Spam Can Man

I must admit, one of the problems I have found with joining baseboards together especially with exhibition layouts is the amount of spare nuts and bolts you have to carry around as well as spanners etc. I have tried using the hinge halves used with a loose pine in the past which is worst than useless as they are so flimsy. For my model of the former SECR station Lordship Lane, I used these little devices which are strangely known in the theatre trade as "Coffin Locks" ! My baseboards are made from 6mm birch ply tops with 9mm ply sides. The ends are made of 18mm ply. The coffin locks I use have lugs on them catalogue numbers GEN145 and GEN146 and can be secured with an 8mm Allen key. You need to cut 88mm by 17mm slots in the ends of the baseboard to take them and they screw in from the inside of the baseboards. I drilled a 10mm hole in line with the hexagonal hole in the latch half to take the Allen key. I still use pattern makers dowels to get accurate alignment of the boards, as you turn the Allen key the latch locates in the receptacle half and draws the two boards tightly together. Perfect! The only tool you need is an 8mm Allen key! I get mine from a theatrical supply shop in London Flint Hire &Supply Ltd, email address is sales@flints.co.uk I have attached a piece from their online catalogue showing what they look like. Unfortunately I cannot show you on my baseboards as they are currently down at our clubroom and due to the Covid-19 I'm not allowed in there!

I must confess none of this makes any sense regarding the government's guidelines. Our clubroom is based on a first floor gallery of an 18th century church off the Walworth Road in London. The government have now opened churches again as long as they social distance and do no sing?! Yet we at our model railway club are not allowed to enter our clubroom due to the government's rules, yet we only have six active members in our club at any time and can easily social distance!

Sorry Michael. I didn't mean to imply that you were going to model Bulleid/Rayworth locomotive 2003 and I think my comment may have been taken out of context and I apologise for any upset it may have caused you and hope you accept my apologies. I am looking forward to receiving my GT3 and appreciate the problems compounded by Covid-19. However, if you do consider doing 2003 or even 2001 or 2002 please put my name down for it. All the best, Gary

Well as I said earlier I am interested in the Bulleid Leader. I showed my interest by responding to KR Models website. I also replied to their suggestion for future locomotives as the Bulleid-Rayworth electric locomotives and Michael Revell kindly hinted that they may consider the third one, 2003. Al the best! Gary

When sticking vinyl signs to vehicles or windows, they usually use a mixture of detergent and water applied to the substrate to help remove air bubbles. I don't know if it would work, but if you could gently lift one corner and introduce washing up liquid between the vinyl and the sign, it should weaken the adhesive sufficiently. Do it slowly and carefully. Like I said earlier I cannot guarantee it will work, but is less evasive than using solvents. Good luck and let me know how you get on.

I was born in 1959. My earliest memories were going to see my grandmother (my dad's mother) at the Honor Oak Estate at Brockley. My late father couldn't drive then, so we used to get the underground train from Surrey Docks station on what I think may have been Q stock. Getting off at New Cross Gate and waiting in the waiting room where they used to have a coal fire at winter. Getting a box of Paynes Poppits out of the vending machine (they also had another machine that would stamp letters into an aluminium strip for one old penny). There was usually some wagons in one of the sidings adjacent to the underground line, the Fyffes vans stick in my mind. Then we would get into a green electric train to Brockley station, the old station with canopies before they replaced it with that hideous CLASP building. Walking down St Norberts Road and then going past the railway substation where the enormous Hackbridge transformers used to hum loudly. Ahh happy days!

Yes I'm interested. I already have a Golden Arrow one. This would look nice with my collection of Bulleid locomotives. All I need now is a Bulleid 0-6-0 shunter and all three electric locomotives to complete the set!

I actually have a resin kit for one of these Maunsell D3/12 shunters made by Golden Arrow Models. Unfortunately I haven't made much progress with it! It is one of the earlier ones designed to go onto a Lima 08 shunter chassis. The later ones are designed to go onto the Bachman 08 chassis. I have decide to modify it to fit on a Hornby 08 chassis that I bought from New Modellers. The wheels were ordered separately, along with the coupling rods. I have got to fit a gearbox to it along with a large 5 pole skew wound motor I got on Ebay from Germany similar to the ones Hornby use on their Merchant Navy loco. I have to add steps, sandboxes and other details yet. The running plate moulded to resin body was cut away and where the step down at the cab is, I had to cut away the running plate on the Hornby chassis and add a new one out of 40 thou black plasticard. The cab steps supplied with the kit are cast in white metal and are designed to be fitted to the resin body, but as I have cut the running plate away in that area, I will need to scratch build new ones as replacements. As can be seen, The body isn't a perfect fit on the chassis yet, but it's nearly there. The kit doesn't have the extra windows in the back of the cab but I intend to add these. Gary

Very impressed with the arches. It is very tricky trying to reproduce rows of arches and also quite tedious! Our solution with Crystal Palace High Level was to make one master arch out of a combination of Perspex and plasticard, from this we made a silicone rubber mould and then cast them out of polyurethane resin (all 70 of them!) It was then a case of joining them together with epoxy adhesive and then hide the gaps with brick embossed plasticard, then finally paint and weather them. I must admit, I would not want to do it again!

I have used brake fluid in the past to strip paint. It washes off easily and doesn't melt the plastic. I have got quite a few Hornby Dublo R1 locos which I bought in various states of dilapidation. I am in the process of superdetailing them. Including fitting Markits wheels, new motors, scale size coupling rods and sprung buffers. Bodywork wise, I have cut away underneath the boiler and fitting a new boiler bottom, fitting the correct safety valves and cut away the top of the fire box and re-profiled it to the correct round shape. One glaring error is the front spectacles which should be round and not arch shaped, I think this was done due to moulding constraints of the time. I filled these in with plasticard and finished off with etched brass spectacle windows at the front and grilled spectacles at the back. Oh, and I removed the moulded coal in the bunker and replaced with real coal. Extra details, remove moulded handrails and replace with wire and turned handrail knobs, dart on the smokebox door and building up the steps. I must get around to photographing them some time! Gary

Hi Zedcell, Went on the DCC kits for working table lamps that can be used in Hornby Pullmans. Very nice and very expensive! With another £20 or so, I could buy a brand new Pullman. Another thing I am thinking of is constant train lighting. I don't use DCC. I have found that I can run 12 Volt LED strips through a bridge rectifier to allow for reversal of voltage (you can get quite small ones from RS components). Just wondering if it is possible use capacitors to keep the lights on when the power is off? Gary

Hi Zedcell, Thanks for that info. I was toying with the idea of turning the shades from Perspex rod, using thin brass tube and a combination of fibre optics and LEDs. I have a lot of old K type Hornby brake Pullmans I can super-detail. They have all been re-wheeled with Romford wheels, so fitting pick-ups is not a problem and I have a pack of LHP transfers (I bought these for renaming my Hornby 1934 Brighton Belle unit as the second one). Repainting the roofs is not too much of a problem, I'll just air brush them the correct colour. Thanks again, Gary

Just wondering if anyone else here has the Hornby Winston Churchill train pack? This comes with utility van S2464S in Pullman livery and two Pullman coaches Lydia and Perseus. It is a real shame that Hornby didn't produce the other coaches, Carina, car 208 and Isle of Thanet. I think Hornby do Carina as a separate item, but it would be nice of the other two coaches were available. Has anyone else managed to replicate the other two coaches successfully? I know that you can buy self adhesive names to re-name coaches. If they were bog-standard Pullman brakes, I have quite a few of the older ones with silver roofs which I can super detail. However, they do not have working table lamps. If that is the case, can you buy working table lamp units separately that can be fitted instead? Many thank, Gary

Thank you gentlemen for your replies. I got the number of the tram completely wrong! As you stated Colin, it should be 58 and not 38! I would like to point that the lengths of tram track are only 18 inches long so the tram will not be motorised. The station and the railway is really feature. The Tram is only an incidental feature. Nevertheless, I do want to get it right. As regards tram track, I am using the method suggested by Ray that was used on the tramway section of our St Mellion layout and also part of the coalyard on our Crystal Palace High Level. That is using Peco code 75 flexitrack with every 6th sleeper removed and replaced with copperclads. The inner rail, effectively a check rail can then be soldered in place using a pair of track gauges. I prefer using phosphor bronze for these for the colour. The road surface is tarmac, so I can use a filler and not worry about stone setts. On the subject of motors, I have had issues with the Tenshodo bogies in the past with gears splitting on the axles. I used one of these bogies for a SECR railmotor with the wheels replaced spoked wheels of the correct diameter. I used Romford drivers with the centre hole filled in with epoxy and then drilled for an interference fit on a lathe. It ran ok for a while until the gears split. I prefer the more robust Black Beetle ones (I used on to motorise my 1938 tube train but that is another story!) It is a real shame that you cannot get hold of them anymore. The trouble with 00 gauge trams is that most of the lower deck is taken up by the motor. I wonder if you could use a proprietary N gauge loco chassis with replacement axles and wheels to 00 gauge? Although that may require a bit of engineering. All the best, Gary

I used to work for the Molins Machine Company in Deptford up until 1984 and I remember the paint shop in Trundleys Road had tram tracks in it from when it used to be used as a depot for horse drawn trams as one of the old timers who worked there told me. I have since confirmed this by cross referencing this with the Godfrey maps of the area. Sadly, I was a young apprentice at the time, so I may have not taken him seriously at the time and I never took photographs (hindsight is a wonderful thing!). I am also old enough to remember (just!) the bridges going over Trundleys Road and Evelyn Street coming from the Deptford Wharf Branch. As Ray quite rightly states, this was going to be a club layout for the fledgling Southwark Model Railway Club when it was formed over 30 years ago! However, the sheer size of it and operational problems made it totally impractical! I must confess, I am not a tram modeller, but am currently building a Tower tram kit for my private layout based on Lordship Lane in Dulwich (on the Crystal Palace HL branch). I am trying to replicate the well known photograph of the tram passing under the ornate bridge as Ray mentioned earlier. I really don't have a clue on how to realistically replicate the conduit channel between the running rails or where to source transfers for the tram number (35 or 38). Be gentle with me, I am new to this RM website!! All the Best, Gary