Wolseley

Now that might be an interesting subject - what cars did we use for our daughter's/son's/own wedding. For our eldest daughter's wedding, we hired two Vanden Plas Princess limousines. For our youngest daughter, four FX4 taxis (three black ones and one white one for the bride and parents of the bride). For our own wedding, all those years ago, my father-in-law (who worked at a wedding reception hall and had some useful connections for the day) arranged for two W114/W115 model Mercedes Benz - I think that one was a limousine and the other a sedan, but I'm not sure.

Just to give things a bit more variety, I have now got myself a Trix Warship and a green Trix 66XX 0-6-2 tank. Both with third rail pick-ups and convertible wheels. After removing the plastic things (I don't know the right name for them) on the backs of the wheels, the Warship ran very well. The 0-6-2 tank, less so, as it kept sticking at one point (always the same one) but I found that the problem was that the front part of the third rail collector kept jamming in the space between the third rail and the point blade. After a bit of attention to the collector from a pair of needle nosed pliers, all was well and the locomotive did circuit after circuit of the track. I think I might change those ghastly wheels on the pony truck though.

Yes, I noticed that mistake.

Austin A40 (Farina) Austin A60 Austin A99 Austin Lancer (Series II) Morris Major (Series II) Morris Major Elite Morris Oxford (Series VI) MGA 1600 Riley One-Point-Five (Mk II and III) Wolseley 1500 (Mk II and III) Wolseley 6/99 Wolseley 6/110

Here's a made up model (if that be the right description) of the familiar Airfix Railbus. You can "Buy it Now" for £20.25, which is £20.25 (plus postage) more than it's worth. http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/AIRFIX-MODEL-No-R201-B-R-RAILBUS-CONTRUCTION-KIT-BUILT-/301900825840?hash=item464ab104f0:m:mBeqEvbcHbtGxcF96DKgwvg

The photo of it taken from above makes it look rather like a model of an open cut mine.

I don't know the exact dimensions, but I would be surprised if it wasn't a bit bigger. But as far as external appearances are concerned, you would probably only notice it if you stood the two cars next to each other though.

Seeing the references to the Ford Granada, I thought you might want to make a comparison with the Australian Ford Falcon. Here are 1980 examples of both. That was the year when the two cars looked more alike than ever before or since: Granada: Falcon: The only obvious external difference is the size of the side windows, those on the Falcon being deeper, which I think suits the car better.

Or, for £74.99 you can have a Dublo 0-6-2T complete with tender: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hornby-DUBLO-MODEL-No-EDL7-0-6-2-LMS-6917-TANK-LOCOMOTIVE-WITH-TENDER-WORKING-/252276946820?hash=item3abce0b784:g:1OQAAOSwpzdWs2KZ This has been on eBay for quite a few months but, for some reason, no-one seems to want it.

You never know what you might find in the local supermarket car park - in this case a remarkably well kept 1970/71 holden Kingswood:

Not yet. It's still struggling along with a less than perfect power supply. I just bought two more locos that are currently in transit and I don't think it would be a good move to buy new controllers at the moment. I'll wait until a few weeks have gone by.

I can't claim any credit for being clever (or should that be devious?) about it though. We bought our dining suite in 1982, long before I had any Hornby Dublo items.

Just for fun, I Googled "Triumph Harold" and found that one of the results was a Daimler Conquest: Sort of appropriate.....

In case you're wondering what he saw:

We had someone call around yesterday afternoon about the kitchen renovation we are having done. I still had the trains set out on the dining room table from when our grandson was over a couple of days ago, and our dining room is positioned where anyone walking through the house sees into the room as they walk down the hallway, and the kitchen is at the back of the house. He talked about them with me for about 15 minutes, asked to see them running and took a video on his mobile phone of Sir Nigel Gresley and the 8F doing circuits of the track. He was born in 1964, so he had never encountered 3 rail Dublo before.

Once and once only, about 45 years ago, at that age when we are inclined to do stupid things and not think of the consequences. It got a bit too scary as speedometer climbed past 90, and I applied the brakes at that point, as I could tell that my control over the car was rapidly disappearing. The car in question was a 1969 Holden Premier (with the 3 litre six, not the V8). I'm not sure now, but I think the maximum speed was somewhere in the region of 105 to 110 mph.

Another one arrived today. Now I have nine. Maybe I need one more to make it an even number, but I think I'll stop accumulating them after that.

There were a fair few cars of the late 1940s/early 1950s that did not have boot lids and not all of them were at the lower end of the market. Early Jowett Jupiters were another car with this feature (or should I say, lack of this feature).

So it appears that the easiest solution to my problem is to replace the one controller I have with two separate ones. It does mean spending some money, but I don't really mind that, as I want to be able to run two trains at the same time, and I don't really like sliding controls much anyway. Also, in years to come, whatever layout I end up with will be likely operated by two people (it isn't at the moment, as my grandson is only 2) and having two separate controllers, aside from fixing the problem I have at the moment, would make operation by two people a bit easier. I'm not too keen on buying second-hand controllers, especially if they are to be around 50 or 60 years old. Are there any fairly basic (and hopefully it would follow that they are relatively inexpensive) controllers currently on the market that I should be considering?

I have only ever seen two Metropolitans. It was back in the mid 1970s and they were both sitting together in someone's back garden in Kirkcaldy (I can't remember exactly where in Kirkcaldy it was, but they were visible from the railway, as I saw them while I was going from Montrose to Edinburgh by train). One of them was the same colours as this one. Given that Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes are both in Fife, I wonder if it's the same car?

That was, of course, a reference to the corellas and not our friends.

We were visiting some friends of ours in Burradoo (just south of Bowral) today and there was a flock of about 50 corellas that kept circling the area and stopping in trees all around the property. They were making quite a lot of noise for about 45 minutes or so and then flew off. After that, the thunder started and it rained very heavily, but just for a short time.

Thanks for the responses so far. I tried setting it up again, with the same result. If I remove the points and replace them with straight track, both trains operate as they should. Here is how the track is wired (bear in mind that this is a temporary set up on a table only at this stage). There are no breaks in the insulation of the wires that run underneath the outer oval - in any case, I tested this by lifting up the track so that it wasn't touching the insulation, but the result was the same: This is the controller I am using. It is not a controller that I would choose to use, as I do not really like sliding controls. It just happened to be sitting in a box in the garage unused since the 1980s, so if I can use it, it means I have a bit of money I can spend on other things. The main reason I used it was that it was there already. It seems to have an intermittent fault which may or may not have any bearing on all this. It does at times emit a noticeable buzzing noise and very occasionally the power to the rails stops suddenly, although it is inevitably restored after a quick thump on the side of the controller - a wire inside touching something it shouldn't maybe?

I had some tracks set up on the dining room table this week to amuse our grandson (and me too of course). It’s a fairly basic train set type design with a reverse curve, a siding or two and a turntable. Yesterday I decided to try something a bit more adventurous for next week (we baby sit him three days a week). After our daughter picked him up, I started adding a second oval of track (our dining room table is just wide enough for this) and joined the inner and outer ovals with a pair of manually operated isolating points. This was the only connection between the two ovals. Just to be on the safe side I put an isolating tab between the two points. When I applied the power to either oval of track, I found that the locomotives on both ovals started to move at the same time. This is the first time I have ever rigged up something that requires two locomotives to run at the same time independently of one another so, what with my lack of experience at running two trains at once and my rather basic understanding of electrics, I’m at a bit of a loss as to why it didn’t work properly. Obviously something is not right, but I’m not sure what I have done wrong (unless there is something funny going on inside the controller). I have attached photos of the underside of the points, to show what I did. Can anyone explain to me what went wrong?

We get mostly the white sulphur crested cockatoos (sometimes in flocks of 50 or 60), but also corellas and galahs. Rainbow lorikeets are regular visitors to our garden. No black cockatoos, although the area we live in is fairly built up - maybe there are some black ones in the rather extensive bushland around my suburb. I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of them flying overhead on at least one occasion.