Buckjumper

Ha! Super story with a lovely twist, and the photos are fantastic. Over here on the Eastern, contemporary documents used the words wagon and truck concurrently to indicate whether they were loaded or empty. For example loaded wagons were forwarded to... and empty trucks returned ...etc. The caveat, and there's always one, was lettering on specialist wagons which always used the word truck, viz; loco sand truck, egg truck, etc. Godt nyt

I didn't realise, or I'd forgotten, that Richard's layout was outdoors Don.That's pretty impressive in any gauge given the temperatures endured there. Agree his scratchbuilt wagons are fantastic.

Yes, of course, an important job and in such circumstances par for the course. But due to his long and fruitless investigations where he was chasing ghosts and insinuations of his own making, where he was 'deliberately losing documentation' (that's a quote from the initial disaster recovery company), where he was lying to cover his own improprieties, and ultimately his inaction to sign off documentation to get flooded rooms dried out properly, we went from having seven rooms affected by floodwater to ten because of secondary damage, and several month in, the claim almost doubled, moving into six figures. Ultimately we were vindicated when an email he'd written was unintentionally forwarded to us and blew his game wide open. Our insurance company was not happy (understatement) and after an investigation by both the insurers and the loss adjusting company it was found he was attempting to wipe out both ours and many other affected homeowners' insurance (I probably can't say why, but I'm sure you can guess), and the result was he was removed from his position. You can imagine the distress his actions caused on top of having lost so much in the flood, and although we were treated with the greatest respect by the loss adjusters afterwards, and our enlarged claim paid in full (I suppose in today's litigious culture a concern for them was that we could have caused a serious legal ruckus, but all we wanted was to get our house back to normal and to be able to replace possessions we'd lost), that one bad apple has spoiled the barrel and my opinion of that profession is consequently rather low.

Whoops - I missed your earlier post. I'll put it down to Xmas excesses Yes, we were signed off in December, almost 22 months to the day of the flood. It's been a long journey but we're just about there now, with just a few minor niggles to iron out, so I'm back to modelling at last. Eighteen months ago the room I'm sitting in typing this was a shell; bare brick, concrete floor, no windows or doors, demolished walls, the ceiling was held up with acrow props and there were a couple of driers, a desiccator and dehumidifier running full pelt. It also took two rebuilds to get right, and was one of ten downstairs rooms affected and rebuilt to various degrees. All that and the weekly - often daily - battles with the first loss adjuster (who after investigation was eventually removed for improper practice, and not just towards us...I can't say any more than that!) and then with the dilatory restoration company. Suffice to say that I'm feeling a great deal of empathy with people in the North and in Scotland who were flooded over Christmas, and the gamut of emotions they'll experience over the coming months.

Don't get too bogged down with our talk about compensation/springing side at this stage Lee, and definitely don't let the concept be a hindrance to you getting on and enjoying building wagons. With Slater's and Parkside kits just follow the instructions in the box and Chaz's step-by-step photo guides and you'll be fine. At some point in the future you might think 'I'll have a go at compensation', and you may find it improves things a bit for you, but then again, maybe you won't notice any difference! There really isn't one true path to getting it right; we all forge our own little furrow and take concepts and ideas from others which resonate with us and work for us.

Ha! No, me neither, that's exactly why I spring my stock which helps smooth out any irregularities. However, we're in the very fortunate position of having a professional carpenter in our group who is happy to design and build the baseboards for other member's layouts. Our group's other S7 layout, West Mersea, which has been on the backburner for a couple of years while the smaller and (soon to be) exhibitable Love Lane (suburban Essex Hainault Loop extension c1950s) is finished, has an outdoor section, but that is brought inside after running sessions. I know how much maintenance a permanent outdoor OF layout needs and I shudder to think of the time, effort and expletives expended to keep an outdoor S7 layout running.

Yes and no. It's a conversation which has come up before among my S7 friends at our monthly meet, and the general consensus is that under the right conditions, i.e. properly weighted stock and impeccable joinery and track laying - especially at baseboard joints - should reduce the need to spring or compensate. A S7 Brit with a solid chassis was happy enough on one of our layouts 'Love Lane' and 4-wheel stock under the right conditions seem to be OK. All my S7 sprung stock is passive - i.e. the bearings ride on the upper limit and have a 0.5mm downward movement to cope with track irregularities whereas others prefer active springing where there is both up and downward movement. There was an interesting experiment in MRJ #101 and #103 which had otherwise identical rigid, compensated (tested both movable and fixed-end first) and sprung 4-wheel wagon in 0F and S7 negotiating turnouts on a gentle slope, and the results were presented in tables. Interesting reading if you can access a copy - mine are still packed away, but I do remember that there was a significant difference between sprung and rigid in 0F, and the sprung S7 wagon gave a 100% perfect performance. However, theories and controlled-condition tests are all well and good, but in practice if a layout runs perfectly whatever you chose to do, then who's to argue with that? *Cross-posted with Heather's reply.

Haha! I wasn't kidding, well at least, not completely... I heard of using liquid lead in condoms over on the old 7mm Yahoo group about 10 or 12 years or so ago when problems with PVA/lead and exploding boilers were first being reported, and a number of builders thought it to be a safe alternative. Quite a few of the locos I've built have a sausage of liquid lead in the boiler, but of course the strawberry angle was entirely tongue-in-cheek! Happy New year Chaz! I'm hoping to get over to see you and DG at St. Albans - a 40 minute drive across county is as close to a local show as it gets for me.

Alternatively cut a hole large enough to thread a condom inside, leave the end out so you can pour the shot inside, tie it off and seal. If you can get a little 5 min Araldite on the floor inside using a right-angled scraper then as the condom settles it'll stick to it and not move around. Chose your condom carefully and you could replicate fresh fruit traffic into Norf Lundun; at exhibitions you might have viewers exclaiming, 'I can actually smell strawberries...!'

I remember Pete saying he had a real case of hot boxes with some JLTRT wagons running on Leamington Spa a couple of years ago, but then the distances (and speeds!) a train traverses on Dock Green compared to Leamington is negligible. Even so, perhaps some graphite powder between the two mating surfaces will help keep keep any movement smooth.

I think you've already got the perfect excuse in your gas-lit branch set. Park it up by the stop blocks by the bridge for easy access to your carriages, and send it down the line every few days for topping up. There are a number of photos of DD5 No.7 at Lambourn, even in the late 50s to top up gas-lit horseboxes. See the Atkins bible and here: http://www.time-capsules.co.uk/picture/show/1302/Lambourn-Railway-Station

Yes, I concur with Northroader. Town gas was uncompressed - the Metropolitan made use of it initially, carrying it on big bellows-like bags on carriage roofs until the mid-1870s, but it was uneconomical and the bags needed replenishing every three hours or so. The Pintsch system worked at 140psi and a typical incandescent burner consumed 7cu ft p/h (Atkins et al), so cordons were parked wherever carriages could be conveniently recharged, and the tanks replenished every few days by a trip down to the nearest resupply point.

Ah! That sinking feeling when you think everything is going swimmingly, and then you realise you've really screwed up. I know it so well! Happily you saved the day. I do like these wagons - they fall into that nice gap between being unusual enough to add a bit of interest from the usual opens and minks, but not so outr

From the 2nd and 3rd photos in the above post, I've only just realised there is some detail included on the Slater's vans which is omitted from Parkside's, and that is the bracket which joins the bottom of the outside frames to the solebar, tying the body to the underframe on the prototype - compare with your SR van on post #3451. Ironically the Parkside solebar has the small foot of the L moulded so all it needs is a sliver of strip between the two to complete, whereas the Slater's solebar omits this and needs the foot of the bracket represented. I'd not noticed that before!

As we're having a brake-van fest... it looks like I got my inner handrails wrong too. This was the last one I built, probably in about 2005 I guess, from my olde-style embankment and background photo. My first BR BV was built 10 years earlier, c1995 and was one of my first 7mm Slater's kits. I've still got that one lurking in a box somewhere. For Robin's benefit, I think the only real issues I remember having as a relative 7mm newbie was getting the clasp brakes to fit properly without catching the wheels, and the instructions for the brake rodding were as clear as mud to someone not used to the technical aspects. In the mid-90s it would have been nice to have had a resource such as RMweb where someone could have posted a shot of the underside of their model to help me, but photo-rich internet forums were still a decade in the future! Anyway, the real reason for posting the photo is this; one thing I did correct was the rainstrips. Looking at prototype photos they came in many different shapes and orientations on these vans, but I've never found a photo showing such a wildly curved U - and why would they be like that anyway? I have noticed that many 4mm brake vans sport the same feature, so it is a case of perpetuating a modeller's error? Perspective distortion from a side-on drawing? So I carved them off, sanded the roof smooth and fitted straight pieces of strip instead .

Ah, but you see you're gullible enough to be fooled into thinking I'm gullible... Ha! Thanks old friend. Back to the thread... One thing to be careful of is that brass roofs really are too thin to represent roof planks of 3/4" or 1" plus the end and side infill (I'm sure Simon knows the correct terminology, I've not got my Stone's to hand, besides which, it's early...!), so ideally needs to be beefed up a little. However, it's the perfect material for the roofs of things like a GW 'Iron Mink' or an LNW Medium cattle van.

Haha! More than you, Dunks.

Just a wagon. Go on, you know you want to. And a bit of track. (Got him, lads!)

Unfortunately not so, the cost of injection mould tools are enormous and are in the thousands of pounds (say, £3K - £20K for a 1-16 parts tool with a run of 1000+ over several years) whereas the cost of a replacement sprue with the lost parts on is literally pence or even fractions of a penny, depending on the size of the run. Andrew Hastie at Parkside explained it to me once when I lost some locks from an SR van, and the figures knocked my socks off.

Transfer spacing can be a pain, and slicing it all up to re-kern happens more often than I'd like. The wagons all look great though.

Oh dear! Benton knows his onions. It's not going to end well for Woods or Lawson, is it?

A couple of weeks ago I was in the position of having 10 months of RMWeb to catch up with. An impossible task really, but Dock Green was one of the few threads which did get my full attention, and well worth it too.

My understanding from a fellow modeller who is a retired chemist is that Slater's Mekpak used to be Methyl Ethyl Ketone - way back when George Slater would smoke while demonstrating the product(!), but many years ago was reformulated and is now something like trichloroethane. Methyl Ethyl Ketone is still sold under the Butanone label by C&L. All very useful solvents in their own ways.

I doubt the LNW meat vans would have had steam heating fitted - they were in the goods register and steam heat would have been an extravagance for anything other than specific fruit or banana vans which often ripened the fruit by steam-heat en route to market. Milk vans, however, were rated non-passenger coaching stock - an entirely different class of animal, and given the dates of construction, and that steam heating was introduced on the North Staffs in 1910, I'd hazard, a guess that only the first three batches of the 6-wheel milk vans were retro-fitted and the rest fitted from new. Some also had a Westo thru-pipe for working air-braked foreign lines. Interesting about the use of a PVB until the D.93A's were built. The GW held out till 1897 when it introduced a short vac-braked brake to compliment the vac-braked X2 MICA B meat vans introduced that year, and were only between Acton and Smithfield Market - I don't yet know what they used as a brake for the meat vans from Birkenhead to Acton. In re buffer heights; IIRC although the RCH acceptable standard was 3'4" from rail top to buffer centre, in practice the acceptable leeway for most railways was 3'3" - 3'6" give or take a smidgen. ISTR the LNW generally aimed for 3'5½" unladen. Given worn springs and a full load, a wagon could easily settle by a couple of inches or more. Conversely new springs and no load could make a wagon sit higher than expected. It's a quandary for us modellers who tend to try to standardise on buffing and drawgear heights for the purposes of acceptable running. The real thing was far less affected by these issues. I'd agree about block trains, and other companies did the same. I've a photo of a block train of 20+ LSWR refrigerator vans at one of the London docks, of GW MICAs at Acton, and the GE ran fitted fast goods en block from 1905 onwards. I'm sure a wealth of other companies did the same. However, the interesting slant for me is that on short trip to Smithfield - only 20 vans + a short brake were allowed at a time, so the GW block trains were broken up at destination. Further study of the WTT shows that of the four daily meat trips to Smithfield, only one was dedicated meat - the rest were meat + general merchandise, so the fitted vans were mixed in with unbraked stock. I'm looking to recreate a similar scenario with the LNW goods. I think this is a good decision on the grounds of both finances and sanity - a vast number of fitted vans might look good on the layout, but I'd be fit for bankruptcy and the loony bin by the time I'd built the last one. That's encouraging! Interesting about the Midland block beer trains - I didn't know that, so thanks - that's something else for me to chase up. Don't underestimate the voracity of consumption by Victorian Londoners, poor or otherwise; for example over in the East End, the two ten-story granaries at Brick Lane which had a footprint of three acres could only store enough grain to feed the 1860s 3 million Londoners for two days. It's been estimated that if the ECR (and later GE) stopped daily transportation of grain into town, 30,000 would have died of starvation after just the first week, the numbers then rising exponentially. Add to that 10 block-trains of coal came in daily to feed the domestic requirements of those living within just a few furlongs of the GE main line, amounting to almost a million tons burnt at the hearth per year. So I'm sure that despite the Midland's block beer trains and the bitter (ha!) rivalry of the Midland and LNW, the raging thirst of Londoners across the city would have ensured enough room for the latter to access markets in the capital. Wow - fabulous photos! As you say, the first one would make a great micro, but that third one is the one which grabs me - what a backdrop the buildings on the right would make. Apologies - I seem to have caused your thread to digress a little!

Nice tip! I've always used a cocktail stick to do the same; the taper wedges in nicely and centres the collar on the housing, but the melted ABS from the bond can grip the wood a little, not enough to bond, but enough to roughen the inside and necessitate a little cleaning up on the inside of the joint, I'll use a drill bit from now on.