thegreenhowards

I’ve had one like that which I bought off ebay. It also took me a while to figure out what was wrong! Even weirder, I bought one loco which was correctly fitted with live drivers on one side, but the builder had also put pick ups to all the wheels including the live ones. Why?!!!

I ran some more trains yesterday - this Covid is good at forcing me to play trains! D5312 left with the quad art set and was replaced by this rare spotted beast. If a driver was relieved to get off a Baby Deltic without it breaking down then they’d be truly amazed with one if these! I’ve only seen one photo of one working on a passenger train on the GN whereas there are lots of the Baby Deltics. So whether a scene like this ever happened, I’ve no idea. But I’ve bought the loco, so I’m going to use it! …and here’s the proof that mine, at least, works.

I thought mine was Railway Magazine but when I found it, it was Trains Illustrated: “Summer Saturday at Kings Cross”. I assume that is the same one you have? A good read!

I agree. I look forward to seeing your SO timetable in action. You will need a very large number of Gresleys! Or more likely reuse some many many times! Particularly looking forward to the speeding 9F! I have an article somewhere on a day in the life of KX on a 50s Summer Saturday. Have you seen it? If not would you like me to try to find it? Andy

Duplicate post

Today I feature my engineers’ train. This is normally headed by my J6, but as this who follow Wright Writes will have seen, when I dug it out it was not up to the job - low on power. So today, J3, 64140 is in charge. I’m quite pleased with the train which is all kit built apart from the leading Shark (Hornby). A couple of the Grampus were bought second hand (£1 each!) and renovated - the rest built by me. I’ve now put a new motor in the J6 and it works much better than it ever had before, so I will be finding something for that to work soon. Here’s the video of the J3. https://youtu.be/Ingp3guTN4E

Thanks Gilbert, That fits with my reading of the CWN. The thing I can’t understand is that one rarely sees photos of uniform rakes of Gresley SKs but one does see photos of mixtures of coaches with oddities like my tourist twin in them. So I’m assuming that, in practice, it was a case of digging out what was available and running that. I’ll continue to do so until I’m proved wrong! Andy

I don’t when I’m trying to work out where to put the lining using pre war black and white photography!

Thanks Tony, I’ve nothing to lose so I’ll have a go at cleaning it up. Andy

Thanks John, I did consider trying to mount the motor square but I’m quite nervous at this part of kit building so tend to stick with the simple. I didn’t want to drill an already constructed gearbox for fear of filings getting in the wrong place and I never considered soldering it! Filing white metal is more my level! Andy

It takes a lot to stop me playing trains! But no, It was a mild cold for a couple of days and now I’m feeling fine. I’m rather frustrated at my government imposed ‘house arrest’ as I would have loved to go for a cycle today and don’t see what harm that could have done. But I’ll obey the rules. Only two more days now if I test negative tomorrow and Tuesday.

Can I ask the assembled experts on here a question about Mashima motors? I’ve been having trouble for some time with my J6 which I built about 4 years ago when SE Finecast first re-released the Nucast model. It ran smoothly but extremely slowly. It was just about OK on the engineer’s’ train which is its normal duty but I like to have some spare power and speed and there was none. Recently it’s gone from being slow to slowing down and stopping, so it was time to investigate. The original motor was a small Mashima - possibly a 1220 - see photos below which show the old motor beside the chassis. It measures 12mm across the flat sides of the can and 20mm long including the thinner bit where the bushes are. Anyway I replaced it with one of John Isherwood’s Mitsumi motors as seen in the photos above and the difference is remarkable. It took quite a bit of white metal removal from the firebox sides to fit it in which is probably why I didn’t use it in the first place. But the loco runs smoothly with plenty of power and can get up to a scale 60mph which is ample. I now need to touch up the paint where she got battered in the process and then she can re-enter traffic. My question (really as a learning point for me) to the experts is would you have expected the small Mashima to be up to the job or is it more likely that the motor is defective? It runs fine with 12v applied across the terminals now it’s out of the loco. Andy

Thanks Jonathan, Metal bogies are a good solution and one I tend to employ on my own builds now - I use MJT as I've never come across ABS ones. I also use some metal underframe bits - particularly the battery boxes as they add good weight. It would be a large and expensive job to retrospectively replace all my old Kirks with metal bogies now, so I'd rather avoid that if possible. My solution seems to work for now but I'll have to wait to see whether the additional stress on the bogies has any unwanted side effects. I did have a couple of bogies which required re-gluing while I was adding the weight. I do like the Kirk kits. As you know I've been building a lot in O gauge recently. I know they're not up to brass standards but they deliver quick results which is important for an impatient bu...r like me! Of course, I'm familiar with Roy Mears' work on Grantham - very impressive rakes. You kindly put me in touch with him and I'm currently working on a pair of his laser cut plastic sides which build up in the same way as Kirks - more on Coulsdon Works in due course. Andy

I’m rather pleased with myself after some work on Friday and Saturday. I decided to drag out a relief rake of Gresleys. While the CWNs give fairly fix and uniform formations for these trains (e.g. BSK, 7*SK, BSK) pictures seem to show rather more variety with a concentration of end door Gresley stock but some other stuff mixed in (Gilbert with his vast array of research might be able to add more flesh on this). Anyway, I dug out a few Gresleys which hadn’t been run for a while. Several of them were Kirks and I find they’re not the most reliable of runners, particularly those with Kirk bogies so I wasn’t expecting instant success. But even judged against my low expectations it was pretty abysmal with at least one and sometime two or three derailments per lap. I wonder how I ever got these running before! So I took the worst coach and weighted the bogies like this. That made a dramatic improvement - I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it before! So I treated the other Kirks in the rake to the same treatment and, combined with some back to back tweaking and wheel cleaning, they all improved as well. So I know have a nine car rake which performs very reliably. The complete formation is now: five Kirks, one RDEB Tourist twin and two brass sided Gresleys on Hornby donors (coaches 6&7 - these always run well). I think I only built one of the Kirks myself - the others were second hand. Whereas I built the other four coaches so they’ve had a more thorough testing as part of the build process. Does anyone else have tips on getting Kirks to run reliably? Better still, as you can see, I used 60869, the V2 with mangled valve gear to haul the train. Sorting the valve gear out proved easier than I expected. There was far too much slop in the arrangement and the rod from the cylinders to the centre drivers was wobbling and catching on the back of the slide bars. So I tightened everything up - I moved the back plate of the slide bars in and reduced play in the various soldered linkages by moving the pins in slightly with my soldering iron and pliers. It now runs well (fingers crossed!). Sorry that the front of the V2 is not in focus. I wanted to show as much of the train as possible clearly so moved the point of focus back. Here’s the video.

As I’ve run quite a few trains recently, here’s a second one for today- 60066, Merry Hampton with the down ‘Car Sleeper Limited’, Britain’s first motor rail service. This is the 1955 - 1956 formation with the original 4 wheel extra long CCTs and Gresley 61’6” sleepers. The latter are only visible in the video. You may well ask how the Class 26 has time traveled back to 1955/56! But if you can look past that anomaly, here’s the video.

Not that I know of Graeme. I didn’t build this one and I’m having a ponder on whether to repaint it so I haven’t done anything yet. The pictures in Yeadon on p 87 suggest Jonathan is right….as normal! It’s not my thread this time so you’re embarrassing me in public! But I don’t mind as that is how one learns. As I said, I’m having a ponder on livery. If @woko produces his 3D printed 6 wheelers for the club layout, it may go back into GCR lined Brunswick green which I think looks majestic.

I’m fine thanks. Just ‘a bit of a sniffle’ for a couple of days and I’m self isolating from the family in the loft so plenty of time to play trains!

Spent quite a bit of time self isolating in the loft yesterday and ran several trains. The first of these is a returning horsebox special to Newmarket (which shares a road in the fiddle yard with the Cleethorpes so naturally falls at this point). This photos reminds me that weathering my horse boxes and hiding the damage to brick paper on the viaduct ought to be brought up my list of priorities! Here’s the very short video.

It’s got to be the Atlantic. They’re such gorgeous locos! and I have to admit that it would look even better fully lined out in GCR livery.

Rob, I agree about large logo blue. I still remember the excitement when it came out and while everyone else was raving I was thinking, that’s a bit ‘in your face’. I loved the Scottie dog and liked the white line as I thought it added variety and broke up the large blue body side in a reasonably subtle way. I sort of grew used to large logo though and it feels right on 37/4s and things like 56s as ‘ISW’ says. Andy

Rob, They look superb. Do you know if they just worked on the Cheshire lines or strayed down to the Southern end of the GC?

Thanks John, I’m sure you’re right. Some rakes derail on the first circuit and then are fine without me doing anything. It must just be loosening up like an old man! I have a CDU but still have a couple of points which need throwing 2 or 3 times before they work properly after a period of inactivity - in each case where two points are thrown by one switch on a crossing. I don’t have the Sunday lunch problem, probably because of the CDU. Andy

The easiest train yet. Worked first time, no derailments, no decoder issue. The way it should be! This is Britannia, 70036, Boadicea on a down Cleethorpes service. Strictly speaking this formation changed to get rid of the a Gresley RKB shortly before the Brits arrived at Immingham. I sometimes run this with a B1 which is more prototypical, but I like the excuse to run a Brit! Here is the video.

The other development today is that I have the lurgy! I tested positive this morning which I suspect means I was infected at the football on Sunday. Anyway, it’s ‘just a sniffle’….at least for now and I’m confident in my jabs. The good news is that this means I won’t be able to go out and will have more time for modelling! I spent some time yesterday and this morning debugging the derailments on 60139 and made some progress. It seems that (at least some of ) the derailments are due to a section of track on the gentle curve into the station we’re there is a less than perfect track joint which coincides with a baseboard joint with a slight peak. This was occasionally causing the bogie to slip one axle off unnoticed (by me!) and the bogie then derailed on the slip the other side of the station. Like other issues, I’ve known about this problem for some time but I think it’s got worse over the Summer. So I bit the bullet and having softened the ballast, I lifted the track around the baseboard joint yesterday. I let it dry overnight and cleaned it up to look like this. You can see the slight ridge in the baseboard joint which has been exacerbated by some slight warping of the boards either side. I then relaid it this morning using thin cereal packet card instead of cork to reduce the height marginally and putting an extra piece on the left to eliminate the height difference. Rather than go for an even curvature I have tried to keep it almost straight across the joint which reduces the tendency for axles to jump off - not quite so aesthetically pleasing but better than a derailment. I have done some tests with the problematic Yorkshire Pullman rake and it seems to have improved things dramatically. I get no derailments on this stretch and can run it round at 2/3 speed with no derailments lap after lap. There are still some issues on the fiddle yard points at full speed but that’s not unexpected. So I think I can cross that problem off the list. But I will leave it unballasted for now while I test some other rakes. Then I have the problem of matching the ballast! I hope this warts and all account is interesting/ useful to some people. I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘bl…y amateur’, but for those less experienced it may contain some useful lessons. In my defence this is the oldest part if the layout which I laid about 9 years ago and was my first attempt at track laying since my teenage years.

Yesterday I had more success. This is the 1735 KX-NCL as it was in the early to mid fifties with the ex Silver Jubilee triplet and 3 Thompson brakes as well as the inevitable mk1s. The coaches worked first time with no derailments. The loco was a bit jerky and I needed to change the decoder to get it running smoothly. I’d taken this whole rake to see ‘Sir’ in the Summer and the A3 blew its clip there. I replaced it with a cheap one I had spare but that was jerky. Now with a Zimo it’s super smooth. Here’s the video.