Brassey

Somewhat late but here is my outside frame mink. This was built in the 80's and the only wagon I finished to this level with decals. It has since been updated with grease axleboxes and couplings but I will have to live with the solebars. The roof has come loose and the brake levers are broken off. I have no idea where the buffers came from but they are solid brass.

Hi Phillip Thanks for asking. My track is all hand built; 1mm ply sleepers with bullhead rail soldered to brass rivets every 5 or 6 sleepers with the rest held in place glued to C&L Finescale chairs with Butatone. Sleepers are all individually stuck to the plan directly onto the baseboard. I chose to solder because I did not think that the glue would hold the curve whilst it dried. The rail stop is an LNWR model from I think Lanarkshire Model Railways that I bought two off at a show. The other will go in the yard at the other end of the layout.

I too printed the Templot plan out full size and then mounted this on 6mm ply templates: These were used to mark out and build the baseboards, planning to avoid point work over joints: The original LNWR spec for maximum cant was 6"; =2mm in 4mm! I achieved this by raising the roadbed rather than the track:

If you are going to do that you might need an LNWR break van to go with it. London Road Models do one. Also the Ratio LMS opens are LNWR vehicles so some of those would make a nice train. You could throw in some Slater's MR kits too for a good pre-grouping set up.

Hi Mikkel, Yes. The intention is for the up local goods loco to be Dean Goods number 2439 which, for some reason according to RCTS, got an S4 round top boiler as late as July 1912 and was allocated to Hereford! So I have an excuse to do it in almost fresh from the works finish. I am saving a Martin Finney kit for this one. I have a few options for the down local goods which might be another Dean or a tank in the short term but needs to be a Shrewsbury based loco. So it might be an Armstrong or a Beyer Goods! And yes, one 517 is currently in the paint shop and it's train is under construction. More on this in due course. Here she is is action: So far all the testing work on the layout has been done by my trusty Wills 1854 Pannier Tank which I built in the 80's. It has had a new Alan Gibson chassis and Mashima but still has it's Ultrascale wheels that at the time were sold by the EMGS: Since this shot, as a reward for all it's hard work, it now has buffers, brakes and handrails! One day I will finish it (I already have cab side plates). So tank engines do work over the point work into the yard but getting a tender to reverse with it's train is another matter. The Scalefour Society forum has a new thread on updated point work building and I can now tell from this how and where I need to fine-tune my track work. All I need to do this is the time to dismantle the layout which is currently set up in a bedroom in order to be able to work on it from both sides. In the meantime I want to complete some of the trains to thoroughly test the track work before I start ballasting. Watch this space! Edit to add video

Despite my good intentions of building things straight from the box, I just can't stop myself from kit bashing. So in parallel to building an LNWR Coal Engine, I am working on Coal Tanks as the plumbing is the same. Also the painting and lining should be relatively easier before I paint and line the Coal Engine. This started out as a K's whitemetal kit but uses a London Road chassis. I have already made one chassis that works well and is my slowest runner which is probably down to the Mashima 1424 motor and High Level gearbox which I think is 50:1 coupled with the weight of the whitemetal body. However, in my enthusiasm and haste, I failed to paint the wheels before fitting. I need a couple more Coal Tanks so I started building another chassis before finishing this body. I'll decide later which chassis will be on which loco. So I had to drill the crankpin holes on another 6 x H spoke A Gibson wheels in addition to those for the Coal Engine; a glutton for punishment: As is my current practice, I extended the frames at the front and I replaced the frame spacers with Comet's P4 version. What I failed to do was measure these first. The standard for P4 is 15mm. However the Comet are slightly under. In addition, the London Road frames have a slot half etched that locates the spacers. This further reduces the width between the frames and compounds a problem to the extent that the motor I wanted to use (a Sagami which is 14.5mm wide) would not fit. So on the next chassis I made my own spacers to a wider width. The moral to this is to always check all the measurements an never assume something is correct. A lot of these items were created in the pre CAD days and so are not as dimensionally correct; in P4 some of this makes a difference.

Well it’s two years since Darren Ray of this Parish and he of Handcross fame very kindly measured and drew for me the station building and bridge at Berrington and Eye. And I have done almost nothing with them! So his success with his layout has shamed me into getting my finger out and doing some progress on my layout. Readers will note that things have stalled whilst I have tried to get the track working properly. For the past two summers I have taken a week off to work on the track and, although things have moved in one direction or another by fractions of a millimetre, there is visually not much difference. So no pics have been uploaded. The main challenge is to get the up and down trailing entries to the yard working without derailment. As was common in pre-grouping days, entries into yards off a main line were always trailing for safety. The challenge is to get a goods train to reverse across these formations which is one of the most difficult movements on a model railway. As previously stated, there were only 4 local goods trains timetabled; 2 in each direction. On closer examination, the LNWR Down local goods was CR (Call as Required). The LNWR timetables don’t give arrive and departure times but looking at the times from the previous and following stations, no time was allowed for shunting at Berrington and Eye for these trains anyway. The GWR local goods however, have arrival and departure times shown and were both allowed 10 minutes at Berrington and Eye so these would have done the shunting if any. So that’s 2 trains out of 90 per weekday going through the station that would have entered the yard! So my agonising over the point work only effects less than 2% of the trains. To show that I have not been totally idle on the layout side of things though, I’ve overlaid the station building footprint drawing over the O/S map template and this shows how accurate the whole plan is. Bearing in mind that I am literally building the layout onto a blow-up of an O/S map, this is quite reassuring. I even started to make a mock-up of the building in card from the fantastic drawing to see how it fits height wise:

Ian Kirk is on this forum and may well still have the master

The Malcolm Mitchell 4mm offering is not exclusively pre-grouping e.g. Grange, Manor, Castle, King...all post-grouping. I have read elsewhere that David Geen stated the 517 was the biggest seller by far. That now has competition from a cast kit. I bought a 517 as soon as I knew DG was retiring.

There was a coal merchant at Church Stretton called Hyslop. Wagons might have been seen on the Swansea route

This is sat abandoned somewhere in Scotland: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cessna152towser/2708240708 Also: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/93378-the-lilleshall-company-a-little-known-industrial-railway/page-2

Ratio make LNWR 50' Arc roof corridor stock in plastic kit format and are relatively easy to put together. The challenge that you have already alluded to is the livery. Jol Wilkinson penned an article in MRJ a few years back now on reproducing the LNWR livery on coach kits Current suppliers of LNWR brass coach kits are London Road Models and Stevensons Carriages. Worsley Works do some too. And Wizard/51L have a few also. No connection to any beyond being a customer of every one. The chances of any RTR stock is very slim

I've seen Ratio at the York Easter show but whether they have any spare parts there I would not know

The iron you have may be designed for electrically boards but is too powerful in terms of wattage for what you intend to do. It gets too hot which is why it turns solder to blobs instantly. The pointy tip does not help either. For track work it may well melt chairs before soldering anything. I produced all my track and wiring with an 18w Antex iron. The track is soldered to brass rivets every five or six sleepers so I've had quite a lot of practice. You can pick the solder up with the bit and take it to the job which sometimes helps. The tip is not pointed nor is it a chisel but still quite thin. I clean track with a fibre glass pencil and use Carr's orange label flux for track and electrics as it is non corrosive and does not need serious cleaning up afterwards. I use ordinary multicore solder which also contains flux and has also proved quite clean. I pick the solder up off of a clean piece of glass having previously wiped it on a solder sponge (the bit that is; which must cool it slightly). A 25w watt iron (I have one too) gets too hot and cracks the glass. How do I know? I have an Antex temperature controlled iron for whitemetal with Yellow Label flux. It has the same tip as the 18W. And for everything else, i.e. etched kits, 145 solder and Green label flux again with the 18w iron. All this was recommended in Iain Rice's books on track and loco building and it works for me too. The 25W is now reserved for emergency use as I am now onto my second 18W so they do not last forever. So it's another new iron I'm afraid and at slightly more expensive. PS: I do most of my soldering onto glass which is a lot cleaner than the workbench. I picked this up from Jol Wilkinson's instructions for making London Road Models LNWR kits.

Well I must correct myself as, having actually consulted a timetable, there were trains that ran between Pontrilas and Ledbury. There were a few overnight and early morning freights from Pontypool Road and at least one Birmingham Passenger from South Wales, although it looks as though this didn't actually stop at Pontrilas or Ledbury: This is from the Summer 1936 WTT. There are probably more trains (including down trains) but it is late and there's 120 pages of timetable to go through to find them! Although it is academic to this exercise, the freights did not go through Hereford Barrs Court but Barton and onto the Worcester line via Shelwick Junction. Hereford had quite a complex of lines including the Brecon Curve which would have allowed an up train from Pontrilas to run onto Gloucester without needing to reverse at Barrs Court. This is best explained by a map but all the maps I have are in books and are probably copyright. My interest is in the Shrewsbury to Hereford line but this thread has made me finally drag my head through what happened south of Hereford. So thanks for that. If I find a map I will put it up here. PS: the layout at 72 does reflect the correct direction of traffic for this way of working

IIrC, very little traffic, if any, ran directly between Pontrilas and Ledbury. Both were linked via Hereford.

Superb as usual Jol. Might catch London Road at easter. What are the corridor connections please? peter

Mikkel, did you keep the front sand boxes? Brassmasters now sell the Finney ones and lots of other bits too. See their website. Peter

Pontrilas signalling diagram is here: https://www.s-r-s.org.uk/html/gwt/S2252.htm Ledbury is here: https://www.s-r-s.org.uk/html/gws/S2620.htm Here's a flavour of the carriage stock but not sure which period you are modelling: NB: X = corridor

I was responding to a question whether the cab shape was correct and, like the poster, could not be bothered dragging myself through 68 pages. The other point, subtly made, is that in the time it's taking for this thread to reach 68 69 pages and everyone waiting for the Oxford releases, I've built two Dean Goods out of spare bits from Finney and Mallard kits with enough left over for another 2. So if you want a Dean Goods with all the elements correct, wide plate versus narrow etc; then build a kit, it has it all covered.

I have some old Precision paints pre 1928 GWR green that, being a skinflint, I am loathed to throw and would rather use. I exchanged emails with Mr. Phoenix-Precision some while ago who assured me that the paint would be perfectly usable as long as the tins weren't rusty, though they would need a lot of stirring! There is no sign of rust externally, as far as I remember, I have never opened these. In Ian Rathbone's video he uses Precision green to airbrush and when he opened the tin the contents were black but he said no problem because the green pigment settles to the bottom and stirring would sort this. The same happened on opening my tin. I stirred and thinned with white spirit, as is common, and airbrushed onto a loco body. Towards the end I noticed a sheen appearing in the spray cup and some of this transferred to the model with a coppering effect. On cleaning up I noticed that the mixed paint in my mixing bottle now had a red layer. Now that the loco has had time to dry, the finish is good but the colour is virtually black! It occurred to me that 1970's paint may not be compatible with modern thinners so before another coat, I tried some experiments. I let some of the paint down with Humbrol enamel thinner and another with Pure Turpentine. Here are the results in the pots: The enamel thinned one on the left has completely broken down and the colour changed from green to reddish brown. On the right, that thinned with Pure Turpentine has, thus far, remained true to the original green. Does anyone have an explanation for this? I have searched the forum for clues.

Here is the cab from my as yet unfinished early DG which uses some spare Martin Finney sides. One would assume that MF got this shape right: To quote the Martin Finney instructions: "The cabsides of the first sixty engines had a large sweeping cut-out whereas the later engines had a standard two arc opening. With the fitting of Belpaire fireboxes the cabs were raised to allow the spectacle windows to be refitted..."

Hi Mikkel Note also that the earlier DG no. 2397 in http://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrls836.htm has a straight reversing lever rather than the hockey stick shape of later DG's. 2309 would have had this too

Does the range include the 4 wheel GWR coach chassis?

Oops missed out the 44. but I knew there was a 67 in there! Memory playing tricks. I'll shut up from know on.