Metropolitan H

Well, as mentioned above, I do have a number of ETS powered GWR 4-4-0 locos: - An ACE "City of Truro" No. 3440, in the fully lined out livery that it wore in the late 1950s when I was taken on a special to Doncaster behind it and MR Compound No.1000 in the full MR livery - and I did see "City of Truro" on a DN&S service train at Winchester Chesil. Regarding the ACE model it is only strictly correct in the fully lined livery for the late 1950s onwards, as it has the chimney and details as the later "superheated and piston valve fitted" version of the City class which post-date the fancy livery carried in preservation - but I like it and it is a pet favourite! - An ACE "Straight Framed" Bulldog No. 3352 "Pendragon" in plain Green with the GWR roundel device on the tender. A very good loco, but it only has one motor clutch so doesn't free-wheel like the later models. But it will pull a very large load for a 4-4-0 as the weighting is very good - a superb mixed-traffic loco. - A "County Class" 4-4-0 No. 3821 "County of Bedford" which started life as a Hornby No.2 Special loco, but came to me as a purchase from the Alan Cliff collection - in a fully rebuilt and repainted condition, with an ETS mechanism and Great Western tender. It is rather smart and very tempting at a very reasonable price - much less than the indicative prices for the proposed ACE re-issues. My only complaints are that it has only one motor, the driving wheels should be larger and it needed a lot more weight in the right place to really match the haulage of the ACE pair - these issues are being addressed, with no changes to the body, purely a mechanism transplant and a new cast lead weight (when the weather if fit for such activities). If I was to complete the set of GWR 4-4-0s, I would also need to find one of the first series of ACE / ETS "Bulldogs" - which have the curved frame outline - and get another of the straight framed "Bulldogs" to convert to a "Dukedog" like 9017 (aka 3217) on the Bluebell Railway which I rember from the Cambrian lines and the Didcot Newbury and Southampton in the 1950s. Alan Cliff once posted pictures of a Dukedog conversion on the old ACE Trains Forum and I am tempted - but I need a reasonably priced donor Bulldog first. Regarding the GWR tenders, I now have 4 of the ETS made versions - 3 seen above, and the Mogul 2-6-0 one. Regarding the softness of the joint between the flare and the sde plates, I think the one on the mogul is not as crisp as the earlier ones - possibly down to a change in metal thickness and / or tooling? Hope the above is of interest. I'm a fan. Regards Chris H

Unintended duplication!

Deleted - Unintended duplication as silly messages when attempting to upload???

I hate to say it, but that sounds plausible - and possibly not the first time! Regards Chris H P.S. - At least you got things running long before I did. I must get on with finishing the lifting flap / track laying / wiring of Gutter Lane and then start on the platforms and rest of the built environment! But I do enjoy running the trains. CH

That ties in with my memory, which clearly remembers not starting on the turntable till after you had got the first trains running through the broom cupboard. Regards CH

My records - with pictures and video by Ted R - show that we had a Clatterbang Train Fest at Chez Nearholmer on 23rd May 2014, when numerous trains circulated - including the Q class, your B-L N class, the ACE 3-SUB (or is it a NOL?) EMU and your first Terrier. Visiting trains were from the Met and GWR. The turntable shown in your film of the Q wasn't delivered till the very beginning of June 2014 - I took its pre-delivery pictures here on 31st May. The awful "Madras Marmalade" grease was removed from the Q class mechanism on 29th June 2014. Hope that helps with the narrative. Regards Chris H

I see you have passed through into "Mirror-land" in the latest iteration of the layout design - as well as refining the sidings layout! - Is this to confuse me or you? Regards Chris H

Michael, Thanks to drawing my attention to the ETS branded version of the SR "Express Dairy" tank - at what appears to be a reasonable price. The only problem is that my Dairy / Bottling plant siding on Gutter Lane is effectively full and the present "Milk Train" fits nicely on Gutter Lane - see below: I would still like a 4 wheel GWR Siphon "C" - to carry the churn / butter traffic alongside the tanks - I have a suitable underframe, but creating the louvred sides will take some effort and there are other priorities further up the list! Regards Chris H

What did you say? - I knew engineers who worked on Deltics as Young men - and suffered Tinnitus for the rest of their lives and little sleep due to the constant noise in their ears! Music it wasn't. Regards Chris H

I understand that ETS, like the rest of Czech Republic, have been suffering very badly with the Covid virus - deaths per million are circa 1.5 times the UK numbers. Also they have been churning out diesels for ACE Trains - as well as working on the WJV Atlantics etc. I just hope they recover properly and grow from the experience. Regards Chris H P.S. - I too have been chaning couplers, but I do the simple change which is still worthwhile. My three milk tankers have shrunk by nearly 1.5 inches! Before: After: Regards CH

Where is the front coupling hook and shackle? - Otherwise that is rather superb and suggesting I have a lot to learn! Regards Chris H

Agreed. Happy New Year. Chris H

It may have orginated from across "The Pond", but at Birlstone it represents a marginally smaller type that worked en Francais. So I reckon honours are even. By the way, one has to remember that at the time of his invention of the "Hot-Bulb" oil engine the young Herbert Ackroyd-Stuart was working in his family's "Bletchley Iron and Tinplate Works", not a very long cycle ride from chez Nearholmer - so a bit of a local hero! There is a plaque on the wall of the company premises in Denmark Street, Fenny Stratford. Just a pity he never got to developing the engine with the very high compression ratios of the later Diesel engine - which was much more fuel efficient. Regards Chris H

He has already got a few diseasels - some of a foreign persuasion from across the English Channel and some of more native types. There is also at least one EMU to be seen occasionally, but bearing in mind his profession I'm surprised there are not more! Regards Chris H

While over at Gutter Lane, a certain bloke in a red coat has called to refill his sleigh from the front van on the 21.00hrs from Paddington to Market Blandings: A Happy Christmas to all who visit here. May all your wishes materialse - at least all that are legal - but in the current situation that might be a very big ask! Best wishes Chris H

Unintended duplication deleted. Chris H

One of my treasured documents is a copy of British Railway Journal No.74 - which contains the marvellous, long article "Post War Operations at Reading South" by John Copsey and Chris Turner. But I did not need that article to confirm that the picture above is definitely NOT at Reading South - where the the two island platforms were bereft of any buildings and the four platform roads went right up to the buffer stops not far in front of the terminal station building set at 90 degrees to the tracks. I would also note that the signage shown in the above photograph is more akin to that on the main platform (No. 4) of Reading General, than anything seen on the Southern Station - and those coaches were unlikely to be seen at the Southern Station. The other things to remember are that when first built in 1849 there was only one platform road at the SER station - this station was rebuilt with a single island platform circa 1855/6, to create the station which was burnt out in a storm in 1859. The next station had a longer single island platform between 2 passenger roads and being built in brick lasted better - not being rebuilt with two island platforms, 4 roads, in 1896, by which time the LSWR had opened its lines through to Wokingham and there were a much larger number of trains every day. If you look at my post at the top of the previous page you will find my planned - but never built - "Aldbrickham Southern" layout plan which is closely based on Reading South with the correct number of platforms and passenger roads. Hope that helps. Regards Chris H

No, but for part of my career I was The Assistant Rolling Stock Engineer for London Underground - just the four initials on the back of my Hi-Vi vest! Regards Chris H

When I were a young engineer PTI = Positive Train Identification, now PTI = Platform Train Interface. I have never really worked out how the first morphed into the present ? Also there was FART = Fully Automatic Railway Train, till officialdom decreed that it had to become FACT = Fully Automatically Controlled Train! Regards Chris H

Pleased to say the postman delivered my saubs copy yesterday. Now I can hibernate for the rest of the weekend. regards Chris H

And lots of water - = 1tonne per cubic meter! CH

K and other chaps, I've developed a rotten cold which is making my thought processes slow and I had to go look after no1 Grand-Childer-Beast this p.m. - but I think we are getting very het-up looking for 500HP which is a notional difference between "ihp" - a standardised calculated value and "dbhp" which is a measured empirical value from the dynamometer car - so it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, though not wholly so. Going back to where does 500hp go, lets think about: - Cylinder losses - Worth looking at https://www.advanced-steam.org/technical/improving-locomotive-performance-and-efficiency/ and similar. The "ihp" calculated from indicator diagrams doesn't tell the whole story. If you really want to go there, you need to delve into the wrtten works of Chapeleon, Porta, Kyala, Ell etal - they were getting much higher overall efficiencies but with more to do. - What are the hot bits of a loco - apart from the boiler - when it has been on a hard fast run, which you don't touch. - Basically the cylinder casings, the smokebox and anywhere around the chimney or exhaust. The bearings are mainly whitemetal based, so extreme temperatures lead to failed bearings - not that common in practice even the middle big-ends on Gresley Pacifics didn't set off the "Garlic" bombs very often. - Sam Ell (Swindon) did a lot of good work on improving the exhaust draughting of various locos to streamline the passages and reduce the back pressure. - The big advances though came from compounding - ala Chapeleon and Porta - as the simple expension steam locomotive still chucks a lot of heat up the chimney in the exhaust steam that isn't fully expanded in the cylinders. Take that lot together with smaller losses in windage, bearings, friction, aerodynamics (not a great effect until you are regularly running at more than 60-70m.p.h. - or running tube stock in a deep level bored tube, another story) and the wheel/rail deformation etc., I think that the 500hp difference (approx 16%) between the "ihp" and "dbhp" figures for a hard worked simple expansion "British" Pacific or 4-6-0, doesn't sound so unreasonable. It isn't good - which is whythere was a lot of development continuing till the diesels became more readily available and reliable. Why "Compounding" and other developments didn't catch on is another argument - which has a lot to do with the quality of the training of loco crews and shed staff. Then people realised what a filthy and labour intensive place the steam railway was. Pity we didn't get the investment into electric railways much earlier. I still like playing with steam locos, but please recognise that it was bloody hard work. regards Chris H

The windage effect of a spoked wheel is significant - especially the faster you go. So replacing spoked wheels with disc or monobloc wheels will improve the efficiency markedly, but it can also lead to overheating of traction motors as the "Wind" created by the windage really did help to keep the motors cooler (sufficient to stop the commutator / armature bar solder joints from melting) - so often it was only the trailing wheel sets that received disc wheels. The other loss to consider is the cyclic deformation of the railhead and wheel rim - which leads to rolling contact fatigue, to spalling / cracking and other failures. It is real and absorbs effort. Remember the contact patch should be no bigger than a old sixpence, but supporting 10+tons. A subject for further discussion, but I've forgotten most of the maths. Regards Chris H

But this is a southbound train - so the walk "Back" would be towards Grantham and points north!

The post hasn't brought my subs copy yet, but at lunch time today I noted a good stock in the Milton Keynes branch of WHS. Hopefully the postie will deliver before the weekend. Regards Chris H