RJS1977

If you go for 34 (or even 33), it might make applying the transfers easier...

Nice job.

I am currently cutting and shutting a left and right hand from Hornby railroad Colletts.

Won't be as accurate as yours but should be close and a 'cheap fun' project.

I'd be interested to see pictures of that one too as a Collett full brake is on my to do list as well. Had I known it could have been done that way, I would have picked two up from Anoraks Anonymous yesterday....

All of which reminds me of my old boss who hired a Transit to help a friend move house, loaded the van, and en route to the friend's new address encountered a low bridge. My boss told the friend to go to the other side of the bridge and wave him through if there appeared to be enough room. The friend did, so my boss eased the van through under the bridge gingerly and apparently had a few inches to spare. He got where he was going, unloaded the van. As the van had fitted through fairly comfortably in the morning, he drove through at a much quicker speed on the return trip, forgetting that now it was empty, the body now sat higher on the suspension....

 

 

I know it's been off the road for a while

Isn't that where a Landie's supposed to be?

Picture of the roller reminds me of an interview with Sid James I was listening to recently, where he was recounting how he accidentally caused a week's delay to filming 'The Titfield Thunderbolt'.

Apparently he lost control of the steam roller he was driving in the film, and flattened the camera!

Has anyone ever tweaked the badges of cars to spell different words? I seem to recall a brief phase when some cars carried the word "Turbot" in Porsche-type script...

 

My car carries "Borat" using an extra letter from VW's own badge script

 

 

There's a Discovery near me in Anti-Flash white with RAF roundels and the words 'Land Rover' on the bonnet changed to 'Avro' :-)

Maybe he was a bit confused about past exhibitions - the Burnham and District MRC hold their exhibitions in the King Alfred School.

No - King Alfred were a bus operator in the Winchester area back in the 60s.

There's also the steeple cab electric that used the same chassis (just in front of the ships).

Yes - that would have looked rather silly if Triang had put cylinders on the Nellie chassis! 

 

 

And a couple of photos of her older sister:

 

 

 

These two put in sterling service on the branch shuttle trains on my father's layout.

I just spotted that there's the cab of another one (the remains of one of the two bodies I cut and shut into a Tanat Valley loco) just visible to the left of the picture! The smokebox of the other body is just out of view - it acts as a stationary boiler in the lean-to on the back of the shed.

PS - the Airfix signalbox has now been repaired!

And the point of Triang was that by producing trains which could be bought for a lower price than HD, Trix etc, it opened the model railway market to people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford the more expensive offerings. For them, an 08 with inside frames, a shortened Princess, or an inaccurate Jinty were far better than no trains at all - something which seems to have been largely forgotten in today's hobby.

Before arranging a real valve gear to suit Nellie, you must remember that the entire design was done by Bodgers of Margate, who when faced with making an 08 diesel simply put a 3f 060 chassis in place of the shorter outside framed real ones, I suspect it ranks with putting wheels on the Titanic as idiocy.

Dear old Tri-ang could not have cared less about accuracy, it was a toy........the policy slid them slowly into bankrupcy in the end, unlike Euro makers who made the toys look accurate, and pleased both markets. Hornby survived by the skin of their teeth and Chinese production woke them up at last to the modern model railway world.

Stephen.

Because Hornby are now such a financially successful company..... Now they're not pleasing *either* market!

If anything, Triang's downfall was getting involved in too many other toy markets, and perhaps also buying out the failing H-D range....

What Triang did do was to introduce many people to the hobby who would not otherwise be here.

Did the flasher unit still work?

Yes it does.... no it doesn't.... yes it does.... no it doesn't..... yes it does.....

The layout I (and 2nd Reading Boys' Brigade) were restoring has now been returned to the Cholsey & Wallingford Railway. There are still some minor jobs to do on it, like fitting working signals. I have constructed a perspex cover for it (though not yet fitted as I had to wait for the glue to dry), and legs will be added in due course:

Some years ago I repainted one into GWR colours as per a 'Junior Modeller' article. It was some time before I discovered the GWR didn't actually have one...

And a couple of photos of her older sister:

These two put in sterling service on the branch shuttle trains on my father's layout.

That's why Bagnall used marine drum fireboxes etc., you could raise and slope the firegrate to get space, but it left valve gear exposed to ash etc. It is why most 040 small locos are outside cylinder to get around the problem. I doubt it occurred to the Lines Bros design team.......they made toys, not models.

Stephen

All model trains are toys, it's just that some are toys for older people with deeper pockets....

Even in the old days manufacturers used batch production so that if a model sold unexpectedly well it wasn't as simple as just cranking a handle to make another couple of hundred appear. That said, I also much prefer being able to buy models after having had a chance to see them and make up my own mind about them. I'm enough of a realist to see the attractions of the pre-order model for manufacturers but personally I don't like it.

They may have used batch production, but when they controlled the production line it was easy enough to reduce the numbers made in a batch that wasn't selling so well and use the time to make a larger batch of something else. Nowadays they have to compete for production line space with other companies.

They also wouldn't have to wait several weeks for the next batch to arrive in the UK...

Now, if I could find some RTR valve gear like that I 'd have a go at building a GWR steam railmotor!

Indeed, I've built a steam railmotor with a modified Airfix autocoach body on a Nellie chassis. Mine hasn't got any valve gear either!

By this time next year hopefully Abergwili will be open, which should resolve the parking issues.

Thus, Mountain Goat, you see why it's difficult to run a Gig Guide in South Wales...

It does seem as if perhaps there should be some sort of co-ordinating body - given how few shows there are in the area (which in some ways is rather a vicious circle - there aren't many shows so few people build exhibition layouts, which means there's a shortage of layouts to attend shows), it's a shame when two fall on the same day.

That said, my father and I did manage to attend the Woollen Mill and West Wales O gauge shows on the same day last year!

Start with a black body, and there's no lining marks!

 

As for a display - hell, I've got a lot of them.....blue, yellow, red, bright blue, bright red, black, top tank, 'wrong' numbers for the colour.....all because Nellie was my first loco when a kid, and I found a mint boxed 1959 version a few years ago (I'm a '59 model!) for not a lot of money.  They kind of get to you.

Yes, they do get lonely on their own....

Maybe it's time for a National Nellie Rally, where as many as possible would be assembled in one place, then cavalcade around a layout.

 

K

On the Tri-ang demo layout at Warley?

BR blue - Yuk. I didn't actually get interested in railways until about 2 years later, but soon discovered that green steam engines with Indian red wheels were much nicer, quickly followed by discovering that the ones that colour that ran on rails 7ft apart were even nicer!

And as someone who was born in the BR blue era, went to school alongside the WCML from the end of the blue era to the early privatisation era, and has travelled on and observed the railways extensively since then, I think BR blue is certainly the most boring and probably one of the most awful liveries I've seen in my lifetime!

If memory serves there are (or at least were) two Hornby battery (or clockwork) systems. 

One system, aimed at younger children, had snap-together plastic track and so was incompatible with mainstream 00 but had the advantage that it was easy for small children to assemble.

The other system used regular Hornby set track, which meant it was compatible with the main range, but the track had to be assembled by older children/adults.

Quite. My father's loft layout features an end-to-end branch line where two trains shuttle alternately, and a main line where three or four trains can lap independently with timed station stops and signal stops where necessary to prevent trains rear-ending each other (usually). This is all controlled by a number of reed switches (£1 each), relays (ditto) and 555 timer circuits (50p each). Yes, it's quite complex, but far less so then my club colleague's layout which operates a similar block system with DCC. There is no programming involved in our system so no obsolescence due to operating system upgrades and we know exactly how each component works - so if something goes wrong, it is relatively easy to track down the fault and replace the errant item with no major cost outlay.

 

 

 If a new model is not sufficiently well detailed and has a coreless motor you are effectively excluding a large part of the potential market, which does not seem wise to me.

I'm not sure about this - certainly as far as the "not sufficiently well detailed" part goes. I firmly believe that if a manufacturer brings out a low-budget model of a previously unreleased prototype (e.g. Adelante, Class 800 or perhaps even something like a Gas Turbine), people who want a model of that particular loco/unit will still buy it, and the market will be opened up to people who couldn't afford a more expensive model.

The Bachmann Skarloey is a case in point - whilst clearly a toy model (albeit retailing at Peckett prices, largely due to the licensing fees - had it not been for that, I reckon it could have been obtainable for around the £50 mark) - as it's the only RTR model of a 'Talyllyn' style loco, importers in the UK have seen them flying off the shelves (one importer said his US wholesaler had sold him more than all his US retailers put together!). Likewise I'm sure that if Hornby were to bring out a better-proportioned 'Toby', anyone wanting a RTR J70 would buy it, irrespective of the lack of detail.

There are still a lot of unreleased industrial types out there, which would be well-suited to Junior layouts but which would probably sell well to anyone wanting a model of that particular class. If someone wanted say a Bagnall 0-4-0F, would the fact it was produced without sprung buffers or a fully-detailed cab interior really put them off buying it if the price was commensurate with that?

This may (or may not) also apply to prototypes which *have* previously been released by other manufacturers but are now unobtainable (e.g. Class 14).