Michael Edge

The extra grilles at the nose ends were added long before the middle coupling rods were taken off, that also involved moving the numbers. Our kit includes all the options I know about but one thing I'm not sure about is the window in the body side - was there ever one on each side? It's just about impossible to tell and it (they?) was replaced by a grille at some early date. The chances of getting any model of 10100 exactly right are remote - but who would know?

When I moved to Upton (West Riding) in the 1970s coal was quite legally bought and delivered in this way - it came as a bit of a surprise though when I got home from work to find the driveway blocked by a ton of coal. Back home in the Lancashire coalfield it always came delivered in 1cwt sacks.....

All the 2MTs had the same boiler at the same pitch, BR built locos in the LMS number sequence were identical and the BR standard version only differed in the gap at the front of the footplate. I've never seen a list of which ones were PP fitted though.

This loco is different in almost every photo, changes were just about continuous - and for good measure when it was in black livery it's impossible to know which side of it you are looking at, it had two left facing crests. Bizarrely when it was painted green it had the early heraldically incorrect left and right facing crests so it was possible to see which side was which.

The chain drive 4wh Sentinel is 34T, the rod drive variety was more popular for heavy use such as steelworks.

If you can wriggle it in and out of the boiler that arrangement will work well, you can fill the firebox with weight, the motor is in an area where you can't normally fit any. The motor is usually the lightest part of the drive mechanism so getting it up there is an advantage not a disadvantage.

2" is definitely too big, a quick look through some drawings showed up 1 1/2" handrails on a Midland loco but that's the biggest I can find, except where the "handrail" is actually a tube with a control rod inside.

They were a one off, not on a production etch. They are adding to the very slow progress on an etched EM1 though.

I find that a drop of washing up liquid works for this.

I've got quite a few photos of the canopy but I would leave it off - it went after passenger services to Northallerton were withdrawn in 1954.

I think that will be a lot better.

It depends what you mean by handrails - boiler handrails and others fitted in pillars are usually 1 1/4" or 1 1/2" diameter but the sort that are not fitted in pillars (just bent wire in models) are thinner, 3/4" or 1". From a model point of view the pillars we can buy are usually too big so I normally use wire which is slightly thicker than scale to give a better ratio between the handrail and the pillar diameter. For this reason in 4mm scale I use .5mm wire rather than .45mm and in 7mm I use .8mm rather than .7mm.

We have GC Iracier axlebox cover etches, could you use these on HR castings? Apart from the lettering (which isn't clearly visible in this scale) they are the same.

ICI Billingham yes but they had very different buffer beams to the standard Janus. This is the frame of one of the Billingham locos at RMS Locotec some years ago.

Ex LNER locos including V2s worked over the LNW from Leeds after the Woodhead route was closed to steam in 1954. The Yorkshire 0-4-0s were probably going to Allerton for maintenance, they wouldn't send them that far for fuel. After the MDHB was severed at the Pier Head it took a full 8 hour shift to work one of these round Liverpool from Bank Hall to Brunswick - one was out stationed there and had to be changed over from time to time. There were at least 180 coal wagons (including one 60 wagon train of empties) on Wentworth Junction before we put Herculaneum back up last month, I'm busy going through all the couplings at the moment.

Drawings are all done, we started with measurements of Army 610 at the Avon Valley Railway years ago. The difficulties started with the long wheelbase Scunthorpe locos, this got progressively worse as I went along. The locos look much the same but moving the centre axles further apart move the engines and transmissions outwards as well, this resulted in a longer platform and longer engine casings. There are however quite a few parts still in common but the MoD one is different again from the other short wheelbase locos - fluted coupling rods for a start.

Pony wheels would just have been a case of the works using anything available when re-assembling a loco. I remember from trainspotting days just how many different stamped in loco numbers could be found on any one.

You can but the screw thread will wear the coupling rods faster - depending on how much running the loco does this might not matter much I have some 4mm locos with coupling rods running directly on steel screws (Sharman wheels, same problem with the bush being too big) which have been running for more than 30 years now. You could try sleeving the screw with some thin walled brass tube which might leave enough meat on the rods.

Another one showing one of your signal boxes Peter. The scenery wasn't originally intended to go this far down the M&C, it has all got a bit fictitious by this point but there's no real point in having so much railway off-scene.

The pedal car was possibly the most profitable car they ever made - about 40,000 of them were produced.

That's a good question, the 2-6-2Ts have much the same throwover as the 2-6-4Ts at the front. It might just have been for symmetry - the 2-6-4T has much greater throwover at the rear and definitely needed oval buffers there.

added to the list

Don't even think about lead shot and PVA, it would expand and burst your loco apart.

You can melt it with a soldering iron but I do it in a ladle (metal pouring ladle from Tiranti) over the gas cooker, usually when Judith isn't around!

I see that the muck has been rubbed off the cabside number on 63824 - common practice but mostly unnoticed or ignored.