daftbovine

I went to the same exhibition and really enjoyed it. I was impressed by the standard of modelling, parking was tight but we found a spot, we went on the Sunday and I can’t say I noticed any rucksack bashers or smelly people. I would have liked somewhere to leave my coat but otherwise a thumbs up from me. I dropped my scarf in the car park on the way out. Some kind person handed it in and it ended up in the college lost property department. A kind lady there is posting it back to me.

I pre ordered a Bachmann Wainwright class C in the fully lined green and a Hornby Wainwright class H in the same livery. They are both so beautiful looking I didn’t want to miss out. The latter was £78. I think it was a good investment. I think that if a loco has a very appealing livery it’s likely to be popular and it’s worth pre ordering.

I have far more than I can run, at the moment I am building a layout in N that can only take three locos, I have ten times that many. I also quite a few 00 locos and a fair amount of rolling stock and no layout at present. My problem is that I get attached to locos and stock, most have been bought a good prices and have a story attached to them and I find it very difficult to part with them. Most do get run occasionally. I also have quite a mixture of scales, 000, N, 0 and 0. I suppose I’m a collector with one small layout.

I’m one of those who were concerned by the price difference mainly because I have a limited budget. I will stick with my order for the Dapol version and hope for the best. I have very little knowledge of the detail differences between the various versions of the Terriers so I’m hoping Dapol will have done their homework. I am a little bit wary of their attention to detail as they have been known to use the wrong fonts for numbering some of the N gauge Terriers. This bothered me enough not to buy one version, I may not know about some things but I do know about lettering and typography.

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall at Rails and Dapol today. I wonder if Rails will lower the price of their version? Assuming the £30 deposit for the Rails version is non refundable, and you decided to cancel your order, You would only need to pay an extra £9 to get a Hornby Terrier and that is at RRP with discounting you might be better off. I’ve got a whole lot of the old Terriers, I’m hoping that eBay prices for the older ones will drop considerably so I can buy a few more of the ones with obscure liveries.

I’m rather fed up because I have a Rails one on pre order and the Hornby one is considerably cheaper, I suspect that Rails and Dapol are rather fed up too. Hornby are in business to make money so I don’t blame them.

I recently had to bite my tongue on FaceBook when confronted by someone who asked for people to design a layout for him, I know that some people do genuinely like designing layouts but this person didn’t know what area he had available for a layout or whether he wanted to go for N or 00. He wanted a layout for a four year old that could also be interesting enough to be run by an adult. Needless to say he didn’t get much of a response but some people did try and help only to be told their ideas weren’t suitable! I think the thing that irked me most of all was that he wasn’t prepared to do any research on the internet or by looking at trackplan books to narrow down what he actually wanted. At no stage was anyone thanked for their input. Eventually it was suggested that he find a local model railway club, good luck to them.

Someone on this forum (I think) came up with the idea of freezing brightly coloured children’s wax crayons and grating them with an old kitchen grater. This produces a fine brightly coloured powder. You can try this without much outlay.

A couple of observations (spoken from experience) some of your track is very close to the edge of your base board so ensure you design in some sort of barrier to prevent trains from being knocked onto the floor. Even a slight bump to the layout can do this. A strip of clear Perspex attached to the edge of the base board works well as does a thin strip of wood, it needn’t be too high. Using second hand track can have its pitfalls, I’m using some of my own previously used track on a new N layout and have found the need to carefully check that all rail joiners are clean, undamaged and fit tightly, if not they need replacing with new ones. Points need careful checking too, make sure the springs work well and the blades make good contact with the rails. I won’t comment on your layout design as my track planning skills are severely lacking but I’m sure someone else will be able to help.

There are a few buying and selling groups on Facebook, I bought a loco from a private seller without any problems. The price was too good to resist. As a seller you will probably get better prices, the same applies to buyers but there are no guarantees and you do get the occasional dodgy person not playing by the rules. If you want to be completely safe eBay is probably a better bet.

We recently returned to the UK from Africa, we sold most of our furniture and only brought back clothes, ornaments, pictures, books, kitchenware, tools, mountain bikes and model railway items. Our removal company would not insure anything unless it was packed by their packers so we sorted everything into logical piles and left them to it. Once everything arrived we realised how ‘creative’ their packing had been. We needed to put in any claims for missing or lost items within a month of the boxes arriving in the UK. We spent a frantic few days going through over 130 boxes of completely mixed up household goods. The model railway items were spread over at least ten different boxes. I expect to be searching for and finding things in strange places for the next few years.

Another thing to look for is “Made in China” stamped into the plastic chassis baseplate on Bachmann/Farish steam models.

For the digital version of the magazine to get the DVD to play you need to tap on the red arrow button on the picture of the DVD on the banner at the top of the cover page. It doesn’t always work first time.

I model in N and find that good tools help a lot so I have invested in a magnifying lamp and magnifying glasses that fit round my head plus reading glasses of various strengths. Fine jewellers tweezers help a lot too. A lot of the tools used for jewellery making are useful for railway modellers. I tend to leave off most of the details in the detail packs too fiddly and I can’t see them that well from a distance anyway. I’ve heard people say they’ve had to give up N because of their eyes, I’ve just got stronger glasses.

Today’s competition is just right for the younger new modellers Hornby needs to attract. I entered to try and win the trainset for my nephew.