Wheatley

Keep them out of my garden then. A plastic beaker of water on the study windowsill has proved quite effective during WFH. I don't even need to throw it now, just rattle the window catch and it stalks off somewhere else You don't actually need to hit the wretched thing, half a pint in the general direction seems to work.

The panelling on the Tri-ang Caley coaches matches the Grampian 12 wheelers too well for it to be a fluke (the waist panel is a bit shallow) and if you can get the more recent Hornby ones the paintwork is top drawer. The six wheeled bogies were Fox plate bogies, easy enough to knock up from some Comet 6 wheel units but you'll need some springs and axleboxes. Caley Coaches do brass ones (I think) but the Comet whitemetal ones are a reasonable compromise. The Tri-ang coaches are slightly short so the shorter GWR 6 wheel bogie frames may look better than the 'correct' LMS ones.

My layout is in the garage and 3/4 of it sits on kitchen units, a mixture of second hand and cheap DIY store ones. I fitted a top made of everything from sheets of left over 18mm chipboard flooring to laminations of 6mm MDF , whatever was left over from other jobs. But it's level and with a couple of coats of floor paint it looks quite smart. The layout sits on cinventijval plg and softwood boards on top of this. The fiddle yard boards have all the wiring on top where I can see it, or where it has to go underneath, all the terminations and connections are on top with only plain wire runs underneath. The scenic boards have as many of the point motors on top as possible, hidden under removeable buildings and scenery (or at least they will be when I get round to adding buildings and scenery). The rest is underneath but all boards with wiring underneath hinge up so it can be got at. I'm getting too old to be soldering upside down in cupboards !

Ah yes. The sidelamps and the duckets they're attached to. Oops!

They're in stock at Monkbar Models in York, I picked mine up today. Very nice. It will get repainted in the 1969 livery described by Mr Larkin - "scruffy with white lettering". There were only 50 built and they were scattered around the ER in threes and fours - I suspect more than two in the same place at the same time would have been a fluke. Like 47406 mine will end up in a "not quite sure what it's doing but it looks intetesting" short PW train, or dumped in an overgrown siding having accidentally wandered onto the ScR.

If it's the LMS version then the conversion is essentially cutting three holes in the end and (I think) adding or removing the side lamps. If you can cut straight you may not even need the Comet end.

There was a very large GWR layout featured in the Journal not that long ago, which was damaged in a fire at the owner's premises. The insurers coughed up for it to be rebuilt by professionals, including fine arts restorers if I remember correctly.

You can't set a single figure, at least I can't. Some bits have to be dead scale (most buildings for example), some can be reduced (lengths of sidings and loops) and others can be missed off altogether. You can also sometimes do it by accident. There is a reasonably complex junction on my layout, to do it exactly to scale would require more space than I have, but if I set it out in Peco Streamline (using all large radius points) it not only fits but it looks to be in proportion. Elsewhere there is a two road engine shed which, if modelled exactly to scale overpowers the scene, but looks better at 75% of scale. The only critical dimensions were that it must fit two specific pre-grouping 0-6-0s end to end, and that they must fit through the doors. That gave me the footprint and I scaled the rest from that. The rest of the shed yard, especially the yard throat, is horribly contorted to fit it in the inside of a curve but the shed itself looks OK.

Quite. Smart meters don't save money, turning stuff off/down saves money*. SSE don't have a scripted answer for that. (*No E7, solar panels, electric cars or other complications here.)

I'm with Nearhomer. I left school in 1985, boys were taught metalwork and woodwork and (up the point where they all closed in our final year) been expected to go down the pit, join the forces or work in warehousing or glassmaking which were the local industries. Top set were expected to go to uni but were on our own as to how we actually got there. Girls were expected to stay at home and cook/have babies or work in Asda or one of two local shirt factories and were taught accordingly. We had two computers between 1600 students. Thirty odd years on all those industries are gone. My lad is taught coding, product design and other subjects which didn't exist when I was learning how to make book ends out of bits of old desk. Meanwhile I can just about work a phone.

Is this COVES ? If so there's nothing on their Facebook page about it and comments from them within the last week saying they hope to have the site open to the public 'in the future'. I'd have expected to see something on there if they were under threat. They might have more urgent things to do of course.

"Don't fall off" with perhaps a hoop at the top if you were expected to work there. Look at signals for an example, until very recently there was only a single hoop at the top on most of them so the lamp man could lean back against it to leave both hands free.

Gets my vote. I can use as many Black Fives as I can get, but not at £250* a time for the new Hornby one. I'm not paying that for a £150 loco with another £100-worth of pointless gimmicks included. (Working lamps ? Which if you can see them in daylight are too bright?). If Oxford can do one for less they'll get my money, I can take care of the detail differences myself. (* At least, by the time it gets here).

Is the question how did (do) they detect and manage poor rail conditions ? Three main methods: 1.Blanket instruction to drivers to brake earlier and lighter, with additional instructions at known hotspots (known from experience). Causes delay. 2. Driver reports 'unusually severe conditions' for a particular location to the signaller, who must then caution trains until a notice can be wired/faxed/emailed out to Signing On Points. Causes more delay. 'Normally severe conditions' for a particular location are covered by (1) above. 3. Driver has an adhesion related incident - a SPAD or station overrun - and gives poor adhesion as the cause. Control may require the following service to make a 'controlled stop' and report back - if that slides past as well then driver 1 is usually exonerated and driver 2 is not admonished either. Network Rail staff have some hand held widgets now which measure railhead conditions but I've no idea how they work. In my day it was done by looking at it and deciding whether it looked more black than silver. Causes a lot of delay. If the train can detect it as it goes along then that's potentially a game changer, especially as the technology already exists for trains to talk to each other and share that data.

Edit - what Keefer said. Caley Coaches do the 115A, £90.

From memories of watching them go past school in South Yorks in the 1980s, 36 behind a 56 and usually 32 behind a 47. No 58s round us.

You could try asking Bachmann, we're all just guessing.

Because apart from the 500% increase in shipping costs linked to by Metroland, the market for model railway bits (especially the minority interest which is British OO) is miniscule compared to other consumer goods. Apple sells between 40 and 50 million Ipads a year that's a lot more units to spread any additional cost around.

It gets easier, they get more independent and can be left to play on their own, and eventually you adapt. I lost my weekend afternoon modelling time because the bench is in the living room but switched to evenings, theres nothing worth watching on the telly anyway. The biggest problem is staying awake !

Buying enough Met Camm Pullmans for a full Queen of Scots set, on a whim. I even bought the Hornby Railroad brake coaches to go with them. They've been sat in the stock box ever since and never turned a wheel on the layout. Of course the first thing I do with any purchase is to chuck the box out...

Omicron appears to be causing as much havoc if not more in terms of absence as lockdowns 1-3 did, albeit with less serious illness. The difference is this time everything is trying to operate as normal instead of half the national infrastructure being locked down. I work for a TOC, my first job in a morning is to read the Control log from yesterday. On a bad day pre-covid there might have been half a dozen traincrew diagrams uncovered at start of day, to be made good by stepping up crews through the day. One day last week there were more than a hundred uncovered, all down to people either testing positive or isolating because a close contact had. You can't come to work with a negative test every day when there are no tests to be had. On the subject of RM, we're still getting Saturday deliveries, he's just walked past ! So any issues are likely to be local and short term, the problem being that all these short term local issues are rolling around disrupting different bits every day and making any kind of contingency planning impossible. Doesn't matter how many posties are sitting around at your local DLO waiting to go out if the bloke who drives the lorry which brings the post from the main sorting office knocked a couple of hours ago.

No-one made him sell the rights.

And why, in the 1990s, my local PWME was interviewed under caution as to why atrazine was showing up in drinking water boreholes in properties alongside the railway at levels way in excess of a safe dose. BR hadn't used it for years ago that point but it was still in the groundwater.

Very nice ! I did something similar with a DJH Black Five a few years ago, albeit on a non-DCC Hornby chassis. You need to remove an awful lot of metal from inside the boiler ! It'll pull the house down though ... In my case it was because the Kemilway chassis is was on was the only EM chassis I ever got to work properly, and I couldn't bear to dismantle and regauge it when I went back to OO.

There's an extra piece of glazing and one more masking operation to paint the yellow ends. Clearly the price of masking has gone up exponentially.