roythebus1

Just a thought, would it be possible to use the EMGS bullhead crossing jig with FB rail inserted upside down? It depends on whether the head of FB rail is the same as BH. It would also aid the soldering of thin shim as slide plates or whatever they're called.

A lot of heritage railways are using flat bottom CWR and concrete sleepers away from station areas. It's a lot cheaper on maintenance of track and rolling stock. But it loses the diddly dum diddly dum of wheels on rail joints.

Fascinating, I have a friend in Belgium who was a driver on the NS.

There's a Facebook group NMBS/SNCB that could provide answers to questions about mixing dd and sd stock. The "old" DB was mixing dd and sd stock just after the fall of the Berlin wall. They had some DR dd stock as well as new electric locos on lease for a few years. They were used on the Rhine-Ruhr Sbahn services.

That's more or less what I've done, except I used some 1/8" square plastic I had in stock.

Quite possibly.

How do you fit the underframes to the body? Do you make them narrower to sit between the MTK solebars? I'm still puzzling about that on my Cravens parcels car!

But he can't as there's no "wrong line" starters on either platform. there's also spring points shown on the right side of the diagram on the main line just beyond the starter! there also seems to be very little room to shunt in and out of the siding due to the spring points!

It was my visit to the Köln Messe in the early 1980s that started my interest with the DB and meeting a DB driver on the class 101 that was on display outside. We are still friends to this day, he's long since retired and has a large G scale American railway round the garden of his house. I had a few cab rides with him over the years, a nice one was Köln-Koblenz all stations along one side and back along the other side of the Rhine, another was to Hannover and back. He of course enjoyed similar cab visits here including the Waterloo & City line and a trip down the main to Alton. I've still got all my German rolling stock, sadly not used for about 20 years.

I've had remote uncoupling for years, called Kadee. Far cheaper than all these electronic gimmics. what surprise me is that everyone spends a fortune to have the latest super-duper detailed model then runs it unprototypical Peco track and uses great big tension lock couplings.

I done the Dortmund show many years ago when the fledgling Copenhagen fields appeared there. An excellent show in those days too. But lots of "proper" traction, loco-hauled S bahn etc. all changed now.

I wish someone could supply a decent jig to hold the wing rails in correct alignment with the crossing V! But, with the advent of the British Finescale stuff rom Wayne, why bother hand-building?

It looks more like K's, but the pole pieces and magnet belong more to the Triang X04, so I'd go for Zenith.

At the risk of going slightly off-course again, I hear of similar rumblings with the London Buses franchises. they are all bar one let to the multi-nationals usually run by overseas governments while the UK government isn't allowed to do the same. From what I hear the operators are up in arms over the electric buses fiasco, the road layouts imposed on their buses by the addition of cycle lanes everywhere, all designed by people who have obviously never driven a bus, let alone ridden on one. As for the contracts, they are being re-written mid-term and the operators have simply had enough Several of them are reported to have walked out of meetings with TfL officials over the impossible conditions that have imposed. That is why we read of some services being "backed" by operators as it is impossible to run them for the costs originally agreed. TfL seem determined to keep fining operators for problems that are basically of TfL's own doing. Some of the top people from the operators have told TfL in no uncertain terms what they can do with their contracts using almost barrack-room language. To agree with what The Stationmaster says in one of his replies above, I remember interest rates on my mortgage being around the 17% mark when I was a train driver. Luckily in 198 Thatcher, for all her faults (and I still hate the woman to this day) for some reason authorised the train drivers to have a record-breaking pay rise. That enabled me to get a decent house in Streatham. then 2 years later she engineered the flexible rostering strike which saw all 28,000 drivers threatened with the sack for trying to protect our terms and conditions. like the ASLEF strikes thee days, it was more about T&Cs rather than the money. But she got her way. Railways were privatised and the race to the top for drivers' wages started. Waterloo drivers found that with the advent of Eurotunnel they could make the short walk across the concourse and almost double their money driving to Paris once a day instead of Waterloo to the City of London and back 16 times in a day. I suppose it's a pity the other rail workers pay hasn't gone up at the same rate as drivers' pay.

As a volunteer guard on the IWSR in the 1980s, we had a group of the scouts on the train, all dressed in grey uniform jackets. Going along I looked out as per my duty and saw what appeared to be someone in a grey jacket and cap swinging round between the first coach and the loco, a Terrier. I pulled the handle to stop the train, then walked forward to meet the driver. Told him what I'd seen and he laughed. What I'd seen was his fireman swinging round the footplate to give the Westinghouse pump some impact maintenance to get it working,.