rogerzilla

It's amazing how much this stuff goes for on That Auction Site - does anyone have a real loco nameplate?  A fully working semaphore signal?  Lots of wagon D-plates? Judging from the YouTube videos of his layout, Pete Waterman has spent a lot on this stuff over the years!

It's interesting to see *any* new passenger locomotive in these days of multiple unit sets.  I think they're quite striking, sort of jolie-laide.  Wikipedia says one nickname for them is "Warskips" which presumably comes from the old Class 50 (and Class 42) names and the fact that they are only marginally less utiliarian in appearance than a Class 66 corrugated pig.

What's the practical constraint on keeping engines in steam?  Is it simply money or is it volunteer labour to do the work?   

Didcot seem to have similar issues; last time I was there (about a month ago) the only home steam engine available for service was the steam railmotor.  6023 is still having troubles with weights and springing (not sure if the new blastpipe has sorted out the poor steaming) and stalwart 3650 has been relegated to static display, the boiler ticket presumably having expired as it's seven years since it ran in preservation.  4144 (which has been back in service for just over a year) was also in need of repairs.  On the bright side, Pendennis Castle looks as if it's getting there; the boiler cladding was going on.

I used to have the Dean "Lord of the Isles", the original Tri-ang model with three clerestory coaches.  It was reputedly worth a fortune but, when Hornby reissued the model in the 1980s, values plummeted.  Like most single-wheelers, it wouldn't pull very much,  When it broke down Hornby fixed it and also replaced one of the sandboxes (?) on the running plate that had fallen off years before.  Unfortunately the replacement was a different colour brown (Indian Red, the GWR would have called it).

My Duchess of Buccleuch is pretty awesome, if a bit too detailed for its own good.  The front steps are very fragile.

The ones Bachmann sent me for my Modified Hall were too loose.  They suggested gluing them in place.

You could probably back convert a couple of Airfix autocoaches if you were desperate; the GWR coverted railmotors to autocoaches because the little steam engine couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and they could barely move when fully loaded.  The dinky valve gear would be the hard part.

Have you thought about hanging it on the wall?  If you have trees etc it will have to hang down (scenery outwards) rather than fold up but it will end up at a nice working level for adults (4 feet plus carpet clearance, obviously) although kids will need to stand on a box.  You'll need four or five strong steel hinges, a batten fixed to the wall with frame fixings, four stout hooks and two chains to support it when it's horizontal (forget hinged legs, they are too much work and too bulky).  On my 6 x 4 baseboard, which is pretty heavy chipboard with framing underneath, the tension in the chains is about 23lb which is well within the capabilities of decent hooks (the Versa Hooks I have are rated for 40lb).  8 x 4 would still be OK assuming similar construction.  Bonus is that it makes things much queter because the whole shebang is fixed to a masonry wall rather than echoing through the floor.

Hope it's alright if I share one then, albeit nowhere near the Bluebell...

 

925 Cheltenham, at Swanage:

Swanage Railway Spring steam gala 18,04,2015-5 - 1.jpg

 

Regards,

Matt

As this is the Bluebell thread, I wonder if Stowe will be put back together in the next two years?  SO's niece is a pupil there and she'd love to see it before she leaves.

The doors are a funny colour - sort of gunmetal.  I caught this set (or another one the same, if they're cxracking on with the resprays) last week from Swindon to Bristol Parkway.  I'm still not totally convinced by it but it looks better close up and shiny.

The new trains are electro-diesels so could be used before electrification, although I doubt they offer any advantage over an HST when tunning on their own power. They're electro-diesels so they can operate beyond the electrified GWML (Weston, Camarthen etc).

Didcot is THE place to see the corrugated pigs. They seem to breed there. Often mysteriously idling for hours on end, occasionally moving a few yards then going back to sleep. In DB Schenker livery they are very, very red.

If possible try to avoid curved platforms on set track.  The radii are so tight that you need to leave ridiculous gaps at the edge of the platform to prevent fouling; RTR stock also swings out far more than the prototype because a normal model 4-6-2 is basically an 0-6-0 with massive front overhang; the bogie does nothing to steer the loco around the curve.  it's not an issue at all with straight platforms.  If you only run small locos it's not as severe a problem. Carriages have their bogies right at the end and swing out very little.  The thing to watch with carriages is fouling in the middle if you have "inside" platforms, but that's not as bad as the issue of long locos fouling on "outside" platforms).

House prices and traffic congestion are both epic in Oxford, so anything allowing people to commute more easily by train from cheaper places has to be welcomed. Unfortunately the station of choice is probably the new Oxford Parkway. Good bus service into town, but far from central.

Traffic chaos here in Swindon as Stratton Green bridge is closed for 3-4 months while half of it is demolished and rebuilt to give the necessary clearance.  It's the main road between Swindon and Stratton St. Margaret.  They closed it a year ago with the intention of doing the work but found a load of buried services they hadn't counted on, so gave up for a while and re-opened it to traffic.

Just a thought - if the HSTs are being replaced by Hitachi electric units rather imminently, isn't repainting them a bit of a waste of money?  I suppose they'll still be necessary beyond the electrified GWML but I assumed many of them would be re-leased by other operators.

It doesn't work for me.  I think it's the clash with the yellow warning panel, which makes the green look drab.  I didn't mind the old livery although the pink stripes always gave me the impression of a train gradually derailing.

There was also a lot of standardisation and spare parts, so they would often replace rather than repair.  Boilers, for instance, were just swapped out most of the time, meaning the locomotive could be returned to traffic quickly, and the removed boilers were repaired at leisure.  If I remember correctly, engines for overhaul were only in the big works like Swindon for a couple of weeks, rather than somewhere netween 3 and 25 years in preservation.

It may amuse you to know that the GWR managed to re-gauge the track from Paddington to Bristol in a weekend, including the logistical nightmare of moving all old broad gauge stock off the network to avoid it becoming stranded; in 2015 it is taking Swindon Council a whole year to reconfigure one miserable roundabout.

I spotted all of the class, although Hood (50 031) proved elusive and was finally seen, thankfully preserved, years later sitting in the cafe area at the Swindon Steam museum (!)  You could hear one coming a mile away, a sound somewhere between a deep throb and a splutter (the inertial air filters had gone by that time and they were fairly fresh out of their refurbishment, so running well with no real smoke).

They're the diesel everyone seems to like, even though they are basically a big blue box like all the others.  I think it's the warship names.

Some of the previous "overhauls" have been rather shoddy, which explains why this one is costing about the same as building a new one from scratch (actually, I think Tornado was rather cheaper).  What I don't understand is why the NRM is prepared to do this for the Scotsman when they have said that Mallard probably won't run again because they don't want to turn it into Trigger's broom, which is pretty much what they're having to do to the Scotsman; it won't be very original in terms of parts, even compared to its BR days.  Presumably the current (as opposed to a previous) world record holder is special.

This paper explains some of the cost over-run.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/smg/corporate/~/~/media/33CDC07ED88345BEA5412F91D8742D45.ashx

Also http://www.nrm.org.uk/flyingscotsman/scotsman-season.aspx

I think tickets for the inaugural run are restricted...I know someone who's going.  It's not very pretty in late BR guise, though, is it?  Watch "4472" on BBC iPlayer and see it as it should be, from the 1968 non-stop excursion.

A cheap option may be to pick up the Hornby Hogwarts Castle (which, confusingly, is an unmodified Hall) and repaint it.  The one to avoid is the older Bachmann split-chassis Modified Hall (Soughton Hall); it runs very nicely when it wants to but you always have the problem of the brittle plastic axles cracking.  Mine is fixed, for the time being, but this acts as a disincentive to run it a lot.

I rather like the Hawksworth welded tender.

Since Bachmann will undoubtedly know that a Modified Hall in GWR livery did not exist, they will not make one. Simples. But then if you're not worried about authenticity, you could buy a BR green one and then change the crest for GWR lettering. Or buy a Hornby original Hall in GWR livery.

The first Modified Halls were GWR, but 7900 never was (7900 came straight after 6999; GWR numbering was fairly jumpy).  The old Bachmann model was available as 6962 in GWR livery, which was correct as 6962 was built in 1944.  In fact, 6959 to 6980 were pre-1948 and would have come out of Swindon in GWR green.  I don't know exactly what date during 1948 they started painting the new ones in BR livery but anything from 6996 onwards is almost certainly going to have worn BR livery all its life.

Anyway, it's now academic as Bachmann have agreed to send me some axles for £2 plus £2 p&p, so the old one will be as good as new (which it is, really).  So rumours of spare axle unavailability are unfounded at the moment, and they're fairly easy to fit.  I've already had everything apart to locate the problem; this time I won't take it apart quite so completely as it was a bit tricky getting all the motion back together.

I recently bought a "mint" split-chassis Bachmann Hall (Soughton Hall) with the intention of renaming and renumbering it to Saint Peter's Hall (my girlfriend used to work there...it's now called St Peter's College and is part of Oxford University; they have one of the nameplates from the scrapped loco).  Unfortunately, and probably inevitably given its time in the box, all the plastic axles for the driving wheels split after the first run so it's scrap and is going back for a refund.  Therefore I'm looking at a retooled Hall.  Does anyone know if Bachmann intend to release one in GWR livery?  Yes, I know 7900 was built in 1949 and never a GWR engine but she likes GWR stuff and it's not meant to be prototypical.  Heresy, I know.