fiftyfour fiftyfour

Railtec, previously very good indeed, have stopped replying to e-mail order requests. Trying to get a custom order as a work-around to the fact that a pack I want has been long term out of stock. He has taken down all "contact" function from his website, e-mailed using the address on the packs and via the one used to confirm orders and no reply after a week. Anyone else with half-done project on the workbench now stuck or probably going to have to complete with inferior solution (Fox or print-at-home)?

And one of the presenters asked them about going from a train with two locos able to limp forward if one loco failed to a train with one loco ergo no movement at all if that burst. They tried to hold the Class 91 back until the Friday but it was visible passing going the other way on a test train comprised of blue/grey SLE/SLEP from the 43108 can ride on 1S16, and pointed out by the traincrew on same!

332's were the HEX units that took you from Heathrow to outer West London for a sky high fee, the 333's trundle around Leeds, Ilkley, Skipton and Bradford.

The ROSCOs have no interest at all in protecting TOC revenue flows, they are motivated only by maximising return from their asset. Even if it were true the Open Access business model was slaughtered by Covid. Don't forget that the 91's were VERY cheap and nasty, and it took a total rebuild to make them anywhere near OK. Now they suffer badly from woefully poor acceleration when compared to modern distributed power kit, hence their rejection from Euston to Blackpool open access.

York had shut by then and the quality of what Derby was churning out at the time was variable, to put it politely (see any early Class 170 for details!). Never knew the 333's were in a state, ironically they are pretty nice units to travel on. I guess the point about the surplus 350 and 379 does kill them stone dead, does feel wasteful to be scrapping stuff that we now regard as mid-life based on 30-40 year stock lifespans we expect these days.

If the industry cannot work out how to fit TPWS to a mid-life unit that is identical to 16 other units in traffic elsewhere then it's time to pull down the shutters and close up for good! And the HEX work was hardly demanding, especially when compared to Aire Valley.

Both 43313 (Ferme Park vs Class 08) and 43300 (Neville Hill vs Class 800) have been used as spares sources for XC and EMR respectively. 43185 was probably high on bogie hours or high on body rot or had something else wrong which sealed its fate, they wouldn't have placed a lot of value on sentimentality or the fact it had a badly applied set of vinyls for its final three years in service!!

Know I've said it before but I'd much rather just have a standard IC Swallow pair as was the norm 1988-1997 rather than yet another celebrity. We have NEVER had a WR pair, two different Eastern/Scottish pairings and none of those ever come up on eBay for less than £400.

the 1978 one was before they entered service- the lack of exhaust deflector on an ECML car gives that one away immediately. I'd go along with the earlier suggestion on the 1981 shot, either a headline timing improvement or some other kind of special occasion- didn't the Selby diversion open at some stage in '81 which would have knocked a good many minutes off the York-Doncaster section timing?

In later years sticker headboards were used to relaunch the Devonian and Cornishman services in May 1987 (see below, not my photo) and again for the Cornishman in the Virgin era (again not my shot)

You've got your Mk3 buffets a bit mixed up. For WCML Mk3a loco-hauled in that era you want an RUB, which has three large bay windows. There were only about 25 rakes with one of those in, and they later (I assume) got reclassified as RFB when the seating area became designated first class rather than "unclassified" but that was after your era, if it happened at all before they were converted to RFM (and the window layout hacked about with!). TRUB, TRUK, TRSB are all HST vehicles, and for my money the most visible difference between the loco hauled and HST vehicles is the roof at the vehicle ends, abd its such a significant difference between loco hauled and HST so you have the choice between Oxford, Oxford or Oxford if modelling a Mk3a rake I'm afraid.

I hope Railtec do a pack for the Barbie one day, but there is no point whatsoever asking them as they get about 200 requests a day. I'd like them to do the First decals and the pink swoosh elements and the gold and pink band so its a single colour blue spray and then a transfer pack over the top. It was a bit weird that they did the shorter lived "fag pack" ahead of the Barbie style as fag-pack was available as RTR (Barbie wasn't, unless you count the toys using the 1975 Hornby moulding) but I guess he was looking at the loco-hauled market and did the HST as an add on.

Or just accept that it's an outrageous waste of public money subsidising a lightly used sleeper service and can the whole lot!! Prior to the plague imagine how much better the money spent building 75 brand new Caledonian Sleeper carriages could have been used on daytime services- for example a build of 58 carriages could have extended all Cross Country Voyagers by one coach...

43038 had a white cab roof which made it look a bit more Class 91-esque, there are photos out there showing it newly done, or you may prefer the "in service" look.... http://www.hondawanderer.com/43038_Finedon_1992.htm

Metalic was maybe the wrong word, they feel like they have a glossyness to them that I wasn't able to replicate on the printer at home. http://www.hondawanderer.com/43143_Knighton_2007.htm Kind of shows what I want to achieve. I was going to (bear with me!) spray the pink onto a waterslide transfer sheet and print the outline of it onto the dried pink section of the sheet and cut that out and apply it to the loco, I don't think I'd be able to accurately mask up the curves on the bodyside nor do I think the resolution of the pink would be good enough on a home printed transfer. Then having some "pink transfer" left over I'd be able to slice up the narrow pink bands and apply those as transfers, and I could distress or otherwise manipulate the band that goes around the front as they were always quite washed out, even on otherwise tidy power cars as shown on the picture link. I just wish someone would take all that hassle away from me!!

What item number for the gold First decals please? I'd like to see a set to find what size they are and if they might "do" for the later blue/pink "barbie" livery which is universally ignored. I have no means of producing gold decals on the print at home method, they just don't come out the right colour without a glossy/metalic look.

the "conversion to HST trailer" comment encompassed those. The earlier poster thought they had travelled on loco hauled Mk3's out of Reading, which they could only ever have done on the sleeper.

Caledonian Sleepers is more complex, as they are more like a "hook and haul" freight contract whereby GBRf provide all the locos, all the drivers and the control function but without the baggage of the work "belonging" to any particular TOC. I'd argue that the importance of the sleepers had been in steep decline even prior to black death as earlier, later and faster "daytime" trains diminished the need for them; if you are a business person in Cornwall you can have a night at home and get the up Golden Hind and still be in London for 10:00 and probably do quite a bit of work on the way- and that was reflected by falling demand for the sleepers over the years.

Correct, no loco hauled Mk3 stock ever made it onto Cross-Country apart from summer Saturday "hire ins". When the Mk3's were displaced on WCML by the Pendolinos they mostly went to Anglia, with smaller quantities ending up in other roles such as Wrexham & Shopshire, charter rakes, scratch rakes like the North Berwick 90's and conversion to HST trailers. Before the WCML Mk3's were released XC had the full fleet of Voyagers in service.

You'd only go down the genny van route if you were planning to sub contract the haulage to a freight operator, which was floated a while ago and firmly blocked by the union locally.

No they don't, only 43014/123 had it. It's just a through cable to allow a conventional ETH loco on the front to therm stock behind the power car.

You don't rewire the coach, you take the MA set off and feed the auxiliaries off the 415V three phase, which is effectively what the MA set does to the 850V DC supply. It's been done on many loco hauled Mk3 coaches now and none of them have needed anything like the work you describe. Converting the other way (HST to loco hauled) is a tad harder, it was done on some TRUK vehicles to make them into RFMs.

Nobody could ever make a sound financial case for replacing any of the Mk3 sleepers given the amount of passenger journeys each one could operate in a week. It would make better economic sense to add sliding doors to the Mk3 SLE/SLEP if they really cannot manage that situation even with the number of crew they have on board. Then all you need do at Penzance every evening is pinch one of the mini HST sets and make it into an 8 car train by shunting 3 sleeper vehicles and a first class/lounge between the power car and the TS and off you go....

These gronks on the back/front of power cars around Bristol are just local moves to turn the power car- you do all know that don't you?!! It would have been driven from the power car when that was leading, or from the 08 when that was leading. Similar move may have been seen Laira-Plymouth to facilitate power car swaps over the years, Craigentinny just took their power cars out on the mainline with a shunter in the back instructing the driver over a radio.

I've been an advocate of converting the sleeper to HST since the mid 2000's; it's so easy to do and would have made economic and operational sense.