Wheatley

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.

There are (or at least were) some on some of the user worked crossings on the Settle - Carlisle. If you picture the ramp made by the approaches to an accommodation (field to field) crossing where the railway is on a low embankment, they were in the fields marking the bottom of the smaller embankment forming the ramp. Cast iron with MR cast into them, one at each corner. The other location I know they were used was to mark the railway company's land in private sidings. The gate was not necessarily the ownership boundary.

Not RMweb specific (it's not half as annoying as most non-BBC 'news' sites) - I don't mind banner ads or side bar ads, but what is it with all the ear wax adverts all over the place ? Eeeuch ! The internet is snided with them at the moment. My wife is getting them too and her browsing habits are definately not similar to mine.

The basic process was: 1. Out of the ground (run of mine) 2. Washed 3. Screened (sorted for size) 4. To customer, either directly from screens in BR wagons or to landsale in NCB wagons. If all those were on the same site, close to each other and connected via conveyors or tubs, then the main use for internal users was between screens and landsale. But washers especially became increasingly centralised with run of mine coal being tripped in from several shafts. Look at Weymss, Waterside or Lambton Hetton & Joicey for examples. Increasingly as time went on surface railways and internal users were replaced by underground conveyors, the ideal was coal brought up next to the washer with rapid loading bunkers for HAAs fed directly from the washer. West Side Washery at Woolley near Barnsley was planned to take coal from , I think, 10 local pits and South Side at Grimethorpe a similar number.

"First wash your cow ..."

Thank you :-) I confess I keep forgetting about the Glasgow line, my research has mostly been concerned with what was likely to go through Newton Stewart ! Yes, lots and lots of NPCCS of all shapes and sizes, I wouldn't be surprised at fruit vans but they aren't easy to spot in the background of photos mixed in with ordinary 12 ton vans and of course there is no way of telling whether they are in fruit traffic or general merchandise unless they are in multiples. I'd forgotten about the tractors, later on in the 60s there are photos of the morning Stranraer-Glasgow goods being double-headed through Ayrshire (Std5 + Black 5 or BRCW Type 2 + Black 5) with long rakes of BR CCTs in the consist, presumably the empties going back north. Milk tankers are interesting, I know road tankers came across post war but I suspect that all went north to Glasgow. I've only found one photo of a tanker on the Port Road proper so far, not including various shenanigans around Dumfries involving condensed/powdered milk for the Carnation factory at Maxwelltown. By the 1960s Glasgow was self sufficient in milk from the surrounding area, Kahedron put me on to an Aberdeen area - Dumfries flow of pre-condensed milk for the Carnation factory which appears to be what various photos of milk tanks on the Lockerbie branch are all about. Most of the dairy traffic in Galloway by the 60s appears to have been cheese and margarine in vans rather than milk tanks, although there is mention of 'cream in churns' as late as 1960 so presumably a very specialised flow. A romantic break in Stranraer ? Erm ... yes. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Port Logan are worth a trip. I called in at the industrial estate which used to be Edingham Munitions Factory at Dalbeattie once in the middle of a weekend break with my wife. There was a NATO exercise going on along the coast and there was this really cool looking Land-Rover parked up in the corner so I went to take a photo. She wasn't expecting to have a rifle pointed at her and V signs flicked at us, really secret Land-Rover as it turns out.

I think the tankers were Esso but don't quote me on that just yet, I'll have a proper look later. The 14 tons or thereabouts black (Class B) should be ok, I've not found any of the larger 35 ton tankers in pics. By 1959 the modernisation plan was in full swing with BR fitting 10'0" wb vans and opens with vacuum brakes so fewer grey and more bauxite as your period gets closer to 1964. Not common on the harbour though, mostly vans and parcels stock on there. I've not found a lot of information out about what sort of traffic was actually handled at the harbour in that period apart from containers and ferry oil, all the non-ferry traffic went to Town of course.