John-Miles

I have an ex-David Jenkinson 4-2-2 made from a K's kit and it has a tender drive. It will happily pull 6 bogies.

The Swansea Vale Railway used baulk PWay. The Midland relaid it with sleepered track when they took over.

The GW Roller bars are very useful items. e.g van roofs from nickel silver, much better than plasticard and when you start a thread on loco building, boilers and cab roofs.

They look too clean to be leaving work.

Can anybody provide any further information about this image please. Also another wagon number for Stephen.

Sorry for being slow to pick up on this. My recollection is that Derbyshire Carriage and Wagon was on the Sheepbridge branch. This crossed over the road from Eckington to Chesterfield at the bottom of Whittington Hill, there was a level crossing with a low level Midland Signal box, and the wagon works was on the north side of the crossing.

I don't think this can be true. For instance near where I live there is the delightfully named Dingle Road which is on a 1 in 40 and even if the gradient diagram is slightly out you can see it is well over 1 in 270. There are plenty of other examples in South Wales of stations on steep gradiemts and of course there is Five Ways which IIRC is on a 1 in 80.

It is reported that Stamp was a big fan of Hitler and the Nazis so it ironic he was killed by one of their bombs.

It's bleak on Kinder at the best of times, in the rain it must be awful.

Around 15 years ago I managed to arrange a meeting with someone who had been a signalman at Brynamman (correctly spelt with one "m"). He said the lack of a run round loop wasn't a problem. With goods trains, the loco ran into the passenger platform while the guard held the train back and then the train was run into the goods yard by gravity. When he was there all the passenger trains were P-P. The only challenge arose in very cold weather when the wagons could "stick"

As a retired academic and the author of many fully referenced works and a former editor of several academic journals, I fully concur with what Dave Hunt as written above. A fully referenced and annotated article would make for very boring reading for the vast majority of railway fans. The audiences for railway books and academic journals are very different.

One wheeze to make the Furness lubricators is to get an O gauge handrail knob, cut the stem off and the insert a piece of wire through the knob and with a bit of solder make it into the right shape. Then bend the wire to 90 degrees and you have your lubricator. I used this method before I acquired a lathe.

IIRC Roy Burrows did an article in the MRSoc journal about MR fencing and the diagonal version was relatively late. I have been to The Wenvoe Arms tonight so I should really be breathalised before posting an answer.

In the 1950s, which I am old enough to remember, you could see loaded coal trains heading in both directions through Chesterfield - on the Midland of course. The GCR loop was very quiet and the LD&EC was barely clinging on by then.

The choice of glue IMHO depends on what you are trying to do. For instance Plastic Weld dissolves most plastics which in some circumstances can be useful - for example if you are joining Wills Coarse Stone sheets you can just do a butt join, roughly lining up the mortar joints and then use Plastic Weld to reform the "stones" to hide the join. It's much easier than trying to match up courses and stone sizes. On the other, Limonene is great where you want to adjust things as you make the join, for instance lining up bricks because it doesn't melt the plastic. So my idea is match the glue / solvent to what you want to achieve.

Going back to the Royal Scot discussion, Langridge has quite a bit to say about it in his 2 volume work "Under 10 CMEs". IIRC the valve gear was based on that for the Fowler 2-6-4Ts.

The latest Backtrack has an article about relationships between people in the GWR CME's department. In the course of the discussion the author rehashes some of the common myths about how Derby made a mess of the Jubilees and the old one about the Royal Scots being partly based on the SR Nelsons and completely designed by NB. I would send an email to the editor but they don't seem to like my missives. I sent them one recently pointing out the errors in the Railways of Hereforf articles but they haven't printed it. Yours Grumpily!!

This photo is my K's 2F. It's probably 50 years old, rigid chassis, one piece coupling rod, K's wheels and I thought it had a Triang motor but on closer inspection it's a K's. Not that detailed, no fall plate for instance but for its time it was ok but not nearly as sophisticated as the subject of this thread. Built to EM standards and it still works well but oddly no coal in the tender!! I'm not sure why it is loading upside down. I did edit the image so it was the other way up but it still loaded the wrong way up.

I always enjoy looking at how others do things. I would have longer wires for the wipers but then I use compensation and if you put too much of a vertical force on the wheels you affect the compensation.

Many of the railways in the Borders and Wales had significant timber traffic. Even the Bishops Castle Railway, which wasn't noted for carrying anything much, seems to have carried a lot of timber. On the Neath & Brecon, timber was sometimes loaded well away from stations by using a mobile crane and the running lines. Certainly one could speculate that the above timber loads came from the N&B.

The Midland had joint ownership of the County Donegal.

I have used the Brassmasters coupling rods on my 2Fs (they are Gibson not Ks) and I am very pleased with the results. I think that avoiding the join on the centre coupling rod pin reduces the amount of slop (that's a technical term !!) and gives better running. I also have an ancient Ks 2F in LMS livery with Romfords and a Triang motor. Not seen this thread before but I have enjoyed looking through it.

I did a trip around 20 years ago from Cardiff to Fishguard and return. On the way out we went via Landore and Cockett but on the way back we travelled via the Swansea District line which was a nice treat.

There was at one time a Pembroke Dock to Paddington HST. Someone had to get out at Manorbier and open the gates and shut them once the train was through.

About 15 years ago I managed to get hold of some large data sets which contained the original bid price for Civil Engineering contracts and the final bill. The ratio between the two on average was 1.4 (i.e. final bill 1.4 times higher). This might seem scandalous at first sight but in Civil Engineering the lowest bidder usually wins so they need to somehow up the money which they do by gaming the system. For example when you start digging holes and something unexpected turns up the contractor will make the most of it. If the client asks for a variation that again becomes expensive.