Richard Hall

Does anyone have any information regarding the extent to which banking engines were used on the long climb from Hawick to Whitrope? I have been trying to research this but the evidence seems contradictory: "District Controller's View" suggests that almost all heavy freights had a banker, and the diagrams in the book seem to bear that out, at least for the mid 1950s. On the other hand, most photos I can find of steam-hauled freight trains on that section appear not to be banked. Peter Handford's recordings on "The Railway to Riccarton" have the "Waverley" banked out of Hawick and two V2-hauled heavy goods through Stobs - one banked, one not. I am wondering whether the use of bankers started to tail off after the mid-fifties. Regardless, my list of locos for my Shankend (or possibly Stobs) layout will have to include a couple of J36s - an unpowered one to hang on the back of up freights, and a powered version to run light in the opposite direction. Although given that my track plan has the Up and Down fiddle yards stacked one on top of the other and a fairly prototypical gradient through the scenic area, my freights might actually need banking... Richard

Still trying to work out where the photos were taken - not helped by the photo captions disagreeing about whether the train was headed north or south. My best guess is about half a mile north of Shankend viaduct, going by the line curvature and the telegraph poles, but the photos I have found of that area are 10-15 years later than these and the area was more heavily forested by then.

Not sure I have seen this one anywhere before - a K3 on the final climb from Shankend to Whitrope in 1952 with a train made up mainly of tank wagons. https://www.flickr.com/photos/robmcrorie/27394552220

I am now enjoying "Rails Across the Border", thanks Ross for that suggestion.

I have been busy buying books for my Shankend project, so I thought I would start a list here of WR related books and videos / DVDs. Everyone feel free to add further items or comments. Books: Steam on the Waverley Route - R.H.Leslie (Bradford Barton) On the Waverley Route (Edinburgh - Carlisle in colour) - R Robotham (Ian Allan) The Waverley Route (Postwar Years) - R Robotham (Ian Allan) Hexham to Hawick - Darsley & Lovett (Middleton Press) Carlisle to Hawick - Darsley & Lovett (Middleton Press) Last Years of the Waverley Route - D Cross (OPC) Waverley (Portrait of a Famous Route) - R Siviter (Runpast) Waverley Route Through Time - Perkins & Macintosh (Amberley) BR Past & Present No 9 (South East Scotland) - Sanders & Hodgins (Silver Link) Waverley Route (Railway World Special) - N Caplan (Ian Allan) Border Country Branch Line Album - N Caplan (Ian Allan) District Controller's View No 8 The Waverley Route - J Hodge (Xpress) Border Counties Railway 2 (Reedsmouth to Hawick) - D R Dunn (Book Law) DVDs: Railways of Scotland vol 2 The Waverley Route (Cinerail) Britain's Lost Main Line (TVP)

I don't know which I'm enjoying more - that fabulous old LNER parcels van (basically three standard box vans nailed together) or the fact that I now know what the station garden at Shankend looked like.

A WR loco although not on the WR: 61184 of St Margarets runs into the bay platform at Longframlington with an inspection saloon, while a North Blyth 2MT, 46474, waits to return to Morpeth with the twice weekly branch goods. October 1960. The Dapol B1 is the first of my "Shankend" locos to get some attention in the form of general dirtying and a new number. I managed to break the right hand combination link bracket off the footplate - it was slightly bent and I didn't realise it was glued on. In fiddling about with it I then sheared the rivet holding the link to the bracket. I used a 16BA brass screw and a crankpin washer off a 2mm Assoc chassis etch to bodge it all back together. It's a lovely runner, not as nice to look at as the Farish version, bit crude in places and with a driveshaft running through the cab, but at least it doesn't have that poxy Farish tender drive.

Thank you everyone for all your very helpful comments and tips. The capillary tube repair to the oversized holes worked beautifully. I have now done a bit more work on the loco body, filled the gaps I could see (using solvent-based Tippex and a fine brush, which creeps along small gaps and fills them very easily) and gave it a coat of primer. I haven't yet tackled the oversize tender handrails but I feel I really should. Here are a few photos, put up not out of vanity but because I know from experience that the only way to spot flaws in a newly built model is to photograph it and stick it on the Internet

Noooo! Stop it now. I don't need any encouragement. Actually I think the next purchase might be some Dapol Gresley coaches as they are plentiful at the moment, but who knows when the next batch will be along?

I'd looked at Gorebridge and it would work well as a model with an overbridge either end of the station. But I have the same problem there as with Hassendean which is that the location doesn't really appeal, at least on paper. The section of the WR which fascinates me is the wild hill country on the Hawick - Newcastleton stretch. That limits me to Shankend, Stobs or Steele Road. (Or Riccarton Junction if I win the lottery.) I think I may need to organise a road trip, have a look at that northern section and see if I can fall in love with it. Of course Gorebridge is now open again, so I could even take a train there. Meanwhile... I can't help thinking that if a manufacturer is going to produce a real authentic WR locomotive it would be rude not to purchase it. As a result, 60079 Bayardo of Carlisle Canal shed is now sitting on my desk at home. I see Farish have released their A2 as 60537 Bachelors Button, but I'm trying to resist as funds are a little short. The problem with these short production runs is that if you don't buy them when they are released, it's almost impossible to track them down later. Richard

My father's layout is set in the Edinburgh suburbs in theory, but he tends to run anything that takes his fancy. The D30 should look well alongside the C16 that he built a few years ago. Scotts have fabulous names, don't they? If I built another one for myself I wouldn't be able to decide which to choose. Possibly 62421 Laird o' Monkbarns, another Waverley Route regular and one of the last two survivors.

Patience was never one of my virtues, although I'm getting a bit better with age. Ordering the correct tool to open out the bearing holes in the frames would have held up the job for three or four days, and I wanted a rolling chassis there and then. Good tip about the capillary tube, I don't have anything small enough at the moment so perhaps I'll learn from the twist drill fiasco and actually buy some. I don't know whether the PDK kit is a good etched kit or not as it is the first one I have tried. It mostly seemed to slot together nicely and I don't have a lot of big gaps to fill at the end of the build which makes a change from the old whitemetal days. My last build was an NB Models J37 when I was about seventeen, and that was a challenge as I recall. I'm thinking about building the PDK J36 for my father's Christmas present.

This project has been rumbling on for ages, but since I've just had a massively productive weekend and got the little beastie running, I thought I would put it on here to encourage others to have a go at etched kit construction. It's a PDK kit for an ex North British D30 "Scott" 4-4-0, bought about ten years ago but not started for various reasons until last year, when I built the tender body using conventional soldering methods, lots of swearing and burned fingers etc at which point I shoved it back into the drawer it had come out of. With my father's birthday coming up soon, I thought the D30 would make a rather good present if I could get it finished. I had read an article about resistance soldering, so I bought a Frost "budget" resistance soldering unit and quickly found that resistance soldering is like magic. The Frost RSU came with only very basic instructions so I have been teaching myself via the Internet and I'm still learning. I acquired a sheet of 2mm steel to use as an earthing plate, and bought some decent copper sheathed carbon rods to replace the tiny, feeble carbon electrode that came with the Frost unit. These rods are a foot long, cost about 50p each, last for ages and can be sharpened to a fine tip with a pencil sharpener. I also got hold of a mains foot switch, which really should be included with the RSU. Photo shows the RSU and my home-made earthing plate: the unit normally sits on the floor, the red button increases the power for heavier work and can be operated with one foot, the on-off switch with the other foot. Once I'd got the hang of the RSU, the loco body absolutely flew together. There are plenty of mistakes, not least that the leading left side splasher sits too far back on the footplate and doesn't line up with the driving wheel. I had a lot of trouble soldering the boiler seam, and screwed up the smokebox wrapper so badly that I had to throw it away and make a new one from brass sheet. The instructions are fairly basic, and there are bits in the box and on the etches which do not appear in the exploded diagrams (bear in mind this kit was purchased ten years ago, and cannot be assumed to be representative of PDK's current offering). I got the boiler bands in the wrong place through trying to work out their position from old photographs. The body still needs cab handrails, sandboxes and fillers, and boiler washout plugs, then a bit of filling and fettling, but it's 95% there. I tried soldering the chimney on, but the RSU doesn't seem man enough for this kind of work, so the chimney, dome and all the castings are glued on. I soldered the handrail knobs though, just because I can. Doing fine overlays like the cab window frames and the beading round the cab roof is dead easy with the RSU, you can solder layer upon layer without the whole lot coming unstuck or pooling into one giant blob of solder with little bits of brass sticking out of it. Tender body is just about done, and I gave it a coat of etch primer to see how much fettling it would need. The answer seems to be less than I thought. Those handrails are massively overscale for a reason: I carefully drilled out all the pre-etched holes on loco and tender to take the handrail knobs supplied with the kit, and then found that (a) there weren't enough handrail knobs for all the holes and (b) the NBR only used knobs on the boiler and smokebox handrails anyway. This left me with some very oversized holes which made fitting correct diameter handrails difficult, so I went for the super-size option. I'm not convinced the handbrake standard is in the right place, but I couldn't find a photo to show what that place should be. Chassis is a fold up nickel silver affair and didn't impress me much, having most of the flexibility of a compensated chassis but without any of the accompanying virtues. I ended up twisting it this way and that until it sat square, then Aralditing a large block of lead into the middle. It no longer flexes. The axle holes were undersize for the bearings supplied and I don't have a taper reamer like proper locomotive constructors have, so I tried opening out the holes with a twist drill and ended up with the axles not parallel to each other. Easily enough fixed by using the rods to work out which bearing was out of spec, removing it and filing the hole oval, then soldering it back in again. Following this butchery, to my relief the wheels rotated smoothly with the rods fitted. Markits wheels and threaded crankpins, loco is live one side and tender the other, with an insulated drawbar, so only the driving wheels on one side have pickups - good old fashioned phosphor-bronze scrapers. Mashima 1420 motor and flywheel which fit nicely in the rather narrow firebox, driving the rear axle via a Markits three stage 38:1 gearbox which pushes the flywheel end of the motor up into the boiler while keeping the cab completely clear. The gearbox was fine once I realised that the etched holes for the bearings were oversize (in contrast to the chassis), so I had to mesh the gears myself by trial and error. The RSU is great for heating top-hat bearings, moving them slightly, then cutting the power and holding them in place with the electrode until the solder cools. Not a trick you can play with a conventional soldering iron. The two intermediate gears have tiny grubscrews with slotted heads: I broke one, so decided to make the gears floating, with the shafts retained by bits of code 40 rail soldered to the outside of the gear cradle. The bogie is sprung with a length of phosphor bronze strip soldered to the drag link and bearing on the underside of the front frame spacer, which helps counteract the usual 4-4-0 nose-heaviness. Brief tests suggest the loco has about the right amount of adhesion for the rather small and feeble motor: it will spin its wheels but not too readily. I still have to fit the brake gear (left until last because it makes wheel removal almost impossible) and make a new tender drawbar: the first one (from an old N gauge model) works but is a bit fragile after I melted two brass pins into it and soldered a PB contact strip to them. I am scouring the house for suitable plastics. I also have to do something about the driving wheel centres, and fit the balance weights. The Markits wheel pack came with an etched fret of wheel centre covers and balance weights. The covers are retained by the crankpins: unfortunately I think the distance from the centre to the crankpin hole is fractionally shorter than the crankpin throw on the drivers, and I couldn't get the covers to run true however much I fiddled with them, so it's back to my old trick of smoothing over the axle end nuts with Blu-tak and painting it black. Finally the tender chassis: another fold and twist affair with undersized axle holes. I bushed the outer two axles and left the middle one running in the unbushed holes, giving it a bit of horizontal and lateral movement to cope with sharp curves and rough trackwork. (It's destined for my father's layout, and I'm starting to think I should have built it fully sprung...) Again I still need to fit the brakegear. Back in my teens I never bothered, but I'm determined to complete this kit without any bits left over. Hopefully I'll have the last few bits of metal work done in the next couple of days, then it's off to the paint shop. Mid-fifties BR lined black, my father wants it as long-time Waverley Route stalwart 62440 "Wandering Willie" for which I have the name transfers. North British engines had their names painted on the splashers, no fancy cast plates here. I'll post some more photos once 62440 has been painted. Richard

I've been thinking some more about Shankend. I reckon a 4 x 3 board is about the largest size I can handle unaided. At the moment I live in a tiny cottage, and the only way I will get some WR into my life is to build the scenic section on three boards, work on one at a time, and hope that by the time I have all three done I'll be living in a bigger house. So, Shankend in 12 feet? (In N gauge or 2mmFS). Viaduct is about four feet, scale it down from 15 to 12 arches and it should easily fit onto one board along with the northern approach. Station is only a little thing, maybe four feet from the signalbox to the north end of the platforms., especially if I lose one of the goods yard roads. That gives me four feet for the scenic bit in the middle which is almost too much. I'll have to thoroughly mangle the landscape around the signalbox to provide a scenic break, but the same goes for every other WR station I've looked at, possible exception of Hassendean which somehow doesn't appeal as a location. Possibly shortening the viaduct will ruin its fine proportions, but I think it will be OK. I'm pondering doing the whole thing to 2mm finescale track standards just for fun (there isn't a whole lot of pointwork outside the fiddle yard). Period: I'm torn between mid-fifties when no-one was even thinking about closing the WR, and death steam circa 1966 with that fabulous mixture of filthy steam locos and BR blue corporate image. And Claytons of course. I could do both, but strictly speaking I'd need a removable goods yard as it had been cut down to a single siding by 1966. Incidentally, while trying to confirm that bit of info I found a photo showing the Down Outer Home at Shankend. It's co-acting. Ooooh. I'm in love.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I'm leaning more towards mid-fifties now, so my new V2 is safe from ham-fisted repainting at the moment. I'll dig out my neglected Borders branch layout at the weekend and see if the V2 (or anything else) actually runs. That's assuming I make a bit of progress on this birthday present for my father, which couldn't be more WR if it tried. "Wandering Willie" is my first attempt at an etched brass kit, my first stab at resistance soldering, and the first loco kit I have built since 1987. It's a steep learning curve: among other things I have no idea (apart from bad kit design) how I managed to get the splashers further back on one side than the other. One of the axles isn't perpendicular to the frames either, and that definitely isn't my fault. It's a pity I didn't notice it before I soldered the gearbox to the frames...

The postman has brought goodies. This might be seen as a statement of intent. I've had thirty years to try and work out how to recreate a tiny bit of the WR and I still can't decide how to go about it. All the stations on the wild and woolly section either side of Whitrope seem to be difficult for various reasons, usually a complete lack of scenic breaks. I'm wondering whether to be super brave and try to do Shankend station and viaduct which has a deep cutting either end - 15' x 3' scenic area looks an awful lot in "N" gauge but I suspect it isn't enough for this.

So they did. 69564, sent there from Parkhead in August '57 and withdrawn June '61. The Hawick N2 was ex Parkhead as well.

Browsing through shed allocations while planning my next project and found that for nearly three years (1958-60) Hawick had a Gresley N2 0-6-2T, number 69510. Why? Was it sent there by mistake? I would have thought there were enough N15s around that if Hawick really wanted a big tank loco in 1958 they could have had one of those. And the big question - did 69510 ever work the main line? The only photos I've found show it pottering around the shed yard. And while I'm here - anyone know when V2s started to appear in green? I've just bought a lined black one at a very fair price, but can't find out whether St Margarets V2s were still black in 1958. Richard

I squeezed a Mashima M16K into my coarse scale J39, the result being the slowest runner I have ever owned. The downside is that I had to take out a fair amount of cast weight to get it to fit, so it wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding, about twelve wagons is as much as it can manage. My fiddle yard takes ten wagons

I now have the skew wound 5 pole open frame motors (see post from 15th June). I'll see if I can stuff one in my long-suffering J39 tender drive, or possibly the 4F, and report back.

Now let's see someone build a Wickham PW trolley in 2mm.

Instant flashback to my younger days messing about with high-end audio systems. The cheapo manufacturers quoted something called "PMPO" (Peak Music Power Output) which sounded impressive on paper but meant nothing at all. Meanwhile I was running valve amps which claimed 20W output but would cause structural damage if you cranked the volume up. Happy days.

It's hard enough finding 12 volt micro motors, let alone 24 volt. This sort of thing does not exactly inspire confidence in the Chinese vendors, but as you say these motors seem happy enough on 12 volts.

The only motor that hasn't yet turned up in any of my searches is the really useful one - 8 x 15 flat can, as used by Farish until they went coreless. That is an ideal size for 2mm or N as it will fit in the firebox of almost anything. I have found some, butt only 3 volt.

I should be on commission. Now sold out, less than an hour after I posted the link. The 1015 cans seem to have all gone as well.