Mr_Tilt

For anyone in the north, I'm doing my short talk on the APT project in Darlington on this coming Saturday afternoon. It'll be at the Head of Steam Museum on Station Rd, at 1.45 pm. It should last 1.5 hrs, but they ALWAYS over run. 🙂

VERY interesting! I'll have to put him right about Hastings Coach though...... 🙂

I was on board the train at the time that vid was shot. Coming into Preston Station was like Moses crossing the Red Sea, there was a WALL of people on the platform, but as only a very few actually boarded there all the rest must have come along just to see the train! A memorable day indeed.

Naturally the next two are MILES from you, one in S Wales and one in Darlington. I'll post the dates and places on here when it get nearer the time.

Come to one of my talks Andy, and you'll have ZILLIONS of useful facts about E-Train, and a lot of useless ones as well. 🙂

50 years ago TODAY, the APT-E first moved under its own power. Only in the RTC Yard though, and down past the Track lab and back again. A momentous occasion. 🙂

Dunno why this came up twice. ☹️

Re-build the layout. You know you want to, just to hear that turbine roar as your E-Train goes past you. 🙂

At the time the RTC was the most advanced railway technology centre in the whole world, and still would be if Maggie Thatcher hadn't had a barn sale of the country's best bits. ☹️

Only too well, I had to endure umpteen miles of test driving the things before they were announced. ☹️ No-one took the slightest notice of any of our test reports, and not only about the blasted gear change either, which made me wonder why we bothered. Just one reason why I left and moved to BR..........

That's SUPERB work, and it improves the look of the entire train no end. 👍 Reminds me of the tiny antimacassar decals that Railtec do for the Rapido E-Train TC1 VIP compartment. There was only one of the originals left, but luckily it was in my loft! 🙂

Initially............WOW! 🙂 That looks very promising for sure. Perhaps the turbine exhaust ducts could be a tad taller though?

I took my Inter City E-Train to Scotland last week, as I was taking part in the IPMS Scottish Nationals Show up there the weekend before last. I'm a member of the What If Special Interest Group (SIG), and we build models of stuff that the manufacturers didn't get around to doing, so the E-Train 'update' was a perfect fit. 🙂 Not only that, but we were right alongside the Project Cancelled SIG, and of course the E-Train fitted that as well, so we displayed the model across the border between the two SIGs. 🙂 I might say it was very well accepted, many people saying things like 'Aye, they shoulda done that for rrreal'.

And how much more did we do in those 22 years than they did in a similar length of time?

Will it have one wiper or two? 🙂

Oh yes, a 2 + 12 set in that scheme would look awesome. 🙂 I've just driven up to Scotland, up the M6-M74 route, and kept on seeing ghosted signs of POP-Train and P-Train hammering up Shap and Beattock alongside me. 😉 They would have been going a LOT faster of course.

Doesn't it just? I phoned Rapido Andy and asked him who'd done the design, and it was the whole Rapido team, so congrats to then. A really good job. 👍

Got my Inter City E-Train unpacked and all clicked together nicely. The current production seems to need s tad more force to click the vehicles together than the earlier version. Perhaps the tooling has worn a little by now? I couldn't actually run it as the Gloucester MRC Test Track is being rebuilt, but it looks pretty impressive just standing there.

Well they have, and I've ordered one. GULP!

Much though I like the 'proper' E-Train scheme, that Inter-City version looks REALLY good! Now I'm wondering if I can raise the finance to get one, assuming there's any left of course.....

That looks rather splendid in the Inter-City scheme, such a pity we never got as far as a fleet of E-Trains. What's wrong with the artic bogie? It's an E1T so it's what they would have used in that position anyway. Perhaps you meant the Joint Module? Nothing wrong with it that a coat of paint wouldn't correct. And you've actually re-produced the twin Power Car consist that Paul and I produced to get PC1 & 2 across the main line at York while we were moving the train to Shildon in 2004. 👍

If you, of all of us, don't know by now......................... 🙂🙂

Those pics may have been just a positioning move. For the initial tests we used the 17, Lab 3 and both POP vehicles, with both PCs tilting northbound and just PC3 tilting southbound, or otherwise we'd have tilted the 17 clean off the track! The little gennie aboard Lab 3 wasn't pokey enough to drive all the various tilting, air and hydrostatic packs aboard POP-Train so we needed a beefier generator car, and the first one was the BSK, otherwise known as Lab 10. Apparently it wasn't actually a BSK, it was something else, but we called it the BSK anyway. But then we weren't 'Real Railway People' of course.... 🙂 Later on we built the BG (Lab 23) as gennie cars were in high demand at the RTC, and Lab 23 effectively became an APD-only vehicle. Ah yes, the 'January 9th Incident'................ There's quite few pics of that event on the Net, and it was the reason they put the 'This train must not be moved without Kit Spackman being on board' notice back in place. That was the first time POP-Train had ever gone anywhere without me, and look what happened? 😲

There was only one wiper on both PCs originally, and at Rebuild 1, after the First Run, they fitted twin wipers on PC1 to see if they were any better than a singleton. The train stayed like that until the Last Run, when the bird strike occurred en route to York, but it was a waste of effort doing anything to it then so it's still like it now. In the Support and Conservation Group we've thought of taking one good wiper off PC1 and replacing the bent one on PC2, but then we'd lose a reason for people to ask why they're different. 🙂

It wasn't a bird strike, there were always two wipers on PC1 and one on PC2, once we'd got past the first run. The bird strike was on PC2 on the last run, which is why it's bent now and never got fixed at the time.