Hello From America!

[Gryphon]

Hello!

 

I normally do n-scale modeling of American trains (fancy way of saying I have a loop of track on plywood and plans way too big for my space and time), but I've always been interested in British trains. After stumbling across a N-scale model of a BR Standard 5 with DCC and sound for sale, along with the crimson and cream coaches, I found I just had to order it. After looking for simple layout designs to put the train on, I found this forum had a number of threads on the "Minories" layout which seems to fit what I'm looking for; a simple and fairly small/portable layout designed to replicate high intensity urban passenger terminal. I was hoping you could help me with a few questions I have.

 

1. Is there anything special I need to do to make the UK decoder place nicely with my DCC controller (Digitrax Zephyr). I've read that DCC is a universal standard so the locomotive will work, but I don't know if there is anything I should look out for, particularly in terms of programming values.

2. Rapido couplers. I can't remember the last time for American prototype equipment it came from the manufacturer with rapido couplers, but it clearly is a standard in the UK. What options are available for uncoupling that doesn't require me to pick up the equipment? What options are available for replacing the rapido couples with ones that are smaller and more realistic? Does anyone have experience mounting the American Micro-Trains style couplers on UK models?

3. The Minories layout plan. I was hoping I could learn a bit more about how it operates in practice. For example, in the plans I've seen and the playlist on youtube (Brenford Exchange, I think) don't seem to have any off-stage turntables. Are people turning the locomotives by hand? In n-scale, do people encounter a lot of pickup problems moving small steam engines over all the back-to-back switches in the plan?

4. Any places to learn more about British passenger train operation? I thought I had a basic understanding of railroad stuff, but then I started seeing stuff with passenger trains like Brake 2nd Composite, Trailer 3rd Open, etc, and it started to sound like a foreign language haha!

 

Many thanks!

[Kaput]

Can't answer all your questions but....

 

The decoder will be fine, like you said its a standard. Main difference will be the function layout is different. UK standard is for F1 to be sound on/off and especially on Bachmann/Farish sound models, F2 is the active brake. While in US models it seems more common for something like F8 to be sound on/off and F1 and 2 are bells/whistles/etc.

 

Easiest replacement of the couplers would be Dapol Easi-shunts which are magnetic knuckle couplers like the micro-trains style but a bit chunkier although I think they are compatible(ish). Any other knuckle coupler option would require removal of the NEM pocket and a spot of surgery to mount.

[The Johnster]

Minories is intended to be operated by diesel mulitple units (imagine single cabbed Budd RDCs with a trailer coach in between) and largish tank engines as an urban suburban terminus.  At rush hours, it would be very busy, and incoming loco-hauled trains are hauled out by fresh locos positioned ready on the loco siding, removal of the train releasing the loco that brought it in.  Tender locos like your BR standard 5MT (power class five, for mixed traffic) would normally be used on longer distance services than Cyril Freezer, who designed Minories, was thinking of.

 

Minories is completely passenger-orientated, with no freight element, though parcels traffic might be handled during off-peak periods or overnight, especially if the station was near a postal sorting office or newspaper premises.  If you have room for a fiddle yard at both ends (you call them staging roads), it might be worth basing the station on something like Birmingham Moor Street, a suburban terminus of much the same sort, but with a main line running past it into a tunnel, the other end of which is Snow Hill, the GWR's main Birmingham station.   Moor Street is opposite to Minories in that it is elevated above street level, but has a goods depot at street level accessed by a wagon lift.  It is also unusual in having a sector plate loco release, a feature shared with the suburban bay platforms at Snow Hill.  Loco depot is further out of town, and would be 'off stage' on a model. 

 

As to British operation, the principle difference in the steam era, and for the first several decades of the diesel era, was that we ran freight trains of unbraked wagons which were partially controlled by a guard (conductor) in a brake van (caboose) with a screw-down handbrake to ensure that the chain couplings were kept taut.  Your Janney buffer/drawhook/couplings and air brakes are a splendid idea but, for several reasons, were adopted slowly and late here.  Some of our railways used the Westinghouse air brake, but the more common automatic brake was the vacuum, in which the brakes were held off the wheels by vacuum on the upper side of a vertially mounted cylinder while atmospheric pressure was admitted to the lower side.  This gave the advantage of the brake being 'fail safe', as any failure or leakage would admit air to the vacuum side of the system, and the brakes would be applied automatically by the weight of the piston.  If for example a coupling broke on a vacuum fitted train, brakes would automatically be applied on both portions of the divided train, which will then come to a stand harmlessly even on a gradient.  The movie trope of the baddie uncoupling the car with the gold inside, for it to roll back down the hill to the waiting gang, would not happen here.

 

All passenger and parcels/mail trains are 'fully fitted', with the vacuum brake working throughout the train.  Some freight trains are also 'fully fitted', mostly express goods traffic.  Some freight trains were 'part fitted', with a designated minimum number of vacuum braked wagons coupled to the locomotive with the brakes working, and a tail portion 'unfitted' behind that, held in check by the guard's brake in the brake van. Then there were 'unfitted' trains, mostly local mineral traffic, with no vacuum braked wagons at all, limited to 25 mph top speed.  Controlling part-fitted and unfitted trains over roads with undulating gradients took a degree of skill from drivers and guards far in excess of that required to drive a fast passenger train; you might be trying to control a thousand tons at sixty mph, with only half a dozen wagon braked from the locomotive and the rest 'loose' 

 

Our locos had smaller loads to pull over shorter distances by and large than yours, and pacifics or 2-8-0s are considered big engines here,  Tenders are accordingly smaller, as water is picked up from water troughs, which you call pans, only one of our main line companies not adopting this method, with the result that it's locomotives had our only bogie tenders.  We were slow to adopt bogies for freight work, and in fact still have some 4-wheeled wagons in service, which means that our freight trains are slower than yours; most, in the steam age, could only manage averages over distance of around 25mph.  Freight locomotive driving wheels are typically of around 56" diameter, older mineral locos more like 49 or 50.  Some of our main line locos could probably fit in a Big Boy's cab; the loading gauge is tiny compared to yours.

 

Guard's brake vans are (with one exception) four or six wheeled rigid frame vehicles and much simpler than your cabooses (I always want to say 'cabeese' for the plural of caboose), which have comfortable bunks and cooking facilities for men on duty for days at a time.  Ours have benches and a small coal stove on which you can boil a can for tea; we're Brits, our railway, like our country, runs on tea.  All running lines are controlled by block signalling, 'absolute' (one train in a section at a time) for passenger-carrying and main freight lines. and 'permissive', speed limited to 15mph for local short-distance freight-only lines, in which case trains are allowed one after another into the sections.  I believe some of your line in remote areas are still worked to timetable without signals or blocks at all.

 

Saloon coaches were rare before the 1930s and compartments were common throughout the steam age.  Bogie coaches were not universal until the 1950s, but the open veranda type once common in the US were rare here.  Prior to the inroduction of bogie vestibuled gangwayed stock in the 1890s, passengers could not move between coaches and refreshement & 'comfort' stops made our journeys long and tedious.  Afterwards, refreshements, meals, and toilets were available on the move.  The compartments were retained with side corridors.  Even in the 50s, suburban stock with compartments accessed only by side doors were still being built.

[turbos]

Hi ‘Gryphon’,

Welcome to RMWeb, probably the greatest online U.K. (and beyond) model railway resource the world has ever known. Other U.K. model railways sites are also available.

First up, don’t ask too many questions that Google etc. can answer, the RMWeb search function is rubbish so use Google with RMWeb as the first word to get the answer you want if it exists on RMWeb.

The U.K. model railway scene is roughly as big as the USA model railway scene but is condensed into a much smaller geographical area. Although geographically smaller the U.K. is as regionally diverse as North America but  has a longer history of locomotive hauled trains. This history is divided into ‘era’s’ from the birth of railways to the contemporary scene.

N Gauge is the second most popular model rail scale in the U.K. 00 Gauge (4mm scale trains on 3,5mm HO track) is the dominant scale and is accounts for over 50% of the U.K. market with N Gauge around 30%.

A great resource for information on U.K. railways from a modelling perspective is Hattons website, they’re a very big model railway retailer and manufacturer, their website includes a lot of prototype information. Rails of Sheffield and Kernow Model Rail Centre are also very good retailers website for information.

In the U.K., N Gauge has three main manufacturers, Graham Farish (owned by Bachmann), Dapol and Peco.

Produce a track plan, a geographical location and an era and the RMWeb community will give you lots of direction and information on how it would operate and suitable trains.

 

Brian.

[BR60103]

Gryphon:  I'll try to answer your queries as another North American.

I have a Minories terminal on my layout. It works best with small suburban (commuter) trains with small locomotives.  The train is pulled into the station and a different locomotive couples to the back end and takes it off the suburbs again. The loco that brought it in either goes to the spare track to wait or goes to the back of the next train in.  The train can go to either a fiddle yard or out onto the layout until it comes back in.

Coaches have letters describing them. 

F First

S Second

T Third or Tourist. (Second was discontinued at one point; years later third was renamed second.)

B Brake. A combination of a baggage compartment and a room with a brake wheel in it. See the beginning of the movie A Hard Day's Night.

C  Composite of F,S, and T (2 or 3 of them)

K Corridor -- compartments with a walkway down one side. Like American sleeping cars. See the Harry Potter movies.

O Open.  No divisions between seating sections and probably an aisle down the middle.

R is Restaurant which may have a Kitchen or Buffet. May also be Second or Unclassified.

SL Sleeper

P Pullman. Not a sleeper, but a notch above first.

DBSO Driving Brake Second Open a combine with a driving compartment at one end.

Trailer refers to a car with no motor/engine in it. In multiple units, it may be driving or non-driving.

 

This came out of a 40 year old book.

For some reason, British passenger cars didn't seem to have hand applied brakes, except in the Brake cars.  So trains had a brake car at the outer end in case a section had to be left somewhere or decided to go off on its own. A train that divided (multiple destinations) would have a brake for each section.

 

Edited September 16, 2023 by BR60103

[NBL]

Hi Gryphon

 

Minories is a great concept and I've seen a lot of layouts that are variations on the theme, and I have one bubbling away in the back of my head.  

 

There is a thread under the layouts and track design section of this site that is devoted to Minories.

 

The era your 5MT and coaches represent is the 50/60's transition era which saw the introduction of BR standard steam locos and the first fleets of diesels and electrics, along with pre-br designs.  Diesel and electric Multiple Units also started to appear in this era, all would be in geen livery.

 

Liveries would be mostly black for steam locos with all green for diesels.  There are several variations of the black and green liveries though.

 

Coaching stock would be crimson and cream or maroon for mainline stock, crimson or maroon for suburban and parcels stock.  The ex GWR and SR sections of BR ran regrouping colours on mainline stock, the SR also applying it to suburban stock.  

 

Freight stock would almost exclusively be grey, with some bauxite, and almost all was 4-wheeled (and considerably smaller than US boxcars).  The exception would be bogie steel carrying wagons.

 

As has been mentioned Dapol produce MT style knuckle couplers which are a clip for into stock with NEM sockets, however for availability, taking the NEM sockets off and replacing with MT coupling may be more cost and time effective form you.

 

Graham Farish, Dapol and Peco are the main manufacturers, with Sonic (available only from Rails of Sheffield) and EFE Rail producing some stock.

 

Enjoy research UK stock and operations, I found it fascinating researching US and German railways.

 

Try not to get too bogged down on minute details that you'll rarely, if ever, see in N Scale

[Gryphon]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

 

@The Johnster Thanks for the information about brakes and freight operations; I didn't realize it took UK railways so long to adopt continuous braking!

[The Johnster]

One of the reasons was the customers, especially the coal mines.  For many years, starting from about the end of WW1, they strenuously resisted any attempt by the railway companies to persuade them to adopt wagons longer than the 9'wheelbase 16' body lenght 10ton loader that George Stephenson would have recognised instantly, because they would have had to renew their tippler loaders to cope with them, and their shunters objected to vacuum brake hoses which got in their way.  These wagons were still running in the 1990s, albeit in vacuum braked form by then; the last unbraked ones had lasted well into the previous decade.  Some progress was made with longer wheelbase wagons, and in the very late 60s the 'Merry-go-Round' type was introduced for colliery-power station traffic, long wheelbase 55mph air-braked aluminium hoppers that could be loaded and unloaded while moving at a continuous very slow speed, with the power stations having balloon loops around their discharge bins to facilitate this.  Resistance against higher-capacity or continuously-braked wagons lasted even after the coal industry was nationalised in 1947.

 

This may seem strange to an American, but coal mining here was a somewhat speculative venture and few of it's backers wanted to tie up any more capital than they already had in mines that could easily and at short notice fail to continue to be viable due to the faulted geological conditions, thinner seams, methane gas, and groundwater problems of British coal mining, which is deep underground as opposed to the level and thick coal seams of your Applachian coalfields which are up off the valley floors inside the mountains.  Pitheads of the common European type, for raising coal in vertical shafts of up to (or rather down to) several thousand feet depth from underground galleries are rare in your coalfields, and the coal usually comes straight out of the mountain on a level or gently sloped conveyor into the tippler building for processing.  They are, from a venture capital pov, a surer thing, and capital for new plant was easily raised; not so here, where owning coal mines made as many paupers as it did millionaires.

 

We adopted continuous braking in 1889 for passenger trains, after a bad runaway accident in Armagh, Ireland, made it a legal requirement, but were much slower to adopt it for freight or mineral traffic.  It was the mid-50s before vacuum braked freight vehicles outnumbered unbraked ones.  Some railway companies resisted the 1889 law, claiming that brakes that actually stopped the trains reasonably effectively would lead to drivers becoming negligent and an increase in accidents; they just didn't want to spend the money, of course.

 

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by The Johnster

[Gryphon]

13 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Some railway companies resisted the 1889 law, claiming that brakes that actually stopped the trains reasonably effectively would lead to drivers becoming negligent and an increase in accidents;

Haha that sounds just like modern companies!

[The Johnster]

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.  

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

On 15/09/2023 at 19:53, Gryphon said:

Any places to learn more about British passenger train operation? I thought I had a basic understanding of railroad stuff, but then I started seeing stuff with passenger trains like Brake 2nd Composite, Trailer 3rd Open, etc, and it started to sound like a foreign language haha!

As a start, here's a run down on carriage stock descriptions of the LNER, and the subsequent closely related British Railways scheme, contemporary with the class 5 loco you have purchased. One immediate difference between these schemes, the LNER in common with the other companies generally operated 1st and 3rd class, the advent of BR saw these restyled 1st and 2nd class.

https://d240vprofozpi.cloudfront.net/stock/carriages/LNERS_Carriage_Codes.pdf

 

As for the Minories concept, tender locos - including that very model you have - regularly worked the longer suburban service turns, such as the 50 miles from London Kings Cross to Cambridge. (They were turned either in the main off scene loco yard or in 'Kings Cross loco' in the station throat.) Any passenger loco could work these services, including pacifics which were the largest express steam type in general service, while the B1 and B17 4-6-0s were the usual traction.

[RobinofLoxley]

There's a lot of discussion, and then some more, and a bit more after that, on Minories. It was intended as a very compact illustration of a very compact urban terminal, and as such is rarely modelled as it was designed. Usually bits are added on - there was some provision for this in later versions of the original plan but the whole things invites that; otherwise you would just have the same kind of train arriving and departing throughout the day with only frequency variations, and secondary movements such as taking stock out for cleaning etc. But the core principle is widely used any time there is a 3-road terminus its likely to use the Minories structure because its so efficient for that, in its time.

 

So after deciding which extra bits to put in, the discussion often turns to the hidden end - what to do with trains leaving the modelled scene.

 

Personally I have early memories of my father catching commuter trains to london, which was the start of an interest in railways, seeing those steam hauled suburban services. I recall tank engines, and I must have been 6 or 7 when I first saw them, and I can remember engines facing the wrong way, i.e. running tender first sometimes, and at others pushing, but I think only Kings Cross bound trains were ever pushed. But this scenario at modelling level is achieved just by having a run-around.

 

Otherwise, fiddle yards tacked onto Minories are going to be more extensive than the modelled area, which is just a consequence of its compactness. You can have traversers, sector plates, cassette systems, where the train leaving the scene is going to be replaced by another similar, including replacing the loco. Its possible to have a turntable either at the far end of the fiddle yard from the station, or on a spur from the station so light engines can be turned in order to take trains with trapped locos back out. This is a different circulation to the push-pull type I can recall from Kings Cross.

 

It would also be possible to run return loops, this requires at least 3x as much space as the original terminal.

 

This is just a poor attempt to summarise material relevant to the OP from about 110 pages of thread.

[F-UnitMad]

On 16/09/2023 at 00:03, The Johnster said:

might be worth basing the station on something like Birmingham Moor Street, a suburban terminus of much the same sort, but with a main line running past it into a tunnel, the other end of which is Snow Hill, the GWR's main Birmingham station.   Moor Street is opposite to Minories in that it is elevated above street level, but has a goods depot at street level accessed by a wagon lift.  It is also unusual in having a sector plate loco release, a feature shared with the suburban bay platforms at Snow Hill.

Hi Gryphon, and welcome to RMweb from a Brit who primarily models American trains - there are quite a few of us here so disposed!!

Just quoted the part above from The Johnster to point out that, comprehensive as that information is, it should also be in the past tense; Moor Street's goods facilities are long, long gone, as are the sector release plates, and at Snow Hill the bay platforms as well.

[MattR]

Hello from another American who loves British railway modeling! As someone who knew absolutely nothing about the subject before December 2020, it's amazing how much you can learn in a short time, especially hanging around on this website.

 

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by MattR

[Nearholmer]

If you delve back far enough into US railroad history, you will be able to find termini very much like Minories, an intensive suburban service operated by tank engines on a “turnover” basis.

 

I’m no expert on US railroads, but one that I think followed this pattern (even if it was 3ft gauge) was the East Boston terminus of the Boston, Revere Beach and Lynn RR in its original form (I think it even dived into a tunnel shortly after the platforms), so you might want to study that. It quickly grew bigger than three platforms, but it was quite modest at the outset.

 

Edit: yes, here are the tunnels. At first glimpse this might be, say, somewhere in Edinburgh or the North of England!

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by Nearholmer

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, F-UnitMad said:

ust quoted the part above from The Johnster to point out that, comprehensive as that information is, it should also be in the past tense; Moor Street's goods facilities are long, long gone, as are the sector release plates, and at Snow Hill the bay platforms as well.

 

Yes, that's right, all of it pertaining to what I refer to as the 'traditional railway', roughly the steam age and the first two or three decades of the diesel age, is in the past, where they do things differently.

 

In my defence, I was also left unsupervised at the time...

[ITG]

1 minute ago, The Johnster said:

In my defence, I was also left unsupervised at the time...

Funny that, my wife bought me a T-shirt with exactly that slogan across it. Wonder what she was trying to tell me?

Ian

[The Johnster]

A conversation with my ex-wife many years ago; 'the trouble with you is you've got more money than sense'!  'But I've only got 32p'.  'EXACTLY'!!!

 

She may have had a point, to be fair...

[Nearholmer]

Back to East Boston, a US Minories for a moment: this is an interesting read, with maps/plans showing how the station grew http://goodoldboston.blogspot.com/2011/07/lost-train-stations-boston-revere-and.html?m=1

[Gryphon]

The BR Standard 5 and the coaches arrived yesterday and I am pretty blown away by the quality of the engine, particularly its slow speed crawl. Even creeping over a complex web of points with unpowered frogs it can go through without a hitch.

 

I'm not sure what to think about the rapido couplers though. The coaches have some pretty clever engineering to make them close couple and still take pretty sharp (11" radius) curves no sweat, but breaking out the "hand of god" when I want to do any switching gets old fast.

 

Apologies for what are likely going to be very stupid questions:

1) I was looking at the Dapol and Graham Farish coaches I got and I'm a bit mystified on how I would replace the rapido couplers with the easi shunt - let alone some american Micro-Train couplers - without doing a fair bit of surgery to the coaches. The coupler is 'sandwiched' between two plastic pieces. Is the rapido one supposed to pop out and the easi-shunt slide in? Looking at the design of the easi-shunt coupler itselt, it seems like the rapido one pops out and the easi-shunt gets pushed in. I did a bit of poking and pushing but it did not seem like the rapido coupler wanted to pop out. (And I'm loathe to break it the day after it arrived!)

2) I also got a Peco box wagon kit (I enjoy building model kits) and it looks like the way the coupler is mounted would require notable surgery to the model to cut off the molded box to fit the NEM box. Do I understand it right?

3) On the subject of the box wagon kit, decals. Would a sheet like this be appropriate for the box van? I'm not sure if it is the search terms I'm using, but I'm having a weirdly hard time identifying the decal sheets I would need.

https://www.railtec-models.com/showitem.php?id=1047

 

Thanks for all the comments and insights!

[Nick Holliday]

On 18/09/2023 at 10:14, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

As a start, here's a run down on carriage stock descriptions of the LNER, and the subsequent closely related British Railways scheme, contemporary with the class 5 loco you have purchased. One immediate difference between these schemes, the LNER in common with the other companies generally operated 1st and 3rd class, the advent of BR saw these restyled 1st and 2nd class.

https://d240vprofozpi.cloudfront.net/stock/carriages/LNERS_Carriage_Codes.pdf

Just to be pedantic, BR didn’t abolish third class until 1956. Up until then second class only appeared theoretically, I believe, on the Southern Region in connection with continental services. As only first class was identified externally this shouldn’t affect models.

[doctor quinn]

On 27/09/2023 at 02:34, Gryphon said:

 

2) I also got a Peco box wagon kit (I enjoy building model kits) and it looks like the way the coupler is mounted would require notable surgery to the model to cut off the molded box to fit the NEM box. Do I understand it right?

3) On the subject of the box wagon kit, decals. Would a sheet like this be appropriate for the box van? I'm not sure if it is the search terms I'm using, but I'm having a weirdly hard time identifying the decal sheets I would need.

https://www.railtec-models.com/showitem.php?id=1047

 

Thanks for all the comments and insights!

Could you post a picture of the wagon body? That decal sheet would cover pre-BR vans (LMS, GWR, LNER & Southern) that were still in service with BR. If you're looking for information on goods wagons, Paul Bartlett's photo site is the go to place. https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/paulbartlettsrailwaywagons

[The Johnster]

Much useful information about wagon numbers and liveries can be had from the (UK) N gauge society, who publish full colour drawings, and Paul Bartlett's (HMRSPaul on this site) website.  He is the wagons guy for the National Railway Museum and a very informative and approachable bloke! 

 

For your early BR period, the basics are that vacuum fitted wagons (and your van is probably vacuum fitted by the 60s) are painted bauxite and have white lettering, wagon number and load weight left hand bottom corner, tare weight and wheelbase rh bottom corner.  Unfitted wagons are in grey livery and some painted in very early BR days will have white numbers and lettering, but complaints from yard staff over legibility at night (many British yards were poorly lit and there was still a wartime 'blackout' mindset) led to them being given black panels on which the lettering/numbering was painted in white.  Stick to bauxite for vans and opens and grey for minerals as a basic for now, until your research is more developed.

 

You will see photos on Paul's site of wagons with the numbers/lettering in block outline panels, but this is a largely post-steam adaptation and not relevant to your Standard 5MT period.  The black panel bottom rh corner is from this period as well, has 'next overhaul due' and such information.  The sheet you show is suitable for wagon built to pre-nationalisation 'big four' designs, the company being indicated by the prefix letter to the running number; some of these were still being built well into the mid-50s to complete orders made before nationalisation but these still carried the M/E/W/S prefixes. 

 

Further confusion may arise with the Southern Railway's 'uneven planking' vans (the uneven planking was a clever device to get more wood out of a tree trunk), as many of these were built by the Southern for the other railways during the war on the instruction of the wartime Ministry of Supply.  Timber/lumber was a strategically important material, and the Southern had a large stockpile of these planks pre-cut and of little use for anything else, so any new vans built at that time for the other three railways were supplied by the Southern's Ashford workshops, and these lasted into the 70s, so it was possibly to see them with all four of the big four prefixes; the majority of the cuckoos were LMS, though.  Built unfitted, they were upgraded by BR with vacuum brakes and screw couplings througout the 50s and early 60s.

[Gryphon]

On 30/09/2023 at 04:18, doctor quinn said:

Could you post a picture of the wagon body? That decal sheet would cover pre-BR vans (LMS, GWR, LNER & Southern) that were still in service with BR. If you're looking for information on goods wagons, Paul Bartlett's photo site is the go to place. https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/paulbartlettsrailwaywagons

Took the standard PECO box van, painted it a dark red/brown and used some drybrushing to bring out the highlights on the body and frame. Painted it red/brown to imply it was air brake fitted and wouldn't look too out of place in a passenger train as a parcels/mail van. 

 

[The Johnster]

You should (but don't rely on old Peco N stuff with generic chassis to be correct) be able to tell if a model is intended to represent a vacuum brake fitted vehicle (air brakes were rare at your 5MT with crimson/cream stock period, and while some lines used it the standard was vacuum) by the presence of a vacuum cylinder (biggish lump, 'bout 18" diameter, foot high) under the floor.  This van is, from the broadside on view, either a GW or BR standard type, and the difference is that the GW design had wooden ends with t hood ventilators each side of the end, and the BR version had corrugated steel ends with a single central hood vent.  Very few of the BR vans were produced without vacuum brakes; you may as well forget about them.  I never saw one, only photos.

 

I will now introduce you to an ancient British custom called 'XP'.  BR, and some of the previous railways, branded vacuum-fitted general merchandise, livestock, and perishables vans and open wagons with XP (meaning 'express') in the lower right hand of the sides,  above the wheelbase and tare weight information, indicating that it was rated to run in passenger trains.  These vans, if vacuum braked, were rated XP, a bit anomalous as they were 10' wheelbase and speed restricted to 45mph (60 before 1967), but yes, you can attach it to passenger trains or dmus, but not air-braked stock, only vacuum.  Mostly at the rear except during summer, as they did not have steam heating pipes and could therefore not be marshalled between the loco and any passenger-carrying stock.  Mineral wagons or tanks, even vacuum fitted, were not allowed to be attached to passenger trains (unless there were specific local instructions).

 

As you are probably becoming aware, trains in the UK are subject to many strict, absolute, universal rules concerning how they are run, as unchangeable and inexorably inevitable as the courses of the stars in the firmament, but there are always exceptions to these rules if you look hard enough...  For general modelling purposes, stick with any you are aware of, though!  Everything is like 'this' except for when it isn't, which it isn't except for when it is, and you have to do it like that, except for when you have to do it like this, in which case don't do this like that until the rules change and you have to do that like this, or was it that, not sure myself now; everybody following at the back?