Portchullin Tatty

Mike, Can I hold my hand up for interest in the modifications that you have made on the brake van please? I am close to finishing a Bradwell BR underframe and have a second in its pack which I had in mind modifying as the LNER predecessor. I know there are underframe / body differences but not put any effort into determining what they are yet. I also know there are rather a lot of variants within the BR standard. You can save me the research! Mark

Duncan, The chances are that all goods yards at the time had cinders ballast that covered the sleepers and may have been surprisingly close to the railhead. This is because the shunting locomotives would have been the version with a tail and four legs and walking across what we now think ballast was uncomfortable for them and the raised height of chairs/rail was an encumbrance* to getting the most out of the horse as it had to step around these rather than lean into the weight. Have you seen the Chris Nevard method of ash ballasting? I think it is the most realistic approach and uses Das modelling clay, a thumb and paint. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=463962129104807 *We call this a trip hazard now; that is not a concept I think they will have used!

NanoCAD is well worth a look at; it is an AutoCAD clone and other than a few commands being titled differently is almost indistinguishable. There is a totally free version - NanoCAD 5 - or the upto date version is free for an initial trial period and then as long as you promise you are not making money out of using it you can carry on using if for evaluation. Cracking model; as ever! Mark

A toy train video starting with a bit of Everlong - whats not to like!! I too enjoyed that Jessie.

I had (until I moved house recently) a Dunster House log cabin and I know a number of others that also have. They do a variety of grades; you want to go for the one with the greatest level of insulation to it and double glazing throughout. They are relatively easy to build if you have a moderate amount of DIY nouse but there are stages that need two people and even then it will take a number of days. I built mine on old railway sleepers that I supported on concrete pads excavated about 300mm into the ground. The first year the interior was fairly moist as the timber needs to dry out and season. So you need to bear this in mind. After this it was always really comfortable with nothing more than a greenhouse heater bar for comfort. I was very pleased with it. A view of the inside can be seen here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2013/01/20/glenmutchkins-part-1-have-summer-house-will-build/

Some photos to wet your appetite; taken at the Tonbridge show.

Looking grand! Something that is catching my eye is the free-standing gables. They almost certainly would have a roof enclosing on them both because the window head otherwise looks as if it might be at the gutter line but really because they would be very slender otherwise and prone to collapse. I am a building surveyor and we had to do some emergency works to a building next to Harrods a while back where the roof was found not to be tied into a gable a bit like this. It would have been exciting if we had not found it before it went!

And maybe a few £bn cheaper.......... Quite a few £bn!

Fabulous stuff!

Hi Jol, In truth, I merely thought it was M&L as it is a nearly finished kit in a blank box with a set of bogie sides. I would be interested in seeing the article you refer to if you recall where it was. Do like your completed diner; they are beasts. Looking forward to seeing Citadels version.............

I had guessed what the beast was intended to be by its overall dimension! Something like this.................... An M&L etched kit built thus far by my father and now passed to me to finish at some point. The challenge is the roof which has been built up with plasticard. Solvent has clearly been trapped in this and is "bubbling up." I need to find a solution to this at some point (the London Road roof for the picnic saloon is a different profile!). As a beware, you will be as much interested in WCJS coaches as LNWR. Many of the former are 6 inches wider although I would need to check if this is over the body only or also the underframe and hence potentially the footsteps.

Regarding the beast, be mindful that the problem with platforms will be the footboards not the actual body itself. So you might want to put the footboards onto it? Whilst you are doing that you might was well line it too?

Stephen, An amendment of your technique for forming tumblehomes to consider is to secure the lower edge of the carriage side to the rolling pin with masking tape so that as you roll it forward it pulls the lower edge up. Otherwise, it is challenging to get the curve of the tumblehome to go all the way down to the bottom of the side. Mark

Stephen, If these have footboards, (which I presume they will), then the swing will be a lot less as they get constricted. Having said this, buffer lock can still be a problem. An alternative approach for six wheelers is to use sliding axles. Details here: https://highlandmiscellany.com/2018/02/20/sliding-axles/ and in action here https://highlandmiscellany.com/2018/03/01/sliding-axles-a-reprise/ Mark

Once the basic structure of the gantry is in place, the real task of making the signals signally commences. First up were the smoke deflectors and the brackets for the balance weights. Also fitted are the main portions of the fan route indicator, but that will be explained further once I get it going! For the arm bearing point and lamps I am using some 3D prints produced by Steve Hewitt and available from Shapeways. They can be found here https://www.shapeways.com/product/JJRSB … arketplace. They are fairly expensive but they are neat and save a lot of manufacture. There is, however, a but – they are very delicate and I am very fearful of thier long term durability. I am highly likely to draw some of my own up and get them cast in lost wax. It will make them even more expensive but I have about a 50% casualty rate at the moment, so maybe in the long term it will be cheaper! The arms are Masokits, these are definitely the best available arms for LMS/LNER/BR semaphores. This is especially true of the minature shunt arms as the MSE ones are simply too delicate to bother with (imagine how do I know that………….!). So this is where we are now at with the arms mounted temporarly on the bearings. There are five movements in the down direction (three of which operate via the route indicator) and then a pair in the up direction – hence the back to front arms. The plates at the top of the dolls are mounting points for ladders. It transpires they are wrong and have already gone! So the intensity level has dialled up a notch with these portions (especially breaking the bearing/lamp fittings) but it really gets interesting when you try and make these things work. I don’t know myself yet (although I know for the couple of arms I have finished, so I have an inkling), but i think it might be fun to have a little sweepstake on how many moving parts there will be in the finished gantry. Five arms, three fan route indicators and each is operated by way of angle cranks in order to get the movement down to the servos under the baseplates. Each arm, crank and intermediate wire counts as a moving part, as do the servos………………..guesses please?