Deliberately Old-Fashioned 0 Scale - Chapter 1

[Nearholmer]

Oh yes, looks very likely, doesn’t it?

 

I’m guessing the Meccano job was made when he was still a schoolboy.

[Edwardian]

Courtesy of that lovely website Kevin Linked to I found my Coarse-scale O usernamesake:

 

You've got to love these.  Though she seems to have Derwent's wheels. The 'air smoothed' casing might be the Shape of Things to Come, but she's running on 1820s wheels!

[Nearholmer]

The wheels are a pretty good rendition of Bulleid-Firth-Brown cast steel ones. I think it’s the very prominent yellow line that makes them look odd. My ‘pure southern’ livery one doesn’t have that, and looks better.

 

Or, am I guilty of over- literality?

Edited March 9, 2018 by Nearholmer

[sem34090]

When it came to picking the first loco when I came into this hobby it was a bright colour and looked interesting, and a bit like the Bulleid Pacifics my Dad had shown me pictures of.

 

I now have two others, a triang one (with a later Hornby Body - 'Spitfire' in Southern Malachite) and a very recent Hornby one ('Exeter' - turned 'Blackmoor Vale') in 'normal' BR Green.

[Nearholmer]

Sounds as if you’ve yet to acquire the true classic version, as produced by Mettoy.

 

Every layout should have one, if only for target practice.

 

I hope the wheels, and the lack of wheels, don’t upset purists.

[sem34090]

Terrible model, appalling... one detail completely destroys any realism of that, otherwise fine, model!

 

The wheels are spoked!  

[Nearholmer]

Says here that it’s “so realistic”; who am to argue?

 

The version shown on the catalogue is totally bizarre in reality, because the tin print shows it in sort of semi-section, like one of those anatomical models, with all the veins and arteries showing.

[Simond]

Wow, what an “interesting” model. I think I’d call it “impressionistic”.

 

It bears some comparison with a finescale model I tried to help a now sadly departed friend with.

 

I think it was a Kemilway model blown up from 4mm (ish) to 7mm (ish), and the chassis was so narrow, it was something almost suitable for N gauge. It would certainly have been narrow enough to use wheels like those in your photo, and still leave clearance. I failed the courage test, and didn’t dismantle it properly (it should have been stripped and rebuilt with suitable spacers but the owner was “conservative”) so it was “improved” by the addition of “C” washers from plasticard clipped between the wheels and the chassis bushes. Despite this rather cavalier attitude to engineering, it ran surprisingly well. The wheels weren’t awful either.

 

As we’ve deviated into finescale if only briefly, he also had a Schools. It was a lovely model, powered by a Portescap. I installed an early DCC decoder in it, as we were right up with the very latest technology, but following said installation, it developed this rather weird habit of going awol. Happily he had an enormous garden layout. You’d be surprised how fast a Schools and four Bachman brass coaches can go if the decoder simply turns on full chat. And indeed, how fast a sixty-odd year old bloke can accelerate from nought to rather faster than his loco is going...

 

Do excuse the diversion,

Best

Simon

[Nearholmer]

It’s easy to laugh at these old toys, in fact it’s almost impossible not to, but they served the same ma rket as those very strange plastic train sets, made in China, that figure in cheap toy shops nowadays.

 

For grown-ups, the best part of a Mettoy set must have been the box art. They produced some really good pictures, in multiple styles, and I particularly like this one of the line out of Waterloo. But, how many Pullman cars are there in the train? Is it me, or is it too long?

[Simond]

I don’t think he’s started yet. The rear 8 are in platform 5. Good job it’s corridors.

 

Best

Simon

[GRASinBothell]

Mettoy even managed to produce some with the right number of wheels.

This was my first loco (long since gone to the great engine shed in the sky when its spring broke, I'm afraid...).

 

Gordon

[Donw]

Well since we compress everything width and length of platforms, train lengths, radii. main line lengths, timescales etc. why not compress the trains themselves. With the imagination of a child one of those pulling two or three short coaches is an express.

 

Don  

[brianusa]

Well since we compress everything width and length of platforms, train lengths, radii. main line lengths, timescales etc. why not compress the trains themselves. With the imagination of a child one of those pulling two or three short coaches is an express.

 

Don  

 

Still is for me; tinplate always needs a little imagination.

 

Brian.

[Annie]

Mettoy box art was really good.  I've got a box (and the contents) for one of their larger sets.  The box is knocked around unfortunately, but the couple that sold it to me said it was it was their brother's favourite toy.  He was an invalid and died young and the family kept the trains to remember him by.  They were going into a rest home and they sold everything to me because they had me figured for someone who wasn't going to break it all up and sell it all off piecemeal to turn a profit.  Quite a bit of Brimtoy stuff came with it all too and it was all in lovely condition.

 

 

I've always wanted one of those Mettoy Etons, but somehow never had the money at the right time.  I have one of the Pullmans from that set though, - only without a roof which is a bit of a shame.  I have a few of the smaller green 0-4-0 tender engine clockers though and the smaller sized bogie Pullmans.  They look quite good with Hornby M1 and M2 tender engines.  Better than Hornby's own 4 wheel efforts truth be told.

[Annie]

Sounds as if you’ve yet to acquire the true classic version, as produced by Mettoy.

 

Every layout should have one, if only for target practice.

 

I hope the wheels, and the lack of wheels, don’t upset purists.

Got one of those too, but missing the correct tender.  They don't look so bad, much better than the 'Safetylectrics' which are seriously weird.  I guess it's because I've still got a 9 year old me somewhere inside my brain that I have a liking for all these little trainset toys by Chad Valley, Mettoy, Brimtoy as well as Hornby's 'M' series.  When I was still an HRCA member I found that the other women members tended to like these trains too.  The boys would be trying to outdo each other by showing off the latest large pre-war item they'd just purchased and us girls would be having fun with our 'small trains' as the boys tended to sneeringly call them. 

EDIT:  I should mention by the way that some of Mettoy's goods wagons are actually quite realistic and of near to scale proportions.  Chad Valley did some LMS looking brake vans that are nicely proportioned too.  One of mine even has 3 link couplings which Chad Valley fitted to their earlier wagons and locos for a short while.  Brimtoy purchased some of Bing's old press tools and their earlier tinplate stuff made using these old tools isn't too bad at all.  I have an early Brimtoy signal box that's as good as anything else from the pre-war period and is quite a rare piece.  Later on Brimtoy lost the plot though and much of the stuff from their final years even I won't buy no matter how many pairs of rosy tint Christmas morning nostalgia spectacles I might put on.

Edited March 10, 2018 by Annie

[Nearholmer]

Here’s something a bit more hardcore.

 

I’m biased, but I think this is the best bit of ‘Giant Hornby Dublo’ to come out of the revival of old-fashioned 0 so far.

 

(The moody background is a an old blazer, draped over a box!)

Edited March 10, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Northroader]

Cor, look at the wheels on that!

[Annie]

Lovely aren't they  

 

That's the kind or wheel you can depend on.

[sem34090]

Ha! It just clicked...

 

Nearholmer has a posh Mettoy Bulleid...

 

Well, 21C165 became Mettoy's 34065... I should hope that yours carries the name 'Hurricane' in order to match the high realism standard set by Mettoy, Kevin!

[Nearholmer]

Oh yes, it does, it does.

 

I really wanted a ‘Blackmoor Vale’, having scraped a tiny bit of rust off that at the Bluebell during its restoration in the early-70s, but production of all versions was over by the time my chance came (a long service award). I got in touch with Ace’s ‘Mr Engineering’, without much hope of getting hold of one, but he happened to have one that had died spectacularly under warranty (a major burn-out of the lighting controller board) in his workshop, which he turned into this super-smooth runner, free of all modernity in the form of electronics ...... it turned out to be the Mettoy-alike ‘Hurricane’.

Edited March 11, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

Following a suggestion that I post details of my ten year old son’s ‘long project’ at school.

 

He has chosen to work on an extended family tree, with the objective of covering the history and geography of where his ancestors come from, as well as their personal stories.

 

It should work very well, because we already have the basics on all sides, reaching back to the mid-C19th (much further for my father’s family), and because it will span India and Ireland, as well as southern England. We have both the colonisers and the colonised, so it will give a seriously good ‘end of empire and emergence of new nations’ picture.

 

The challenging part, is how to draw all the information out/together, in a way that works for visitors to a history fair, and I expressly don’t want him drawn into using electronic media.

 

We’ve got a few ideas, and he has until next Wednesday to ‘pitch’ a concept or two to the two teachers who are overseeing it.

 

It has to be complete by 6th June, with the fair on 27th June.

[sem34090]

Ah, so (Other than yourself!) no railway connection, I assume?

[Nearholmer]

My mother’s grandfather trained with the LBSCR, but quickly set up his own account, as a motor mechanic at the dawn motoring and motorcycling. He was an A1 model engineer, who built superb clocks, telescopes, several miniature road locomotives etc, but that the closest. Vast numbers of sailors, labourers, stonemasons, soldiers, a district tax collector, gardeners aplenty, ladies maids, but no railwayists.

 

Ah, but, ‘a man who was big in the post office’, who was also the first secretary of The Model Railway Club in 1910. He had a cracking tinplate layout, which I suppose counts.

Edited March 16, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Simond]

Trouble with family trees is they’re apt to get a bit wide.

 

I suppose if you keep going, they probably start to get thin again at the other end, a bit like Anne Elk’s brontosaurus.

 

So a wall chart? Or possibly some kind of concertina-fold booklet?

 

Personally, I think I’d use a CAD program, as the piece of paper is effectively infinite, or Excel, for the same reasons. But I do appreciate that there may be good reasons for alternative, graphical-rather-than-digital, approaches.

 

What about the wallpaper in Sirius Black’s house?

 

Best

Simon

[Nearholmer]

Er, can we make that a ‘maybe’ on the wallpaper?

 

One possibility is a pyramid, with four faces, one for line line of each of his grandparents, and little cupboard doors that open to show what we can discover about each person. The faces of the pyramid could also act as canvas for history and geography.

 

But, I want him to ‘optioneer’ over the weekend