Helmdon

Nice - I don't do electrics (or the North East) but plenty of people in the market for this - whether they knew they were before 1200 or not - I reckon

anyway, much as I'd like it to be Gazelle... I offer up Cornwall, MR158A, Gladstone, Henry Oakley, the Midland Spinner, take your pick.... riffing off Ellerman lines though, and seeing as this is Heljan, how about Pender with its clothes back on? Especially given TT120 is right for 3'....

true, but a lot more to fall out...

You mean the bloke in the warehouse? I think that's a bit unfair. Firstly, it's all over in seconds; secondly he does actually walk towards the lorry as it gets really silly; and thirdly, when it comes down to it, what's he supposed to do other than shout a warning (which he may have done, though it doesn't look like it, and again there's no time for the bloke on the lorry to react to it anyway) or put himself under a pallet of over 800 carriages? I say this as someone who could well be watching the demise of my dynamometer car in that footage.

locomotives suitable for Woodford Halse in the very early 1950s. The more mainstream ones are no problem, but whitemetal kits are either no longer in production or rare as hen's teeth. It has taken me 7 years to get hold of a B16, L3, N5 and C13, in various stages of completion!

getting back into soldering after 25 years off.... will 60W do for OO or is that overkill? Really need temperature control as aside from trackwork I've got a DJH B16 and a Nu-cast C13 to build.

was just going to say double white was a GC thing but see you've got in ahead of me with more detail than I knew! Gorton paint shop having a last hurrah/two fingers up...

that was like sitting through a nightmare! what on earth was the agency (assuming they used one) thinking??? Everything you've ever heard/read/dreamed about subliminal messaging and playing records backwards merged with the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange

I've been weighing it up over the weekend, and can't justify one, even with strong family links to Bromsgrove. It would be a white elephant on my set-up. However, the agonising has persuaded me that I *do* actually want a GT3 (which, obviously, is right for my line, at the stretch end of my dates) so I've got in quick before the order book closes on the second wave of those.

well, when it was built, on a small engine railway like the Midland, it probably was big.

Funnily enough, that’s nearly me. I’m building what you might call a scenic operator railway. Actually, in 2 scales, I’m building two. I’m as interested as the next person in the history of locomotives and rolling stock but I most enjoy scenery building and operating. Out of the box on the wheeled stuff suits me fine, though I have done the odd Nu Cast etc to fill the gaps in my loco fleet.

Looking forward to my fictitious maroon one for some fictitious action on a line it didn’t run on!

absolutely outside my period, and in a cost of living situation really can't justify it - but having mentioned it a page or two back all I can say is this was a no brainer from the start!

You could do a six wheeler in blue/grey though…. after all, BR did!

love it. One of my projects for this winter is an old Hornby early emblem B17 Leeds Utd which I got from Hattons for about £50 during lockdown. Badly renamed and numbered but runs well. With the new Fox Transfers, some T-cut and Clear it will re-emerge as Sunderland, for no particular reason other than that was my Granddad's team and I'm not really into football.

I really wanted to get Dancing with the Moonlit Knight in there somehow (because of its wonderful, deranged brilliance) but clearly that's not happening!

yes, very good, you must have got those jokes out to a timetable. Best to get em out by Friday I always feel. Anyway, Supper's Ready..... I blame my father, I'm only 41.... Moving swiftly on, and not wishing to call down the wrath of the purists, but all this makes me very keen to get my hand on the unlit 4-pack and full brake of LNWR I've got on order to give my Lucknow something nice to pull on an otherwise entirely early 1950s set-up.

They changed the Unicorn procedures with the onset of Covid, to discourage people from gathering at the lineside. That's when it moved to being a plane. What's happened here is that they haven't changed it back. Sorry - posted at exactly the same time as Phil!

I'm not against BR liveries at all - given my modelling interests I've basically got nothing else in OO!

agree with all of that - but (again, at 41) what I saw in my formative years was the preserved railways as envisaged by the original pioneers, many of whom remembered pre-grouping. Leander, etc, in LMS livery; Great Marquess in LNER and so on. I think what I'm suggesting is that the generation reaching middle age and volunteering might be about to start repainting things on the preserved lines to what they remember as children, rather than the almost total capture of the last 20 years by the children of the 1960s. Even at my relatively young age I can remember (I started volunteering as a ten year old on the SVR) elderly people expressing disgust when confronted with locos and stock in BR livery, they wanted to remember the good times of the Big Four. And a lot of their wallets were dictating both preservation and modelling at the time. So what I think with steam, my hunch as I say, is that it's going to be a bit of a free for all as the older generation leave us, but with a lot of shoots for the Big Four, both in preservation and modelling, because the children of the 80s grew up with a Big Four preservation scene in many cases. On the SVR the arrival of BR liveries on basically everything (or that's what it felt like) was a palpable tide from the mid-1990s. I do remember we were actually conscious of it happening at the time.

agree with most of what you wrote, but I suspect that you've missed the mark here slightly in terms of the future of steam. As alluded to a couple of posts before I don't think the fascination with 'end of steam' is going to dominate more than another decade at the most. If you're a younger modeller, and you want to model steam, why choose the sad bit at the end? I'm 41 and do model BR era steam, but the optimistic bit just after nationalisation and before the standards really got going (never mind Beeching). I suspect that given the entire constituency (pretty much) shortly is going to be people with no first hand memories of mainline steam, we're going to see a bit of a free for all as the attractive designs and liveries start to be what sells. Pre-grouping I think will be a bigger niche than it is now, but remain a niche. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that in another couple of years it's all going to be about the late 1920s and early 1930s. Just a hunch. On your modern image groups, I agree entirely.

Pretty astonishing (in a good way) if they manage the week after next - Mid September - having been this quiet this long.

That's dead easy - it's American software and that's what it calls it. For hundreds of years the Royal Navy appointed officers to ships, and drafted ratings. For the past nearly 20 years, everyone has had an 'assignment' because that's what the US software the forces bought calls it...

in early BR black, in the Woodford Halse area, I've only seen them with Ross valves. Agree the N5 (some of them) didn't have them from new. My tame LNER/BR fireman didn't even recognise the model as something I know he's fired.

Afternoon, after a bit of advice please. I model the early 50s on the GC London extension, and have slowly been assembling a stud of locomotive classes that would have been seen at Woodford Halse in the early 50s. I'd been after an N5 for nearly a decade, and recently acquired the part built kit below. The sharper eyed will notice that while it has been completed as an N4 (see safety valve), it has been liveried and numbered as an N5. I know there was a slight difference in bunker length between the N4 and N5 but I can live with that (and suspect the kit was intended to cover both anyway) So, in no particular order: is there a source of ross pop safety valves anywhere? was thinking about asking Bachmann as their valves on the D11/1, J11, O4 are basically what I need what' going to be the best way, assuming it's possible, to remove the current safety valve any recommendations on wheels/gears/motors please? It's an old kit (built and painted rather well) but obviously totally without paperwork in terms of manufacturer