brack

The DJH kits for SAR were available for 12 or 16.5mm gauges. 12mm is closer to 3'6" than metre gauge in H0 anyway (12 x 87 is 1044mm, 3'6" is 1067mm). They referred to it as H0n3.5 rather than H0m, but its still 12mm.

I see johnster has posted a similar response whilst I was writing. EMD and EE made a success simply because they didnt have to accommodate building steam locos at the same time, or worry about marketing one type vs another and cannabalising their own sales (remember for a steam loco most of it was built in house, whilst for many established builders a diesel loco involved buying in engines, electrical gear etc, so presumably a smaller percentage profit to the builder unless they could bring those in house).

Very few of the big steam builders successfully made that transition. There was a huge amount of steam locos ordered from 1945 to 1955 as lines everywhere caught up on replacements or spent war reparation payments. The works were all full. Then almost at a stroke the orders dried up as railways suddenly shifted to diesel but also as their traffic base declined hugely with the increase in cars, lorries and air travel. NBL should've had the transition in the bag as they'd sorted out some licensing deals, but they didnt have the capital to reequip the works, so ended up trying to make diesels designed in metric measurements with 50 or 60 year old imperial lathes. If Baldwin and alco couldnt make the transition and maintain market share, I'm not sure you can blame NBL or beyer peacock. Their late steam output was excellent though, and Beyer, Peacock's workmanship was still held in high esteem up until the doors shut.

11 tons, ridiculous. The 'big' sierra leone garratts (2'6" gauge) put out 23000lbs te on an axle load of 5 tons. The private builders were turning out far better stuff than the big railway companies for years. I imagine it's because they were less parochial and insular, had more influence/cross fertilisation from abroad, plus if you're churning out designs at a greater rate you ought to be learning from your mistakes or evolving them more rapidly. Even those times our railways did innovate it was often when they were looking and talking to those further afield. The classic british mixed traffic 460 first appeared on the Highland, but the Jones goods was based on a design for india. Gresley described the SAR 19D as one of the best steam loco designs in the world, but didnt choose to build a branch line 4-8-2. We all know that Gresley's pacifics were modelled off the K4, and some of the more forward thinking pregrouping lines had sent people off to look at lines in the US. Churchwards principles were influenced by what he saw abroad.

It looks even more huge when moving. What's up with the piston rods though? Looks like they're about 8 foot long, did they make the connecting rods too short, or trying to keep reciprocating masses smaller? The valve gear seems to be driven off the 5th driver as well? Weird...

The V4 was reputedly much better riding than B17s and presumably B1s too. The rear carrying wheels ought to have helped that, as would the 3 smaller cylinders rather than 2 big ones (I know B17s are 3 cylinder machines too, presumably the difference lay in the trailing truck). Having said that the B1 (and most 4-6-0s) were known to be good at getting trains started off as they transferred weight onto the rear drivers on starting, whereas I imagine the V4 would be more like a pacific and have a tendency to sit on the rear carrying wheels.

Re the LNER V4, there was nothing wrong with them as such, they were well regarded, but the problem was that gresley died and Thompson put together the B1 out of reasonably standard parts that was easier to build and maintain, then produced tons of them.

Yes, I'd hate anyone to judge me by the statements of our current 'government' or its dysfunctional predecessors!

I thought the ultimate insult to Mr Gresley involved putting a duck on his statue?

I've put rivets on my 1/24 designs. It does take a while. It also rather gives the lie to the idea that you can easily rescale cad to any size. Technically you can, but unless they're similar scales (eg 1/48 and 1/43.5) you probably shouldn't. Moving a design from 1/43.5 to 1/24 essentially meant redrawing it, and took about 60% of the time to do a new model, as I had to change/hollow all wall thicknesses, check tolerances again, adapt to a different chassis, add extra details and rivets and consider the material and print processes suitable. 1/43.5: (My design, fleischmann 7000 chassis, my model on Tim Tincknell's layout, Mick Thornton's photo) 1/24: (My design, Bachmann Percy chassis, Steve Holland's models and photo) 1/17: (My design, ETS 32mm gauge chassis, Henrik Laurell's model and photo). Anyway, such as is possible on this thread I fear we digress. Back to CA?

The museum of wales site has this picture of one of the saddle tanks: Withdrawn in 1895, put into store and not sold until 1902. Given that is not long before Mr Lundie passed away in 1908 perhaps his affections extended towards the other 240ts or they were just not very good at clearing out the works. The vulcan foundry website has this drawing of the first batch of tender locos: http://enuii.com/vulcan_foundry/photographs/Drawings/no 419-421 Rhymney Railway 1858.jpg Shows how plausibly mid victorian main line locos can become light railway style tank engines...

I picked up a 1 yr old FDM printer on Saturday for £50 off gumtree. Having fun, so far pretty successfully. It isn't good enough for modelling work but it has tempted me into looking at the photon printers. Up until this generation of resin printers I've not seen anything which was close enough to tempt me, but a photon for under £250, if I could get a couple of commissioned locos I could pay for it!

Pressing that worm off the shaft and putting it on a cheap ebay gearmotor would tame it whilst still keeping the same drive train.

As a designer of quite a few FUD models for over 6 years, I'd suggest that most rivet and bolt work on prominent flat surfaces should not be on the CAD. Doing so in FUD prevents smoothing of the surface and shapeways' FUD prints with small protruding details 'drag up' from beneath the protruding detail, spoiling the surface and definition. Just because something could be printed in a single piece doesn't mean it should be. The best solution (in my opinion) with FUD is to smooth and prepare the print surface then apply archer rivet decals afterwards. Many CAD designers are desperate to add everything on to the print, which produces lovely looking CADs but makes for models which are extremely difficult to finish to an acceptable standard (again, for me). Perhaps newer technologies will overcome this but certainly the current shapeways FUD offerings you have to design around those limitations a little.

Perhaps he's already applied?

Chromium (iii) oxide is a very commonly used green pigment, I'd assume it was named for that.

I did wonder about reusing the front half of the bug to make a small wheeled 440t, maybe 4'8.5" or 5' wheels. I wonder how it'd compare to an lner D51?

I believe the back end of Drummond's bug survives. Is there no rebuild project for it?

If you're selling through ebay or amazon you have to pay them a slice of your profits. Don't know how Peter's deal with it, but there are some businesses who have 3 prices for the same item bought direct from their website, via ebay or via amazon.

The winding house/screens at beamish are from elsewhere and reerected but the drift mine that you can go down is original.

They're O9 (7mm/ft, 9mm track representing 15"-18" gauge). The pechot bourdon was displayed at les invalides last year for the centenary of the armistice (I think it's the one that ended up in Serbia, there is another preserved in dresden). The design was developed for trench railways in the 1880s. During WW1 the french ordered loads of them from Baldwin (280) and NBL (15), to go with the 100 or so they already had. Whether it was wise to continue building a 30 year old design throughout WW1 is a different matter.

Pechot bourdon: Sort of like a double fairlie, but a fair bit smaller than the welsh ones (the boiler design is different to a true fairlie). The small jouef decauville is sort of a 3.25t type 1 (but as you've noticed, very overscale), but the square tanked design dates from 1892. The earlier 2.5t locos had curvier tanks, my attempt at modelling them (but to a narrower gauge) and something similar to the paris exhibition coaches is here: There was a loco of this type at the exhibition, it was later used in Madagascar.

Its scratchbuilt by charlie insley, photo is by james Hilton. The drawings are fairly widely available, if you don't already have them: The mallets showed up in lots of places around the world - france, Sweden, Norway (2'6" gauge), Vietnam, French Guiana and more! If you're using the minitrix chassis the hard part is done for you, it's just plasticard for the body. Scratch building is always worth a go, don't be too intimidated, like many things it's just practise! I think there mightve been a pechot bourdon at the 1889 exposition as well, but cant be sure. That'd be a more awkward scratch build.

I've seen two very good models of the small deauville mallet in 009 using the minitrix BR98 mallet chassis. This isn't perfect and doesn't have the outside frames on the rear engine unit, but looks about right. This is Charlie Insley's loco, based on the later swedish cabbed versions (one of which survives on the oslj): I've built a pair of 2.5t decauvilles in 7mm scale and they were pretty small! I also built an 18" gauge version of the mallet in O9 but I sold it to a gentleman in tasmania.

Is that formentera?