Ian Simpson

"Great British Railways". Why do I get the feeling that might not live up to its name? (Except geographically of course. Well, as long as Scotland stays in the Union.)

I don't think it's as highbrow as that:

I'd suggest starting here. Mr B comes in at 8.22. (But you'll have to wait to 8.58 for the grasping lawyer.)

I think the secret of buying a house on a 1905 layout is to shrink yourself down to 1/76, but to keep your gold sovereign at its existing size. Warning: you should always take independent financial advice before reducing yourself to OO/HO scale to buy a cardboard house.

Update: And So The Cuts Begin P.J. O'Rourke once recommended his Circumcision Principle to Federal budget-setters - that you can shave 10% off anything. Austerity-minded politicians should note this is generally agreed to be an procedure that should only be performed once. In the case of Middenshire, the traumatic cut came because I realised a lot of bookcases and wall units, at least the secondhand ones I tend to buy, have shelves around 30 inches long. The Tinories layout was 32 inches long until this morning, but reducing the fiddle yard cartridges from 11 to 10 inches (which will still - just - take two coach trains) and removing the short length of track between the platform throat and the fiddle yard means I can reduce the length to 29.5 inches. So Middenshire really is a bookshelf layout now: Now I just have to get rid of two-and-a-half feet of books ... (Edit: and clean the garden table!)

But they've got hobbits!

My school had a model railway club back in the 1970s. One day the chemistry teacher looked in, gave our 00 layout a brief once-over and asked why the main line seemed to have been diverted to avoid a telegraph pole. Forty-five years later I'm still trying to think of a plausible response.

Looking very good - and the grime and decay can only improve it! BTW I gather the British 1:87 Scale Society have just produced a new issue of Satellite, their newsletter - the first one in several years. Ken Clark says the PDF copy is on the Society's Io group. Edit: if anyone doesn't want to join the Society (membership is free), I can send them a PDF of the newsletter on request.

There's a Google Books scan of several years of Railway Returns from the 1880s here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Railway_Returns_for_England_and_Wales_Sc/Fh8PAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Railway+Returns+Capital&pg=RA7-PA21&printsec=frontcover You can download it as a PDF file by clicking on the three dots on the right of the bar at the top of the page: The Returns are mainly interested in the financial and safety aspects of the railways, and they concentrate on mileage and receipts rather than details of the rolling stock. So for 1884, the main goods info for the Midland is simply: Table 2 "Traffic etc" Goods traffic (p 54) - Minerals 14,846,106 tons - General merchandise 9,620,185 tons Gross receipts (p 55) - Merchandise £2,760,025 - Livestock £85,638 - Minerals £2,165,835 Table 3 "Working expenditure etc" Working expenditure (p 72) - Repairs and renewal of coaches & wagons £304,368 - Compensation for damage & loss of goods £23,785 Rolling stock (p 73) - Waggons of all kinds 75,008

The British Library may help, when it's open again: I'm hoping to get up to London when we reach the next stage of the CV-19 road map, and if there's a particular company and/or years I'll be glad to have a look. BL membership is free, and I do recommend it as a great resource for historical research! It may not have the company minutes and reports of the individual companies, as the NA does, but it does have the books, articles and newspapers where they were reported and discussed.

Thanks, 33C, that sounds an excellent idea. Or perhaps those little radio-controlled cars that appear just before Christmas! I'll have to experiment. I think it would be possible to use short lengths of brass tube to deal with any differences in axle thickness. Hopefully a dropper resistor and the larger wheels would get the speed down from Formula 1 speeds to shunting-friendly ones!

Thanks, Richard. I've found the DeWitt Clinton barrels are separate items held in place with (rather tight) pins, not an integral part of the tender chassis. All that's needed is a pair of pliers and the brutal determination of a medieval dentist. Oh, and nerves of steel will help as well. When I did this, I was gripping the wheels so tightly that they started to come off their axles - which is how I discovered they are actually just pushed onto the axles in the first place. And that leads on rather nicely to @33C's clever suggestion ... Edit: thinking about it, a sharp blade across the base of the barrels might deal with any paint that is helping to hold them in place?

Many congratulations (although very well deserved, too!). I'm so pleased for you. I must admit I thought the Centre had closed, so I'm also happy to hear I was wrong. I'd better get on that No 12 bus to Eastbourne ...

Thanks, Richard, that's a really useful find! Perhaps I should add that the small wagon turntable at the end of my layout is a PECO 90 degree crossing from their US Code 83 range, glued onto a thin circle of plastic cut out using a compass cutter, with a drawing pin stuck underneath for the pivot.

Thanks, Douglas! The one in the portrait photo of the goods depot and fiddle yard is a GEM white metal kit. It looks great, but as it was larger than any of the actual locos it seemed a bit out of place. (It would however look great on a set of wheels!) So I've gone with the smaller version in the other photos, made from Dapol's plastic Rocket kit.

I buy most of my tools from Squires Tools of Bognor, and I've always been pleased with both the range and the quality of tools that they stock. Of course other suppliers are available; its just that Squires have the most extensive range I've seen. (Okay, I know you' said you find the variety confusing! But all of their stuff seems to be robust and well-made.)

Many thanks, Mikkel! That battery is the controller: Because it's such a short run from fiddle yard to terminus (about half a metre) the locos don't really get a chance to speed up, and so there's no speed control. I've found a dropper resistor of 45 to 60 Ohms produces the slowest running speed with the Norris locos, although it took some trial-and-error to find this out and it did rather dent my faith in Ohm's Law:

Many thanks, Chris. I haven't forgotten your kind offer to cast a set of Brighton seafront railings (just glimpsed on the right hand side of that last photo). If the offer still stands, I'll send you the dimensions and some photos in a few days. Hope you're well and having a good Easter.

As locos grew more powerful and trains grew longer, most early railways quickly outgrew their original terminus stations. Those stations that couldn't be expanded tended to be down-graded to good depots as new stations were built nearby. So it's no surprise that the Grand Middenshire Trunk is also building itself a new branch terminus: The baseboard is a piece of 6 mm MDF, labouriously cut to size using a Stanley knife and steel rule, with thin wood bracing beneath due of the horror stories I've heard about MDF sagging under its own weight. The size is 32 inches x 6 inches, which is just narrow enough to use long coffee stirrers to operate the points and signals. These rods lie on top of the baseboard, but are effectively "buried" in the layer of cork sheet glued between the baseboard and the track. Track is PECO Code 75 Streamline with electrofrog points. Despite the mishmash of wiring at the back of the baseboard (below), the whole station is a single electric section with insulated fish plates protecting facing points from short circuits and pre-soldered fish plates providing power at the rear ("toe"?) of every point. This means I can isolate the two outside sidings just by setting the point blades towards the central track. The board includes a fiddleyard (below), which is simply a single cartridge that slides into place and has power supplied by a couple of crocodile clips. The cartridges are just strips of thick plasticard of the same thickness as the cork underlay. The biggest scenic challenge is how to disguise this unrailwaylike feature. To do this I've built a modest goods depot to sit in front of the fiddle yard. The centrepiece is made from a Bilteezi LSWR goods depot, scanned and shrunk to 3.5 mm scale and chopped about in a photo-editing programme (although the traditional sharp blade on a printed sheet of card would work as well). I added some Langley architectural mouldings and strips of plasticard to give the facade a bit of depth, and made a plasticard tiled roof that would jut partly over the cartridge. The wall to the right (which is a bit bland, and needs something like a large advert to break it up) is just a sheet of plastic card with 3 mm scale brickwork. Oh, and as if one uncompleted layout wasn't enough, there's also the 00/HOn9 Lough Down and Long Covid Light Railway quayside scene to be built: Those coaches are actually 3D prints of Victorian EMUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volk's_Electric_Railway Brighton's Volk's Electric Railway is of course famous for its customer care and good public relations:

Those are wonderful models, Mike, and the tutorials on designing the prints are very useful as well!

Definitely a good idea, happy to help out! Ian

My quick fix for the outside frames. I added 4 mm wide strips of 0.0100" plasticard to the sides of the loco to make the frames: Then added shorter vertical strips of the same card to represent the axleboxes: Followed by an undercoat of Humbrol enamel paint. Perhaps I'll put another horizontal strip over the top of those vertical ones: But at the moment I've no idea where I've put my expletive-inserted spear fencing! While I'm looking for it, here's a photo of Nigel's Bachmann John Bull conversion with railings made from the fence:

Many thanks, Mikkel. Once I've done it, I'll post an update.

A Bury 2-2-0 for me, I think! And who knows what Rapido will give us at noon on April Fool's Day :

The iconic British locomotive design (and the most common one) in the early 1840s was the 2-2-2 inside-cylinder tender loco. Each builder had their own unique features, but the general outline didn't vary too much across UK companies. This post gives some suggestions on ways to use the Dapol (ex-Airfix) Rocket kit to produce a generic single. The model was built by Nigel Hill, who unfortunately isn't on RMWeb. There's still some work needed, especially fitting outside frames and handrails around the footplate: Nigel used 0.0040 inch thick styrene sheet to make the chassis, using the hornblocks (I think that's what they are called) from the Dapol kit to hold the axles in place. A strip of stiff card around 60 mm by 14 mm wide would be suitable for the main chassis, although Nigel's chassis was a bit wider, which meant he had to cut out notches for the wheels. Hopefully the photo below shows the arrangement for the axles: the middle blocks are glued flush with the top side of the sheet (he cut additional notches in the chassis strip to allow this), while the blocks that take the carrying wheels are glued to a couple of pieces of 0.0040" card between the carrying wheels' axle blocks and the chassis strip to get the right height: He used the Dapol Rocket drivers and tender wheels for the chassis, although in the photos I've replaced the carrying wheels with Gibson wheel sets (and may replace the drivers as well) to make the wheels more free-running. The loco is powered from the tender by a Bachmann deWitt Clinton tender drive unit with the Rocket tender sides fixed to it. One easy tweak to the driving wheels is to trim out the little piece of plastic that holds the crank pin, as there won't be a coupling rod: Nigel then used a piece of planked plastic card to build an upper layer that acts as the footplate, adding splashers made from strips of thinner plasticard. He didn't get around to fitting outside frames, and I haven't done this yet myself. I think I might be able to use strips of plasticard for the outside frames (edit: now described in the comments thread below, at post 5), and cut-down pieces of Ratio GWR-style "spear" fencing for the rails around the footplate. The boiler comes from the Rocket kit, but Nigel built his own smokebox and firebox from plasticard. Alternatively the Dapol firebox can be trimmed from the Rocket's boiler (it's moulded onto the boiler parts, but sits too low for an 1840s design) and then glued back on at the right height. I used a Dapol kit butchered in this way to make the stationery engine below: