Wheatley

It depends. The strikes cover shifts starting within the 24 hour period, so affects night shifts running into the next day, which will have a huge impact on maintenance depots which are busiest overnight. Even if all the guards, signallers and station staff are back at 06.00 on 22nd, any units which have not been fuelled and serviced overnight won't be running. The impact of that will get worse through the week as each successive strike creates more displacement. Individual TOCs have emergency timetables for the 22/24/26 based on what they think they can guarantee to have available, which isn't necessarily as much as you think, hence the 'Do Not Travel' advice from some covering the whole week.

Peters Spares were selling pattern parts to replace the plastic muffs, not sure if the B1 was among the range but it would be worth a look. Edit - just dawned on me that I'm talking about the axle muffs - the bit with the gear attached on the driving axle which is the usual weak spot on these, and I suspect you're talking about the bit with the actual spokes on. I don't know of a fix for that other than getting hold of a 'spares or repair' non-runner and swapping the wheelsets over.

I think you've got the washer on upside down - it should be at the top of the spring and slides on the plastic slot with plenty of lube between the two. I suspect that what's happening is that the spring is catching on the plastic slot and stopping the pin sliding in the slot, it's sticking and causing the inside wheelset to unload and lift. I've got three serviceable Jubes here (and a couple more in the works !) and they all have the washer between the spring and the loco chassis.

The Guardian seem quite content for you to click "Not now" or whatever it says, ad infinitum. It pops up every couple of weeks or so for me.

I'm not up on the differences between Boxers and Terriers etc without going googling, but this purports to be a Boxer tractor unit. The RAF had one or the other in the 70s as prime movers for the iconic Queen Mary semi-trailers. https://images.app.goo.gl/WCqdyjkeoPFHViH89 https://redirect.viglink.com/?format=go&jsonp=vglnk_165471131285810&key=a4c54307b563ee086b4e6e0a3d2df72a&libId=l45wcofy01001j83000MLc16s6r9q&loc=https%3A%2F%2Fhmvf.co.uk%2Ftopic%2F12026-queen-mary-aircraft-recovery-trailers%2Fpage%2F4%2F&v=1&opt=true&out=https%3A%2F%2Fhmvforum.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fmonthly_2010_03%2F59dcb85b2a9b3_8614605cMastiff..jpg.169be56a90b2b46bfb5d8731f7685806.jpg&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&title=Queen Mary Aircraft Recovery Trailers - Page 4 - Military Scale Models - HMVF - Historic Military Vehicles Forum&txt=

I'm 40 miles away from my Jubilee collection at the moment so may be talking out of my hat, but the easiest way to do this may be to simply use the old Stanier tender in it's entirety and just adapt the coupling between it and the loco. In fact, if you can get the new chassis to fit the old body you may not have to adapt anything as (as far as I can remember) the old loco-tender coupling is just a big peg on the tender engaging on the rear of the drag beam under the cab. The new chassis has the now standard chassis to chassis coupling instead. I'm getting quite good at cobbling one good old-chassis one out of two duff Ebay ones (I find the plastic slide bars break almost as often as the axle muffs) but I've not tried new chassis to old body yet. I did get a Hornby Royal Scot chassis to fit the old body shortly before it crumbled to dust in a cloud of crappy mazak dust.

I've no doubt 70 years ago there were similar complaints about the newfangled supermarkets where you had to pick your own pre-packaged goods off the shelf instead of some helpful soul in a dust coat weighing it out for you. ("Fork 'andles'). I don't know that it's better or worse, it's just different and will continue to change. I certainly don't miss wasting half my lunch break queuing in the bank. The old ways survive where there is a niche reason for them to. Our not particularly big town still has 3 proper butchers for example, all pushing the "locally grown/reared" benefits.

The stripes it has on the manufacturer's website - https://uk.Hornby.com/products/br-vent-van-era-4-r60028?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7dfglPn69wIVC7h3Ch3GMgN1EAAYASAAEgIhCPD_BwE At least it appears someone noticed before they got out into the wild !

R60028 - either the stripes are wrong, or everything except the stripes is wrong !

Your telephones need to be a bit further from the track, they should be positioned so that anyone using them is in a position if safety - ie able to stand at least 4' (16mm) from the nearest rail or 6'6" (26mm) if the linespeed is over 100mph. 'Zone phones' would be common around any concentration of points as well as any SPTs which happened to be nearby, they were used to communicate with the poor unfortunate sent to wind points by hand in the rain when they failed, or with the S&T for routine testing. Cables would run from each piece of equipment back to the trunking, whichever side the trunking is on, orange pipes to take cables under the track are correct for the1980s as far as I recall but out of favour now. They were supposed to protect cables from tampers but in practice they just made them easier to hit Nice to see this sort of detail being added, as a signalman I tripped over plenty of it.

The R965 is incompatable with the power pack from the newer and truly dreadful R8250, I think off the top if my head that they're different supply voltages. What Sam said - buy a Gaugemaster, their Combi is the cheap end of their range at £40 and will outlast any number of second hand Hornby ones. Second hand 965s of unknown and possibly dubious provenance are currently £20+ on Ebay.

The problem being that self-evaluated common sense is often characterised by the lack of same.

There may well also be an unholy row/discussion about variations to contract going on between Network Rail and its contractor, limiting what can be said in public.

You'd have been at Skipton around the time we were stirring a tin of paint with the Buckeye Lifting Tool to tart up the 'APPLEBY' rockery sign then ! Never did any training anywhere else to compare it with but the ER signalling school at Donny was certainly unique. If you forgot to mention the lever collar in your answer you were likely to collect one in the chest while everyone sitting in front of you ducked ...

So following Mark's lead whilst looking online for the later book, I hadn't twigged that M30204M was of course the notorious High Value Package Vehicle in the Great Train Robbery. There are one or two photos of it online ...

Thank you, I will hunt that down. I have Mr Johnson's earlier 1985 book which has the apparatus side of the same vehicle !

Indeed. I trained on them at Neville Hill (ER) and the first thing we were taught was that if we were caught using any kind of lever, bar or stick to help lift them we'd be Form 1ed as that was a guaranteed way of losing body parts if it slipped. On returning to my new supervisory posting at an ex-LMR location the first thing I was handed was the official LMR Buckeye Lifting Tool, a sort of lever/bar/stick thing with a knurled handle ! My RO2 took one look at it and decided it would make a good paint stirrer.

There's also still no mention of cranes, wrong or otherwise, in the Network Rail statement. Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere but there's insufficient detail in either the NWR statement of the MP's interpretation of it to suggest what.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a photo of the letter rack / non -apparatus side of one/either of these please ? They were both 57' sorting vans built in penny numbers, there are a couple of photos in Jenkinson and Essery Vol 3, but they are of the apparatus side. As far as I can tell from the plan view in the drawings they had shorter sorting racks than a normal sorting van with the 'bulges' only extending 2/3 of the vehicle length, and a sliding door in the non-bulged bit as well as the usual outwards-opening door(s). In that respect they gave the appearance of being a combined sorting/stowage van. It's for a possibly ill-advised kit bash of a Hornby one so absolute accuracy is not essential and if necessary I'll do it by combining standard components, but it would nice to be somewhere near. Thanks.

Run the majority of stuff 'as it comes' and modify the 5% which has issues, be they dodgy back to backs or Dapol's bizarre square flange on its milk tankers. Granted that 5% would have been a lot bigger in the 1980s, but the majority of currently available stuff should now run reasonably well on the majority of currently available proprietry track.

After removing the acrylic strips dribble a few drips of cheap cyano into the ballast either side of the joint. The pound shop stuff will do. You might have to give it a mist over with some matt varnish if it goes shiny.

Described by one pilot as 'Like flying a council house from the upstairs bathroom window". (Reasonably sure that quote is on the SHFNI thread on Pprune if anyone cares to look ...).

More thread drift, sorry. In the 1960s Metalbox provided tins for the Carnation Milk factory in Dumfries, and McNeil & Libby' creamery at Milnthorpe on the WCML. The traffic was handled in the bizarre D 1/214 single end door vans. I assume the odd design suited the loading arrangements at Metalbox, which at the Petteril Bridge site at least consisted of three parallel sidings terminating in a loading dock. It certainly didn't suit the arrangements at Dumfries, they were handballed off by a bloke standing in the 4 foot!

Nice. Agree about the splashers needing to be a bit shorter.

What Stonojnr said, most normal people go straight to Youtube or Facebook for any sort of crafty/DIY/IT tutorials these days, I've just spent 20 minutes learning how to multiply by percentages in Excel. Some are obviously better/more accurate/less lethal than others but that goes for any advice, even some from alleged professionals. Why if they don't have what you want ? That said you could always pick up a couple of brushes, tube of glue, packet of track pins etc if it bothers you. Browsing in the shop then buying on Amazon is naughty, but that's different.