Invicta

I seem to have been a bit of a late starter with exhibitions, not helped by a couple of lengthy breaks from active modelling since my teens- I remember going to a couple of small local shows as a kid , then in my student days, Newcastle at the Guildhall in the late 80's. After that, nothing much until I moved to Kent and started doing the rounds of the Kent shows, Canterbury, Folkestone, Ashford, Tonbridge, Chatham Dockyard etc in the early/mid 90's - the first big national show I went to was Ally Pally in the early 2000's.

Some of those were in partnership with manufacturers (10000/1 was Dapol and the ICI Hoppers were Oxford) , so would the tooling presumably be owned by them?

It's not just me then! I was putting the packaging from my banana vans in the recycling earlier this week and thought "those two little boxes look much too useful to throw away", so they're now on a shelf in the garage waiting for use as workbench storage.

KT7/157* is just a historical note, with no picture or wagon numbers mentioned. The main reference for North's Navigation is KT6/115, and has a number of pics- the wagon numbers shown are: 184 (6-plank dated March 1891) 1647 (7-plank, dated Feb 1894) 1931 (7-plank, June 1896) 2197 (7-plank, Nov 1897) 1055 (7-plank, Dec 1898) 1145 (7-plank, Sept 1899) 3000 (7-plank, Dec 1911) These are all Gloucester works photos 3300 (7-plank RCH 1923 from a Cambrian Wagon Co. advertisement, published 1926- this last one is in a different livery just lettered 'Norths' rather than North's Navigation Collieries and lacking the 'NNC' monogram on the side door) 322 527 (both in a photo of North's wagon repair sidings, no date) 121 (photo of the screens at St John's Colliery, no date) These last three are also in the later, simpler livery- , both photos feature a number of wagons in this livery, but only the numbers quoted are legible 262 192 928 - all in a photo of the company's coke ovens at Tondu, and could be in the simplified livery (they're heavily weathered, but the wagon numbers are at the LH end, rather than the RH end of the older livery), but the photo shows a fourth wagon in the old 'NNC' style, with an undecipherable number. All are fitted with coke rails.

I wonder that as well, unless they have some future plans to use the Hattons name and brand- if all they wanted was the database, then that could easily be rebranded as the 'Rails database' or similar. It's completely uninformed speculation on my part, but we know Rails have taken on processing the orders for the second tranche of Hattons Genesis coaches when they arrive, but IIRC had stated they'd not bought the tooling. Might they now be looking to take on the project long-term and produce future batches as well, keeping the Hattons name?

Yes, the 1:45pm (the double-headed non-stop train to Leicester North) was stopped immediately after Rothley station, and reversed back into the platform where it was held pending the arrival of a paramedic and ambulance- Hope the passenger involved is OK. We were a good half-hour down reaching Leicester Nth, and there was a further delay on the return when the train was held on the approach to Rothley because one of the railcars was in the section ahead. When I left about 4:30pm, the stock for the 4:00pm was just arriving back at Loughborough... Apart from that, a really good day out, as you said, very busy - I managed a couple of runs behind each of the guest locos and a trip on the NER railcar, as well as a few of the 'home team' - the NER railcar seemed particularly popular (despite someone on Facebook earlier in the week complaining about the presence of diesel railcars at a steam gala!) , it always seems to be packed out whenever it visits the GCR

I'm from Coalville, and remember there being a lot of Airfix stock coming out of the Palitoy factory shop very cheaply- I've still got a couple of Royal Scots. There's a local urban myth that when the Palitoy factory closed, a lot of surplus product was buried near the factory, and I'm sure I've heard suggestions that this included a quantity of Airfix Mk2s! There could be a grain of truth to this story, as ex-Palitoy chief designer Bob Brechin said in a Leicester Mercury article a couple of years back that after the closure, some unsold stock did end up in a landfill site at Lount near Ashby

The Lee & Green tanker was a commission by British Railway Modelling magazine in the early 2000's- The prototype is listed in the Keith Turton PO wagon books (Vol 13, p.78- it's also the front cover picture). According to the photo caption, the wagon dates from c.1911, and the photo shows a board along the side listing "Factories at Sleaford, Spalding, Bourne, Boston & Skegness" which is missing from the model. Keith Turton suggests they would have been seen in a fairly localised area working between Bourne and these factories, some of which had been closed by about 1934 There's a piece about Lee & Green here which includes the wagon photo.

That was a surprising and shocking piece of news- in fact, when first I saw an announcement from Hattons in my Facebook feed last night, I was half expecting news on the second round of Genesis coaches, or a new Hattons Exclusive, not the end of an era! I think I placed my first order with Hattons in about 1984 as a teenager, although I pretty much stopped railway modelling a few years after that until the early 2000s, and probably didn't place another order with them until about 5/6 years ago. Over the last few years though, I've been a fairly regular customer though, and have always had prompt and excellent service from them. Having been through a couple of redundancies myself, I really feel for the Hattons staff who must be going through so much uncertainty at the moment, and I hope that they're able to find new employment quickly and without too much stress. The other thought that comes to mind is that I hope a deal can be done for someone else to take on the rights and tooling for the Hattons Exclusives- it would be a fitting legacy to the work done by the Hattons team, if such excellent products were to continue in some other guise.

I'm sure there's been a 4mm LMS layout on the exhibition circuit in recent years that featured an 'LMS Castle'- From memory I saw it at the Loughborough exhibition a few years back, and had a brief "Is that what I think it is?" conversation about it with one of the layout operators. Can anyone recall which layout this might be?

I wonder whether the Belpaire rebuild might be in their future plans?- When they did the Midland 2F some years back, they did the Belpaire version, then followed up with the round-top firebox version as their next release.

...also whisky blending- the LMS built a couple of demountable Loch Katrine tankers, the twin-tank Lemon Hart one (delivered after nationalisation) and a single-tank one before the war for Portal Dingwall & Norris- Amusingly, the tank component of this was finished in GWR chocolate and cream, allegedly at the request of W.S. Norris, a director of PD&N, who was a GWR enthusiast and IIRC owned a notable O-gauge layout of the period.

I think they have done both the Ivatt and also the Midland 0-4-4T (the LMS unlined black version) in motor-fitted form though - the lack of an LMS push-pull driving trailer (whether of Midland, LNWR or LMS standard origin) has always struck me as a really obvious open goal that Bachmann keep missing! IIRC both the LNWR Coal Tank and L&Y 2-4-2T were sometimes motor-fitted as well, though I don't think Bachmann included this option in the tooling for either model?

IIRC every Matchbox military vehicle kit came with a different base, complete with shell-holes, sections of shell-damaged buildings etc., plus at least one appropriate soldier figure to add to the base. Ah yes, I've got a couple of Diamond T kits stashed in the loft somewhere, and I remember them having that base- the Matchbox T-34 came with one depicting the tank driving through a wooden fence, plus an accompanying Russian soldier figure. Your railway base originally came with the Matchbox M-16 half-track

For me, possibly the most useful thing Rapido could do would be to run through providing a matching pre-grouping brake van for each of their forthcoming steam loco releases, we've already got an SECR one for the O1, and you've mentioned GER for the J70, but GNR, NER, LBSC (Didn't Hornby do one years back?) and Highland varieties to hang behind the J13, Y7, E1 and Jones Goods respectively.