Lyonshall Castle

Thanks.

No. Still waiting. Any news on when they will be mailed out?

It was great to meet you last night in the Fletcher Moss, John. I hope you didn’t mind me intruding on your group. As I said, I love Stoke Courtenay and your attitude to railway modelling and have followed your postings with anticipation. I hope I can get my West Midlands WR 1950s/60s project up and running in the near future and be able to post some of my own attempts at railway modelling before I get too old for it. Cheers Bill

Just seen this thread so am probably much too late. I have a number of Hornby XS Castles and discovered that Kidwelly Castle with the Hawksworth tender has a 21 pin ESU Loksound v3.5 whereas Clun Castle with Collet tender has an 8 pin ESU Loksound V4 decoder. Both sound similar but need different tweaks to their CV settings to get the best results. The v3.5 needs a 100ohm speaker whereas the v4 needs a 4 ohm one. I discovered this as the sound died on one and I discovered it was the speaker when I put the decoder in another Kidwelly. You can get replacement 100ohm speakers (bass reflex or 28mm round) from DCC Supplies to replace blown ones. Hope that helps.

You can turn off the firebox glow with a simple push of the F6 button......

That’s a fantastic ex GWR station, especially the platform canopy. It looks scratchbuilt. Would you consider posting details of how you made it? I am endeavouring to recreate a similar effect so any help and advice would be appreciated.

You are right about trying to mix and match Trix Mk1s with other stock - it didn’t work, especially in my case where the other Mk1s were HD tin plate sided and not only taller in height but shorter in length than the ‘undernourished’ (I like that word in this context - thanks Philou) Trix coaches. IMHO all subsequent versions of MK 1s from Triang through Lima, Mainline, Replica et al were hopeless until the Bachmann versions appeared

You are right about trying to mix and match Trix Mk1s with other stock - it didn’t work, especially in my case where the other Mk1s were HD tin plate sided and not only taller in height but shorter in length than the ‘undernourished’ (I like that word in this context - thanks Philou) Trix coaches. IMHO all subsequent versions of MK 1s from Triang through Lima, Mainline, Replica et al were fairly hopeless until the Bachmann versions appeared albeit with overnourished ribbing on their roofs.

Thanks Bernard. That explains why the difference in scale wasn’t too noticeable.

Did anyone run Trix stuff in the early 60s? I still have a die cast Britannia that could haul 14 HD tin plate sided Mk1s without effort. Ok it was HO not OO but as a working model it was superb for its time and outperformed my HD Castle. And to my eyes it was the most accurate model of a Britannia in terms of cab shape etc. for nearly 50 years until the most recent Hornby iterations. I also bought a number of the Trix plastic self-assembly Mk1s (again made to HO scale) which included a BCK, unavailable from any other manufacturer, and commonwealth bogies. They were easy to cut’n’shut to make other types unavailable at the time such as an SK. Given that everything RTR then was not 100% accurate in terms of scale, size or dimensions, the difference between Trix HO and the OO of the rest was easily overlooked.