Wheatley

Neither can anyone else, I suspect that's why they're still a lobby group and not a user group :-)

Two model trucks side by side plus a bit ? If you can find a prototype on Google Maps the measuring tool is accurate enough for scenic modelling purposes.

But apart from that ...

Oops. Yes you're quite right, I had two and I'd completely forgotten that. Only because they a) couldn't get the wretched Ringfield motor in there and b) already had the old loco-drive six-coupled chassis which had the right number of wheels and was therefore near enough. They were still dreadful.

Quite. Easi-Chas targets the market the RTR manufacturers aren't.

The paths can be in in permanently and only activated as required, although that particular one is (according to the train planner I just asked) used for de-icing as well as adhesion purposes which would still run outside the normal leaf fall season. You will apparently find all sorts of paths for NMT, structure gauging and other infrastructure trains which might only run occasionally but always on the same route. It saves having to put them all in as STP paths every autumn, or trying to put them in and finding that some enterprising TOC/FOC has nicked a bit of the path for something else in the meantime and made it a pain to timetable your RHTT. (Marginally beaten to it by 4630 !)

I presume there are fewer people buying detailing kits, which is either an indication of how good RTR has got since they started (the forthcoming Hornby Black 5 addresses most of the shortcomings the BM kit addressed) or how lazy RTR buyers have become. The continuing development of Easi-Chass would suggest the former. No-one sells a conversion kit to beat a Lima 33 into a 26 or 27 anymore either, we all just bought the Heljan ones instead.

Agreed, traction tires will win every time for haulage, even with the Christmas cracker Airfix motor in the tender. The later Hornby loco drive re-issue of the Airfix/Mainline Fowler 2P has traction tyres too, just on different wheels. The old Hornby Ivatt 2MT was tender drive (Edit - oh no it wasn't !) (and dreadful), a fair comparison would be with the Bachmann Ivatt 2MT.

In fairness to the big organisations, being told "Spend money on anything quickly because we're only the government and organisational skills and joined up thinking aren't really our strongpoints ... " is not really a problem of their making.

Free Money - having done a bit of digging this is actually the HS2 North London Pothole Fund. DfT have gone to the TOCs and said "We have £Xm we weren't expecting, if you can spend it on something which a) makes a tangible improvement to the network and b) do it before the end of CP 6 (i.e. this March), it's yours." At the end of CP6 any unspent cash goes back to the Treasury and you have to bid for it all over again to spend it in CP7. So it is actually free money.

The Bachmann coaches were very very good for their time (i.e. light years ahead of Hornby !) they are dimensionally accurate and well moulded. They do (did?) a brake third and composite, you could make a full third by sawing them up if you were so minded but the sensible way to do it is probably to by a composite and stick Comet sides on it. Where they show their age is the moulded detail on the roof (although it's not bad) and the basic underframe and gangways. They can be hugely improved by adding Comet cross bracing, vac cylinders and dynamo, you can usually get away with using the moulded trussing. They're also readily available second hand and can be used with Comet sides to produce a lot of Period 1 and Period 2 57' vehicles. If you do nothing else new buffers, gangways and vac cylinders will really lift them (and metal wheels if they're the Mainline version). The Comet kits are good basic kits, but they were designed as packs of standard parts to be combined as required for different variants. That's sensible but it makes construction a bit odd sometimes where you think "That could have been etched as one piece rather three to be joined together". Nothing drastic though. I rarely build the full kits, more often I use the Comet sides and details with a second hand Airfix or Mainline donor for the basic carcass.

But how does it run out of the bath ?

Absolutely it does !

Thanks Alisdair. He's certainly one of the people (Derek Cross being another) who I wish I'd met. Both are responsible for an obsession lasting my entire adult life with a part of the country I have no connection with beyond family holidays ! "A Glasgow & South Western Innocent Abroad" was the real start of it ...

I can't do any more to the platforms until the station building is complete enough to be set in position and boarded around, so I've been channelling my inner Geoffs Kent/Taylor - this is the wooden tea room / parcels office on the Dumfries end. The extra bit of wall on the right is part of the main building: The glazing bars are sticky printer label sliced as thin as I could manage with a brand new scalpel blade. Once the slightly wider top and bottom frames were in place that left a pane 16mm high to be divided into 5 equal panes. So 3 and a smidge millimetres. Rather than try and guess four smidges consistently, here's an old O-Level Technical Drawing tip: Draw a line on an angle of a length divisible by 5, in this case 20mm. Then mark off 4mm intervals. On a drawing board with a parallel motion T square drawing the glazing bars in using the marks on the sloping line is easy, on a bit of plasticard you need to draw two sloping lines at either end of the piece and join the dots up. The incomplete glazing bars towards the left hand end will be covered by poster boards but it meant the horizontal bars could be laid as a single strip. The missing glazing bars towards the right hand end are prototypical, I've no idea why ! The weather boarding is a mixture of Evergreen sheet and (before I realised you could get weatherboard sheet) 10 thou planks laid individually. All the square section timbers are Evergreen.

Fixed that for you. I used to work with some of the signalmen who had worked the branch ten years before my time :-)

There was no attempt at shaping geography, it was simply an exercise in stopping the national network going bust. Look at the tangle of parallel LNER (NBR) and LMS (CR) lines along the Clyde or around Leith, or the spiders web of LNER and LMS lines around South and West Yorkshire. The latter were even still part of two different BR regions until quite late on.

Swan's book is excellent and contains several 1930s photos. (I can't comment on the early loco captions as they'd all been scrapped before my period of interest !) The Oakfield Press book on the PP&WJR contains some period photos too (some of which may also be in Swan). "Branches and Byways - Southwest Scotland and the Border Counties" by Robotham is my other go to book, half if it is concerned with some minor railway further east but its on Abe Books at the moment for less than a tenner. Edit 1 - all these concentrate on the PP&WJR rather than the Ayrshire & Wigtownshire but include photos at Stranraer. "Little Railways ..." covers both. You need a Compound. The G&SWR also had a Peckett 0-4-0 at Ayr Harbour (there's a thread on here somewhere, possibly in the main Peckett thread) which can be made from the Hornby one reasonably easily by the look if it, although I've not found another donor to try it with yet (I'm not allowed to touch 'Dodo', apparently its 'pretty'). LMS period 1 (Bachmann/Mainline) and 2 stock on the boat trains and through services, also LMS clerestories (Ratio). G&SWR and Caley non-corridors on the locals -scratchbuilding for the former (or a very involved kit bash from the Ratio non-corridors which seemed like a good idea at the time) and Caley Coaches for the latter. G&SWR corridor stock were handsome vehicles but unlike anything else you could adapt to suit. Almost anyone's wagons as previously mentioned. Finally I doubt DL Smith's stories were recorded or based on formal interviews. I'm not sure what he did for a living (Edit 2 - librarian apparently) but he seems to have spent a lot of his time around trains and enginemen just listening, and knew a number of them personally. I suspect his anecdotes were all written from memory. The G&SWR Association is small but very helpful, although it's modelling content is geared to 7mm as that's where its modelling members' interests mostly lie.

This was about the Servqual regime (empty bins, correct posters, clean trains etc), not operations. I haven't seen the slides and I'm certainly not an apologist for Avanti, but having had to sit through a few tedious presentations from corporate branding/marketing types about similar subjects which are of no interest whatsoever to the operating or any other department, I suspect this was an ill-judged attempt to get across that Servqual really isn't difficult, and it's a battle that's yours to lose rather than one which requires something terribly complex to win. "Read contract - work to contract - perform to contract - get paid". Badly worded and crass certainly. Evidence of corporate p*** taking and taxpayer eye poking ? I doubt it.

Paste Table hinges can be mounted on the side of the structure: https://www.ironmongeryworld.com/pair-of-steel-paste-board-hinges.html Or you could make your own bespoke system using M4 bolts or similar: Just keep the axis of the hinge above the top of the rail. Only just above will work fine.

Thanks Rob, there's a great deal of trial and error involved though ! One of the advantages of having the whole down platform and its buildings on one board is that it fits on the dining room table so I can work on it in comfort. I've made a start skinning the platform surfaces with balsa, two layers of 1/16" laid at 90 degrees, the forecourt is a single thicknes of 1/8" because I'd run out of 1/16". The tarmac surface will go on top if this, probably in thin card, the balsa allows any minor undulations in the surface to be taken care of with a sanding block first. The big hole full of tools is for the station building, which needs to be a bit more complete before I fit the platform surface around it. Talking of trial and error, the Peco concrete platform edging is perfect for Newton Stewart, the down platform having been rebuilt in concrete in (I think) the 1920s. But because the platform edge forms the edge of this module, rather than use the Peco sections as they are supposed to be - glued to the baseboard and the platform built up behind - I formed a false platform edge in 15mm square stripwood screwed to the baseboard top with the Peco edging stuck to it. That way the platform edge could overhang the other board slightly and the position of the edge could be adjusted by moving the screws. In the end a filler piece of 2mm stripwood (old venetian blind slat) was used as a filler as well. The first two attempts to fix the Peco edging to the stripwood using hot glue just resulted in a lot of practice in scraping cold hot glue off plastic and wood, the third attempt using double sided foam tape was much more successful.

I use weathering as a de-stressor too (if I don't think I'm stressed enough I drag a loco chassis off the Shelf of Doom ...) Those are lovely. Still waiting for Monkbar to put the SR 8 planks in their bargain bin :-)

Agreed. The risks to charter train passengers are exactly the same as those the 325 dead people were exposed to, with the exception of more tendency to try and look out of the door droplights. The frequency of exposure to risk across the national network has changed, but that just means you're likely to kill them less often. It's still an uncontrolled (and easily controllable) fatal risk. Indeed. The NYMR only has the paths because the franchised service is so sparse they aren't getting in Northern's way trundling about at 25mph. If it becomes the case that the service frequency improves and 25mph is no longer practicable then they'll need to fit CDL. I assume they're in the process of fitting it anyway as the exemptions are timebound and not perpetual (as WCRC have found). That said, there are greater challenges to raising line speeds on the Esk Valley than NYMR services. On the wider Value of Prevented Fatalities discussion, beware of using road risk as a comparitor. Society is far more tolerant of killing people on the roads because people perceive that they have some degree of control over their own destiny in a car.

Lol ! Like selling a pet ! To be honest a hole in the chimney would be the least of the mods affecting any of my locos - renumbered, often repainted, weathered, crew added, different couplings ...

I'd drill them out. But then I've never sold a loco on.