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That comment says more about Cyril Freezer than it does about finescale modelling! I recall that he was not a huge fan of P4 either. There is nothing wrong with people wanting to challenge themselves and pushing the boundaries of modelling in the pursuit of the most accurate possible models. It is just not for everybody and there is a trade of in terms of time taken and effort needed against possibly a small improvement in results. Rather like P4, the number of good quality, extensive S7 layouts that you see with long trains running at good speeds is tiny. It is only fairly recently that I have taken a big interest in 7mm and have visited some of the specialist shows. Far more than in 4mm, there is a huge range of skills and abilities in the larger scales and I see many items for sale that only bear a passing resemblance to what they are supposed to be. The number of people who create work in 7mm to the standard of the best 4mm scenic modellers is small and many layouts have what I call a "dolls house" look, being almost toy like. And then I see something like the "Midland in London" thread on here and it opens my eyes to just what can be achieved. But back to the OP, I would be interested to know why you chose 32mm over 31'5mm.

I am a newbie to 7mm. After some 40 years working in EM gauge I am going dual gauge. I hadn't heard of 31.5mm gauge but I was invited to view a layout that was built in a loft, which exhibited the best running I can ever recall seeing. The layout had been built by a professional railwayman with lots of experience of the real thing and we were able to propel full length express trains, of around 12 bogies, round relatively tight curves with no clicks, bumps and not a hint of a derailment. It was just how I want mine to run, although I won't have room for more than 5 bogie carriages. I asked him how he had obtained such superb running and the answer he gave was that he used 31.5mm gauge through his points. Now I have no doubt that there are layouts with 32mm gauge that run as well but I always prefer to go on what I have seen with my own eyes and I was sold! The other factor is appearance. The gap through check rails on 31.5 is narrower than the rail head, like the real thing. In 32mm, the check gap is wider than the rail head. It is a tiny difference but visually, that change in proportion makes a big difference to the realism of the track. 31.5mm pointwork looks, to me, more like Scale7 than it does conventional O gauge at 32mm. And finally, if there is anybody out there who can tell the difference between 32mm and 31.5mm without measuring, when there are no check rails around, they have eyes far superior to mine, as I can't! The latest MRJ has, on its front cover, a photo of a layout built using 31.5mm (I think - I may be wrong but somebody told me that was what was used) and it looks superb. So that is what I will be using. I want to build all the track anyway, as I have P.way drawings of GCR track and I want to model it with correct sleepering sizes and spacings, which ready to lay track doesn't cater for. So it can all be 31.5mm gauge with no need to have rails widening and narrowing at points, as some do (including the one I saw that ran so well). I fully accept that others hold alternative views and there can never be a "right" or "wrong" in such things as layouts in both gauges have been built and work. But that is my personal preference.

Lovely stuff Graeme. I have said it before but anything GCR is alright by me! I wonder if the problem with the bogie wheels touching the cylinders is being caused by the relationship in the positions of one or the other. On the prototype, the cylinder was central between the bogie wheels but on the model the cylinders are much nearer the front bogie wheel. I don't know which is wrong without measuring but it looks likely that the cylinders are too far forward. Moving the cylinders is perhaps not an easy option but having seen what you can do to a loco, if anybody can do it, you can!

One of the things that strikes me is that the Buckingham locos, with ages from 71 through to the babies at around 40 years old, have a lot of play and slop in them now but not quite as much as you get in a brand new RTR loco. I often think of them as being nicely "run in". Several have been rebuilt with new motors over the years but at least a couple have wheels, motors and gears from when they were new.

I have had some of the Buckingham locos on Retford and to see the little 2-4-0T tearing round with the 40 wagon fish train at a scale 70mph was quite something. It has axle holes so worn that the only thing holding the gears in mesh is the weight of the loco. If you lift the body up the gears slip. The trains on Buckingham have mostly inside bearings and a huge amount of drag plus they have to negotiate 2ft radius curves and some quite dodgy track. I have pulled some of the trains along by hand and I can assure you that the locos have to work hard compared to pulling something with pin point bearings. I would back something like the 4-6-0 to out pull most kit or scratch built locos, let alone any RTR ones. There is no doubt that a loco hauling 15 cars round Retford has to work really hard but the query raised was about mileage and I would maintain that the Buckingham locos will be some way ahead of most others simply because of the number of hours (usually around 6) the layout is run every week. As for Pendon, what about the 2-8-0 that pulled 100 wagons round week after week for years? Tony

There is a big difference between the mileages run up by locos that work on a regular basis and those that get run less frequently. On Buckingham, there are locos that have worked week in, week out, for (in some cases) 70 years. The total length of run is around 40ft each way, so in round numbers, a trip to the fiddle yard and back is roughly a scale mile. Locos do this maybe once or twice in an operating session, which takes place twice a week. So that is 4 scale miles a week, or around 200 a year. A loco doing a 200 ft circuit on something like Retford but doing it perhaps 30 times a year does around 90 scale miles a year. If I was guessing which layout has the locos with the highest mileages on I would nominate Pendon. It is a biggish circuit and the locos run frequently and go back a lot of years. In 7mm, perhaps the Gainsborough layout would put even Pendon to shame as some of those must have clocked up many, many miles due to the distance, age and regular operation of the layout.

That is why I mentioned it on a thread about tight curves!

Wigan is always one of my favourite shows in the exhibition diary and one of the few that I regularly travel a long distance to see. I hope to do the same this year and I am looking forward to it. I will just pass on what little thing that crossed my mind. I can't see any P4, S7 or 2mm finescale layouts, so the "finescale" versions of the main scales are represented by just one EM gauge layout. That is not to say that there isn't a superb collection of high quality layouts. It is just an observation from a finescale enthusiast.

Whisker Hill Curve at Retford is, according to Roy Jackson (who built it dead to scale in 4mm:1ft EM Gauge) "The tightest main line curve in the country". In 4mm scale, it works out at just a shade over 3' radius. It may not fit the criteria of being negotiated by all locos and stock as some were banned (Austerity 2-8-0 locos were banned tender first after one derailed) but it was certainly used regularly by main line trains on the GCR route until the "dive under" was built and I have been round it on a DMU before Retford station was rebuilt. It is very noisy indeed when a train goes round and the sound can be heard from well across town. That doesn't answer the query about points but for the fixing the location and for the size of the radius I would be very surprised if there was anything much smaller than that.

There have always been exceptional happenings on the railway. There is nothing wrong with modelling such things but to me, they rarely make convincing scenes. It was Frank Dyer, in one of his articles, who said that he always tried to recreate the sort of every day typical railway scene on his layouts and I think that is one of the reasons why they looked so realistic. Model railways where people feel the need to show every "one off" prototype and have engineers trains or departmental stock that in real I've you would see once in a blue moon running all the time just don't convince me. Sure these things "happen on the real railway" and if that is what people think a real railway looks like then good luck to them but it is not for me.

When people talk about the Thompson B1 outlasting, say, a B16, does it make any difference knowing that the B16 was in service, in some cases, for around 45 years, whereas the B1s managed far less than that? It makes the whole "this loco was withdrawn later than that one so it must have been better" defence worthless. Things like reliability, coal consumption, ability to do the job they were built for, these things make one loco better than another, not the dates into or out of service, which may have been drastically changed by traffic patterns or technological developments. It is like saying that some of the 9Fs were only running for a few years so they must have been poor designs. The B1s were built, initially, in wartime. On the cheap and with as much cost saving as possible. Would they have lasted 45 years? Apart from the rather pampered preserved examples, we will never know. They were designed to replace ageing classes that had been service, in some cases, since around the turn of the century, that were clapped out and had been kept in service beyond their "proper" withdrawal dates due to the war. This whole notion of who was the better designer or which loco was "best" will never get us anywhere because there is no "right" answer. Each of us can pick and choose some facts to support our case but none of it can ever result in any more than a personal preference. I could argue that as Gresley adopted the Robinson D11 for Scotland and Thompson adopted the J11 as a standard design, plus the fact that the O4 was much used by both in original and rebuilt forms, years after it first appeared, perhaps Robinson was the daddy of them all. But that would just counter my own views, so I won't!

Pure guesswork on my part but I had got the idea in my head that classes that were on "borrowed time" and due for early withdrawal/rebuilding may have been given higher class number because when the fleet was whittled down to the chosen "standard" classes, they would all have the lower numbers. It only seems to have happened on his new build types as things like J11s and J72s were amongst the "standard" classes. Perhaps they didn't get new class numbers as there were no new designs introduced that could have caused him to want to use the lower numbers and give the existing classes higher ones. As for your other questions..... don't get me started! What we don't know is how long some of his designs might have lasted in service if it had not been for the modernisation plan. We might have been talking about B1s running up 50 years or more in traffic, similar to some of the pre-grouping designs they replaced.

For those that have seen him, particularly a few years ago, some of us have often wondered why you never saw Tom Baker and Roy Jackson (of Retford fame) in a room together. Roy did have the right pattern of knitted scarf too (and maybe still does).

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is to check for fluff, dust and muck between the pick ups and the wheels and also to make sure that the pick ups are touching the wheels at the full extent of any sideplay. Clean wheels, clean track and clean contact from the pick ups to the wheels solve 99% of cases where locos need a nudge in my experience.

I did! Lots of fan based guesswork and a few inconsistent bits from later plot lines. I think some people actually think it is real! Spot on! I used to prefer Dr Who when the storyline was spread over several episodes, with a cliff hanger at the end of each show. The stories were allowed to develop over several hours of viewing and didn't need resolving within 40 minutes. They only needed one or two storylines per series instead of 8 or 9, so they didn't end up repeating the limited range of available types of plot so quickly. Recent series have, to me, been let down by plot rather than acting ability. Changing the main actor won't alter that but the other changes going on with the series, behind the scenes, might improve things.

The gender change perhaps. It happens enough and more in the open than it used to be for it to be no longer such a shock (I hope). The age difference? Not so sure that happens in real life! The granddaughter must be around 70 years old now (unless she has lived many hundreds of years like The Doctor). The person who used to be Granddad (and looked as if the age gap was about right) and is now Grandma but looks around 30 (but is still, of course older than the Granddad when he was an old looking man). Now if my granddad re-appeared not only as a woman but one looking much younger than me, I might just scratch my head a bit!

Speaking of which, in the early days, the Doctor was a grandfather and had a granddaughter. Unless I missed something, there should have been, at some point, a Mrs Doctor (never mentioned nowadays) and they must have had a child (unless that is the one "created" when David Tennant was in the role - my favourite so far). Somebody is going to have to explain to the poor girl (who is likely to be a grandma herself now) that not only is her granddad now her grandma but she is a grandma who looks a lot younger than her granddaughter. The poor grown up child will be well and truly baffled. I have no idea whether a female Doctor is a good or bad thing. I do know that it can't be "wrong" because the character was created by the BBC and if the BBC have decided that a gender change is possible, then it must be so. My problem with recent series has been the writing, not the casting. Get that sorted and a female Doctor could work out as a welcome change. If the poor actress has the level of material that Peter Capaldi has had to deal with, she could be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

I think it was some sort of homage to the boring old "they don't have any copies in xyz Smiths" that used to blight MRJ threads. Those of us dared to suggest that sort of thing was a waste of the internet and RMWeb have never really been forgiven.

There is probably nothing in it about modelling pre-grouping Great Central Railway either but rather than moan about the lack of articles directly relevant to me I will still enjoy seeing what others get up to.

You are spot on with that Jol. There is a huge difference between the originator of the business starting from nothing, gradually building up a product range and learning as they go along, compared to a new owner taking it over and really expecting (and being expected) to know everything about it straight away.. When the system works well, the transition can work almost seamlessly. I will quote Andrew Hartshorne and his acquisition of Comet as an excellent example of how it can and should be done. As for phones, I do have a mobile. I use it as a portable alarm clock but other than that, I only ever use it to keep in touch with family when they or I am away and even then it is usually just an "I got here safely" text. I am on Facebook because I joined when my daughters were away at University as a way of keeping in touch but in 10 years I have hardly posted anything. It is a good way of seeing what my friends get up to and sometimes somebody will post a link to some wonderful modelling work on the net that I wouldn't have seen otherwise but over a week, I will probably be on it for no more than 5 minutes. Now RMWeb! That is another story. If I spent a bit less time on here I might get a lot more done! Still, I regard this as the place where I interact with a bunch of like minded people. If you like, it is what I do instead of being a member of a model railway club. But if the internet and mobile phones were banned tomorrow, I don't think that my social life would end, as it would for many youngsters. I do have some very good real friends and I see them regularly, which would be enough social interaction for me! When we do meet up, which is usually 3 - 4 times a week, the mobile phones very rarely come out!

In an ideal world I would agree with you. But what about a trader who has a limited amount of that most valuable resource, namely time? If they have enough orders and business to service the amount of trade they get but don't have any extra time available, then how would they be able to handle the extra enquiries and business that a website would be expected to generate? It is not just about setting a website up. It is about keeping it updated and having the resources to deal with the business generated by it. I earn a living from model railways nowadays and I have a good amount of work coming in through recommendation and word of mouth and no spare capacity to do more. Tell me again why I should be expected to have a website? The same applies to the sorts of traders you are talking about. I find that asking around, particularly on RMWeb, will soon get you pointed in the direction of more obscure products. If there are products that are so under the radar that nobody has heard of them, then you can always either make what you want yourself or choose to build something else. But I would rather these traders carry on as they are rather than have them swamped with orders to the point where they get fed up and pack in trading.

Yes and yes. It is the 11B (small boiler variety as built) that Peter Denny built and it was photographed on Buckingham. It is sights like this that make me want to build models.

Yes it does! Is there some sort of loco appreciation training course we can book you on? No 110 "King George" got a smaller boiler again in 1918 so would have probably gone to the LNER in that condition. The main change that upsets the look of the loco for me is not so much the bigger boiler it is the longer firebox and shorter cab. When they put the smaller boiler back on they rebuilt the cab to original form and give it the original chimney and dome too, so to all intents it was back to early condition. The books I have looked in don't say how long it ran like that but it may have been until withdrawal as no further rebuilding is mentioned.

When Malcolm Crawley started building his superb GCR Atlantic, he was originally going to paint that black until I niggled away at him and he gave in. I used to say "When you can paint a loco like this (I would then wave a GCR livery photo under his nose) why would anybody want to paint one black?" So here is a D9 on a certain old layout. I know the tactic won't work here but you can't knock me for trying. Many years ago, I used to be able to sit down and put a kit together in a couple of days. More recently, I probably spend too much time checking details and correcting the little things that are not quite right. It makes a tiny difference to the finished model but puts a huge amount of time onto the build. As I have said before, we each have our different approaches and I will never be as prolific at building locos as Tony W if I live to be 150!