pete_mcfarlane

Some more experimentation. I wanted to see if it was possible to make a roof by laminating multiple profile sections together. The answer is yes, but it takes a lot of plasticard. The red section is an entire sheet of 20 thou plasticard. I drew the profile sections with a recess in the bottom, which takes a strip of plasticard to align the cross sections together. There's still a small amount of misalignment between the pieces, but nothing a rub down with some wet and dry couldn't cure. I'm still undecided about this method, as it uses a lot of plasticard (although 3 sheets of 2 thou isn't that expensive) and a couple of hours work to assemble them together to get a roof. But it is a way of getting obscure roof profiles for your coaches - it's time consuming but needs no skill and avoids the hassle of carving roofs from solid blocks. I've also bought some of the Silhouette sketching pens. I gave them a try on the latest revision of my SECR 10 compartment third. This seems to be a cheaper method of checking designs before cutting them. The coach side itself is a lot better than version one, with the windows looking a lot better.

The new tram line ends up at a Park and Ride site next to the A453 on the edge of Clifton. Anyone who's tried the A453 in the rush hour will know why that's a good idea.

The next coaches I planned to do were the two coach pull-push set 656. There are drawings of this in the Mike King book on Souther Pulll-Push units. It consisted of an ex-SECR 10 compartment third (the kind with two layers of steel sheeting on the sides) and an ex-LSWR driving trailer. Having recently bought a Silhouette Portrait cutter on the back of this thread I decided to have a go at drawing out the SECR coach and then doing a test cut in thin card. This is the result. It was designed using the software that comes with the cutter, and then split in to two files so I could do two passes. One to scribe the door lines and window frames, and another to do the cutting. There are a few dimensional issues that I've now fixed. The windows were spaced too close to the doors, and the corners had too large a radius. The roof profile has also been tweaked a little. I've yet to try cutting plasticard with the cutter. I've discovered that (as other have already commented on in the Silhouette thread) the blade isn't really suitable for scoring things like door outlines as it's too narrow, so I'll need a suitable tool for this. If it was just the doors then I could rescore them with the scraper board tool, but I want the cutter to do the distinctive window frames on this coach. Some more experimentation is needed.

I missed this at the time, but I'm now rereadingt he whole thread as I've got my own cutter. I'm wondering if you could use this to scribe a design (ie a scanned in drawing) on to a sheet of 10 or 15 thou nickel silver that's been covered in engineering blue or black marker pen and then cut it out with a piercing saw in the usual way. That sounds worth a try at some point.

If they teach you to build locos to this standard, then it sounds like those weekend workshops are worth investigating.

Mine arrived today, and that's pretty much what I've spent the last 45 minutes doing. So far it's been pretty straightforward (says the man with a BSc in Computer Science......). The only problem I had was that I initially had the wrong size of cutting mat set in the software, so only some of the shapes were cut out. The software didn't seem to mind being told to use a mat wider than the machine.

Worsley Works do a few etched kits - presumably shot up or down from kits in other scales. http://www.worsleyworks.co.uk/1-87/1-87_Scale_Index.htm The GNSR 4-4-0 looks rather nice. If you are really masochistic then they do some 5'3" Irish stuff in HO!

As far as I know you can't get a kit for one of these vans (David Geen does the earlier LSWR vans). I did bash one of the the similar insulated vans out of a Ration BR Banana van plus some MJT and ABS underframe parts. The result was pretty close, although the plank spacings and roof profile aren't quite right.

I'm glad it's not just me who's mangled a set of rods whilst opening them out!

Even more astonishing than these HT services is the hourly EMT service from St Pancras to Grantham on the 27th. Peterborough appears to be closed for engineering works.

I model the Southern after about 1930, so I'm not a pre-group modeller, but I've certainly built lots of pre-group Southern stock from kits and a few from scratch. The reason I chose this period is that there's very little available as RTR. To misquote JFK - We chose to model pre-grouping locomotives and rolling stock not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I'm tempted to get one of these for a spot of 4mm scale coach construction. Hand cutting panelling overlays is time consuming! A slightly thick question - how long do the blades last? I suppose the real question here is 'should I buy a spare blade with the machine?'.

I'm 38 and struggle with lining! The railmotor is very impressive, especially given its Jidenco origins.

I rather like this layout. One of the very first RMs I bought as a I kid had your article on the working wagon tippler, which greatly impressed me.

Did I really start this in June..... After some intermittent progress, a recent spurt of activity has got the R1 ready for painting. At the end of the last instalment I was about to order some Gibson coupling rods - these arrived and were eventually fitted. It took a while to fettle the rods to get smooth running, but it now quite smooth and controllable. This is good, as I've not built a loco without a flywheel before and wasn't sure what to expect. Once the rods were on, the rest of the chassis went together as per the instructions. The body detailing is now done - these Victorian engines look simple, but they have quite a lot of piping. Most of which didn't come with the kit and was fabricated out of bits of wire etc. The biggest challenger here was finding photos of the same loco from different angles at roughly the same time. Along with the Terriers (and possibly the GS&WR 101 class) I can't think of a class with more detail variations. This was the state last night - today it's had a blast of Halford etch primer. This has shown up the inevetiable gaps and blobs of glue, so these will be sorted before it gets a coat of black.

Boris Island isn't an official scheme - it's a speculative punt which may or (more likely) may not happen. The 7 year build time would presumably be from when the very lengthy series of public enquiries ends, so you'd be looking at the thing actually opening in 12-15 years time. Because that floppy haired buffoon Boris Johnson is involved on the periphery, it's being presented in some parts of the media as an official scheme that is going to happen.

Genesis kits did kits of both versions, but they look extremely crude to my eyes. I think Worsley works do an etched one as well. The MTK example I saw on Alistair Rolfe's stand looked OK. It had an etched body if I remember correctly.

I'd guess a lot of that 90% are commuters heading in to Glasgow and Edinburgh. And percentages are of course pretty meaningless in this context - the 10% of rail travellers heading out of Scotland is still going to be a huge number of people. But the figures don't really matter. It's another of those 'down with this sort of thing' pressure groups scouting around for any figures that back up their case.

Because French politics are really only of interest to the French, we don't see those years of political debate before the first sod is cut. We just see the construction period, and then compare it to the overall times for the British schemes. It's also worth remembering the endless wrangles that surrounded most of the Victorian railway projects before work actually started. These never get mentioned when people talk about how quickly those lines were built.

And lets not forget that many of the cost increases are for reasons like that - changing the route, adding tunnels etc to minimise the impact of the line. It's not as if David Cameron forgot to include the costs of (say) all of the bridges in his cost guesstimate and suddenly added them at the last minute (as some of the papers would have you think).

Being a 4mm scale modeller the toilet door knob was a bit impressive! I'm not sure that I'd fancy the etched roof though.

The published timescales for HS2 have construction of the Leeds/Manchester sections starting in 2022. It's the southern section from London to Birmingham is what is starting in 2017. From your comments about disruption, loss of property value and lack of compensation I'm getting the impression that HS2 is going to go quite close to your house and you are worried about the impact.

I note that the BBC's 'expert' anlysis talks about 'train lines', whatever they are, and they are still saying that 'HS2 is designed to shorten journey times...', no matter how mny times the Government says that it's about increasing capacity. Being a cynical type, I expect there's going to be an awful lot of anti-HS2 noise and Government kicking in the media and particulary the press over the next few days. A lot more coverge than will be given to a certain trial at the Old Bailey.

The man the Austrians sent to prison. They lock people up there if they say the wrong thing, to protect themselves against Fascism.

Luckily Hitler didn't understand track gauges. Certainly not the difficulties of invading a country with 5' gauge railways when all yours are built to 4'8.5", and you don't have any decent lorries.