Guy Rixon

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

It's the celebrity locos that sell, which is a source of frustration when trying to build up a balanced stud for one's layout. Surely as a SECR modeller you're thinking: "Not another flash Wainwright loco - why can't they do an F?"

This SECR modeller is thinking that he'd prefer a class for which there isn't a kit. The F (and associated classes) is available as a printed kit. If anybody wants to go weird and Kentish, the LCDR A, A1, A2 classes need doing, and also all the Kirtley express engines (not that I personally need the latter).

None of which stopped me from ordering a D.

11 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Barrels is barrels but these appear not to be loaded according to The Rules, which state: "Returned empty casks must not be loaded end to end, either on their bilges or upright one tier upon another, as such loading may lead to the end of one cask knocking in the end of another". Bilge to bilge and/or bilge to chimb was the order of the day. Having looked at the diagrams, I infer that the bilge is the rounded middle of the barrel and the chimb the flat end. A bit of googling refines the definition of chimb: "the projecting rim at the end of a cask". 

The point of the rule is that the circular end of a cask, inside the chimb, is only held by friction against the staves. If the cask is empty and the end is struck it can easily be driven in, at which point the cask collapses.

I suspect that such a short line would have been worked "one engine in steam", so no signals needed at the time of the model.

The original signalling would suit the through station before the branch was truncated. Since there's no loop, it's not a block post and existed in the middle of a section, protected by possession of a staff or tablet. Therefore, again, no signals and the sidings would be worked by a ground frame unlocked by a key on the staff.

If BR resignalled it as a terminus, then you need to think what two-train movements are enabled by the signalling.

As drawn, a goods train might arrive while a passenger train is held in the platform, but it would be outside the home signal, so outside station limits and in the section. Therefore, that train has to shunt and go back to the junction before the passenger train can depart. Further, no passenger train may arrive while a goods train is present, because the section is occupied. My view, as a non-expert in signalling, is that you'd need another home signal, outside the sidings, to govern goods trains to the junction and probably you need a home signal for trains arriving at the station. Both these are likely to be some distance away (on the same post?), probably outside the layout.

A fixed distant 180 yards from the box seems too close, unless the the line speed is unusually low.

13 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

Who draws these things - do they know anything about wagon brakegear? (Apparently not) !

 

It's clear that the designers have no understanding of the workings of what they are trying to reproduce - one can only blame their employers; ( ..... though it is, after all, akin to the blind leading the blind).

 

I'm just glad that I will not be around to see what will be churned out in years to come, when real modellers are no longer around to point out the plethora of errors.

 

John Isherwood.

 

 

It's likely that the designer is employed by the company making the tools and physically moulding the models. Such as person knows how to design for making moulds, but they would know nothing about brakes on extinct, foreign wagons.

The commissioner of the model should be checking the CAD for things like this. We don't know if they've checked and missed this, or if the CAD has been put onto social media before checking. Of course, getting it snarked at here may be the checking process. Has anybody informed Oxford that they have a problem?

16 hours ago, Alex TM said:

The 'Saundersfoot Railway' is new to me, so I will look it up.

An industrial railway in Pembrokeshire. It connected mines (coal, iron) inland with ironworks (one of which still exists as a ruin) and with the small port at Saundersfoot. The approach to the port was along a ledge at the cliff's foot, through rock-cut tunnels and finally along a street of the town.  It would make a cute cameo-model.

The likely outcome depends on the stresses and left in the plastic when it was moulded or pressed. I've subjected Evergreen strip, which is made of HIPS, to boiling water and it worked: took and held the desired shape, didn't otherwise distort. Conversely, I used a hairdryer on a plastic wagon with the sides braced out slightly (trying to remove bowing-in of the sides); before it softened enough to take up the outward bow the tops of the sides melted and shrank. I think they were moulded with volumes of lower density near the in-gates and then shrank into these volumes when softened.

Consider also what plastic the bogie is made from. If it's not made of HIPS, the softening and melting temperatures will be different and probably higher.

If heating works, it works quickly - seconds to minutes, rather than days. 

Apart from braking variations within the P7 diagram - and I'd guess that the operators considered them interchangeable if they were classified in one diagram- there are many later diagrams in the NER diagram-book. The numbers go up to P22 IIRC.

There were four or more lines out of London Bridge from quite an early date. This is not just the station throat as there's a mile of widened track to the first junction. 

1 hour ago, Paddy said:

Is the PECO banana van an accurate model then?  Would the roof have been painted the same colour.

 

Many thanks

 

Paddy

It looks like their refrigerator van painted yellow. The refrigerator van, IIRC, was based on a SR-designed van (so was not very accurate when painted up for the LNER); it may be that the SR banana vans were similar externally.

I don't think Peco have ever made an accurate model of any wagon.

7 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

As usual, the LNWR seems to have been first in the field for this traffic, its first banana vans dating from 1904 with the Midland and, I now learn, the Great Northern joining the fray in 1905. I'd welcome clarification but my impression is that import was first through Liverpool, hence the LNWR, Midland, and perhaps Great Northern, interest, though later (but still before the Great War) the Midland was running Avonmouth - St Pancras banana trains via the SMJ. I don't have Atkins to hand but from what I can glean, Great Western banana traffic began c. 1913, at much the same time as the LSWR traffic.

The first imports for which the LNWR deployed vans were by Elders and Fyffes into Manchester via the ship canal. Later - IIRC 1912 - they moved the terminal to Garston.

19 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I very much doubt you are wrong on that point. They're uniformly company-owned vehicles, the only pre-grouping ones of which I'm aware being LNWR, Midland, and Great Western, with the LSWR coming on the scene just before the Great War.

I think the GNR also had some. If I've remember this right, they were actually assigned to traffic from Southampton; presumably the LSWR didn't have enough vans to have them tied up north of London. There's pictures in the GNR Society book about fitted and special vans (which of which I'm sure I will eventually find my copy).

12 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

The trouble with modelling banana vans is that, as far as I can work out, they ran in block trains. So if you want one, you want forty. (Well, twenty.)

In my edge-case, the layout will include a ripening facility within basket-carrying distance of Covent Garden, next to a cross-London line with the LNWR at one end. Therefore, I presume that the block trains came from Manchester to Camden, were split, and a portion of 8 to 12 vans went on to Strand. Where the rest went is unclear; Stratford market is one possible destination.

12 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Not just banana vans; it would be unusual (not unknown) to see cattle wagons other than in block trains, and petrol and similar traffics passed from refineries to distribution depots in block trains as well.  Mineral traffic apart from coal was almost exclusively in block trains as well; coal ran in blocks, but also as the tail end of part fitted trains.  

 

For the oil traffic, the block trains started in 1939, by government dictat. All seaborne oil was redirected from east-coast ports to the west coast and the products then moved to eastern distribution centres in block trains. The rail tanks of oil were not allowed to stay in the "Red Zone" overnight, so had to be efficiently managed; hence the block trains.

Prior to the war, oil products more often moved in single tanks or small groups.

On my list of stock to build for my own layout is a train of LNWR banana vans. I may do them in resin as a printed kit. If so, I'll make the prints available for purchase.

The transport of petroleum spirit on land might have been tightly controlled, but its waterborne movement was laxer. When the demand for motor spirit rose in the 1920s, many river craft were converted simplistically to tankers, with not too much attention paid to safety features. Some Humber keels were altered in this way and several of them blew up dramatically. There was one story of the skipper being blown clean across the deep channel on to the bank; apparently he survived.

I've used Tamiya semi-gloss and Railmatch matte, both thinned with Tamiya thinners, airbushed over Fox transfers and had no problems with disrupting the transfers.

I find that if the matte varnish is overthinned then it starts to become glossy.

2 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

This is what the front of the layout looks like at this point, roughly:

 

 

After looking at this shot, provided by @TJ52 :

 

And the ever more pointed adhesion to Holborn Viaduct, if it might be a good idea to include a representation of the descent towards the Metropolitan Extension and Farringdon at the front of the layout:

 

 

The signal box over the gradient would provide an excellent view block for the trains going to/from the station on the top of the viaduct - and there is still a slice of space left for a ground-level scene. After some conversation with @justin1985 the 'sea of tracks' might be egregious, but the various levels of the train shed, platforms, water tank/shed, viaduct, gradient, buildings behind, signalbox in front, and this slice of ground-level should hopefully stop it from looking like baby's-first-fiddle-yard.  Additionally, the adjacent 90 degree curve module (yet to be constructed, obviously) will have a much greater depth and that bridge over Ludgate Hill - so should hopefully balance the 'high level' focus of this board.

 

I would very much appreciate any comments or thoughts on this adaption.

It's visually similar to what I'm planning for Strand and also to the Blackfriars layout that appears at Warley last year. I very much like layouts of this kind.

You would need to decide how you work with the train shed. Do you model the roof as removable so you can take it off to operate? Do you fix the roof and rely on autocouplers? Do you put the buffers slightly beyond the scenic brake so arriving engines are accessible in a miniature fiddle yard?

Phoenix enamels seem to be very sensitive to the thinning. I've tended to increase the thinning, run the brush at lower pressure and do more coats. Using less thinning I tend to get a grainy finish.

Do you want an attraction, like a ride-on miniature railway, that only operates when staff are present, or something that can just be turned on and runs unattended through the day?

To combine GCR with LYR, consider the various, unbuilt schemes to bridge the Humber and thus break the NER's monopoly on access to Hull (historically, the HBR was built instead). I once schemed a GCR-sponsored line up the valley of the Ancholme to the bridge that met a LYR-sponsored line from Goole, with a junction near Ferriby Sluice. These railways would have had serious freight flows -- much traffic to and from the port of Hull plus some steelworks traffic -- but also long-distance passenger services.

59 minutes ago, Hal Nail said:

Obviously you can add a load but you may not want to. I've squashed plasticine in between all the chassis members on a couple of opens but its not quite dense enough. Lead shot is a suggestion I've seen elsewhere. I think it can swell when reacting to some glues though so you'd need to avoid that.

It's water-based glues (including PVA) that cause the problem: you mustn't let it get wet (or feed it after midnight). Formation of salts on wet lead involves expansion that can burst things. Epoxy seems safe: I have wagons from decades ago with expoy'd lead weighting and they haven't exploded yet. For safety, make sure to paint or varnish any exposed lead surface so that it can't drink in atmospheric moisture.

It would help if you could tell us the diagram of the wagon -- is it given in the instructions? There were several 8-plank diagrams for the SR and they're all slightly different. There are ex-LSWR ones, ex-SECR ones and three different kinds built by the SR themselves. Annotated photos on the web suggest that the ex-Parkside kit might be for D1379, built by the SR, on 9' wheelbase with Morton-clutch brakes.

Looking at the drawings in Bixley+ An Illustrated History of Southern Wagons vol 4, all the axleguards seem to be of, or close to, the RCH profile.

Photos in Bixley+ of D1379 show buffers that are similar RCH standard, but the ribs on the guide are shorter than the RCH pattern common on PO wagons: the ribs on the SR kind don't extend the full length of the buffer guide.

Some other 8-plank wagons of different diagrams are shown in Bixley+ with SECR self-contained buffers. These latter are essentially identical to the well-known, self-contained wagon-buffers of the GWR. The SR version has a riveted flange on the back of the buffer head which the GWR version lacks (welded construction?).

The SR agreed to change to small lettering on wagons in 1936, at the same time as the other companies. How long it took for all the large-letter wagons to be repainted or withdrawn I don't know, but 10 years sound plausible.

Presumably coal raised around Cannock might find its way to London? If so, I could use a few such wagons.

On 22/01/2020 at 18:48, 57xx said:

 

Practically every model they've made so far. It's evident on many of them that the "accuracy of its execution" is down to poor research.

I suspect not: my guess is that things go wrong between the researcher and the engineer who designs the tooling. I've been in this loop.

It's really hard for the engineer to get things right if they don't have a unified set of drawings of the subject, and it's hard for the researcher to spot errors of detail in the engineers work, even when the researcher has the CAD files and tools to display them. If the feedback from the engineer to the researcher is only screenshots of the model, not the 3D model, then seeing errors is even harder. Add a few layers of management and a language barrier and the job becomes nearly infeasible. It's possible to get things right, but it takes commitment and persistence.

However, I do agree that gross errors, like getting a roof profile massively wrong, are sloppy work and should not happen.

Consider fully describing to a designer a wagon where one doesn't have a full and consistent set of drawings. "Start from this arrangement drawing ... doesn't show all the details clearly, use photo A and photo B and photo C as a guide, 'cept B and C are later than A and (jargon) got swapped for (jargon) and (jargon) wasn't there when (jargon) built the wagon. Now, GA doesn't show the (jargon) and (jargon), so see this other pile of blurry component drawings we scraped from a different source, use those; except not the (jargon), that was different, look at the photos for that, sure you can work it out, OK?. And the component drawings are for a wagon with different (jargon), so the (jargon) needs to be longer to mate with the (jargon) on the GA...". Now consider all that translated into Chinese by and for people who've never seen a real, British wagon. And consider checking all that detail when the screenshots come back from the factory.

For buffers, I am willing to scale up any of the 4mm-scale buffers in my Shapeways shop to 1:64 and have already done so for two items. They can then be used with rams and springs intended for 4mm scale. Buffer heads that scale to 15" or 16" in 4mm scale are close to 12" and 13" in S.