James

No, in triple grey with snow ploughs

Looks like a well equiped workshop in the background.

I'm afraid on some lines staff act like the public are merely getting in the way of them enjoying themselves! I've seen plenty of volunteers behaving in a rather unprofessional way. Not all railways are like this (the GCR impressed me with how they ran things on the engineering side of things) but they do every railway some damage as a result. Maybe, but try going into prepare a steam engine at 6.00am on a wet, cold dark morning or relaying track in the rain or snow. Running a heritage line is a buisiness and the customer expects it to be right! Turning up because you are rostered is not always a bundle of laughs but it does show considerable commitment by those of us "playing trains" on Heritage Railways. ... and yes at the end of the day we do enjoy it! The other one must be the KWVR? I hope that weekend goes well - always looks like an interesting project. But at the EVR, they do strike me as rather different from many heritage sites - http://www.mytesttrack.com and its operations show the railway runs professionally as a business. I doubt they'd have all those clients if this wasn't the case!

Looking at layouts at Pontefract today made me think of one less obvious cliche - signallers standing outside their boxes.

This looks rather interesting OLHE and industrial railways on the same layout - not a common choice and the better for it I think!

I also think that to be convincing it requires long turnouts - with typical model-sized pointwork it can look rather toy like.

I think it reflects, certainly over the last fifteen years or so, the age of the modellers building them. In my dad's case, that's the era he remembers! And for me (as well as my pre-group interests) its just interesting with so much variety. North Shields - end of!

I'm sure there was a Walrus on site - there are Whales still in Dutch colours. The PGAs are stored at Frodingham, or at least where last year. I'm confused by this...

What livery is it carrying?

The Teeside tanks are huge! The GrantRail lads from Scunthorpe often went to Teeside to assist with things like renewals and derailments - when I first went to Scunthorpe and commented on the size od the torpedos there, one just said I should see them at Redcar "right big B******s them!" In fact everything seems bigger there - the blast furnace in the photo must tower over the four queens!

I think they had BR build plates - well one did... Many wagons on the site had long lost their build plates. The scrap wagons are, I think, on old BR Iron Ore tippler wagon underframes and on some of them you can see where the plate was. It's odd, because they're incredibly hard to remove! The Rustons are long gone - they were stored before diposal at Frodingham depot some years ago. I think one may have been preserved. Found this rather intersting photo of one - Clicky There's some interesting stuff on that site too! With plurals like these I always think about Alan Partridge 'Lexus' and and 'Lexi'!

A couple of Grants' Walruses (or Walrusi?) are now used at Scunthorpe steelworks on p-way duties there.

Mick's great! His archives are seemingly endless and he is very generous with it too And please do document this current stage - as a local I find the project very interesting!

That's superb! Thank you for posting that

Just had a good read through this thread - some lovely stuff in it! It also shows an area which, I suspect, many enthusiast know very little about. The use of the EFE OB buses on layouts is a prime example! And the large personel carriers seem a world away from the Transit type crewbuses I'm used! And while I'm here, are there any drawings published for the Ford Cargo based crew buses? I remember them from when I was younger and I'd love to have one for the early nineties layout I'm planning.

That looks rather nice! But on the narrow gauge track it looks like it's on a miniautre railway!

I think thats changed now - the industrial locations I have visited with work have tended to be quite tight on security - much like a lot of companies and sites. Tata (Corus), for example have banned photography at Scunthorpe. On the tours you're only supposed to take photos of the AFRPS stock. But you can guess how I found out about this rule! But I think if you make contact with the company there are still chances to get in.

Brilliant post!!! Very interesting and, I suspect, a period not covered by many photographers.

And he gave the LMS Society a whole issue! Which I think show's that he was well aware of the wide range interests in the hobby.

Very nice details to include I like to see things like this - many non-railway people wouldn't even think to include them!

Very impressed by that - sounds better than a lot of DCC steam sound chips I've heard!

I can see where the comments have come from! It's not just what others think but it's not wanting to be lumped in with a lot of generic things. There are some crap depot style layouts out there! And sadly some decent ones will be grouped in with them - Hanging Hill is one of the best with proper operation but I bet many people have just dismessed it without ever really seeing how good it is. Another reason for me is that the loco requirement would be rather a lot of time to commit - all the locos would need to be 'built' - 'built' not perhaps in the most conventional way but similar to my recent Class 31 thread. So I may revisit the idea, but it would be easier with a larger selection of stock. In the meantime I have another D&E project which should hopefully be a little different from the norm

I have to say this put me off a depot layout. On one version of RMweb I said it was my intention to have a layout which would have been part of a laqrge depot. In Modelling the British Rail Era there's a rather nice plan for one end of an HST shed which is the only way you could convincingly model such a large area. For me, night time visits to depots like Immingham and other depots (sometimes in daylight!) would provide a lot of inspiration for layouts! However the popularity of MPD layouts puts me off as I don't want to spend a lot of time building an exhibtion layout to be just dismissed as just a another depot layout...

Having looked at these, I think you be better with Exactoscale Fastrack in 00 - the appearance for concrete sleepered track would be much better. The turnouts look acceptable but overall Fastrack would offer far more for plain line.

And the CAD image looks rather nice I think it deserves to be successful!