Compound2632

Numinous, surely. Having made the pilgrimage to this barren spot, you await the appearance of the steaming genius loci and adore.

It has to be admitted that the whole business of having to lower the droplight* and lean out to open the door is positively antique. At least the Mk1s had a catch on the inside - but of course no central locking! *and the Mk3s don't even have a stout leather strap to help with that operation. I well remember my first experience of the SNCF, at Calais c. 1980 - yes, a stiff climb up into the carriage but then the announcement: attention à la fermeture automatique des portes. (Up to date version here.) "They order, said I, this matter better in France" - Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768).

Do the daylight strips come in "overcast grey"? Rain has been mentioned as an occasional feature of this part of the world. No "helpful" suggestion for that but could the effect of diminishing visibility on a wet day be achieved by hanging gauze curtains along the layout - one between the railway and the houses, one along the front, maybe?

... which is really the wrong way round. Find a long straight section of the Paris Metro, e.g. the line 4 under Ave. Jean Jaures, and you'll notice that there's a gradient up into the platforms, designed in to help with rapid stops and starts.

There seem to be different arrangements for the side lamps - the fixed housings, like the ones I made following the photo, or more conventional brackets just to the left of each door. I presume you are working from the drawings in Noel Coates, Lancashire & Yorkshire Wagons Vol. 2 (Wild Swan, 2006), especially the rather nice cut-away drawing of the interior? I have to say, I'm not bothering with the interior in 4 mm scale!

Black with illiterate symbols, per the photo on the L&Y Soc website. I've just this evening done the lettering with HMRS pressfix transfers and home-made numberplates, though I don't have the "G. BRAKE FIRE EXTR" lettering. As to the footboards (and wooden footboards in general) I think it's impossible to tell. Other modellers seem to be happy to go with black (google "l&y brake vans"). Preserved carriages by and large have black footboards but would they have remained so in regular use?

One way forward is to make and print one's own brick paper using a suitable drawing package and good quality laser printer - essentially printing the elevation of the building, with wrap-rounds for window and door reveals etc. Alternatively, scribing plastic or good quality card sheet... Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a 4mm scale individual brick system - possibly from the original C&L? As I recall, bricks had to be threaded on to plastic rod uprights. Unlike the track system, it didn't catch on.

.. a common problem with plastic models and even some printed card kits, to say nothing of full-sized modern pseudo-Victorian buildings! Trouble is, once one starts worrying about the bond, there's all sorts of details that can't be kept at bay: quarter-bricks at corners and window recesses to begin with... Then there's the question of course heights. Modern brick and most brick papers and embossed plastic sheets give course heights of 3" but quite a lot of Victorian brickwork - especially for civil engineering applications such as bridges - seem to be nearer 3.25" - which does make quite a visual difference and is also a trap if trying to scale a building from photographs.

With the 'six foot' being 6'0" for both standard and broad gauge in practice (in general) and assuming the switches themselves are of the same geometry, a broad gauge 1:8 crossover will be (7'0.25" - 4'8.5") x 8 = 18'8" longer than a standard gauge one.

The carriage nearest the camera is presumably one of the NSR 4-compartment 4-wheeled composite carriages that arrived on the line sometime between 1915 and 1919, which may help date the photo. From the shape of the ducket, the third carriage could well be one of the two ex-Midland D529 4-wheeled brake vans, which Col. Stephens bought along with some elderly Midland bogie carriages when he re-opened the S&M in 1911.

Neat. Not only are incoming engines turned, they also end up 'right line' for working back!

Shrewsbury Abbey was an early victim of road development - Thomas Telford had much of the surviving Norman abbey buildings demolished to make way for the Holyhead Road in the 1830s - between the abbey and the station, in the photograph.

Brunel's seems taller because he was so short!

Have you fitted brass pin-point bearing cups inside the axleboxes? And... how does it go round curves?

He was 5'0" and the hat is estimated at 8". Allowing for crown overlap, say 5'6" - certainly short enough to lie down safely in the four-foot* in the path of an oncoming BG train. *or should that be seven-foot?

Joseph Locke et al. didn't have a copy of these to hand...

That would be nice but probably simpler to start from scratch. (Like many a 4mm scale RTR conversion project...)

Maybe one of the original Midland 2441 Class engines, alas as rebuilt with Belpaire boiler. There are significant differences in the tanks (especially if one went for one of the condensing engines), bunker, and cab - the parts they haven't got. When you say frames and wheels, does that include cylinders and motion? (I see it has no siderods; the Butterley site says 'for spares' though some commentor on national-preservation.com mentions the 3F 0-6-0 idea which as we've seen is a no-go!)

As a teenager, I went Youth Hostelling by bike a few times with my father - a keener cyclist than I... I recall cycling home from Bridges Youth Hostel, on the west side of the Long Mynd - pushing up to the top, then walking down to Church Stretton as our brakes weren't up to the descent. We must have got some pedalling in after that but the other bit I remember is pushing up the hill out of Bridgnorth. We'd probably pushed up Wenlock Edge too, but I don't remember that. My father had a talent for picking Youth Hostels at the top of long hills, though I'll admit the rain probably wasn't his fault.

But isn't that chicken & egg? Isn't the restricted width at low level a consequence of having raised platforms, even if only 1'6" above rail height - a common dimension for many stations as built. Most of the comments above cover recent practice but the early story has its points of interest too. Early platforms often sloped gently down towards the line, for drainage I presume, to that 1'6" at the edge. Around the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century there seems to have been a move towards increased platform height - up to 3'0" above rail - which led to platforms sloping away from the edge. The tragedy of the Wellingborough accident of 1898 was that the up main platform was the only one at the station that hadn't been raised, so that unattended trolley was able to roll off the platform onto the line. Goods and cattle platforms were generally higher - 3'6"-ish - to make life easier when barrowing goods or walking livestock over the drop-flap wagon door. But these platforms weren't on running lines. At many stations that still have their nineteenth-century buildings, sunken or modified thresholds bear witness to increases in platform height, as do changes in the brickwork at the platform edge. Always an interesting study to while away the time waiting for your train!

I think the question is: how did platforms get to be as high as they are, given that they started being at little more than rail level, as they still are in places in many other countries today? Carriage floors have been at around 4'3" or so above rail level since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Consider where the passenger carriage came from: how do you get into a horse-drawn carriage?

Both the 2-6-2T classes just look as if they're dragging far too much baggage around with them for their boiler size. The Fowler engines had the G6S boiler which was a superheated version of the boiler used to rebuild the oldest Johnson 0-6-0s to Class 2F, so with the same sized cylinders (17.5" x 26"), it's no surprise they failed to justify their 3P classification. Compare the Class 2P 4-4-0s, which had G7S boilers - the superheated version of that fitted to the 3F 0-6-0s, and larger cylinders (19" x 26"). The Stanier engines didn't look quite so weedy, the taper boiler and bigger firebox giving them a bit more oomph, but when compared with the contemporary succession of enormously successful 4P 2-6-4T designs, one has to wonder what was going on.

What is the first carriage behind the B12/3? It appears to be an Eastern Region Buffet Car of pre-Grouping origin - Great Eastern?

I'm afraid that's no good. The G7 boiler fitted to the 3F rebuilds of the Johnson standard goods engines was an altogether larger affair than the G5 1/2 boiler of the reboilered 2441 Class tank engines and their younger brothers the LMS standard 3F tank engines. Most of the tender engines had 5'3" diameter driving wheels, though some (ex 1142 and 1698 Classes) had 4'11" drivers; the tank engines had 4'7". Frames are different. Cylinders and motion might be the same.

Looking very good - mine, somewhat smaller, is progressing through the paintshop... I confess to being just a little disappointed that you haven't actually used sheet metal for the sides!