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MS&LR drawings from 1895 are available on the web that show the height of a passenger platform as 3ft above the rail and a height of 4ft for "wharfs" which presumably covers loading docks. Even though it is a different railway company, the drawings are worth a look as they are fully dimensioned and in the absence of correct LBSCR drawings, they can certainly be used to give a good indication of dimensions. http://www.swithland-signal-works.co.uk/plans/plans.htm

I am not sure that anything can be partially started. It is either started or it isn't. I have recently altered one of the association gearboxes to take a 38:1 gear set by opening up the holes for the worm wheel upwards slightly and filing the hole for the gearwheel to give the larger wheel clearance. The 30:1 worked just fine in the Dean Goods but the SR U class has larger driving wheels and Yeovil is DC, so I thought the bigger reduction might be worth going for. We will never know if 30:1 would have been enough! I know a 38:1 box is on it's way but I didn't know how long I would have to wait and the modification was quite easy and quick.

Some of the buildings on Buckingham are now 76 years old and apart from the odd bit of damage from clumsiness in track cleaning or suchlike are as good as the day they were made. There is little or no fading but back in the day, the papers would have been printed using inks and techniques that are probably no longer used. The layout has, for most of its life, been in a room with windows covered and no natural light.

You are quite right Tony. The social side of the hobby is, for me at least, one of the best things about it. I enjoy working alone but the days with friends and visitors are the real reason I build and work on model railways. I had my regular running session on Buckingham with a couple of friends on Friday, spent a big chunk of Saturday playing trains on Retford at Sandra's and today I am planning on spending the day with John Houlden, sitting doing some modelling work together. One of my friends said, as we were leaving Sandra's place yesterday, running Buckingham one day and Retford the next was like being in modelling heaven!

I have found this a few times before. Firms that have had other people up in arms due to what they say is poor customer service and communication have been absolutely fine with me. I think it sometimes comes down to the tone that you adopt when you approach them. Some people just don't enjoy engaging with those who make an approach in an antagonistic and adversarial way, especially when it is likely to be splashed all over the internet. There are rarely any winners in that scenario.

Please put my name on one when they are available Mike. I have fancied a model ever since I worked with them at Orgreave a lifetime ago and my enthusiasm for building a 4mm one subsided when it was done as a RTR model. Mine will have to be a filthy green though, rather than like a carnival wasp costume.

I saw that on Warren's stand and wondered if you had anything to do with it. I nearly had to put sunglasses on to look at it!

They had a chair of the four hole pattern and used two fixing bolts and two trenails. I recovered a few from some old sidings a while ago and some still had the trenails and bolts in place, with the bolts being on diagonally opposite corners.

I did make the trip to Barnsley today and probably spent more time looking at this loco and the NB Atlantic than anything else. They are both lovely models and truly inspirational.

So if KR models say "Sorry but we couldn't get the valve gear to function fully as we had hoped" then that makes everything OK? I have never got involved with paying up front for models that haven't been produced yet. It is a game for mugs if you ask me and seems to often end in tears and tantrums.

I am sure there is a great debate to be had as to what constitutes "fully working" valve gear on a model loco. Unless it is a live steam model, there can be no such thing. So perhaps the description wasn't worded so well. I had a look at the videos of the German locos and while they do have correct motion in the valve gear parts, they look very chunky and overscale. KR seem to have gone for motion parts closer to scale size but with a flawed representation of the movement. I watched the video of the EP too and at normal viewing on a big screen, all I saw were some bits wiggling around in pretty much the way I would expect them too. If I have to slow the video down and zoom in on it to see what is wrong in the movement, I think my eye would be fooled at normal viewing speed and size. As always, we have a choice as to whether we accept what is offered to us and nobody is forced to part with money for a model they don't think is good enough for them.

I may be wrong about this as I am no expert on the type of valve gear on this loco but.... The vast majority of steam locos produced are modelled in mid gear, which means that the valve rod has no significant movement. If Bellerophon is being produced portrayed as being set in moid gear, giving the valve rod little or no motion, why are people complaining that it doesn't move? If it did move, it would be wrong! I am not trying to defend anything. Just pointing out that the valve gear on this model looks as though it will have the same sort of compromises that model railway valve gears have had as long as I can remember. I don't recall such anguish over model locos being run forwards and backwards when they are modelled in mid gear before, so I fail to understand why it is a major problem now. The internal workings of the company are another matter, about which I know nothing. I would be surprised if they sell groceries or cars though.

I am sure all those demanding motion of the valve rod have also altered their models with Walschearts gear so that the valve rods move and the gear alters depending on the speed and direction of the loco. Come on folk. How many RTR models have ever had accurate and fully functional valve gear? None that I know of! Yet I don't recall anybody threatening to take manufacturers to trading standards over it before. The valve gear on this loco would be tricky to make fully working for anybody in any scale. Those expressing their disappointment should perhaps show us how they would design and produce it in a way that can be mass produced at a reasonable cost.

The signals on the M&GN section of Little Bytham are worked by servos, with the electronics supplied by the guys behind Liverpool Lime Street. I have been using their boards or MERG ones for quite a few years now. The only problem I have had is that the arm position can just go a tiny bit out of true for some signals, sometimes, with the MERG boards but it is dead easy to tweak the settings. Edit to add that although TW very kindly credits me with the construction of the MR signals, they were quite well advanced, including the posts fashioned from brass square section by that fine builder of signals and other models, Mick Nicholson, before they came to me. I just had to finish them off, paint them and make them work.

What a superb example of model making, painting and weathering. I had the great pleasure of seeing Richard work on this model at Missenden and I was very impressed by the way he would alter or replace parts in the kit that were a just a tiny bit out of scale or not correct in some way. I recall him explaining that the use of an etch means that you don't get the variety of thicknesses of metal that you get in the real thing and that an over thick etched component could throw dimensions out by a few thou, so he was using the kit parts as templates to make new parts in metal of a different thickness. I hadn't seen anybody go to those lengths before. He really was going "the extra mile" to build his locos and it shows!

Absolutely right. The price of modern RTR carriages and locos is of absolutely no concern to me whatsoever! A visit to most model railway shows will allow you bring home a whole secondhand train for less than the price of a modern RTR loco, or even perhaps a carriage. There are plenty of decent quality models (I am not thinking Triang Princess here) around that will let anybody get started. Then you have the fun part of refurbishing, perhaps detailing and repainting them to bring them up to a decent modern day standard if you want to. Many secondhand models can be used as purchased if somebody doesn't have the will or the ability to do anything to them. Or you could get some sheets of metal and/or plastic and invoke the spirit of Peter Denny and others like him and make your own. At the recent EXPO EM, I ran my Church Warsop layout for the weekend with nothing on it RTR at all and I wasn't alone in that. There were several layouts where everything I saw had been either kit or scratchbuilt. I am always on the lookout for unbuilt kits on second hand stalls and I have enough stashed away, mostly bought at knockdown prices, to keep me occupied for the foreseeable future.

I enjoyed my trip to the show today. A couple of the layouts were being exhibited by friends so I thought that I would visit to show my support. Not a big show but some nice quality layouts. It does seem to me that if you want small diesel or electric layouts then you get TMD/shed/depots and not much else. The TT (3mm not the new version) home made locos on Bluish stood out from the crowd as being quite unusual. Halifax King Cross and Bawdsey are always worth a view and both show how a relatively small layout can be interesting to watch from an operational point of view if the running is well thought out.

Fascinating stuff! I just can't help but get silly schoolboy giggles at the thought of me going down to me shed to do some "Soddering".

Soldering with a silent L. I have heard this before from across the Atlantic.

As I youngster, I got to meet Barnes Wallis, at Scampton on one of his visits there later in life. He kept up his friendships with RAF personnel right up until he passed away. I was too young to really appreciate the significance of the meeting but around 30 years after the raid, it was clear that this was a man who was very highly thought of in RAF circles. We can debate the rights and wrongs of war or the impact of the raid until the cows come home but there is no questioning the audacity, boldness and sheer genius of the concept of bouncing a bomb across water and rolling it down the face of a dam. Neither can we question the skill, dedication, bravery and sacrifice of those who took part. One of the highlights of my childhood was to taxi along the runway at Scampton in PA474 after the aircraft had been to Scampton for some work to be done. Then I was able to watch her fly at Scampton several times. It was so easy, as an 11 year old, to let my imagination run riot and to think of myself as being there with Guy Gibson and the rest of 617 squadron on that night 80 years ago.

I enjoy building layouts and I enjoy operating them but my last layout that was set up permanently at home was built with my Dad when I still lived at home. When I got my own place, I never had room for a layout that would be operationally satisfying so i built a succession of exhibition layouts. Then the opportunity to have Buckingham arose and a shed was built to house it. So now I get the best of both worlds. I still exhibit my own layouts but there is what I regard as the best layout to operate that has ever been built ready for a running session any time I fancy it. It tends to get run once a week when one or two friends come round. I have run it "solo" especially during lockdown but it is much more enjoyable with a team of two or three. So if I am alone, I prefer building things. If I am with friends, I am happy either building things or "playing trains". With people here running the layout, several hours can pass by in a flash.

I think the Werrett drawings are better, as the late Roy Jackson used to say, than the ones we haven't got. There were often variations between batches and alterations to real wagons in service that official drawings don't exist for. So if he recorded and drew a wagon that is at variance with official records, there is no way we can ever be truly sure whether he was wrong or if he recorded a wagon that had been altered in some way. 100 years later and with no great catastrophe going to befall me if a detail us not 100% in line with whatever photos and official records exist, I am not going to lose any sleep over building a wagon to his drawings. It is very hard for anybody to prove conclusively that they are wrong and that no wagon ever existed that looked like what he drew. All we can ever say is that they don't match. Given a choice between building a model based on limited details that may be suspect, or not building it at all, I tend to adopt the former approach.

I hit the "submit reply" box and nothing happened, so I hit it again and it said I had to wait 53 seconds before submitting it again, so I waited 53 seconds and hit the button again and nothing happened so I gave up. Then I looked at "New Content" again it was there 3 times. It baffles the living daylights out of me sometimes.