Annie

Thank you very much Marly and gobbler for your supportive comments.  The modelling ply and card I ordered have arrived, but I'm having a bit of a struggle at the moment with not being very well so I haven't done anything much at all.  

50ft Ex-GER coaches in GNJt.R livery await their next turn of duty.  I make my own coach sides the same way I make coach lithos for my old 'O' gauge trains.  Not high detail by any means, but it suits this clockwork tinplate girl.  The old green 4 wheeler is painted in an older company livery of which there are several as digital trainsets make it relatively easy to try out different colour schemes.

R1 on the wharf at the end of my 'what-if' imaginary railway's branchline.  The 'G' and the 'N' do not stand for 'Great Northern' by the way.  I like R1's, - especially the ones that had the reduced height cab and boiler fittings.

Good old aluminium 'U' channel.  I've got some of that so if all else fails I'll be doing the same.

I think a slender instrument motor with a gearhead would fit.  For some reason I have a tendency to collect such things and I have a particular one in mind that should fit between the frames.  Of course all this is academic until I can get hold of a 3D print myself and can have a look at it.

Love that blue Mamod powered one with the Rocket wheels.

Many years ago when I still had good eyesight and steady hands I had a go at making a Clayton & Shuttleworth loco like the one in the Engineer article.  I was working in finescale 'S' so that gave me a little more room to play with.  Unfortunately it never got finished due to too much 'life' happening all at once and I think the bits are still rattling around in a box somewhere.

Beautiful LNWR coaches and whatever the politics of them ending up standing in the platform road of your layout it's always nice to see coaches in pre-group liveries.

And thank for the stunning snowy landscape pictures.  We've just had an awful very hot and humid Summer so it took me a moment or two to get head around the fact that on the other side of the world it's cold and covered with snow.

Nice locomotive, - shame about the colour.  I suppose someone might go that colour if they're being strangled  

Distraction in all directions is something I'm good at Kevin.  I do have a good mech made by Middleton I think.  It's a modern can motor powered chassis with a compound gear train and bevel gear final drive intended for rejuvenating old Hormby No.1 locos.  It's pretending to be a wagon load in this picture.

And you've seen the green loco I built from scrap M1 and No.1 Hornby bits along will some LSWR Adams 'O' gauge fittings...... That works fine and can haul 21 Hornby open wagons so it's a really useful engine.  It's powered by an instrument motor driving through chunky robotics gears.

Well I have all the parts necessary to make a second one and if I use the Middleton mech I could make it a slightly longer 2-4-2 with the same family resemblance.  Not a difficult task as it mostly involves putting Hornby bits together in ways the maker didn't intend along with a couple of easy to make tinplate bits that can be glued in with epoxy.  That would give me two reliable engines which would be all I need to start with to run the layout.

Otherwise I have most things I would need in the way of goods rolling stock, but I am short on coaches.  The coach problem can be sorted a bit with litho sides and junk Hornby 4 wheelers until I can make something based on Leeds parts.

The big thing now that I've got everything unpacked that I'm going to use is to clear away the clutter and sell the tinplate stuff I no longer want to help fund the layout. Once I have a clear space I can mount and support the layout boards properly and tracklaying can begin.

And I must do my best not to get distracted until the layout boards are fixed in place.  Perhaps I should write that out 100 times to make sure I remember it.  

Yes it's a nice looking small river port with plenty of character and nothing outsized so it couldn't be fitted into model.  If I can muster my fairly miserable artistic skills I'll use background of the photo as a guide to painting a backscene.  I'm not sure if 'spectacular' is quite the effect I'll be working towards.  More a kind of slight shabbiness, but in a polite and well meaning kind of way.

I hadn't seen the Gainford Spa  thread before, but yes the two locomotives were built by the OP who started off that layout thread.  I'm perhaps not so keen on the box tank, but I certainly wouldn't mind the other one with its lovely piano saddle tank.

Amongst the things I had filed away for Foxwater I have this fish van litho I made very much in the spirit of the tinplate era.  

I also made a bogie version to fit a Leeds wooden bogie van body I have.  I still need to make the artwork for the ends, but that shouldn't be a big job.

And last of all a litho for a salt wagon.

So was the chassis too wide or too narrow Martin?

Edit update:  I've just seen your post from 15th September, but I don't think those problems will affect me much at all.  I use either 1/8th or 3mm axles on my coarse scale 'O' gauge locos and I always mount driving axles on a short subframe between the frames which also carries the motor.  Very old school 'O' gauge constriction methods, but they work and don't give any problems.  Again the narrow chassis will be fine since I'm using 'O' gauge wheels to Greenly standards.  The brake gear will need to be cut off and moved, but that won't be a problem.  My last loco used side rods hand filed from thickish aluminium with brass bushings, but others I did had side rods hand filed from sections cut from old nickel silver forks. All that's needed is a bit of patience and some decent sharp files.  Being a woman of slender means has taught me to employ files and found materials to make things because in a word it's CHEAP.  I haven't made any 0-6-0's yet so I don't know if my simple methods would work for those.

The parts are for a Barclay I never finished because 'life' happened, but it shows what's possible with just a file and some drill bits.

I had a good read through the cardboard locomotive challenge thread and I'm going to give it a go  http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/90399-challenge-design-a-card-loco-kit/page-2

A small shunting loco is always going to be useful and it will be a good way for me to get my hand in with building locos again.

I found a good stationery suppliers here in New Zealand who does on-line ordering and I've ordered some mounting board as well as a pack of good quality card  Living in the rural countryside like I do makes such supplies hard to find locally and they certainly won't have it down in the township.  One place I found on-line must get their mounting board handmade by Albanian dwarves using papyrus delivered by wheelbarrow from Egypt with the prices they were charging so it certainly does pay to shop around.

Edit:  I've ordered some 1/16th plywood from an aero-modelling supply place as well since it's a material I like using as well as card.

Thank you very much Dava, - I could kiss you.

I'll PM you my email address.

The couplings I'm looking for are ones like these Don.......

Hornby link type.

ACE link type

The ones I was using were (I think) were NOS ones by Bonds, but Walsalls must've finally run out of them.

The ACE type is nice, but largely mythical as it's impossible to find any to buy, - and the Hornby link coupler is now made by Progress Products.  Nobody seems to be making the Bonds ones which I would prefer to have.

Please forgive the thread hi-jack Kevin.  

I've got my eye on some of those Leeds wagon lithos, though I do have some Milsbro ones as well which I want to do something with.  I'm not terribly fond of the Hornby 'auto' coupler which can and does scratch the tinprinted surface of the wagons and coaches it's fitted to.  My eventual aim is to change all my rolling stock over to link couplings.  I used to buy a very nice link coupling from Walsalls, but they don't seem to have them anymore so I'm now trying to find another source.

I find the cab on 'Bognor' quite fascinating and very much on the unusual side.  Definitely one to file away for later.  

A very fine looking group of tank engines they are too.  I like the SECR livery as applied to their tank engines.  It always seemed to me to have an air of solid practicality about it that's very appealing.

Yes exactly Kevin they were toys and were generally played with until they turned to scrap and fell it bits.  I have a largish collection of CV, Mettoy and Brimtoy trains including some nice almost pristine items of rolling stock.  Mettoy made some nice open wagons and vans that are a less toy like in appearance and I've wondered more than once about narrowing their gauge and using them as narrow gauge rolling stock alongside my larger 'O' gauge stuff.  Some CV rolling stock had 3 link couplings and I have a couple of nicely made brake vans that are so fitted.

Anyway I had a lot of fun with collecting them and enjoyed their cheerful simplicity, but I'm now going sell them all off to help with funding my layout ambitions.

Interesting to have it confirmed that CV clockwork mechs and Hornby clockwork mechs did indeed come from the same factory.  Looking at them side by side the differences are superficial and very slight.

Zerah Colburn's "Locomotive Engineering" mentioned in the IRS webpage can be found here  https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_57kxAQAAMAAJ

I have always liked the look of early Manning Wardle locomotives, but the fluted domes and safety valve casings have always scared me away from trying to make a model of one.

And yes I saw that Adams stovepipe chimney too and went 'Oooooo' and immediately fell in love with that old drawing  

I had a Bayko set and it was great fun.  I did exactly the same thing and built buildings for my trainsets with it.  I don't know what happened to it.  I think it basically got played with into a state of destruction and one of my brothers broke some the pieces (the rotter) and then parts got lost.... and so on and so on.  I recognise the Chad Valley set as I have the remains of a very down on its luck locomotive from that same set as well as one of the odd oval section coaches lacking its bogies.  When I was still working before I retired due to illness I tried to buy one of those sets on ebay, but even with being employed in a 'good job' the bidding swiftly went beyond what I was willing to spend.  The clockwork mech from one of those 4-4-0 locomotives looks very Hornby like and I think it would be very easy to mistake it for a Hornby product.  The wheels while looking very similar to M1 clockwork ones are a slightly different diameter though.

The LCDR R1 Class, and SECR coaches are beautiful.  I really love to see vintage scratchbuilds and especially in 'O' gauge.  They have quite a different quality about them that's absent in modern finescale scratchbuilding.

Yes the much hoped for G6 will play the role of a regular 'modern' visitor from the mainline connection to the LSWR.  Sometimes on hire when one of the Foxwater engines is out of sorts and needs to be mended and other times handling goods traffic to and from the little twiglet of a branch line that the Foxwater Light Railway is supposed to be. The backstory is the expected imaginative concoction of semi-plausible historic manipulation where the Foxwater was proposed by by a group of local worthies and built in erratic stages under the shadow of looming near bankruptcy, but somehow managed to win through and subsequently turn a slender profit each year due to the relatively steady traffic of fish, sea salt, sand and farm produce to the LSWR connection at Friars Stumble (and no you won't find a town of that name on any old OS map no matter how hard you look).

I did intent to make Foxwater and its small river wharf a terminus, but since the space I've got for the layout will allow it and I've got some very nice pressed steel 'O' gauge bridges made by Marx it just seemed sensible to bridge the river and create a continuous run. Where the line might be going when it crosses the river is something I haven't thought of yet, but with two Marx girder bridges and two plate girder type bridges to hand the bridge across the river should look sufficiently spectacular.  Perhaps there might have been great ambitions to take to line to somewhere fairly important and significant only the money ran out before it got there leaving the spectacular bridge behind as a mute witness to failure.

Other stations on the line?  Well I did always to intend there to be a 'Foxwood' and 'Foxhill' is another possibility.  'Foxton-on-Marsh', 'Foxbeck', 'Foxbridge'...... all other possibilities.  The meandering Foxwater river running through the district is the connecting theme and of course at Foxwater itself it's navigable and provides a safe harbour for the small local fishing fleet.

This old photo of the East Quay at Wells-Next-The-Sea has the look about it that I would like to achieve.

Aaaaagh! I just saw some dismals in this thread!  How do I take my eyeballs out and wash them  

Back in my late 20's and 30 somethings I lived on an off shore island which was of a very rural nature and I often did farm work of one kind of another including helping out a farmer who kept cows of one description or another.  One fine afternoon I was helping him along with a couple of other chaps to move some semi-wild cattle that's been hiding away in the hills for a while.  To call them stroppy was bordering on a mild understatement and when one of them looked at me in a way that said, 'I don't like you' I and swiftly advanced I found myself suddenly able to do a flat sprint and vault a modestly high wall in a stunning display of athletic ability without a moment's thought as to how I might do such a thing.  So yes I really am wondering how largely untrained railway staff might've got on with handling grumpy cattle when required to feed and water them and get them back in the cattle wagons again.

Well done sir!  

That would great Sir Douglas, - thanks  

All my old MRJ's died when the garage was flooded during the last big rainstorm we had.  I don't see much chance of getting any replacement copies unfortunately.  

If I get stuck I can always modify a class B or C drawing using photos as a guide.

Seems like hundreds of years ago now, but I scratchbuilt a P4 class B in brass back when I still had eyesight and steady hands so I should hope I can manage to build a Manning Wardle in 'O' gauge.

Folk talk about fitting a motor in, but with my Class B I used a skinny can motor attached to a dinky little gearbox and actually placed in the chassis so it formed the boiler once the saddle tank went on.