DCB

The layout I operate works well with the 6 loops and 6 dead end sidings under the terminus. The down side is trains to the terminus are generally banked up the 1 n 30 ish as some Bachmann and Hornby bwith decoders and tender pick ups struggle with 3 coaches, though the bankers can manage 7 which is all the platforms hold anyway. However because of heavy framing and limited clearance "fiddling" has to be restricted to the siding nearest the operating well and the dead end. usually the MO is a terminating train stops a fresh engine is attached to the back. the train loco cut off and the fresh loco pulls the stock out and then backs into another siding allowing the incoming loco to go on shed. If its a goods the brake van is cut off first and shunted by hand to the back of the train, if re marshalling is needed then it has to be in the road nearest the operating well. It works for us, but a lot depends on detail. for instance the H/D peco couplings we use and indeed and Kadee couplers are vastly better at reversing than Tension lock couplers and nice smooth 3 ft radius points are much less derailment prone than set track points so we can habitually reverse 20 wagon goods through point work involving reverse curves with very few derailments. Some of our coaches have tension lock couplers within the rakes but these have been moved back to shorten the distance between coaches so the gangways almost touch with buffers retracted, and the heights carefully matched and the back to backs set to 14.25mm to ensure that reliability. My incomplete loft layout has low level hidden loops which can feed either up or down main line with an MPD station and marshalling sidings on the visible level with again gradients around 1 in 30 but it is horribly over complicated and work ground to a halt 10 years or so ago as I just can't figure out how to make it work . Though the intention was to fiddle in the marshalling sidings and send goods out and back with layovers in the hidden loops. And as a concept marshalling and remarshalling trains, changing engines etc in a series of visible sidings is probably more satisfying than having a set of storage sidings pretending to be a station as many people do, where trains sit for hours at platform in through stations, but its your choice, you use set track and tension lock couplers of you want, you can always take up crochet when you get so sick of the derailments that you put a sledge hammer through the whole ****** mess

I like the idea of a floating tender chassis where the rear axle takes the tender body weight at the back and the front of the tender body rests on the loco chassis with the rest of the tender chassis just taking it's own weight. I have several Airfix Truro kits but the smokebox looks too small for a Std 4 and maybe too big for a No2 and in all the photos and drawings I have seen the frames should drop down behind the rear bogie wheel and just beyond the steps, not over the rear bogie axle, and that stuidly enough really bugs me and has stopped various schemes for a bulldog or Dukedog in their tracks. The ultimate haulage power solution might be a K's powered tender chassis with an additional shaft driving the loco wheels through a universal joint and suitable gearing. City of Truro may have hauled light trains in her Ocean Mails days and final DNS duties but in preservation she has hauled 8 and more, I remember her slipping furiously at Bridegnorth in the 1980s and I think she took 7 up Sapperton Bank during the GWR 150 in 1985, I might be wrong memory fades.

The axles were the Mainline achilles heel, and the motor was not much better. but Mainline never did a Grange, only the smaller Manor so I guess you have a renamed Manor. They also did a 43XX Mogul which used more or less the same chassis. Later Bachmann upgraded the chassis with a worm drive motor progressing through bigger axles to squared axle ends and then abandoned split chassis with their later models which improved things greatly. The Mainline problem is poor contact between wheel boss and chassis, any lubricant except special conductive oil caused electrical resistance which heats the wheel boss and loosens it on the plastic axle, the cure is to fit pick ups from te chassis to the backs of the wheels, my 03 had this dome 30 years ago and has outlived several Bachmann "Replacements" though its otor has been replaced several times. Thirty years or so ago I had this trouble with a Manor and a couple of 43XX so after correcting the quartering and super gluing the wheels in place I took the motors out of two 43XX Moguls and fitted Hornby County powered tenders using tender pick up on one side and one side of the loco chassis for the other with an improvised drawbar. The Manor wheels still would not stay put so I used Romfords with 1/8th axle bushes pressed into plastic tubes the same size as the Mainline axle holes. The bushes on one side were soldered to connecting wires and earthed to one side of the split chassis and again a Hornby County powered tender was used, it still runs very sweetly and is very powerful but I just don't like tender drive so it seldom gets used. The other Manor, an original plain green Mainline one, I treated to a Triang "Hall" Chassis with Romford wheels and as much lead as I could cram in keeping the Mainline tender and it has been a stalwart of the layout for around 30 years, re liveried in clean BR lined green it looks very pretty as opposed to my usual "Weathered" look. I also did a 43XX with a Triang chassis with Romfords which is a much better runner than the Bachmann 93XX. as it is much heavier and can pull 50% more. I also have a Hornby Grange body on a Triang Hall chassis with Hornby Dublo 22mm driving wheels, it pulls much better than the standard Hornby Grange and when running looks much better as the "Scale" valve gear on the Hornby Grange looks rather effeminate. On a tangent, the Hornby/ Airfix 61XX Tank chassis is pretty awful and the Bachman runs very smoothly so I am wondering about putting a Bachmann 93XX chassis under the 61XX body with loads of lead in the side tanks......

Are there any details on the chassis? I posted about powering the trailing wheels of a 14XX recently as with the back heavy weight distribution of these locos it seems to me powering the rear axle as well as the driving wheels is the only way to get decent performance. Traction tyres just don't seem to stay in their grooves on my Airfix and Hornby 14XX. I was planning either two separate motors or a single motor geared to a layshaft with 50 to 1 gears for the diving wheels and 40 to 1 for the trailing wheels and engineered to last. my converted Hornby Halls are 30 years old and still going strong. But the bottom line is a superb looking loco that slips with just one auto coach or hops like a frog is no use to me what so ever.

If the flywheel has a relatively narrow "seating" on the shaft or overhangs the shaft end it is really easy to get a flywheel on slightly out of line, and it is dead easy to bore the centre hole eccentrically 0.5 mm at the centre equals 1 mm at the rim, I had one on slightly eccentrically on a K's 57XX and it literally vibrated the loco to bits. As regards removing a flywheel they can always be removed, it is just whether they and the motor remain re usable, blow lamp is one solution, mount the motor vertically in a vice with the flywheel on top to keep the heat away from the motor as far as possible, but I know if I tried it the success rate would be under 25%

Assuming it was operating in the 1960s You could try visiting the local pub (s) and asking around for former railwaymen who worked at Wooler especially signalmen and remember how things were done. As an alternatively if you are too far away try Facebook, several Wooler Pubs have Facebook pages, maybe you could post a plea for info there?

As Wooler had North and South signalboxes I would guess that depending on traffic the trains were either signalled into the correct platform or the up goods handsignalled with flag or lamp into the down platform. If aan up goods was to cross another service before shunting it would arrive at the up platform and probably draw forward before setting back into the down platform. It may well be a signalman who worked the box is still around who can tell you how it was operated in reality, not necessarily as the rule book suggests

Surely the crane uses special 12 ish mm plastic wheels on metal axles, flanged outers and non flanged inners and the match trucks use standard all plastic 12mm ish wagon wheels. The match trucks will need romford/ jackson non pinpoint axles unless you fancy fitting Romford pin point bushes to the H/D axle holders to allow the use of Hornby pinpoint axles. You remove the retainer by easing up the tags so the retainer and axles drop out. You need to file the bushes flat and flush with the back of the retainer so it will fit back in, which is a fiddle. I would have thought that modern Hornby wagon wheels would have fitted the H/D axles, if not you have a big problem as the crane is top heavy and will not tolerate the axles being a sloppy fit in the pressed tin inner chassis. the centre axles have elongated holes but it ought to be all right on R2 curves with all wheels flanged. I am away from my crane at present but I think the pressed tin subfame is riveted in so may need drilling out if you need to bush the axle holes. It is possible if the Hornby axles are too small then Lima Wheels may fit. It might be easier to relay the entire layout with code 100 rail The Cord is standard green Meccano cord, and the jib lifting cord goes around a rod towards the top of the jib, not sure where the hook cord goes. The winding handles foul all sorts of things so I replaced mine with gear wheels once part of clocks on shortened winding handle spindles which mean the crane can still be operated. I used model ship rigging cord from Cheltenham Model Centre which is my local model shop for jib lifting and hook.

What happened to the Atlantic, I would have thought Gresley might have popped a tin cover on a couple of those C1 Ivatt Atlantics which he tarted up with big superheaters etc for some shorter express formations which didn't need an A4. Most folk fail to realise the C!s only started to fly after being Gresleyised.

You can have an awful lot of fun with a 3ft X 4ft layout, double track 1st and 2nd radius with sidings and two crossovers. My son had a 4'6" X 3' layout with double track, two crossoves, platform loop, turntable. 5 loco roads but did require a hacksaw taken to set track points, and 15" Ist radius curves but it was great fun. The board was ply probably 12mm and the supporting frame was around the outside and projected above board level by an inch or so thus keeping derailments off the floor, normally it was used on the kitchen table and stood against the wall when out of use. All the wiring ran along the baseboard surface

The GWR problem was that they went in for portional working in a big way, almost none of their long distance trains ran as a fixed formation so adding and removing carriages was an everyday thing at Swindon, Bristol, Gloucester, Plymouth, Newton Abbott, Exeter,Taunton etc and a screw coupled side buffered carriage is a lot easier to couple and uncouple. A buckeye coupled coach is much safer in a collision but the GWR in general didn't do much in the way of collisions in the way that the LNER and Southern did. Conversely the LNER and SR (ACE excepted) did not do so much portional working, indeed the SR liked to have fixed sets. Among my many pet hates is Buckeye fitted Mk1s in the middle of a rake modelled with buffers extended and ridiculously long floppy corridor connections fitted to fill the monstrous gap

The Minories in my old Peco 60 plans for small layouts has the Peco 2ft radius points arranged with one left hand and one right hand point making the crossovers, and in my opinion the design has never been bettered for getting access to any of three platforms from either of two main lines in the shortest distance possible Minories drawback is it was designed as an urban terminus with engine changes on all trains, which was a very rare mode of operation on BR away from a few London Termini, Moorgate etc. Generally at a terminus either a pilot would come on and draw the stock away or the loco would run round. Equally in steam days it was rare for trains to be able to arrive at all platforms of a terminus, from memory trains could only arrive at the 2 arrival platforms at Cheltenham St James but could depart from all 4. The idea of separate suburban platforms is more a major terminus thing, Kings Cross, Glasgow Central, even Marylebone didn't have any. I think what I am saying is design a track plan to suit how you want to operate. Loaded passenger trains are not allowed to reverse but ECS can, pilot engines pull out ECS to release the train engine, but rarely to pilots pull ECS into platforms for departures, unless they bank the train out that is, Paddington being the main exception, but usually the pilot will propel ECS into a departure platform which will almost certainly mean propelling around reverse curves, so no set track or 2ft radius if you want reliable running. Of course there were termini which handled through trains, Bath Green Park being a classic example where one main line engine would bring a train in and another immediately couple on and take it back the way it came, at least the same way as far as Bath Junction where Birmingham/Bristol and the S and D lines diverged. But plan for the operations you plan to do, I designed a layout for operation 25 years ago and it is still fun to operate, even some of the awkward moves were designed in, no facing crossover from branch to yard so the trains have to set back on the main line, so much more interesting than simply crossing straight over on some hugely complicated ladder. Another Minories quirk is when designed modellers usually had far fewer locos, and less stock, so with a fiddle yard it could operate with 5 or 6 tank engines, and 4 rakes of passenger stock. For us modellers of the 1950s generation with far more stock and locos it can only take a fraction of our collection, but converselywe are now back to impoverishment with carriage prices through the roof and a decent express rake plus loco now pushing £ 700 in OO scale perhaps Minories is bang up to date again.

H and M variable transformer power units such as the Safety Minor don't have rheostats. The Safety Minors just have a shaft disappearing into the transformer These give variable voltage, turn the knob and you can measure down to 2.5 volts off load The Clipper, Duette etc are variable resistors with rheostats as shown and will usually measure around 14 volts off load as soon as you turn the knob. They usually have high and low resistance and also half and full wave selector switches. I like the Safety Minor with variable voltage as it is much easier to run different locos from different manufacturers double headed. Crawling slow running is probably better with the Clipper or Duette on half wave , but I was at the NYMR this week and apart from the last 4 feet buffering up to loaded trains I didn't actually see any crawling slow running, The Safety Minor has a drawback in that the maximum voltage and thus power is limited compared to some others. The plus point is it has a 1 amp cut out and not the point destroying rail burning 4 amps of DCC, a big consideration if you are building for 25 years retirement and not just a few exhibitions.

Interesting topic,I have been thinking about this from the opposite viewpoint, my problem has been with dead and dying Bachmann and mainline chassis, 2 X 57XX and a 94XX with Bachmann chassis are on my work bench with chassis problems as I write, a burned out motor and slipped driving wheels and I am wondering about fitting an X04 with Triang gears and Romford wheels to a Bachmann split chassis to make a reliable chassis with the correct wheelbase, The earliest iterations of the Triang / Hornby chassis the Jinty, ( 32 + 33mm) Princess (26X26 from memory) had strip sideframes and Mazak spacing blocks, screwed together and will take a modern motor gearbox with minimal work, but we are talking 1950s here. The Polly 0-4-0 (32mm?) is similar but is rivetted together. The later mazac chassis is really pretty hopeless as the narrow slot in the chassis does not allow a gearbox to fit without massive amounts of filing and a severely weakened chassis As regards the replacement of the X04 I find the worst aspect of the Hornby chassis is the excess sideplay on the worm wheel, I shim mine to about 10 thou, 0.010" with steel and brass washers which improves running immensely, as does the fitting of Romfords with screws through the coupling rods instead of the pins on the older chassis, I have good results with Wrenn 2-6-4 T and Castle wheels on Hornby chassis to get a decent crank throw, but I have had issues attaching the Worm wheel to the 1/8th axle. I have used 18mm Romfords on a 94XX (Farish) Pannier and simply drilled out the square on the centre wheel and pressed Hornby bushes in and pressed them onto the Hornby axle. I have used several "Long" motors from Computers on various chassis, both Wrenn 8F and Brass with Romford gears but not on cast Hornby chassis as there is just too much Mazak to carve away. However, I shall now revisit my scrap box with a view to grafting two "Polly" chassis together with Bachmann rods and a computer motor, that's if I don't get sidetracked with the twin motor 9F chassis again.

Slogging up about 30 yards of 1 in 14 gradients with 6 coaches at a scale 30 mph is probably the cause but I have lots of burned commutators and collapsed brush springs in my scrap box

The trick is to find a narrow CD tray motor, the wide ones are ok for BoBo types and probably for the 08, 4575 and 94XX as well but they foul the unpowered wheels of the 37/47 chassis. The white scalextric pinions fit and the motor jut needs a strap to hold it in place. You will need a resistor as I run these on 3 volts 2X AA cells in the garden Pics of 2 of my garden 37s below showing motor straps Note one motor has been filed away for clearance for the centre wheel. The Lima motor is pretty awful, I burned out several commutators which are just discs of PCB.and the brush springs collapse and they are pretty uncontrollable compared to Bachmann etc.

The 45XX Four foot seven and a half inch leading drivers would have been uncomfortably close to the valve rocker pivot as well as to the motion bracket if the leading coupled axle had remained in the 44XX position. Did Holcroft say the 45XX drawings were different from any others in his experience or the 44XX. I am guessing the 44XX were the first taper boiler locos built at Wolverhampton and the first outside cylinder ones as well as being the first pure Churchward design so the drawings would have been very different to the 850 and 2021 class they had been building for years.

I now see that 4410 was Wolverhampton works no 774 /06 and 4500 was 775/06 so it does look more and more as if the change to 4' foot 7 1/2" wheels was a last minute change. Obviously changing the wheelbase meant cutting the hornblock slots six inches further back on the main frames. As the mainframes were simply cut from steel plates and bolted together to check alignment before being rivetted together the extra work involved in changing it was a pencil line on a drawing. all the other parts remained the same. No new rods or changes to that big curved plate below the boiler. Don't forget these were the last engines built at Wolverhampton, this was a 19th century facility unused to building outside cylindered locos but used to 4'1 1/2 " wheeled 0-6-0st I expect they were drawn at Swindon and I would love to see the original drawing as many books about Swindon 30 and 40 years later talk of design revisions being made and the revision then copied to the drawing, rather than drawn first. Sadly everyone who built these locos is dead now, and there are no 44XX left to look at

Early 20th century frame construction was essentially black smithing with hammer and chisel and ratchet driills and red hot rivets so it made little odds if a slot was cut 6" one way or the other, or if a frame stay was put in a few inches back, but Churchward was very keen on standardisation to the extent of having both left and right hand cylinders cast from the same pattern so as to be interchangeable, which also meant the cylinders had to be horizontal, so moving the wheels back rather than re designing and almost certainly weakening the motion bracket was probably the easy way out.The sectional drawing in the Russel book shows a huge cut away in the 45XX motion bracket so another three inches clearance would would mean a very significant redesign,I am not sure but I always thought the 45XX plate frames ended at the motion bracket and that bar frames continued forward to the cylinders. The fact both leading and trailing coupled axles could be moved so keeping standard rods and a standard motion bracket may have clinched it. I may be completely wide of the mark but Churchward was well known for visiting the "Shop floor," and talking to the workmen, an essentially practical engineer. As regards weight distribution the 45XX was a ton heavier on each coupled axle than the 44XX except the leading which is 10 cwt lighter than the driving and trailing, however the leading pony truck is 9 cwt heavier, with the leading coupled wheel further forward?, logically there should be less weight on the pony truck not more.

Looking at the drawings It seems to me that when they tried to fit 4 '71/2" wheels into a 44XX either in the workshops or more likely on a drawing board the tyres on the leading coupled wheels fouled the motion bracket, This is the bracket which sweeps down over the driving wheels to support the slide bars at their mid point and is cut away to clear the leading driving wheel. The easy cure was to move the leading coupled axle back 6" to allow some clearance. As moving the centre axle would have necessitated new connecting rods the quick and easy answer was to move the rear axle back 6" as well which meant all the motion parts and rods could be the same albeit the coupling rods swapped left to right which moved the pin joint from in front of the big end to behind and only the frames needed to be different in having the cut aways for the horn blocks cut further back. The only other substantial change was to fit deeper buffer beams so the buffers could be lowered 3" to compensate for the engine sitting higher on the larger wheels. To be honest I never realised the wheelbase differed between the 44XX and 45XX before reading this.

Modified Peco OO code 100 curved point The point blade on the sharper curve had to be modified and now slides in and out on the pivot end fishplate instead of simply pivoting. It works fine with old H/D and Triang locos fitted with all flanged Romford wheels with minimal sideplay. and made a run round loop at the junction possible.

I have never bent a code 75 turnout but have curveded quite a few code 100 turnouts by cutting the "webs" between the sleepers, the easy way to gain a few degrees or millimetres is to curve the last straight section beyond the Frog. Getting more viscous I have curved a Peco curved point down to around 18" radius from 30" This was a hacksaw job cutting across all the webs from one side to the other. It needed a new shorter points blade to compensate I think I tried shortening it but this put the tie bar an an angle so I fitted a shorter blade from a different peco point, on the more tightly curved road from my scrap box, they pull out of the tie bar and disconnect at the pivot end if you squeeze up the tags. That was just one blade not the pair of blades and tie bar, no way would I try to change the tie bar except on the very old code 100 points where the two halves of the base "clipped" together under the tie bar. Chopping off large chunks of points and diamond crossings can also make a difference to complex station throat pointwork or Loco sheds where available space is at a premium, it is also possible to do the same to set track points and save an inch or so on length.

Muir of Ord was the de facto terminus for the Kyle and Wick/ Thurso lines in 1989 while the Ness Viaduct was down.hence the construction of the TMD. I think 5 of Inverness's 6 stag 37/4s were north of the viaduct when it failed, the far north goods had a 37/4 that day, the Kyle train and one if not two Wick Trains, and the Thurso pilot. Timetabled trains started from Dingwall, as it was as quick to get from Inverness to Dingwall by replacement bus via the Kessock Bridge as to Muir of Ord, in fact the bus was quicker than the train timetable. I was there in June 1989 and saw the first 156 undergoing trials, sadly they were a success and several were brought in by road and some 37s moved south so by 1990 the far north was all 156 and little freight returned when the Ness Viaduct reopened. To a certain extent my garden railway is modelled on the Kyle and Wick lines in 1989 when they were cut off from the rest of BR I have an uneasy feeling that the TMD was redundant almost as soon as it was erected if not before as the 156s took over the duties from 37/4s. I have pictures somewhere, and probably carriage numbers but not to hand, My wife and I holidayed in Inverness in 88/ 89 and we spent time chasing 37/4s along the coast in our MG Metro but the coming of the 156's spoiled our fun

Thanks everyone The Princess Royals and the P2 2-8-2 s and W1 4-6-4 had longer wheelbases than the Duchess, but my point was you just don't need a 75 foot turntable, although the overhang can be a problem, as they found at Bath Green Park when turning West Countries which fouled the wagons on the adjacent sidings! The On30 9" Turntable looks good, might be just what I need.

I get irritated by the huge wastage of space caused by the big proprietary turntables As I don't run anything larger than a LMS Duchess I don't need a full size 75 foot Turntable and have been using a manual 65 foot turntable which is a cut down Airfix Dapol plastic kit.for many years. However I do like the ideas of motorising the turntable and have been wondering about getting something N gauge and grafting on a cut down Dapol deck and OO track, has anyone done anything like this? I am also wondering about a 50 or 55 foot table to turn 0-6-0 and 4-4-0 tender locos for my projected "Isle of Skye" fantasy layout, again N gauge, with OO track perhaps?