whart57

We had a good show in Dorking this weekend. A constant stream of people asking questions and appreciating what we have done so far. I will be updating the blog over then next week or so.

Not qualifying from the group stage is not a problem, after all few get further than the quarter finals anyway. The problem is when the only relevance of some mismatch is the bonus points scored. Most tournaments, including FIFA's World Cup, would be materially improved by reducing them to 16 sides. Bloated tournaments are cash cows rather than sporting events. In the case of the FIFA tournament the bloating is entirely due to the corrupt leadership chasing the votes of African, Asian and Central American associations to keep their place on the gravy train. However the result is that only dodgy regimes can afford to host these things. Unless, like England and France, the sports stadiums are already there. I don't think there is a one size fits all development strategy. South America, the Pacific islands and Europe beyond the 6N are all different. The Pacific islands would benefit from administrative changes regarding players, and the sons of players, attracted to New Zealand and their ability to play for their ancestral home. Portugal, Georgia and the other smaller (in rugby terms) European countries might benefit by English and French professional clubs adopting local clubs as feeder clubs, lending out coaches and giving opportunities in the development sides to promising young players, and should they make the grade, professional contracts. How that would be funded is a mystery of course.

It's probably possible to carefully stick a small Plastikard overlay on the arm of the N gauge one to make it more 3mm scale sized. I'd suggest making it look more Victorian - your light railway having acquired a second hand signal - by making the arm wider at the end than by the post. The shorter post can be explained away with "it's a light railway, innit".

There will always be sides in a tournament who have no chance of winning the thing. The questions is, are they competitive? The relative ease with which Italy, not the strongest of the Six Nations, disposed of Uruguay is probably more indicative of the RWC having expanded too fast than France's demolition of Namibia. The problem with the present format is that a lot of rugby gets played to get the answer everyone expected to see in terms of the eight quarter finalists.

In the past the Rugby World Championship has been contested by New Zealand, South Africa and which of Australia, England and France can get their act together. Argentina last time and Ireland are recent additions to that club of maybes. The rest, Pacific Islanders, other six nations teams have always been there to make up the numbers. As have Japan and the North Americans, though the latter have been real disappointments lately. The problem comes when you match those who are just along for the ride against real contenders. Rugby is a very cruel game when sides - and particularly packs - are ill matched. Watching a top level pack push their lesser opponents around the pitch for eighty minutes is not particularly edifying. In the round ball game lesser sides can park the bus, but in rugby that bus gets shoved out of the way.

If some group games are "essentially irrelevant" then that means the competition has been expanded too far.

Ah yes the Arnhem trolleybus. The number 3 route went past the top of the road where my grandad lived. The zoo and Openlucht Museum were at one end of the route and the NS station at the other. Arnhem had a tramway network. It last ran on the morning the First Airborne arrived.

Dirty Old Town - Ewan McColl

Blatant fouls in union are instead endless discussed by officials both on and off the pitch while the players get their wind back before giving one side the chance to kick the ball a long way.

My scratchbuilding experience is in 3mm scale so I did bring some of that up into my 4mm scale light railway modeliing. I like the idea of these Simpson springs though, once the exhibition is out of the way I'll try that. Shame Eileens is no more though, getting hold of enough phospor bronze wire might be tricky.

Scraper pick-ups on small non-driven wheels? I'd rather not. To tell the truth I try to avoid wire pick-ups, they are like running with the brakes applied. Drivers and coupled wheels get enough push from the motor to overcome the friction but carrying wheels need such a light spring that they don't make a good connection anyway. The exception is if the wire presses on the axle, in which case it's more or less like the bearing anyway.

Italy had the misfortune to join the 6N at the start of the professional era. Had they joined ten years earlier the gap between top and bottom would have been less stark, and more bridgeable with the sort of packs around then. Development doesn't happen "organically". Development is a combination of local growth and outside encouragement. Argentina's development has a lot to do with their players coming to play professionally in Europe, the South Pacific nations have their players polished up in New Zealand. Perhaps what Italy did wrong was to try and develop through having their own clubs play in the Celtic league - whatever its called this week. If we switch codes for a moment, there was a "development" success story in rugby league this week. London Broncos fielded a side in the RL Championship against Bradford with not a single northern born or antipodean player in it or on the bench. Mostly Londoners with a few from just beyond the M25 and the odd Midlander. When it comes to developing RL in the capital Broncos have tried everything. It would appear that the combination of commitment to an academy developing young players and a professional side of a good standard for them to aspire to is what works.

OK, a goodly load of lead shot onto the floors of the railcars and slow running is much improved. The chassis are compensated but as the power is picked up via uninsulated wheels on one side of each vehicle, I suspect it may need to run for a bit to polish where the axles pass through the bearings. I also upped CV2 (start voltage) to 2 and changed CV3 to 8 to increase the acceleration. It now behaves as if the driver has heavy feet. I can live with that for now.

Well changing the value of CV66 doesn't make the problem go away and turning BEMF off entirely - CV61=0 - removes all slow speed control, the railcar goes into bat out of hell mode. More experimenting needed but at the moment the chassis is more sensitive to pick up issues than it ever was under DC. Probably needs a bit more weight.

Thanks, I will try that

I'm installing a Zen V12 decoder into a Colonel Stephens railbus (scratchbuilt). The motor is a small Chinese can type - 8mm diameter - and the chassis has run well on a DC test track. However running on DCC the chassis surges forward before settling back to speed step one. After that it accelerates and decelerates fine and steps ups smoothly through the speed steps. What can I do about that surge though? I've tried changing the start voltage CV, giving it values of 4, 2 and 1, but that doesn't fix the issue. It's almost as if there is a setting to wallop full power to overcome "stiction" which I don't need. Any ideas?

We now have just the one long Wednesday left, and we need to set priorities. However the station building is finished and partly bedded in.

August was a productive month, but there is still much to do to get the layout ready for the Dorking show, even as a work in progress job. We're hoping that some of the things we are trying to do are of interest to visitors, there will be plenty of other layouts with trains running on them through completed scenery. We can't escape from the fact though that making models of real buildings is a lot more time-consuming than throwing together a Metcalfe kit or that making trees from thin wire takes longer than using Woodland Scenics products. Results are more interesting though. Two buildings should be completed in time for the show though. A 4mm scale version of Bodiam station will be our Holbrook station, and just over the road from that station will be our Dog and Bacon Inn, relocated back in the cottages the real one vacated in Edwardian times. Present state of play is shown here. Just for reference, here is the real thing. These cottages didn't draw the attention of many photographers and we have had to rely on snatches in publicity shots taken for the Dog and Bacon after it had moved to the building next door to determine that the whitewashing of the brick probably happened after our period. Holbrook station is also taking shape We need another sleeper built buffer stop - the ones at Bodiam are our prototype - and some platform furniture. The platform surface will be ash but the planked way from the goods office door to the platform edge is already in place. In the goods yard we already have a steam lorry ready to go on - see earlier blogs - and a part unloaded coal wagon is under construction by a member who is not part of the core team. We chose to have a sleeper built platform facing rather than brick. One comment here regarding track. Your author has spent the last twenty years in 3mm scale using 14.2mm gauge track apart from an interlude experimenting with 13.5 mm gauge - both gauges intended to be a more accurate representation of standard gauge than 12mm gauge. Your author was therefore a bit concerned about adopting 00 gauge. However the PECO Code 75 bullhead is such an improvement on the normal 00/H0 fare that all concerns have gone, and the British Finescale point kits complement it beautifully. It will be noted that some grass has appeared. The Noch Grassmaster has been out, probably a little too lushly. Brambles and other weeds will have to be applied and where the grass has encroached on the track cess, some will have to be scraped out. However, time presses. We will be at the Ashcombe School, Dorking (RH4 1LY for the satnav) on the weekend 30 Sept/1 Oct, doors open 10 am and we have only two long Wednesdays. We aim to have some things running, and we aim to have at least part of the layout looking decent. Otherwise we will be sharing our ideas, techniques and anything else of interest. And there are going to another 20 layouts to see as well. If you come, please come over and say hello.

My thinking was along similar lines, after a century in which small SER tanks gave way to SECR railcars and then autocoaches either side of a P class. Probably push-pull trains in the Southern steam era until the North Kent line was electrified and Blackwall Point given the third rail. Everything running down with closure seeming imminent until some cheesy grin in Downing Street decides to build a national cultural venue next to Blackwall Point station. Saved by the O2!

What I would really liked to have done is build some Cudworth well tanks, outside framed, open cabs, and have them pulling ancient four wheelers, the thirds with tiny windows and outside framing, the firsts with curved quarterlights like the old stage coaches, and of course birdcage brakes. I've always liked the 0-4-2Ts built by Slaughter-Gruning (lovely name for a loco builder) and the version - built at Ashford - with smaller 5' diameter drivers was used in the mid 1800s for local goods work in the London area. I think it would need to be done in 7mm scale to give that Victorian rolling stock justice.

The Blackwall Point backstory was applied to a small 50 inch by 50cm layout I started building for the 3mm Society's 50th Anniversary in 2015. Family difficulties meant I never finished it, but I include the trackplan here. Very much a minimum space "bitsa station" design. The points were B6 geometry as at the time we were experimenting with etched brass and laser cut ply point kits and one of the purposes of this layout was to be a test bed for that. (Wayne Kinney's point kits have come along to rescue us all from that clunky kit method). However the resulting points did look good - 3mm Society cosmetic chairs needed too - and were very smooth running. I did take a picture or two I also made a small 1:5 scale mock up, which I photographed. Operation would have been a bit nightmarish, these micro-layouts always are, but the challenge was to have a complete layout within the confines of 50" by 50cm - the 50 being important given it was a 50th anniversary. Unusually the gauge was 13.5mm, again this was to be a test bed for suitability of that gauge. I re-gauged an SECR O class I'd built to 12mm gauge with new wheelsets and intended to do the same with an SECR railcar. I'd also widened the wheelsets on half a dozen wagons from 12mm gauge. This is not the place to go into the merits or not of 13.5mm gauge over 14.2mm gauge, just accept, dear reader, that it seemed a good idea at the time. When regauging the O class I did build a new tender chassis, one with split frame electrical pickup. It made the loco a much better slow runner for shunting purposes.

For a bit of relief from things Western I offer another imaginary railway, a short one in London's Docklands. In the nineteenth century London's docks spread along the Thames, mostly on the Essex side. Development on the Kent side was restrained a bit by the presence of Greenwich Observatory. However by the 1860s businesses were springing up along the Thames along the peninsula of Blackwall Point. These were the upcoming "new industries" of chemicals and telegraphy. So I imagine the SER, which had run its North Kent Line around Greenwich to avoid Admiralty opposition, to have built a branch out to Blackwall Point where a ferry connected it with the GER's Blackwall terminus on the London and Blackwall Railway. The map, based on an 1870s map from that well known Scottish source, shows what I mean. The junction with the North Kent line actually existed as part of the Angerstein's Wharf goods only branch. I've given the line an intermediate station of Greenwich North as well as indicating potential private sidings.

Ah, MW cabs. The Selsey Tramway had three Manning Wardles, Is and Ks admittedly, and the cabs were all different. They weren't even all MW designs. If Rapido were committing to provide every cab variant then that really would be a rod for their own backs

I already have a cupboard full of unbuilt and partbuilt kits .........

I had hoped my smiley would have defused things. To tell the truth, I thought the SECR MW was a class L, it was only when I consulted Bradley before posting that I found out different. So you could get away with giving the Rapido loco an SECR paintjob and numbering it 752. The other interesting thing is that it doesn't seem to have suffered the slate grey livery. A photo in Bradley from 1921 shows it still in the Wainwright livery. Presumably it wasn't thought worthwhile to get it back into the paintshop. One point I don't think has been made is that locos like this were popular with contractors engaged on railway works. That means you can have them on what is otherwise a mainline layout, sitting in a siding with a couple of wagons until they were given temporary permission to go and do a bit of ballasting or shore up a cutting wall. Despite my gripes, I want one though, so when I have figured out how to place a pre-order, I will. Now about that W&L Earl/Countess in On16.5 .......