Northroader

The magnets I'm using are little block ones, not the special kadees job, so their attraction crosswise is limited anyway. I just put them on their side. Cutting them in half? North poles bits, south poles bits, you know what you're doing, well in front of me. Uncoupling is accompanied by a lot of jiggling, and the layouts that small, if a train divided, you could claim you meant it. By the bye, Jason, I do come and have a look at the Facebook page you set up, and I'm enjoying it, it's just when I do a like or a reply it never comes up, more in the way of knowing what you're doing, and pressing the right keys. (Edit: looking at this, I thought, "coupling is accompanied by a lot of giggling", best not go there, eh?) Ray, we've got this peculiar sect round here, they dress in high vis jackets and shorts and go round pushing rubbish paper through your door, but the interesting thing is they mark their territory by leaving rubber bands lying on the pavement. I find these are most useful for holding the roof down while the glue sets, so I won't be calling up a jolly green giant thingy.

David, (isambarduk), followed your links this evening and had a very pleasant time looking at all the twists and turns in your modelling work, both finescale and tinplate. Highly impressive stuff!

Here's some progress with the feed mill, which I'm beginning to like:

Whoops, looking at Digbys drawing I've got the push rods ar** backwards, silly boy!

3H, or THREE AITCH MODELS, as it's got underneath. Very good looking wagons, too, David. I have to confess when they came out I hadn't yet got into O scale, but I would imagine a great shout of "At last!" came from O guage practitioners. They're a simple kit which makes up well, the only thing I don't like are the plastic buffers, but very relevant to the discussion we've been having on cost of wagon kits. Pity they've gone the way of all good things. As you probably know, you can still find second hand ones on GOG dos, at the bring and buy, or the exec. & trustee, just needing a bit of TLC. Here's a few from my mineral wagon fleet: Another job has just appeared out of the wagon shop, although this was only needing paint. Mikkel's workbench thread has recently had a good debate on the GWR 'iron mink' van, and detailing the same. I dug mine out, which I've had for some time. Question is, did I make it, or buy it second hand. Whose kit is it anyway, 43to1, perhaps? Memory failure on this one. I posted a picture, and decided it really ought to be backdated to have the red paint scheme, another thorny item of colour, on the lines of Stroudley Green / Yellow. My view is that Victorian paint pigments didn't come out of a test tube the same way as modern paints do, and the cost of pigments varied greatly. The vermilion, aka signal red, or post office red, was an expensive pigment, and wouldn't have gone on the whole of the wagon fleet without the directors having total meltdown. A lot of private owner wagons had red oxide, which was a dark red brown, and more economical. My dad worked in an engineering works making large girders, and used to bring what they used to paint everything before it went out, for jobs outside at home. This was called red lead, in reality a bright orange, and my fancy is this formed a base for the GWR colour. Mr. Nigel Digby did a series on the colours of the old pregroup companies, and I put my wagon against his artwork, in the British Railway Modelling for Jan 2003. This is quite a light red, with a tendency to orange, I think of it as terracotta, same as a flowerpot, although there's absolutely no real grounds for this. I've put some chalk dust weathering on it as well. The last job I showed was the van, GER, but could just as well be a GWR woodbodied built previous to the minks, so I put the pair together for comparison.

The original horseboxes for the broad guage had bodies 9'8" long, 10' wide. Guage of course 7', wheelbase 6'! These were put on passenger trains with poor old horsey inside. Bet his head was spinning when he was taken out.

Saw your previous line in this months C.M. as advertised. Looks really well presented, deservedly so.

Like the rest of us?

The l.h. Part doesn't do anything, it's just fixed to the underside of the wagon. I was just trying out a really silly idea, bg trains on a minimum radius, which the link allowed me to do. I don't have a bg line right now, and I'll put the couplings back to something rather more conventional when and if I get round to doing something simple later on. No, I agree with Miss Prism, loads of fodder do make a really good item on a goods train. I think mine has started to moult, though!

Agreed, a load of fodder makes a very useful thing to have around. A bit earlier than 1910, and the wagon might be a bit wide.. (sorry about thecouplers, a bright idea due for a change)

You haven't smelled them.

The practise for coach roofs was to form by t & g boards laid lengthwise on supporting curved sticks and then cover by canvas stretched over. This was then waterproofed by layers of paint. Bear in mind the texture of the canvas is totally different to coach sides, which are wooden panels, well sanded and varnished to finish. You could attempt to keep the sides clean and smart, but the roof would just get dirt and grime forming into the roughness over its life. I think it's best to start with Matt white, but experiment with darkening the surface. A van roof I did recently got grey paint over the white, which I mopped with a paper kitchen towel to get a faintly dappled look, then when dry plenty of black pastel chalk powder dropped randomly and brushed crosswise.

What larks, eh, Pip? No, James, you're right, raising the matter of what it's going to cost to get a model you want is something that concerns us all. For a long time now, I've been scratchbuilding, mainly because of my chosen scale, O, which I go for because I like the bulk. Loco kits are dear, and pregroup stuff minimal. In OO, you're quite competently demonstrating how to adapt hand me down stuff to get the effect you want, I just wish you could get the same cheap items to mess round with in O, although there are a few in the wagon shop at present. Cobbling takes time, and scratch building takes even more,and I do get frustrated with a lack of progress, particularly now I'm aging, so I feel if I can cut some corners by getting the odd kit, or even RTR, so much the better. So far I'm not sleeping rough, as a result. I get the idea, Kevin, that you're on much the same course, and a few years behind, and getting to the same conclusions. Marc, of Furness Models, many thanks for coming on the thread, A) thanks for the explanation of differences and likenesses on the GER / GWR van, you've obviously gone much deeper into it than I. B) thanks for your honest account of just what goes into the cost of producing a kit, I'm used to Ogauge costs, and find yours quite comparable with the rest, and well worth paying. C) thanks for the effort put in to produce pre group wagon kits, it is a gap in the market which you'll doing well to fill, and I'm glad you're not stacking shelves. D) thanks for your service at the shows, despite the costs, you always give a happy mien. (I'm the nitwit who asks who wants another gunpowder van anyway, and then asks for the one you're currently out of stock of) I like to slip in a picture for entertainment if I can, this ones for Kevin, but not scratchbuilt, I'm sorry to say. Gauge 1, 10mm/ ft, "Gottersee" by Kevin Smith, seen at an Oxford European show in 1994. Simple terminus to fiddle yard, with the size of these models, it couldn't be anything else, a Prussian T14 with donnerbuchsen. The sheer weight and bulk make it totally magnificent, Bob.

It is a van which would be a must for CA, you could upsize everything else as an alternative? G'wan, g'wan. I think the common factor on the van design is James Holden. He was Dean's principal assistant at Swindon, up to 1885, which was when these vans were being built, when he went to Stratford as Loco superintendent for the GER and I suppose having the say on the c&w side as well. The vans are remarkably similar, and I suppose he offered the design to the traffic bods, who just wanted the size upped a little bit. This theory fits the facts nicely, and I doubt if either outfit was buying freight vehicles from outside at that time? It could also link in with things like clerestory coaches.

Well, I'm still running tests on the double slip between times, another shim has appeared dead opposite the first I showed you, so definitely disqualified from entering in "Platelayer of the Year" contest. I'm propelling a set of wagons through, and still not fully satisfied yet. At present I can approach in three directions, the fourth way snakes off behind the scenery of the right hand baseboard, to a fiddle yard. The design of this has been hardened down, so I must lay this before I can make up my mind on the double slip. In the meantime the C & W shop has turned out the second kit I got at the Reading trade show, another Furness Wagons job. I bought it as a GWR wood body outside framed van dating from the 1880s, before the 'iron minks' came out. The body is resin castings, which I put together with 24hour araldite. The frame is brass etchings, soldered up, and white metal castings, which I epoxied on, being a coward. A piece of 2 x 1 went inside for weight, and the roof made up. This is brass sheet, and was etched with curves for rain strips, made from brass rod, and soldered on, and then the roof glued on. There's a lot of little etched bits which you stamp out for rivets which form the reinforcement where each of all the framing struts meet. With all these in position, I thought the door needed a bit of detail, and dug out a very good drawing, by Mr. Kenneth Werrett in the Feb. '66 MRN. As the photo shows, I was a bit slipshod here, just using plain rectangles of plastikard for hinges, and rod for the vertical bolt. Looking at the drawing, it struck me there wasn't a rain strip, and I don't have any pictures to check for this. The GER also built vans which were dead ringers of the GWR ones, which Furness also produce, so dig out a drawing of these (Tatlow, "LNER wagons") The drawing again misses the rainstrip, but a photo shows one with them in LNER times. What about dimensions? The GER bodies were 6" longer and 6" higher than the GWR ones, and checking out the model, the GER sizes have been used, so I've got a GER van wearing a GWR hat. You might have noticed Washbourne tries to be an equal faith, multi gender, trans opportunities, inter cultural layout, so GER vans are just as welcome as GWR ones, and so ---, it's been painted slate grey (GWR paint wearing a GER hat) and lettered accordingly.

The shot where it's coming out past the pub is a really nicely staged view. Looks great!

Don't worry about the number of pictures, I can't get enough of this layout.

I'm knocked out flat with the erudite research on the Camp label. I agree, it's obviously Egypt with all those pyramids in the background, but feel terribly deflated when our Egyptologist declares that actually it's. .. not very good. When I was a spotty just teenager in the scouts, we used to tip a whole bottle into a steaming billycan, well, it is called 'Camp' after all, and sit around drinking it - real coffee! wow, what sophisticates, getting away from mums tea, and all this talk of it not being the real thing is a bit of a let down, even sixtyodd years on. Then there's the thing that the Camp enamelled advert was one of the most common to be seen on a railway station. If there isn't at least one at Castle Aching I shall feel even more let down.

Like Steve said, Jen kept her tam o shanter on at a fetching angle all through, never removed it once, there was just the inference things were going to happen soon after the ending, so it wasn't disappointing at all. It's much better to dream about that than watch the filth they put on "Nature Watch" don't you agree? And aren't the BBC doing a good job of running the NHS??? And Camp coffee, ahhh, in a steaming billy can???

There was a sort of disused brickworks thingy which might / might not have a German sort of decauville whatnot carrying bricks to an undisclosed place which could have been a squarish shaped conical doodah. Oh, and they were eating a lot of beer and sausages while they were getting all these folks packed into a barge stuck in the mud of the salt marshes and our Jenny was the deeply misunderstood daughter of some bounder, but in the end she went off with the hero character with the implication of a good lathering to follow. It's great when you can spoil the story for folks who have no intention of watching it, don't you agree?

You just been and bought a Peckett.

Shift the iron man, keep the floozie in the jacuzzi.

Some time back, I encountered a JL lookalike in a Gurkha officers uniform at an armed services get together in WB. Honestly! She was totally....... lost in recollections...ahhh.