pete_mcfarlane

There were quite a few 'deliberate' mixed livery Souther express EMU units - mainly those with Pullman cars. Some of the late 1930s buffet units also had their buffet cars painted in Malachite green, with the rest of the set in the darker Olive green. There's also the 8-VAB with it's blue and grey buffet car in an otherwise blue set http://www.flickr.com/photos/12a_kingmoor_klickr/6281025709 As diesels, there were various weird formations involving Hastings vehicles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here's a tadpole with a mix of blue and blue and grey vehicles http://www.southernelectric.org.uk/sales/img/foxley0079_1202.jpg. Not all the Tadpoles had blue/grey motor coaches - some of them got reformed in to blue/grey Hastings sets whilst still in Blue. And for bizarreness you can't beat this BR Green/Connex combination: http://www.hastingsdiesels.co.uk/news/articles/2003a03/

Dave, That's extremely useful and answers a couple of questions! For starters I was wondering what type of ventilators these units had - the answer in this case is several. It also looks as though the driving trailer still has the same equipment boxes on the end as it had in its EMU days. It's be interested in any more information you've got, especially the measurements of the motor coach - this is the current state of the motor coach drawings and there's a fair amount of guesswork in there.

Colin, That's quite interesting - so adding the strengthening partitions (to stop distortion) actually causes some of the distortion in the first place. Some food for thought there.

I'd not thought of using cyano on plasticard joints (although I've been happily using it to fix brass/whitemetal bits to scratchbuilt plasticard models for years). I'll have an experiment with it. I also suspect the distortion woul dbe less of a problem with a compartment coach compared to these open saloons - the toilet area shows no sign of distortion because it's better braced. I did pre-curve the roof, using the Geoff Kent method of rubbing it on the back with a curver scalpel handle. I'm wondering if cyano might be a better solution for the roof as well, it would avoid nay distortions (and be a lot quicker). Something else to experiment with,

I'm rather enjoying this coach building. Here's the latest update. The trailer second is now on it's bogies. The ends have been fitted with steps and pre-drilled for handrails/filler pipes and glued on. The roof has the first 10thou wrapper on, and is wrapped in masking tape whilst the solvent dries. One thing I did spot was that the sides have bowed inwards slightly. I've designed the thing with an inner false roof, which pushes them back out again to the correct shape. So far this is the only distortion I've had.

That's the premise behind Nigel Kneale's extremely scary TV play 'The stone tape'. Which is well worth a watch.

A rummage through the boxes of bits has turned up most of the parts I need to finish this coach. First of all were a couple of sets of MJT compensated bogies, one of which has been soldered together tonight. The wheels are from the same people as Black Beetle motor bogies, and also were found in one of my boxes. I also found some DC Kits BR2 single bolster bogie sideframes - I'm still undecided about whether to use these as they're a bit crude. I did use them on my DC Kits 2-EPB, but comparing them with photos of the real things shows how much work is needed to bring them up to spec. They're also 1mm too long in the wheelbase, and I don't have enough to do the driving trailer as well. Some more thought is needed - it's a shame Bachmannn don't sell their ones as spares. I've also made a start on the motor coach drawings. This is the current state of progress. I've got two drawings to base this on - the BR weight diagram showing the 'corridor' side, and the one in the Cheona book of DMU drawings. I started by tracing the latter in Inkscape, as I did with the trailer, but ended up moving almost every element of the motor end around until it looked right. I'm increasingly thinking that the drawing was based on photos and a few known dimensions. And not very good photos either - for example the short frame motor coach had two part handrails to the driver and guard doors, the drawing shows one part handrails as per the long frame units. The group of four grills on the motor coach has rounded bottoms to the lower grills when the real thing doesn't and so on. I got this far last night, and the next step is to draw it our (using a pen in the Silhouette) to check that it looks OK. Talking of photos, I've only got a few of my own photos of the preserved Hastings, so I've been making use of lots of photos off www.preservedthumpers.co.uk. Well worth a visit. This is one of my handful of photos of a real Hastings, taken when it visited Nottingham in 2009. I've also got a few of the motor coach roof that should come in handy later on.

There's a flooded qurry in Northern Ireland that's full of asbestos contaminated Irish Rail and NIR DMU vehicles. That's definitely one to give future archeologists headaches - why did 20th Century man offer so many of his metal transport machines as an offering to the water gods?

MTK did them, and either the 507 or 508 was available from NNK after they took over the range. Whether it (or any of the other NNK kits) will ever appear agian is a good question. After several years the new owners have only reissued a few bits. I'm sure a modern specification class 313 kit was anounced on the forum a few years back, but I've not herd anything for ages.

A quick update to show that the ends have been assembled, and a roof former made along the lines suggested by Geoff Kent in the latest MRJ. These are now hardening overnight. The ends were cut from 20 thou plasticard. As everyone else has found out already, the Silhouette won't cut through this completely, so I ended up having to go over the cuts again with a scalpel. There are two sets of ends here, including a driving end that's in the process of having it's windows added (and hasn't been separated from the surrounding plasticard yet).

Apparently Labour are going to delay the HS2 Bill so they can kill it off if they win the next election. At least that's what the Telegraph are saying, as proof they've got a couple of quotes from Ed Balls saying that it might take longer than originally planned to get the bill through Parliament. Which suggests that our journalist chums are still struggling desperately to find non-existent holes in the political consensus around HS2.

Both are 4mm on OO gauge track. I'm impressed that you think they are larger.

If you are really daft, like me, you can cut an E2 in to three bits and stretch it to the correct length. If I rememember rightly the Hornby version is 2mm short in the boiler/tanks, and 2mm short in the bunker. The footplate also needs adjusting, as Hornby made the drop at end end too big. the basic mouldings are very nice, with all sorts of separate detail. It's just a shame they bodged it on to their existing chassis.

This is the the laminated roof after a week or two of hardening. I've no doubt that another go with a more robust base to the roof would work and not go banana shaped, but having read the latest MRJ I think I'll have a go at Geoff Kent's method of wrapping a couple of layers of 10 thou round plasticard formers. This should be quicker and lest costly. I'm still experimenting with the Silhouette and various drawing tools. I've parked the SECR coach for now whilst I try out these techniques on something simpler. I had a go scanning in a drawing of a suitably simple vehicle and then tracing it in Inkscape. There was a steep learning curve whilst I got to grips with this - it took a couple of evenings of fighting the software but the result is a set of sides for a 57' Hastings/Tadpole trailer third.These were cut in 10 thou, and the inner sides in 15 thou. I'm struggling a little with some odd problems with Inkscape and/or the printer driver. As you can see, the lower side (cut from a separate sheet) is slightly shorter. it's probably only 1% different, which is still a bit odd and I'm yet to work out why. So it took a few attempts to get an accurate set of sides. These were then assembled in to a basic coach body. This started out as an experiment, but tonight I started drawing up the end and roof components with a view to finishing the coach and then doing the motor coach and providing a suitable EPB driving trailer. I've been after one of these units since 1987 when I got a copy of the Brian Haresnape BR Fleet survey book on DEMUs and 2nd generation DMUs. The only real challenge was the drawings - I tried using one from the Cheona book of DMU drawings, but it needed a lot of tweaking before it looked right. Luckily it's easy to do this in the drawing software, but I get the impression these drawings have been done from a few known dimensions and photos (for example the windows looked too small, the bogies are wrong on the motor coach, and the plan view has the vehicles too wide as I suspect the draftsman confused width over body with overall width over the door furniture). Remind me not to try using the EMU drawings from the same source.

It's got a vanity plate, which (assuming it's the original reg) suggests that the armour was to enhance the egos of those inside rather than to actually stop bullets. If I was worried about being shot at/kidnapped, I'd want my car to be as inconspicuous as possible. (I checked the plate because I wondered if had a NI registration number).

I had a bit of a strange problem tonight. I printed the same set of sides out twice from Inkscape (using the Silhouette printer driver), once n 15 thou and then again on 10 thou immediately afterwards. For some reason I've not fathomed, the 10 thou sides are 2mm too short. .I didn't have time to investigate further. Has anyone else seen this?

They'd also have to knock down the modern art gallery which is built on the site of Weekday Cross junction. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, as it's hideous. The idea of reopening the Great Central instead of building HS2 sounds like the anti-HS2 brigade clutching at straws. Yet again.

And the wonderful thing is that it also puts the costs up. So having originally complained about the envrionmental impact, the various anti-HS2 pressure groups can then move on complaining about the 'snowballing costs' and the extra traffic disruption caused by the solution to the first issue.

Has the figure of 10 years come direct from an official HS2 document, or is it what the local media are reporting? (Not that I'm cynical, but every local paper will have you believe that there's something uniquely apocalyptic about their town's traffic problems and are probably going to exaggerate HS2 traffic issues a little)

And that's the beauty of being an opposition party - you can make these grand sweeping claims without really having to work out if they are financially viable. And then they get in to power and find that there isn't the money to do what they promised. I do think that Barbara Castle needs a bit more stick over this though. Folk history has Dr Beeching closing down vast numbers of railways at the behest of his evil master Ernest Maples (have a look on Wikipedia - he's been cited as closing lines in the 1950s before he joined BR and of UTA lines in Ulster) when the reality is that both parties enacted pretty much the same policy in the 1960s.

I think the price is rather optimistic. I also suspect it may not survive being lifted on to the lorry to take it away!

If somebody wants to do an alternative body for the E4 chassis, then the E4X rebuilds would be a good bet. The various X rebuilds of the Brighton radial tanks are quite attractive in a freakish kind of way with their oversized boilers.

It's Bachmann so they can get away with moulded on detail. If Hornby did it then a large chunk of RMWeb would be foaming at the mouth about 'design clever'. It looks like a pretty good model. Are they doing the original smokebox or just the extended version? If the latter then the LBSC liveried model of 479 will presumably be in it's current preserved condition.

Just out of interest, when did coal trains from Gedling/Cotgrave stop heading east? I presume they went to Whitemoor via the Grantham avoiding line and Sleaford.

Up to now I've avoided anything involving CAD and computers for mu modelling (and DCC for that matter!), because I spend all day sitting in front of a computer trying to make other computers work. But I can see the value in this cutter for making things like coach sides. It didn't take that long to do the drawing for the SECR third, probably a couple of hours, which is what it would take to mark out a sheet of plasticard with a pair of sides. Except that it will cut the sides out a lot more accurately than I can ever manage and I'll be able to reuse the drawing in future.