Guy Rixon

More like the opposite: the core has been changed around so many times (breaking most of the extensions and add-ons in the process) that it did not stablise and get highly optimised. i don't think there is much of the original Navigator left.

Concerning short trains, two points. First, the "strengtheners" may well be through portions attached or detached en route. Secondly, at the start of the 20th century, a lot of fast trains were really short. There was a noted express service from Liverpool to Manchester on the MSLR that was only four coaches, hauled by a single. Train weights increased through WW1, but may still have been moderate in the 1930s. It was WW2 where huge and slow trains became normal.

There's a lurking assumption here that steam engines, locomotive or otherwise, are the acme and measure of industrial development. I think steam power is actually a side effect of industrialization and the main industrial-revolution milestones (from the British/European/American experience) are: large-scale production of iron smelted with coal; production lines; electrical power and light; standardized small parts. IIRC, Rome/Constantinople had the iron, production lines and the standardisation, lacking only the electricity; and nobody had that until the late modern period. From what I remember of Roman tech, the military got most of it. Their empire was fighting existential battles for 2/3 of its history. Therefore, if there had been a Roman steam engine, I suggest that it would have driving a tank c. AD 1000 and the controls would have been in labelled in Greek.

Did you see Charles Phillips' list of proposed designs for locomotives of the Southern companies? There are some there that I'd never heard of. Notably, there is no 2-6-0, although Mr. Wainwright seems to have laid plans for almost every other wheel arrangement. I think a Wainwright atlantic would have been a rather fine thing.

But the Chinese didn't keep their empire in one piece all the way through. It came apart rather badly during the Warring States period. Also, the Roman empire lasted about 1600 years which is rather better than ephemeral.

From 1909, the Met had a tiny freight-depot at Vine Street, near Farringdon. Trains to this depot were worked by electric locomotives. There was also an electrically-hauled freight service to the Chiltern Court flats, next to Baker Street station. There was a dedicated siding at Baker Street. Coal was supplied and refuse removed. I think this was not, technically a private siding as the Met owned the flats.

Regarding the decoration, your choices are the various kinds of transfers or printing directly onto the model. I suspect that making a RTR wagon at a reasonable price implies printed lettering, as I would expect the labour cost of applying transfers to be a bit high. Would Peco be prepared to do this kind of work?

What decoration does your wagon need? Can it be lettered with existing packs of transfers? It would help if you described the prototype of the wagon.

The headstock and end supports on the hopper have been printed with a "checkerplate" pattern. When this happened on one of my prints I queried it and Shapeways acknowledged it as a printer problem and gave me my money back. I did find that the pattern could be scraped off successfully with a knife.

Best of luck; I hope this works out for you. Being somewhat paranoid of roofs, I personally would fit cross-members at cantrail level to resist the bowing before fixing the roof. If the aluminium roof has a flange that fits inside the top of the sides, then this needs to be notched to fit over the cross-braces. I would therefore make my cross-braces as vertical plates aligned with the corridor partitions, and would reduce the height of the (removable, cosmetic) partitions to leave space.

All the successful, high-res prints that I've seen have been in some kind of acrylic resin. This is particularly true for prints that have lots of negative space, e.g. cosmetic, suspension parts. The resin printers, particularly at Shapeways, seem to have issues with printing flat surfaces, so printing, say, a coach end with panelling and details like lighting-control bars is hard. I have seen, at exhibitions, PLA parts from low-or-mid-priced printers that seemed fit for purpose for use in scale models. E.g. the 7mm scale coach parts demonstrated on the Isinglass stand, which look like they could be fettled quite easily. These include no fine details and the areas that have to be flat are large enough that they can be sanded flat. I'm not sure that it would work for 4mm scale. I note that parts without small, embossed detail may still need reasonable resolution for larger details. I'm thinking of mouldings on coach sides here. How are your machines set for printing panelled coaches in 4mm scale?

BTW, I've heard a rumour that Shapeways are now shipping at domestic mail-rates from the UK. Dunno if this is true. I would guess that they send over goods in batch from Eindhoven and then have a British agent who splits them out into packages for Royal Mail.

Before selecting a print service on price/service/delivery metrics, one needs see what they print in and to decide in what materials the part could be printed, bearing in mind resolution of detail, surface finish and strength. John's pen-holder looks like the kind of thing that would work well in PLA. Conversely, PLA is typically not a good material for fine-detail parts in small, modelling scales.

The "B" set of GER-coach fittings is now available in 7mm/ft. The prices for this one have come out rather high relative to the 7mm/ft "A" set of fittings. The extra cost is not my margin, it's Shapeways' charges. I think I may have found an instability in their pricing algorithm. However, there's little or no scope to fix this by tweaking the model. It's on the very edge of what they will print. All the negative space makes the polygon count very high, so much so that I had to reduce the facets-per-cylinder number to get it uploaded at all. Also, the parts had to be re-sprued as the three-long-lines arrangement used for the 4mm model is too long for Shapeways' printer.

Grommit has been busy uprating them for 7mm scale. The A set is available now and the B set will be out when I've recompiled it with the right number of leaves in the outer springs. "Recompiling" sounds trivial, but is actually a day-long slog for my laptop with lights dimming all over Devon. Also, squeezing 65Mb of model up the damp string between me and Shapeways takes a while. However, the suspension detail is quite a bit finer now so it was worth it IMHO.

The "A" set of GER-coach fittings, with plain shackles on the outer axles, is now available in 7mm scale. I have de-bodged the suspension details and rebored the buffers to take Slaters' rams and springs. The "B" set, with J hangers on the outer axles, is almost done, but has gone slightly wrong in the assembly of the set (used 10-leaf spring instead of 11-leaf for outer axles, doh!) , so will be along later, possibly tomorrow.

And presumably they cannot be operated from your 'phone.

This will give an approximate plan, but it will have all sorts of projection effects that distort it towards the edge of the picture.

Shapeways restrict the number of polygons in uploaded models to make them manageable. Perhaps your models have a lot more polygons? You can get a lot of faces very easily when using rounded parts.

Open PO-wagons for merchandise are vanishingly rare. PO vans are slightly less rare; there were some in the south east. Some of the Kentish breweries (or breweries of Kent?) had vans, and there were some for cement works. Searching this form for "Huntley and Palmers" may turn up some more vans, mixed in with a lot of mineral wagons.

Not as yet; it's planned. I could upload a 1:43.5 version scaled up exactly from the 1:76.2 original. However, the design for 4mm scale has some compromises with true scale that possibly should be mended for 7mm scale. I plan to have a look at the changes tonight, so there's some prospect of a 7mm-scale product next week.

On request, I have now produced the LNWR, Emmett, wagon-buffers for 2FS. These are available in the shop, pending a test print. As ever, they are printed without heads and rams, but with a pilot bore of 0.3mm, to be drilled out to 0.5 or 0.6mm for an turned, unsprung ram as available from the 2mm Scale Association. Sorry, Shapeways won't let me print the bore at full diameter. The spigot at the back is 0.8mm diameter, to suit the Association chassis-kits. If this works out, I can do other kinds of buffer in 1:152 (and 1:148 if need be), but the kinds with ribs would be challenging.

One final factino concerning ex-LCDR motor trains: one of the D&S kits for the 6-wheelers actually contains an alternate end with the windows for the driving trailer. I have one somewhere, unused from a kit that I made up as a normal coach. I'm planning to use the brass part as a template for a plastic end in my scratchbuilt driving-trailers.

Note that this is an ex-push-pull set and the engine has run round to the end of the set with the controls. The bogie coach is similar, but not identical, to one of the Branchline kits. The 6-wheeler in the centre is covered by the old D&S kit. The SER relic at the back has no known kit. The branch was operated by train actually in push-pull mode between 1914 and 1916. Probably not this set, but it could have been one of the sets formed of old, ex-SER 6-wheelers.

Exactly so.