whart57

33 minutes ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

I suspected you were joking.

 

..... would go to a great deal of trouble inventing a mechanism to furl and unfurl the sails without ever quite seeing that replacing the sails with paddle wheels or a screw powered by the engine would render the sails obsolete and the ship more efficient.  

Weren't steam winches developed for precisely that purpose? It wasn't such a stupid idea because the tipping point when the cost of bunkering the coal needed for a long voyage no longer outweighed the loss of revenue because of the reduction in cargo space was not reached till late in the nineteenth century.

3 minutes ago, Barry Ten said:

Here's a working Dutch barge based on the Faller system:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JLhgX9kAeA

 

It's described in a recent Continental Modeller.

That is a very nice model. The trouble is that the barge leaves no trail in the water. Neither does the swan but that is less jarring. And nor does this sailing barge suffer from variations in wind speed. I mention these points to stress that perfection, particularly when trying to model motion, is an ever-receding target. And that is on a layout built to P87 standards with an exact 12.26mm track gauge.

11 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

Thats the problem with real water. Its 12" to the foot scale and stays that way.

But sometimes it works better than the plastic stuff supposed to represent it at smaller scales

Faller actually make a boat using their system. What I liked about the roller approach is that it meant the wake and other water surface changes caused by a boat passing can be represented, which can't be using the Faller system.

A barge on a canal would make an interesting animation on a future GMRC layout. There is an interesting method used on a layout based on Amsterdam's trams where one of the famous tourist boats pootles along the grachten. The water surface is in fact a continous loop of clear plastic driven by rollers. The join in the plastic is made vee-shaped so it is disguised as the bow wave of the boat and the boat itself is in three sections so that it can bend round the rollers, go back along the underside and then reappear and do the trip again on the surface. The wake of the propellors is painted on the underside of the plastic. From photographs it appears quite effective.

14 minutes ago, LNER4479 said:

That's a pity because I believe you might have liked this from Heat 5 (available on My5 catch up)

 

 

 

I'm told that photos submitted to Continental Modeller of this layout show proper Swiss stock. And isn't that crossover laid out as if for right hand running? (Not that I know enough about Swiss railways to know whether they run on the right or the left)

38 minutes ago, Dunsignalling said:

Maybe not 99% but certainly half, if the other modellers I meet regularly are typical. I watched the first series but something (I'm not even certain what it was) by the fourth programme in this one, put me off it.

 

Now I'm wondering what we did wrong in the fourth heat ........

3 hours ago, jools1959 said:

It does somewhat annoy me to hear criticism from what I would call “armchair” modellers who berate the blood (in the case of Rail Riders), sweat, tears and most of all, sheer hard work that’s put into building the layouts.  All I’m going to say if you don’t like it or think you can do better, get off your bums, form a team of six and apply for the next series and we can all have a pop at your efforts.

Yes try and keep the criticism constructive.

Having been there, done it and (literally) got the tee-shirt, I have huge sympathy with the three teams in this semi-final. It was a pig of a theme, and not easy to interpret and not made easier by the toy train track plan they were gifted and the challenge of carrying something from one end to the other. TG's forget the railway approach worked but at the expense of no longer being a model railway.

Let's see what Saturday brings. The three teams there had the same given track and the same challenge, but the theme did at least allow railways to take centre stage.

On 02/09/2019 at 19:04, brack said:

The other likely factor is that those lines which were parts of a larger concern ran fine until the plug was pulled as there was money coming in from elsewhere, but small independent concerns decayed and dwindled before succumbing.

One factor immediately after WW2 was impending nationalisation. Companies hoped for compensation based on operating track mileage, and the independents on compensation full stop. The East Kent Light Railway for example kept running a daily train to Wingham, for which there was absolutely no demand, simply to make it appear they were a going concern..

On 07/04/2019 at 12:48, redrob said:

Does anyone know a source of good quality scenic items suitable for Indian forests or tropical lands. 

I would prefer non-tropical landscaping (deciduous trees) but failing that any jungle terrain supplies would be useful. Scale needs to be 1/87.

I know that you can get some decent palm trees, but not sure what to use for other forest trees.

Also does anyone have suggestings for modelling elephant grass?

India is a big place, can you be a bit more specific?

2 hours ago, jwealleans said:

 

We were at the filming of Heat 5 and they did at least four, possibly as many as 6, takes of that moment.  I did note at broadcast that they didn't use the first one where a number of Team Grantham members had their heads in their hands.

Just for the record, in Heat 4 there was just the single take

29 minutes ago, RLWP said:

 

A Faulhaber driving through a worm gear in a Backwoods Miniatures Hunslet:

 

I was careful to say "I'm told", practice and theory often diverge

34 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Not a good reason to buy something as important as a motor, IMO.

Depends on the purpose doesn't it? For powering a kit that cost getting on for a couple of hundred once ancillaries such as wheels and castings are taken into account, then no. For experimenting I would suggest using cheap motors might be the better idea

The purpose of my little sketch was to demonstrate that the engines of 1830-ish on certainly are feasible in 4mm scale. Earlier designs might be too but as another poster pointed out, all that waggly piston rod and valve gear stuff to vertical cylinders is likely to be too delicate for regular operation.

Of course smaller, and pricier, motors are available, but there are two issues when it comes to small locos. One is that the smallest motors are generally not available for 12 volt operation. That either means risking them to operator error or putting some loading resistors in circuit. Which aren't small given they need to be at least 1/4W rating. Or using DCC of course, but that would require a chip which again needs squeezing in somewhere.

The second point, and with small, low-boilered locos it is quite significant, is the gearing. Worm gears are inefficient, "driving with the handbrake on" as an esteemed but unfortunately deceased modeller frequently said, but they also push the motor upwards. The precision gears available are better than the old Romfords, but they are also harder to mesh properly. Poor meshing leads to noise and also that phenomenon where a loco works much better in one direction than in the other. The attraction of the cheap motors available on eBay or Amazon is that they are fitted with a gearbox that reduces motor speed down to the point where spur gears or crown and pinion gears can be used. Motors like the Faulhabers also need that sort of gearbox and that adds to their size as well.

Worm gears also impose end loading on motor shafts, and I'm told that Faulhabers don't like that.

I confess to not being a precision modeller, but I do like tinkering away. And that is what some of us have been doing. Geoff Helliwell, who is a precision modeller, gets some really good results in terms of reliable and smooth operation this way. Though it's the crown and pinion gearing over worm drives that makes the difference.

2 hours ago, Argos said:

I'm not sure why anyone would restrict themselves to a N20 motor if modelling a small prototype?

 

 

They're cheap?

Actually it has more to do with the fact that some of us in the 3mm Society are experimenting with crown and pinion transmission instead of worm gears. Worm gears are after all "driving with the handbrake on" as the late Stewart Hine would say

Further to my earlier post re N20 motors and early steam engines, here is a mock up of a N20 motor with reversed output on a drawing of a London and Birmingham Bury 2-2-0

It does seem to feasible. But these engines are small, in 4mm scale they are about the same size as the 3mm scale engines I am used to

18 minutes ago, Ian Simpson said:

 

A common problem with Google Books, I'm afraid. If you know which drawing / plans you want and you're not in too much a hurry, I can try to copy key pages at the British Library.

Thanks. However as my wife is a regular at the British Library I will impose on her. I suspect though that Alan Prior has used a number in his "19th Century Railway Drawings in 4mm scale"

1 hour ago, Ian Simpson said:

 

It's available as a free PDF download on Google Books at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxFfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1&dq=Francis+Whishaw&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Francis Whishaw&f=false

 

His Railways of Great Britain is an amazing resource for early modellers and researchers!  Francis Whishaw basically just pulled together all the info he could find from all available sources at the time including prospectuses, the early railway press and writing to just about every company secretary in the British Isles.  I'm not sure he ever visited any of the railways himself, but there aren't many obvious errors in such an encyclopedic work. I use it frequently, I love reading it and I'm always sad that he ended up dying in impoverished circumstances.

 

Use the drop down menu next to the cog wheel at top right of the screen to save. There's no need to sign in or to have a Google account, although you will be asked to confirm a capture word before the download starts.

Shame the plates have not rendered well. It looks like whoever did the scanning didn't bother to unfold the sheets

You had to submit your orders before the heat but only with heat 5 was the turn around so ridiculously short that the stuff had actually needed to be ordered before it was known whether it would be needed.

As an aside, why wasn't the obvious thing done - winners from Heats 1-3 into SF1 and Heat winners 4 & 5 and the wild card into SF2? Heat 5 would have had a week's gap rather than a day's.

OO is not my scale but out of interest I fished out the book of 19th century railway drawings I had and laid one of those small N20 motors on 4mm scale drawings of Locomotion and a Bury 2-2-0 of c1840. Smaller motors are of course available but you also need gearing and that takes up nearly as much space again. You can get motors with integral gearing that reverse the drive shaft and they might, just about work with a Bury 2-2-0 or Stephenson 2-2-2 but I think you'd have to pitch the boiler higher.

The problem with using N gauge technology in 4mm scale is the gearing. The gearing is designed for small diameter wheels so unless you want shunting done by Lewis Hamilton you need to make modifications. Which rather defeats the object of using a commercial mechanism.

I think it would have to be 7mm scale to do the subject justice

15 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

The production company liked it as a design so it was 'job done' and back to the work on the Heat layout.

 

Yes, not a conventional model railway at all, rather a challenge involving the use of model railway equipment. Happily - for us - the judges ultimately went along with that.

I can see that it is a way out of the tight corner that KBG had painted you into. There was a mix up early on in the planning and for a short while it seemed we would have that theme if we made the semi-final. We sketched out a sort of Jason and the Argonauts thing where Jason went by train through things like clashing rocks, past whirlpools, dodging skeleton warriors coming out of the ground etc to fetch the Golden Fleece and bring it back. Thankfully we never had to do it.

I was disappointed with KBG though regarding our actual design for the Blockbusters semi. We envisaged an inner city clearance site, with a "proper" model railway, probably with blue diesels, going round while old factory chimneys toppled and the walls of terraced houses were stove in by a crane's wrecking ball. I couldn't persuade them that blocks were actually being busted here and had to redesign a layout round a movie theme.

The reason I was disappointed was vindicated really here. The scope for teams to design layouts are too limited and therefore the results are too similar. That doesn't make great telly and if there is a series three I hope the producers loosen up a bit and encourage variety of approach. And discourage the volcanoes and dinosaurs which are to me at least, a lazy cop out way of fulfilling a theme.

Hmm, this one left me cold I'm afraid. OK some clever work done but let's face it it only met the first and fourth words of the title, the middle two were pretty absent.

Part of the trouble I think stems from the fact that the format changed. The fixed track plan was meant to be the quarter final (if memory serves me right) and the carry something from one end to the other challenge was in the semi. Combining them into one round added to the workload which showed up in the projected scores for build quality.

Then there was the choice of theme. Whereas the heat themes and the other semi-final theme still had some sort of railway link, this one had completely cast off its moorings. Team Grantham's way of getting round it was clever, but a model railway?

2 hours ago, RLWP said:

 

Is this it?:

 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WrU5AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=wishaws+Reciprocating+Railways&source=bl&ots=4DbNoGn2T8&sig=ACfU3U2nOHgeFGysmre0SiiEYKm2XH7tCA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwib9-mRlZnlAhUxVBUIHU24CEYQ6AEwA3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=wishaws Reciprocating Railways&f=false

 

Richard

Looks like it

49 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Steam lifts sounds a bit bonkers, but hydraulic lifts are perfectly ok.

 

Hydraulic lifts were surprisingly common, there was even a company in London that supplied pressure to customers for hydraulics in those pre-electric days. The company still exists, it is part of Colt Technology Services. When Colt set up as City of London Telecoms in the early 1990s they bought up this defunct company because it owned wayleaves across most of the Square Mile. The wayleaves were then used to run fibre around London.

50 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

The "reciprocating railway" is founded on a boundless optimism that any regular railway traveller will instantly recognise as grossly misplaced.

 

Though back in 1839 when Whishaw proposed it there weren't any "regular railway travellers", well not many anyway.