pete_mcfarlane

After an seemingly endless exercise of carefully opening out the coupling rod holes, the J chassis is now free running and can move under power. The motor is just held in place for now, but it all seems smooth and quiet. That's my ancient Hornby trainset controller from 1984 providing the power. There's a fair bit of work left to detail the chassis, fit pickups etc, but it's all downhill from now on.

Will there be a more detailed feature on the challenge entries and results in a the late January issue? A lot of very good modelling was entered in to the challenge, so it would be a shame if gets pushed to one side to make room for yet another review.

It really is a bit of a mess, and doesn't put the case across properly. The Network Rail RUS document has the Erewash valley line being electrified as part of a future infill scheme (along with Notingham - Grantham and various other bits of the Norwich-Liverpool route). Having reread the report this morning, the rolling stock side is incredibly sketchy: The only mention of new rolling stock is "an extra13 train units" which would presumably be HST replacements. There's nothing about the Merdiens being replaced with electrics, but the environmental case (and common sense) would imply that they are. If they are being replaced, then surely cascading such modern high speed trains on to other routes is a secondary benefit worth mentioning? The reliability figures showing diesel trains as less reliable than electric are (with the exception of the 158) for types not used on the MML. There's nothing that I can see about the proposed pantograph car for the Voyagers - surely this is worth mentioning as they could run on electric power from Derby to Sheffield (and beyond if the Yorkshire scheme happens).

The schematic shows no electrification from Corby to Leicester - surely this would be needed for the regular MML weekend diversions? The infill electrification north of Sheffield looks like it is tacked on to the report, possibly to justify the Erewash electrification by allowing EMUs to be used for the Nottingham-Leeds service (otherwise the Erewash line would only see handful of electric trains a day).

The recent Southern Coaches in colour book has two photos of 373 in BR green from about 1959/60.

IIRC the gate stock was originally built with 3 large end windows, and gained the usual Southern 4 window pull-push driving coach ends at the same time as the change from wire to air control. So a wire control version will need a modified tooling - I guess this is why they aren't being offered in LSWR livery.

The Maunsell sets only lasted from 1959 until about 1962/3 (and odd vehicles for a little longer) and only carried one livery, so perhaps are a less appealing choice for a manufacturer. They are very iconic though, I suspect largely because they appear in so many photos of doomed branchlines. The Gate stock is very good news - although they operated a little far to the west for my modelling interests, they've been on my "nice to have" list for years! I wonder how Dapol will cover the various panelling permutations - photos show these coaches ended up with most of the panelling replaced by steel sheeting. If they are due in 12-18 months I may even have got round to building the Craftsman T1 in my to do pile so I'll have a suitable loco.

Some progress on my coach building. The two Phoenix Maunsell coaches are now painted in 1930s Southern Olive Green. I've cheated with the lining - it should be a yellow line with a black line inside it, but I've only done a yellow line. My defence is insanity (avoidance of). The lining is from HMRS pressfix, with the corners added by hand. The interiors are now added - Southern Pride seats and Slater's passengers. All a little crude, but good enough when the roof is on. The Worlsey Works Thanet third is nearing completion (and did you know that Chrome's built in spell checker doesn't have Thanet in it's dictionary?). This went together in much the same way as their Continental. I used a Southern Pride Mk1 roof, and replaced the solebars with Evergreen plastic channel. There's nothing wrong with the etched ones supplied in the kit, but I cocked up bending one of them to shape. Plastic solebars also avoid the fun of soldering the foot boards in to place. The various underframe details are Comet, the battery boxes are scratchbuilt and the bogies are from NNK (now available again and my first choice for SR 8' steam bogies). Lastly, a model from the box of long term incomplete projects has been completed.This is one half of Pull-Push set 609, and has been built from an Ian Kirk kit (which I bought from Colin Ashby's stand at the Derby show in the Assembly rooms just in case you wondered how long it's been lurking half complete in a shoebox). This has had quite a lot of work done on it - the body has been increased in height by 1mm, and a scratchbuilt underframe fitted. The roof was reprofiled as the Kirk roof is way too wide and had a horrible thick cantrail, and most of the end detail replaced. . I have the Parts (including the Branchline conversion kit) to make the driving trailer, which should follow during 2012. One thing to watch with push pull sets 600-619 is the orientation of the trailer third. The outer end has the corridor connector removed and heavy duty EMU buffers fitted. This varies from coach to coach - some have the end with the alarm gear sealed up and some the other. To make matters even more fun the Southern never painted the set number on the inner end of pull-push sets, so it took a lot of peering at photos to work out which way round my chosen set was orientated.

This is the current status of 816. Not the best phot, and the body is only resting on the chassis. Painting is now complete, and it needs the bodyside windows and headcode box flush glazing and various other minor tasks doing. And I've just noticed that the marker lights as still masked off. The biggest challenge is going to be that A1 buffers, and these have a threaded tail which is retailed by a small nut. I'm trying to figure out a way of retaining the buffer heads in a way that stops them rotating - otherwise the loco will be condemned to having wonky buffers. The other thing that's apparent from the photo is how OO gauge Warships never quite look right as the bogie frames are too far inboard. There is a comment section below this for smug remarks from P4 modellers. And this is the EPB driving trailer, which needs a good brush to get rid of the white specks that are covering it. I had endless problems glazing this to a reasonable standard. It now uses a mix of Replica Mk1 suburban glazing for the compartments, and Evergreen clear sheet cut to shape for the cab and brake van. A lot of the windows took two or three attempts to get right, but it's nearly there. I'm now quite pleases with this - it captures the slightly grotty and down at heal look of a Southern Region suburban unit in a way that Bachmann's shiny perfect EPBs don't

Thanks - I'll give that go.

I've spent quite a bit of time on the J this week, but have struggled to get a smooth running chassis. The coupling rods bind for no obvious reason - despite all the usual remedies such as opening out the holes in the rods. I've also checked the wheels are correctly quartered, the chassis is square with all wheels touching the track etc etc. After a few hours of this, I'm starting to suspect there's something fundamentally wrong with the rods., probably through my hamfisted assembly although I'm never keen on having the rods etched on a separate etch to the chassis. The next step seems to be an order to Alan Gibson for a set of his etched coupling rods - I've always had success with these.

I've forgotten the exact ratio of the gearbox - it's something in the region of 38:1 or 40:1. The chassis does indeed come with etched holes for plunger pickups (but none are supplied). Having tried these before and found them a little on the fiddly side, I'll go with the old fashioned approach of wiper pickups. I've not made any more progress since Saturday, but hopefully I should get a decent amount of work done tonight.

I thought I'd start a new blog to record my slightly hamfisted attempts at building 4mm loco kits. The first victim is a Chiver's SECR J class 0-6-4T. These are one of Harry Wainwright's more obscure classes - there were only five of them, and all were scrapped by 1951. I've heard it claimed they were the last 0-6-4T tanks in Britain (although the type survived in Ireland until 1969 due to the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties' peculiar attachment to them). When finished it will be 31599 in early BR condition. The chassis is a pretty conventional affair in etched brass, with a separate etch containing the coupling rods, brake gear and a gearbox (to go with Romford gears and a DS10 motor). I'd experimented with the settings on my camera, the combination of an LED desk lamp, flash and macro mode on the camera produced the slightly odd effect in the photo (which reminds me of a German silent film). The kit suggests starting with the chassis, but then mentions that it needs shortening slightly to fit the running plate. So I started by assembling the running plate (using epoxy). This needed a bit of filler, but otherwise went together OK. A couple of millimetres was then removed from the chassis etch to ensure that it fitted before soldering it up. I used a Comet jig to help with the assembly. I also added extra frame spacers off one of their etches to ensure that the chassis was nice and rigid. The next step was to paint the basic chassis before fitting the Alan Gibson wheels. These were then fitted using a GW models wheel press. This is my first use of the Gibson driving wheels, and no major problems so far. Once they are on, it's not straightforward to remove them, hence the need to paint the chassis (or at least the bit's behind the wheels) first. The moulded plastic gearbox is from a firm called Northyard, who hail from New Zealand. I bought it from Branchlines a few years back and have now finally found a use for it. The huge side tanks will hide a fairly large Mashima 1628 motor driving the gearbox via a length of neoprene tubing. Again this is something I've not tried before, but so far it all seems to fit. The motor will intrude in to the bottom of the cab, but with the doors modelled in the closed position this shouldn't show. So it has taken a week of odd hours here and there to get this far. The rest of the kit seems pretty straightforward, so I'm hoping for a quick build.

On consulting with my lawyers, I've been asked to point out that it was locomotive 10800 that I implied to be at the bottom of said barrel and not member 10800 whose Ouse Valley Viaduct looks quite good. Anyway, back to 4mm diesels. I'm wondering if it's worth a retailer commissioning Heljan to do a 4mm model of that spoof diesel prototype that Monty Wells did in an April Railway Modeller in about 1984. They could sell a good few thousand (it fooled me, but I was about 8 at the time).

The bottom of the barrel still hasn't been reached. The LMS Bo-Bo number 10800 (original and rebuilt forms) and the Fell 4-8-4 are still down there somewhere, and (rather surprisingly) so are the class 43 Warships.

If I understand this correctly, if I vote then I'll have to rate my own entry as well as all the others. Is this OK, so long as I don't take the mickey as somebnody seems to have done already?

I predict a time, not so far ahead, when I'll go to an exhibition and see a layout operated entirely by models of one-offs, prototypes and other oddities. Certain sections of the modelling community seem perfectly happy with this approach, and probably think it's odd that some people have layouts with lots of identical rail blue class 47s on them. I guess that a model of the Leader would appeal to them (assuming they don't spend all their pennies on Blue Pullmans first).

At least the cyclist incident answers the questions about how quickly a damaged bus can be removed from the busway.

Given that buses don't have seatbelts and potentially have passengers standing, I'd have thought doing a full emergency stop at 56mph is likely to send people flying and cause them injuries.A normal brake application, sounding your horn and then hitting the cyclist a more pragmatic option - for starters you only have one inured person sueing you.......

After a bit of a hiatus caused by the need to finish my entry for the 2011 challenge, one half of set 331 is now finished. The vacuum formed roof proved tricky to get to fit - it does now fit despite appearances in the pictures. The roof ventilators are a strange mix on this particular coach - one large torpedo vent, and some odd looking oval ventilators (no doubt somebody's patent carriage ventilator that the SECR decided to try out). These were made from some ABS torpedo vents with the torpedo parts filed off. Luckily the Phil Coutanche book on SECR carriages has a good photo of one of the other batches of corridor brake composites that shows these clearly enough to figure out what they look like. Apart from the roof this kit almost flew together and I'm very pleased with it. More Roxey coaches should follow it in the future. The other half of set 332 is a Thanet Third from Worsley Works. The etches are shown here: Work started by adjusting the profile of the ends. As supplied they seem to have the same curved profile as the later Maunsell Restruction 4 stock, whereas the real coaches had almost vertical sides with a very small tumblehome at the bottom. This only took a minute or two with the file

Now there's a blast fromt he past. It's a feature of all X Windows GUIs and started out on proper Unix workstations way before Linux appeared. I have seen an app (but I can't remember what it was called) that makes Windows behave in the same way. I've got a work laptop running Windows XP with the display extended to an external monitor running at a different resolution, and haven't encountered any major problems. The only bit of Windows software that seems to get confused by being moved from one screen to another is the terminal Services client, but nobody outside of an IT department will want to use that. I did have a problem with my Windows 7 PC at home, where it wouldn't clone screens between the graphics card and a small USB connected monitor (the maximum resolution of one was smaller than the minimum resolution fo the other) and had to extend the display. This seems to have been fixed by a recent patch.

I'd imagine most of the drivers would want their electric/hybrid cars to play a prerecorded lecture to the rest of us on how we should all drive electric/hybrid cars to save the planet.

I think there should be the word "alleged" in the title of this topic. The UK still has the concept of innocent until proven guilty1. 1. Does not apply to those writing gutter press headlines.

I do like those flats. I might have a go at living in them, to see if you really can manage without servants! How are you getting on with your N gauge EMUs?

Actual the shoe beam isn't that far out - the ones on B4 bogies are nowhere near as big as the great chunks of wood on the older units. Take a look at http://semgonline.com/gallery/class421_07.html The EPB/CEP/VEP comparison is interesting as it shows that none of these models sits at the same height on their bogies!