whart57

Farmhouses and an ironworks?

Now I know that East Shropshire is far from being an industrial wasteland, and it was never anything like the Black Country, but you really need a bit of space between the two. You could say you are providing a break but you have a roadbridge under the ironworks sidings.

Some workers' cottages might be a better bet - plenty of examples around Dawley and Horsehay. And how about a tin tabernacle or chapel, there's one in Blist's Hill museum, for something that is definitely not Metcalfeshire.

14 hours ago, Horsehay Railway Modeller said:

(possibly with some semblence of a plateway or wagon way)

 

 

There used to be examples of a plateway at both Coalbrookdale and Blists Hill museums. Except that the pictures of both on the internet are so much tidier than I remember

My Thai layout is built to 3mm scale, or as I tell non-modellers, 1/100th scale. I have also chosen to use 9mm gauge to represent the metre gauge. I did think of going the sensible way and selecting HOm but that would have limited me to three coach trains - four at a pinch - in the space I have whereas 3mm scale meant I could have four, five at a pinch. Since everything would have to be scratch built I could have chosen any scale I liked but as my British outline modelling has always been 3mm scale that was a logical choice.

Track work is PECO code 60 FB rail (sold to represent SR 3rd rail electricals) on copper clad sleepers. These I obtained from the 3mm Society and needed chopping to a shorter length. Points are handbuilt. I would have used OO9 track if the point radii were not so sharp.

The diesel in the picture uses Hollywood Foundry motor bogies, no longer available I believe, and the body work is a mix of etched brass (my own artwork) and resin casts from my own masters. The pic below should give the idea

Indonesian railways are a mix of standard gauge and 1,067mm gauge aren't they? HOm seems sensible to me, it's almost spot on for the Cape gauge.

What is your era? For steam locos there is a book - in Dutch - of the locos built by Werkspoor of Amsterdam for Indonesian railways when it was still the Dutch East Indies.

I'm not sure it's been mentioned earlier, but one film that deserves an honourable mention is "The Great Train Robbery" starring Sean Connery. This film, based on the book by Michael Crichton which in turn was based on a real robbery on the South Eastern Railway in the 1850s, was filmed in Ireland and the railway locations are in Dublin and its environs. However the producers should be praised for turning out a train that is a pretty decent representation of a mid-Victorian express. I'm not sure what the starting points were but they clearly got some advice from knowledgeable people given that the liveries were actually those of the SER at the time

As railway enthusiasts we should all be aware that the limiting factor on how fast trains can go or how heavy they can be is stopping power. I can buy all the ideas about advanced technology from distance worlds developing space ships capable of the speed of light, but how good are the brakes? If they are going to stop by earth wouldn't they have to apply the brakes somewhere around Proxima Centauri in order to have g forces within a sensible range.

Of course an advanced world might have technology that rewrites the laws of physics but if that is the case then we might as well believe in magic.

10 hours ago, Horsehay Railway Modeller said:

Here is what I've done so far for the hill at the left end of the layout. 

 

And here is a terrible sketch showing my idea for the cutting with somewhat dense woodland and a small church halfway up the valley. Possibly in N gauge to create some. Forced perspective and distance. 

I hope you don't mind me making more suggestions, but given the location you are setting your layout in - and the fact it isn't an exact representation of a particular location, have you considered having a pit mound or two instead of just generic hillside. Something like the Meadow Pit mound near Madeley - it's now a nature reserve along with several others inside Telford New Town. Now I believe that up to around the 1960s some of these pits though long closed, still had bits of mining clutter around them, like the shaft head gear. And they were very small pits, nearly all the East Shropshire pits were, so wouldn't take up much room.

The Four Nations in Madeley? Not in Coalbrookdale as such, but in what is now Telford New Town (as is Coalbrookdale)

One piece of advice I'd give with this technique, and it's a bit late in the year to be giving it, is to model a real tree. Over the winter months, when the trees are bare, take pictures of trees, and one or two from underneath would help. Then use them to help you at the wire bending stage. Trees branch in diffeerent ways than most of us think they do.

I may be mistaken but wasn't there an old waggonway running up the dale, the remains of which being re-discovered in the 1970s. Might make a nice little cameo.

Another local site that might make a nice lineside feature is the terminus of that primitive waggonway, namely Ludcroft's Wharf on the River Severn. I think the Gorge museum has given it another name now but that's what I knew it as. Circa 1975 restoration had only got as far as tidying up the outside, go back another dozen years and with modellers license you could still have the remains of said waggonway terminating on the wharf

Now that hairdressers have been shut for six weeks we are all having longer hair than we normally do. (Even those of us whose scalps in the words of the Two Ronnies are skating rinks for flies). A report in today's paper on the reopening of hair salons in Germany says that they already have bookings into the summer but also that at one hair salon the hairdresser persuaded a (male) client that his grown out curls looked a lot better than his usual buzz cut.

Will today's young men have a rethink of their hair styling now that there is more on top, and possibly revisiting the styles of the 70s?

2 hours ago, tractionman said:

but when I tuned in to the SW bands was disappointed, I guess the world has changed!

 

 

All gone to internet radio

After the chedi my next job was turning a Kibri water tower into something a bit more like the one at Thonburi loco depot. The pics here are of my effort flanked by what I started with and what the real one looks like

For my next project I am turning to rolling stock. I have a Helliwell motor bogie which I have hacked to suit 9mm gauge, a load of side frame castings of something modern-ish and three 3D printed bodies from Shapeways. Time to put that lot together to make an SRT Sprinter set. Thai Sprinters are in fact BREL built Class 158s. Obviously to meter gauge rather than standard and with some detail differences, most notably the doors and the fact there are no bellows to the walkways between carriages. But because they are basically 158s I was able to find a body done on Shapeways and persuade the creator to do a 3mm scale version - well actually someone else had done so already - and make the mods to churn out a Thai version.

I may be a little while before I report back.

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

If you think about it, H0 very unlikely indeed to be of continental origin, because it hinges around a scale foot, resulting in a bizarre scale (1:87), whereas a continental scale would hinge around something rationally metric and simple to calculate like 1:100, or even 1:75.

 

So, "the very best amateur modellers" did not opt direct for fat locos; a determined proportion built to H0, and were trying to popularise H0.

 

Kevin

I don't think I ever suggested HO originated in Europe, only that Europe settled on it as a complete thing and not one of many interpretations.

Scale ratios are hardly ever rational, I mean who would choose a scale of 7mm to the foot. Some scales are sort of rational - 1:24, 1:32, 1:48 for example are making use of the way we have 12" in a foot and we subdivide inches on a ruler by halving a gap multiple times to get 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch as the smallest division. And let's not get started on that metric/Imperial mix of 4mm to the foot, 3mm to the foot etc

In the early days people started with a gauge and worked out the scale ratio from that. So you had Gauge 1 was 1 3/4 inch, Gauge 2 was 2" and Gauge 3 was 2 1/2". When they started to go smaller Gauge O was 1 1/4 inch and then OO was 5/8", half of O.

For scales Gauge 1 quickly settled down to be 1:32 scale, and it still is in Europe. Why British Gauge 1 modellers adopted a weird 10mm to the foot hybrid ratio is a mystery to me when 3/8" to the foot (and 1/32" to an inch) is so much more logical. Gauges 2 and 3 had weird ratios, 17/32" to the foot sticks in my mind as the original Gauge 3 scale ratio. As an aside, how many realise that modern G scale is in fact Gauge 3 narrow gauge? In those early pre WW1 days though someone like Bing might well produce the same model for Gauges 1 and 2, the only difference being the wheelsets

It's all a fascinating study into manufacturing compromises, but probably not for here.

Otherwise though we get what we

8 hours ago, The Johnster said:

So, being British dammit Carruthers, we compromised. 

 

 

Actually we didn't, which is why we have such a smorgasbrod of different scales and gauges.

The compromises made in the interwar years all took as their starting point the track gauge. The gauge was 16.5mm (or 5/8 inch) and a manufacturer put a body on it that sort of looked right given the compromises needed to fit in a chunky motor or clockwork spring. Even the best amateur modellers did that. The most famous layout of the late 30s and 40s is Madder Valley built by John Ahern and now preserved at Pendon. But while Ahern laid OO gauge track and built most of the lineside scenery to 4mm scale, his locos were not. He even made a Ffestiniog loco for that layout, stretching and bending it to be recognisably FR but still look right for a standard gauge branch. And capable of holding a huge motor.

It was finescale modellers, mainly after the war, who eschewed compromise. That's how we ended up with EM and EEM (later P4), its why there is OOO (now 2mm Finescale) that is different from N and why even in a minority scale like 3mm scale there are three different track gauges.

But this is a British phenomenon. In Europe and America people stuck with HO and over time demanded and got better quality representations of their locos and rolling stock. An HO loco from a European manufacturer in the 1950s might have been 1:90 scale if it was an express loco but 1:75 if it were a small shunter. Nowadays however they get slated in the model press if they deviate more than a millimeter or two from strict 1:87. The British approach was different, and was the opposite of compromise.

Welcome to some of the weird and wonderful things about model railways, and some of the irritating.

As you say you are new, I may need to give you a bit of history about OO and HO. Both use the same gauge of track but they are otherwise different scales. Some fifty years ago however people like Triang decided that accessories and scenery items were suitable for both scales and marketed this OO/HO hybrid. But it was never a compromise scale, it was just a marketing thing. OO/HO means "not N". And "not O", and "not TT" either. As you have discovered manufacturers are a bit loosey-goosey when it comes to things away from the tracks.

Preiser however aren't so bad. They do a separate if limited OO range even though most of their output is in HO and N. Gaugemaster can supply, other big box outlets presumably can as well.

Things can be tricky if you buy figures over the internet. The Chinese internet traders use the term HO and 1:100 interchangeably (1:100 is a standard scale for architectural models as well as being almost 3mm scale) so figures can vary there too.

The Continental building kits makers - Faller, Kibri, Vollmer etc - are often quite nominal about scale. As a 3mm scale modeller I quite like this as their HO stuff is very often actually 1:100.

Most British suppliers though stick with OO, and stick to scale. Though with small things like rabbits and seagulls making them so people can actually see them in the packet can mean they are overscale.

A very interesting prototype, and one I've thought about a few times.  Though my interest has more often been on the ex-LNWR branch from Donington to Coalport. I still think that would be a great project for a group of module builders to get together on.

Now I stand to be corrected, but if I recall right, the line through Coalbrookdale split two ways, one via Madeley and skirting the Telford new town estates of Stirchley and Brookside (nothing to do with the TV soap) before reaching the mainline, and the other going to the West of Dawley and ending up at Wellington. The Madeley line stayed open to allow coal trains to get to Buildwas - you could feel them going past in our house in Stirchley - but the other line was cut short at Horsehay. The reason it was kept as far as Horsehay was the iron works there which required the railway to ship out huge gantries and the like. That should allow for some really interesting goods traffic

I moved out of Telford in 1980 but the Horsehay link was still open albeit seeing very little traffic

And as Prince Charles found, it didn't require a great amount of technical wizardry to eavesdrop on mobile phone calls made over the original first generation networks.

Official versions of "rubber duck"

Those of us of a certain age may also remember the great teenager split, were you a Caroline fan or did you tune to Radio London. Bit like were you a Stones fan or a Beatles fan. From what I recall most of the girls went for Caroline, primarily because of Johnny Walker on the late evening slot.

One thing that always puzzled me - even after I did some radio basics for my HNC - is why, in Herne Bay, we had great reception for Caroline and London - and indeed Veronica - but couldn't get good reception for Radio City, despite the fact we could see their base on the Red Sands Fort from the sea front. Perhaps they had a directional aerial pointing up the Thames and us on the back lobe missed out.

To be pedantic Ronan O'Rahilly started the first British pirate station. The first European pirate radio operating from a ship was Danish and pre-dated Caroline by seven years. Many of us in Kent in the early sixties were also listeners to Radio Veronica which was a Dutch ship anchored somewhere on the Dutch side of the North Sea which had started in 1960.

One irony in the Guardian obituary is that the government acted against the pirate stations on the grounds that they weren't paying royalties to the artists whose music they were playing. Ironic because the record companies were complicit in this, the exposure a record got on Caroline or another pirate station was worth far more than any royalty payments due.

I'm doing some scenic work on my Maenamburi layout, aka Thailand 2006-2010. To get the feel of Thailand there will be a wat or temple near the tracks - as there is at Thonburi, Bangkok - and that means some interesting exercises with Plastikard. The main body of this chedi is 3D printed but the plinth is scratchbuilt. The attached pictures show the unpainted model as well as the real one it is based on.

On 18/04/2020 at 02:06, TT-Pete said:

Ah yes, so it would appear; introduced in 1960 and would have cost you a princely 2/- (Dapol are charging a bit more than 10p for them now!)

 

 

Working from the ground up I thought I'd start by checking exactly what bogie bits are in the box:

 

 

I've got 2 pairs of Gloucester bogies made and 2 pairs unmade, so the 5th tanker will have a pair of T592 tender bogies in tribute to Bruce's original design. Wheelsets are 9mm Romfords in the Gloucester and 9mm Kean Maygib in the tender bogies.

 

The first job tonight was drilling out the sideframes to take unflanged pinpoint bearings.

 

 

 

I drill the holes on one side right through, and then I use the holes as a jig to drill the other side. Apart from improving alignment, having the through hole means I can adjust the amount of sideplay the axle has. The bearing can be set using epoxy which also fills the hole up and can be sanded smooth for painting.

And none was needed for Westminster as they generated their own hot air .........

15 hours ago, sir douglas said:

only saw a bit while i was eating my tea, an episode of midsomer murders, barnaby goes to the house of a college professer's house to take a ford rally car. but when he pulls up in his own car to the house i noticed a grounded carriage or van body.

 

a quick look at the tv guide says series 12 episode 4, ive found it on youtube and flicked through to find any more shots but nothing decent or close up

 

the first 2 shots are at the begining of the episode with the carriage behind the wall and bush and the third is as described

 

Interesting. Looks like what used to be called a road van, aka goods brake van, although horsebox is another possibility