t-b-g

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.

I had it explained to me by Laurie Adams, who has some really long points on his layout. It is down to the combination of flangeway gaps and wheel profiles in 2mm finescale, which ensure that the wheel tread is fully supported on the wing rail, allowing a long gap at the crossing nose without the wheel dropping into it. I work mainly in EM and I have recently built some pointwork using 18mm gauge rather than 18.2mm and a narrower than usual flangeway of 0.8mm. That works in the same way and I get no wheel drop at all. The same applies to those working in 7mm scale, using gauges like 31.5mm rather than 32mm. Of course those working in P4 and S7 have no such concerns. I have no experience of N gauge so I cannot be certain but my guess would be that the rather wide treads on the wheels might give you that same support through the crossing at the expense of the appearance.

You are quite right but I think you have misunderstood the comment. The jigs that have all the axles fixed will automatically give you all the axles square across the frames. If your rods are not identical each side, they won't go on and you know that you need to alter them. With the Poppy wooden jigs, only one axle is fixed square across and the others are in long slots, which don't fix the axle position. So if your rods are not identical lengths, you can assemble a set of frames with the axles not all square. So a comment about the Poppy jigs not being quite as foolproof as ones which have all the axles fixed makes good sense to me. Of course the answer is, as everybody should do, to make sure that your rods are all the same length before you even try to put them on. I have never found the need to use a jig as such. Making sure that your frames and rods are identical each side is essential and done before the frames are assembled. Making up the frames with long 1/8th inch straight steel rods through a couple of axle holes seems to work well enough. I put the frames in an engineers V block with the rods resting on each side of the V, which pretty much ensures they are level and flat and using an engineers square along the steel rods tells me that they are parallel.

A bit more work this evening on the U Class. The motion this side is substantially complete and just needs a motion bracket, a valve guide and the return crank fixing, plus a dummy top slide bar.

That is astonishingly good modelling!

If you have nickel silver rods running on a brass crankpin, it is important that there are no burrs or sharp edges in the hole in the rod and it is also important that the hole through the rod is truly perpendicular. Nickel silver is harder than brass and a non parallel hole or sharp edge spinning on a brass pin can eventually cut through it. Not properly cleaning the cusp off the inside of the hole in an etched rod leaves a nice cutting edge. I have seen it happen on a couple of locos I didn't build. I like to think that I take care to remove burrs and I can make the holes nice and square. When repairing one of the locos, which had cut through several crankpins, I cleaned up the hole in the rod and that cured it.

Roy always called them up and down slow lines. He called the second "extra" line on the down side the down goods. From memory, that is how they were described on the signal box diagrams but I will double check tomorrow.

I would agree. From memory, some of the Queen's Boards distants are fixed too. I wonder how many places on the system had two consecutive fixed distant signals? That arrangement can't have been very common.

Thanks for the tip but I have them and use them often. In this case, the holes are blind, in that they are not etched all the way through. So it has to be a drill first. The tiny etched dimple means that any size of drill is cutting on the edges of the metal rather than at the point of the drill. It may have worked with a tiny drill first but my record at keeping tiny drills intact isn't good. So I decided to try making my own bits, drilling holes in a sheet of nickel silver then cutting them out, using the etched parts as a guide for hole spacing. I enjoyed doing it and found it fairly straightforward, so there wasn't really a problem as such. I was able to make the rods pretty much to scale size and the bosses on mine are smaller than the ones on the etch, so I like to think that mine look a little bit better too. I really just wanted to explain why I didn't use all the bits from the etch.

That would be a possibility but I have made most of the parts for both sides now (sounds like a song!). It is a technique I often use for working on small bits in 4mm and 7mm scales, so why I didn't think of it for 2mm is a mystery.

That looks very sweet Nick. Will you have it with you at Kettering? Mr Worthington has had a bad experience with what he calls "No Joy" valve gear and it will wind him up nicely to see what you have done with yours! Cheers Tony Gee

I believe they are. I struggled to drill the holes in some of the smaller components without mangling them. I tried various drills, with both electric drills and pin chucks but the rods are so slender that the slightest catch or snatch damaged them. Probably just me being clumsy as a 2mm novice. So I have used them as a guide for rod lengths and cut replacements from nickel silver sheet. So even if I am not using them all directly, they have proved very useful.

Hello Tony, That makes sense. There was a surprising amount of track north of the bridge but you don't see many photos there. I guess the "bottleneck" of going down to double track dates back to the days when it was a level crossing rather than a bridge. I had a quick look on Google Earth and there are still various sports fields on the down side north of the bridge. It took me a while to work out the signals. My understanding is that both lines had splitting signals for the up fast or up slow but I struggled to work out why the slow line signals have distants. I am guessing they indicate the home signals on the bracket known as "Queen's Boards" and would indicate a clear road round the curve in Pl.1 onto the GC line.

Whereabouts at Retford is the other photo location Tony? It isn't somewhere I am familiar with. It looks to be a section of 4 track line with those signals but it isn't on the modelled part, so it is beyond the bit that I know anything about.

I started work on a version of this a while ago, with an island platform between the lower two tracks and leaving the uppermost track as a goods siding. I think it is a really nice design and gives a decent level of operational interest for a layout with only 3 points. Mine is 8ft long by 1ft wide in 4mm scale EM gauge, which probably takes it out of a true "micro" category but that allows me to run 4 bogie carriages plus a small tender loco, or 5 plus a tank loco. These are short pre-grouping carriages rather than Mk 1s. The extra length also allows a short length of track (around 2ft) between the first point and the exit to the fiddle yard, so lots of shunting moves can take place on scene without going into the fiddle yard, plus the loco spur is lengthened and will hold a couple of locos.

I can report some steady but slow progress on the U Class for Yeovil Town. I decided to have a go at scratchbuilding the valve gear. The coupling rods and connecting rods are from etches and we do have some etches for the other motion parts but I decided that my chances of a soldered crosshead made up of several parts was likely to test me, so this is just three bits, a small length of square tube, a filed up block soldered underneath and a piston rod soldered into a hole in the front of the block. Much remains to be done but I am fairly pleased with what I have managed so far.

I can't recall whether it was in a magazine article, or perhaps at an exhibition, that I saw somebody "doing a job" on a Lima Crab. They had either widened the loco or narrowed the tender to get the relationship correct and had corrected a number of other errors. From memory, it is the width of the tender that was wrong. It looks it in the photos but I would need to measure to confirm. It looked half decent when it was done. I don't think anybody would bother doing such work nowadays. At the time, there were only three ways to get a Crab. You had the Lima one, a a Wills kit designed for the awful Triang 2-6-2T chassis or you did some scratchbuilding. I don't think the fancy brass one from the far east had come out yet but I may be wrong about that.

31A has answered that fairly comprehensively. It is one area where push on wheels like Gibsons are very easy to use. No quartering problems for one thing, (unless you are building a GNR Steam tender, before some wag points it out). They arrive with the wheels off the axles anyway and it is easy to mount one wheel on the axle, put it through the frames, sort out sideplay by adding washers as necessary (as little as possible front and back and a tiny amount in the centre) and adding the second wheel.

That would be my solution and I would normally do that even if the correct wheels and axles were available. Making a tender inside frame is a good introduction to making your own mechanisms and isn't difficult. I gave up trying to get tender wheels square and straight in cast whitemetal outside frames some time ago. An inside frame gives you somewhere to mount brakes and tender pick ups if you would like to have them too. It also allows a bit of side play to be introduced on the centre axle, plus a bit of compensation or suspension for those who like such things.