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My apologies Tony. I should have known better than to question somebody who has probably put more valve gear together than many of us put together! In the original photos there was a slight indication of a curve going the wrong way but looking at them again with some glasses on (there is a clue!) it is the front edge of the motion bracket. Another vote here for the GWR Diagram AA16, as produced by D & S. Somebody has obviously built the kit, realised that modelling the GWR is the huge error of judgement that some of us believe it to be and then tried to make amends by giving it the lettering of a proper railway. They didn't get away with it. Although it would be interesting to find out that one got sold off to some obscure independent railway and ended up lettered like that. The "North Exmouth" or suchlike.

I am sorry to be picking nits again but isn't the valve gear on that otherwise lovely A4 suffering from a backwards facing expansion link? It is easily done. I have done it myself in the final assembly, by mixing the LH and RH components. It was one of those "Oh flipping heck" (feel free to insert other phrases) moments when I spotted it.

Hello Tony and best wishes for the season, to you and all RMWebbers. Looking at your photo of the elongated hole in the connecting rod and also at the assembled valve gear makes me wonder if something is slightly amiss with one or more of the components. When the crankpin is at the rear of the loco, the crosshead should be right at the back of the slidebar, which is as it is shown in the photo of the valve gear on its own. When it is assembled onto the loco, there seems to be a gap between the rear of the crosshead and the back of the slidebar. Maybe the connecting rod is too long, or the cylinders too far back, or indeed the wheels to far forward, or a combination of those factors. The easiest to fix on a model would probably be to slightly shorten the connecting rod (or fit an alternative sightly shorter one if there is one available. Apart from doing away with the need to make the hole bigger, it would improve the appearance generally as by moving the crosshead slightly further back, you also alter the relationship it has with the union link and combination lever. It was one of Malcolm's pet subjects and we spent many a happy hour poring over photos and drawings when he was working on some of his express locos. I am not telling tales by saying that some of his locos never quite got fettled properly in the running quality but he certainly taught me much about valve gear on LNER locos and the relationship between the components. Nowadays, I can look at a model loco and quickly decide whether the valve gear looks right or not. One failing that I see many times is that on many classes of loco modelled in mid gear, the lifting arm (the crank that is attached to the reversing lever behind the expansion link) should be in alignment with the radius rod to form a straight line. In many models I have seen it pointing up or down. It didn't bother me at all until I was educated. Now it stands out like a sore thumb. All the best for the new year and I hope this thread will continue to educate and inspire. Tony Gee

It is quite surprising that they were allowed to remain in service for so long. Every passenger seeing a P2 hauled train must have dreaded getting aboard as the chances of them arriving safely at their destination must have been slim. The P2 was a big step in loco design and yes, the pony truck design did cause extra wear on certain curves at certain speeds, which would have been solved by the later pony truck but the operating people on the route were delighted to have them and didn't want them to go. So they really cannot have been as bad as some people like to make them out. I am looking forward to seeing "Prince of Wales" for the very reason that I expect it to show just how close Gresley got to designing the most powerful, magnificent loco ever to haul a passenger train in the country.

I have told this story before on here but as it came from a very good source, I will tell it again. The Peppercorn A1 and A2 designs were drawn in the Doncaster drawing office while Thompson was still at the helm. Edward Thompson was a North Eastern man and spent a fair amount of time at Darlington and while he was away, the drawing office staff, who were the same people who worked with Gresley, set about drawing what they thought Thompson should have been doing. They knew he wasn't going to be there long and that his replacement might appreciate what they were doing. He did!. There were times when Thompson arrived at Doncaster "Plant" and the drawing office staff would quickly hide what they were doing, so that he didn't see or know what they were up to. It was one of Malcolm Crawley's favourite tales of his time on the railway and in the words of Max Boyce, he knew it was true because he was there!

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, get it out with "optrex", as (I think) Spike Milligan once said. Best wishes & happy new year. Tony.

I hope that you get somewhere for the layout before too long. Families are always top priority but having a good hobby and the time and space to carry it out is important too. Even if you don't have room for the layout straight away, perhaps you will have a workbench and scope for doing some modelling jobs in the meantime. The layout is lovely and a very good example of Cyril Freezer's superb design. I have built something similar in 4mm scale but never got it as advanced as yours and now plans are afoot for a 7mm version. Your thread has given me great encouragement as to just what can be achieved. Tony

Or, as Malcolm Crawley used to call it, GWR "cowpat green". It doesn't matter how nice a colour you paint those Thompson locos, they still look as though they were thrown together from the contents of a modellers scrap box rather than designed in a drawing office. If you divide the loco at the front driving wheel and cover the front end with you hand on a picture, they look fine. Now cover the back with you hand and the front end just looks the most ill proportioned mess. It doesn't even look as if the outside steam pipes go anywhere near the cylinders!

I have a number of kits in my "to do" drawer that have had, to my knowledge, 3 previous owners. I hope that I am the one that finally gets them built but with my rate of progress, there is no guarantee! Once again, such matters come down to personal choice. Each of us can decide whether it is more satisfying to get a layout up and running as quickly as possible by using RTR locos, carriages, wagons and buildings, signals and track. Or we can decide to make things for ourselves, or to involve others by buying in help or trading modelling jobs with others. Each of us also has a choice as to which approach we prefer to look at when we are viewing layouts that others have produced. I am firmly with Tony Wright in his views. A less than perfect model that some poor sod has sweated blood to get together is hugely more interesting to me than the very best from a factory in the far east. I am lucky enough to be able to spend a bit of my time encouraging others to have a go and to see a beginner of a year or two ago having a very good go at building a Martin Finney kit gives me a huge personal buzz. I wouldn't dream of trying to tell others what they should do but I am very happy to say that without the satisfaction gained from making things for myself, as well as for others, I would be looking for another hobby as I find the superb quality RTR items just does nothing for me creatively. Yesterday, I saw a loco that a good friend had built. It was his first in 7mm scale and it was stunning. I spent simply ages looking it over and talking to him about how he had made certain parts or performed particular tasks. I came away inspired. That just doesn't happen with a RTR loco, no matter how good it is.

I like that! A friend of mine had a layout with many stations and bells and he had a paperclip attached loosely to bells when there were several together. I always thought it was purely a modellers trick but I am delighted to see that it had a prototype.

At Grandborough Junction on the original Buckingham, the same problem with the bells cropped up and they were fitted with a diode linked to a capacitor. Whenever anybody rang a bell there, the diode on the appropriate block instrument stayed lit for several seconds as the capacitor discharged. I have the circuit board with all the components on it but haven't got it going yet as it is part of the "birds nest" of wiring under the layout and I haven't worked out how to connect it up. We still only have one bell and block instrument working there, so it isn't a problem (yet!). I like the bells! They look good. Cheers, Tony

The way I work out speeds on models (when no gadget speedo is available) is to base everything on a mile per minute being equal to 60mph. A mile in 4mm scale is as near 70ft as makes no difference so a model travelling 70ft in a minute is doing 60 scale mph. A model doing the same distance in 2 minutes is doing 30mph. Of course most of us don't have 70ft of model railway but it is easy to find two fixed points on your layout and proportion the length and time based on those dimensions, so a train doing 60mph will cover one tenth of that, (7ft), in one tenth of the time, (6 seconds). Or one doing 30mph scale speed will cover 7ft in 12 seconds. You don't really need to be too precise and once you get a couple of speeds in your head, it is fairly easy to go a bit faster than 6 seconds to do 70mph or a bit slower than 12 seconds to do 25mph. It isn't too difficult to make up a full table of what times over a certain distance represent what scale speeds if you want proper accuracy. I saw one table based on number of revolutions of a driving wheel of certain sizes. Have you ever tried counting rpm at a scale 70mph on a moving train? I do know a real professor who counted rpm on model railway motors using a strobe light but he is a lot cleverer than me!

Roy Jackson's Retford layout is fitted with one of the clever digital speed measuring machines (I think it was from a firm called ACME). It was a very interesting exercise to firstly see what speed operators thought they were running trains at and then tell them the actual scale speed. With a bit of experience using the speedometer, some of us started to be able to judge speeds fairly accurately and nowadays I can look at a model train and tell with a few mph what scale speed it is doing. It was, initially, very surprising at how wrong some of us were and many a train that should have been doing 25mph was being run at nearer 40mph. The idea of running trains at extra slow speeds to pretend that it is travelling further isn't one that has much merit in my view. An express running at 35mph just because it is on a layout half the length it should be just doesn't look right. I think that Frank Dyer had the right idea in his articles on operation in the MRJ way back when. He advocated adjusting acceleration and deceleration to allow a train to still be travelling at a reasonable speed as it came on scene or off scene. Most of his trains were stopping, so the idea doesn't really apply to trains running through but a slight adjustment, say running an express at 55mph instead of 70mph would not look silly and would still keep the train "on scene" longer than it would be.

Most RTR models are as good as, or better than, most people can make. I don't think that anybody is hammering the quality, although perhaps, as Tony W has pointed out, they are not quite in the same league when it comes to haulage or running quality. The problem is that RTR is now so good that many layouts that you see in magazines or at shows rely on it completely. There is no variety, as each layout has an "identikit" stud of locos and only those few varieties of carriage that the manufacturers choose to provide. I agree that the hobby is becoming increasingly based around RTR and that the number of people who will build things just because they can and do enjoy it is probably declining. It is perhaps a bit in line with the "I want it and I want it now" society that we seem to be becoming. There is, however, still an "old guard" with a few new people joining it, that prefers the idea of having models that they have made rather than bought. It is, to me, the area of the hobby that I enjoy for myself. It is also the area of the hobby that I enjoy when I am looking at layouts and models that others have done. So I don't buy most of the magazines now and I don't go to many shows because both are so RTR centred but I do enjoy (very much) sitting in my workshop with a kit or something scratchbuilt on the bench. It is so much more satisfying than opening a box.

Thanks Tony. I would agree about the appearance with the second set of deflectors. They did look a bit like the afterthought that they were! When you look at the piston rod on the model, it does look as if it is pointing at the centre of the driven axle, which is where it should be. Is there a small gap between the motion bracket and the bottom of the footplate? Perhaps a tweak there (as in a double bend to lift the outermost section) might raise the bracket enough so that the back end of the slidebars lines up with it. In any event, it is nitpicking in the extreme over what is a lovely model!

A query from a non expert in P2 matters here. Did 2002 run in service without the extra smoke deflectors? I know it was built without them but from what I recall reading, wind tunnel tests showed up a problem and the extra deflectors were added very early. What I don't know is if the wind tunnel tests and the modification were carried out before the loco went into traffic It doesn't make the model wrong, just that it is modelled "as built". I know that there have been books on the class but I don't happen to have them!

There are also some LED lights available ready made from DCC Concepts. I have used some in signals, as although they are sold for use on locos etc, they are close enough for signals. I haven't measured them but they look very close to scale size and the handles are the tiniest bit of thin wire that I have ever seen on a model railway product. They supply them with three resistors to vary the brightness. https://www.dccconcepts.com/product-category/lamps-lighting-and-signals/loco-and-rolling-stock-lamps/ Is the link to look at.

I think you may have misread. It is 16' plus a fiddle yard. 8' platforms, 8' station throat plus an 8' fiddle yard, probably a traverser as I don't fancy lifting 7mm stuff on cassettes. I think it works out! A GCR 4-6-0 and 5 Parker bogie carriages is just short of 8' in 7mm scale. One of the advantages of modelling pre-grouping times. Not only were trains generally shorter in terms of number of carriages but the carriages were shorter too. I used to live in Calne in the late 1960s early 1970s. As bored schoolkids in the summer holidays we used to go along to the Harris factory to watch the pigs go in for entertainment. Different times. The station had closed and the track lifted but other than that, it was pretty much intact.

I ended up building one or two O gauge items for other people and really enjoyed the change after 35 years working in 4mm EM gauge. I have built pretty much every layout that I have in my head (apart from one or two that were way too ambitious and I will never have room for). So in order to give me a fresh challenge, I am plotting a 7mm layout. However, my hobby is all about making things rather than buying them so there won't be any RTR in sight. It won't be a shunting plank either. I am going for a small double track terminus station, which can fit in a 16' length (plus a fiddle yard) allowing for 4-6-0 loco types and 5 bogie carriages. The problem with a good supply of reasonable quality RTR is that people then start designing layouts around what is available and they all end up looking somewhat similar in terms of motive power. So you are very likely right in your prediction of shunting planks a plenty but hopefully I will avoid falling into that group!

A few pages back you posted some photos of a horsebox. None of us can really say for sure exactly what colour brown the GCR used but I thought that vehicle looked right to my eyes. I don';t think that you would be far wrong using whatever you used on that for carriages. It would make sense if they matched up anyway, as they should be in the same livery. I have seen other period paintings where the brown is much more like your horsebox. In the painting above, the colours generally don't look too convincing, especially the green of the loco. I don't know of any preserved GCR carriages in a painted brown finish but there are the Barnums at Ruddington that would have been varnished wood rather than painted. It would make sense if the painted finish was near to that colour, otherwise it would have looked as if the GCR had two different liveries. Of course these are well weathered and old no but they give a reasonable idea of the colour to go for. https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7304/9396550796_f24d613497_b.jpg Tony

My apologies. I missed the bit where you mentioned between tunnels at the south end and thought that you were talking about the dimensions of the whole station, not just the "between bridges/tunnels" approach. In old money, I measured the whole thing at being around 24' long by about 9' wide, to include the station frontage. That is why your dimensions pretty much matched what I had worked out by a factor of x 10. The scenic break I had thought of for Leicester would have been the tracks disappearing into the girder bridges at each end, with the station end of each bridge modelled but then with a theatre arch obscuring the fact that you couldn't see the whole bridge. I have never tried it but I have seen it done by others and it can be done effectively. The tracks could then curve immediately after that break.

You might get closer if you replace mm with cm but I know what you mean! It really isn't that long. I measured it once myself and it was the width that was the killer. No matter how long your arms are, reaching the middle of 3.2metres is pretty impossible. The other problem is that you either change the scenic aspect to give a good view or you have to look down on everything. Leicester Central is around the same length but only around 1m wide, perhaps widening a bit more for the turntable. It is also built high up on arches and has trams running along the front of the rather nice building (as built, it got butchered later) at ground level, nicely framing the scene. All those trains terminating or changing loco would make for a superb operational layout.

The island platform style that people often quote as a GCR standard only applies to that little branch that they built down to London. There are many, many stations along the original Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire line that are more conventional. Or there is the LD&ECR route, or the Cheshire Lines system, both of which had superb possible prototypes for modelling. These northern lines were full of interest and scenic possibilities yet many enthusiasts concentrate on the line to London. On some of the routes, a 6 coach train was much nearer what ran on the real thing than a 14 coach set.

I have always been a modeller who has done my best to get things looking as realistic as possible and in that respect, the photo of LB is far closer to looking at the real thing than the photo of Buckingham. There are a tiny number of layouts where you can take a photo of the real location and a photo of the model and you have to stare long and hard to find a tiny difference. Where Buckingham makes up for any lack in that department is in the sheer genius of the man who built it. It has a charm and a personality unlike any layout I have ever seen or operated. Somehow it works a bit of magic and your eye doesn't see the shortcomings. It is the nearest thing I have experienced to being transported into a miniature world, away from the troubles and toils of the real one. So both layouts are quite spectacular creations, in different ways and achieved by different methods but both special.

Those photos certainly show up the difference in model making quality between Buckingham and Little Bytham. Even if he was working today, I am not sure that Peter Denny would have ever achieved those levels of realism, to allow his railway to look so much like the real thing.