Chris M

You need something for testing. I can't use that excuse

And some water based thinners, some sleeper grime paint. No new locos though even though only having one Dapol class 50 is something of a hardship and the special edition BR blue large logo class 66 that Cheltenham Model Centre are selling for £99 looks rather nice.....

If you still have a cheque book you can buy advance tickets for the NEC show without any booking fees from Warley club. You have to provide an SAE though. You can even get the guide posted to you a few weeks before the show if you pay the postage. Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to get hold of some advance tickets to sell at GETS - life is sooooo busy even though I'm retired. Anyway looking forward to running trains for a couple of days. Just waiting for my brother to turn up so we can stuff the layout into the car and then off we go! I'm definitely not going to buy anything at the show, well probably not, well maybe not....I could do with a new xuron if nothing else. Despite clear warnings we all find out that you mustn't use them on steel the hard way.

So far as I am aware there aren't any Warley associated layouts at Taunton this year so there won't be any advance tickets for sale there.

Historical film of the last train

Then came the inevitable closure of the line. Here are some photos of the very last train to run along the branch.

The once proud independent brewery was sold to a big international. Shortly after the brewery was closed and demolished. The branch line lost its last freight traffic which did not auger well for the future.

Things are going downhill at Ridhacre. The parcels depot has been closed and become overgrown

Warley club's new N gauge layout Hawes Junction will be at the show. It was there last year but a lot of detail has been added since then. The station area has the correct track work and is scale length but the sidings and the viaduct have been shortened a little. Most of the scenic work was done by Ed Purcell and Bill Greatbatch although others have also put in many hours. Club member Same has spent the last two and a half years of club nights ballasting the track singlehandedly - she deserves a medal. Most of the stock at the exhibition will be Bill's. All are weathered and many have details added. There might even be an Ivatt 4MT (flying pig) running - it started life as a Farish standard 4 2-6-0 and Bill has done an excellent conversion. At a more basic level I sneaked my HST onto the layout a coupe of weeks ago for a run. The correct signals for the location, which have the ability to work, will be added before the show. At the exhibition it will be running stock that is correct for the Settle & Carlisle line in the 1950s, no HSTs allowed!

I don't know how many GMRC layouts will be there as I am not involved in the planning for the show. I do know that space was planned for the winning GMRC layout right at the beginning this year. With over 90 layouts attending the show there are inevitably some drop outs due to illness, changed circumstances etc during the six months before the show. These spaces are filled by other layouts so fitting in another GMRC layout will often but not always be possible. Agreed, exhibitors are strangely quiet on hear this year.

I don't think I could bring myself to paint coaches light blue and yellow even if that is accurate. I have got a colour photo from the late sixities/early seventies where they appear to be white. They could possibly be a very very light blue but there is no yellow on them. I must say that I think chocolate & cream, which was used later in the later seventies (and is slightly after the era for my project) is more appealing. I have quite a lot of information for this N gauge project which I have not yet started. I have made a track plan though. It could be nice, all I have to do is make a good job of it.....

Just wondering if anyone has information regarding Dawlish Warren station paint scheme during the sixties and seventies. From photos it seems to have been somewhat different to what I expected. Monochrome photos taken in the fifties and sixties suggest that the buildings were not the standard chocolate & cream. The main body was just one colour, probably cream or maybe light beige, but no photos show the expected chocolate lower part of the timber building. Even the doors don't seem very dark colour. Colour photos from the late seventies show the station doors to be a light, faded, blue colour - was this the standard corporate colour for doors by then? Any help would be appreciated. I know the whole building became white by the time it was a museum in the eighties. Also, I know the camping coaches became chocolate & cream at some point in this era. Does anyone know roughly when and what was the colour before that? The previous colour seems to be an unusual one.

I wonder how long the O gauge market will remain buoyant. O gauge stock is expensive and, perhaps more importantly, takes a lot of space to store. Its good to see O RTR doing well but once buyers start to run out of storage space it could bottom out very quickly. Agreed that there are no "must haves" to come in OO. In addition there are plenty of good quality second hand models available at reasonable prices. Twenty years ago it was worth buying new models because they were so much better than the secondhand ones on sale at the time but now the recent secondhand models are just as good as the new ones. On the plus side I have heard that the Great Model Railway Challenge is doing its bit to increase interest in model railways. This TV coverage alone could provide a welcome increase in sales from new customers - but what will they want to buy? Who would be a model railway manufacturer?

This will be the penultimate show for Little Aller Junction. Current plan is for it to be dismantled next summer.

For some years I have used a Bluetooth speaker paired to my smartphone. Using my normal phone is convenient because it is always in my pocket. I pick up sounds from all sorts of places. I use the recorder on my phone, or I can use my pc to record the sound from my videos or even YouTube videos. I use the free download Audacity to record the sound . I can then use this app to edit the sound to exactly what I want. I save it as an MP3 file which I then download to my phone. Rather than use the music player it is better to use a sound player. I use soundpad. This is a good app. You can colour code the sounds, adjust the volume for each individual sound and play as many sounds as you like at the same time. All you need to buy is a Bluetooth speaker if you don't already have one. I recommend getting a reasonably good one. Soundpad looks like this.

Alf Fanthom is the correct person to be sending out such emails from Warley club.

That Lidl loo paper has to be the worst I have ever used. Certainly not fit for purpose. The Shea butter stuff is ok, but my advice to all is avoid the basic loo paper sold by Lidl at all costs. This is actually more important than getting your prostate checked when you get to a certain age, but only just.

I'm glad I had the PSA test. After plenty more scans following a highish psa it looks like I got my diagnosis just isn't time . There is no sign of the cancer spreading but it is on the edge. If I had left it any longer before having the first test it might be a different story. Hormone therapy is sort of ok but not much fun. I feel fine apart from the hot flushes and I still like to see a pretty young lady but I can't remember why. I'm now in training for radiotherapy. You have to be able to drink a pint in less than five minutes and then hold onto it for over an hour.

The owner of Helmsman is a really helpful chap. I have one of his controllers which worked well until I accidentally connected another power supply to the same track and blew the Helmsman. I said what had happened and that it was entirely my fault it had blown but Helmsman said the unit was guaranteed for life and so he repaired it for just the cost of the postage. That's what I call looking after your customers. The controller I have is solid and just does exactly what it is supposed to without any fuss.

I have pushed the body all the way home to the chassis since the above photos were taken. Oops.

I second what Robert said re Dapol. I've done a bit of work mine since I picked it up on Tuesday. As delivered. Now. Very light weathering, dominos and nameplate added. One double arrow removed.

That's my layout and I can confirm that all my Westerns are fine although I did hear there were a batch of bad wheels which got fitted on some locos. If I had a bad one I would have used one of the spare bogies that every Western comes with. I picked up my 50 yesterday. Initial impressions are very good. Very smooth runner, very good slow running straight out of the box. The layout will be at TINGS this year but I'm not sure about the class 50 - it is just a few years out of the era I am running and needs just a little weathering before running on the layout at exhibitions.

I have used the Deltang RC system on my indoor G scale layout in exactly the way described for some years. Power from a smooth supply goes to the receiver and the output from the receiver is connected to the track. Works a treat. Having played with this in N gauge all I can say is make sure the voltage into the receiver is lower than 12 volts otherwise you can blow the pcbs inside your locos. This is very useful when you have friends who aren't able to crawl under the layout to the operate from the middle. I use R C Trains for mine. https://rctrains.co.uk/index.htm

Apologies for going slightly off topic. I run a 1:29 scale PPM 50 in my garden and the run from end to end is approximately just over one mile when scaled up. As the real thing was used on the 0.8 mile Stourbridge Town branch (now run by the similar PPM60s) I am in the unusual position my model having a longer run end to end than the real thing did.