Andy W

Sorry but you're wrong on both points. The Airfix Castle was tender drive, the Dapol County was loco drive, so couldn't possibly have the same chassis. But when Hornby acquired the Airfix tooling from Dapol, along with those locos Dapol had released on its own account, they used the Dapol County chassis under a Castle body. Of course since then they have released a completely retooled Castle with a new chassis, and produced a new DCC-ready chassis for the County without modifying the body (I have a Dapol County body mounted on a Hornby Railroad chassis). And Mainline certainly did advertise the 2P 4-4-0, and the very early Dapol one I once owned had "Mainline" moulded in various places. The reason why Mainline didn't use the Fowler tender off the Jubilee/Patriot was because the 2P was tender drive like all the other Airfix designed tender locos, including the Dean Goods, and Mainline's Fowler tender was unpowered. I think we have an RMWeb member somewhere who actually worked for Dapol removing various types of locos in their expanded polystyrene trays from Mainline boxes and putting them in Dapol boxes. The thread in which he described this is quite recent.

I've just looked steel-bodied merchandise opens up in Don Rowland's book on BR wagons, and it appears that all the examples built by or for BR were vacuum-fitted and so would have been painted bauxite, not grey. I haven't checked the Soda Ash version, but anyway they'd have carried Soda Ash lettering. The steel opens were based on an LNER design, and I don't have the right books to tell whether any of the LNER version were unfitted and therefore painted grey by BR. So if a grey version is correct at all, it would need to carry an E-prefixed running number. They weren't intended to carry coal at all and if someone did load coal by mistake there'd be repercussions - it would be impossible to unload anywhere that needed end or bottom door discharge for instance, and the reaction of the station or yard who had to clean out the coal dust before it could be loaded with a normal load would be quite aggressive.

I'm afraid the history goes off beam at this point. Both Airfix and Palitoy had their model railway ranges manufactured under contract in Hong Kong, the key difference being that Airfix owned the tooling, while Palitoy had an arrangement with Kader Industries who retained all the rights to the tooling. It was Airfix that went bust first and was acquired by Palitoy. There were huge stocks of some Airfix items, but others were rerun by Palitoy with different liveries/running numbers, and some projects left part-completed when Airfix collapsed were brought to completion under Palitoy ownership - the Class 56, 2P 4-4-0 and Dean Goods are examples. The tooling for these was owned by Palitoy. Then comes the closure of Palitoy. The Mainline brand, the stock of completed models, the ex-Airfix model railway kits and that part of the tooling directly owned by Palitoy were sold to David Boyle, who set up the Dapol company with his wife Pauline (guess where the name comes from) to market them. It's been said that he failed to understand the arrangement with Kader Industries and didn't realise that the biggest part of the Mainline tooling was not his. Nevertheless Dapol continued to sell the vast stock of models they had acquired, and introduced some new ones (J94 0-6-0ST, L&Y 0-4-0ST Pug, LBSC Terrier 0-6-0T). There may have been reruns of some models from that part of the tooling they did get. Replica Railways was aware of who owned the bulk of the tooling, and commissioned Kader to rerun the GW 57xx Pannier and to complete the Palitoy projects outstanding - B1 4-6-0 and Modified Hall 4-6-0. There was a furious spat with Dapol, and it is believed it was only then Dapol realised what they had really bought, in the end all they got out of the argument was an acknowledgment slip in Replica boxes over the copyright design of couplings! Kader and some of the ex-Palitoy designers, managers, and sales people saw a business opportunity and Bachmann Europe was set up to design and market products made by Kader using the tooling they owned. The designers were aware of the weakness of the ringfield motors used in the Mainline and Replica labelled products and produced a new split chassis design using a much better motor, a large brass worm, and a heavy mazak chassis, which was used as a replacement in new production and also sold separately so modellers could replace the chassis on their existing locos. Even this was a stepping stone and a further generation of chassis has appeared that is conventional rather than split. No split chassis locos have been manufactured for some years, and existing models are gradually either being retooled with the new design, or getting new design chassis to fit the previous body tooling. Most recently this was the Ivatt 2-6-2T and the Gresley V1/V3 2-6-2T. Others are in the pipeline. To complete the saga, Dapol sold almost all of their OO loco, carriage and wagon ranges to Hornby to help fund N gauge development. Since then they have restarted OO loco production with the classes 52, 22, and 68, and more to come.

But Mainline locos were manufactured for Palitoy by Kader Industries in, wait for it, China (or Hong Kong, which by that time was China). They even owned the tooling and early Bachmann production used the same tooling as Mainline had. Next Kader developed the revised chassis with the giant brass worm on the end of the motor. I've never seen Mazak rot on one of those, but instead the plastic axle muffs break up. Finally we have the Blue Riband and later Bachmann chassis, and again these seem rot-free apart from the N class 2-6-0s. Maybe they make more of their parts in-house and so do exercise quality control.

I suppose it is a question of age. The Moor Street complex of passenger and goods stations opened as late (in railway terms) as 1909-1914. By then nobody was going to put in an entirely new hydraulically powered installation, especially in the middle of a large city with reliable electricity supplies. At sites where hydraulic power was already in use it made sense to make use of the investment in high pressure water pipes, pumping stations and header tanks even when individual buildings were added and/or equipment renewed. And it was Birmingham - home of an awful lot of high-tech (for the period) industry. What better way of showing potential customers how much more advanced the GWR was than its competitors the LNWR and MR, still stuck in the 19th century!

Stonecast implies the model is made from a plaster-based compound, the name Stonecast is the tradename for the material used. That would indeed be heavy for a complete building. Manufacturers like 10 Commandments use Stonecast, but their larger buildings are low relief. Bachmann Scenecraft and Hornby Skaledale are moulded from plastic resin, which is considerably lighter than plaster. Why do they use it? Tooling costs are a lot less, it is much easier to make a complete building in one piece so only details like downpipes need to be added by hand. Injection moulding has high tooling costs and it is between difficult and impossible to make a building of any size in one piece.so assembly is needed before painting. They won't necessarily be cheaper to buy by the time you've added in the cost of the paint and glue, and they certainly won't be cheaper if supplied ready assembled and painted. Have a look online at the US company Walthers, and see the ranges of injection moulded building kits they offer. Not UK prototype obviously, though modern industrial buildings look the same worldwide. Some are 50-60 year old tooling just like the Dapol (Airfix) ones we have here and prices reflect that. Others are brand new tooling and seriously expensive - even though they are "just" injection mouldings supplied in kit form, That's with a market 5 times or so the size of ours so costs are spread over longer runs.

As others have said, the single track 25kv electrified Rathole Tunnel aka the Up Empty Carriages Line, ran right underneath the entire Primrose Hill/Camden complex from a junction off the North London Line just after South Hampstead Tunnel to halfway down Camden Bank. The key feature was that it ran underneath the Regents Canal, whereas all the other lines went over the canal. That explains the segmental tunnel lining. From the point it emerged, you could either keep straight on past the Downside carriage shed to get into the high numbered platforms, or use the dive under to cross the layout again and arrive in the low numbered platforms past the Upside carriage sidings.. It went out of use when the North London Line gained 25kv electrification and the junction with the WCML slows in the Primrose Hill area was remodelled. By then daytime trains were turned round in the platforms at Euston and only sleeper stock and some TPO ECS used it apart from early in the morning, so the slows could cope without difficulty.

I've been on a 8-car class 310 working that was diverted through the Rat Hole tunnel in the up direction towards Euston. In 12 years of commuting into Euston that was the only time I ever used the Rat Hole. Taken at a very slow speed, you could see the London Underground-style segmented tunnel linings clearly.

There were the gunpowder vans (yes, really) regularly worked over Barmouth Bridge during its worm-infested period by a pair of Class 128 Diesel Parcels Units working in multiple. Any locos would have been too heavy for the bridge in its fragile state. That's probably the best example of actual freight as opposed to passenger-rated traffic such as parcels, mail or milk

Although straying slightly off topic, I once found 12 cars-worth of 321 units in NSE livery sitting in Platform 3 of Preston station labelled as a relief to Euston one Sunday afternoon. At that time they normally never worked north of Birmingham. Always wondered which depot provided the driver and guard.

My late father was a Territorial in the late 1930s, in the Royal Artillery. So he was called up even before war broke out, spent the entire war manning anti-aircraft and searchlight installations, and served right through to the end of the war without ever leaving the UK. After VE day there was obviously no requirement for these skills in the UK so he was put on standby to redeploy to the Far East, but the Japanese surrender came before any move occurred. He said that there was an element of risk, even though all the batteries he was stationed at were indeed designed to intercept raiders before they reached priority targets, so mostly out in open fields. If a bomber still had bombs on board, dropping them on an anti-aircraft installation was worthwhile from the Luftwaffe's point of view as it made things easier for the next wave of bombers, and fighters used to shoot-up the searchlight units (and the AA batteries when he was stationed in the Dover area). AA shells were indeed fused to explode in the air. The chances of actually landing a direct hit with a shell on an aircraft was very low, but having a shell burst nearby could easily destroy an aircraft, force it down, or damage it so much the pilot had no choice but to head for home. The actual arc of fire the battery was to operate within needed to be clearly defined, as there was a very real risk of shrapnel or unexploded shells doing serious damage to buildings or people. Ideally they would fire towards open country or the sea. So from a modelling perspective, you could certainly have an AA battery close to a station, it almost certainly wouldn't be there to protect the station itself, but somewhere several miles further inland, or just to disrupt streams of bombers whose targets were quite distant. But make sure the gun barrels are angled away from the station so the debris doesn't land on it or any nearby town or village, and if the layout has a geographical orientation, remember that the bombers were coming from aerodromes across the North Sea or the Channel so the batteries needed to be placed to intercept them. From Dad's memories, the AA crews quite liked sites near stations, because that meant there was almost always a pub on hand...

As far as Hornby is concerned, they have brought back production of various items, but given the vast range of products they do, the direct impact on model railways is limited to Humbrol paint. Good luck to Dapol with their new moulding machine. One thing we may find it brings is a more even availability of items they decide to use it for as they'll want to keep it running steadily to recoup investment.

US company Walthers did produce an RTR HO-scale model of an US prototype dynamometer car that could measure the performance of model locos. so it isn't actually a joke at all. Now how accurate the measurement was, and what you could usefully do with the information once you had it, that's another question.

As you probably know, there isn't one standard design for council housing that was used everywhere, local authority architects departments designed their own, though there are only so many ways you can arrange bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen etc. In addition, for the modeller, the exterior finish is what matters rather than the interior layout. There are brick built ones, in varying colours of brick; roughcast ones; rendered ones; precast modular ones; and even a few stone ones. Roofs may be tiled (in various colours and various shapes of tile) or slated. So if your model needs to be set in a recognisable area, you need council houses that look at least vaguely like the ones built in that area. For example, council housing in Scotland tends to be in roughcast rather than exposed brickwork. Then there are the modifications. As built council houses would have had wooden or metal framed windows. By now almost all have UPVC windows. The "right to buy" means that individual houses in a street which matched when new have now acquired new features, extensions, or fake stone cladding. So a model of a 1940s-1960s council house as built requires a lot of work to make it useful on a 2010s model railway.

Yes, there's a huge backlog of already announced models which haven't arrived yet. There's also a huge selection of tooling in Kader's storerooms which is brought out periodically to do re-runs, usually with different numbers and where applicable different liveries. But they don't offer every model they have tooling for every year, if they did there'd be no way the model trade could afford to stock it all, or have space to display it. So if by 2020 there's no sign of another run of Modified Halls we could consider the revamp a commercial failure. Until then it's just too soon to know, and after all we do want all those models from brand new tooling, don't we? There's only a fixed production capacity. The V2s - I can't say what appears in the printed catalogue as I gave up bothering with them (for any manufacturer) years ago. But Bachmann's on-line catalogue lists items 31-566 (V2 3645 LNER Black) and 31-567 (V2 60881 BR Green Late Crest) as forthcoming models. Are these not the retooled body versions, then?

Bachmann website shows both the crimson/cream AND the teak Thompsons due in Feb/Mar. Now there's a history of website errors when they load the new releases, but since these were announced years ago, it may well be correct. They also show the Birdcages as delivery Sep/Oct, presumably this depends on successful livery samples.

Its in Andy Y's original post: Thompsons (crimson & cream) expected February Birdcages - passed Engineering Prototype stage, now at livery design stage,

What's that then? I can't see anything called "The Final Day", or anything involving any of the locos used on the final day (which were 45110, 44871, 44781, 70013). Hornby have released models of these before, of course. There is a model of 45116 on the Hornby site, priced at £199 for preorder, with TTS sound. But 45116 wasn't around on the last day in 1968 - it went for scrap in 1967, and the version advertised has an early crest tender, hardly suitable for 1968. Have I missed something?

One of the other issues with through services from Oxford to Cambridge has been touched on briefly - that if the train was to stop at Bletchley it had to cross the WCML on the flat. The flyover was intended for freight and had no platforms, though this is being looked at for East West Rail services. Now anyone who has stood at Bletchley between about 17:00 and 19:00 will see a continuous stream of down trains, many following each other on double yellows on the fast (3-4 minute headways at 100mph back in the 1980s, especially on Friday evenings along with outer-suburban services crossing from fast to slow through typical LMR slow speed crossovers), along with stopping services on the slows. It would have taken considerable skill to path a through Varsity Line train across the flat junctions, and even more for Bletchley PSB to actually make it work day in day out. No doubt that was why most services to/from Oxford used the bays on the down side (now removed) while the eastern half of the route left from the through platforms on the up side.

160603

Just tried it. Front mounting lug lines up, rear screw holes line up. What you will need to do is trim away a little of the plastic between the two rear screw pillars - which presumably represents the bunker floor - there's a void above it. This is where the decoder fits on the rechassised version. So far the only difference I can find between the old and new bodies is that the bunker floor is already trimmed away. Build quality on my example is identical, the lining out on the tank sides is better on the new version. As you can't even see the "bunker floor" with the body mounted on the chassis, and it is just a piece of undetailed flat black plastic, it is no loss. Photos to follow. Oh one other difference. The original body has a heavily overscale coupling hook stuck to each bufferbeam. The new one has two screw couplings (no actual thread on the screw, but quite realistic) in the accessory pack. The accessory pack also has much slimmer and more accurate steps and added cylinder drain cocks and guard irons compared to the original accessory packs, though the driver and fireman who came with some of the split chassis models are no longer there.

In the Oxford LNER Cattle Wagon thread helpful posters have told us that since the model is of a 9ft wheelbase vehicle, a BR-liveried version is most unlikely to have ever existed in the real world because few to none made it to 1948. That's apart from the errors in the bodywork and brake gear. How accurate is the 6 plank wagon, both in terms of general fidelity to the prototype and the way the BR livery has been applied? I know that LNER 6-plank opens reached BR service in some numbers, but how about the diagram apparently being modelled?

Doesn't a large part of Healey Mills yard flood every few winters? I've certainly seen pictures of the yard mostly under water, and I'm pretty sure BR built it on the River Calder's flood plain.. As a yard that's not so terrible as stock can be moved while river levels are rising but before the place is actually flooded. An assembly and maintenance plant using lots of power tools is another matter and would require expensive flood protection if they hope to insure it!

Well London City Airport is in the remains of the docks -wrong docks for B4s though. But you must have led a sheltered life - I can think of Norwich, East Midlands, Humberside, Newcastle, Cardiff, Bristol, Newquay, Dundee, Inverness, Southend, Southampton, Prestwick, Bournemouth, Leeds-Bradford, Durham Tees Valley airports as UK mainland airports which are Wetherspoon-free zones. Useful info for anyone modelling an airport, and perhaps Southampton has the required B4 connection and adjacent LSWR line. Edited to add: and Blackpool, Campbeltown. In fact airports with Wetherspoons are in the minority - though perhaps not by passenger throughput.

It's probably meant to represent a Caledonian Railway "498" class 0-6-0T. Ex LNER (and predecessor companies) locos in BR days were prefixed with a 6. Ex LMSR (and predecessor companies such as the CR) locos in BR days were prefixed with either a 4 or a 5. There were simply too many of them to fit in a single block of 10,000 numbers, though BR did manage to squeeze them down into two such blocks, whereas the LMS had used three blocks. Former Caledonian, Highland, and Glasgow & South Western locos all ended up in BR's 50000 series, few though there were from the latter two companies by then. For company they had locos from the Lancashire & Yorkshire and the North London, along with some Midland classes.