Wolseley

I like the way the vendor went to the trouble to make a special box for it, presumably to mislead some gullible person into believing that it was cobbled together by someone who knew what they were doing.

I run HD three rail, but there's no way I would use an original controller. I use a pair of Gaugemaster Combi controllers without any problems and, more importantly, no risk of having 240 volts going through me.

When I use tinlets (or whatever you call the plastic things the paint comes in) I brush it carefully with a sable brush and, after it is well and truly dry, give the model a coat of clear satin or flat using a Tamiya aerosol can.

You can judge for yourself how close it is. I can see one obvious spot where it was touched up, but the colour match is pretty good, especially in normal light. And, as an aside, yes, it is a horseshoe magnet motor in there....

I used Humbrol LMS Crimson Lake (RC403) with a bit of black added for touching up mine. I can't say exactly how much black I added, I just added a brushload at a time until I got the shade that matched. You can't even see where it's been touched up, the match was so close.

The Co-Bo is not a particularly attractive locomotive, but I rather like it. It's unprototypical, I know, but I think it looks particularly good at the head of a train of Super Detail Southern Region carriages.

The underframe details of the Co-Bo leave a lot to be desired by modern standards, but that is part of the appeal of this model.

I don't have a problem with repainting anything unless it's in mint condition and exceptionally rare.

Actually, when it comes to electric points, the points are more reliable, in my experience, than the switches. I have had to discard several switches that looked to be in almost mint condition but, on inspection, turned out to have all the metal inside badly rusted.

1. Yes. I've done that on my layout. 2. Yes, unless they've been mistreated in the past. They might need a clean up and a spot of lubricant on the moving parts, but I've only had one instance of a burnt out solenoid. Occasionally point blades or check rails may be out of true, but they can be bent back fairly easily. 3. The locomotives weren't really designed for scale walking pace shunting over pointwork, so slightly higher than prototype speeds might be necessary, especially for diamond crossings. You might need to compromise a bit on shunting speed but, if you're using Dublo three rail track, you're already compromising on appearance, so it's no big deal. 4. Yes, in fact it should run better than a lot of 2 rail equipment, as the method of current collection is more efficient. Aside from dodgy bits of track that have had a hard life (watch out for centre rails bent downwards so that they touch or almost touch the trackbase, as that can cause short circuits) the most likely reasons for erratic running are poorly adjusted pickups (bent collector shoe springs can reduce performance considerably) and out of adjustment back to backs (14.2mm) 5. Sorry. Can't say. Mine's in a spare bedroom. Regards. Jim

A page from The Model Railway Encyclopaedia by Ernest F Carter (1950 edition):

Well, there's still a bit of work to do, but I think you can now see where this is headed. A model that Meccano Ltd neglected to produce: a Hornby-Dublo Highland Railway 39 class banking tank.

Here's a photograph I took of a Z19 at the long gone Darling Harbour goods yard in either 1969 or 1970. Doesn't look much like an LMS 3F, does it?

Interesting. That's the first time I have heard that given as the reason for the delay. I was going off the statement in "A Century Plus of Locomotives" (published 1965 by the Australian Railway Historical Society, as a revised edition of "A Century of Locomotives" - originally published by the Department of Railways, NSW) that: I suspect that the locomotives were available from stock (with standard Baldwin tenders) when ordered, but the impact of the Korean War, which began in June of 1950, was such that insufficient steel was available to build new tenders. This could mean that steel shortages due to the Korean War would quite likely have delayed the delivery, but only because shorter tenders were specified. If this is correct, we are both right...... Jim

One project I have on the back burner is to convert a Jouef 141R into a NSW Railways D59 class. The locomotive doesn't need too much work but the tender will require a bit of reconstruction. The resultant model will not be 100% accurate, as the tender will be too long but, as it's a tender driven model, I'm not going to try shortening it (the D59's were supplied with short tenders because the standard USRA Light Mikado's tender was too long to fit on a lot of the turntables on the lines where it was planned to use the engines - the modification substantially delayed the delivery of locomotives that should have been available "off the shelf").

The C38 wasn't too bad in its day, but the tender was all wrong. Rather than a model of a C38 tender, Lima used one from an existing model of theirs - an SNCF 141R I think.

Gianni Rogliatti's book, "Leica, the First Fifty Years", contains a list of all such names used by Leitz (their use was discontinued around 1960 in favour of a numeric system). There are probably 75-80 names on each page, and the list takes up 30 pages. One of their epidiascopes has a name that few English speakers would dare to pronounce in polite company......

Well, I never found out what that one sold for, but there's another one ( a boxed two car set) coming up for auction on Monday. Not exactly mint, but about as close to mint as you're likely to find. The estimate is $500–$1,000 and bidding starts at $300. (Lot 17) https://antiquetoys.com.au/pages/auctions/auction_image.php?ref=https://antiquetoys.com.au/pages/auctions/fmta_itemlist.php&title=First Monday Toy Auction&subtitle=March 2022&itemcode=GB161&lotnum=17

And just to show that I actually did use the Leica for taking photographs of my model railway, here are two of them. There has been a fair bit of scenic work done since I took these. Time to take some more photos, I think.

I have actually gone back to using a film camera, mostly in black and white, in preference to digital, not that there have been too many opportunities for photography over the last couple of years. Here are a couple of photographs I took a while ago in the Queen Victoria Building, a rather upmarket three storey shopping arcade that takes up a whole block in the Sydney CBD. Taken on Ilford XP2 using a 1934 Leica IIIa fitted with a 1936 uncoated f3,5 5cm Elmar: And here is the camera lined up to take a photo of one of mt Dublo 0-6-2T's, using the unfortunately named "NOOKY" close up attachment:

I used the gentle tweaking with a screwdriver technique. It worked - this time.....

I've never seen that happen before. Obviously now it's a candidate for stripping and repainting....

It's getting there. It just needs one more coat of. the base body colour and then the smokebox, roof and other black bits, and the buffer beams and so on. And I have to paint the wheels.....

Well, a bit more work done on it tonight and It is ready for its first coat of paint tomorrow. As far as the body is concerned, I filled the gap on the footplate with Tamiya Putty where the bunker had been extended (the sides had already been patched with some styrene sheet), a funnel that looks more like a funnel has been fitted (an old Crown Line fitting intended for a B12 - not right for what I’m doing here, but the right length of funnel would look wrong due to the boiler being a bit too high) and a safety valve cover added (fashioned by hand from one cut off a scrap Tri-ang Albert Hall which was then sawn in half and about 2mm of styrene sheet glued in-between the two halves, the whole thing then being filed to shape before being glued on). I did have a problem with the chassis when I tested it (it was a spare picked up cheaply on eBay a couple of years or so ago for spares). I had tested it previously but only ran it in a forward direction and it ran well but with the occasional stutter (for lack of a better word) which I put down to it not having been run for a few decades. This time, however, I also tested in in reverse but, instead of running, it moved about a quarter of an inch and started making nasty buzzing sounds as the mechanism locked up. After that, it needed a bit of persuasion to run forwards as well. A bit of dismantling and poking around and I realised what the problem was. It seems it was cobbled together from bits and pieces for sale as a running chassis and two parts didn’t match. The armature had an early model coarse thread and the gearwheel was a late model fine thread. A rummage through my spares box produced a coarse thread gearwheel from an 0-6-2T and, once fitted, the chassis ran perfectly in both directions. This did, of course, necessitate the removal of one wheel, which is something I don’t like doing with a Dublo chassis. Anyway, here it is now:

I do have this tendency to start on a project before I've even got the previously started one even halfway, but I suspect I'm not alone in that. Yesterday I got one of my part finished projects out and, with any luck, I might even get it finished this time: