t-b-g

I think Tony W may have inadvertently kick started the discussion again by posting those photos of the GWR Prairies in different scales and the rather lovely 3mm B1 and considering whether or not Hornby had made the right decision in their choice of scale/gauge but for the answer to be discussed elsewhere. It was a bit like setting a bait and asking that nobody take it. That was only going to end one way!

I am sure there must be good reasons for this decision but if I had a choice of boosting the income of the organisation that backs RMWeb or the huge corporation that is Facebook (or whatever the company is called nowadays), I know which one I would choose. I am on Facebook and I do participate in a few railway related groups but it is mainly for keeping in touch with distant friends and family who are not interested in railways in any shape or form. Whichever platform is used, it does seem fairly reasonable to expect the people who provide it to gain some sort of income from it.

There must be some around. I think much of it isn't down to how big a layout is, or how long each particular journey is. It is more about how often a layout is operated. Hitchen was, from what I have read, run quite frequently, as is Buckingham. I know Pendon has an issue with wear and tear on locos as some of the mechanisms built by Guy Williams are now being replaced. I am sure there must be others.

Thanks Tony. Of course you and Jesse would be most welcome. I still hope to get you driving a train on Buckingham one day! I still have the collection of old Romfords that you very kindly offered to give me as a source of spares for the Buckingham locos and since then, a second similar collection has come my way from the clearance of the house of a deceased friend and modeller. I must have around 150 old Romfords of different sizes now. I think I may have mentioned it before but I tried to use some a while ago, when the oldest loco, the "Pom-pom" built over December 1946 and Jan 1947 ended up with a couple of loose tyres, as the old insulation on a couple of the wheels had perished. I went through the collection you supplied and there were 5 wheels of the correct size, 21mm, so I couldn't do a full replacement. A partial replacement was impossible too, as the original wheels had worn down to around 20.5mm diameter and I didn't fancy having two different sizes. In the end, I took the tyres off, added a ring of Araldite around the centres as new insulation and put the old tyres back on. With the wheels from you plus the later selection, I would now be able to install a new full set of the right size if it happens again. I wonder how many model locos run so much that the wheels wear down by that amount?

Thanks for all that but it was a long time ago. It was only a 12v mini drill and the file had a big wooden handle, so I don't think I was in any great danger. I now have a lathe (or three) and a rough idea as to how to use them, plus some very good friends who are real experts at machine tool work if I need help with more advanced stuff so I don't need to get up to those sorts of tricks nowadays. I only mentioned it because I ended up with flanges that looked a little bit how the ones on the C9 seem to look to me.

I wanted some wheels from Alan Gibson a week or two ago. I rang the number, had a brief chat with Colin, gave him my card number and the wheels I ordered arrived two days later. It really wasn't very difficult at all.

I don't know if I am imagining things, or if it is lighting and camera angles fooling my eyes but it looks for all the world to me as if the flanges on the driving wheels are smaller at the bottom edge of the wheels and get wider as it goes around the circumference. I once did that to a set of older Romford wheels so I wonder if somebody else has done the same as I did. I was a lot younger and had no idea about how to use lathes (or access to one) but I had read something in a magazine about turning the flanges down and so I mounted each wheel individually on an axle, put them in an electric drill and attacked the flanges with a big flat file. It sort of worked but they ended up very lopsided and I was never happy with the way the wheels seemed to wobble as they went round, so the loco was withdrawn from service for new wheels to be fitted and it still languishes in the box some 30 years later, as it was built in LNER condition and in the meantime I had switched to the pre WW1 period.

I tend to not actually fix the gearbox in place. I always think it would be a good idea to be able to remove it if necessary. So I adopt a few different strategies depending on the location of the motor. If there is a convenient surface nearby, I will attach the motor to it with a big lump of "Blu tack" or similar. Sometimes, I will use a rigid wire, maybe handrail wire or maybe something a bit thicker, to connect one of the motor terminals to either a pick up plate or the one of the frames if they are live to one side. Mind you, as a non DCC user, I don't have to consider that the wires have to go via a decoder. You could still mount an extra bit of PCB and divide it into 4 sections, if you are going to "hardwire" a decoder in. You could then put a solid wire from the PCB to the motor terminal.

Buckingham has some nice signals and a representation of point rodding. The stools are simply strips of plasticard with holes drilled through them and the rodding is fine steel wire, probably piano wire or something similar. There has been little attempt to model the cranks, compensators and other more intricate items but the overall impact from just having something there is worthwhile. Where the rods go under tracks, the steel rodding is replaced with 20 thou plastic rod to avoid shorts.

Not being a GWR modeller myself, I haven't had to try making those hooks for the bunker rear but I do have a friend who straightens out the split pins supplied for either handrail pillars or couplings and uses them to make the hooks. They looked very effective. He used to bend the end down at 90 degrees, put it through a hole in the bunker back and solder it on the inside using low melt 70 or 90 degree solder. With plenty of flux, the solder would flash into the hole and with it being half round, would hold it in position and stop it swivelling round.

Malcolm Crawley first put that valance/footplate arrangement on the J6 and the LNWR 2-4-0 kits which he drew for George Norton. I can't recall if it was his idea or if it was something he had seen elsewhere and liked.

I have seen models built with cranks at 120 degrees and it works just fine. The important thing is that when the motor starts turning the driven axle, at least one rod can start pulling or pushing the other wheels around. It is fairly easy using friction fit wheels but it would be very tricky to do it with Markits/Romford style self quartering ones.

Absolutely but if you can build a model that is like the real thing or one that isn't, I know which I prefer. I am always my own harshest critic and if I have bodged something, even something that nobody else might ever notice, it niggles me as much as the most obvious error.

LH wheel at the top and RH wheel forwards gives you the conventional RH leading arrangement.

I have just noticed that on Talking Picture channel, they are showing a 1958 film, entitled "The Spaniard's Curse", starring that well known thespian Tony Wright. Presumably this is a previously undisclosed aspect of Tony's past that he has tried to keep under wraps.

How many years does it feel like Andy? Many congratulations on the anniversary. I know it hasn't always (ever?) been easy for you but your efforts in getting it up and running and keeping it going through thick and thin are much appreciated.

Early couplings were notoriously prone to breaking. Casting and forging techniques were not as sophisticated as they became later. So trains used to divide, or break. Over time things improved but it still happens! One function of the vans was to deal with the portion of the train that had broken off by preventing it from running away. The act of stopping a train created a "break" in the journey too. So I can understand the use of "Break Van". I ponder about the use of both "break" and "brake" and I wonder if it came about because they sound the same and many railway staff in the early days of railways were illiterate, so at some point, somebody heard "break" and wrote down "brake".

Hello Tony, We ran a model of No 727 that Malcolm scratchbuilt on "Thompson's End". I am not sure if it went in front of your camera, or even if it had been built when you took the photos for the article in BRM. If it did, it failed to make the final selection used in the magazine. Regards Tony

I have been visiting a modelling friend this evening, working on a 2mm finescale mechanism. I come home to find that I am pretty much redundant, as you have done a fine job with the handrail. Only three tries is quite good. I know one very good modeller who once took around 10 attempts! Of course GWR lamp irons are not like "normal" ones that my locos have. I use a long strip, make a short bend in it at one end, tin the short bit and solder it on then snip it to length. Much easier than tiny components pinging away out of tweezers or pliers. If you have some scrap etched thin strip bits with a right angled bend, you could do the same.

If your layout is a fictional one, you could always say that owing to a narrow tunnel further along the line, the narrower carriages, as produced by Ratio, were kept in service on this particular route. It is the sort of justification that I use when the chips are down!

Quite impressive. We discussed earlier just how much you can alter or add to "Minories" and still give it that name. I am not sure how you plan fits with that I can see at least something of Minories in the upper station throat (although the original didn't use slips). I would be a bit concerned at the access to the tracks at the outside edges, where the boards are at their widest. It looks to me that the lower board is around 3ft wide (I still plan layouts in feet as I have a basic grasp of lengths and radius of curves in feet that I don't have in metric!). Reaching across anything larger than 2ft 6ins isn't something I would want to do. If you want to use tender locos, is the intention to send them off "to the shed" round the reverse loop to turn them? Could you fit a turntable in your top right corner? (Edit to add that I had missed the bit where you said what you were going to do with tender locos, which was an idea I suggested earlier!) Your proposed stock includes a number of items that will need to be built from scratch or from kits and in my experience, getting kits to run around curves as tight as your reverse loop can be very tricky as they are often not designed with that much flexibility. Maybe you have a few tricks up your sleeve but I will mention it in case it is something you haven't considered.

Indeed you did. I am not sure it is a good idea for a 2mm finescale layout though. as you go down to smaller scales, the circumference gets too small to be useful for storing trains and the 2mm finescale world doesn't really go for small radius curves so I think the proportions just wouldn't work very well. I like the idea of the 7 1/4" version though! That I would like to see.

If you have (for 4mm scale), an 8ft scenic section with a 4ft throat and a 4ft platform, then your train length is around 4ft and your fiddle yard need not be any longer than that. In 2mm, by my advanced maths, that makes a 4ft scenic section and a 2ft fiddle yard. To me, a one third fiddle yard and two thirds scenic section is a decent balance. For exhibitions, you can always put some sort of display board up, or some scenic work along the front. Adding a few carriage sidings worked very well on Bradfield Gloucester Square but would involve a total redesign of the track and scenic work and would also fundamentally change the way the layout works, to the point where it isn't really Minories any more in my view.. In most situations where a fine scale (non train set/set track) curve is required, a return loop is going to occupy much more space than the scenic section, and any layout that has more fiddle yard than scenic section always seems to be a poor use of space to me. A traverser with 4,5 or 6 tracks is plenty and if it can be turned around to avoid stock handling, even better. I have used cassettes but I am not a fan. They seem to create lots of work in the fiddle yard and sliding a traverser across to the next road is a lot less hassle.

I like that treatment a lot!

I think what you have done already to the kit is a real "tour de force". It was always going to be an uphill struggle and your work has certainly made a difference but sometimes you have to accept that there is only so much you can do without reaching a point where you would have been better off not using the kit at all. The finished result may not be a perfect model but it will be a lot better than the kit built as intended straight out of the box. To me, the worst thing on the DJH kit was always the smokebox saddle and the resulting boiler height and gap under the boiler, which looked awful. You really have done some good work to make that aspect look right. Not long until this one is finished and I look forward to seeing what you get up to next. Seeing what you have achieved with what is really quite a poor kit has encouraged me to dig out (yet again) my old Millholme GCR 4-6-0 kit, which is probably of a similar quality!