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Originally planned for oval buffers too.

with Hornby its usually June, then August and an outside chance of by Christmas.. but which year isnt always clear either.

I was thinking this… flickr url / not mine

Its nice to see ebay squeal for a change. It felt to me that they were trying to push private sellers away in preference to businesses for the last few years. i wouldnt be surprised if the two are a symbiotic ecosystem, and private sellers clearing out spend their cash on business sellers tat.. so scaring one away maybe affected sales of the others thus hitting ebays numbers twice. i couldnt see anything from ebay, but a quick google gives the community forum this insight from sellers there https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Seller-Central/Downfall-in-Sales-February-2024/td-p/7567514 i used the search “ebay uk sales down 2024” it does reveal similar threads for jan and march, with similar complaints so it could be sellers grumbling, interestingly this rmweb actually makes front page on google… maybe us modellers are more significant than others ? certainly a £5 pair of shoes will take a lot more effort to get attention than £150 loco when it comes to reporting numbers. i did learn ebays golden year was 2018 for number of worldwide buyers, 180mn, its lost 50mn users since then. Its always worth reading the ts and cs of American companies…(even when they are Chinese under the hood).. here you are giving away your photo, voice, likeness, opinions, statements worldwide forever… for £40… https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68675652 Sounds like an AI feast of harvesting your soul for any purpose they like in perpetuity, who knows you may become the next Taylor Swift with all the celebrity issues but for just a £40 payment. maybe its time to go back to old fashioned swapmeets ?

Or buy it from Bure Valley Models for £276 https://www.burevalleymodels.com/p/22318/R30107---South-West-Trains-Class-423-4-VEP-EMU-Train-Pack 😀

The 71 is a bit unique, its buffer is partially hidden behind cowling on the real thing. the head should be easy enough to replace, maybe use a Heljan 86 buffer head, but the whole shank/buffer assembly isnt so easy as Hornby moulded it as one and slotted it to the buffer beam. For a real odd ball… you could make the shank from a Hornby B1 buffer… the 71/86 were Doncaster products and looking at the shape they didnt reinvent the wheel… just inserted a bigger bufferbeam head…so maybe do the same.

Loadstar is speculating General Average maybe declared… https://theloadstar.com/dali-cargo-owners-face-massive-costs-if-general-average-is-declared/ This would mean everyone with cargo onboard would be asked to pay a share of the whole costs as a joint enterprise. personally i’m not so sure… the rules say there must be 1. imminent threat 2. voluntary jettison of cargo 3. successful outcome. With Evergiven, it had to jetison cargo (albeit not lost overboard) to get it free and freed from Egyptian authorities after paying a bribe fine, and so was successful. I guess if they argue taking some containers off when they remove the bridge gantry saves the ship, maybe.. but i’d imagine some lawyers might be floating in the harbour watching that bridge gantry and saying nah those containers can stay on.

The ship was heading to Sri Lanka, I wonder what does the US export to Sri Lanka ?would this likely be empty boxes ?

Do you really think they care about a single £30 loco sold for £35 on its own, 1 sale in a year ? i view this… In context of scaring everyone away from selling, would lead to great advertising opportunities to earn revenue for media companies. its not about “us”. if your not doing this to intentionally make a profit then i don't think you need to be scared, and god forbid you do make a sizeable profit, then i’m sure you would know that you did.. so declare it. Its not illegal to sell something, if I lost my job tomorrow, a whole bunch is going online immediately, if it makes a profit i’d have no issues declaring it, but having been in that spot 3 times before i’m quite confident that I wont at this stage in my life. People have reasons to sell, moving home, job, getting married, kids, large bills, being bored looking at something, being frustrated with something not working, a new release being made, or a fault being found… none of these are crimes.

I imagine they dont want the idiot big fish to stop, but instead to formalize and declare it. Everyone privately emptying their personal stuff they dont care about. Of course the media likes to scare everyone. i just walked through the options of that calculator, if under £6k of personal items you dont need to declare it. If over £6k of personal items but no profit you also dont need to declare it. I personally find making a profit of model railways is a pipe dream, and if you do find 4 or 5 that do make a few quid, its more than offset by the 10-20 that make a loss, but then i’m not buying to make a profit in the first place, my problem is simply buying too much and shifting fashions.

Sounds ambitious… if prices were getting that high, just buy a second hand one, swap the wheels and put it back on ebay. ive done the Hornby coach wheels, easy enough, just pop them off the pointed coach axle using a worm puller. same too for the old Heljan wheels. swap and push them back on ( consider using a vice with tissue around the wheels so they dont get scratched and they go onto the axle easy enough, and a back to back gauge for accuracy. heres before.. (about 0.7mm diameter difference, which based on mounting the axle (centre) is radius of 0.35mm lower sitting on the track… Heljan wheel ( left), Hornby coach wheel. (Right), both sit on an axle of 1.96mm before.. during after.. fyi I did consider a Hornby railroad loco wheel, but these are on c2.5mm axles.

The DC ready ones did not have a speaker installed.

Why upgrade it, when you can just release a 56 and put a class 69 number on it ?

but tax doesnt have to always be punitive, it can be made to look appealing… https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/ Rail industry income. £22bn. However theres some paper money here… The govt gives Network Rail £7bn, but counts £3.4bn as “other income” recieved from Network Rail. so perhaps its really a £18.6bn railway ? The UK has 31million tax payers. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-tax-liabilities-statistics-tax-year-2020-to-2021-to-tax-year-2023-to-2024/bulletin-commentary#:~:text=5.1 Number of Income Tax,UK in 2020 to 2021. (section 2.2) So if the £18bn was divided by the 31mn, it works out £50 per month, and we could have a free to use railway network for everyone.. young and old who pays the “Rail tax”. outside the 31m is non taxpayers, and i’m sure social accommodations could be met appropriately (ie free to retired/kids/prm, loans to unemployed, paid travel by non active or non resident etc). £50 p/m (£600 per year) is a bargain, and a considerable saving to those currently using it… imagine what kind of a railway we could have for £100 a month ? 1.385bn rail journeys in the same period, by 31mn tax payers is equal to 44 journeys a year, so avg £4.40 a journey if £100 a month rail tax was applied. of course some will never give up a car, or have no place rail can accomodate, but it would shift the public somewhat from road to rail.. But is this the kind of logic that leads to things like DBs Bahn card ?

Thats your assumption not mine. If people dont pay road tax (ved to pedants), your not using your car* on the road, unless you know something I don't ? but once paid, you can use as much of the “free” public road network as you like. That I also pay vat, apd, income tax, nic whatever and it all goes into a big golden government vault with rusty edges is irelevent… no virtual tax disc.. i could wake up with a faded golden triangle on my front wheel. no ones checking the serial numbers of those £20’s to see if the exact same road tax £20’s are being poured into a money pit on the A14 and not an a community outreach centre for retired insect lovers of Scunthorpe, but if it isnt the exact same £20 note, its another one identical to it, printed in the same place and coming out of the same rusty government vault, probably with conditions attached to it and an expectation that £25 will be returned later. it doesnt change the ultimate point…Scotrail more goes in, than comes out. Road alternatives exist and the populace served is small… its not going to change, but at some point Scotlands government may need to choose what it can and cannot afford… if it thinks of Scotrail as a piggybank of inward investment it might be surprised to find someday the pigs belly is wide open and the cash put it fell straight out… so new lines, 25kv, battery units maybe little more than new vinyl on 158’s. * i know exceptions apply… electric, vintage, bicycle, uncle joes weird whatever, lets keep to the point.

None of any of this would justify another line in the Highlands. I think Stranraer might to have merit to the new ferry terminal, though how many foot passengers are there in reality and does a coach from Belfast to Glasgow simply do the job better ? i’m keen to do a Scottish trip, and want to do the FW to Inverness bus along the loch.. though with the Jacobite debacle i’ll park it the same place as my trip to israel for some unknown future date.

Most people wouldnt care about semantics. its a tax to use the road… we all know that.

Ive elsewhere made the case that for a few hundred quid a year in taxes we could have a well funded rail network for free for taxpayers. however in both cases the world doesnt work like that. Schools, libraries are more important than rail travel in remote areas mostly used by tourists. This was Beechings principal, and that rationale hasnt changed. Scotrail is unable to stand on its feet, aside of 1 route. scotland has a good, under utilized road network to the same places too, funded by the road tax, which gives road users unlimited road access for free, in absence of a rail tax, taxpayers are subsidizing vacations to Scotland, for who’s benefit ? I am still unconvinced of 25kv across the highlands will find the funding, and reliably taking a BMU from Inverness to Wick is a pipedream for quite sometime. The case for a FW to Inverness line was maybe marginal 100 years ago, and a road is all there is, so today theres no argument for more rail here unless some major new source of minerals is discovered for mining.

Try explaining that to the taxpayer, especially those skipping meals to subsidize someone elses vacation travel.

More chance the scottish govt will run out of money to subsidize these lines and reduce services, maybe cut FW altogether, at least in the off season. Beeching said no lines north of Glasgow made economic sense, 60 years later nothing changed. it only exists because the public dont scrutinise their taxes, and civil servants get away with it.

But none of that is in the tender is it ? or was 92079 a Tender drive version ? 😀 i’m sure a 2-10-2T would have been better… but theres not much demand for monster tanks, so you get the tender for free. The Southern figured it out though at Exeter, and Beattock used 2-6-4Ts too dispelling your “all banking engines are tender engines” myth.

Explain to me what a 9f tender can provide that a Pannier cannot ? I suspect the reason a 9f was used on lickey was more to do with its 10 driving wheels than its 6 tender wheels ? Maybe the question why werent 9fs used as Bankers on Shap ? The answer could lie in purpose… Lickey 1 in 37 for 2 miles Shap 1 in 75 for 5 miles it goes without saying you need more grunt up lickey, but at only 2 miles it could do a lot more grunting… 2.5x more than Shap and around 60’ less height to climb… but having a tank means more coal and water stops, so its non productive time wasted. So logically a 9f with a lot of water could go a lot longer, and push harder up a steeper hill without breaks. Where as Shap with a lesser, longer gradient means longer treks and more height to climb, so you need more locos because of the distance to be covered, but not as much grunt as its a lighter hill… if youve more locos, you've more time to coal / water them between turns. 3 panniers must have been very resource wasteful.. needing plenty of pit stops, Panniers on Shap would need a water stop after every turn. 8 x 9fs on Shap would have been hugely wasteful. Having 2-6-4ts on lickey would have been less useful as half the locos weight is on wheels not providing traction, on a hill thats all about traction, not distance. What doesnt make sense, looking at BR database is 4x 4MTs arrived in April 67, and 4 more in May 67, giving 8 locos…. But transferred away / withdrawn after Apr 67 was 5x 2-6-4tanks.., 3 of which were withdrawn within a month… maybe the 8 came without parts as 1 was withdrawn every two months after arrival until 1968… The 17’s didnt do much better, of the 35 allocated to Preston division in June 1968, all but 3 of them were out of service by December 1968.

A tender engine is a bit of a waste on this really, your trading dragging tons of extra coal/water in a tender designed to extend range, for lumping it up a hill of a short distance. it may have made more economic sense to withdraw the 4MTs and keep the 2-6-4Ts to the end, or get rid of both and take the Southerns 800xx’s after July 67. i suspect no one wanted to waste film of a 17 climbing shap, but given the state of it with exhaust like that, and what looks like white smoke coming from the bonnet it must have been putting in a noteworthy performance !

i never tried emf, i was also tempted to put my track cleaner in there but was worried its effects to the chip, so I stayed away from doing it. Overall using a Gaugemaster prodigy, it worked ok, it gave me a good turn of speed, which a standard DCC sound loco running DC failed to give. (I have a few sound chips, 31,47, 55,66, Bulleid which I swapped out between harnesses) Thing to remember is dc rules still apply.. isolating track sections etc, as its still a DC layout… and its 1 track/train per DC controller, so if you had a 2 track set up on DC, you need two DCC harnesses / track output (maybe number the chips as 001/002/003 etc, which is a cost, and gets confusing if you scale up. (i have 4 tracks, but only ever tried one and didnt try running a loco from one track to another at speed (which I do sometimes do in DC). You could also have a DPDT switch.. with your DC controller track output in one side, your DCC controller ->DCC Chip -> output Motor wires going into the other and the track exiting the centre pins and thus flip between DCC and DC operation onto the track. Having seen pictures of melting bodies and smouldering track using DCC it felt a little reassuring that only regular 12vdc was going to my track, and “off” still means 0volts at the rail unlike DCC which is always on at max, even if the loco isnt. it was a fun exercise, and I did it really for the challenge, its potentially cheap, but my layout was too big to be practical, but a small uncomplex layout I could imagine being ok. Thing is the sound doesnt move with the loco, as the speakers in a static location… (for me Hornys tts whistle of the mn at speed was best). I didnt blow any chips doing it, but I see Jennys potential for it there. Ultimately I didnt wholesale move to DCC as the chip budget would kill me, and i’d need to rewire most of my layout, not to mention a lifetime of tweaking cvs etc… a simple bluetooth speaker / iphone and some synchronised control of my controler gives me some sounds (and as I recorded them myself, brings memories too), its cheap and i’m not sacrificing vdc for sound instead of movement.

Shocking, and for those on the bridge terrifying… they literally had no where to go. Ive seen a lot of these style bridges in the US, long thin, often look very insecure but cover big spans, no chance if anything hits a pier.