runs as required

"Err - please tell me that isn't so .... :scratchhead:" Nay chance...... Standard practice from about the mid 1950s - they used to call it "Lift slab" I believe And it probably all began with 'Concrete Bob' McAlpine and his Glenfinnan viaduct on the West Highland Mallaig branch. dhig

Good Grief! I really did believe that all that camera truck circuit past the lekky meter and out of the Shakey tunnel and around 10 chain curve was on the grandest scale. This pic and those others in the Flikr sequence have completely blown the illusion for me - it can all be contained within a couple of door widths! Not sure I can cope with the Colron unvarnished truth dhig (senile)

And a copy was also partly built (link: http://webodysseum.com/art/the-london-eiffel-tower-plans/ ) on the site of Wembley Stadium by Sir Edward Watkin whose grand plan was to have a railway from Paris (he owned the Paris Ceinture and made a start on the Channel Tunnel) via the SE&Chatham, the Metropolitan and the GCR all the way to Seffield, Manchester, Liverpool and even Wrexham in North Wales! My mum used to see the structure from her Aunt Perl's house (where she also watched a Zeppelin catch on fire and crash over N London in WW1) until it got demolished in preparation for the Wembley exhibition. dhig

Are you inferring that you were perched on a laptop at the time? dhig ( p.p. Sid the Sexist)

Jaz so sorry to read of your present headachey spell. All very familiar to those of us hooked on &%££%$ CAD and Photoshop screens. They say take a break every 45 mins or so, but with deadlines (as well as re-doing silly glitches) I can suddenly discover my eyes superglued into the screen for 5 hours on the trot without a break and it is 3.30 in the morning! I say to younger folks "don't take risks". Mebbe take those Dobermans out for a good long frosty ramble in the sun termorra.... dh

They were municipal buses in the cream and red Southport Corpy livery. And don't forget the elegant de Haviland Rapide biplanes offering short flights off Southport sands at low tide (I never had the dosh to afford one of these), though my uncle let me - as a thirteen year old - learn to drive his Ford Consul along the beach on winter Sundays. He worked at the Everton toffee factory, thus a trip to the dentist often followed on after these weekends. dhig

I think this very unfair about present day Morecambe. The Midland Hotel (LMS 1933, by Oliver Hill - for my money Britain's most versatile Art Deco architect) has been imaginatively rejuvenated by Manchester's 'Urban Splash'. My grandchildren say it is their favourite place for us all meeting up - they can splash about in the rock pools with us all keeping an eye on them while partying in the dining room or the adjacent cafe. Thoroughly recommended for a reminder of the 1950s (that never were) - and for a great overnight stay prior to visiting Carnforth and the "Fancy a Quick S£$& ?" "Brief Encounters" location. dhig (who 20 years ago actually stayed in the manky cabbage smelling pre-restoration Midland Hotel during a wet week-end spent dismantling the crossings outside the doomed Morecambe Promenade station for re-use in preservation) [edit of typos]

What a a great pic. That elevational photo of Seaton Junction box (at 1mm per brick course; 3mm per brick " stretcher") will give you every dimension you need for a 4mm scale replica. & Have a look at Freebs build of Clayton West Junction signal box for how he applied sliding windows. He explains it step by step. dhig

I've only just happened across this interesting thread. To my mind, the most unchanged seaside resorts are a couple of Welsh ones: Llandudno and Aberystwyth and also Scottish ones - my absolute favourite being Rothesay (though, being on the Isle of Bute, lacking a raiway). The advantage of these is that you can 'visit' them with Google or Bing maps and walk about them using the little yellow man. Sometimes Bing gives you a Birdseye facility to study the buildings from different compass viewpoints (eg a beautiful art deco flat complex on the front at Hastings resembling a cruise liner). I use the screen capture button, then photoshop to generate 4mm scale elevs from these views. You also have to think of how the railway arrives - Southport used to have both types of terminus: the old GCR line that played a 'flanker' arriving at Southport Lord Street along the coastal sandunes from Altcar (likewise Yarmouth Beach and Whitby) or the terminus at right angles to the sea front (Southport Chapel St. - as well as the Blackpool ones and Scarborough). Ventnor and Saltburn had the railway arrive on top of the cliff - in Ventnor the hotels/boarding houses opened both off the top of the cliff and exited down on the prom - very exciting. Saltburn still has a wonderful water powered cliff railway on axis with the pier - and with the former Zetland Hotel (elaborately Italianate Victorian) - with a neat railway terminus, now much reduced, behind it. If you have not already found it, you should look at Hoglington (an N gauge exhibition layout) here: http://www.hullmrs.org/hoglington.html It has some wonderful buildings typical of a 1960s E coast resort Good luck with the planning. dhig

Posted today! Gosh its still summer down there in Dover.... We've got enough sun right now to stand out in the garden for a small snifter and a quick shared bag of crisps but it will be dark in 4 hours time. Still in less than a month it will start getting lighter ...... dhig PS Just seen "Mr Turner" where bits of supposed Thanet (and Margate) in close-up look very granity and more likely Welsh/Irish/Scottish. Also where was 'Rain Steam and Speed' filmed? On the Bluebell ? Mike Leigh was very coy about revealing any details of the loco - a typical bit of fudged dt mock-up I thought. :jester:

Queen Victoria was not amused by all the sparrows causing a nuisance inside the Crystal Palace - shooting at them simply broke the glass. She asked the old Duke of Wellington's advice about getting shot of them. "Sparrowhawks marm" he replied. dhig

Surely a barrel that size would deliver more than a polite bit of 'Eine kleine Nacht' musik'. Even hardened Newcastle Quayside p%$£artists would be singing and shouting way into the small hours! :shout: dhig

It must be clear to you how so many enjoy the tiny details captured in The Pink Panther's Tiger's exhibition layout pics. I realise I've also been turning them around in my head while going about my daily affairs: here are a couple of queries: 1 The beautiful model of the allotments at Melton Mowbray - in reality would there be a right and a wrong way for the gardeners to align their rows? Up here on Tyneside (so close to the Arctic Circle) we line-up our rows N-S so that they get equal amounts of morning and afternoon sun. 2 Wingfield Junction (a really ambitious layout located somewhere along the Stephensons' York and North Midland mainline) appearsto have the rolling hills and red earth fields of mid Devon as its backdrop instead of those long Peak district edges! Could I suggest the flashing light of Crich 'Stand', the memorial to the Sherwood Foresters would look good up on the backdrop. signed (nitpicker) dhig

Thanks to you - and to Richard for your help. I can manage brass etch to white metal just fine; it is bonding two large whitemetal castings that defeats me. Regarding solder: I have tried both 70 degree and 145 degree as I understand the 70 is not so strong a bond as the 145. All my electric irons are far less bulky than the big old ones I used to heat in the kitchen gas stove flame as a child. I've not actually been melting my old whitemetal castings when playing the gas torch flame across them - quite simply they lose heat too quickly while I try to speedily pick up the soldering iron..... ......but I'm anxious about prolonging this exchange about my lack of soldering skill too long on sagaguy's thread. Many thanks to you. dhig

I confess I've had no success at all in rehearsing the soldering of large white metal castings . I have been practicing - as djh advise - on recycled large castings from an old Wills 4mm Bulleid Q1 (originally Araldited together 50 years ago). Try as I might to get solder to flow into a cleaned and well fluxed long joint, I cannot overcome the 'heatsink' effect. One of my bell ringer mates - a silver solderer - tells me I should pre-heat the two castings by playing a blow lamp over them until I spot the flux 'going off'; then get in quick with a hot iron to melt in a series of solder shavings distributed along the joint as quickly as possible. And another problem arises: I seem to need about two and half pairs of hands. After several week ends of dispriting failure (and burnt gardening gloves) I've been wondering whether epoxy was all that bad - it took an awful lot of pulling apart (after 50 years) plus I remember how it allows 'manipulation time' for truing-up the alignment of castings. But as an old Welsh doom-monger enjoyed reminding us as kids "God would never approve" Any timely advice out there? dhig

Oo-er.... this all seems a bit sinister If dt stops posting from Dover, I suggest that in a few weeks, we ought to investigate a funny smell coming from behind the insulation in the new loft extension

OMG ! Coming back to your site after a spell way is like nodding off for a second or two in a Planetarium and waking up a few billion years later. Loved your interlude with the Del Boy/Batman caption competition and now those lovely pics from the Spalding show. Especially enjoyed the melding of detail buildings and the semi abstract outline back scene on the Melton North layout (and the precision allotments!) that wonderful French layout - for me it harks back to the early 1950s when my folks allowed me off to bike off from Calais across to the Rhein/Moselle. Mind you.... if I were organising an exhibition and hoping for a reasonable turn-out, I'd ban ladies flaunting pink ipads! dhig [edit of typos]

Before the thread gets deep into chicken runs, can I please just flag up the correct spelling and origins of Major Nissen's WWI/WW2 1916 hut http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut Nissan are UK's biggest carmaker - they Mackem in derland dhig

I just love the rusting truck ! Its an old Sammy Longson's lime-spreader if I'm not mistaken. In our school it seemed like half the Chapel (-en-le-Frith) kids' dads drove those exWD 4WD Bedfords fearlessly across steep Pennine fields. dhig [edit of incomprehensable English]

Gosh this thread spins away so fast! Another 100,000 posts may be up and running by the time I've put typing around my thoughts! I read this interesting bit about Louth and towns last night (Halloween) and remembered about the ghosts of the earlier place that still whisper to you as you pass by the drive-in Burger King. I think you have to invent a back story about the place you are modelling. Drawing a sequence of 'old maps' from earliest origins down to present 'Pay Day Lenders' is a really enjoyable hour spent. I've only been to Louth once as the week-end guest of a mad husband and wife pair of RAF officers on a station closeby - the Flight Lieutenant kept buzzing us in his Gnat? trainer as we drove in and out of town on a busy Saturday. I remember it as a market town - roads converging on a core market place, later replaced by a covered mart. Other places are perhaps a castle, a ford/bridging point (or both) and where earlier buildings and activities have been and gone. I think a lot of modelling ignores this backstory and the buildings appear haphazard. dhig

I find the feedback revealed in the further pics of the new backdrop in position really instructive: Picture_3741.jpg See how the seagull really steals the show in this view over the parapet Picture_3711.jpg Seems to shew 2 things 1 righthand side : an apparent visual continuity over the Folkestone Road bridge is more successful than I'd envisaged 2 lefthand side: the terrace villas bending around the wall to end up virtually alongside the platform edge don't seem to me to work from any viewpoint - and neither does the 2D flat elevation of the ex gents loo. I suggest a Mark 2 version ought to be simply tree and railings in the foreground/ castle in background to bridge the gap between the end of the canopy and the bridge. dhig

Methinks posts #3130-3132 reveal contrasting drawbacks of the Blaydon Sweatshop's Photoshop /Spraymount illusions. 'Shakey' now looks just that a year or so on as the Spraymount has partially lifted and bubbled. The Castle/overbridge backdrop mounted behind the 2D platform building is never really going to be convincing since it is trying to deliver for too many camera positions. It was concocted with dt's platform level and camera truck photo postings as the priority. Mebbe more 'properties' work using seagulls and detail foregound cameos to draw the eye away from dodgy backdrop falsehoods might be a partial answer. (food for thought for the Sweatshop's Malta R&D unit) dhig [edit: that last posted pic shows the viewpoint prob even more! Surprising that the Folkestone Road view looks halfway plausable. may I propose a cameo elderly Mondeo driver in collision with an East Kent bus in the foreground?]

Lovely pics of Peterborough along with your usual thoughtful commentary. The only criticism of your exhibition pictures Jaz is that you always seem able to focus on the beautiful detail bits I miss when I'm actually there. So I may as well just stay sitting tight at home and wait for you to post . dhig

This earlier bit of my CV is just about still 'on topic' - provide you think of the Princess Royal being 00 gauge (and probably back in the tender drive era)...... I once got pressured into taking Miss Hornby to a dance just off Edge Lane L'pool. All I got was a %&$£#*%£$ for crashing into her and being a crap dancer. dhig

Maybe you're right to disregard visionary suggestions not to mention scarey stuff in the night for small bairns..like... the..... Phantom otO ! dhig