Etched Pixels

Should be back again now..

The acetate ones are old screen printing. For new stuff I cut them with a vinyl cutter on brown vinyl and stick that to clear plastic. 3D printing doesn't work well for it. I tried it early on for some 3D printed coach shells but the thicknesses are a pain so even for those I might print compartments and seat shapes but the corridor is a glue in strip using vinyl/clear plastic. Alan

Alan, and I don't mind in the slightest. I did end up on newer stuff combining the roof ends and floor into one - if you don't do that then add a small bar along the length just under where the roof will go otherwise Shapeways sometimes prints slightly bowed coaches. Alan

I use a mix of drawings (preferably old ones included so they were drawn by someone who actually saw the thing for real) and photographs. Enough book drawings are wrong (some hilariously bad where the photo next to the drawing shows its incorrect) that you want to check photographs and other evidence. Picking two drawings doesn't work - it just shows who copied which mistake from where! Even official drawings sometimes turn out to be as designed not as built. The Jenkinson/Campling book isn't bad - but there are errors I found. For some of the books the various societies actually k

Not accurate thankfully they are never on site anyway but all live with PPD. Except for very old stuff (which I suspect never existed in digital form) I've also got digital copies of the artwork although I did have fun extracting them from very old Macintosh apps. There is old stuff that only exists/existed as stock (Bill Bedford parts, Commonwealth bogies, printed coach sides) and stuff it's not really practical to re-run for other reasons (from being old artwork mostly containing stuff I don't need to hand plastic moulding tools which are hard to get run nowdays). Var

They don't interrogate people for past 9mm gauge sins at the door and burn the heretics. In fact an awful lot of the stuff is very useful if you model in N. Alan

One tip on the etched sides - if instead of just sticking them on you mark where they join the original body and file gently just inside the joins so it slopes from the metal thickness at the join to no filing over maybe 1cm or so then you can make overlay etches appear to be a seamless finish without the hassle of trying to take 3 thou off all of the side, because providing the join looks right nobody can see the slightly width change unless its a sharp transition. Alan

The Etched Pixels ones vary. The easy to build stuff uses Peco chassis quite deliberately and N is sufficiently coarse scale wheels and trackwork that you don't need to do anything cleverer than glue two together for a six wheel chassis of desired length. There is also a six wheel Stove R chassis available from the N Gauge Society that some kits can use and it's a nice chassis that comes pre-assembled. The fancier stuff uses etched chassis but that puts plenty of people off. Alan

Only the main fan grille. I don't know anyone who does cantrail grilles so can't help there.

A real 48DS could move a reasonable load slowly on light gradients. My N gauge one struggles with more than about 4 wagons but I can live with that limitation to be honest. According to the official documentation in the lowest gear on the flat you can pull 226 tons but only 80 tons on 1 in 75. Alan

Maybe the Matthieson chassis ?

Colin: many many thanks a lot for that - I looked at lots of internet stuff but couldn't find a matching image anywhere. Alan