Michael Hodgson

Don't hold your breath. I have generally had pretty good service from Hermes, but the quality of their staff is variable and the result is very much a postcode lottery. That strikes me as poor management/lack of supervision. If you have cause to complain, they are downright unhelpful in my experience.

Very impressive. I think the stable block looks a bit too clean though. If the place has just been swept, you need a tired looking bloke with a shovel standing by a big heap, perhaps fitted with smoke unit to give off steam! I like your use of magnets. The plumbers' hemp looks convincing.

That seems to be a running line not a siding. So what do you propose? A tank wagon they're going to siphon the beer out of? An open wagon in a train stopping in section and blocking the main line for half an hour while mine host and his cellarman shove full barrels off and empties back on? All very improbable but you did say it was a flight of fancy. It's your railway. I once worked a large O gauge garden railway which had wagons with frames which could carry a tin can on its side. Towards the end of the running the train ran loaded and the operators received telephone instructions that one wagon had to be emptied at each station. No drugs and alcohol tests for signalmen on that line

Not if you adjust the sensitivity correctly. The cat comes and yowls at the kitchen window when he wants in!

There's a lot of greaseburger vans who depend for their living on truckers and white van man

I don't think it's Covid, as they weren't ringing before all that. I have some sympathy for delivery drivers who have decided that so many doorbells don't work, so it's not worth the bother. When visiting houses I don't know I have sometimes noticed that a new doorbell has been installed but they didn't remove the old bellpush - so you don't know which (if any) is working. And as for blocks of flats, quite often there's half a dozen unlabelled bells! I like big knockers. There's a lot to be said for those old fashioned cast iron ones that are loud enough to waken the dead. Having said that, I've installed a Ring doorbell that you don't need to press - it works by proximity, but that type of bell isn't suitable for all houses.

Limited edition with certificates implies that something is meant to be scarce and collectable. Often it is merely marketing hype about something for which there isn't really enough demand to warrant a decent production run.

When we were in the EU, it probably made sense for trade between Ireland and some parts of the EU to come via Dover and and a second sea crossing to Ireland. The new bureaucracy at two borders must have killed such traffic.

Hermes are still charging extra if you require a signature but nobody is signing anything any more.

Thanks Dibber. That does clear up the colour of the guide rails, at least in BR colours - looks like all the ironwork was black, with creosoted timer decking. Most of the bits seem to be off the wagon or anchoring equipment. Interesting to see that the chassis of the tank trailer including its leaf springs were white! Of course that could have been done by Didcot. Odd that the bottom of the access ladder bends inwards at the base. I note that the vehicle stop chocks shown in the books aren't there. It was presumably decided at some point that chain the trailer down was sufficient. The pulleys would no doubt have been covered in dirty grease.

I had never heard of this stuff. It looks better than thread for roping loads onto goods wagons.

Just surprised he didn't run across the road in front of the approaching train. He would have got back to the van sooner if he had.

Bring back the Deltics. Always impressive when they started up at Kings Cross with mighty plumes of blue smoke blasting right up to the rafters in the overall roof. And when I was commuting from Huntingdon, they made better time running on one engine than the booked class 31.

If they do another run, is the price likely to be rather less than the one grand range, like the ones currently on ebay? Not that I'd be likely to buy one from somebody calling himself fluffybumbum even if I had that sort of money to spare! Makes the one Olivias Trains is selling for £825 look like a real bargain.

I thought maybe I'll just take the easy way out and go for post nationalisation livery and used freight wagon grey. The large "GW" letters on the earlier photos in Russells book (figs. 150 - 154) do look as though they may be the yellowy colour that was used on brown stock. That could just be dirt/ageing, although a newish wagon would be chosen for what seem to be publicity shots (for Messrs Dyson?) Dibber's photo looks mostly plain old rust on the sides but could be bauxite as used by BR on fitted wagons. So much for the easy way out! Also, the wagon in Fig. 156 doesn't have the GW visible and is dated 1935. Interesting to see the dairy didn't have to bother unloading the road tanker from its wagon and just emptied it the same as any other milk tank. Where such wagons were used for beer traffic, I suppose it could be the other way round if the brewery was rail-served. I imagine those needed to be emptied into barrels for distribution by drays. A bottling plant would have been an alternative for beer too, but you wouldn't use this type of wagon if both ends of the traffic were rail-served. I liked the idea that the wheel-ways might be silver coloured, possibly unpainted steel. But in Dibber's last photo the top rail seems to be grey-painted angle-iron mounted on longitudinal timbers. That may all be a more recent replacement of course, and the rails in Russell's photos look much more substantial than angle iron. In any case those rails must have got dirty and greasy very quickly in service. I had originally assumed that the flat deck would have been aluminium chequerplate, but on reflection that would be far too modern a practice, it is timber in the Guinness wagon in fig 149, though it looks more like plain steel plate in Fig 151 with timber at the very ends. The stop chocks were presumably removed from the end nearest the loading bay and secured with chains to scotch the tanker as well as tying it down with chains. Although it's less laborious than humping heavy churns into Siphons, what with winching, securing the tow bars etc, loading these must still have been a moderately time consuming business on top of the time taken to fill the tanker in the first place and drive it to the station.

These wagons were evidently classified as Non-Passenger Coaching Stock and ran under the class C headlamp code. Does this mean their low sides would have been painted brown, like the Siphons, rather than the more usual grey for goods wagons? The colour isn't obvious from B/W photos in the books.

Thanks for that info. As an outsider who never even saw this set I am inevitably guessing at what happened back in the day and may well have failed to see things you just took as common knowledge. I realise of course you were all working, not just enjoying the ride in the open air with the wind in your hair! I don't know what jobs the staff needed to do though, but I expect the tasks and the crew required would have varied quite a bit between journeys. I assume there was a load of measuring and recording equipment of various types and some controls to adjust degree of tilt and its responsiveness and any other variables you might be able to influence and study - would that have been monitored/controlled from PC3/4 cabins, or from what I assume was the relative comfort of the lab coaches. using cabling to transfer the data? There is no corridor connection, so you would have been stuck for the whole journey in whatever vehicle you had boarded and would have need some sort of intercom if you needed somebody to do something on another vehicle. I had naively assumed the couplings were something akin to those on the type of tippler wagon that can be emptied whilst still coupled to the rest of the train. I take it these bar couplers weren't rigid then but had some rotational freedom? I am a bit puzzled though as if the couplings had to allow one of the vehicles to tilt, why wasn't it just as necessary for the other end to do the same? There doesn't seem to be much up top on these vehicles except the large ballast weights, so I'm guessing your tilt packs were built into the bogies.

Any bank that would lend me a billion deserves to be wound up.

If they were loitering on the platform, it's a fair cop. If they were socialist distanced from each other and on the public highway overlooking the line, they could always claim to be taking some exercise.

Those addresses would only be offices, not where the products were handled.

Yeah, they only work on Sundays .... even I know better than to make a comment like that - and I'm a heathen! I remember reading that article, and I've probably still got the magazine. Great model, would like to have seen it.

No worries - I was just curious, and I wasn't going to order a N gauge one anyway, not my scale. I have only got as far as assembling the body shells of the OO one, still got to do the underframe & bogies. I have a Hornby Lab 10 coach in RTC red/blue that I will run with it. They also do a CCT stores van and a Landore breakdown coach in those colours.

Another nice model. Good job you've done there. Did the prototype run with an 04 and a Toad or were those RTC Lab coaches de rigeur?

The H&M controllers with resistance mats had a positive centre off which clicked into place. I think I still have a couple somewhere that I've been meaning to dig out and flog on Ebay.

Perhaps apocryphal but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the bloke whose job it was to maintain all those "Cenotaph" coaling tower hoists had to travel away from home most of the time and had a wife in every large railway town in the country.