pete_mcfarlane

There's a story about Khrushchev visiting an modern art exhibition when he was in charge of the USSR and saying something similar to the assembled artists. 'A donkey coul daub better with his tail' or something similar. When I went to the Scottish Modern art place in Edinburgh (to see the really good Ray Harryhausen exhibition) we made the mistake of looking at the actual modern art. It took me a while to realise that the list of names on the wall was actually an art installation, and not a list of the people who'd donated money to them....

The other upside is that I've never had a pigeon poo on my head in Birmingham.

City Models? I bought some Lima coaches from them when visiting Norwich in about 1988. Nice little shop.

Talyllyn was at the NEC show a few years back. The photos I took of it are rubbish though, due to the NEC lighting.

The original York museum opened in 1928. Aerolite might be a candidate - it doesn't seem to have wandered much - there's a photo of it at Doncaster in the 1970s, but it probably got moved by rail in those days. It seems to always be at York. And what about the Ffestiniog's in house built double Fairlies? Have Merddin Emrys and David Lloyd George ever left the Ffestiniog/WHR?

There's also some weirdness with the top panels, and the alignment of the top of the door vents and the top of the panelling (which should be in line, but aren't so the moulding above the top panels is too deep). There's also something not right with the duckets, which don't extend high enough and look stuck on to the sides rather than growing out of them. That's probably a production compromise, rather than a mistake.

I've not built this particular kit, but I have done the industrial version of the Hudswell from Mercian. The coupling rods had holes that were way too large for 4mm scale crankpin bushes (I think the kit was shot down from 7mm) and didn't match the wheelbase. And were also wrong for the multi-part coupling rods on that type of loco. I ended up making my own. There are a few other builds of that kit online, either in 4mm or 7mm who had similar issues, so I'd check that the frames and rods match. Romford wheels were a thing about 50 to 20 years ago so the chances are that the instructions have never been updated - you could try ScaleLink wheels as another alternative to those already suggested. I used the 14mm 'Industrial Garratt' wheels from Alan Gibson on my loco. One other thing to check is that the throw of the cranks on the jackshaft matches the throw of the wheels you are using - I ended up making my own cranks to match the wheels, which is probably not the most helpful thing for a beginner to hear..... If you go to the High Level site you'll find a rather nice PDF you can print of all of his gearboxes. He also does motors (with dimensioned drawings) so you should be able to work out what fits. A 68:1 LoadHauler Compact+ is normally good for diesel shunters - 90:1 if you want really slow running. I would suggest driving one of the axles at either end, rather than the middle, so you can have a bit of sideplay on that axle.

Dark Green, especially Brunswick Green, seems to have been the default colour for almost everything in Victorian Britain. I have a vague memory of looking into this when building a set for 'The Importance of Being Ernest' and ending up painting almost everything dark green. I guess this is a combination of cost and longevity. (Dark Red/Brown was another favourite for interiors. I guess they hid the dirt in an age where power and heat came from burning coal, and everything got dirty very quickly).

It's the Grauniad though, people read it to have their biases confirmed rather than be exposed to crazy ideas like the UK's problems not being unique to the UK.

Watch out for the roof - this was extensively modified in the 1960s (after one of the locos filled the cab with CO and the crew passed out and crashed). Main differences are exhaust position, lack of silencer, and method of retaining the removable centre section - there are clips on the rebuilt locos. So a green Heljan 33 painted blue might not be completely accurate.

With Roxey kits you sometimes see the ancient vac formed ones listed at not much less than you'd expect to pay for the newer etched kits. Similar to people expecting 1970s Hornby Flying Scotsmen to be worth the same as the latest superdetailed ones.

That would possibly explain why the box art photos on the two SP Mk2 kits currently sitting on my desk doesn't look quite right (and/or the grey window panels on the sides being too shallow). There's a surprisingly large gap between a B4 bogie and the coach body, from some angles you can see the top of the bogie. They are really nice kits though. Looking forward to seeing this build.

Moor Street is another great example of this, where they've got a modern accessible station to look like it's from the 1930s.

There are traffic lights on some tram crossings, so possibly this follows the same rules/logic. There's a very strange 4 track example in Nottingham, with traffic lights on the tram bit and a normal level crossing on the railway.

For LNWR locos, surely the answer is 1951? That was the year the Dundalk, Newry, and Greenore railway closed, with its stock still in LNWR livery 3 years after nationalisation (never mind the grouping). I've also seen a photo of LBSC E3 class 453 still in Brighton Livery in 1929 (I'm tempted to do the EB Models kit in my to do pile as this example). It's next to a newly built Z class, which dates the photo correctly. I think the SECR's Terrier managed to make it into the early 30s still in the wartime grey, although it had spent a lot of time in store.

In Lima's case, any colour diesel you want but it won't be very well applied. There's not a straight line in sight on my old Lima class 156 in Provincial livery.....

Out of interest. has anyone bought a copy of this book? https://camdenmin.co.uk/products/trains-dexception?_pos=1&_sid=049a94b00&_ss=r It looks rather nice (in that expensive way that French railway books do) so I'm tempted.

That's Issac Watt Boulton's 'Rattlesnake', of 'The chronicles of Boulton's siding' fame. A lot of Boulton's engines (often cobbled together out of bits of engines) would fit right in on this page.

So we can expect a political bunfight when the DfT rightly bats it back as unfeasible.....

Definitely an oil burner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBÖ_12 And that's an express passenger loco.

I've done it twice, once at Lincoln in 2001, and 10 years later in Nottingham. Lincoln wasn't busy, so after 3 days of waiting (you get warned about this) we got a drug dealer to try but the defendant changed their plea to guilty at the last moment*. So discharged for the day, and told to check in by phone to see if we were needed again, which we weren't. Lincoln Crown court is at the castle, and very nice. (*After they turned up. Defendant was from one of the rougher parts of Nottingham, turned up at Nottingham Crown court. trial not listed, phoned solicitor, told to go to Lincoln, got train, went to Lincoln Magistrates court. told to go to Crown court (about 1.5 miles uphill), by which point we'd all gone to lunch. As the judge said whilst we were waiting, "this is unfortunately typical with defendants") Second time at Nottingham I got two trials. First one was what could be called a pae*do*hile but in reality was a 20 year old man who was too dim to realise that he was now too old to chase 14 year old girls like he could when he was 16. Lots of time spent wading through the transcripts of their text conversations (on fanfold printer paper, the only time I've encountered this in the last 25 years) and having to be shown sample images that the Police had found on his laptop (not great). Part of the defense hinged on who had access to the password for said laptop (he lived in a shared house), so the highlight of the trial was the (lady, West Indian) judge summing up ("there is some difference between the prosecution and defense over who knew the password, which was f*ckmehard123". We found him guilty. Sentencing happened later, and he got something suspended. Second trial was a wannabe drug dealer whose mates had let him hide the £20k of coke in his flat, and was taking the hit for the Police finding it. Slightly sad as he was clearly very stupid, but not quite stupid enough for this to be taken into account by the system. They struggled to get him to pick what oath to read before giving evidence in his defense - you get two versions, depending on whether you believe in God or not. He couldn't answer that question, which is something you're normally expected to have thought about at some point in your life. "Whichever one mate" he said to the Judge. The drug dealers 'mates' sat in the witness box staring at us, which did worry some of the jurors as they thought it was an attempt at intimidation (they were probably just trying to 'read' our reactions). One of them kept rubbing his nose every 30 seconds, which everyone noticed and probably didn't help their mate on trial for dealing cocaine.... Defendant was found guilty. Let's just say that if you ever hear 'the jury only took 30 minutes to reach a verdict' on TV the reality is that this includes the time spent eating lunch. He was sentenced (to about 4 years) on the day and led away. Take loads of books is the main bit of advice I'd give. You might find somebody interesting to talk to (I remember a lengthy discussion about Ernst Junger's 'Storm of steel' at one point) but you don't want to be the bloke at Lincoln court who'd read his Daily Heil and was huffing and looking at his watch every 30 seconds. Oh and remember to switch your mobile off before going in to the court room. About 17 times, in the same way you do with checking your passport is till in your bag at the airport.

I did find that whilst my Silhouette can never cut 60 thou plasticard, it can still score it far more accurately than I can mark out, I could then finish the cuts with a Stanley knife. I did a load of coach floors this way, and they turned out completely identical.

On the subject of Ukranian diesels, some of these static resin kits look very nice. https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/rtm_kits/m.html?item=125553458811&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2562

I did ponder getting some at one point, but this one is intended to be a tram loco sold into industrial service (as occasionally happened).

I need to go through this thread and restore the photos (and update on progress) but for now here a shot of the layout reassembled in a (very messy) home office. Lighting still to be sorted, power feeds are temporary, and it needs curtains in front to hide the box files full of magazines underneath. But I'm slowly getting there. Next step is to iron out all of the glitches - a point now doesn't throw properly, a Cobalt motor has developed some weird noises, and the main line now isn't level. But I can run trains again.