Simond

5 hours ago, MikeOxon said:

Do I detect Nordic angst in your comment on life? Mikkel

it does have a flavour of H2G2 in referring to Earth as “mostly harmless”...

I thought I had seen this before, but was mistaken.  However, you may enjoy these outstanding, if unusual models.

https://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/Hill.htm

atb

Simon

Perhaps a note to Andy,

he added .ino files (for Arduino sketches) a few years ago at my request.

atb

Simon

Wonderful!

I look forward to the next installment.  Good luck with your various trials and tribulations, and enjoy your cats!

atb

Simon

At a more arrogant age (he was about 13 and therefore did know everything) my son was having a bit of a laugh at dad’s expense, “playing trains”.

I pointed out that creating a credible miniature world required rather more of quite a few positive characteristics than being a passive consumer of PlayStation football, which was his obsession of the day.  
 

neck

wound

back in

Happily, he’s now at University studying Mechanical Engineering, though I doubt he’ll apply it to railways.

atb

Simon

Only one motor vehicle?

must have been a wealthy man!

neigh!

4 hours ago, DonB said:

 

A huge number of horses were "borrowed " for military service in 1914-on. which would rather upset the above calculation.

Don,

You're right, and, additionally, my guesstimation of an average horse life was way out too, they didn’t live anything like that long in hard service.  

My 20 years was far too modern, hobby-horse, not working horse a century ago.

atb

Simon

MrsD would not necessarily agree...

Season’s Greetings!

Simon

Has to be different!  

If you have a one - axle cart, the shafts have to attach to the horse in such a way that the cart cannot tip forwards (weight on the horse’s withers) or backwards (lifting the horse by means of its girth strap).

if you were to do this on a two axle cart, you’d either crush the poor horse as you lifted the front axle off the ground, or the horse would be dangling from its girth straps!

Of course with a badly loaded single axle cart...

not great for the poor horse

I think life for a working horse was quite hard, and littl3 to compare with today’s horses, which are, for 5he most part, hobby animals, in a far more caring society.

apart from the wagon loads of horse manure that was shipped out of big cities daily, (which has been a previous discussion in these hallowed halls) I rather suspect a fair number of beasts turned their toes (or hooves) skyward each day.  

Of course, the railways could afford convalescent horses.  Steptoe & son could not, and if the horse didn’t work, likely they didn’t eat.  And within living memory too.  I was born in 1958, so this is marginally before my time.  

“The horse was king, and almost everything grew around him: fodder, smithies, stables, paddocks, distances and the rhythm of our days. His eight miles an hour was the limit of our movements, as it had been since the days of the Romans. That eight miles an hour was life and death, the size of our world, our prison…Then, to the scream of the horse, the change began. The brass-lamped motor car came coughing up the road. Soon the village would break, dissolve and scatter, become no more than a place for pensioners.”
(Laurie Lee's description of village life before the motor car - Cider with Rosie, 1959)

There were about 3.5 million horses in the uk at the turn of the 1900’s. Assuming a twenty year life, that would suggest nigh on 500 dying each day.  That’s around 200 tons of dead horse to dispose of, daily!

atb

Simon

Jam

this looks good.  I like the colours, and the green is particularly effective.

I’m very surprised that you were able to stick plasticard to clay with PVA.  I hope they don’t “pop off” but if they do, I’d suggest precurving the plasticard (tape it to a used food or beer can of the right sort of diameter, fill can with boiling water, wait a few moments, drop in sink full of cold water) and then restick using something like MEK, poly cement or uhu.

I’m not aware of any easy solutions to your “unrealistic LED”, the real lights were permanently lit, and used a rotating lens & mirrors (with colour and black shades as required) to provide the “flash”, and the sectors of different colours.  I just had a look at the latest chart for Spurn, the lighthouses don’t appear to have coloured sectors, (though they might have previously) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Maybe you can modify a flashing vehicle beacon, though it’s probably far too big!

hth

Season’s Greetings

Simon

Spray cans benefit from shaking atleast twice as long as they recommend, and lying down for an hour on a warm radiator.  And then another shake...

(warm, not super-hot, your significant other is unlikely to be impressed with a green fan on the end of the radiator and the adjacent wall, even if it is the exact prototypical shade for your specific loco on the precise day in September 1904 that you’re modelling)

atb

Simon

And latex from Screwfix is waaaay cheaper

atb

Simon

Oh, just bung in a few drops of turps sub, it’ll be fine...

Thanks Grahame,

the wheels you have look entirely believeable for pre WW2, the ones that came with the Corgi Thorneycroft looked like they belong to a Moto Grand Prix bike...

atb

Simon

Grahame,

Sorry if I missed this, but what is the make / where did you get the bus?  I feel a bout of unashamed copying coming on...

(well, they say it’s the sincerest form of flattery!)

atb

Simon

I recall that cattle wagons were to be marshalled next to the loco, but presumably because if not, they’d suffer from the effects of being loose coupled, given that they would run in goods trains.  

I guess this would not be an issue with a train of passenger stock, so you could probably put the ‘orse wherever was convenient to load, unload, remove from train, etc.  

Not in the middle, I assume!

atb

Simon

But the roads were awful, and potentially dangerous, so if you were heading out from London to the country estate for your summer vacation, you'd probably go to the trouble.

atb

Simon

I'd expect at least a sizeable proportion of carriage truck traffic to be Lord & Lady X plus entourage in the private coach, with horses in the horsebox, and the carriage on the carriage truck, a sort of early motorrail.  Probably attached as tail traffic.

atb

Simon

Novel automatic transmission - Daf “variomatic”, and they made an amphibious car too, given the amount of water in the Netherlands, probably quite a useful proposition.

i think the factory, maybe the company, was bought out by Volvo, the smaller Volvos were certainly made in the NL.

atb

Simon

rather than having a second model on the go to trial your paint, varnish, etc., use a beer can. 

If it's full at the beginning, and you get a successful outcome, you can open it to celebrate. 

If unsuccessful, well, open it to commiserate. 

Might I suggest that the point in front of the signal box is slewed so there is some curve into the platform road.  This will bring its facing end away from the edge of the board and allow a more gentle curve into the FY.

alternatively, a curved point?

atb

simon

10am to 3am?  Wow!

I rather fear I might need something to keep me awake...

I imagine being seen photographing anything remotely strategic, during a war, might have led to a rather interesting, informative and one-sided discussion with someone in plain clothes.  If you were lucky.

Let alone the issues of cost and availability of photographic materials, which themselves were likely to be viewed as strategic too.

i used to work for a company who had a factory in France that had previously been involved in manufacture of film, the Allies had reputedly bombed it...

Atb

Simon