t-b-g

Lovely stuff! Without giving too much away, you have modelled at least part of two properties owned by me and my family. I never knew the station when it was open but my old father in law, who passed away about a year ago and used to live in one of the Queen's Crescent properties which back to to the line knew it well and used it often. He could remember the pre war streamliners going through, accelerating off the viaduct. He used to scrounge coal from the crew of any freights that were held in the long lay by siding. He would reward the crews with a selection of his chrysanths or some veg from the garden. One of the last two remaining railway buildings in Bawtry goods yard bit the dust this week. The goods shed remains, now clad in modern steel sheeting. The other building, the one to the right of the goods shed on your plan, which was originally served by a wagon turntable, hence the strange orientation, has been demolished to be replaced by a tin industrial unit.

Just checked and at 2.35mm high, they won't fit in the 2mm panel on the carriages without spreading over the beading, so the hand lettering will have to stay. Thanks for trying to help anyway.

And the prize for the worst thread drift in RMWeb history goes to.........

I agree that the crimson livery looks very smart indeed. I have just been having another look at the photo of 828. To me, it looks as if there is no discernable lining on the tanks and bunker but I could convince myself that there is lining on the boiler band just in front of the tanks. I could also convince myself that the cab sides might have a black border, with the possibility of an orange line between the border and the main colour. When you get colours like dark red, brown and orange on photos of that age, it can be really tricky to tell the apart.

The loco doesn't look quite as dark as the carriage behind it but the carriage that appears behind the bunker looks the same sort of shade as the loco. So I am wondering if the carriage at the front end is crimson lake but the loco and the carriage at the rear are chocolate brown?

Possibly Ken Pelham?

Retford has SMP plain track but some of the Buckingham locos catch the inside of the chairs with their flanges. I wonder whether the flange profile in the 1940s/1950s was deeper, or if wear on the wheel treads has made the flanges deeper than they were when new? That is certainly the case on the only loco I have measured, which has the very rare Romford 20.5mm diameter wheels but was built with 21mm ones. Either way, they bump along on the plain track.

Many thanks. I had spotted those but I wasn't sure if they would be the correct size for the carriages. The waist panels are quite small! Doh! Just spotted the sizes are shown on the website! Next time I visit my friend I will measure the carriages and see if they will fit.

It was very loosely! The other end of the line was based on Henley on Thames and a train running at a scale 60mph took about 12 minutes to get from one end to the other. There were a total of 12 stations on the layout, large and small. It required around 200 locos to work the timetable. With that amount of layout to build, plenty of corners were well and truly cut.

Either the lines go on to a fiddle yard or reversing loop to allow the trains to be returned, or they go on to a larger railway system (like the one I illustrated above), with perhaps another terminus station at the other end.

A friend of mine built a layout based loosely on Paddington many years ago. He didn't call it Paddington as it was very much modified to fit the location. He sadly passed away before it was properly finished but I did take this snap of it in an "under construction" state.

I agree entirely. I always thought " Half term at Ditchling Green" was a wonderfully evocative title for a layout. As was "The little long drag". I have never been creative enough to come up with anything that good!

Hello Tony. I do remember it well. I saw it a couple of times, at York and elsewhere. I couldn't have told you whether it had working coal loading or not. It didn't make that much of an impression on me. Tom's experience would be another reason for not bothering with such things on a model. For a short while, in the late 1970s, I worked at the Orgreave coke works. I have never seen anything on a model that comes even close to the experience of seeing their hoppers working close up. The whole area around the hoppers was caked in a thick layer of dust, which when wet became the most horrible black slimy sludge! Yet I have seen models of such facilities with relatively clean ballasted track.

I have rarely been convinced by attempts to have working loading and unloading facilities. Most hopper systems involve lots of noise and great clouds of dust, which you just don't get on models. Plus, you often have a scene where the figures are in static poses, when in real life they would be moving around. The best we can really do is to create a scene that looks realistic when photographed. When it is a moving 3D scene, we need lots of imagination to complete the gaps in the movement. The loading, unloading and movement of people in my imagination works just fine. Making one part of the action really happen without the other parts doesn't convince me, although I can be impressed by the work done to make it happen.

Seeing the mentions of Buckingham reminds me that I have wondered about producing an exhibition layout based on one of the earlier versions of the layout. Probably either the double or single track version of the Mk 2 layout. The real Buckingham is not ever going to be taken to an exhibition as it is too fragile to move. It would need a couple of days setting up time to repair all the soldered joints that would break when the boards were lifted, as they twisted and flexed. Yet it would be good to share the locos and stock with a wider audience, so building a replica, perhaps using "old school" methods, Merco printed brickpaper and such, would be an interesting exercise. I hadn't even considered what I might call such a layout. It would have to have "Buckingham" in the name, so perhaps "Buckingham Mk 2", or even "Two tracks to Buckingham" as per the title of the Denny article in Railway Modeller all those years ago. I do think that there is a bit of a difference in philosophy between a modeller building a layout of a real place that has already been done by somebody else and a modeller building a duplicate of a fictional place. One is re-using a location. The other is re-using somebody else's creation.

Each coal wagon has two bodies that fit on the same underframe. At the start of the sequence, empty coal wagons are scattered all over the layout. Between then and when the coal empties run, the wagons are collected together by the pilots at Buckingham and Grandborough and the train, starting at Buckingham, collects the empties from Grandborough and heads "north" to the fiddle yard. Once there, the bodies are swapped for the full loads. They then work back and get split up. At the end of the sequence, one of the tasks to carry out before the next day is to swap the full bodies for the empty one. So the body swaps are not done on scene during the normal running. There would be a further complication in that some wagons would go to Leighton Buzzard but that still isn't connected to the rest of the layout yet, so 6 wagons remain at Grandborough, rather than 3 there and 3 at Leighton Buzzard.

On Buckingham, we have a Director's Saloon, which would normally be seen once in a blue moon. In the timetable it appears daily. Peter Denny told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that one of the Directors was having an "illicit relationship" with a barmaid at the Swan at Leighton Buzzard, which explains the daily visits and a stay at LB of a few hours before the return trip. On another matter, which has been discussed many times before, that of shunting vs. running trains through, I took this snap of the marshalling yard at Grandborough Junction yesterday, during our weekly running session. From the left, we have a down stopping passenger, calling at Platform 3 on it's way to Buckingham. Then we have the daily London to Buckingham goods, which has been reformed, having dropped off wagons for Grandborough and Leighton Buzzard and had some wagons for Buckingham from the other two stations added, using the coloured dots on the solebars as a guide. The loco will shortly come off shed and take it to Buckingham. In the next siding are six coal empties. Three would have come from LB, two from GJ goods yard plus an empty loco coal wagon from the loco depot. A train from Buckingham will collect these and head "up north" to return later with a loaded coal train, which will be distributed around the layout. The next siding has the wagons dropped from the goods train for GJ, which would be worked to GJ goods yard by the pilot between trains on the main line and the last one has the wagons dropped for LB. The pilot has been very busy doing all this while a succession of passenger trains either stop at GJ or rattle through non stop. That, to me, is what operating a layout is all about. To maintain my interest, I need a variety of types of train and movement. Repeating the same thing time and time again bores me very quickly.

Lovely stuff. Although not a big LT enthusiast, I have been helping g a friend finish some ancient Harrow Model Shop carriages to go with the kit built electric he built many years ago. I ended up hand lettering (not my greatest skill) the carriages as the transfers supplied with the kit were pretty poor. The lettering on the ones illustrated is much better. Are the transfers used still available and where might I obtain some please? They would be an improvement on my efforts.

Perhaps the right question to ask is whether you want to build a layout that will be the same as one somebody else is doing. There have been several stations that have been modelled by more than one person. There is no rule or restriction that stops you, other than your own decision as to whether you are happy duplicating what somebody else is doing.

Any good? I guess Tbar is threaded. https://www.ba-bolts.co.uk/babrassst.html

I know people who prefer to work alone. Each to their own. We manage to do the tea drinking and putting the world to rights while we work. Sometimes we work and chat. Sometimes we sit in almost silence while we concentrate on what we are doing and sometimes we will put on some music to listen to. All these (apart from visiting Sandra and Retford) are, or have been, working with one other person. I was in a model railway club once and found that not really conducive to getting on with things. I much prefer either working on my own individual stuff, with perhaps somebody helping me, or helping others with their projects. I found that the club I was involved with had too many people with different ideas about what we should be doing and how we should do it.

I have always been much more productive working with others. Just sitting in the same room as somebody else makes me less likely to get distracted or diverted. From my earliest modelling with my old Dad, through many collaborations with several friends no longer with us, including Tony Johnson, Malcolm Crawley and Roy Jackson, to ongoing work with Sandra Orpen and the rest of the good folk working on Retford, Ken Hill, Lawrie Adams and John Houlden. Whether we are working on the same project or on our own individual ones, it matters not. The hobby has always been just as much about the social aspects as it is about the modelling itself. If it was just me, working alone, I wouldn't have done nearly as much as I have and many of the skills and abilities I have now are there because of spending time with good modellers, who were happy to show me how they approached things. I have done a lot of finding my own way too but there is always someone there to talk through any problems and to come up with solutions or help.

I have recently being doing a bit of 2mm Finescale to help a friend with his project. The 2mm community is a very helpful and welcoming one and there is lots of advice and help available. There are plenty of threads in the 2mm section of RMWeb, some of which show how to convert RTR locos and stock to 2mm. I would recommend joining the Association at an early stage, before trying to do much of anything. The shop is full of useful/essential bits, many of which are produced especially for the Association and not available elsewhere. I wouldn't fancy trying anything 2mm Finescale without access to it.

Those look much better. I have seen the same problems occur on models, presumably DJH kits, of LMS and BR standard tenders. Getting the curves at the top just right isn't easy.

I wouldn't know without measuring but I have always thought that the bent over portion at the top of the tender side on many model tenders isn't quite right. There is too much metal bent over and it should be curved rather than straight with an angled bend. It does alter the relationship between the carriage end and the tender. Having said that, the overall proportions don't look too far out to me. The relationship of the cantrail on a carriage to the bend at the top of the side of the tender looks about right. It is what happens after the bend that makes it look odd to my eyes. The curve of the tender top should almost mirror the shape of the carriage roof.