Wheatley

I have a bottle of Model Air 71.022 RLM82 Light Green which I matched to one of the RTR BR dark greens, but which manufacture's BR dark green I can't remember. Bachmann's probably.

3 links will work on 1st radius curves (15") but only on short wheelbase wagons and locos with absolutely no overhang and with short buffers i.e. a short 0-4-0 and 16t minerals or similar. You may have to adjust the length of links on wagons with longer buffers (eg Oleos). Propelling could only be carried out at dead slow. It's do-able but only just and with a lot of restrictions. AJs are unreliable in OO, there is too much lateral slop between wheel and rail.

Try it out in practice with real track and your longest / most overhanging stock, you may find it comes into conflict at the ends of the curves. Mine did.

Humbrol 20 Crimson is perhaps a bit dark for what you want but it makes a very good 'old' BR Crimson for parcels stock and the like. It's not quite as dark as the 1957 BR Maroon but it comes out if the rattle can more easily than Railmatch.

We have an independent garage/dealer at the end of the road. One of the chains used to get all my servicing and repair work simply because I could leave the car with them while I was at work but after a couple of episodes the independant gets it all now and I take the day off or whf as necessary. A tip I was given years ago is to ask a local cabby where they get their servicing and tyres done, cabbies tend to need more of it than the rest of us and they tend to know how to not get ripped off. Result of that one was that my Landy used to get serviced by an independant Renault garage in York along with most of the cabs of the station rank. Never had any issues with the main dealer for the last car apart from being bombarded to death with requests to rate their service and let the MD know if it was "less than 5*" every time I went near the place. Tyres were easy when I lived in Barnsley - everybody went to Malcolm's !

Same, although I cheat and use Code 75 points with bullhead track, I'll replace them if and when Peco get round to doing the rest of the Streamline range on BH. I know the track is too narrow but I accept the compromise because it saves time I can then spend on things which bother me more.

Ah ! Thank you. I had visions of a massive DC loco shed with dozens of isolating sections. C and L do some plastic fishplates for finescale bullhead track which are just glued either side of the joint and have a half peg on the inside which can be used to make a functional IRJ or trimmwd off to make a cosmetic joint. I never got on with them but you could do something similar in styrene strip glued into the rail web on setrack, one strip either side should hold it in alignment. Fill the gap with epoxy or gel cyano to be sure. Evergreen strip seems to be a bit more rigid than trimming strips from sheet.

Out of curiosity (ok, noseyness), what are you building which requires almost every piece of track to be insulated from the next ?

Same design / tooling / assembly / shipping / distribution costs as a Pacific, two fewer bogie wheelsets and about 10p worth less plastic/mazak in the body. Edit - if you really need a 2MT there is always the DJH kit. That's pushing £300 by the time you've added wheels, gears, motor, transfers etc. All you have to do then is build it.

What he said. A lot of minor routes are only open because of Pacers and that the fact that they allowed a 2 for 3 replacement of the (by then utterly knackered) 1st gen units at a time when the Thatcher government didn't want to spend anything on rail. A lot of the current network only exists because the much maligned and apparently hopeless/useless BR was quietly interpreting its brief in the loosest possible terms. Ron Cotton's creative interpretation of "close the S&C" being the best known.

Yes, scenic boards need the hinge point at the top of the scenery, e.g. paste table hinges on the side profiles or the classic bog standard hinge on top of a convenient bridge pier.

Would bar counter hinges put the pivot point high enough above the rails though ? I have 8 lifting flaps superimposed on each other (layout design by Topsy !), currently under construction, at the moment the 'failsafe' consists of remembering not to drive off the end but the wiring is only jury-rigged at present. I like John's idea of routing all the common returns through the brass bolts. Here's 6 of them, only the right hand 3 are normally required, the left hand 3 are only needed to get into the cupboard behind them to get at the stepladder and tools stored in it. The top two (scenic level) boards are not fitted in this shot.

GENKOC is Generic something or other, BRAKTY is Brake Type, AARKND something or other Kind. I think. Google suggests that the first two letters together make up the GENKOC. BR had loads of acronyms like this, most of them connected to TOPS and all dating from the days when filenames could only be a few characters long which led to some interesting system or field names. Not every letter had to stand for something. Also not connected to the former Telegraph Codes system which was a whole nuther level of sometimes bizarre creativity. I have a colleague who might know, I'll ask him Thursday when I'm back at work if no-one chimes in in the meantime.

Yay ! Not just me then :-)

Peco code 75 insulated joiners fit if you chop them down a bit. They don't look as good as the metal ones but they work.

The 12" self adhesive vinyl ones from tracksidesigns.co.uk are about 3 1/4" deep, either stick the straight onto to layout or mount them on a bit of styrene sheet or similar first. £12 each, hassle free and quick. offtherailsonline.com look to be about the same size but printed onto thicker material to start with, not tried them though. The tracksideltd.co.uk ones are real, i.e. a hulking great bit of vitreous enamelled metalwork. I'd love one but there isn't enough spare wall in the shed ! (and I haven't got £300 spare).

Samson is extremely useful if you want to be vague about period as I do :-) Kashmir was short firebox so can be done from the current Bachmann model. It's also a rare example of a clean Kingmoor Jubilee. Clean Kingmoor anything in fact !

I trust you've noticed that Samson kept its early crest until the end :-)

Here's mine. The megaloops are on the new layout currently under construction in the garage. Slightly confusingly the signalbox is to the right of points 3a but with the frame facing the operator, so 'my' lever frame is correct for the box but the wrong way round for the operator.

Short answer to a long subject: Points and signals on running lines (lines under the direct control of the signalman so main lines, loops, crossovers, bays and connections to yards etc) will be controlled from the signalbox so can be grouped together. Generally the levers to the left of the frame control those points and signals used by trains coming from the left (of the frame), those on the right trains from the right. Everything else goes in the middle, the exact order depends on the requirements of the witchcraft that is mechanical locking. Points in yards will usually be hand points operated by the shunter so it's entirely up to you how you group these. Mine are in a separate frame to one side of the 'signalbox' frame, lettered A to E and reading left to right along the yard as I look at it from the operating position. Fiddle yards - well there are none on the real thing so entirely up to you. Yours are loops similar to mine so it could be as simple as 10 push buttons, 1 for each through route, controlled by diode matrices (more witchcraft). I prefer levers so mine (when I finish that bit) will be arranged as a separate group of levers for each end of the yard. Operating levers 1 at each end sets the road for loop 1, operating 1 and 2 selects loop 2 and so on. It won't quite work out like that because the ends aren't a pure ladder but that's the principle.

Mine is a concrete sectional garage, door sealed up and a false wall behind, walls panelled with celotex then OSB on top of that rather rhan plasterboard (less easy to damage). The floor is 50mm insulation over a waterproof membrane over the concrete floor with flooring chipboard then floatex carpet on top. It could be converted back to a garage by dismantling the false wall, it was designed to come out relatively easily (the layout wasn't though !). Spiders are taken care of by a twice yearly dousing with Insectol. I found a slug in there yesterday but I think that has more to do with Mrs Wheatley not confining her gardening rubbish to her gardening shed.

Thanks, that could explain a lot, and not just recently. I think a lot of us who aren't traders sometimes fail to recognize or appreciate just how fragile some of the infrastructure which supports our hobby actually is, how much of it relies on good will or exists only by chance, and how much of it has absolutely no contingency plan (because, in the wider scheme, it doesn't need one, they aren't producing flu vaccines).

There are two black and white photos in HJC Cornwell's magnum opus, both have much darker bases to the firebox. 812 as built in 1899 (but not in works grey by the look of it) and 820 at a later unspecified date. Likewise 'Caledonian Cavalcade' has a photo of "a war weary 827" in 1918 with the darker base, although in that case it could just be muck. I admit that when I saw the painted samples I assumed the firebox bottom was part of the footplate casting and had just been left unpainted (the boiler bottom is the same on one of them), I was surprised that it is in fact correct ! I don't need one, I have one of the Caley Coaches ones in BR Black and almost enough bits to build a second, but the light blue one does look rather nice. I won't be allowed to weather it though

Princess Victoria (1947-53) was deisel. Hampton ferry (53-61?) and Caledonian Princess (61 on) were both steam turbines but fuelled by what I don't know. The evidence (from a railway modelling point of view) is Class B 14t tanks left in the bay platform but whether they contained deisel or bunker oil is a good question. I was using 'bunkering' in its wider sense of 'fuelling a ship' be that with coal, oil or deisel, rather than specifially with bunker oil. I've not come across any reference to a stationary boiler at Stranraer, either static or loco. Having said that, I haven't looked very hard - I have the advantage over Dan that by the time the train gets to my shed (Newton Stewart) it doesn't matter which bit of Stranraer it started off in, it just has to look like the prototype photo !

Empty carriage at the back too, don't often see that modelled. Given the 16t minerals in front of them, both it and the fish van must be loose coupled.