Toftwood

Oh for a ready to run J27!! but no they push out more GWR/Southern stock Grrrr!

I have been looking for a Hornby rolling road on ebay for a while. I have bid on a few but they have gone for silly prices, over £100 on some.

I have a Hornby B1 as well, its much better. The Bachy B1 was great in its not so distant day and is still a smooth runner but the Hornby one is better and far easier to remove the body and fit a DCC chip into. My Bachy one is currently up for sale on Ebay.

Send it back to Bachmann, £23 for them to rectify and service! I recently sent them a B1 where the rear drivers axle had come apart and jammed the motion, and a n A4 where I had inadvertently snapped off the reversing link bracket. Both returned fixed and serviced for £23 each.

Doesn't that really grip you when for example a point which worked perfectly for weeks before, just ups and fails to switch, deny electrical contact, throw said loco/train off the track. A prod here, a push there, maybe a rub with a track rubber and away it goes again like new GRRRRR lol

Hi Brian, that hand railing on the bridge looks like one of those jobs a; should have done the scenery before fitting the viaduct, b; doing the far side first as the front would not get in the way but has turned out right as they say up north. By the way I have just availed myself of the self same loco (BRC&W Type 2 as they were known back then) Hopefully the installation of a DCC chip will be a little easier than with the Clayton. Great work.

Hi, great layout, as an aside and its probably been covered elsewhere so apologies, you will probably find if you look at stations with large overall canopies, they sit on a ledge inside the walls so that the top of the wall stands slightly proud, and under each of your canopy joints it would be good to fit an impression of a pillar/support.

Lovely work. Never seen corrugated cardboard used for underlay before! Will follow with interest !

I will say sorry first, as is it just me or as lovely do the Locos look, should there not be a gloss/shine to at least some of them? looking at colour pics from the time certainly do show grot, but underneath is a glossy shine. I am not in favour of this over all sub satin finnish that is passed off as "ex works" I will now hang my head in shame for being heretical. Pete

Yeah I gathered that, I lived in Tynemouth until early 75, schooling at St Cuthberts Grammar up Benton way. All three rivers were sewers and the quayside, unlike todays 'fun' place to be, was bl**dy dangerous! :-) Pete

The Tyne was a dead river, if you happened to fall in......and survived you were straight up the RVI for a stomach pump!

Hello Gilbert, I have been reading on and off your journey to create such an iconic masterpiece in awe. The article in this months Hornby Mag tops this off. Awesome is a word abused by our colonial cousins across the pond but I have to say it totally suits Peterborough North. Long may it continue Pete

Wow, a lot of progress and looking good. I shall put this on my watch list.

I am about to get access back to me railway room after ages out of action due to a leaky roof, which caused damage to the ceiling in the railway room. Its now repaired and just needs a splash of paint. Why an engineering degree? well in anticipation of the above I have been doing some 'running in' of several new loco's that I have aquired over the past few years with nowhere to run them...YET! I found that the table in the conservatory is just the right size to take a circle of 3rd radius setrack. So out came precious packages from their storage location (a cardboard box!) and on to the extraction of prized loco's from said packages. Who designs these boxes? Some where quite easy (early Bachmann for example) but the one that took the biscuit was the Hornby package around A3 Brown Jack. After finally managing to extract safely from the two halfs of poly you then have to unscrew two metal bracket from undeneath. Wonderfull Loco, bags of detail, runs superbly but do we need packaging that takes 10 minutes to take apart? Pete.

Can I just add to other posters, that I too have followed this layout from its start on the old web. But then it disappeared , and now its back and better than ever! Well done I love the track plan and that it fits in a 'reasonably' sized room! Pete

Just add my congrats to those above, to eldavo for his fine layout, to the runners up, and also everone else who started a layout (including myself - Cutthroat Lane). This is a brill forum. Still having fun Pete