Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench

[Hroth]

Is the guard in the Birdcage keeping an eye on what the driver and his lady stoker are getting up to?

 

On 24/01/2020 at 10:10, Annie said:

I see the Crampton's young driver has his strange girlfriend from the future on the footplate again in defiance of company reflations

 

"reflations"...  Is that what they called it then? 

[Annie]

1 hour ago, Hroth said:

Is the guard in the Birdcage keeping an eye on what the driver and his lady stoker are getting up to?

 

 

"reflations"...  Is that what they called it then? 

It's called a random spelling moment caused by micro sleeping  Mr Horth.  The word was meant to be 'regulations'.  As a rule I read my posts through a couple of times before I click 'submit reply' or else nobody would understand anything I wrote.  Somehow I managed to miss that spelling mistake.

 

And yes no doubt the guard was keeping a stern eye on the pair.

 

Edit:  Trainz TS2019 places their idea of a driver on the footplate or in a diesel or electric locomotive cab.  Unfortunately the males are all scruffy looking Network Rail rejects in Hi-vis jackets or women dressed in corporate looking trouser suits.  The digital figures are very well made, but completely useless for anything except the modern error.  There is one only male figure wearing a grease top cap, but he's wearing a Hi-vis jacket as well which completely ruins his suitability for the steam era of railways.

There are ways of editing the attachment points for crew figures on the footplate so the TS2019 figures don't show up, but in the case of the SER Cramption and one or two others of my mid-19th century engines it amuses me to have that slightly bewildered looking young lady on the footplate.

 

I call this picture 'The driving lesson'.

Edited January 25, 2020 by Annie
more to say and added a picture

[Hroth]

6 hours ago, Annie said:

It's called a random spelling moment caused by micro sleeping  Mr Horth.  The word was meant to be 'regulations'.  As a rule I read my posts through a couple of times before I click 'submit reply' or else nobody would understand anything I wrote.  Somehow I managed to miss that spelling mistake.

My apologies.

I usually get tangles by mere mistyping.

 

6 hours ago, Annie said:

I call this picture 'The driving lesson'.

 

Lesson 1.   Now Sharon, where did you leave the shovel?

 

[MikeOxon]

12 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

 

Lesson 1.   Now Sharon, where did you leave the shovel?

 

 

Audience shouts "Look behind you"

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, MikeOxon said:

Audience shouts "Look behind you"

 

Ruddy spoilsports!

[rocor]

After Annie had stated that the young woman was the drivers girlfriend from the future, I began to visualise her as Rose Tyler, The companion of the 9th and 10th Doctor Who's.

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, rocor said:

After Annie had stated that the young woman was the drivers girlfriend from the future, I began to visualise her as Rose Tyler, The companion of the 9th and 10th Doctor Who's.

 

She reminds me more of the current Dr, played by Jodie Whittaker.

 

Given that, I'm just waiting for an unpleasant monster, with more tentacles than eyes to pop up from behind a hedge...

[Regularity]

2 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

She reminds me more of the current Dr, played by Jodie Whittaker.

You mean talented, but struggling to deliver because of poor script-writing and Direction, coupled to absurd plot lines?

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

You mean talented, but struggling to deliver because of poor script-writing and Direction, coupled to absurd plot lines?

 

Yes, and we could probably bring wokeness into the mix too....

 

[Regularity]

4 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Yes, and we could probably bring wokeness into the mix too....

 

I’d rather we didn’t...

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

Given that, I'm just waiting for an unpleasant monster, with more tentacles than eyes to pop up from behind a hedge...

 

That would be the mighty Derby octopus, ready to move in and turn you into a joint (line) and bestow upon you such benefits as Whitaker's automatic tablet exchanger. (I'm sure that a working version could be an interesting bit of virtual modelling.)

[Annie]

11 hours ago, rocor said:

After Annie had stated that the young woman was the drivers girlfriend from the future, I began to visualise her as Rose Tyler, The companion of the 9th and 10th Doctor Who's.

I do have a blue Police telephone box model actually.  Hmmmm........

[Annie]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That would be the mighty Derby octopus, ready to move in and turn you into a joint (line) and bestow upon you such benefits as Whitaker's automatic tablet exchanger. (I'm sure that a working version could be an interesting bit of virtual modelling.)

Attempts to model animated tablet exchange using model figures have been tried by various clever folk, but it ended up being very complicated as well as not being very successful.

There is a full set of GWR tablet exchange gear available for Trainz, but they are all static models.

 

[Annie]

Just because I can.

 

 

 

[Annie]

Horribly hot weather here so sleeping a lot and not doing much.  I did have a play with my trainset though.

 

E&GR No.3 on the GCR-GER joint line.  I got fed up with the hedgerows beside the line so I deleted them all.  Or nearly all; - there's still some to be found at Barrow Hills, but dark gloomy looking hedgerows are what you'd expect to find around there.

 

 

 

E&GR No.8 at Brenton Woods on the joint line.  I have a big project on at the moment to change all the platforms on the layout to pre-grouping types without the wartime era white racing stripe at the platform edge.

 

 

No.8 on the B&FER line shortly after leaving Bluebell Magna.

 

 

General overview taken with sparrowcam flying above the little village at Lodge on the B&FER.

B&FER 'Sharpie' No.10 is in charge of a passenger train from Foxhollow and is heading for Moxbury.  The GCR-GER joint line (over by the coast) is looking much better now after weeding out the hedgerows and generally giving it a tidy up.   Beeching would have rubbed his hands with glee at the sight of such an apparent duplication of rail lines, but since in my world his Mum runs off with a lady tram conductress when she's in her early twenties there will never be a Richard Beeching to rain down horror and devastation upon it.

 

 

GER Y14 No.555 at Elgar Junction yard on the joint line after assembling a goods train to take through to Oakmarket.

 

 

And after arrival at the reception siding in Oakmarket goods yard.  Y14's aren't a common sight at Oakmarket at present, but that is likely to change in the near future.

 

 

'Sharpie' No.10 again at Lodge on the B&FER.  Those 6 wheel coaches have been surprisingly successful despite being very old models from the earliest days of Trainz.  I still need to do some final detailing and fit them with vacuum brake pipes (tedious!) before I can call them complete and done and dusted though.  They are quite heavy though and while the 'Sharpies' are up to the job of working the passenger service with them, when I used one of the much smaller and lighter single driver tank engines to shunt a rake of them about at Moxbury it was pushed about all over the place when it tried to stop.

 

 

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

39 minutes ago, Annie said:

I got fed up with the hedgerows beside the line so I deleted them all.  Or nearly all; - there's still some to be found at Barrow Hills, but dark gloomy looking hedgerows are what you'd expect to find around there.

 

 

Yes, hedges aren't really a very typical railway boundary. Have you got any post-and-rail fencing?

  

39 minutes ago, Annie said:

GER Y14 No.555 at Elgar Junction yard on the joint line after assembling a goods train to take through to Oakmarket.

 

 

Like the LDEC wagons - a nice rarity. I stumbled across a real one the other day.

[Northroader]

[MikeOxon]

From the BBC website today: "A government fund is to be launched later to help restore historic railway lines closed more than 50 years ago under the so-called Beeching cuts."

[Regularity]

2 minutes ago, MikeOxon said:

From the BBC website today: "A government fund is to be launched later to help restore historic railway lines closed more than 50 years ago under the so-called Beeching cuts."

Also from the BBC website:

Quote

But today's announcement is only a tentative step towards recreating a functioning railway to Fleetwood. An assessment of the economic and social case will now be carried out. The funding - £100,000 - is peanuts for now.

 

[Annie]

11 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Yes, hedges aren't really a very typical railway boundary. Have you got any post-and-rail fencing?

I have a good few different types of post and rail fencing Mr Compound.  Part of the problem was that I used a section of an existing layout by another maker to build my little empire around so I inherited his love of hedgerows beside railway lines.  Being still a bit green about the pre-grouping era I tried to fix the mess by trying to improve the hedgerows on the railway boundary and never came up with any kind of successful solution.  Now that I've got rid of all the excess shrubbery I can work on progressively removing the placeholder hedges on the railway boundary and putting in post and rail fencing instead.  In some areas such as along the tramways there will still be hedges beside the line, but not so much of it.

 

11 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Like the LDEC wagons - a nice rarity. I stumbled across a real one the other day.

With not a lot to go on I think I've managed to put together a reasonable representation of a leased LDEC wagon.  There's just those two on the layout with both carrying the same number and I can't remember now whether I was able to find an actual wagon number or if I just took a jab in the dark at it.  The underframe and chassis ironwork is all RCH unfortunately since I'm stuck with having to use that mesh for 5 plank wagons.

 

The wagon number in the photo looks like 476 something, might be a '3', so that's useful to know, but that's for a 6 plank wagon and not a 5 plank wagon, - my wagon isn't an end door wagon either.  My wagon is numbered '3928'  which as I mention might not be correct.  I've just checked my picture archives and I don't have any LDEC wagon images so I suppose I must've found something on-line on the interwebs, but where?

 

Edited January 28, 2020 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Hroth]

8 hours ago, MikeOxon said:

From the BBC website today: "A government fund is to be launched later to help restore historic railway lines closed more than 50 years ago under the so-called Beeching cuts."

 

Perhaps the heritage lines should give the government some feedback on how much it costs to restore 50 year old "Beechingd" closures.....

[Annie]

 

Isn't she beautiful.  The B&ER 4-4-0ST I commissioned has now been sent to me and I'm all of a quiver about driving her for the first time. 

 

In other news the weather is horrible here.  The Australian bushfires are now so large that they are affecting the weather in the Tasman Sea and along NZ's east coast.  The temperature is stiflingly hot during the day and it stays hot even at night.  I've been having all kinds of random crashouts into deep sleep which is very frustrating to say the least.

 

No snaps to show you of what I've been doing since I haven't been much motivated to sort any of them out for posting on the forum.

[Northroader]

On a technicality, the saddle tank didn’t extend back over the firebox, which was raised, and it looks flush, but you can see  a row of washout plugs along the side.  Oh, and you’ve got a bg engine on a ng ?matrix, so the buffers could go inside the guardirons, and that vac pipe looks like an air brake bag. Sorry, send me to Australia. Otherwise, it’s a superb job.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Northroader

[Annie]

It's one of the Vulcan Foundry batch Mr Northroader as rebuilt by the GWR.  Cameron who made the engine for me used the most recent research from the article in Lightmoor Press's Railway Archive article on the B&ER saddle tanks.

If it's not right then I suppose I'll have to put up with it since I don't know what else can be done about it at this late stage.

 

[Annie]

Not that anybody cares, but these are some snaps from doing a test run with my new B&ER 4-4-0ST.

There's some odd small details I want to see if Cameron can sort out for me, but otherwise the new engine drives very nicely indeed.  The advanced steam controls work well and this is a very different engine to drive on the 'advanced' controls as compared with my much fettled 'Bogie' class engines.

 

A contrast. A GWR 'Bogie' class from TS2004 days and the new Vulcan 4-4-0ST made for TS2019.