RANGERS

I've acquired one of these as a first step towards DCC having set out to buy an NCE Powercab (there was a great deal on offer thanks to the Hobbyhorse 25% discount a few weeks back). The wireless thing was the clincher but I've yet to test it, the intention of doing it with the rolling road this weekend was put on hold thanks to storm damage to the railway shed which needed urgent attention. Looking to try it next weekend now. Now have a bit more flexibility after acquiring a used Multimaus so it'll be interesting to compare the two modes of operation with my DCC chipped locos.

Well deserved, a great shop run by a super team.

Barnstaple was the subject of a pretty detailed study in the first Model Railway Compendium

One of the East Lincs line bridges ended up at Sycamore Lakes campsite and fishery at Burgh Le Marsh. It was still there spanning one of the lakes a couple of years back and I guess still is.

Sounds like there's 375 cheap pianos needed..... http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FTf1siNx5_4

In 1994- 5 there was a loco hauled set which worked one return trip a day on the MML, I think from Derby to St Pancras and back. Diagrammed for 2 x 31s, the down train was 17.15 out of St Pancras and became a bit famous in it's day. The stock was from Etches Park and did change during the lifetime of the diagram but it did include NSE stock. Fallback loco was usually a 47 although I believe a single 37 worked it once or twice. In the opposite direction, NSE stock appeared in the excursion sets from Sheffield and Nottingham to Skegness, as did Scotrail, Sealink and Inter City, often in mixed sets. These would also have been Etches Park sets so it seems likely that they inherited a number of them as they were cascaded out.

I can't be certain of the date but I'm pretty sure it was in June, possibly early July (school hadn't broken up for Summer hols) and it was a Saturday.

I was at Toton for that open day. 44008 was painted up specially for it and I could have been in the cab on that shot! I still have a penny which she ran over, there's probably thousands of them around it seemed like everyone there that day had one. It was quite a day, DMU trip from the disused platform of the east side of Nottingham station to Toton and then a day among what seemed like hundreds of blue diesels. There were at least three green 20s at Toton that day, 147 and 157 I think were two of them but I'm not certain, there were probably more than three even.

Magnificent stuff!

Just about sums up what I came across, it was in a much worse state than I'd guess it ever was in its time at Barry. Very sad to see it but given its current state, I'd doubt it'll ever be in a complete state again, let alone steam.

I came across an LMS Crab in a very rural area of Lincolnshire a few weeks ago, the wheels had been removed from the frames and running plate and the cab was separate from the rest of it but it was unmistakable. I'll keep the location under wraps to keep the metal fairies away but I'm more than a little curious as to what it was doing there? Presumably it was there for some part of restoration but it was an odd place to find it, any information would I'm sure suppress my curiosity.

Acquired a Princess yesterday and apart from the steering wheel having moved (it's horizontal above the dash!), it looks pretty much perfect to me. About their best yet IMHO

Every time this thread crops up again, I come up with a completely different list of layouts. There have been so many inspirational layouts which have formulated my thinking over the past 40 or so years, I doubt I could ever produce the definitive list. The Border layouts and early P4 BR blue layouts of Ian Futers were the ones which sprung to mind this morning as I was laying out a couple of points on a board.

Inspirational stuff here. Puts me in mind of the Iain Rice layouts of the '80s which inspired so many around that period, this one takes the ideas to a new generation of modellers.

That's true, it's a bit of a rarity but if you allow for the changes of ownership of the original business, there are one or two examples, not least of which was the Routemaster fleet, some of which saw 40+ years. I know of one coach operator who ran a coach from new until it finally went for preservation in 2009 at the tender age of 36. Specialist vehicles are usually the most numerous, we've a few tractors around here which comfortably exceed 40 years and one which is now in it's 64th year. There's a Coles crane with a local steel fabricator which is now approaching 40 and still road legal, although I can't say if they've had it from new but it is a local plate so quite possible.

I'm not sure if they still survive, but Kirby & West Dairy in Leicester used to have a fleet of milk floats which were antique, I'd guess 30s- 40s maybe. They were around when I was in Leicester regularly in the late 1990s but may have finally been pensioned off by now. Update - evidently they are still around although some of the floats aren't as old as they appear, something of a retro exercise.

WOW! It's 20 years since I was last in Malta and there were a good few relics out there then but I'd expected that thy'd mostly have disappeared by now. The 1600E Cortina looks fabulous, the same colour as one of the three I owned in the '80s. I wonder what the condition of the spare wheel well, sills and strut tops is like, mine rotted faster than we could weld them up.

Black fives were common in Skeg' as were 4Fs. There's a photo of a Jubilee on the GNR Friargate line heading a Birmingham - Skegness train in East Midland Branch Line Album. It's possible it didn't run through but may well have done. There's several pics around of Crabs heading for Skegness/ Mablethorpe, one of them was taken at Boston so that one almost certainly made it there.

That would be where I was thinking of, I suspect it was a bit earlier though, from where I was working at the time I visited, pre-1988 I'd guess. They published a couple of "catalogues", actually A4 duplicated sheets listing various items. One covered locomotives and rolling stock IIRC, another was road vehicle kits which contained, as well as the usual Langley/ Westward/ ABS etc, other kits I'd never previously come across including Mi-Kits. I'd say that the Goxhill and Firsby businesses were one and the same, quite how the Chris Crawley name came into it, I'm not sure but possibly it had passed with the stock when the Tottenham business closed?

I wondered what the connection between Kings Cross and deepest Lincs was! I'm presuming Brian had the retail shop which opened in the filling station at Irby in the Marsh (Chris Crawley Models?), the next village up from Firsby. When I went there in about 1988, there was a pile of items which had obviously come from Kings Cross, most notably some of the built bus kits which once resided in the display case at York Way, a Dominant 111 from a Pirate kit was one I particularly recall. IIRC there was a woman in the shop at the time who told me that they'd moved from North Lincs, Brigg area I seem to remember it was. A year or two later, the retail side had combined with the manufacturing side and Irby had closed, the two being combined in the outbuildings of the former Station Hotel at Firsby (it wasn't the Station House, that was adjacent to the former station). I visited one gloriously sunny afternoon and bought several bus books, one about Sheffield United Tours the most memorable. Almost a couple of decades later, 2004/ 5, I bought some items on Ebay which were located in Skegness. As we were there regularly at that point, I asked the vendor if I could collect and when they gave me the address it was the same place. It turned out the seller was the daughter/ daughter in law (Brians presumably) and they were clearing the last of the stock, I seem to think the place was for sale and they were moving. I think I asked what the connection was but she didn't know. I seem to think Brian Robinson (Brians Kits and Bits) ultimately ended up with some of the stock.

Nice weathering job on the wagons. I'd need to check the IRS record but I'm fairly sure one of the L&Y type pugs was used in the works at Corby. One point is the BSCO wagons were built by Chas Roberts to an order from Stewarts & Lloyds to carry coking coal, not ore. Ironstone is pretty dense and therefore fairly heavy by comparison to coal. With just 16t gross weight, these wagons would have been able to carry very little ore. Ironstone wagons were usually rated at 20t plus for wagons of this size, 27t in the case of the BR std tipplers. They saw service for over forty years, from pre-war to 1980 when Corby finally closed.

Anyone a former customer of The Model Shop in Lincoln Rd, Peterborough? Up the back staircase of the electrical shop downstairs was a mecca for modellers of all persuasions, particularly finescale modellers with a preference for the Eastern part of the country. Being our best, local "proper" model shop, I was a regular visitor for over 20 years until Chris and his Mum finally shut up shop in about 2002. I still see them at shows from time to time, even still selling the remaining oddments behind the club sales stall at Market Deeping MRC show!

I remember this place well. I found a stash of Airfix mineral wagon kits there in the eighties when they were like rockin horse manure.

Solido did a very good London Transport RT in the 1980s, they can be picked up faitly readily at swapmeets. The Altaya Bedford TJ is a superb model and was fairly common on the roads into the 1980s, It lasted in production for the UK until about 1975 and for export beyond that

'Not sure of the origins of the underframes but the wagons were built from redundant stock in the main repair shops at Corby. They were internal user only, used mainly as in this shot for transporting scrap tubes from the tubeworks back to the blast furnaces for re-processing. They were pretty rudimentary in their construction, angle iron and tube, and had a hard life, not lasting long. I presume the underframes were re-used for as long as they were serviceable, having new bodies at regular intervals.