What locomotive have I just bought (and what can be done with it)??

[Fat Controller]

Just now, LMS Bess said:

Ah yes now. Competition between railway companies. I love reading about it. The ferocity of the competition is the same between America and Britain, but the form it takes here is so ... recognisable. 

More 'NIMBYism than competition, I fear. A slight digression; my old boss had been ASM Ashford, his patch being from the Ashford area as far as Richborough; former SER territory. However, the section from Dover Marine to Buckland Junction was LC&DR territory, and was covered by the Dover Marine ASM. The two railways had amalgamated in 1899, but considered themselves separate entities almost 90 years later.

[The Johnster]

It was pretty recognisable here in the early days, with fights breaking out between staff at break of gauge interchange stations like Oxford and Gloucester.  The Midland blocked a Great Northern loco on the buffers at Nottingham, holding it and it’s crew hostage. 
 

But I would think the Earl of Radnor was simply objecting to the obstruction of the sea view from his villa; the GW and the SER were not in direct competition anywhere.  

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

More 'NIMBYism than competition, I fear. A slight digression; my old boss had been ASM Ashford, his patch being from the Ashford area as far as Richborough; former SER territory. However, the section from Dover Marine to Buckland Junction was LC&DR territory, and was covered by the Dover Marine ASM. The two railways had amalgamated in 1899, but considered themselves separate entities almost 90 years later.

When railways amalgamated, or were grouped, or nationalised, they had already established working practices, not to mention rivalries and alliances, some of which had led to the amalgamations in the first place.  These working practices largey continued after the amalgamation, grouping, or nationalisation, with only the liveries changing, and eventually new locos and stock appearing.  If you lived alongside, say, the Midland main line between Gloucester and Bristol, you would not have noticed all that much difference between 1900 and 1960.  
 

When I worked as a freight guard at Canton in the 70s, I used to frequent a pub near Horton Road shed called the Windmill.  The bar was painted green at one end and red at the other; first time I ever went in there I failed to take the cue and went to the red end.  Only to be ‘stringently requested’ in a Derby accent to ‘f&ck off oop yer own end, Canton’.  

[LMS Bess]

Today's excitement is unceasing as I've just received some more bits of Hornby oo track I put dirt cheap bids on. Few more points and short straights and curves. So I can try actually laying 'em out. Some of the less knackered sections might even be usable. I've been fiddling about with Anyrail but now to see what's what in real life. And! Some SR wagons and vans. 

 

Quite a lot of the latter in fact as I didn't realise how cheap oo stuff goes for on eBay. Chucked a load of 2 quid bids about. Oh well, nice problem to have 

Edited October 29, 2020 by LMS Bess
Added a qualification

[The Johnster]

Old HD and Triang wagons can often be had quite cheaply in job lots, as can Mainline. Lima, and Airfix.  Airfix are the least crude of these, with brake blocks aligning with the wheels, but they all suffer from the crudity of having handbrake levers moulded in.  It is probably worth buying Airfix for the chassis alone, as you can put Lima, Mainline, or HD (stick to the plastic bodied 'super detail' wagons from the 60s) bodies on them even if you didn't particularly want the Airfix vehicle.  Airfix have the advantage of the least obnoxious tension lock coupler of the period, Lima's was an abomination.  

 

I'd advise replacing the plastic wheelsets with current Bachmann or Hornby all metal wheelsets, which might be costly if you have a lot of wagons to do, but is worth it for the better running and the elimination of the plastic wheels' renowned and considerable crud-spreading ability.  This is a fairly simple operation; you prise the old wheels out of their plastic conical 'bearings', throw them away to prevent your being tempted to use them again, and replace with the new sets by forcing them into place.  A good bit of brutality is needed so be careful to protect anything vulnerable on the top of the van or wagon, like roof ventilators.  If the new wheels are a loose fit in the old chassis, you can provide brass cup bearings superglued into the conical recess,  You might want to consider replacing the plastic blobby mushroom head buffers with something a bit better as well.  

 

As this is probably going to be a setrack shunting layout with propelling of rakes of wagons through no.1 or 2 curves, try to standardise on a coupling.  You will have to use tension locks at these radii, and, because the couplings are claimed to be inter-compatible but actually have different bar and hook profiles, mountings, and materials, the bars may ride over each other when you are propelling, which means they will cease acting as buffers, and the real buffers will interlock.  I use Bachmann NEMs which come in 4 types, long and short, and straight or stepped down shanks.  They come complete with NEM pockets and 'fishtails' to attach to the mounts  Using combinations you can enforce a standard bar height and distance from the buffer beam.  Mounting them requires removing the original coupling and it's mounting block, hacksaw needed if this is moulded to the wagon floor, and providing your own dovetail mounts.  These are available from Parkside and are made of quite soft plastic, so are easy to trim to the correct height if they are too big, or be packed if they are too small.

 

An alternative is to use Hornby Dublo couplings, but I always found these to be unreliable.

[LMS Bess]

Re couplers I was actually planning on using Smith's three links. I gather you can prevent buffer lock with these by running a bit of wire across the buffers or installing sprung buffers? 

 

Also, decals ordered today. 

[LMS Bess]

(I'm entirely willing to work through a load of experiments and difficulties w couplings by the way, all part of the fun)

[The Johnster]

Smith's 3 link or other scale couplings are not suitable for use with set piece track geometry, unfortunatlely.  They need a minimum of at least 30" radius, Peco Streamline medium, though I have in the past managed to get them to work on 24" by the cheat of mounting the coupling hooks slighty too proud of the buffer beams.  The problem is that, on setrack curves, the buffers will lock even when you are hauling stock, and the lock will not be prevented by the trick of fitting a bar between the buffer heads because there will not be sufficient play between the vehicles on the sharp curvature.  You might be able to ease the problem with sprung buffers and drawhooks, but unless the springing is a light as possible you will have problems.  I doubt that you will be able to get any scale coupling to work reliably below 24" radius, and even then you will have to avoid reverse curves.

 

Before my 3 decade hiatus from modelling I was using Smith's instanter and screw couplings, but when I restarted again 4 years ago I found that my eyesight, hand steadyness, and hand-eye co-ordination are not what they were, and 'regressed' to tension lock couplings after some thought.  Kaydess would have been a viable alternative but I saw little point in replacing one type of unsightly, unprotoypical (for steam era UK modelling) coupling with another, since any new stock I would be buying would be fitted with NEM tension locks. 

 

It was not all bad news, as I have automatic coupling at least, albeit with manual uncoupling, and the ability to use setrack turnouts and curves in the fiddle yard has enabled me to increase it's capacity by a third while extending the 'scenic' part of a small BLT by 25%, enabling me to run 11 wagon coal trains instead of 8.  I use a home made shunting pole for uncoupling, a wire hook soldered to a bent up piece of old rail strapped with a cable tidy to a torch with and led worklight from Maplin's, but similar items are available af Halfords and other places.

 

Check out NHY 581's thread on Layout Topics for inspiration as to the standard of realism that can be achieved with worked up RTR items and tension lock couplings.

[LMS Bess]

Do you know the part number for the Peco streamline medium? I'll try out those on Anyrail 

[melmerby]

Bachmann Tension locks, as well as coming in at least three stepped versions and three length versions also come in short and long versions to replace the older large Tension locks with a screw fitting.

Lima couplings are often moulded as part of the bogie or underframe, so will need cutting off if replacement is required, most others are clip in or screw on.

 

The axle lengths of old wagons can vary between about 24.5mm to 26mm depending on maker and period.

People like Alan Gibson can supply the correct length axles with replacement wheels.

[LMS Bess]

Okay, just playing around with the Peco medium turnouts on Anyrail (just because I'm really taken with the three link coupler idea). I've got a question here - in the diagram below, you can see I've made an approximation of the trackwork at the end of the pier, involving turnouts mirroring eachother.

 

Using OO Hornby setrack parts, it's quite straightforward although the tracks end up a bit too far apart. Using the Peco turnouts, instantly the whole thing looks better and less toy-like (takes up more space lengthwise but perhaps a happy tradeoff), but, I was wondering how one would go about filling the gap between turnouts with straight pieces - would you just cut a length of the flex track to fit, or is there a part? And how challenging is cutting the flex track - anything to watch out for? 

 

 

[melmerby]

Flexitrack rail is easy to cut

Heavy duty cutters, Xuron track cutter or fine X-acto saw will all do the job

Personally I use the former, you will also need to cut the sleeper base to suit (Stanley knife).

You need to make sure the end is cleaned off and square with no burrs left after the cut so a rail joiner can be slid on without too much force. (Fine file)

 

If you are thinking of cutting Flexitrack, I would definitely use Peco Streamline points rather than Peco Settrack or Hornby points.

 

Even Streamline is really too spaced out, it's 50.8mm or 2" track centres but it's done so you can get longish vehicles around 2' radius points curves without them touching each other.

 

EDIT corrected points for curves

Edited October 31, 2020 by melmerby

[LMS Bess]

Soldering, decaling, now cutting flex track ... what's next, actually running a train?

 

It turns out there's a short Peco set track piece which added on to a standard Hornby straight fills that gap in context (according to Anyrail). As all this is code 100 it might work. 

 

Here's the results of tonight's end-of-pier scribble anyway - just a 'possible' as I slosh ideas around - as you can see the nearest we can get to a 'boat train' on this shelf is one carriage and one utility van, which would simply turn up on the down (middle) track, cut off loco, then be pulled back into staging; however a little train of four wagons/shorter vans can enter, and either end up shoved into the headshunt at bottom right (which is what they've done in pictures I've seen, for whatever reason) or left on either the down track or the track closest to the boat to load or unload. 

 

Interchangeable backdrops might be fun, with either a passenger or cargo ship.

 

The rails on the real pier were embedded - doable I think, I've made road crossings before, though I'd probably leave the points as is and live with it.  

 

The overhead crane is an interesting feature. I noticed there's a Dapol (I think ex-Airfix?) crane cabin and boom that looks similar to the ones at Folkestone; there might be potential to make this functional or even motorised (but this is a bit faraway twinkle in the eye). 

 

I'm restricted to this length of shelf because I'm in a rental flat and can't be putting up own shelves, and that's the shelves that are there, and I'm using the floor space for my N scale stuff (N.B. I'm well aware of the downsides of floors, and was warned, but there are no kids or pets, the modules are stood on little 1cm 'feet' clear of the dust level, and I find dusting the track every single day and giving it some IPA now and then leads to acceptable functioning - it's a compromise to get 'around the edges of the room' operations like the American fellas do with their real estate ... though I did run my GP40-2 over a moth the other day.) 

 

 

[LMS Bess]

Some more SR goodies have arrived - the works Centenary brochure is a treat, massive fold out map included. 

 

 

[LMS Bess]

A lengthy departmental zoom meeting today, most of which was wonderfully irrelevant to my role as a bottom feeder, allowed me to start trialling tarpaulin loads for open wagons. Usual balsa wood formers, and I've got endless supplies of green rizla papers because it comes with the baccy but I prefer blue rizla. I'll be trimming the ruzla 'tarpaulin' down to 20' X 14'. I'm going to try and make these removable, by having the tarpaulin glued not to the wagon side but to a cardboard insert. Let's see what happens. 

[LMS Bess]

Tarp loads so far. Think we're a bit out of loading gauge on the left! Need to figure out a way of doing the ropes to solebar now. Maybe rubber bands. 

[LMS Bess]

Staff

 

[LMS Bess]

Also, first ever weathering attempt in this scale (after putting couplers on - plenty of that to do). My weathering process is to select a victim and totally slop it with pastel powders, then set it to one side and look at critically in a few days. If it's not the right mess, wash off and try again, doing a bit less the second time, and so on. 

 

 

Edited November 9, 2020 by LMS Bess
Adding a bit of explanation

[LMS Bess]

Staff now have flesh and overalls. I'm thinking black or dark brown for jackets and flat caps, does that sound about right? 

 

 

 

 

[PatB]

I'd go for a mid charcoal grey for those. Whilst a high percentage of work clothing was nominally black, most black fabrics fade to shades of grey fairly quickly. Black on model figures doesn't, IMHO, look quite right in most cases.

[Brit70053]

I'd still go with Satin Black for the greasetops (head gear).

 

Regards,

                John

[cypherman]

Hi all,

i would go with dark grey or dark blue depending on time period then a wash of matt black over the figures.

[LMS Bess]

Here we go. 

 

 

[LMS Bess]

Some more steps before I use the decals mind 

 

I was thinking I'd use plasti kote spray varnish on em - unless there's a better one? 

[LMS Bess]

Trying a different weathering method on some of the wagons. One I've done before in N: tiny dot of alcohol on each plank, gentle scrape with fine sandpaper avoiding metal struts, to get a faded chipped wood effect. I'll be going at those solebars with rust powder but only after spraying em with clear matte, the plastic is slippery and needs bite I find.

 

Third pic, the wagon I powdered before has been rinsed in warm water taking off some of the excess ... and I'm actually quite happy with it. Some metal wheels are in the post.