Wolseley

I had three Hornby Dublo green Co-Co diesels, so I decided to turn the one with the least impressive paint job into something different, so here we have "Meld" in BR blue. All I need now are some blue and grey coaches for it to pull........

Well I wouldn't want to be travelling as a passenger in something like that......

There was a photo of a diecast railcar in the initial post yesterday, but it's not there today. Very strange....... I can't throw any light on what it is, but I thought it was probably inspired (if that be an appropriate word) by the Bugatti railcar rather than being anything approaching a model of it. A rather interesting relic nonetheless.

Or what about the Prince Gloria?

I just had a look in the section on Dinky Toys in The Products of Binns Road, by Peter Randall and, aside from observing that scales were anything from 00 to 0 to 1, and often in between, it throws no light on the situation. As an aside, and nothing to do with scales of models, I noticed the book mentions that, in January of 1956, two tone colours were introduced on a lot of the cars, under the advertising banner "Gayer than Ever". Which sounds like a copy of the Rootes Group's advertising slogan for the release of the 1956 Hillman Minx in September 1955 as the VIIIA deluxe Gay Look, with the car promoted as "the new two tone Gay Look Hillman Minx Deluxe". The first car my father had after we arrived in Australia was a 1955 Hillman Minx Mark VIII, so he narrowly missed out on having a "Gay Look".........

Very nice work. I have tackled an etched kit for a brake van and, as a result, have the utmost respect for anyone who tackles an etched kit for a locomotive. I wouldn't mind trying myself, but life is too short for me to take on something like that while I still have unmade whitemetal kits. It looks a lot more accurate than the 60 class I recently put together by marrying an old DJH kit with a Tri-ang Hall......

Were they maybe like Matchbox cars, where the scale was whatever it had to be for the vehicle to fit inside a standard sized box?

When I read that, the first thing that came to mind was Tony Hancock's film, "The Rebel", where Hancock plays a disillusioned office worker with aspirations to be a successful artist but, regrettably, no talent in that direction. Near the start of the film, he is seen working on a monumental sculpture, "Aphrodite at the Waterhole" or, as his landlady calls it, "That great ugly thing here".

I suppose my resolution would be to make a start on a few more of my stash of unmade whitemetal kits and convert them into models. I managed to do this with two of them in 2023 (or four if you count the repair and rebuilding of two already made GEM Cardeans). The two I did in 2023? The first one was a GEM NBR Glen, mounted on a Tri-ang L1 chassis. It's not an NBR Glen any more though - a bit of work changed it into a Highland Railway Big Ben. Second was a DJH Caledonian 60 class. After trying to make a workable chassis out of the DJH parts (I hasten to add that this was a very early DJH kit and the chassis components leave a lot to be desired) I gave up, got out a Tri-ang Albert Hall (with a damaged body) I had in storage, removed the superstructure of the body, modified a few bits and married it to the body parts of the DJH kit. Not perfectly to scale, of course, but as I run mostly vintage models, the compromises are acceptable (at least to me) and I now have a 60 class that runs reliably and can haul six tinplate coaches and could probably take more. So for 2024, I am aiming to do more of the same. With at least 15 unmade kits (I haven't counted them), my first job will be fitting a Tri-ang M7 chassis to a DJH Caledonian 439 class.

The locomotive isn't Dublo, but the track and coaches are. I haven't finished lining it yet, but here's my LMS liveried Cardean (GEM body and tender kit on a three-railed Tri-ang B12 chassis) hauling a train of Dublo LMS carriages. There are four on, but it can take more although, as my layout is only 8' by 4', more than four carriages look a bit silly. As I said, the coaches are Dublo, but it really looks at its best when hauling a train of Trix Twin "scale length" LMS coaches, of which I have four.

Here's my 15/60 at a club outing a few years ago:

Also known as "Bin Chickens" from their habit of feeding from garbage bins in urban areas. Very resourceful birds indeed.

NSW Suburban Set, R450, 2 coaches, no track for $11.00 (£5/5/-)! Sounds like almost as good a bargain today as Hattons advertising 3 rail Hornby Dublo Southern Region EMU power cars for 50/- (two rail were 65/-) in the April 1965 Railway Modeller (no trailer cars in their advertisement, maybe they were sold out). If only one could go back in time…….

From the rather playworn and retouched appearance of the transfers on the locomotive and tender, I'm tempted to suggest that it is an original Dublo "Canadian Pacific". It's impossible to say for sure though. I see no-one has put a bid on it yet.

There's nothing printed on them to identify the component, unlike other makes, but here's a photo of mine:

They look like they are spare bulbs for the building lighting kits that Meccano Ltd introduced around mid 1961

Well, I have now finished converting 3820 to three rail, using a Marklin skate. I fitted non-insulated wheels to the tender so that the pick-up from the outer rails is on all eight tender wheels and three of the driving wheels.. After I tried it out I noticed that it's missing its traction tyre, so that's something else for me to sort out. In the meantime I still have 3830 to take care of. Here's a video of 3820 on the layout, sans traction tyre. As you can see, it has no difficulty negotiating a diamond crossing, perhaps the most troublesome piece of Dublo trackwork (my layout was originally going to have two of them but, thankfully, one was eliminated in the planning stages)

Here's a link I found to a PDF copy of his well-known (well, it may not be now, but it was a few decades ago) booklet, "Cardboard Rolling Stock and How To Build It". "Cardboard Rolling Stock and How To Build It" I'm afraid though that my memory of ERG products centres around the three link couplings, which I recall being described once in the Railway Modeller, without being mentioned by name (not by CJF, but in one of the cartoons), as looking like "the anchor chain of the Queen Mary".

Interesting. I never knew what his first name was. I had only ever seen him referred to as E Rankine Gray.

I'm no expert on Wrenn but, from what I've seen, their shades of paint varied slightly from one batch to the next, so that a colour match that works for one locomotive might not work for another of the supposedly same colour. If it were me, I would just try mixing my own shade of black until I got it right.

If you were replacing the rails with nickel-silver rails or something similar but only on the straights, how would locomotives with Magnadhesion (which would be just about everything by Tri-ang from that period) behave when they moved from the non-steel rails on the straights to the steel rails on the curves? I suspect you might see some of them slowing down and slipping slightly where the track straightens out. I'm with 33C. This stuff is bullet-proof as long as you keep it clean. I would say it's a case of replace everything or nothing.

They arrived this morning and turned out to be in better condition than I was expecting. Here is the green one: As for the black one, I'm afraid I separated the body and chassis before I thought of taking a photograph, but here is one showing the locomotive and tender chassis. The driving wheels on the right have pick-ups, as do the tender wheels on the left, the tender being electrically linked to the locomotive by the drawbar. It looks like it should be pretty straightforward to convert it to 3 rail collection. I was surprised to see that the centre driver on these models was flanged - something I had obviously forgotten about. It's the rear driver that is geared to the motor and it has minimal side-play. The front driving wheels have a bit of side-play, but the centre ones have 3mm on each side.

Here are a few photographs I took today. As you may notice, I still have to letter the City of Bradford's tender and I have to paint Princess Alice's wheels blue.

Well, I should have them this weekend. I got a message from the vendor that he will be visiting someone in the suburb where I am on Sunday, so he'll drop them off rather than posting them. I have been thinking that I will number the black one 3827, as that was the only 38 class I saw that did not end up being preserved although, that said, it was awaiting scrapping and not in steam when I saw it. The green one, which is presently numbered 3830, will become 3813, for the reason that it was the only 38 class I saw in steam in revenue earning service, four months before it was withdrawn in September of 1970.

The Lima NSWGR C38 Pacific has been mentioned in this part of the forum before, as can be seen from the above posts. Why mention it now? Well, I just bought two of them. I saw two come up for sale on eBay at a low starting price and put in bids on each. One was an unlettered black one and the other a green one. I was expecting one or both to go for more than my maximum bid, otherwise I would only have bid on one, but bidding for both stopped just a few dollars under my last bid. I should have them in a few days, as the vendor is in Australia. In the meantime I have to figure out what I'm going to do with two of the things.......