Wheatley

The wall mounted telephone, desks and stove are fine. The chairs look rubbish for sleeping in and would very quickly have been replaced by a domestic arm chair (in earlier days before fire safety regs etc). The lever frame looks a bit like the Ransomes "horse rake" https://old.signalbox.org/frames/ransome.htm or the LMS 'turnover' type https://old.signalbox.org/frames/lms.htm but only a bit. Definitely not typical.

Found the ARC kit of the 12" Barclay, here's the comparison with the Hattons 16" version: Rather than replace the signalbox why not repaint as per your photo of Carron further up ? Brown up to waist level and cream above, including the corner posts and other blue bits.

Yorkshire Tar Distillers was in business 1920s - 1970s when it became part of Croda. There are some photos of tanks out of use at Croda on Paul Bartlett's site, mostly crudded up but with odd bits of yellow lettering visible so I suspect the livery is correct if not necessarily the exact type of tank. There are some employee reminiscences here - http://stairfootstation.co.uk/tar/ - coal tar was the starting point so my guess (and it is only that) is that the rail tanks were used to bring coal tar in in bulk as a raw material with the finushed products (pitch, naptha, creosote etc) going out by road.

Use the 0.3mm wire but crush it slightly (not wafer-thin) in a pair of flat smooth jawed pliers. If that makes it flat but too wide one of the metal section suppliers (K&S ?) does 0.25 or 0.2mm wire instead.

Looking a bit more like a building now, this is the road/forecourt side with the tea room / parcels office extention nearest: The stonework around the windows is 5 thou sheet stuck over the Slaters embossed stone, it will shrink into the mortar courses so will need a wipe over with some filler before painting. The real ashlar trimmings were flush with the coursed rubble used for the rest of the wall but cutting out all these was tedious enough without trying to inset them ! Platform side. The working drawings for this were done in 2017 as soon as Andrew Swan's book came out (saving me a trip to West Register House to see the originals !), and the walls were set out a while ago. On sticking everything together I realised I had got the double doors on either side of the building leading to the booking hall about 6mm offset from each other so I altered them to be directly opposite each other. On checking Swan later for something else I noticed that the PPR had built them about 18" offset from each other so I'd been right to start with ! They'll have to stay wrong. The boarded over window had a small poster board, totem and gas lamp fastened to it so I decided boarding it over was probably correct. The others marked with crosses will have larger poster boards covering the whole window.

Your weird zigzag thingy is a kickback siding and headshunt, they are popular with modellers because they are awkward and therefore interesting to shunt, and unpopular (but by no means unknown) on the real thing because they are awkward and therefore tedious to shunt :-) For layout ideas Carl Arendt's site is still available here - https://www.carendt.com/micro-layout-design-gallery/micro-tymesaver-designs/ The link goes to the Time Saver page, a popular shunting puzzle invented by John Allen in the US. It's s been done so many times its a cliche but I quite like it. For UK layouts have a look at some of Iain Rice's books, there are several covering small layouts !

OK, I really didn't mean to drag this off into a fight about the rights and wrongs of the ASLEF strikes, it was simply a inference that even the DfT must have been aware that a significant part of the network would be unavailable on the day their promotion started. But Clay Country has it bang on. ASLEF didn't create an internal labour market that only ASLEF members could fill, the privatised industry did that. ASLEF didn't then spend the next 25 years failing to notice this fairly obvious open goal and playing both sides off against the middle nor did they fail to notice that, generally speaking, railway staff loyalty is to "the railway" rather than Sea Containers, Arriva, Stagecoach or whoever, and that the unions represented stability which the constant procession of names on TUPE letters did not. They also didn't fail to notice that they were rather better at this negotiating lark than the various well meaning but (in many cases) naive HR types they were pitted against in negotiations. ASLEF exists to serve the interests of its member and (barring the odd punch up at barbecues) it has done and continues to do that very well (clue - they're on £60k a year). Until someone perfects Google Train that is likely to remain the case. As for doctors I don't think anyone disagrees that they're underpaid for what they do but that's not how capitalism works. NHS doctors are also a closed labour market represented by a single union, maybe they should be asking their union how such a pay gap arose?

I use code 75 bullhead on the scenic bits and Streamline in the fiddle yard, the only difference being I used code 100 and made up my own 100/75 rail joiners. Code 100 was even cheaper than 75 and it's bomb proof, also it meant I could use 3rd and 4th radius set track for the inside curves as tight curves are more prone to kinking. Bog standard PL10s used with the mounting base are pretty bomb proof too, the slimline surface mounted motors tend to be a bit more prone to going out of adjustment in my experience. The only restriction using small radius points will impose is that some things will buffer lock more easily when propelling through them. Shouldn't be an issue if you're using the as supplied hook and bar couplings though.

It wasn't a criticism of ASLEF, more a comment on timing.

This is Cheddleton, not a million miles away. 27th (!) photo down - https://www.churnetvalleyrailway.co.uk/cheddleton Check out Google Streetview too, they appear to be still there at Cheddleton.

"between 30 January and 15 March 2024" Check with ASLEF first ;-)

Another vote for Barter Books. As mentioned it isn't cheap for the good stuff, because he knows what he's got and how much its selling for elsewhere. But as mentioned when I was handing over 50 quid for a copy of Vol 1 of "LMS Carriages", all the online sellers check against each other, as does Oxfam, and the alternative is checking every charity shop you walk past in the hope they don't really know what they're doing or what they've got. And the cafe is excellent :-) Also Nick Tozer in Huddersfield if it's railway books, he does mail order.

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 !