roythebus

I worked on loads of 31s as a secondman at KX. They were quite capable and reliable locos for almost everything we used them on, from cross-London freights to suburban trains out of Moorgate to the Cambridge buffet expresses to standby express work. We had just over the ton a few times on the up buffet expresses coming through Wood Green tunnel. It was only when we had an "out of area" loco from the <spit> western that we had troubles. Slipped to a stand one Sunday trying to pull 900 tonnes of spent ballast out of KX, well, it WAS raining; failed once on an evening Cambridge down train north of Welwyn Viaduct on the 2-track bit, got dragged out PDQ with a loco from WGC within 15 minutes. A regular feature was overheating leaving KX in summer with the radiator end leading, the air flow missed the radiator vents!

Interesting. Must be the later mk2 Wills chassis. I'll have to find my old one out.

Yes, I have the wills version as well, it originally had the Triang XT60 fitted which I've probably still got kicking around in the spares box. I think the kit cost about £4/14/6 back in 1966! It took another 2 weeks paper round money to buy yhe wheels from Jones Bros of Turnham Green. How dis you manage to squeeze an X04 in there? My Finecast version with the little can motor can easily pull my 37 wagon freight train! I'll do a video of it later.

I remember the adverts in the model press when they were released boasting about the microscopic detail of the lettering being readable on the makers' plate on the body. Truly remarkable for that era, the model was ahead of its time in a lot of respects.

Quote of the week from the above article (remember it's in Wales): Bill Kelly, Network Rail’s Wales route director, said: “A huge amount of progress has already been made as our engineers work tirelessly to repair the damage and open the Heart of Wales line as quickly as possible. “They have had a mountain to climb in the last few weeks, but we now know the timescales for the reopening of the line, which we know is so vital to the local communities it serves.

So where is this mystery thread?

I'd send it back and ask for a refund as it works!!

You're mixing those up with the 508s, the brakes on those were bloody awful! I speak from bitter experience..mever had a problem with SUBs/EPs or the main line stuff, but 508s, nah!

An idea I've had for a long time is to model a bit of the West London Line. Being a Fulham lad the line skirts the eastern boundary of Fulham. I've been fascinated by the huge warehouse alongside the line where it crosses under the Cromwell Road, the main A4 out of London. Several people have done variants of Addison Road/Kensington Olympia and other bits but not the bit between Kensington High Street and Warwick Road..The line provides opportunities to run stock and locos from every region, including London transport and with some modeller's licence I've assumed the link to the Hammersmith & City at Latimer Road was re-instated after WW2, maybe the link to Shepherds Bush and Richmond didn't close in 1960, and the third rail from Clapham Junction was laid a lot earlier. The track wasn't rationalised and wagon load traffic is buoyant and Tescos didn't buy the goods yard site. I use 00sf as I have a lot of 00 stock and tried the 00 fine scale but that meant pushing wheels out to a wider bak-to back. too much trouble, so converted to 00sf and everything runs fine and it looks right in my eyes. It turns out there's a bit of family history with the line too. The furniture warehouse was a depository for Whiteleys, the Bayswater store. It's been there since the 180ss and I discovered my paternal grandfather was a carter at Whiteleys delivering furniture on his horse-drawn cart in the 1890s. Luckily I have use of a railway room where I live with my partner Lisa who is also interested in railway modelling! There's just about enough room (24' x 11') to do a slightly shortened version of the section I'd like to model. So I set to work with Templot and with a lot of help from Martin Wynn he kindly downloaded the NLS map of the area and gave me guidance as to how to get it to load and run on my macbook. Once that had been sorted, it took about 5 hours to do a rough version of the scale track plan. When I can work out what format I can use to export from Templot to here I'll copy it across.

I suppose we've become so accustomed to the Trix loco "looking" right for so many years the odd few mm short doesn't notice. It just LOOKS right despite the bogie wheelbase being wrong too. It has the atmosphere and character of the real thing. Top marks for noticing my spoof on the steam heat pipes. the white pipes are control air pipes on mosts locos that have them; the only point of them on the early electrics would be for the loco brake on any trailing loco. They were never fitted for multiple operation. They could work in tandem and would need a driver on each loco to drive it, with the driver on the leading loco controlling the brake on the whole train. By the time I got to work on them in 1974/75 they'd all been fitted with dual pipe train air brakes. It would have been interesting to see one doing a ton with a Black 5 in tow providing steam heat! But no doubt they'd be limited to something like 50mph with a steamer in tow. Over the years I've converted a Hornby dublo one to a class 73 as per Chris Leigh's article in the MRC in about 1963, a Triang body to an 82 or similar, a Trix to an 85 (still got that somewhere) and a Trix to an 86 before the Hornby model came out. I've still got the bits of that if anyone is interested in a body for bits. And an AM1 under construction from Comet suburban coaches on Adrian Swain underframes and ends. I'm never going to live long enough now to finish all these conversions that were started in the late 1960s!

Somebody's taken a wrong 'un here mate.

And the yellow ones. Add steam heat pipe for the train heat boiler.

Set points before signals, they would be interlocked on the real thing! Shunt and release is very time-consuming, not a problem on a model, but would be in the real thing, hence a turnover loco is provided.

Said the actress to the bishop.

Goods traffic on the Widened Lines was indeed intense at time. Trains were short, locos were 0-6-0T or 0-6-2T. the GWR stuff was tripped infrom Acton Yard or Paddington goods, Midland stuff to Cricklewood/Brent, ER from Hornsey or Temple Mills, and Suvvern didn't get a look in except on cross-London. But on our Minories the Suvvern would be served from hither Green/Bricklayers Arms or Nine Elms either via the East London Line or Holborn viaduct. So an excuse to run any region's goods trains and locos. Trains had to be short because of loco route availability, terminal capacity, and live capacity, fitting in between an intensive suburban services of the Underground and the main line. My latest idea for a Minories style plan is High Street Kensington, 2 through tracks tunnel to tunnel, 2 terminal tracks again tunnel to tunnel, and a substantial coal depot accessed from one of the terminal tracks via a 3 way switch-back to street level. and no run-round in the goods yard. I still haven't worked out how the loco ran round, but it would arrive in the terminal road, propel the goods train up an incline, pull it up another incline, then propel it to another incline, pull back again then propel into the sidings! Maybe they used horses to drag the empty wagons onto the loco or gravity down the first incline onto the loco? Nobody seems to know. Sounds fun though.

I made one from a bit of scrap ali strip and a couple of bits of plywood. however I cut the middle slots with too big a gap so it doesn't work properly, so I'll remove the ali strip, turn it round and file some new slots. Simples.

Are you sure it had air brakes fitted from new? From memory they were vacuum brake only, air brake on the loco only.

a couple of people on the Isle of wight Steam Railway wanted to reproduce the Southern typeface and done some considerable research on the matter. They came to the conclusion is that almost every sign was different, whether it was in the typeface, width or height of letter, style of letter. I seem to remember it was an article in the Island News magazine maybe 5 years ago. The research was probably done by Terry Hastings and Tim cooper, both IWSR historians. the simple answer is there is no standard typeface! A standard type style maybe!

It was until the recent problems.

No, it looks better the way it is. Continentals usually do things differently to the British way. There's a metre gauge tramway I work on in Belgium (TTA) that has the exit crossover half way along the platform. And they often don't use the same raised platforms we have in the UK. It's nothing to find a siding branching off midway along a platform in Germany.

I would suggest the results of the rugby testing station have been largely disproved in recent years with the advent of the "steam specials" over Shap and the S&C. Witness the Bulleid Pacific going over Shap with a heavy load on plus a diesel on the back for the ride with the safety valves lifting. Or the remarkable video of 3 steam trains following each other on the same stretch "on the block" with one train catching up with the one in front. Were all these specials heavier than the average train in the 1950s I wonder?

I've recently re-discovered my Wrenn R1 which I fitted with fully flanged Romford wheels back in the 1970s. It goes round Setrack points with no problems. I've just used the body to make a detailed version using an etched chassis with other improvements.

My MTK Cravens parcel car has recently re-surfaced, that runs on a pair of Lima bogies. There's also an unbuilt 140 railbus lurking somewhere unbuilt as usual! I had one of the class 40s many years ago, the gearing supplied by MTK was all up the creek as it wasn't a reduction gear, a large gear wheel mounted on Triang X04 (or similar) drove a lay shaft through a smaller gear1 It wasn't possible to make it into a reduction gear as the motor then wouldn't fit or the holes in the gears were the wrong size, I can't remember what. At the time they were really all that was available apart from the few diesels produce by Triang, Hornby and Trix.

So, apart from the small dimensional errors, presumably the prototype would have been built by different builders, hence the detail differences in body style/detail and different underframes? From memory the Lima version seems to have pedestal suspension. What is the general opinion of the "most accurate" model?