AdamsRadial

I don't use the abrasive blocks because I nickel-plated all the old steel setrack I salvaged to build my layout with, and as it's only a few microns thick on the surface I think the abrasive method would be down to the steel in only a few passes. I mostly just wipe around with a piece of lint-free cloth soaked in either meths or IPA. As a manual cleaning method to remove surface grime burnt-on by arcing, I push an old wine-bottle cork around the track, and then use IPA or meths to remove the black lines left on the surface of the cork. If the track is a bit grimy I might use a piece of balsa wood for the first run around. Both of these methods seem to burnish the rail surface, rather like an old leather strop was used to tidy up the razor between customers. For those of you tempted to try the nickel-plating method, one word of warning, I had a pair of points disintegrate in the plating bath, it may be they were on the point (ugh) of disintegrating anyway, but when I did the rest of the batch I carefully suspended them upside down and lowered them into the bath until only a millimetre of railhead was submerged, leaving the hollow rivets on which the blades pivot clear of the chemicals.

It's a lot easier to add a Belpaire firebox to a model than to remove it from one

The other thing to bear in mind about various opinions is that people have different abilities and patience. One person will be unable to get a particular printer and material to work, and announce so, whereas somebody else might persevere with the settings and find a way to make the same model and material work, but the first voice to speak often sets the minds of the readers to the point where any dissenting view is treated as exactly that, rather than as evidence that the original opinion might have been too early. Personally, I have two things to say here, I think it's better to do the learning on something cheap and simple, and secondly, don't believe everything you read. Especially if I've had anything to do with it.

Broken chimneys seem to be very common, I have mended a Jinty, R1 and Triang 3F using the plasticine and super-steel trick. My challenge now is to make up a missing smokebox door for an Airfix 4F. One good thing about the diecast Hornby-Dublo bodies is that they don't break so easily as plastic, or warp.

My sig picture is a screenshot of an MSTS route I built back in 2008, it shows a view out of a coach across to the cluster of water towers at Shepherdswell with an Adams Radial tank standing in front of them, where it seemed to spend all it's life. 2mm FS is indeed a challenge, I'm not sure my fingers could manage stuff that small, let alone my eyes, but with things like these laser cutters and plotters it's becoming more of a possibility. What I am also working on is how to use the plotter with some Rotring-type pens to make my own lining transfers. Once you have a mechanism that can accept GCode or SVG instructions, there's quite a few things that could be stuck on the carriage apart from a laser. EDM is a possibility. Possibly drawing lines of solder-paint onto tinplate or brass. Blobbing tiny spots of glue for rivets, and maybe using a 3D-printer hot-end to blob bits of plastic down for rivet heads?

That looks very like a Colonel Stephens East Kent Light Railway hut I'm watching this thread with interest because I have a MakeBlock XY Plotter which currently has a 500mW diode, but I have the parts to fit a 1.8W diode to it. Like the OP, I started with a Craft Robo, and got tired of having to stick the work to a carrier sheet, and also problems with it being flexed as it was shuffled to and fro. However, the kerf on the laser I currently use is nearly half a mm (0.452), and I am contemplating using a Craft Robo knife as the cutter for card and styrene sheet.

Just in case I gave the wrong impression, I *do* have a low-cost Prusa variant, but as I've said, I spend a lot of time tinkering with it to try and get the results I want. As it happens, I do love to tinker, and I'm not in a rush to get things made just yet. What I don't yet know is if a budget 3D printer to do rough prints of a 3D model followed by getting Shapeways to do the proper items is the way to go, because the cheap printers won't be able to do some of the tricks the expensive ones can, and the tweaks you make to the model to try and make it come out passably on the cheap printer might work against you on the high-quality ones. But if you like to play, you'll get an aluminium-framed Chinese Prusa for two-thirds of your budget, and have plenty left over for the reels of filament and some spares. (Belts in particular can take a hammering, and some of the aluminium pulleys can work loose on the steppers and become so sloppy they too need replacing.)

You'll just about get an Omerod 2 for that, or you'll get one of the Prusa variants flooding out of China. Bear in mind that these are not going to be very precise without your spending a lot of time tinkering with things like belt tensions, extruder settings, bed temperatures. For that money you could buy a lot of stuff from the Shapeways shop ...

Instead of having a 35mm addition to the front of the baseboard, you could do a brick retaining wall so that the whole station is in a trough, rather like the Minories design. I think it's a great design. The real challenge is going to be getting the locos to run slowly and precisely enough to get in and out of the short lengths of track, but that's just a running issue. Are your six-wheel coaches the type with a swivelling centre axle?

You could cheat and have a motor in the coach and treat it as a loco Thinking about this, I suspect you're going to end up having the initial gradient fixed and then tilt the fiddle yard either level to keep the stock stationary, or downwards to align with the sloping track when you want the stock to roll or the loco to haul it in.

My method was a bit hit and miss, sometimes the stock just wouldn't roll when I pulled the choke cable, and I ended up tapping the baseboard with my fist just like you have to when a loco won't start. The tilting track idea sounds as if it should work.

In that case Holman has only just finished his apprenticeship at the Neasden depot I am a bit like you, I also have 7mm stuff which includes some Lima SNCF coaches which made me want to do something with them. I thought of modelling TF1 at Richborough, with the ferry as a large floating fiddle yard that had stock vanish into it, was then floated away, turned around, and re-berthed against the tracks. It was a scheme which never got past the water-on-the-floor stage. I did have a model of Eastry South and Hernden sidings which used gravity-shunting. That was good fun, though not exactly realistic as I was trying to ignore the fact that a Lima 0-6-0 4F looked nothing like an Ilfracombe or an O class. I used the choke cable from an old car to brake the train so that the loco arrived and moved to where the wagon was that was to be rolled into the sidings, I would push the choke cable in so that the end of it rose up between the tracks and lodged behind the leading axle of the wagon, run the loco and train forwards, then change the points and pull the choke cable back, letting the wagon run into the sidings.

If the Colonel had reached Richborough Port with the EKLR in time, the cross-channel services might not have ended after the repatriation of the stock from the Great War, and who knows what might have been trundling to and fro across the Monks Wall? Also, though they weren't carriages, a lot of foreign waggons or vans were supposed to have been stabled on the Tilmanstone line adjacent to the site of the early Northern connection to the EKLR, perhaps a coach or two came across with them.

Beamish does indeed have a pithead, complete with working beam engine, and adjacent to it a wonderful colliery sidings and loco workshops. I could have spent a week there, as it was I had to make do with a day. To my regret there were no locos in steam either at the colliery sidings or at the railway station, but the Pockerly Waggonway was running. I'm not sure what era the pithead properly represents, though. I suspect there was some modernisation anyway, apart from mods to comply with H&S, which the boilers of the Pockerly locos also required.

Well I, of course, yearn for a 4-4-2T that graced the metals of the LSWR and my particular favourite, the East Kent Light Railway. As nobody ever made one I've been saving up tinplate cans ready for a cut-n-bend-n-solder session next year. It takes a lot of hunting around to find food in metal cans that don't have that annoying double corrogation to them, but I've found black olives and tinned biscuits in the local B M Stores that have lovely metal. Not the best of diets. Oh, and Lidls have Espresso coffee in suitable tins as well. I do actually have a white-metal and nickel-silver kit to build of the Adams Radial sometime, but it's finescale, and that's what puts me off starting it. Finescale doesn't take kindly to being played with on the floor like wot ur ment to do (sic).

I agree about the 4-coupled locos suiting O-coarse. I have two Hornby 4-4-4T nut-n-bolt locos that are great for running round 2' radius curves that an LNER 0-6-0T struggles with, despite having flangeless centre drivers. I have also got one of the 4-4-2T specials waiting a repair to the drivers ( metal fatigue issues), but I have to say I far prefer the proportions of the 4-4-4T.

I've already tried that stuff for my painful shoulder joints, it didn't work for them and if it did anything for the knees, I must have missed it. I was thinking a bit more today about why it should be so much fun crawling around on the floor fiddling with bits of setrack rather than going through the serious planning process of making a layout, when it struck me that half the fun of model railways is the fiddling around trying different arrangements. Once you've designed a trackplan and built a baseboard to suit, you've lost the fiddling part. Oh, and Il Grifone's mention of pushing reminded me that I have a box full of Lone Star 000 pushalong which I ought to get laid out on the desk, there's a bit more space there now I've retired.

I love tinplate, both clockwork O gauge and electric OO. I've been slowly collecting Hornby and Basset-Lowke again over the past few years, then I got offered a boxful of Hornby-Dublo 3-rail I just couldn't refuse, and a couple of years ago, at the bottom of a box of broken Hornby clockwork wagons and buildings, I found a Trix-Twin set with two of the little tank engines and a few tinplate coaches. I think it's the fact that the models are a mixture of evocative and conjectural rather than precise miniatures that makes tinplate so appealing, you can look at it and not have to worry about whether the rivets on the smokebox wrapper stop too soon or if the injector pipework is too coarse, it's just instant visual enjoyment. Somehow I've got to keep my knees supple enough that I can still crawl around the floor with the O-gauge, but I also have to think about somehow getting a dumbell layout hinged to the wall so I can mix up the Trix and the Dublo with the more up-to-date DCC sets I got given as my retirement present. Any recommendations for oiling old knees?

Superb models, and I myself would be reluctant to see that paint go under the grime. Perhaps you could time-lock the period to the "smart" era?