions, people telling you its good, people offering advice, people enjoying it, joy is not always in you looking at it and feeling joy, joy can be in bringing others joy showing off things you make that heck might even inspire them to pick up a knife or some paint and glue and get cracking. Then you get to sit back, sip your nice cuppa and feel good knowing you helped spur that on. You might even find yourself feeling more positive of your own work as a result. All the best, other people have theirs, you have yours, it's not a competition unless you enter it in one.

Spot on. And the one year she did, let's say I'm still in trouble for repainting the gift I was given rather than cherishing it as is.

For £850 it best have some of those gamer lights my old PC's never had. I hear they add buoyancy to the floating points.....

SAD is an odd thing really, marked by both seasons in the sense of weather seasons but also cultural/emotional seasons as eluded to with Christmas and the loss of your father, my condolence. Vastly impractical as it is as an aide to most people I found the year or two I spent doing the back and forth between the UK and Australia to be very beneficial to breaking down some of those ties of seasons being marked by traumatic experiences which had become seated in the flow of each subsequent years events. What was a cold Christmas confined to home by pressures of bad weather and shorter daylight hours leading to rumination on past events in a cycle that was unhealthy became an all together different outlook. It's a very hard thing to explain with lots of odd perceptive outcomes such as the sky somehow seeming bigger and the curiosity for new things flooding back at a times usually consumed with old things but definately worth a go if the means are available to do it. Belgium does sound gun though, never did get to ride eurostar before abandoning the northern hemisphere🤔

Does it matter if the tooling is original? Because I'm quite sure a lot of these physical mould tools have been replaced over the years as they degrade. The Hornby GWR single was from memory(correct me please) entirely replaced at some point as have been the toolings of many a wagon kit, Ian kirk, the o gauge stuff, (memory again) even mentions this on the website or did as a reason for the temporary unavailablity of some kits. Likewise that Hornby 08, yes was still produced but heavily modified in terms of the chassis the motor etc etc. Long and short where do we draw the line to say it is still the same product?

There's pecking orders and badge of honour mentalities among every class, certain drivers would seek certain duties above others it's just known to be the case. Still kinda is, some seek a position in freight, some in passenger, some seek to migrate to certain routes, some seek training on certain motive power. Way of the world.

But reportedly loved by crews and couldn't half put in a good show once you got it going. It's likely one of those impracticalities that became a badge of honour to overcome, much like buying a sports car with no traction control and not ending up in a hedge. 😅 It's a machine that demands skill and respect and you gain respect being able to handle it.

This is good. Now given that as we've learned we start with maxium tractive effort and we descend on a curve as our speed increases let us ask what effect our maximum line speed would have on our requirements for tractive effort and ponder weather low tractive effort in the case of the M class is in fact an indicator of lacklustre design or failiure given the maxium line speed is 60 compared with the maxium line speed of (guessing) 80? London to Brighton etc. Let us also ask, by how much would we have to change the specifications to reach equilibrium with the atlantic mentioned. This will be a fun bit of number crunching.

What is a tractive effort and why does one matter? * stands back *

Yup, all big all boring. Once you see some tiny 0-4-0 working it's guts out pulling above its weight in industry these big toys become a bit dull to look at. That said GWR if only because of the variety of exotic stuff they took on via absorption that started before grouping was even a thing. Rest, yeah nah.

Given the fondness of late for the industrial loco, Hornby doing many, rapido in on it, Dapol, hattons etc etc For next year a little industrials category might be an idea, otherwise good stuff, votes added.

You can always so no to more responsibility, much easier to stop climbing the ladder and take a break where you are than climb it only to have to climb back down and then back up having taken on too much. Look after you cause if you aren't looked after who looks after your family? Best to make sure there is enough coming in and you're 100% before chasing lots coming in at the expense of anything coming in at all if that makes sense.

The idea that you're paying to replace the whole loco with new materials is also a bit misleading, in the case of crewe they were more than capable of taking a loco, scraping it internally and reprocessing most of the materials. They had on site their own steel processing and much more, even their own brick works. In the case of locos purchased from other sources yes it may represent more of a loss but ultimately when you have that much in house expertise your costs on just about every process are basically labour and energy if you are scrapping and reprocessing for the most part.

Well over a decade means... well over a decade. The actually bad ones lasted much less, the ones that find alternate use cases last much longer, the ones that are superseded with no practical other place to go or potential buyers end up gone. There is no hard and fast rule of life expectancy for a good loco. That is a modern apparition. There's what made sense to each railway for each loco or class at that point.

If we hassle him nicely he might get to scratch building that christmas island peckett in a what if form for british industry. That would make for quite the sight on a layout

As a quick side note, before I start work, there's human factors to consider whenever we talk coal consumption, humans are very much creatures of habit. If you get used to firing in a particular way you tend to get stuck firing that way. I've witnessed this play out with preservation era firemen coming for a play on locos they don't usually use. All it takes is for one design to supersede another and the firemen to remain stuck in their ways and you can have an apparent poor coal consumption caused by them laying it on thick when not needed. Might not seem much at first glance but add it up over the sheer number of trips and yes you end up with a big bill for coal. Equaly applies to steaming capabilities, the person controlling use of that steam can be doing so in a poorly managed way and if you apply that to many people you end up with reports of poor steaming. Sure if we fire something up tomorrow when I go play trains then there would be among the people there those who can get a long way on a little and those who go nowhere for a full tank of water and all the coal. It's a very difficult one to judge even by the account books unless they are wildly consistently terrible numbers. Also other things like size of the coal play into it but again, whole other rabbit hole to go down to try and find the truth to any of it

Hindsight is the great twister of reality. I don't think any railway particularly foresaw labour disputes or rising coal prices, while this may have not been ideal for the balance sheet or indeed the firemans back does it mean they were bad locomotives that couldn't do the job. Nope. Is your car bad because oil prices went up? Is the plane badly designed because the price of the gate at the airport went up and you got the knock on cost? As long as it goes, as long as it doesn't actively lose money just loses some % of profitability for the railway even these business based arguments don't make the design bad they just make it less than perfect at that moment in time. More interestingly, name a perfect loco capable of weathering any economic condition or traffic demand, I don't think one exists, even the mighty GWR couldn't really do that.

Even more difficult if, as a manufacturer, you insist on making hyper realistic models, yet also insist on them being able to pull a huge rake of coaches. Sacrifice the ability of your 1830s esq 0-4-2 to pull an 18 coach train and set the goal somewhere more realistic and the RC option becomes far more workable because you're not looking to make it heavy as possible by havingas much solid material as possible you're instead looking to fill that space with equipment to ensure it goes and keeps going when asked(until whatever enegery storage gives out). We sacrifice running quality to the demands of massively heavy diecast blocks to satisify pulling power. It's a vicious cycle predominately perpetuated making everything rule 1 compatible in the extreme only to have everyone from rule 1 to the most diehard realist have a bad time. Nothing implicitly wrong with rule 1 before anyone says but I to that... just it is the cause of issues and the prevention of solutions in some ways for both sets of modellers when it comes to how to get the electrons to the right places.