pete_mcfarlane

Not for Belgium. A lot of Belpaire's locos (and railmotors) had square chimneys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_State_Railways_Type_25

Next you'll be asking for them to model the air brake and ETH equipment on more recent Mk1s. And ends with no steps..... Phoenix definitely do some etched ones as part of the range they inherited from NNK. No idea if they are accurate or designed to fit MTK coaches (which almost certainly aren't accurate) https://www.phoenix-paints.co.uk/products/4mm-products/multiple-unit-spare-parts/multiple-unit-detail-etches/4-40162 The best approach I've seen is with some of the etched Southern Pride sides, which come with pre-cut vinyl frames to overlay on the brass. You can make these yourself using a Silhouette craft cutter - I've done these myself for the 4-BUF I'm slowly scratchbuilding.

There are some genuine 'preserved' railways like the Snailbeach or the Cromford and High Peak, where significant amounts of the infrastructure have been kept in (or restored to) their final working condition. But they aren't operating railways.

They are more like Goering than Hitler - Goering was the incompetent and morbidly obese Nazi who liked to play with his train set...... And like a lot of one star reviews, it's an incoherent stream of consciousness with dodgy use of apostrophes and incorrect use of similar sounding words.

I built an NBL 0-4-0 with these beams. If you don't get on with them, just fit High Level hornblocks in the rear axle, along with the central pivot from the kit, and compensate in the usual way. The beams let you compensate without hornblocks.

You tend to bite people's hands off if they show an interest in volunteering. Because you have to. And this is one of the challenges with managing volunteers - there aren't enough applicants for you to be picky.

In my experience, the problem with older volunteers can be that policies on things like health and safety and safeguarding are continually tightened over time, so ways of working have to change. And this manifests itself as 'management are stupid because that's not how you do task X' from the volunteers. Especially if people aren't talking to each other properly to begin with.

Probably when Red Star Parcels folded in the early 200s and parcels stopped being sent by passenger train.

Quite possibly, so long as you can get it out of the plaster mould afterwards. I'm also tempted to give it a go for some coach roofs that I'll need for a scratchbuilt project next year.

Doesn't this happen every few years with Derby Works?

I remember this article. It was apparently a common method of producing scratchbuilt 1/72 aircraft. The class 47 looked pretty good (in the grainy black and white photos). Carve a wooden master, grease, make a 2 part plaster mould. Grease the moulds, apply papier mache on the inside, leave to dry and then remove.

Might be worth redoing the destination blinds. The frames look way too thick. Craftsman?

What I have seen is s 'rough' strip up the middle of the road to give the horse better grip on hills. Italian example here: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@45.7648637,10.8083415,3a,75y,132.7h,80.87t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sxjphKdITtn-fhmZE2AiOkw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DxjphKdITtn-fhmZE2AiOkw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D314.6482%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu (I'm assuming this is probably driven by economics, and the rough stone had to be shipped in and was more expensive, otherwise they'd have built the entire roadway out of it) War chariots were something that was associated with Barbarians.

Winker (misprint) ?

These people were always there before Sat Navs, they just used to get completely lost and ask you for directions to a village 30 miles away and act all annoyed when you didn't know where it was.

I've seen this exact encounter many times between the guard and people getting on at unstaffed stations. With the added complication of the guard not always knowing where they've started from.

They look really good. I do wonder what percentage of the first twenty odd years of my life was spend travelling on Nationals.

Not steam locos, but I was at Crich last week, and what started out as a lovely day turned to rain and greasy rails. It was fun watching the trams making a start from the Terminus, with much wheelslip, grinding to walking pace, and application of sand. One of the crews commented that you'd expect the Sheffield 'Roberts' to cope better with hills, being from Sheffield. So go to Crich on a rainy day and you can see this close up

Exactly. BR and their successors somehow managed to cope with ECML services being operated with a mix of HSTs and Mk4 sets for years. I guess the hypothetical ideal situation would be to have a 50:50 mix of trains from 2 different suppliers, with identical characteristics for operational purposes (seat layout, performance (which these days could probably be tweaked through software to be identical), the same couplers so one class could at least drag a failure of the other type, and so on). The suppliers take care of maintenance, so the biggest overhead would be making sure that your crews had traction knowledge of both types.

There are plenty of semi-derelict Finnish locos dumped around the UK

I never quite understood the logic behind some of this - there were several diagrams for class 76 depending on whether they were MU or boiler fitted, but all got numbered as 760xx. And the 25s sub-classes weren't number in separate blocks, as other classes were. It's as if there were several people doing the TOPS number allocations, and they all did things their own way.

Only the NBL ones. The Swindon built Warships were class 42. There were enough difference between them to warrant separate classes.

This applies in pretty much every organisation - the other team/site/business unit is always full of morons who don't know what they are doing.

Maybe I'm worry about my soldering bits more that I should do.

Some more progress. The body is complete, apart from the cab detailing. Again no major issues, and everything fitted. The only minor annoyance was having a temperature controlled iron, and having to continually swap bits/temperature when soldering up the buffer beams (low melt with one bit for whitemetal, normal solder with another bit for brass. The basic chassis is also soldered up. Cutting out the half etched hornblock holes (after assembling the chassis and setting the compensation beam) was a bit tricky with a piecing saw and a tiny chassis, but I got there. Next step is to do the rods, which being a critical to get right first time job can wait until I'm slightly more awake (having drive to Derbyshire to visit the tram museum, having a few days off and it being the only railway type attraction open today).