Edwardian

Brilliant photographs. part of my thinking was that they are a number of manufacturers of agricultural machinery in GE territory, so the Mac K with its steam engine could go anywhere.

Yes, I hear that the National Trust want to preserve him for the nation; we just want him back in his old, familiar garb. To wit, the Society for the Revival of Cherished Alter Egos, Noms de Guerre and Personnae, and Associated Iconography has been inaugurated and determined that our dear Nearholmer must return in his true Southern Railway Guard form!

Ignoring the shows front and left thrown by the window, I'd say the third shot is a pretty good effect. Interesting that a mix of bulb types, as opposed to positioning and colour, can enhance the effect.

Excellent. I like the traction engine load, what model is it? Really looks the part and represents the sheer variety no doubt to be seen when more or less everything went via rail. For my part, I have now acquired a Dapol Lowmac, so a GER MacK will follow at some point. As I plan to have an agricultural contractors based at Castle Aching, I am thinking of loading mine with a portable steam engine to be delivered to them.

Well, I had to do something. The name East Lynn had already been taken for a superb and inspirational S Gauge layout. I would have used it, otherwise, as one of the sayings in our family, uttered upon someone's sudden departure, is "Gone, gone, and never called me 'Mother'!" Funny lot. Anyway, this line, I believe, is not in Mrs Henry Wood's novel East Lynne, which, I confess, I have never read, but is in a stage adaptation of this melodrama, which, I assume, my Yorkshire grand or great grandparents once saw! I think I mentioned that my mother's antecedents were all characters in a J B Priestley play?

Thank goodness I only pinched half the name and half the buildings from there! Otherwise, I'd end up with a sort of early Twelfth Century Milton Keynes (but without the roundabouts). Speaking of Normans in Norfolk, no one has picked up on the fact that my King's Lynn is called Bishop's Lynn, the original name of King's Lynn!

Bl**dy Normans. Haven't they heard of "sympathetic development" and the need to use local materials? They'd never get planning permission for it these days!

I daresay if I get around to it before Bachmann, they there will be a transferred example in the collection, but, it goes in a long waiting list of project locos, so no immediate sale for Bachmann.

Superb. Final proof that less is more.

A fuller update to follow, with some pictures of my version of the Ostrich. In the meantime, I have laid the village out on the dining room floor to finalise the dispositions and work out the size of the village board. The board will be exactly 5' long. At the far, castle, end, it will be 3' in width. At the nearer end, it will be 2' deep. There will be a second 5' long rear, and purely scenic, board, which is to contain fields, woods and the parish church, a large feature, though to be built smaller than 4mm scale in order to aid perspective. The idea is that the church and mature trees at the opposite end of the layout to the castle mound will balance the background visually to an extent. So much for theory. This is purely mind's eye, and test and adjust modelling. Nothing on paper, let alone models of models or mock-ups. That is why I have to set up the village components together every so often, to see where I'm going! Honestly, I spend 17 years in an armchair reading up on how to do this properly and then the fit comes on me and off I go doing everything the wrong way. In front of the village board will then be the first of two railway boards. The idea is to fit the two together in a very simplified version of Iain Rice's jigsaw baseboard concept. Anyway, the reason for covering the dining room carpet this morning was to arrange for the rear, High Street, module to be set at an angle from the backscene. If you look at the plank in the picture below, this represents the course of the backscene and you will see how the rearmost row of buildings is now angled away from it. Looking at the village, there are really no parallel lines in its layout now, which I hope will give it a natural look. The essence of an old English village is that it seems be an organic thing, to have grown and not been planned or, even, built. Hopefully that sense will come across when CA is eventually finished. I will certainly have built the village, but will certainly not have planned it!

One that takes a year to build and then only works for 3 days a year, presumably.

Annoying not to do a lined LNWR version. Either Bachmann will wake up to the fact that pre-Groupers would like to buy more of their products than has hitherto been possible, or I will get a plain one once the prices have gone down and do it myself. Either way, no immediate sale is the penalty for neglecting Edwardians!

Nick, thank you for that. I have seen a number of wonderful layouts to 2FS; a quality and level of detail that I would scare have thought possible until recently. Then again 3mm is a fairly happy medium, I very much like the look of S, and 7mm gives an appearance of solidity and a presence that the smaller scales cannot match! There is much to be said in favour of each. I suppose I naturally gravitate to 4mm as it is familiar, both from childhood railways, but also childhood military modelling. Never say never, though .... In other news, I hope this weekend to complete, more or less, Castle Aching's High Street, which is the one at the rear of the scene. I want to do this because I have decided to alter the angle of the baseboard slightly and cannot determine the exact footprint of the village until I complete this range of structures. I suppose I am, literally, working back to front. I am also doing so in the figurative sense, because I am next to build a baseboard for the village and will build it to suit the eventual size and shape of the village rather than fitting the village to a pre-determined baseboard size, because nothing has been pre-planned! The village you see is both the cardboard mock up and the finished village! Once I have the village board, I can produce a board in front to carry the railway. The eccentric way in which I have gone about this meant that I needed to get the village most of the way there before I could start on the real estate that actually carries the railway. I am looking forward to track construction, maybe sometime in September with a following wind. Looking forward to point construction less, BUT, I notice in this month's Model Rail, Chris Nevard is tinning his PCB sleepers as well as the bottom of his rails, so I feel slightly less eccentric on that score! As for stock, I cannot afford any more components at present, but might start on some trial wagon bodies to see how I get along.

Sinister!

Good to see them making the journey from myth to reality.

1969, so all over by then. Shouldn't we have grown up to model blue diesels?

Gosh, you're almost as young as I am!

Thanks. Which, however, begs the question, what are suitable drawings for this purpose?

I am very persuaded by the GN Coach Fittings sprues for the 6-wheelers. Is there any possibility of a GE set?

Once more, the effect is spot on. Not that I was around in the '50s, but it seems to be a very convincing evocation of that era and one with a great sense of place.

It appears that brake vans conformed to the general wagon livery change in 1908, i.e. they gained 'LNWR' initials (http://www.lnwrs.org.uk/Wagons/brakes/BrakeVans.php). This suggests that the dark and light grey treatment of the brake van pictured above was a pre-1908 livery variant. The LNWR Society website does not, so far as I can tell, make any mention of a light and dark grey livery. I have perused the pages on brake vans, covered vans and cattle wagons, all of which had external framing for the earlier diagrams. Neither the pictures nor the livery descriptions provide any hint of the two-tone treatment. Picking out the framing in a darker colour does not appear to have been common! From what I can see, newly painted stock has white/pale roofs, but, as Caley Jim said, they would soon be grey.

Best I could do with my limited LNWR knowledge and resources. The brake van with the dark framing was apparently photographed in 1913. Assuming the LNWR adopted company initials lettering for brake vans in 1908, it would seem to be a livery earlier than that, and is captioned as showing "the two shades of grey" livery. It might be that your photograph also shows two shades of grey, rather than black and grey. The monochrome vehicles are pictured in 1885 at the works, so, presumably wear the then current livery. If I had to form a conclusion on just these pictures, they point to a darker grey framing introduced at some stage between 1885 and 1908, but I would bet good money that the situation is by no means so simple as that!

If I can afford it (!) I will subscribe to a Single, probably the large tender option. If money were no object, I'd have the small tender option to run with late '30s LNER/ECML stock (yes, I do have some of that boxed up somewhere!). A train to go with either (the 1938 train used 'period' stock, not modern Gresleys) would surely sell, and no doubt be of all manner of usefulness! Really, though, what would suit me best is a Single with the splasher cut-outs filled in as the last of the breed were running in the 1900s. That would be a better choice for me than either 1874 or 1938, but, even if I could afford to, would I dare make changes to such a model?!? So, yes, I would add to DJ Models', or any other, wish-list, Great Northern 6-wheelers of the 1880s. These, at least, could not be produced in BR only versions! I am conscious that I have indulged in a much broader debate than the question of what DJ Models might be asked to produce, and it is probably the case that the issues have been sufficiently ventilated without the need for more at this stage. I do agree with your points and sympathise with your dilemma. For steam-outline, meaningful choice is concentrated within a single period, though the late '30s modeller is not too badly off, if only because most of the prototype's 're-tooling' had been done by then! I would make one DJ Models-specific point and, finally, get back squarely on topic. The Hudswell Clarke. Can we at least have a pre-WW1 variant? So far as I can see there is an earlier cab design, which would cover the period c.1889 onwards. The cab currently planned seems restricted to those built in the inter-war years. It would be great to have both. In support of an earlier version, I would add that Hornby's Peckett represents 1890s 'tooling'! These small industrials had longer lives than most mainline locomotives, so you can still be running 1890s vintage Pecketts and Hudswell Clarkes on your Transition Era layout and, no doubt, beyond. Further, they did not tend to be rebuilt to a later style during these long years in service. The cab design dictates from when you can run your Hudswell Clarke, but not to when you can. Whereas, you can't run a 1920s-built Hudswell Clarke round your Edwardian factory/colliery/brewery! So, this isn't a case where a subsequent rebuild means that the manufacturer cannot sell a model representing an early condition to the mono-period modeller. It's all about planning for maximum coverage, and I fear it is not done as often as it might be. Again, this is likely to prove too expensive, sophisticated and exquisite a model to buy in order to hack about, so it is important for the manufacturer to provide for a range of options.

Earlestown works photos of 1885 suggest not. O/S framed 'Willesden'-labelled goods brake (still with pre-1908 diamonds) photographed in 1913 with dark framing and described as "the two shades of grey" livery. Penlan will surely know.

I would not have thought so either, but Oxford's email to me say that the tooling suite will cater for all variants, and did so in the context of a question about the round-top version. Mind you, I will remain cautiously sceptical that Oxford will do this. Really looking the part. Excellent conversion.