FoxUnpopuli

Can anyone give me a lead on some drawings of the large LMS mechanical coaling and ash plants? (Similar to that seen in the Barrow Road shot above.) Or any size of mechanical coal/ash plants from any carrier, for that matter...

Bump. @Zunnan - how is Bournville shed progressing? Got a sitrep?

Has anyone used these Brassmasters 'couplers'? http://www.brassmasters.co.uk/coach_couplings.htm

Impossible without it, Duncan - the scan was cut into parts, squared up in Inkscape, and imported into sketch planes in the CAD programme, allowing me to sketch the construction lines over it. It's worked pretty well! CAD modelling (like real modelling) is one of those tasks which you start and then sucks hours away enjoyably. As I've just bought a house which is roughly equivalent to that from 'The Money Pit', modelling time of any sort is in short supply! Christmas was good and honourable Father and I discussed many things for getting some kitbuilding started - but I sneaked in a bit of this too. Couple of questions for those that "know"... 1. What's the profile of the steam chest pipework? My guess is it's not circular...? 2. The dome appears to be flat topped, but on an angle parallel with the boiler taper - is this so?

Not exactly perfectly accurate, but a fun exercise. The frame outline is simply blocked in at the moment, and lots to do as you can see. I have purchased some books over the Christmas period with a few 3P images in, so I shall try to figure out some of the 'character' of the loco that I may have missed.

Oddly enough, that appears to have happened to a Bachmann V1/3 I recently acquired as part of an eBay job lot. It had a hard life, by the looks... Awful paint wear aside, the body isn't terrible, so may get a repaint and find its way back to service. The chassis has already been condemned and will serve only as a donor for bits! I haven't taken many photos of the job lot, they've mostly just suffered typical Bachmann age-related breakages. There are some awfully painted motions though, so much so they hardly turn - lots of scrubbing to do. However, some of the locos have such battered motions/linkages, it makes me wonder what people actually do with them. Bowling practice? This was my makeshift workbench yesterday:

Well, I have a Airfix 4F that's fully functional. A few photos for fun. This is how I remove the brush retainers - through the chassis, before removing the motor. You can do this 'levering' method from the top too, but I find if I slip doing that, I bend the tags. Either way works. With the retainers attached, the wire loops through the tender frame, so it's just a bloody awkward thing you have to do to service them. Of course, as you lever, best to keep a finger ready above the brass retainer - when they pop, the spring will do its level best to disappear into the carpetosphere, never to be seen again. I remove both, then try to remove the brushes before dropping the motor assembly through the frame, else I find the loose brushes also ping out and disappear to neverwhere. Evidence of over-oiling. This loco ran, but was noisy and sticky, and the chassis was sticky also, jamming the wheels occasionally which you'll see later. Dismantling the unit is quick and easy, four screws and two clips and it's apart. I stripped the tender down to this level - I don't take the magnets out. All of the parts except the brush springs are in the jar, which contains IPA. Jar closed, jar shook thoroughly! I fish each part out with tweezers and dry with kitchen towel. A gentle rub of the traction tyres cleans and rejuvenates them, I have found. I use a toothpick to scrub dirt out of the gearteeth roots. I also cleaned out the housings with make-up spec cotton wool buds - they don't shred fluff as much as the baby ones. Drying with kitchen towel, maybe also shredded into little pads and poked into corners with a jewellers 'driver. Reassembly was mostly uneventful, I use a needle oiler almost exclusively on 4Fs. On splitchassis locos, I use PECO Electrolube or similar. If a loco has a worm drive, I use a dab of the white PTFE/Lithium assembly lube very sparingly, as is it quite thick. One thing I did find... I fabricated a spacer washer from some hard nylon tube I had, pushing the end over a cocktail stick and paring off a 0.75mm (ish) spacer with a craft blade. Not ideal, but it would have needed quite a stack of the OEM washers to take out the play. I swapped the original washer to the commutator side and fitted the spacer between the pinion and the second gear on the armature shaft. Time will tell how well this works - and it may go into the bodge thread. The result was good running - from the tender at least: I like the Airfix ringfield mech - I know many don't. However, I find it robust and good running, so I'm looking forward to see how they perform in the coming years in my new venture. Anyhow, for 4298, the chassis was stripped... Again, evidence of overoiling. Also, a little overspray was evident, so it was all cleaned down, reassembled and lubed. I didn't take the conrods off, and I wish I did, because they are definitely contributing to the stickyness, but a dab of oil on the pins resulted in the following: All I have to do now is clean the oily fingerprints off of it! Not much content here, I'm sure everyone's serviced a 4F before... but I enjoyed the process, and if I do this much detail again (rather than a couple of photos) I'll try to make it worthwhile. I'm thinking of fabricating some fixes for those Bachmann pony truck axles and reversing linkage mouldings - that might be worthy. Next installment looks like a bevy of 1980s Hornby Ringfields. Not sure if they'll be worth it as they're rough runners when they're good, but I'm going to try. Two Black Fives, a Duchess and a 4P Compound - all my old fleet, as I don't think I'd be daft enough to buy them second-hand. Purely sentimental value, these will be relegated to the back of the shed unless they suddenly become spectacular runners. I have a CDROM replacement motor which we may try if any one of them turns out to be rubbish, but I'm going to gut them as completely as possible, clean out the insides of the axle tubes, oil and reassemble, and see what we get. Any bets on bad pickups spoiling play? We'll see. But for now, keep 'em lubed, - Mark.

For a future OO Garden Layout covering all the Big-Four carriers, I have been buying second-hand locomotives and stock for a couple of months now. This is sort of a cart-before-horse scenario, as I've bought a Victorian house which internally needs pretty much rebuilding from scratch, in a plot of land where if Ellen Ripley were here, would probably agree it requires us to take off and nuke the site from orbit to get any semblance of order in place. However, in the safe, warm, fireside Christmastime residence of my honourable parents' home, I have begun to amass this rag-tag collection, and I've been servicing it whenever I visit. Yesterday's batch is pictured below: The 4F and Scot are mine, purchased new many (many) moons ago. I'm pleased to announce that the Scot just needed a defluff and light lube and runs like a champ. The 4F I simply stripped to the cogs, cleaned, lubed and rebuilt as a matter of course - I've bought four others recently and they are all receiving the same treatment. Again, I was pleased that mine is one of the better examples of the model, albeit very amateurishly weathered by my barely-teenage self. This will be rectified in a batch with all the others sometime 'soon', but I experimented with some number removal and found that a light touch with a glass-fibre brush lubed with IPA seemed to be a good method, followed with a polish with cutting compound, wiping up with IPA again. A nice glossy surface now awaits transfers. The Colletts were recent 'irresistable' secondhand purchases, one privately and one from a well-known big model retailer. Now it's a shame I mixed them up and don't know which from which, because one of them has a truly horrendous 'fix' in lieu of a brush retaining plate - I've started a thread on 'modelling bodgery' just to do that justice. Amazingly, it runs fine - better than the other one. The other I have stripped completely and rebuilt, but is slow and seems to be working hard. Monitoring voltage suggests it has a high-resistance but I haven't quite figured out where the issue is yet. Any helping hands on the compact Collett much appreciated. The V2 is a lovely example provided to me by @ikks. It really is a lovely model, albeit the years have thrown up the usual Bachmann maladies - split pony truck axle tubes for example. It runs like a champ though, and the body and valve gear are immaculate. Over the coming weeks, I'll be servicing some B1s, V1/3s and more V2s which are very much in the same boat, but in far poorer condition. Hopefully I'll be developing some fixes for the common Bachmann issues on these locos which aren't bodges and we can all see how I progress. Today's fresh item is another Airfix 4F, however. You may have seen all this before but I like the old 4Fs and this is the final one of the first batch to be stripped and rebuilt so I'm documenting it here in the next couple of hours. Tidily repainted & detailed by previous owner. Lettering a bit skewiff though. Ready for stripping. - Mark.

Modeling Bodgery! So no names, no pack-drill, but I've been buying a lot of second-hand locomotives and stock recently, knowing some heavy servicing (and possibly scrapping for spares) would be required. Some little bits of bodgery have been discovered (and fixed) along the way, but last night after testing this immaculately presented Mainline Collett Goods on the track and it running just fine, I split it open to discover this: I'm not sure if the leg of the capacitor is supposed to be an extra pickup, or there was any method at all in what could euphemistically be called the 'replacement' for the missing brush retainer. I'm amazed it runs at all, but it does. I will, however, be replacing the 'repair'! I suspect someone got a bit heavy-handed trying to remove the body and bent the retainer beyond repair (I have not yet stripped the loco further to see if the spring is in there - unlikely but possible.) Colletts have a knack, you have to spread the running boards apart near the firebox to cleanly remove the motor from inside the body - they're pretty tight. So, bring out your dead, previously badly repaired, hacked, or questionably surgically altered locos and stock for some good-natured ribbing - even yours! What horrible bodges have you witnessed in your modelling travels? - Mark.

Sgwâr Gwinllan?

Double posting, my bad manners, but I got around to finishing this and at around the 19mSomething mark, there's a PW train with multiple brakevans, crane, match trucks and bogie wagons with layers and layers of track upon them, tailed by the lifting jig for the track itself. What a fabulous thing to model! Also, what is the station throat seen at the late 21m early 22m mark?

Ahh, a Who fan... ... not so much Rick Wakeman then?

So in the TV/movie industry, bluescreening gave way to greenscreening, but the idea is simply to take a colour which isn't found in the shot you're masking. If you hang (or velcro) some contrasting cloth/curtains around the room (say, bright orange) for these shots, might that make it easier to 'shop in the new sky? (Don't you ever get tempted to add in a Dakota or a Tempest patrolling up there?)

Wonderful. I see the 'combined' dome, like #91: Will the 'separated' dome (I'm afraid I don't know the correct terminology) be available - viz: Photos courtesy of Atlantic via Pinterest & Warwickshire Railways respectively. Knowledge to answer, courtesy of @Steamport Southport and Wikipedia - 91 has a Type 6 boiler, 171 has a type 6A. Thank you!

Very sane & understood. As for the solvent on Bachmanns, that's good news. I've been trying to renumber Airfix 4Fs, and I was two steps away from getting a 5" angle grinder out. Neither IPA, thinners not meths would touch them. I haven't yet tried T-Cut/Farecla cutting paste... I have bought an A2 in early BR applegreen livery, and already have the transfers to put it back to 528 with LNER on the tender. Since it only entered service in February 1948, I will stick my fingers in my ears and "la, la, la" when people point out it couldn't happen. Now you've told me it should be 'relatively straightforward', I shall be giving it a go.

I like the V2 also, have been trying to find sensibly priced s/h Bachmanns (I like a challenge) and considering a V2 kit when I had some experience under the belt... but this is (obviously) interesting to me, lazy as I am. LNER post-'46 liveries and numberings, please. Although (and why manufacturers don't do this is beyond me) an unnumbered and unlettered set of liveries would be great.

I have purchased a V2 with some missing/broken bits: including a broken RH cylinder moulding. (See pic where bit broken is circled - it's the tail of the valve assembly.) I thought I'd reach out to RMWeb before I approach ebay/Bachmann. My V2 is wartime black, not that it matters too much. Does anyone have a spare? (See also cylinder topic...) -- Mark.

I have purchased a V2 with some missing/broken bits: including a missing axle from its tender... I thought I'd reach out to RMWeb before I approach Bachmann. Does anyone have a spare? (See also cylinder topic...) -- Mark.

N-gauge would be a more relaxing solution. Gradient is a whopping 5%/1in20 as mentioned by others above. Riffing on S&DWatty's idea - you could change the station throat to a 'Minories' type. All good comments.

In the back of Peco's 'Guide to OO Gauge Railway modelling', page 116, is a small corner layout - not as small as your space, but adaptable. It's a small branch line terminus to a fiddle yard. I'll send you something by PM. Consider swapping Setrack for Streamline and smoothing out the curves a little. With such a narrow space you want to save as much space as you can, and the wide centres for parallel tracks with Setrack won't help. The layout below is very similar to DavidCBroad's above in concept, but sweeps up an incline over the fiddle to get you some more real estate. Fiddling will be... fiddly... so you'll need some good solid engineering and testing to make sure the (very clever) traverser system works 100%. I've kept the industrial bit simple, with one point. It's complex enough getting up there, with a three-way and a double slip at the station entry to get you the headshunt/loco staging siding. I thought a turntable might be overkill but you could shoehorn one in if you kept it small! You can simplify to taste, but space saving turnouts like the 3-way, double-slip and the short Y-point are useful tools, don't dismiss them too quickly. (Edit: I have goofed the traverser geometry, but you get the idea.)

I spent weekend before last renovating a whole bunch of s/h stock, not least of which, four Airfix/GMR 4Fs. All were poor runners, and I got my own one out too, which hasn't turned a wheel in 25 years. It was... about average among the other four. Over a few hours, I stripped the tender drives down to the component gears, washers, brushes and armatures, cleaned them with IPA, checked the brushes, (not one needed replacing) lubed them up, rebuilt them, rejuvenated the traction tyres with IPA and spaced the wheels. As far as the locos went, the ones which had been 'maintained' were basically full of wet, sticky oil, so they all had to be stripped to clean and lightly oil them. The Airfix pickup system is pretty bloody good, and I think these will convert to DCC just fine. Both loco and tender have quite short axles and were invariably under 14mm back-to-back. Now they're spaced to 14.2 to 14.4mm, as opposed to a more conventional 14.5mm. A couple of the locos badly needed quartering, so that was done with a little trepidation (never tried it before) and now... All five run just fine. They're acceptably quiet, smooth, plenty of traction, run down to a plain (non-PWM) 3 volts or so at an absolute crawl, with no hunting or any sign of pickup issues, Same can't quite be said for my old Hornby Ringfield-powered Duchess of Abercorn, nor Black 5 #5138. Both responded to cleaning, but the Ringfields really are poor units compared to the Airfix lump - even if they don't feel like they should be. I've bought a Strathpeffer Junction upgrade kit (although I'm an engineer, so I'm going to tinker and make one or two myself, I think) and am looking forward to reviving one of them with that. Honourable Father and I have also bought a variety of motors from eBay for future kitbuilds, and I might have a go at converting the Duchess to loco drive for fun. She's not exactly a 'Super-Detail', but these models hold a certain sentimental value. All of my my old Mainline locos (which again, haven't turned a wheel in 25 years) ran faultlessly from the box, untouched. Amazing. The Replica Railways 57xx didn't fair so well - all the green lube had basically turned to glue! Once again, a complete stripdown, clean and relube, and she's as sweet as a nut. I'm having tremendous amounts of fun already, and it was just my first weekend back in the modelling saddle. The 4Fs are going to get detailed, painted and renumbered to be Bournville Shed residents, along with everything else I'm sourcing at the moment. The Darlington Works part of the layout has to wait... We're going to go full DCC at some point, but I don't care about how 'difficult' it is to convert Mainline/Bachmann split chassis units. That will be fun too! My advice would be to get to a model fair and get your mitts on the merchandise. If it looks OK to you from an 'acceptable model' point of view, you can probably make it run smoothly - and if it doesn't, it's just got character! Everyone else's opinion be damned. Rule One is the only rule! P.S. @hayfield Any chance of first dibs on what you decide to sell of that Jinty?!

OP: @Joshua Gonzalez How did you get on with this? I too am looking into sourcing a V4. Don't quite understand some of the conversation above... kits were available from East Coast/ABS (I have seen them on eBay) but etches are available from @Michael Edge/Judith Edge kits?

More interesting information, thank you!

Not sure if the LMS Garratts banked the Lickey, although they did run trains up it. The U1 did bank, and was converted to oil, but wasn't well regarded for a variety of reasons - fairly or unfairly. Good discussion. No doubt the 9F was the successor to Big Bertha's 'big gun' role, but I like to think what would have happened had the LMS required a replacement sooner. This discussion about coal storage is interesting, but if a big Stanier tender had 9 tonnes, and the tank described had 6 tonnes... The Jinties managed it with a little over 2 tonnes in the back... presumably they kept stocked from staithes at the bottom of the hill, right?

Well... I scaled two drawings together, roughly. It's a Fairburn in this view which was shorter in wheelbase, but the Fairburn and Stanier 4P did share boilers - the 4C pattern at 200psi. The blue lines are on the cab front, roughly the front of the 2-8-4 firebox, and the front and back of the 2-8-4 smokebox. Don't disagree with you on the driving practices, but it's logical to assume you'd drive this proposed loco just like an 8F: the big firebox, boiler diameters, boiler pressure, cylinder sizes, driven wheelbase & spacing*, driven wheel diameter, front pony truck, boiler centreline and detailing all seem to match the 8F... Also you can see the distances from the rear driven axle to the tail. As the Fairburn was shorter I did quickly dig up a drawing of the Stanier and do some sums, give or take an inch: Fairburn - 17'2" Stanier - 17'5" 2-8-4T - 18'6"