Miss Prism

Yes, and no...

Geoff Burton. His website's recently been discontinued/not-renewed, so I hope he still has the range and all is well. They're great plates, and it would be a shame to lose the range.

I accept that I can be notoriously Miss Picky at times, but I disagree, Gwiwer. My point is that, for all Hornby's pontificating about 'design-clever' and the need to cut down design time, they've spent a vast amount of time putting surface detail into the 2-BIL that is either grossly-overscale or didn't exist in the first place! Much the same thing can be said for the horrific rivets beloved by Bachmann, Dapol and Heljan around their window surrounds.

The more I look at Andy's pics in #2, the more I don't like. Those thousands of button-head rivets are just so overdone, and they must have taken hours of pointless design time to put in. They're even on the faces of the bolections! Arrgghh! This is not clever at all, it is stoopid. It looks like an old army tank. The top of the doors could do with being closer to the cantrail as well. All too late now, though, for comment.

Shouldn't some of Hornby's vehicles have the yellow stripe above the first class accomodation? 1961???

Maunsell panel 'rivets' are very subtle, but even so, I think Hornby has overdone them a bit. The real thing was more like badly done countersunks: The vertical seams forward of the drivers door seem to have been accentuated too much in the laser scanning: the real ones were far less defined: The key to the 2-BIL 'look' is the difference between the flushness of the glazing in the longlights and the angled inset of the droplight aperture, and I think Hornby could have been a lot cleverer over this aspect - the angles of the longlight and droplight glazing should be different: http://www.semgonlin...r_2bil-2108.jpg The fuseboxes look a bit bare and lacking strapping etc, and it will be interesting to see how Hornby has tackled the resistance banks and the other myriad of things in the underframe. And yes, the shoebeam is too deep, the wrong shape and lacking some fixture detail. Sure beats the Kirk kit though!

Aha! Haven't got Russell vol 2 to hand. Is that with a longitudinal or transverse vacuum cylinder? (And didn't those tenders migrate to Moguls or something like that?)

I can't recall seeing tender frames of that shape behind a 28xx, Ken.

The frame colour on Bachmann's fictional City of London (sorry, can't hotlink) seems far too bright, and redolent of the 'incorrect' bright mid-bauxite 1960 repaint of City of Truro, but Bachmann's photography always seem a bit lurid. RMweb pictures of Bachmann's City of Truro frame colour vary, but here's one of the better ones: A couple of prototype City of Truro frame colour pics: (licenced under Freefoto Creative Commons) (licenced under Freefoto Creative Commons)

Thanks very much for this, BJ. I think it sums up the dilemma gwr.org.uk has in trying to portray colours without resorting to words or terms, which are sometimes less than useful. Whilst nerds like us enjoy the academic historical speculation, all the average website punter wants is to see a on-screen colour or a range of colours to try and match to. Ideally of course, I should be insisting whenever the next 7mm masterpiece appears from the 7mm mafia on two picture versions - the 'before Welching' and the 'after Welching'...

This flickr pic is quite useful I think, if only to provide a comparison with the brighter red of the coaches: No.13 'Kissack' at Douglas, Isle of Man. by Marra Man, on Flickr

Thanks, Nick. Page duly amended. Would appreciate the old RMweb url to the lamp body insignia.

I know this topic has been discussed a number of times, but I've put up a couple of new pics on the gwr.org.uk site, including one of Stephan's delightful Dean 2-2-2, to show how interpretations of 'indian red' vary, and to compare with the very light tone used by Chris Wesson in his 3245 2-4-0 pic used to head that page. 'Indian red', in modern parlance, is probably no more than a fancy name for bauxite (itself a multitude of shades), but it's interesting to note modellers seem to have been moving toward a darker tone more in alignment with GW Way's rather vague 'purple-brown' citation. Btw, here are some colour swatches (based on Leyland L78) I posted a while ago in another thread for comparison, the last being an attempt to scale the distance a bit. Please note that the colour you are looking at will differ considerably according to whether you are looking at a CRT or an LCD screen. (The latter will appear far lighter.) All we need now is a pic of Buffalo Nick's Buffalo frame colour and the journey to the 'dark side' will be complete.

'Snooze' = Scalefour News, innit? (I have to hold up my hand as having invented the term, although it is primarily one of endearment.)

Fantastic laser cut valence, Wenlock. What was the width and space dimension you adopted for each 'plank' ('tongue'?)

Btw, Mike Smith's CSB pannier article will feature in Snooze 181 (it should have appeared in 180 a while ago, but got held up), and it's interesting to note the similarity in his frame spacer cutouts to those Nick used, although Mike managed to leave a smidgeon of frame spacer next to the frame, rather than cut them through as Nick has done. (It really doesn't matter one way or the other, in my view.)

Just discovered this entry by accident, while I was looking for something else... Anyway, regarding CK's query on why there are several plots for the 7'3" + 8'3" wheelbase, they are there primarily to show there are many possible solutions, particularly when playing around with the amount of reduction of the springrate on the middle axle. To be honest, apart from the intuitive feel everyone shares about the middle axle needing to be a little weaker than the outer two, no one really knows what this degree should be. In context though, the variations in middle axle strength shown in the plots are exceptionally small compared to previous eras of springing, where 6-coupleds were often not more than 0-4-0s with a middle axle lightly sprung or even floating around in the air somewhere. The 7'3" + 8'3" plots are also there because it became my sort of default yardstick experiment in the early days - the first plot was done before the modern spreadsheets came into existence, and was a bit of an exercise in convincing myself the mathematics would scale properly. (In those days, much beam software tended to blow a fuse if you plugged in a beam diameter less than 0.1m.) The first plot was also done a long time before the HL pannier chassis was a glimmer in Chris Gibbon's eye. 10 years ago, I think the only commonly available chassis around for the wheelbase was the old Comet one, and I had no idea where any future manufacturers would put their frame spacers, so it was a case of trusting to luck to a large extent. Later on Chris introduced his Collett Goods chassis, and of course his CSB jig, and these days I try to spot published plots to a 0.5mm increment, but it's not always possible, not that anyone should get too hung up about the first place of decimals - experience seems to indicate that to the nearest 0.5mm is good enough given the other errors in the system (arising chiefly from friction), but generally it is a good objective to reasonably maximise a beam length - "design safe", in modern vacuous soundbite terms.

Hoboking's picture posted in his comment above seems to have disappeared. Did anyone manage to keep a copy?

7723 was in a batch with riveted tanks.

Tony - the Gloucester-built long general purpose wagons were 65'6" over headstocks, 68' over buffers, 50' bogie centres, 5' bogie wheelbase (diamond frame), 2'6" diameter spoked wheels. The wagons came in two types, a 20T 'rail wagon', and a 30T version with additional sidesheeting for ballast and other materials.