Graham Hughes

I know that is the identity generally attributed but I don't believe it is. In my opinion it is the Balmenach Distillery loco 4066 of 1897. There is another photo of the one in your picture at Aberdeen harbour showing the other side and there is a photo of the Glenlossie loco which is definitely of that distillery's loco as it has Glenlossie on the nameplate on the side of it. For me there are just too many differences for it to be the same loco as the one at Aberdeen. The cylinder block is a different shape on the Glenlossie loco compared to the Aberdeen Harbour one. Glenlossie has round sandboxes whereas the Aberdeen one has square ones. The cab steps are very different and the cab side window is a different shape. The Glenlossie loco has a small platform outside the cab on which is mounted the brake lever, the brake rods are outside the wheels and the loco does not have the lamp irons near the roof. On the other hand there is a photo thought to possibly be, but not confirmed as, the Balmenach loco which matches the one in the Aberdeen harbour photos in all those respects. The only visible differences are the Aberdeen loco has a running board at the side of the boiler and the sheet guarding the motion which projects from behind the gear wheel casing on the right hand side is larger on the Aberdeen one. Both those features look to be later, "home-made" modifications and both are similarly absent on the photo of the Glenlossie loco too. I suppose it is possible that the Glenlossie loco was modified extensively between delivery to the distillery in 1896 and 1915 but it seems far more likely to me that it is the Balmenach loco which has had a running board fitted than the Glenlossie loco that has had a significant number of seemingly pointless cosmetic modifications. I know there is supposed to be a record or recollection of the Glenlossie loco travelling to Aberdeen but if it did I don't believe it is the one that is the subject of the photos. There were only two other Aveling and Porter locos known to have worked at distilleries in the area. The replacement for Glenlossie built in 1924 and the one supplied to Benriach and Lochmorn distilleries in 1896, but that was a 2-2-0WT similar to the preserved Blue Circle Cement one, so both those can be ruled out as the one at Aberdeen. There was also one supplied to Mosstowie Quarry near Elgin, No 4141 which was also an 0-4-0WT. I have never seen it suggested that this might be the loco that worked at Aberdeen though and have no idea what it looked like. As you can probably tell I have been researching these locos as I am planning a model of Cromdale station with the Balmenach Distillery branch. That is why I am looking out for a drawing. If nobody knows of one I will get back to the Lincoln archive and see what I can find. Then I only have to try and build it in 2mm FS.

You may be aware of them already but if not have a look at 3SMR.co.uk where they have a range of diesel locos rtr but unpainted. Their track page will explain what is available in that regard. They do their own range of flexitrack which the webpage says runs Triang. They also have a site dedicated to secondhand Triang at ttmodels.co.uk. At one time the 3mm Society used to resell a lot of Triang at cheaper prices than you normally find from the trade or on the likes of ebay. I don't know if they still do that.

Anyone got drawings for the one in Dava's profile pic, by any chance? Lincoln Archives have the Aveling and Porter drawings but that one isn't among them. If anyone knows of a drawing it will save me from having to try and find the nearest design in their collection.

It is indeed. Worsley Works has more information on their website.

He is also a very accomplished and prolific modeller, which is why I am coming back to try and get him to address the points I raised. I would genuinely like to hear his reasons for making assertions that to me, and I suspect to you, seem self-evidently false. Maybe I am missing something I can't see what. I can't for the life of me see how pushing the cylinders outwards makes more room for the valve gear when all the valve gear is positioned outside the cylinder centre line. This all seems to me a bit like those people who think they have destroyed the whole reason for P4 because someone is using less than scale radius curves. It looks to me like someone somewhere has got the idea that moving the cylinders out is necessary to build outside valve gear in the true to scale gauges and the myth has caught hold within the 3mm Society. I have certainly never heard it suggested in regard to 2mmFS or P4. It seems to me that if the valve gear rods are going to be overscale in thickness, pushing the cylinders inwards would be a better bet. Moving them outwards is surely only going to make things worse. In any case I can't see how having your track a scale two and half inches narrower is any better than having your loco valve gear two and a half scale inches wider. It is only the locos with outside valve gear that won't be to scale then, the other way the track and everything that runs on it is not to scale. I am pretty sure that when Bob Jones finished that 9F, scale valve gear or no, he didn't think to himself, "I should have built Fencehouses to 9mm gauge."

So I presume that as you have now resorted to personal insults rather than addressing the points I made that you concede those points. Let us keep the discussion to the subject rather than attacks on individuals. I will repeat the points concisely: 1: How does moving the cylinders outwards help make room for the valve gear when all the parts of a locomotive valve gear are positioned outside the centre line of the cylinders? 2: You state that the back to back for 13.5mm gauge is 11.8mm. The standards on the 3mm Society website show this as 12.15mm +/- 0.5mm 3: The standards on the 3mm Society website for 13.5mm and 14.2mm gauge are identical except for the track gauge and the dimensions which follow from it. In that circumstance the minimum radius will be directly proportional to the difference in track gauge since that is the only dimension which changes. 4: Despite your claimed advantages for 13.5mm gauge very few modellers seem to be modelling in it. The 3mm Society has a long list of members' layouts, all of which, discounting the non-standard gauge ones, as far as I could see, are to either 12mm or 14.2mm gauge. and an additional one 5: If you reduce the back-to-back to 11.8 mm how do you get round the fact that the track standards set the distance over the check rails at 11.9mm and the minimum inside clearance as 0.10mm, that is 0.20mm greater than the back to back? If you reduce that measurement and increase the check gaps you then get into a situation where the wheels are not wide enough to meet the requirement that they be at least twice the width of the check gap in order to be properly supported at crossing gap. All of these are factual statements. Would you care to address any of them rather than simply posting personal abuse The thread was started by a newcomer to 3mm Scale who wanted advice to help decide on whether to work to 13.5mm or 14.2mm. Now perhaps you would tell us why a newcomer to the scale should choose a gauge which very few other modellers appear to use, and which requires him to deviate from the published standards to gain the claimed advantages rather than choosing one that a large number of fellow modellers are using and which has been shown to work satisfactorily to the published standards? A claim based on the erroneous assumption that moving the cylinders out makes more room for the valve gear does not really provide a very good reason. I stand by my original statement that 14.2mm was the best option and that 13.5mm gauge had very few adherents. Don't tell me I don't know what I am talking about, tell all your fellow 3mm Society members who are working in 14.2mm gauge. I am not sure what it says about the members of the 3mm Society who apparently follow this forum but don't join up to post advice to a potential new member looking at starting out but only do so to be abusive to those who, in the absence of any advice from 3mm modellers, try and help. Now, briefly, to the personal attack. Show me one incidence where I have knocked 3mm scale. I have said several times now that I regard it as my favourite scale to scratch-build in. If you look at my posting history you will see I have said this before on other threads. I am currently engaged in a continental TT project which may or may not see light on these pages depending on how it goes. I don't hate 3mm scale or anything about it, except that I am rapidly losing any good feelings towards a few of those modelling in it. Yes, you have met me, at a Borders area group meeting at the home of a chap at Wetherall whose name escapes me at the moment. (We all went to the pub up the road for a very nice lunch) and at a couple of AGMs. As to my own modelling I think I have built around a dozen locos to 14.2mm gauge but then was more involved in manufacturing than personal modelling. If you want to, you can still order my 3mm wagon kits from 3SMR although I wouldn't recommend it as they are probably getting a bit dated by now compared with more modern offerings. Did you ever build the Finney and Smith NER G5? If so you might have been surprised by the large number of very small castings that came with it. I know I was when Dave Finney sent me the bag of the original 7mm ones that he wanted reproducing in 3mm. All those were my work, patterns moulds and castings. I did quite a number of others too, as personal commissions and some for the Society shop when, I think it was Allen Doherty, later of Worsley Works, who was New Products Officer at the time and commissioned quite a few. So yes, I was active in 3mm Scale for many years. From memory I think my membership number my have been 2442 but i am not sure, that may have been my HMRS number I was seriously considering rejoining the 3mm Society as besides my continental TT I was tempted, as I posted in last month's Railway Modeller thread, by the drawings in Railway Modeller to resurrect the Brougton layout I was building to 14.2mm gauge but which stalled as I could not find drawings for the buildings. The track I built for it has been lost but I still have some locos and rolling stock and the full size plan I drew up for it. With it being the Society's 50th Anniversary year as well I though it would be nice to join again. I even printed out the membership form. That is not going to happen after this thread. Now rather than responding with more personal abuse I am sure it would be more helpful to the OP if you were to address the five numbered points I made at the top of this post. I am sure that clarification and discussion on those would be more useful to him in making an informed choice of which gauge to model in than more metaphorical "willy-waving" over who has built the most locos or "My modelling is better than yours".

There, I think, we might have the reason why the claim that you need to model to 4'6" gauge to build locos with outside valve gear comes across as nonsensical to many of us, if it based on the assumption that you need to widen the cylinder centres to fit the valve gear in. Setting the cylinder centres wider makes no sense at all, since every component of a locomotive's outside valve gear is outside the centre line of the cylinders. If you want more room for the valve gear it would make more sense to move the cylinders inwards. It is possible, within the limits of the 3mm Society 14.2mm gauge standards, to have wheels narrower than scale over the faces. Typically a full size connecting rod would be around three inches thick. That is .030" in 3mm scale. Worsley Works etch their 3mm valve gear in .018" material. The boss on the full-size connecting rod would be as much as 6 inches deep and the one on the coupling rod another 4 inches. It is perfectly possible to increase the thickness of both rods, if it felt it is needed, while retaining the overall thickness of the bosses at a scale dimension to fit. Taking the cylinder centre dimension I quoted earlier for the LMS Class 5, even at the maximum over faces dimension allowed by the standards there is still 1.8mm either side between the face of the wheels and the centre line of the cylinders. All you have to fit in there is the thickness of the coupling rod and half the thickness of the connecting rod. How thick and strong do you need to make the rods? Not according to the published standards on the 3mm Society's website, it isn't. According to them the back-to-back for 13.5mm gauge is 12.15mm +/- 0.05mm. We heard it when we were making the erroneous assumption that the valve gear goes between the wheels and the centre line of the cylinders. Except the 3mm Society standards don't reduce the back-to-back. In fact all the wheel and track standards for the nominal 13.5mm and 14.2mm gauges are identical except for those dependent on the 0.6mm difference in actual track gauge. If you are going to depart from the standards you can do so equally in 14.2mm gauge as 13.5mm. The 0.6mm difference in gauge doesn't, by itself, make a significant difference to anything. 13.5mm gauge was around back when I joined the 3mm Society. I can't recall exactly when that was but I remember you joining a little while after. In the time I was a member of the 3mm Society I wasn't aware of anyone other than Ken Garrett modelling in 13.5mm gauge, not many seem to have taken it up since. It has had a long time for its supposed advantages to be appreciated but I didn't see a single example of it when I looked on the 3mm Society's webpages of members' layouts. All the standard gauge ones are to either 12mm or 14.2mm. For anyone starting in 3mm my view is that those are the options to consider.

Thanks for posting that photo Gareth. You made an excellent job of converting my bits of whitemetal into a model locomotive.

I think your model of 499 is the only one of my loco kits I ever saw built up in the flesh, as it were, rather than in photographs, apart from the ones I did myself.

The wagon kits and the locos are long gone. The casting machine was on its last legs, the moulds were not suitable to use in a different one and the loco kits seemed likely to be rendered obsolete by the then impending takeover of Farish by Bachmann and the chassis they were designed for becoming unavailable. At the same time I happened to be offered a good job so the kit business came to an end. The J-52 wasn't one of mine, ABS/Beaver made one, it was the first loco kit I built too, and then I believe there has been another more recently. I wish I still had the GNSR 3-plank wagon, and the ribbed square base buffers for it, now I am modelling that railway in 2mm scale.

That is an impressive bit of modelling. It should look very effective when it is finished. (Incidentally the Youtube clip of Hodbarrow Haematite mine that comes up on the suggested offerings when your video ends is well worth a watch.)

Only in so far as one is the commercial gauge, one is the correct scale gauge and one is in between. The track and wheel standards are not directly comparable. In those terms 14.2mm is more closely equivalent to EM than P4.

It is interesting that someone should join the forum to tell us it is, apparently, impossible to build locos to run on scale gauge track that have outside valve gear and then someone else should join to agree with him. Both seem to be 3mm modellers too. I think rather than "common knowledge" this sounds like it might be a myth circulating among 3mm modellers. However, let us suppose for a moment that all megreog says is correct. How does reducing the track gauge by a fraction of a millimetre change any of it? If you can't make the valve gear because the components are too small at 9.42mm or14.2mm what miraculously changes if the gauge is 9mm or13.5mm? The over scale wheel thickness doesn't affect the valve gear as the position of that is determined by the cylinder centres. There is no need to increase the distance between the cylinder centres to accommodate the finescale wheels. I have in front of me a general arrangement drawing for an LMS class 5. The dimension between cylinder centres is 6' 7 7/8" or 13.3mm in 2mm scale. The over face dimension of a 2mm FS wheelset is 11.10 mm. That gives 1.1mm either side between the wheel face and the cylinder centre. That means one could make both the coupling and connecting rods from 20thou material and have more than adequate clearances and keep the cylinders in the correct positions. What happens outside that is not affected by the overall width of the wheelsets unless someone is proposing to move the cylinders inwards in the narrower gauges.

It is a bit of a minefield, not helped by the 3mm Society having so many different sets of standards with 3 gauges and Tri-ang, intermediate and fine standards. My personal view was that they should have stuck with one set for 12mm and one for 14.2mm as the "Society Standards" while acknowledging that Tri-ang TT and 13.5mm fell outside those. Instead of standardising, the "standards" seem to have attempted to cover every possible combination of track gauge and wheels profile. Personally I would suggest that if you want the ease of use of a "coarser" wheel profile go for the 12mm Intermediate and if you want closer to scale wheels and track go for 14.2mm Fine. Apart from the historic Tri-ang standards for those still running it, I really don't see the point in the others. (Incidentally, I see 3SMR still have stocks of my 3mm wagon kits listed. I think somebody may have over ordered many years ago )

There was a very complex and involved equation in an article in Model Railway Constructor in the mid-seventies, I think written by G Iliffe Stokes. No doubt, if you could resolve the equation, it worked, but I never managed it.

Blimey, that link should have a warning that you need some of those glasses for viewing the eclipse before you click on it. I don't remember the colour plates in the back of George Dow's Midland Style looking like that.

Agreed. I just hope the OP hasn't been put off a scale that deserves to be more popular. 14.2mm is a perfectly workable gauge. Looking at the members' layouts on the 3mm Society's website most are 12mm gauge, several are 14.2mm and I cant find one in 13.5mm gauge. To answer one of the questions in the OP that seems to have been missed, regarding wheels, as the profiles for 13.5mm and 14.2mm are the same the wheels that are suitable for one will be equally suitable for the other so there is no advantage for either gauge in terms of availability of wheels, (unless the supply of axles for one or the other runs out, I suppose.)

You can't build a standard gauge locomotive to 3mm scale to run on 13.5mm gauge either. Its wheels will be too far apart to fit on the track. Heck, I was a member of the 3mm Society for at least fifteen years, I produced a number of wagon kits for 3mm Scale, parts for the shop and other private projects and, as I said above still regard 3mm as my favourite scale for modeling in but you are doing a good job of putting me off. If your aim is, as you say, to promote 3mm as a modeling scale, I have to say you are going about it in a very odd way. Incidentally, what on earth is the "scale envelope"? Here's a 2mm FS loco to 9.42mm gauge. Perhaps you would care to point out its faults and where you could improve on it. You don't need to do any of the calculations you mention if you want to build one, Just send Bob Jones £170 and he will send you the kit.

My workbench currently has a baseboard on it that I built today. Nothing spectacular, just going to be a little model of Inverugie station to try out track and scenery techniques before I start on something a bit more elaborate.

This thread is a bit like the comment in Model Railroader many year's ago "How to convert your brass Shay into two plastic diesels and a spare tender". It is certainly an extensive bit of reworking but the end result is very impressive indeed.

Of course you can build locos with outside valve gear in 14.2mm gauge and 2mm FS. I have done both as have plenty of other people. I haven't built any in P4 but there are many people who have. In 3mm scale the difference between 13.5mm and 14.2mm represents a scale 35mm on each side of the loco. Just a third of a millimetre to scale. There are plenty of ways to lose that from the depth of the valve gear if you need to and most of them less noticeable than reducing the track gauge. Isaac Newton was undoubtedly a brilliant man in many fields but I am not aware that railway modeling was one of them. Why would a lack of square centered driving wheels hold up progress? Why would anyone want square centered wheels anyway? (I ask as the person responsible for the stepped axle in 3mm FS wheelsets, intended to give a more realistic appearance than the 1/8" axles that were originally planned.) I met George a few times during my time in the 3mm Society and he was a very accomplished modeler and never struck me as someone unable to quarter driving wheels. 14.2mm gauge is 5% wider than 13.5mm. Given that all the other dimensions in the standards are near identical that would suggest that a radius of 1000mm in 13.5mm gauge would be equivalent to 1050mm in 14.2mm, not that noticeable, I wouldn't have said. I agree it is a shame that more 3mm people are not active on the forum but self-publicity does not seem to be the forte of the Society. I don't think the website has changed since it was built to the same format as Clive Thompson's one when he owned 3SMR. I would also agree that as a modeling scale it has a lot going for it. Personally I think it is the best one out there if you are scratch-building.

Somebody else did take it up then, as George wasn't the one I was thinking of. He was working to 14.2mm gauge at the time I was a member of the 3mm Society.

Does anyone model in the 13.5mm gauge? I know there was one chap who was heavily into it years ago and thus got the standards recognised by the 3mm Society but I never heard of anyone else taking it up. 14.2mm is perfectly workable with no need for exceptionally large radius curves. Just looking at the standards the two are pretty much the same apart from the difference in gauge so minimum radius is going to be much the same for both.

You might to try and get hold of a copy of this book too. Out of print so you might need to find a secondhand copy.

Jerome LOL (featuring Sara Z) My current favourite is the new album Rockland by KatzenJammer