whart57

I wonder how often those C56s get steamed. The pictures posted on the internet of steam runs in Thailand (generally on the King's birthday and the anniversary of the first line to be opened in Thailand) invariably show larger locomotives, a Pacific and a 4-8-2, coupled back to back as there are no turning facilities at Ayuttaya or the Bangkok depots.

Absolutely, the Sierra Menera too - 4-8-0s, big NBL 0-6-6-0s and garratts. There's a load of Spanish metre gauge lines that have a lovely mix of British, German, French and Spanish built motive power but I've not seen much respresentation of them in model form, especially as its not that far away and some of these systems ran steam quite late on.

You won't see that unless someone has put the work in researching these lines. I'm building a layout based on Thailand and I would guess that 70% of the research is my own work. That's why it is set in the present day, I don't have a Tardis. You need loads of photographs, even more so if you don't have drawings, and not just the static posed shots of new locomotives. In southern and eastern Europe there were often restrictions on photographing railways as well. Just ten years ago transport police in Madrid made me erase a couple of pictures I'd taken of trains on the metro when they saw me take them. They've probably eased up now otherwise they would spend their days hassling people to erase selfies but restrictions in the past mean there is a greater shortage of pics than there might otherwise be.

Have they thrown off one colonial power?

Please pack it in with your overly-political posts please. It's about as popular here as talking toy trains on a politics forum would be.

Stop posting political threads then. If the Royal Navy gets involved in Belize, as OhMisterPorter up top suggests might be necessary, then that will be a political decision. Guatemala offers absolutely no threat to Britain thus it's not a defence issue, it's a political issue of what interests Britain is prepared to use military resources on. And then that will depend on who does the lobbying. The fact that a very senior person in our government party has very extensive interests in Belize, so extensive that the Belize government does not dare to go against them, is a very significant factor. It is not overly political to say so. After all you and me both will be paying for the diesel or whatever frigates run on and the pay of the ratings on board.

I think we are looking at the ultimate main line banker here, for Lickey, Shap, or Beattock, maybe the Devon banks and Folkestone Harbour as well. 

Surely if you were designing a locomotive for the Folkestone Harbour branch you would follow what you were actually doing with a clutch of R1s and design a Mallett?

Yeah, what ungrateful sods for wanting a democratically elected government rather than being ruled by a colonial power

 

(P.S. Belize is a close ally of the UK and home to the British Army jungle warfare training unit)

Well actually a government owned by a couple of British tax dodgers, in charge of a country that exists to launder money, but let's not spoil your fantasy. But now we know why the British government is willing spend a few billion pounds of taxpayers money on a new aircraft carrier.

Having just had a look on Google Earth to get a feel for the lie of the earth I have a question. Apart from the frontier along the Sarstoon river and one or two road crossings can anyone on the ground really say where the bloody border is. It looks to be going through virgin forest to me with no settlements, never mind towns, for dozens of miles. In which case if some Guatemalan logger starts chopping trees then who is going to say you can't do that, these are Belizean trees.

Call me an old cynic, but: in what way would it be in UK interests to intervene in Belize?

 

Kevin

Didn't the last Tory party chairman effectively own the country?

Would the idea be worth reviving given the global warming impacts of burning kerosene to release large amounts of CO2 and water vapour into the stratosphere?

Distilled water is not ion free.  Indeed it is not even pH neutral (7.0).

 

Surprised?

  I know I was.

 

In the condensation process, the water dissolves CO2 and creates carbonic acid (pH 6.5) with carbonate and primarily bicarbonate ions.

Jeez that takes me back. In the 1970s I worked as a lab technician in a school and we made our own distilled water using a glass still. One day the subject for first year science was acids and alkalis, teacher (actually Head of Science) handed out the indicator strips along with a range of chemicals for the kids to try. All the kids reported water was acid. He decided they must have been messy workers and went to demonstrate water was pH neutral himself. Acid. Break time came to test a sample fresh from the still. Acid. Gave me a bollocking for not cleaning the still properly. I had descaled the still over the summer but surely after the gallons of distilled water produced since then any descaler would have washed out? Anyway, dismantled it, washed it through, sloshed ethanol around inside it to remove traces of the water that might be lingering with its acid components, put it back together, ran it for a while, tested a sample. Acid. This went on for weeks. Then one day I took a sample, heated it to boiling point and let it cool before testing. PH neutral. Still don't know why and what occurred but the next year I boiled all the water before giving it out to first year science to dip their indicator papers in.

Jetex, now there's something I'd forgotten about.  I was, when I was about 11 or 12, into model gliders for a while, and a friend, well a bloke I knew, I wouldn't have had him as a friend because he was fruit bat mad even then, lashed a Jetex to one of my gliders on top of the fuselage 'to see how fast it'd go'.  It shot off like a rocket and the wings tore off in the first few feet, after which it was simply an unguided missile, briefly, and then a pile of broken balsa; the Jetex went around in circles on the ground, set fire to the grass, and nobody'd go near it until it had run out of fuel.  He claimed it was my fault because I hadn't fixed the wing on properly...

 

I was impressed, though.

In the "Eagle" book of balsa modelling (which I won in some primary school painting competition way back in 1961 or so) there was a plan for a Jetex powered model. Never built it, though I did build some of the other plans and they worked very well. I presume it was a bit more robust than your glider

Try this:

http://www.railpictures.net/photo/381524/

I might be wrong about them not being in the preserved fleet, looking at the picture more closely the two locos might be Japanese built C56s without tenders and a couple of those are theoretically steamable.

What a train eh? Double-headed with a couple of GE UM12C diesel electrics, a dead steam loco, 3 or 4 four wheel vans, 3 four wheel brake vans and another dead steam loco. Note the red rag tied to coupling lifter bar to indicate the tail of the train.

A lighter engineering train is:

http://www.railpictures.net/photo/381353/

Now here's a NG idea. 12mm gauge is equivalent to 15" in 10mm scale (it's even closer in 1:32) and a Triang Jinty wheelbase is about right for those Heywood 0-6-0Ts. The width of the wheels is probably not that far out when you are thinking of Gauge 1 either. Could make a nice little freelance estate railway

... imagine if the Lynton and Barnstaple had lasted until the 1980s only to be shut for good in 1985.

But you can be sure Lynton station would have received a fresh coat of paint in 1984 ........

The Thai railway photo above shows the train headed by a loco that had been withdrawn from SRT service and sold or leased to the contractor doing line doubling work. The SRT had to borrow them back. They also had to press into service another class that had been laid aside. But then I suppose that those Krauss locos and the metre gauge version of the DB V160 in the photo, being diesel hydraulics, were better suited to "swimming" than the diesel electrics.

After the floods receded the track needed proper testing before trains could run at normal speed and there is a photo of the SRT using a dead steam engine as a mobile weight. Lord knows where they got that steamer from though, it wasn't one of the preserved steam fleet.

I know this is completely off the wall and defeats the shelf nature of a minories layout, but it always strikes me that the interest is the pointwork beyond the platforms. Has the concept ever been tried in a continous run layout? Since you have an overall roof over the platforms you could bend the track round after a foot or so, and as you can't see it the radius could be as tight as your trains will take. In fact only platform roads with a crossover at the end need to go into the back of the fiddle yard. At the other end it shouldn't be difficult to put in some urban scenic treatment to justify flange squealing curves - you could even lay a continuous check rail to make it seem they are meant to be sharp. You might get the whole shebang into a garden shed or third bedroom and you would be able to have longer trains

Not if you lived south of the Thames  

It wasn't just the coaches that were tinplate though. I have some vans I inherited from somewhere that are printed tinplate, and they look far too flat.

Regarding common wheel arrangements, there were no 0-6-0 tender engines in the Thomas the Tank engine books until well on in the series either. I wonder if that is linked to the absence in the Triang and HD ranges.

Wouldn't you notice that by the fact no more carriages are passing?

We don't have slip coaches anymore, and I suspect the HSE would go ape if a preserved line tried to revive them. but back in the day, at what point would the main train have to present a tail light and how would they do that. Stopping to hang a light on the buffer beam would rather negate the point of slipping coaches.

And yet Hornby Dublo was still selling printed tinplate in the 1960s. If I recall too the range of locos was strangely light on the common beasts - the 0-6-0s and 4-4-0s. In fact it's a strange anomaly that despite nearly half of British steam locos in the 20th century being 0-6-0 tender engines there was only Triang's somewhat iffy 3F representing the type as a commercial RTR job until the 1980s. Triang's L1 was the only 4-4-0 too.

Another snippet about Triang that was related to me when the 3mm Society went to discuss a possible revival of TT with Hornby. Margate was a silly place to have a toy factory. If you sell toys then you sell most at Christmas - hardly an earth-shattering observation. But if parents and grandparents go shopping for toys at Christmas then they start doing that in November. Which means shops want their deliveries in mid October so they can get it on the shelves as soon as Halloween and Guy Fawkes are cleared away. Which means your factory has to be in full production from July to September. And what time of year is it hardest to recruit casual workers in a seaside resort? I was told that back in the 60s and 70s Triang actually lost workers in July as people opted for spending some weeks out in the open selling ice creams or stacking deckchairs rather than in a warehouse packing boxes or minding machines.

Yes, but let's not lose sight of the fact that Triang was primarily a toy maker. The company didn't only produce trains, it also produced the Chad Valley range of dolls houses and I believe they were also the makers of Sindy dolls, sometimes known as the British Barbie. And Scalextric racing cars. Some say it was Triang's decision to push Scalextric that killed TT, which may well be the case if you consider Triang's sales chain. Triang supplied to High Street toy shops, not model railway specialists. These toy shops, like all retailers, had limited shelf space and limited capital for stock. When Triang reps rolled up the shop keeper would point to his shelves and ask where he was supposed to put all these new ranges. And why are you giving me trains in red boxes and trains in yellow boxes?

It was also a time when model railways was losing appeal. Hornby collapsed and was broken up with the Dublo trains going to Triang and Triang attempted some pretty iffy gimmicks like train mounted rocket launchers and exploding boxcars. The only way commercially produced TT would have survived would have been if Triang's TT division had been bundled up and sold as a unit, rather like Hornby Dublo living on as Wrenn. But that would have required more enthusiasm from the model railway specialist retailers, which was unlikely to be forthcoming. After all, if you read the model railway press of the early 1960s there is an undercurrent of sniffiness and disdain for Triang, and a belief that Triang was just toys and not serious railway modelling.

Interestingly, the Class 158s sold to Thailand have rear lights but the back of the train is shown by hanging a big red disk in the trailing cab window

http://www.railpictures.net/photo/518868/

A fairly safe bet, I think, is that anything sold as 'collectible' isn't. The 'Collectors' Plates' and similar 'tat' being a case in point. The auctioneer, when we sold some items from my father's estate, was quite scathing about such things and was proved right (as we expected!). First Day Covers are another thing no-one wants. (£2 each from a dealer so one can easily imagine what was paid for them.)

 

Grifone funds don't run to 'Liverpool', 'Dorchester' etc. so no problem there. I intend to fake a track cleaning wagon, but can't find a suitably tatty donor.... Why they thought it necessary to modify the casting I don't know, I would have thought it quite acceptable to leave it as a mineral wagon. Tri-ang after all just used the redundant TC box car moulding for theirs. Somehow I've managed to acquire three of them in different colours. I did manage to acquire a reasonable ICI bogie tanker without paying an arm and a leg, but the hopper wagon still eludes me.... (Wrenn ones are quite common, especially in fictitious P.O. liveries....) (I purposely don't collect Wrenn, though I'm not above using Wrenn parts to keep Dublo in action.

The iron rule is, and always has been, that an item is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. Economic crashes from the Dutch Tulip mania in the 17th century to the recent banking crisis eight years ago are caused when enough people lose sight of that rule. As the Dutch found out four hundred years ago, paying loads of money for something because everyone else is will come unstuck when all of a sudden people think "what the hell, it's only a bloody flower".

The Dutch Tulip Mania is an interesting subject to read up on and there are some decent books on it. It's become a bit of an economic staple because it was almost a lab experiment in a way. What we can learn from it is that markets can be created which have little foundation on basic economics. The Tulip mania started as a competition between a handful of stupendously rich merchants (there were a few around at that time in Holland, this being the so-called Golden Age) to show off the most gaudy tulip flowers. The tulip had only just been imported from the Middle East and ironically the most prized blooms were actually infected with a virus though of course no-one knew that then. It was a gamble, because tulip breeding was barely understood at the time, but these merchants could afford to lose the thousands of guilders if the gamble failed. The money sloshing around in this trade attracted others though, and as more people piled into the market, there was a shortage of goods to trade. So the trade spread to more common varieties of tulip. Now, however, the people buying were not super-rich merchants wanting a tulip bloom to wow their friends or humiliate their rivals but people who had borrowed money to buy bulbs they would then seek to sell on at a large profit. When the market caught on to the fact that no-one would actually pay that much to plant those bulbs in the ground that the crash came.

The various "Collector's Markets" we have seen all follow the same pattern. They start out with a few wealthy individuals pursuing an interest. In stamp collecting they might have been interested in having good examples of the first stamps ever issued - the Penny Black or the Twopenny Blue for example, or coin collectors wanted the full set of coins in circulation in Elizabeth I's time. Or model train collectors chasing Bassett-Lowke originals. Then others get interested but they can't afford the real rarities so they collect something close - Hornby tinplate instead of Bassett-Lowke for example. As long as enough are interested then there is a viable market, it's when either the demand drops off or an over-supply has been engineered that things go wrong. With stamps and coins both happened - the collectors grew old and died and few younger people took up the hobby, and the unscrupulous tried to create fake rarities with special issues and commemoratives.

In the end, it's the underlying value that still rules. The rich merchants of Holland still pursued their perfect flower after the Tulip Mania crashed and burned, and the result was today's thriving flower and bulb industry in the Netherlands. Museums and the few serious collectors there are will still want to complete collections of 19th century stamps or 16th century coins, and things like a near perfect example of a Bassett-Lowke steamer still have an appeal beyond the model railway fraternity. As for the rest, well they are only worth what people will pay for them. If you aren't prepared to pay the price asked on eBay for something as an item then the chances are that that is not its value as an investment.

I'd say that 4.5 metres is well under. If you assume 2 metres is the height of the door then I would guess it is about 6 metres high. You could estimate the height of the entrance floor from the number of steps up to it, either use the steps in another kit to get the size or look up standard step heights on the internet. Then a typical door plus frame is 2 metres, and then you have a bit of headroom and that roof space