Drotto

Now for another poser> Has anyone thought about fitting a Kadee coupling to the tender. The mounting is in accordance with NEM 363, not the usual 362 that evryone uses. It is a pig of a job which I haven't cracked yet. Following this, I am waiting for one of the Parr Bagnall tank locos, but if the same NEM363 mounting is used, I shall have to pass I am afraid

I scratchbuild rolling stock and always need at least one sheet of letter transfers to finish the job off. Railway company specific sheets are no us at all. Neither are sheets with different font sizes put together. I need to be able to buy sheets of differen font sizes although I prefer to refer to the actual size in mm.

I discovered this topic quite by chance. As a modeller of anything that runs on rails, from anywhere in the world I found the French goods wagon drawings very exciting to the extent that I have already made one of them and I am about to start on another. So far I have buit the EST open wagon in 4mm (1/76) as that is the scale that I work in - mainly. Two photos, painted and unpainted.

I am still waiting as well. I did message KR about it and got the reply "we are despatching as quick as we can".

There have been many reviews of the Beyer Garratt since it came out but I have not seen one comment about the alignment of the coupler pockets. They point upwards at quite a pronounced angle to such a degree that when I fitted kadees to mine, they would barely remain coupled to anything else. I raised the matter with Hattons and eventually they admitted that there was a problem but nothing could be done about it. So when they sent me the third attempt to get me a sample that was acceptable with regard to other quality problems I found (the first one died after 3 laps of our club layout, the second arrived with half of the factory fitted detail parts in the bottom of the box) they supplied me with a spare pair of pony trucks to experiment with. I solved the problem by resetting the pivot arm to get the couplings to line up, but this does mean that the rear brake block just misses the top of the track. I spoke to a Heljan UK rep at Warley and his reply was that Kadee fitment was not a UK requirement. This is a cop out - even tension locks will be out of alignment. I hope they get their next steam outline loco coupling alignment right. However, what a wonderful beast. Min just sits in a spur in the loco depot with an occasional light engine run to the fiddle yard and back. It is maybe time for another trip round the club layout with a train of mineral wagons that we have there.