Captain Slough

Good afternoon all Could I tap your collective wisdom again? I bought this around 1996 because I liked the picture on the box and because it somewhat resembled LMS Articulated Railcar 80003 which i had an ambition to model. Its a Piko BR185 railcar in DR colours, complete with original box, original unused detailing parts, original still-folded leaflet and Piko distributor list dated April 1983 I'm going to offer it for sale but know practically nothing about it. I'm assuming from the fact that the paperwork is in German, Russian & Polish that it's East-German manufacture not West. I'd like to know a little about where the prototype was used is the "DR" livery a post-unfortunate-historical-events East German livery or is this a 1930s colour scheme? (I'm not sure if E/Germany railways continued under the old name while the W/Germany ones became DB) Also - is this a rarity or a mass-produced thing I'd find millions of if I looked in the right place? From the look of it its never been run - I've never run it and theres no evidence of dirt or arcing on the wheels. Packaging is factory-fresh too Thanks - Chris

@Andyman7 you should really post a picture of your current DMU & DMU-projects collection as I reckon from various comments you've made that it's getting pretty impressive....

Great Northern Railway of Ireland had 4-4-2s with curved solebars but its only a passing resemblance. Cab design looks vaguely Great Central to me.

now thats funny because in my collection of stuff I'm slowly auctioning off I found one vehicle that I'm pretty sure is an airfix body on a Dublo chassis Also got several Airfix vans that were built in the 60s presumably with Dublo couplings in place of the Airfix ones - the standard Airfix coupling mounting pin was probably deliberately designed to be at the right height and the same diameter as a Dublo coupling mount.

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1280280242571556/?ref=browse_tab&referral_code=marketplace_top_picks&referral_story_type=top_picks Berkhamsted, West Hertfordshire. Seller says they are clearing a collection. i have no connection to seller but sharing this in case its of interest

I have 2 Wrenn NCB hoppers as cleared out by Dapol - they have Dapol couplers. which are too short and cause buffer-lock....

Well I am selling several original wrenn wagons in eBay currently so not sure how it's a minefield. Just search for wrenn theb use the filters to limit to just wagons. Loads on there. It's not even an expensive thing to start collecting

Got those & built.... see last post in this thread....

found a guy on Youtube with an ever ready set with a triang motor bogie

I suppose you could always jack up the other end by the same degree, extend the solebars downward with a new skirt of plasticard, repaint it silver and run it as District line C-stock - it would be about right for scale height and length then , if nothing else

sometimes I think that your primary interface with the world is to divide everything you see into things that can or cannot fit a Triang power bogie and then to go from there in terms of how you relate to it. So anyway I just borrowed a bogie from one of my Triang R157 metro-cammells to see. Answer: Yes its 00, its already overscale for a tube train and a Triang motor bogie makes it about 4mm higher at the minimum but otherwise would be possible to fit - there is adequate lateral space and only about 2mm too little front-to-back space, and easily enough material there to make it work. It would look wrong though as the car is obviously higher at the motor bogie end If I were going to repower this for 2-rail 00 I'd use a Lima class 20 power bogie and shaft drive it's 3-rail by design anyway of course so you'd need to rewheel all bogies with wheels that insulated and werent suffering metal fatigue

for a "sense of scale" check, heres my scratchbuilt (plastikard, 1997) Northern Line 1938 driving car with one of the Ever-ready cars the '38 car was built for diorama use behind a platform in a corner of my layout so is unfinished below the solebar line, but is absolutely to scale apart from the thickness of the window dividers

this came up briefly in a mention from Grifone a few days ago so I dug mine out, mainly to be shocked again at how bad it is: the Ever-Ready underground train , the battery maker's 1950s entry into railway modelling and the only model they ever produced these 5 vehicles all came from different sources and mine since the mid 90s when they were already 40+ years old. I've restored the red paint, preserving original decals where they were still present. Since going into storage in 1998 the wheels have started to break up (being Mazak) but the rest of the body is stamped metal and shows no sign of corrosion. Neither power car has a power bogie - one was present and very incomplete but it crumbled away to dust and I can't find the remains of it. I think the Hornby B4 bogie was there so it could sit in a station platform on my layout for a while without sagging. The modelmaking is crude but the biggest insult is that the design is clearly OVS Bulleid Southern Railway ("Waterloo and city") 1940 stock so the red livery is wrong, as is the Stanmore destination on the only one to have a surviving front decal If anyone would like to take these on as a project, let me know

When I have finished sorting and reducing my vintage train collection I will retrieve and search thru my archive of 1960s modelling mags to find the article on converting a Hornby-dublo AL1 into a 73 The guy did a huge amount of work, would have been less effort to scratchbuild one

try double heading a Lima warship with a Trix Twin warship set up for 2-rail power. Power levels good, inertia levels pose a danger to the structure of nearby walls in case of a derailment

Interesting....Now I didnt say it but I thought the design looked LMS as well, as the profile of the roof is right for LMS and wrong for just about everything else. I thought - which I didnt also say - that they were possibly pre-war Marklin bodies on something else's chassis because I know that in about 1937 Marklin introduced an LMS Royal Scot or Jubilee 4-6-0 to their HO range (I forget which) and it would make sense for them to have made LMS carriages to go with it. Political circumstances at the time meant few were probably sold.....

HI all you lovely geniuses Was wondering if any of you ever saw this before. Its one of two identical stamped tinplate carriages I bought on the Hemel Hempstead antiques market in about 1994, both are painted in BR carmine & cream but without numbers and have no makers marks. The stampings are absolutely identical, the one shown is in better condition, the other having lost a wheel and more flaked paint. Theres no lithography or other paint under this livery. It was applied to bare metal. The wheels are 2-rail insulated with cleasr plastic collar bushes and each bogie has a power pickup, is flexible to compensate for poor track, and rests on an insulated rubber collar. The couplings (Fleischmann?) are mounted on a fibreboard extension so as not to cause short circuits against an adjacent bogie. No glazing but theres a strip of cellophane paper inside the vehicle, separating the 2 MES bulbs that are connected in series between the two bogies. Its possible to see inside the carriage over the buffer beams as shown below. The bulbs are held in what appear to be standard bicycle lamp holders and considering the series wiring are presumably 6.3v standard dynamo bike bulbs. No makers mark but the large weight underneath looks like a later addition which may be concealing something. From the profile I'd say these are proportioned to be 1:76 not 1:87 despite the German-looking bogies. Has a early 1950s feel to me but I've never really had a handle on exactly what these are. Thanks for any insights

has anyone mentioned DMNS - Don's Miniature New Street? Created by Don Jones, apparently it lasted until about 2007 at his home in Sutton Coldfield and he died around that time

Bet you felt flushed with success on getting the lot

i bet I have one that you don't Railway Modeller Volume 1 Editions 1 to 4 - 1947 Found them on an antiques market stall.... paid about £2

I havent looked at my one for ages, but I can tell you from memory that there were reasons it was short-lived - stamped metal, stampings overlap metal instead of tabs so the ends bulged, and a wheel profile that was only compatible with Trix Twin track, but it was pure 3-rail and DC so couldnt be used at the same time as Trix equipment, and the final insult of being based on the designs of the Bulleid 1940 stock for the Waterloo & City - the ONLY non-LT London tube line - but wearing LT red...... and going back to one theme of this thread - a motor bogie made of mazak that crumbles. As mine has. Might be a 1950s product but the product standards were more like 1910. Hard to believe that the exquisite Trackmaster N2 and the Ever-Ready underground set came out in the same year.

I have a halfbuilt 2-car 309 Clacton powercar somewhere. I just used a Triang Mk1, cut the sides around to the right window arrangement, cut the end off at each side of the corridor connection and added the flat roof for the pantograph and plastikard sloped-back cab window surrounds Never finished that one as it turned out Triang Mk1s dont have uniform thickness of the sides and as a result it was never entirely flat down the carriage sideswhere I had resegmented it

Once I have finished sorting thru my collection of trains and reducing it down to the small core I want to keep, I may start going through the magazines... I wonder if theres any value for history's sake in copying some of the articles on EMU kitbashing into here for modern modellers to appreciate

Yeah. if we'd all bought shares in Apple Computer in the 1980s we could have all the vintage EMUs we wanted.

I love the fact you have a Rowland Emmett inspired engine sitting there 33C. I lived in Hemel Hempstead for a long time, where theres a huge public mural in the town centre done by him incorporating elements of his fantasy railway designs Also, that SR EMU looks familiar ;-)