Titan

And he has not even added the correct bodyside grills (in addition to the radiator grills) either!

I must admit that this is high on my wish list, as until the Class 85, I have at least one example of the available RTR electrics for my 1970's ish blue era layout. But my budget only stretches to cheap second hand locos so I may have to wait awhile... As an aside I have decided that my catenary should be relatively easy to remove, as this has two advantages: 1. I do not have to complete everything prior to installation of the catenary, so it does not have to be the last thing done - which is just as well as if it was it might never be built! 2. It can be removed for track cleaning, maintenance etc.

Just to be clear - in the context we are discussing we are not talking about loss of contact - more of an up and down movement between masts on the model which if run fast on the typically short spans used, can give a sort of bouncing along look, which in real life does not happen. Incedentally - the contact wire on the real thing is installed with the midpoint between masts up to 30mm lower than the ends to counter for the extra 'give' ie if level contact wire the pan would rise by up to 30mm in the middle. Make the middle bit 30mm lower and in theory the pan remains level as it travels along pushing the wire up - A lot of thought goes into making it run as smooth as possible!

What jim says is very valid. In real life every effort is made to ensure that the pan runs dead level, and where a height change is required the transition is as smooth as possible. Although in practice the pan can bounce slightly, we are talking just a feww mm in real life which would be imperceptable on the model. Here is an interesting video of a pendolino pan at speed, shows how the wire sweeps from side to side, changing from one wire to another, up and down for bridges etc.

Surely it ought to have the buffers removed and knuckles fitted or it would not be much use? (but it does look good!!!)

More likely being shunted around sharp curves that does it - the cone angle on the wheels only works on moderate curvature, so on tight curves one wheel on each axle will be forced to slip on the rail. If on one axle the left wheel slips and on the other the right wheel slips, it will only take a couple of shunts before all the wheels are completely out of sync.

Doubt very much that it was the last model made at York - The last thing they built was the class 365 networkers, and I would expect that there was a model of that too, as well as some of the things they made in between!

Now, madness or not, gave me a laugh! http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/100-GENUINE-STERLING-SILVER-925-VINTAGE-LAWNMOWER-CHARM-FREE-GIFT-BAG-/170813057832?pt=UK_Jewellery_Watches_FineJewellery_CA&hash=item27c5406b28

It could have an automatic winder - a weight inside the watch which swings around as you move your hand and winds the spring - Then it only needs winding up if you leave it on a shelf for a day or two..

I suspect that it is in fact the circuit breaker rather than an insulator as such, so its probably about right.

Undated coins are a major cock up and embarrassment for the mint - I understand that it only ever happened once before in the royal mints entire history. Because of the embarrassment, the mint was offering £50 per undated coin that was returned - maybe that offer still stands hence the ebay price hovering around the £50 mark? At the time it hit the press and got a lot of publicity undated 20p coins were selling on ebay at up to £500!!! And if you were a shop that happened to have a bag of them from the bank for your change...

Wrong! It is not a petrol engine, its is a glo/nitro engine. It has no spark, and relies on compression assisted by a glow plug to fire, so calling it 'petrol electric' is in fact much much more inaccurate than calling it 'live diesel' !!!!

Ooo - new take - how to get lynched on this thread!

Funny you should mention that - years ago I helped run a vintage Hornby layout, and someone managed to fuse the ring main - no problem, we just swapped the electric locos for clockwork and kept going!!! When one of the stewards desperately trying to rectify the fault glanced at us he was heard to comment 'look they've got power they're still running' the smugness turned to hysterics!!! We were glad when the electrics came back on - with two circuits and two engines per circuit - one being wound whilst the other ran - after about 15 mins of constant winding my hands were knackered - but we did succeed in always having a train running - which is more than could be said for some of the other railways even when the power was on! For those who have never tried running an intensive service with O gauge clockwork, you really do not know what fun you are missing!!

Close - I don't think free listings apply to buy it now, but he has already sold several at the normal price of £5.99, before running out of stock and jacking the price up to stop people buying. When he gets more in he will lower the price back to normal - saves him having to relist. Although in this case it looks like he is not due to get more stock for a while since he has now withdrawn the listing due to non-availability. It does make me wonder though - the number of times this perfectly logical practice has been reported in this thread and explained and yet people still highlight it as madness...

Well they are much better suited to hauling trains...

Triang/Hornby 31, 37, 47, dublo/wrenn class 20 and so on, so there were plenty of other diesels out there. The jouef 40 was sufficiently overwide to be immediately obvious and give the nose a very squashed looking appearance - no need to get the micrometer out on this one!

Because e***n kept bidding until he was the highest bidder. If e***b had not put on his £185 bid in on the 13th, then e***n would have been highest bidder at £44.18 and stopped bidding. Then if e***b used a sniper to place his £185 bid at three seconds or thereabouts before the auction finished, he would have got it at £46.18, as e***n would not have had time to place another bid, let alone the 31 that pushed it up to £190...

And if e****b had used sniping sofware he would have won it for £46.18. Bidiots - great for sellers, bad for those who do not snipe...

Try #2611

Common practice - you run out of stock, but rather than cancelling the ad and then paying again for a new one, you just up the price to something no one is going to pay, and adjust it back again when you have stock.

Scale 20 tons = 20 / (48 *48*48) (length*width*height, you should be scaling in 3 dimensions, not one!) = 0.0001808 tons, or about 180 grammes in real weight...

The Baby Deltic was a design disaster from the start. I believe that it arose due to EE not having an power unit in the type two, or type B power range as I think it was at the time, the current range having 125 bhp per cylinder, giving 500bhp, 1,000bhp, 2,000bhp, and presumably 1,500bhp for a V12 version if there was one. After the success of DP1, EE was keen to promote further use of the deltic engine, and being asked to provide 10 type B locomotives for evaluation under the pilot scheme decided that it was a good opportunity to demonstrate the 9 cylinder 1,100bhp turbocharged Deltic unit. However, the tiny deltic engine weighed about as much as an empty crisp packet compared to a conventional engine, so EE deliberately beefed up the superstructure to give added weight to compensate. Embarrassingly they got their sums wrong, and consdiderably over did it! The result was that it was several tons overweight and completely unacceptable to BR. The Baby Deltic had to go on a serious Diet. The most obvious was all the holes drilled in the bogies, particularly the equalizing beams and headstocks. However there was an awful lot of weight to shed and that was just a small part of it. Other measures included replacing the buffers with lighter oleo units, replacing auxilliary equipment with smaller units, replacing steel roof panels with aluminium, steel electrical control cabinet doors replaced with aluminium, and ripping up the engine room floor and replacing with thinner steel. All this effort knocked a couple of tons off, but it was still overweight. EE managed to persuade BR to weigh it with 2/3 fuel and sand rather than the usual full tanks, and without the gangway equipment (of course the doors wre left on, it would have been a bit draughty otherwise!). It was then grudgingly accepted, although restricted from some of the routes BR wanted to use it on. So EE had created a loco with all of the disadvanteges of a high speed highly stressed engine, with all the disadvantages of a conventional loco, and having the advantages of neither! But that alone was not enough to make it the truely poor loco it was. For some reason, EE decided that all of the auxilliary equipment should be mechanically driven from the engine, rather than having separate electric motors as was the case in most other locos. Thus there was a drive shaft from the engine to a gearbox with several outputs. One vertically up to drive the radiator fan, and others for traction motor blower, exhauster, compressor etc. It was this area that contributed towards the unreliabilty. One example was that it was found that the natural frequency of this drive shaft was within the operating speed range of the engine. It would thus vibrate excessively causing failure. When it broke the flailing shaft would take out all the nearby cooling pipes. The highly stressed engine would then overheat so rapidly that it would boil and sieze up before the coolent level in the header tank fell to the minimum mark which would trip the automatic engine shutdown. Similarly the high engine temp would not trip since there was no coolent for it to measure the temperature of! It was this reason that BR insisted on the fitting of coolent flow switches to class 55, so that the engine was shut down as soon as cooling ability was was lost. This was one of the areas which the refurbishment program concentrated on, and the results were that afterwards they were much better, although still a little behind other diesel types, and of course still saddled with the high maintenance requirements of a deltic engine. As a side note, during the refurbishment one of the Baby Deltics was selected for a test bed for a new type of four stroke high speed diesel engine from English Electric. The conversion work was almost complete, with new engine mountings, relocation of equipment and some external changes to grilles IIRC. The engine was just days away from being installed when the project was cancelled. The loco was then refitted with the deltic engine but a lot of the other modifications including those to the grilles were not reversed. I cannot remember the number of the loco concerned, but I think as a result it was the last loco to be refurbished. It was speculated that had the project continued, it may well have produced a better alternative to the paxman valenta for use in the HST. Now, I am almost willing to bet that if this loco is produced in model form the subtle differences won't be depicted! Most of the above is recalling what I have read from Brian Webbs 'Deltic locomotives of British Rail', a book which I would consider essential reading if you are serious about these little locos.

google auctionstealer, its the one I use, it is free for up to 3 snipes a week, or you can pay a small fee for unlimited snipes and other useful features. It has saved me considerable amounts of money over the years!

Would it be that the axleboxes are not in line with the wheel centres? ie the whole bogie frame seems to be too low?