Annie

Possibly having a little too much fun.  An Anglicised Engerth 0-8-4T built circa 1860 hauling coal on my imaginary railway.

I'm having a fairly rotten time of it health wise at the moment so I'm sticking firmly to doing things with my digital trainset.

Continued to work on the twiglet of a branchline which helped to take my mind off things.  The buildings on the small station need their textures working on a bit so that they properly match and the noticeboards need changing to suit the GNJt.R, but overall it's coming together how I want.

That North Cornwall goods shed is very nice and would be very much the kind of thing to be found on a small rural railway.  Then I suppose I'm a bit biased since I like North Cornwall railway architecture.  Not so keen on the GWR, but I find the Cornish absorbed lines absolutely fascinating. 

Interestingly the red dot insignia was still on US Navy aircraft, (which I didn't realize) officially until May 6 1942 - as evident in what looks like it might be a Vought Vindicator, Douglas Dauntless or Devastator in the video resulting from the May 8 sinking of CV-2.

 

The red dot was officially removed on May 6 to avoid confusion with the Japanese Hinomaru roundel.

My Dad was in the in the RNZAF during the Pacific War and he said that the Americans would shoot at anything that moved whether friend or foe so I'm not surprised they had to take the red dot insignia off their aircraft.  Not big on target identification were the Americans  

I very much agree Don.  To be completely honest I've looked at examples of modern RTR locomotives and I feel too scared to buy them (apart from not being able to afford them of course).  They are just too spookily realistic as if a mad scientist had roamed around an MPD armed with a shrinking ray.

Ah now I remember what I was on about before.  Operating signals and points with cords running over pulleys would no doubt eventually lead to being driven nuts with keeping everything in adjustment, BUT on my branchline my copper signals that were desperately doing their best to look like MR ones had the most wonderful prototypical double bounce motion due to the combination of the cords running over the pulleys and the springy steel operating bellcranks which had quite long operating arms.  My blobby hand soldered points had a lovely motion too and the spring steel bellcranks took up any excess movement and positively locked the point blades in place.  I did find out quite quickly though that glue wasn't the best to hold points together though and brass tacks and solder had to be resorted to.

I loved using tinplate.  Where I used to work before I retired I would claim the empty catering sized coffee tins because they would yield soooooo much beautiful tinplate for building things once they were cut open and carefully smoothed out flat.  

A boiler that says 'Brasso' inside.  I love it, - that's what good old fashioned scratchbuilding was all about.

When I was very young and keen (around 17 I think) I hand laid the track for a Midland branchline layout using recovered rail from (pre-Triang take over) Hornby set track glued onto thick card sleepers.  I hand filed levers for a lever frame from old steel Triang rail and made most of the frame itself from 1/16th aluminium off cuts.  The points and signals (all proudly made by me from copper and soldered together) were operated by sashcord running over small brass pulleys under the baseboard and the bellcrank like operating links were all bent up from some springy hard steel wire that was a devils own job to bend properly with pliers.  And it worked!

I didn't belong to a model railway club then and I only had some 1950's MRNs a friend had given me to refer to as I was yet to start buying RM.  A few not very good books on railways from our local library were sometimes useful; - but anything like a thought of the internet and detailed information at the click of a mouse was total science fiction and an impossible dream.  I sometimes think about that layout as rough about the edges as it was and how I used to make things of my own devising that largely did work most of the time.  And I had fun, - lots and lots of fun with it making things, - sometimes not very expertly, - and running trains.

I do often wonder if kits and and out of the box solutions in exchange for money have killed off some of that inventiveness with using the materials you had to hand rather than what was ideal.  My Dad was a sheetmetal worker so there were always oddments of copper and aluminium about which came from the work he did.  I didn't discover brass as a modelling material until a year later when I built a kind of post train smash looking LNWR 2-4-2 tank engine on a sawn up Jinty chassis from an off cut I was given.

(Ah sigh)  I'm not sure what the point of all that was, but anyway do please carry on.

Large prairies are certainly a locomotive that has a very real presence.   

I've been buying models from Paulz Trainz lately as he has quite a bit of useful stuff that suits what I want for my layout that isn't available on Auran's Download Station.  His pre-group early NBR models have caught my eye recently as some items are just the thing for my imaginary GNJt.R where elderly rolling stock and locomotives can still be found at work alongside more 'modern' rolling stock from the post-grouping era.

I purchased some of Paul's Hurst 0-4-2 well tanks yesterday.  Most probably because elderly well tank locomotives have been discussed a bit on the forum lately.

(Picture is from the Paulz Trainz website)

Now the Pickering railcar would definitely be one to go on my shopping list as it would be perfect for my little light railway.  Have you given any more thought to producing the 6 wheel coaches in 'O'?

Having once had aspirations to be an author something I learned very quickly was to take backups of all original self written material and take backups of the backups.  It only took me the total loss of two thirds of a manuscript to drive that lesson home.  I know it's not much use handing out advice once the horse has bolted, but in the future it might save you future heartbreak.

All good fun and certainly thought provoking in the 'what-if' department  

People better be careful what they wish for. We are currently working on the Furness or more correctly Sharp Bros/Sharp Stewart 2-2-2WT in 7mm. We might have the prototype ready for the NEC. Along with a 2-4-2T and 2-4-0.

 

Marc

My only concern if you excuse me saying so Marc is that I might have to sell a kidney to buy one.  

All these lovely pictures of single driver tank engines      

A trick with single driver locomotives is to drive the two outer axles and leave the big wheel to idle along.  Or set the chassis up so it has a pony truck at the front and the model rests on the centre and rear axles.  I remember Mike Sharman discussing such things in RM hundreds of years ago when I was but a young slip of a girl.

A gratuitous drawing of a Sharpie well tank just because.

 

If you want PARTS from any of the locomotives in most cases I can always yank them off and offer them as separate shop items. So chimneys and domes and steps and boilers for example can always be made if you want them for scratch building. The new A0 range also follows the same format. A few combinations offered as full locomotive shells but most are created by a mick and mix.

That will be something that I'll very much bear in mind for the future.  I won't make any requests until I know exactly what I want and I have the money to pay for it as I don't believe in messing folk around.

And concerning the debate that seems to endlessly go on about WSF and FUD (or at least on NGRM it seems to) I'm a big fan of WSF simply because with my poor co-ordination and fumble fingers due to this illness I live with I can't break it.  FUB FUD would be in bits all over the floor in my clumbsy hands and since it seems to have both the price and fragility of fine porcelain I wouldn't consider it for a moment no matter how glowingly perfect its surface might mythically be according to its supporters.

Just as an aside note WSF is great for things like 16mm scale fittings and parts as the surface finish on anything I purchased in this material in the past was really excellent.  WSF is also a lot cheaper than buying the same fittings in whitemetal and the parts are often crisper and cleaner and of course lacking in casting flash.

Cabs are generally not too hard to build when it comes to locomotives, so a cabless version of Seaforth makes a lot of sense.

Seaforth in 'O' would certainly keep me happy.

Otherwise a Sharpie single driver well tank with options for alternative cabs would be a taste of heaven itself.

A random screenie taken on the little twiglet of a branch line on my HUGE UK layout.  My 'what-if' railway uses slotted post McKenzie & Holland signals and in remote corners of the line some 1870's signals survive too.  The two ex-NER tank engines are in the background because they're still carrying 'cat on a mangle' totems because I haven't altered their textures yet.  The ancient teak brake/luggage van is from Paulz Trainz and the two six wheelers are of my own devising.

I have to say though as a piece of fantasy stitching all those elements together really does work and it looks very plausible.  And of course I'm a keen fan of Sharpies and since they seem to have gone just about everywhere they're a good choice for a a 'what-if' railway.

That is such a great image, - what's the source?

Annie

 

I wasn’t seeking to open some kind of purist/impurist divide. So far as I’m concerned purity and impurity are both fine in moderation.

 

Kevin

My apologies Kevin, I didn't want to start any wars and I do agree that moderation is the key.  Having been exposed to rabid and fanatical P4 modellers during my tender youth may have left a too lasting impression on me  

A different sim and one many of you will regard as past its sell-by date, but there is a lot of pre-grouping material being produced at the moment for MSTS - especially LNWR and LYR. Plus a couple of pre-grouping routes.

The LNWR carriages in particular are superb. Before long everything in the LNWR carriage books will be available.

http://tsforum.freeclanforum.com/t1013-rufuskins-workshop-lnwr-coaches

Jonathan

Those LNWR coaches are seriously nice.  I have got a copy of MSTS somewhere around the place and I did give it a bit of a run on my computer before I did the last upgrade and it certainly was interesting and a bit different.  The problem I have though is that with the mental confusion and sleepiness that's always hanging around due to narcolepsy the control interfaces for both TS and MSTS end up totally frustrating me.  Despite its sometimes occasional faults and shortcomings Trainz TS2009's  simple DCC control interface is what I'm able to successfully manage to use.  I know that's not considered to be the 'proper' way to run train simulator software, but it works for me.

Regarding the wrong landscape (Looe), in addition to many routes not being made from DEM data, there are projection differences between the MSTS/Kuju and Auran simulators that can result in screenshots from two identical routes at identical positions differing between MSTS and Auran routes. My profile picture is looking out of a coach in Shepherdswell platform towards the Adams Radial on the siding it always seemed to be photographed on, taken from the MSTS version of the route I started over twelve years ago. Positioning the coach and engine in the more recent TS2010 route results in a different skyline because of a subtle shift in alignment of the high embankment, the dip beneath it where the dump siding runs, and the trees on the knees. Both routes were built using DEM data and the 1924 OS map. (Of the two, I believe the Auran projection is the more accurate).

 

Even having DEM data doesn't ensure a perfect route. I puzzled for ages over the impossibility of getting a steady falling grade between Elvington Halt and Knowlton, having to carve cuttings thirty feet deep. When I made a field trip to the area I found the spoil waste from Tilmanstone had been dumped over that area, and of course the satellite/Shuttle missions had dutifully recorded the resultant upwards movement in the landscape.

If I go back to having a go at the Looe Branch again that's very much how I'd like to do it.  Trying to do it any other way just ends up with a frustrating mess.  I spent dozens of hours on the Moorswater area trying to fix the major errors built into the original layout and even then it still looked completely wrong.

Mini announcement.

 

I have decided now the next Loco to be made will indeed be the 0-6-0 Sharpie, or early version of the D1 class.

I've had 2 emails and a post on here asking for it and showing interest and after looking at the loco it is clear it is (for the most part) just an E1 with different wheels.

Thus making it won't take an absolute age and the tender is already in effect done. So after these next re-scales I'm working on I'll get on with it.

 

Thoughts?

That is a very nice G5 and as for the purists they can all go hang themselves.  Failing to appreciate a nice in-the-spirit-of-tinplate's-golden-era 'O' gauge locomotive is indicative of having lost their soul and what might have remained of their imagination.

That's what I really needed with the Looe branch Sem.  The landscape on the downloaded layout I started with was just so wrong that it made it just about impossible to build the railway in any kind of accurate form.  It's not always possible to get things like buildings and other details completely correct, but the landscape and the track layout has to be right or else it just turns into a huge mess.

The LBSC electrified lines would be a fascinating subject for a model and I'm fairly sure the catenary and some of the rolling stock is available on the Auran Download Station.