t-b-g

A close second!

We are bringing Leighton Buzzard out of exhibition retirement for a couple of shows. Warley in a couple of weeks and Ally Pally next March. Both are special anniversary occasions. It is the 50th show for Warley and it will be 70 years since Peter Denny first exhibited a layout at the MRC show. Although that layout no longer exists, some of the buildings from it, as well as the locos and stock, still exist and will be on view. The rest of the layout is substantially operational, although many small tasks remain to be done. It has got to the stage where we can run much of the timetable and I have friends round twice a week for running sessions just as Peter used to do. It is (I know I am biased) the most enjoyable layout to operate I have ever been near. We shut the door on the rest of the world and 3 hours fly by. It is the ultimate therapy and all the problems of the rest of real life just vanish for a while. Once these two shows are done, the next part of the restoration is to attach Leighton Buzzard again. We haven't done this yet as it covers the points in the fiddle yard and they are not 100% reliable yet but are getting near. But generally, progress is steady, immensely satisfying and very enjoyable and rewarding. What more could anybody want?

I do know people who have been soldering for years and can still just about manage to get two bits of metal to stay approximately together with a big blob of solder, which is attached to neither bit of metal firmly. The truth is, soldering is much easier than many people think it is. Get the metal in the right place and hot, some good flux, the right amount of solder and you are away. If anybody spent 5 minutes watching somebody like Tony Wright, or several others on here, they would soon wonder what they were worrying about. It is certainly much easier than drawing part of the human body well! Those of us who can't understand why people struggle all learned it sometime and were once novices, probably scared of getting burnt. Some are self taught, some learned from watching others. I have personally taught quite a few beginners how to solder. All can now solder to a reasonable standard and some of them quickly became very good indeed at it, having previously thought it next to impossible.

Is the new owner either an RMWeb member or can be persuaded to become one so that we can still get to hear progress reports and updates on the layout? I appreciate that it would be up to the new owner to decide how public they want to be and whether the layout will still be exhibited from time to time but it would be nice to here how things are going.

Not really a regular working but trials were run using two Britannia locos, double heading, from Mansfield up the GC main line, with a rake of fitted 16t mineral wagons. This was part of the preparation for the famous Annesley "windcutters". In the end they decided that the trains would be OK with more conventional motive power but the trials were to see how things went with super power and 60mph running. I only ever saw one photo in a cutting from a local newspaper but my Dad saw the trains and said they were quite something.

Always one of the best kept secrets on the show circuit. The Hull club put on a smashing show but the attendance's just don't seem to be in keeping with the quality of the show. Perhaps having a big chunk of water in your natural catchment area doesn't help. On show this time will be Geoff Kent's "Black Lion Crossing" which is worth the admission price alone. Anybody looking for something to do this weekend could do much worse than sort a trip to Hull out.

Either Modelu (3D printed) or Lanarkshire Models (whitemetal) do some lovely lamps, which make earlier productions look exceptionally crude. Possibly worth a replacement program?

There are a tiny number of vehicles, maybe 4 or 5, which were built rigid. These comprise a couple of kit built wagons along with a couple of really early scratch builds. I am not sure if Peter Denny was given the kits as gifts as he didn't go out and purchase kits as a rule. The rest are all sprung, including conversion of the Triang bogies on the GWR clerestories that he converted for the GCR. Most have inside bearings of flat brass with axle holes drilled through. The brass axle bearings are soldered to wires which in turn are soldered to a plate, screwed or glued across the centre of the wagon or bogie. Some of the alignments and engineering practises are a bit iffy but in the main they work well and when you can see a difference in the running over poor track. The 6 wheeled carriages have a sprung wire bogie for 4 axles and a simple vertical spring on the other one. A few have an outside pin point bearing, an inverted U, over the axles and then the U is soldered to the sprung wires. They have now worn quite badly through 70 years of regular running and the axle ends have so much play they can cause problem with derailments as the wheels almost fall out of the wagons. They are on the "to do" list!

I have worked almost exclusively in EM for some 35 years and after being told that I was a bit of a Luddite I have tried springing, beam compensation and a few hybrid systems. None have been any better than my rigid mechanisms except on "difficult" types like 0-4-4t or 4-4-0 tender locos. On those, I now rest the body on the bogie pivot and a fixed axle and allow the other axle, nearest the bogie, a small amount of vertical movement, controlled by a simple wire spring. Even the best "rigid" mechanism has a small amount of play in the bearings. Most RTR locos have axles that can slop about all over the place. So I find that I rarely get any problems with power pick up. I find it easier to build reliable pick ups, with good even pressure on the wheels, if the wheels are simply turning in a bearing and can't move up and down. As a final point, on Buckingham, all the rolling stock is sprung but the driving wheels of the locos are rigid. The track is uneven and have all sorts of humps and bumps but it is rare that anything needs a prod. The layout is run twice a week and the track has been cleaned a couple of times in 6 years. Any faltering is always down to fluff collecting between the pick ups and the wheels, which could happen just as easily on a sprung or compensated arrangement. So rigid in EM is just fine.

Problems will happen. The difference comes in how you deal with them. Blind acceptance that these things happen or carry out some remedial work to put them right. Every fault has a cause that can be corrected. If people are willing to take the time and effort needed to correct them. Whether that be some concerted cleaning or adjusting some errant track with a soldering iron or improving a back to back on a wheel. The worst we had was with Narrow Road at Alexandra Palace a few years ago. The atmosphere was thick with dust and moisture that settled on the layout and caused dreadful running. So we set one operator on constant wheel and track cleaning. Not much fun but it kept the trains running. By the time all the wheels were cleaned as the locos came into the fiddle yard it was time to clean the track and as soon as the track was cleaned it was time to clean the wheels. It is easy enough to remove a poorly performing wagon, carriage or loco, or to choose not to use the siding with the dodgy point motor but when it is the whole layout and all the locos that are suffering, that sorts out the men from the boys!

The maths of scale speed is not difficult. Once you work from one mile in a minute is 60mph you can quickly work out a scale distance on any layout and time a train over it. In 4mm scale a mile is around 70ft so 7ft is one tenth of a scale mile. If a train covers that in one tenth of a minute, better known as six seconds, it is doing a scale 60mph. Most of us will have a stopwatch on our clever mobile phones or a clock or watch with a second hand. Sure you will get small errors but it will give you a good idea of what 60 or 30mph looks like.

I think that most people will have had some from of derailment at some time. The difference comes with how the modeller deals with it. Derailments don't ever just happen. They have a cause. Be it track or wheel problems, buffer locking, baseboard misalignment or something else. What I find frustrating at exhibitions is when a layout has a train of, say, 30 wagons. 29 run superbly but one derails. So it gets put back on and derails again next time round. So it gets put back on again and the cycle continues. The idea of simply removing the vehicle to either sort out at home later or even at the show just doesn't occur. Or tweaking a bad rail joint so that stuff stays on. It is the "it always does that there" acceptance that doesn't sit well with me. It would drive me potty if I accepted such things on one of my layouts. I know of one very well known exhibition layout that hardly gets touched between shows and comes out of storage with exactly the same faults that it was put away with after the previous show. The way some layouts are operated at shows is just plain poor. People who have taken the layout along because they wanted a weekend away with their pals, who chat in groups with their backs to the paying punters and seem quite miffed if somebody actually interrupts their socialising by showing an interest and wanting to ask a question. There have been times at shows when I wanted to ask something and I just could not catch the eye of the operators, even those not actually running things. To me, it is down to the exhibition manager to get a balance of layouts. There are some people who want lots of action on a tail chaser and there are others who appreciate the finer aspect of operation, including proper signalling and block bells. For every Gresley Beat or Stoke Summit there should be a St Merryn. The best shows are those with a variety of sizes, scales, prototypes and methods of operation. A show with nothing but tiny shunting planks is just as dull and one dimensional as a show with a dozen big tail chasers and nothing else.

I can't help thinking that to judge some stories, told by a father to his son some 70 years ago, by the standards of today, is a bit harsh. They are what they are. A product of their time. The fact that stories are still being written, all this time later, using the same characters, surely proves that they had some merit. I remember being a small boy. I wanted "boy" stories. This meant soldiers, trains and aeroplanes. If anybody wants a target for lack of political correctness, I give you Biggles! My sister wanted "girl" stories, usually involving nurses, ponies, princesses etc. She wouldn't listen to my story books and I wouldn't listen to hers. I grew up a well rounded, highly tolerant individual with no prejudices against any group on grounds of religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation, so those stories didn't turn me into a racist misogynist. If anybody wants stories with lots of diversity and balanced representation in terms of ethnicity and sexuality, then I am sure there must be some they can read and they can just leave poor Thomas on the bookshelf.

I am currently helping a friend with yet another scale reproduction of a big station on the ECML, in EM gauge, set in the early 1970s. We got hold of some C & L concrete sleeper base and some flat bottom rail and spent an hour or two filing the edges of the rail so it would slide in. The purist will tell us that we have the wrong type of sleeper or rail fixings but at least there will be a mix of concrete sleepered flat bottom and wooden sleepered bull head and each type will be, as far as we can tell from photos, where it needs to be. The points are copperclad, soldered construction, which again is a compromise but one that was accepted due to the number of points needed and the time saved doing each one that way. For another project, I have got hold of some "proper" MSLR P. Way drawings for pointwork, so I hope to build pretty accurate models (apart from the gauge which will be slightly under scale size) of appropriate pointwork. I did this once before and as Tony W says, nobody noticed! Still, I do my own modelling to please me rather than others and I only need around 7 or 8 points, so the timescale is not a factor. The plain track will also be hand made as the MSLR had some unusual ideas about sleeper spacing, with "facing" and "trailing" ends of plain track having different sleeper spacings. Again, nobody else will notice but I know it will be there. And yes, I did spot the FB track on Stoke Summit and Charwelton! Yet I am sure that I wouldn't have known if two of the carriages on the Elizabethan had been swapped from their proper positions or if the V2 on a particular train was one from York but that train should always have a Top Shed loco. I can understand why compromises in such things are made and I fully appreciate that to some folk, the track is only there to give them somewhere to run their trains but it is an aspect of modelling that I find fascinating and much neglected.

The comments about the track are interesting. It is still very much the poor relation in modelling. There are several layouts, some quite well known and highly respected, which have superbly modelled trains running on the wrong sort of track. I suppose it all comes down to the interests of the layout builder and the perceived impact on the viewer. I wouldn't know if a train had the correct diagram number of carriage for a particular date that is visible for 15 seconds in a running session but I do notice when the track doesn't look right and that is visible all the time. A pre 1923 layout with concrete sleepers and continuous welded rail would be regarded as ridiculous (unless there was one I haven't seen) but a 1950s or 1960s layout of a real place that had more modern track but is modelled as BH rail on timber sleepers seems to be generally accepted because that is all that could be bought. Isn't that the same thing as using RTR locos and stock to save the trouble of making your own? It just goes to show the variety of approaches to the hobby and the different ways we choose to spend that most scarce resource, time.

Dreadful news. Every time we take our models to shows this sort of thing is a danger and I have had close friends who have had locos stolen, which were unique models and irreplaceable. It is heart breaking. Hopefully these will come to light when some toe rag tries to sell them. Are there any photos that can be put on here so we know what to look out for?

Alan Buttler, scanner to the stars! Very rock and roll. You soon won't want to bother with us mere railway modellers. Will XTC be appearing in the shop for those who wish to model a rock concert?

Is "walking distance" set out in any know reference work as a particular standard and if so, what units is it measured in. If not, I would define it as "The distance a grumpy railway modeller aged 65 with dodgy hips can walk in 30 minutes without getting out of breath by rushing".

The thing is that there are lots of designers who earn a crust from brand imaging and general corporate work. There have been many liveries over the years and some of them have looked superb but no designer worth his or her fee could possibly suggest using an old livery and still justify their fees. So they have to come up with something new. When all the good colour combinations and designs have already been used up, they come up with fresh new ones, which are usually garbage. As it is very expensive garbage that the rail companies have paid sky high fees to have designed, they would look incompetent if they had to admit that their fees were wasted on a rubbish design. So the trains end up looking like a primary school pupil chucked some garish poster paint over them. Those same units painted in carmine and cream, with a black and gold lining, or lined maroon, or even BR EMU Green, would look fine. I would love to see one of the ECML sets painted up like the LNER pre war streamliners, with perhaps a similar tribute to the past on the WCML with trains in either blue and silver or red and gold. I think they would look superb.

There was a good article including copies of prototype drawings of a Cowans Sheldon 50' turntable by John Wright in MRJ Issue number 25.

The essence of a minories is that beyond the station throat there is no point work and that either a pilot or another train loco deals with anything loco hauled. Any turntable or traverser and it is still a model of a terminus but not a minories.

Leighton Buzzard is not set up and linked to the rest of the layout yet but if you get to Warley show (Or Ally Pally next year) please feel free to have another operating session. Cheers, Tony

I have visited previously and chose not to go this year. The main factor was the journey time, of at least 3 hours each way. A few years ago it wouldn't have bothered me but as the years go by I find long distance driving no fun any more. I have had too many journeys where hold ups and delays make a 3 hour trip a 5 hour ordeal. That plus the cost of fuel make me think long and hard before travelling a long way for a day out. The entrance cost is rarely a factor as I don't mind putting some funds into the coffers of organisations putting on these sorts of shows. I will continue to visit the "North" show as that is only an hour away.

Well I like it! The difference between shunting 3 sidings and 4 in a goods yard is negligible and I like the loco shed. It gives extra traffic with loco coal and LE movements. The only suggestion I would make is that the very first point from the fiddle yard could be changed from a RH to a LH to straighten up the exit a bit. That just leaves one bend in the main line rather than have it bending twice, with no obvious reason for them doing it "in real life". I am not too keen on the layouts where the run round is done on a sector plate. Virtually every move requires the fiddle yard to be moved over and to my way of thinking, the less that is done using the fiddle yard the better. I much prefer modelling and operating a limited but complete station rather than a more spread out part of one. With all these things, much of it comes down to personal preference. There is no right or wrong. Whenever anybody posts a layout design on here, you can pretty much guarantee at least a couple of people will have alterations to suggest and there is nothing wrong with that but it doesn't mean that your plan is wrong in any way, just that it doesn't fit with how they would do it if they were building it. One of the most enjoyable layouts I have operated is Peter Denny's "Leighton Buzzard". On the face of it, there is a lot of railway crammed into a 6' board (which is what it was before the gas works was added). It has a goods yard, a private siding and a loco shed and can be operated for hours without getting boring.

There is a fully detailed caption to the photo on the disused stations website that identifies the loco as a Gresley designed N2 and the line was a GNR branch line.