John Tomlinson

If you do want to take the body off, these are like other modern Hornby coaches. Turn the coach over and place on a soft surface. In each corner of the underframe you'll see a transparent piece of plastic, which needs to be pushed outwards towards the coach side, and this will release the chassis in that area. Repeat on each corner. IIRC there's some body lugs in the centre of the coach side so slide a cocktail stick between chassis and coach side to release these. The securing lugs on the bogies can now be seen clearly above the holder moulding on the inside of the chassis, squeeze these together and the bogies relase. John.

I raised the question here on the H2 thread a while ago, but got no takers! If anyone has come up with some wheeze on the cab doors which I think are the same on both, I'd be grateful. "Yesterday I finally got around to detailing up my "Beachy Head" in BR lined black. What a lovely thing it is! I wonder, has anyone done anything with the cab doors that allows them to be fitted closed, but with the loco still able to go round 30'' curves? I can see it might be possible to design some hinge arrangement akin to that on movable fall plates, but would be interested to know if anyone has actually done this? I don't normally get too excited about this topic, but on the H2's and H1's the arrangement is unusual in that they open and close outside the cab, and so are rather noticeable if left off - not to mention the pair of holes on the front of the tender! There also seem to be pictures of these locos running with the doors open, so maybe that's the best option. Many thanks in advance, John."

Yes, we modellers are a stroppy lot when you think about it! Demand lots of fine detail, but moan when in a journey of thousands of miles across the oceans little bits drop off and are loose in the box. The lights issue is a classic, up to the late 90's when the high intensity headlights appeared in Britain, they were barely discernible. And anyone who'd ever tried to read in a Mk1 coach at night, even with the extra individual lights on, would know it was near impossible and a sure path to eye strain. I do plastic military modelling sometimes, and on modern jet aeroplanes there has become a fashion for highlighting panel lines, so they look as if they've been ploughed. This is totally unrealistic, and I was reliably informed by active RAF engineers that any aircraft with such gaping hollows in its surfaces would never get off the ground. Yet folk do this on their models, and win competitions in the process! Funny old world. John.

I take your point, but on the real thing the actual swivelling of the bogies would be indiscernible as real railway curves are far less sharp than we use on our models. The other thing, and I confess some ignorance here, I'm sure that on some German tenders the apparent bogies weren't bogies at all as we understand them, simply fixed frames. IIRC this was true on the Br52 Kriegsloks for one. I'm happy to be contradicted on this as I don't speak German and have struggled to understand the literature, so may be wrong. John.

Those "no photography" and other signs put me off too! ROF Euxton was plastered with them. A school friend was once arrested for being lineside at Euxton Junction by the WCML, this would be in 1975. The issue wasn't that he was on railway property, but that he was sufficiently close to the ROF to have been spotted by security using a camera doing railway photography. The coppers took him to Chorley police station and rang his Mum, who was allowed to come and pick him up and take him home, with strict instructions never, ever to go there again. I do recall some rolling stock and one or two diesel shunters at Heapey back in 1974, when I first came across the site on a walk - I grew up in Whittle and know just where you were. One of the shunters at least made it to the scrapyard in Chorley by the railway line near Harpers Lane, I went to ask them if they'd sell me the builders plate but the owner said the loco had been resold to Italy - I don't know if that actually happened or not. Happy days indeed! John.

I was curious to see your mention of the now closed Chorley to Cherry Tree line, not far at all from where I grew up. The ROF outstation at Heapey could, had the line remained open, easily become a strategic reserve for locos, with the substantial storage facilites for munitions that were excavated into the hillsides there being re-purposed. And I've still to establish the truth (or not) in the rumour that a rail tunnel existed between that site and the main facility at Euxton, now Buckshaw village. The triple units based on 86 bodyshells are splendid, and quite convincing when one thinks of the multi-unit locos in use in parts of the former USSR, and I'm sure other places as well. John.

I'd agree completely with this. The crud has to come from somewhere, and little of it can come from the tyres otherwise they'd vanish quickly to nothing. What I do know from extensive purchases of British "OO" pre-owned, is that a good number of modellers have lamentable housekeeping. Ebay descriptions of "erratic running" are often explained simply by huge quantities of gunge on the wheels, and some too on the pick-ups, which makes you wonder how the previous owners think electricity conducts! I do accept that some of our RTR manufacturers have at times been guilty of excess lubrication at the factory, but is it really that difficult to do some focused cleaning with the likes of Slater's Track and Mechanism Cleaner and some cotton buds? In Britain we seem to have a big "downer" on tender drives, perhaps because the offerings we had decades ago frankly weren't that great, and manufacturing of the locos was sufficiently rough to regularly give the phenomenon of driving wheels stuck and being pushed along. That doesn't seem at all to be the outcome with the likes of Roco and others, which frankly are in a different league. John.

Yesterday I finally got around to detailing up my "Beachy Head" in BR lined black. What a lovely thing it is! I wonder, has anyone done anything with the cab doors that allows them to be fitted closed, but with the loco still able to go round 30'' curves? I can see it might be possible to design some hinge arrangement akin to that on movable fall plates, but would be interested to know if anyone has actually done this? I don't normally get too excited about this topic, but on the H2's and H1's the arrangement is unusual in that they open and close outside the cab, and so are rather noticeable if left off - not to mention the pair of holes on the front of the tender! There also seem to be pictures of these locos running with the doors open, so maybe that's the best option. Many thanks in advance, John.

As would a match to Bachmann 31-995, being the first green livery with orange and black lining. IIRC they did 10000 in this, but to get the pair would be nice. I've looked at trying to modify the raised number however highly likely this would just end up a mess! John.

I don't want to teach you to suck eggs, but in the top photo, where the misalignment is clear, were the cranks in line on the other side? Sometimes there is play in the motion so that the cranks seem out of alignment, but in fact it's just play showing on both sides. John

If you were aiming for something like the rolling hills of the North Downs, then that's exactly what's happened. Looks great! John.

I'm pleased to have found this layout, and enjoyed watching some of the videos. I wish I'd done more in Belgium back in the day. A few of the ADL "Along Different Lines" tours and shed trips, plus a bit of linesiding for photography. The latter focused mainly on Athus - Meuse, and seemed like jolly hard work for not much traffic. This was in the late '90's, and although full freight timetables were available (IIRC in Lok-Report, or maybe Today's Railways), they seemed mainly to be honoured in the breach! Happy days nonetheless, and I shall follow this thread with interest. John. John.

I'm not more knowledgeable, but would suggest the same. IIRC the S69xxx numbers are on other catering vehicles in emu's, the 4-CEP's for one. John.

These two really look the part, and you should be well pleased with the outcome. They prompted me to dig out the old David and Charles book on the Stanier 4-6-0's, written back in the 70's, which despite being a slim single volume tells us much of what we need to know about these and the Jubilees, the kind of super-detail we now get in the Wild Swan and Irwell loco books being far into the future. I've always found the numbering of these rather confusing, a bit like the sub classes of 37's, as they start to go backwards in batches after the first big tranche, and had forgotten that 44687 was in fact the last one built, at Horwich, and into traffic in May 1951. My grandad who I never met worked there until his death in 1950, and I've always liked to think that he might have made bits for some of the others built there in the late 40's and numbered in the 44xxx series. If 44744 reminds us how economical in beauty this batch was, 44687 is quite the other way, with its high running plate that was carried on into the BR Standards. Thanks for posting these pictures of a very interesting time in British railway loco history. John.

I think they're all acrylic now, BUT BEWARE. Acrylic doesn't mean water based, some of them if not all are solvent based. Which means that if applied on top of other paints they can cause damage. This happened to me some years ago when I sprayed on top of Humbrol traditional enamel, just blistered the whole thing and needed stripping back to the base. John.