ChrisB

I don't suppose you have any old Lima bogies hanging around do you? Have been routing through the loft looking for suitable stuff for my grandson's first railway and, amongst all the other stuff I found a couple of bogie -less Lima TEA s. Happy to pay a reasonable amount for them if you do.

Does anyone know if the white doors on these pics of 1048 at Barnstaple in the early 80s are a one off or did all of the NNVs have them.

Rob Dark's other photo of the train with the assortment of stock for trials to Meeth.

Rob Dark's photos of HAA at Torrington as mentioned above.

Absolutely superb modelling but let down terribly by the lack of weathering on the Land Rover. 😄 Anyone that has owned one of that age will be familiar with mossy green bits on the roof and rusty spots on the wheels!!!

It's basically a 15ft shelf down one side of a triangular garage (corner plot) with a big breeze block pillar making an uninterrupted view from one end to the other impossible. It;s about 14 inches wide at it's narrowest and just over 2ft at its widest. I know you are a fan of the cyber heritage site so you'll reckognise the view I am trying to recreate here.

Class 73s in North Devon? Heaven forbid! Yes Ian it got a fair bit of use before everything came to an unexpected and abrupt halt. The layout has been untouched for over two years and is now home to many spiders! I've always known I would get back to it and it's likely to be a while yet. Perhaps I'll start a thread with some of the pics I took during it's construction. I don't want to hijack Rich's thread but here's one showing, hopefully, how I wanted to capture the scenery around the Eggesford area.

Great to see you finally make a start for your sake more than anything. I know you've been full of enthusiasm for this for a (very) long time now. Your track plan is almost like a mirror image of Lapford! I don't quite fit in with your "serial procrastinators" title. I actually made got quite far with my Barnstaple ish layout before things came to a halt about 2 years ago. I never got around to starting a thread on it but it's still there under a layer of dust and I know I will return to it at some point. Looking forward to seeing your progress however slow it may be.

Looks great in every respect except for the NEM pockets being very close to the outer end of the wagon forcing a huge gap between vehicles. With the pockets so far out, it doesn't even leave the option of swapping for shorter couplings. It may seem like a minor thing but I've always questioned the logic in pursuing accuracy to the nth degree but having a scale 2ft gap between buffers when running on a layout. I know that Bachmann have some of theirs pushed outwards due to interference between axles and the huge mounting assembly they use for their couplings. I would have thought that, with a clean sheet, this could have been avoided.

Is anybody aware of any of these ever making an appearance at Westbury? It seems just about every other hopper livery (including Tilbury) got there at some point but a quick search shows no evidence of these. Edit. Just found this from 1986. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hoover29/10907899505/in/photolist-hBTQuR-c44t35-bzngLV-J9DqkW-5XU7ER-5XYnaN-7b74yA-8D7CjM-EeEPEz-7hyvt3-5XYfD7-5XYne9-agsuY3-BSXK2-oeSWG1-ow6JAr-6z9oXX-6yzboT-5XTZL4-6zdtx1-3UsUYx-6yzbnK-D1NqUT-wYbmrj-tMfQar-pZGo6h-pqTzy3-n2ck1d-6z9pjr-6yzbmr-5XYfB7-c44uaJ-c44qAq-c44vj7-6yzbjV-c441b3-c44wBm-c44rs3-EQKma5-c442z3-c443Z7-c44G3o-ENLXEe-EmDYaC-C7YuF4-s39tyg-kWeZjG-kWdjBp-kWePky-kWePq3

I agree with The Q. Landrovers with headlights in the grill panel were Series 2 and would almost certainly have all been gone by 1990. After that came the Series 3 (you don't say) which had headlights in the wings and a plastic grill. These gave way in 83/84 to the 90 and 110 (which refers to the wheelbase) which were externally pretty much identical except for the wheel arch extensions to cover the longer (now coil sprung) axles. They also had a grill with all horizontal slats. Most of these would have had spare wheels on the bonnet.

Nice choice. I would be up for a rake in 80s/90s livery but the LaFarge livery is too recent for me. Hope this goes really well for you.

Are you sure they're not Mk 4 Cortinas?

Love the finish on that Marina

Looks great Rob. You should be very pleased. Are you actually going to just enjoy it for a while before starting the next one?

Oh well. Mother will just have to wait until you go and see her then ! Nice work Rob. Can we have a photo of the whole thing please?

Nice work. It's amazing what skill and inventiveness there is hidden away. Don't be shy. Show us some more.

Thanks for that. There have been numerous occasions when I've been sat looking at my thumper wondering how I could get the two halves to sit closer together whilst keeping the lights. This will do the trick nicely.

My father was a career soldier and I remember him telling me about when they took delivery of the new Foden 6x6s and 8x8s in the late 70s and early 80s. They arrived in Matt green and they started spraying the matt black on them but it wasn't going fast enough. The solution? A couple of dozen squaddies with buckets of black paint and floor mops! Dad said that mops and buckets were frequently used for painting vehicles. I've also been told that, due to the urgency of getting vehicles out to the Gulf for the first Gulf War, some had cans of sand paint poured over them and it was then just spread out with brooms.

Fine if you want to pay £200 or more for a loco. Despite recent price hikes, the reason so much is made over there is because it's cheaper. The Chinese are perfectly capable of producing any colour you like. Somebody in the UK signed off on these to say they were okay and to go ahead with production.

You can only write as you find. I suppose you could neglect to mention certain things but that would be, at the very least, a disservice to your readers. If you were to do that, it devalues not only that review, but any others you write in the future and you would be better off not writing anything. As I said before, it will be interesting to see the language used in any reviews. Good luck!

....and they sit too low.

Many a true word spoken in jest...............................

.......and in the first of your 3 pictures above.

I haven't even looked as I was never even going to fit the standard Dapol couplings. I said it in a previous post but this loco could have been a huge, positive milestone for Dapol if they'd got it right. Instead it seems to be heading towards being a huge negative one especially in the light of comments like those above. This is my first Dapol locomotive and I will certainly think twice before ordering another one. I have a Dutch liveried one on order and, although my heart tells me otherwise, my head says "Cancel". Such a shame. Better decide soon. As has also been said, the silence from Dapol is deafening. It will be interesting to see what kind of language is used in the magazine reviews. They generally tread carefully for fear of upsetting their bigger advertisers but they really ought to tell the truth if they're claiming to give honest reviews.