craigwelsh

It would take a much greater rise in costs and cockups yet to make Britain viable (well unless the Euro still implodes and sends us to the 3rd world..). I can't see Bachmann - the Chinese company, moving here though! Its definately possible someone forgot to get rid of an incorrect mould over there.

Its not but why would that have mattered if the underlying bodyshell was accurate?

It was a contaminated batch of mazak, same as with the batch of Heljan 47s and the batch of Bachmann N class. The material is still the same just hopefully no one in China has chucked some crap in the pot with it since!

They possibly might do if you ask them. I never asked tbh as it wasnt too bad from within the UK and an out of warranty fix. You may be able to make some of the postage back flogging the spare bodies if they don't give you something to cover the cost.

This is all 16/0.2mm from CPC for the droppers, think we bought about £40 worth of rolls so i've got another couple of stripy colours yet for the goods yard and inner lines off the junction. The green is actually old RS wire mainly stripped from the original install. Its an absolute pain to tin compared to the CPC new stuff so I wish i'd bought a new reel of green! The CBUS and Tortoise drive wires are 7/0.2mm iirc as we really didn't need the amperage through those and the physical size difference is another good physical identifier of use. Signals should be quite obvious too I think as they will probably use the original looms the servos usually come with. Magnets will probably get orange 16/0.2mm .

The chassis has swollen up and expanded hence you can't get the body off it easy. If you want the body saved you'll want to force it off which will probably leave you with 3 bits of chassis. You could leave the body on for Hornby if you want, they will send a spare one back. Certainly contact them though as yours is duff.

Uh, cheers

I'll have to mention that one to Gerry, oops . Did this take a decent amount extra compared to the average wagon kit in the end?

Looks spot on that

that's the one. Wiring info up now. Wires are poked through the bottom of those tabs, soldered on and then snipped off the top. Once tested buried in ballast. http://www.rmweb.co....e-about-wiring/ Haha fair enough. Can't be as bad as Paul's TPO saga . I'll be popping down to Cardiff this weekend to ask him more awkward questions about that .

People have asked for an overview of the layout in the past so here are a couple from a few months back now. The layout is 18ft by either 10/12ft, i'll have to check.. Bit small in P4 really but Dewsbury takes up the bigger area available in the club upstairs so this is as big as it can be. Much of the yard has been relaid along with its ballast since this view and the scenic work at the far end has come out as the white polystyrene it was built on really wasn't stable and an over use of tile adhesive had made it far too heavy!

A few people have asked about the wiring on this layout and hopefully the following pictures will help a little. In time i'll try and do proper diagrams but hopefully these will help people out. Zoom in on the images for clearer views. On view in this shot are the following types of dropper. Pink - Goods Loop outer Red/Purple - Goods Loop inner Grey - UP Main outer Red/Yellow - UP Main inner Black - Down Main outer Red/black - Down Main inner The code makes it easy to flip the board and attach the correct droppers to the correct copper sub bus. We use sub buses both for fault finding and for potential occupancy detection. You always have solid colour for the outer rail and these always connect to the higher bus line of copper too (the pairs of buses are vertically stacked for each line under the board). From another board so no goods loop but the shot below shows the UP and DOWN line sub buses along with the main DCC around the layout using the blue and brown mains cable. We've confused things by having two power districts so two main DCC buses as well as the sub buses! The inter board connector also has two pins used for every DCC wire too, CBUS and 12v DC have yet to be wired up to this connector. In this next shot we've got some more wires and a MERG CBUS point control module. Green - Frog wires with numbers attached. Here we have two wires from point 12 to join up and wire correctly. Twisted Pair Blue and Yellow - MERG CBUS control bus, goes all the way around the layout controlling all signals, points, controllers and potentially block occupancy, electromagnets too. Twisted Pair Red and Black - 12v DC power that goes to all of the MERG CBUS boards Yellow - Tortoise control, numbers as per the frog, there go from the turnout to the MERG CBUS module which can control 4 of them. We can easily flip the wires if the motor goes the wrong way or indeed flip the output in software. Here are 3 of the recently installed fiddleyard points on the new trackwork in this area. This trackwork replaced some which had very tight radii (we now have a 3' 6" minimum). Above baseboard where possible for ease of access, the frog wiring also is pretty obvious! Once all the remaining track and motors are in I intend on painting the board surface all black to make it look a bit more presentable and hide the traces of old removed track! An overview of the complete point installation. The Tortoise have sub bases for quick change if needed and are fitted with ribbon cable and 9-pin serial for the same reason. Close up on an installation showing the serial connection with two control wires (Yellow), frog wire (Green though not numbered yet) and the correct dropper colours for this circuit (Red/Yellow and Grey). In the background another motor needs installing which will have Red/Black and Black feeds. Due to our Tortoise having the earlier revision boards inside more substantial switches have been retrofitted to deal with frog switching as shown. Any queries or questions do please comment!

I'd certainly like to see your updates on track, always good to get other methods to learn from. Btw though you used kits previously I assume you'd replaced the sleepers anyway with your own stained wood ones?

4 circles of brass wire soldered to the top perhaps to model that beading? It looks higher than the numerals though it might be a bit tricky. The frontage will look great with that clock on it showing the correct time.

I don't think Andy has enabled any code to do one. You'd have to upload a png picture of one or something. Btw your remark about the vac pipe upstand getting the in the way on the GWR Herring was curious as the operating method was the horizontal gas pipe on the sides below the solebar held from opening outward by two split pins. There was no operating method on the ends. Did you mean another type and i'd misread? The other regions must have hated that design as you couldn't control the flow of ballast, it would just dump out in one go! The only limitation was a stop to only open the doors so far that seemed to extend from the hopper door to a vertical position behind the solebar.

The response has gone now but I was going to ask if the WB and length of body on the Trout matched the Herring/Mackrel but clearly from Paul's data this wasn't the case. My apologies for sending the topic down an erroneous route of fishkinds..

Don't show Dick some of those chair positions, hope your switch anchors are all present and correct too . i'll try to do another blog post soon on the Slattocks wiring so you get an idea what we attach to our dropper tags. Can I assume this is laid onto new Templot alignment that Morgan completed?

Np. I was suggesting his collection of negatives though more than any he may have got in books. I did check working wagons vol2 and there wasn't anything in there though there was another GW Herring view i'd forgotten about. I think quite a few of us ended up spraying an EWS Shark black..

There is a picture of a BR one in Don Rowland's B% Wagons 1st 1/2 million, bit specific though with Glasgow branding. He might have more in his collection but I haven't found one yet amongst the prints i've gone through. Dave Larkin must have some amongst his vast collection, probably not a 50s date but as departmentals his mid 60s photos usually have wagons in original condition amongst them or an easy removal of something like a post '64 data panel.

Indeed http://www.flickr.com/photos/midlandexplorerboy/5594857882/ If anyone knows if some of the brake gear was welded to the hopper on these though do tell..

Ah yes good point, it was one of them then, certainly wasn't the 1/582 it was supposed to be from the index .

The Met Cam drawings of the BR one are both in the HMRS archive and with Serco at Derby. They seem to have gained the name Herring by then though rather than Trout which is really annoying when you think you've found something about the GWR Herring that doesn't have any preserved examples! There must have been a lot of green paints around in the late 60s from BR(S) coaches as well though I don't know how much was made up by works at a time.Certainly much easier to be a WR modeller without the odd colours for a while!

Did many Hawksworth get yellow stripes though? I'd guessed by the time it was widespread most Hawksworth were on more secondary services. A bit of yellow isn't the hardest thing to add though anyway if you have a picture of one.

Its a grey and not a very dark one either from what I remember at Manchester. Think its got time travelling axleboxes on it too.

There was a rather nice 7mm one for sale at the Manchester show though I think the prototype looks like a modeller has been a bit silly with a 4F and stuck an extra set of wheels on and put the boiler too high.. You can tell some of the Manchester club when you sort out the motion Dave, apparently Slattocks has a couple of Gibson kits waiting for it in drawers . I'll stick to Super D's, they look better and I can have a South Wales one.. Those frames look like they'll survive even the most rough of shunting accidents Larry!