The Johnster

The fundamental problem is the same as it’s always been; model railways are impractically large in the sort of homes the majority of us live in, anything short of a mansion or castle in fact, and it is often impractically expensive to provide other accommodation for them that is climatically suitable for the models or the operators, unless compromises to scale are included so that the models can negotiate curves which are much sharper than scale. If if this is not done, the models can be made much closer to scale, but space-devouring scale curvature must be used and the models must be sprung/compensated unless track and baseboards are billiard table level. These are very big asks in domestic situations. This is is true irrespective of the scale, the gauge, or whether the gauge is correct for the scale. Like Jason, I’m thoroughly wedded, even permanently welded, to commercial standard RTR 00!

And the coach, incorrect livery for the loco's period, screams poor quality exhibition club layout to me!

Harlequin's colour chart is very useful. I use Maplin's anglepoise LED strips, but the principle is the same in regard to colour 'warmth'. Maplin's are as the snows of yesteryear, sadly, but I am sure similar lamps can still be found. They are bright enough, 'diffuse' well, and adjustable, with 3 brightness settings and 3 'warmth' settings, having 2 strips of cool lights and a central warm strip. The 3 settings are all cool, all warm, or mix. I rarely use all warm, unless I am trying to reproduce a bright evening ambience, as the effect I am going for is that of a dull and overcast day, the most common weather in the South Wales valleys that I model, and for most hilly areas. The sun is behind the mountain for much of the time even on sunny days, and we don't get those East Anglian big skies. The natural light in the railway room is subdued daylight, so when the real weather is dull and overcast the anglepoises can be used on 'cool' as 'fill' lighting at low brightness and the brightness can be increased as real night approaches. As the room lighting is pretty white and neutral, and not particularly bright, the layout lighting takes over in a fairly effective way. Angle is very important; my view is that typical layout lighting is far too warm and far too directly overhead, unless you are modelling the tropics. Real daylight in these latitudes illuminates the sides of stock and buildings much more than such directly overhead lighting sources can, so my anglepoises are offset to the front of the layout. This can give trouble with shadows when I am leaning in to uncouple, but looks ok when I'm sitting in the operating seat. Natural daylight with some low level cool fill from the anglepoises is best, and I can replicate different weather and seasonal lighting conditions to some extent. I had all sorts of plans at one time for strip lighting on gantries but in practice am quite happy with this setup, only ever originally intended to be temporary but unlikely now to be replaced. And my lighting doesn't overheat...

Couple of standpipes as well, I imagine and some hose for cleaning the pens when they are empty as well as filling the troughs. And you need some sort of storage for the feed. My standpipes came with a Ratio kit but I can't remember which one offhand; possibly fence posts.

Very salient points, John. But this is really because both EM and P4 are attempts to combine respectively a closer to and to a more or less accurate track gauge in 4mm/foot scale, with corresponding flange and flangeway dimensions, with finer scale modelling. It is, in a sense, the opposite side of the track gauge coin. 00 track is the wrong gauge for the scale, H0 is correct, but no real attempt at fine scale is made in H0; commercial flangeways and 'slop' allow big locos to negotiate sharp curves. There is no 4mm modelling at the correct track gauge comparable to commercial H0 at it's correct track gauge A more 'like for like' comparison would be 'coarse' scale 4mm RTR similar in standard to the current 00 models, but with 18.83mm gauge track, something which to my knowledge has never been attempted, as in UK modelling, scale gauge always means fine scale modelling. But a coarse scale pacific for 18.83mm track would probably be able to manage no.4 and possibly even no.3 radius curves, with the tension lock couplings preventing buffer lock. The overall look would be an improvement on 00; some of the coarse scale compromises would still be there of course, but the proportions of track gauge to stock of the correct width would make the appearance much more acceptable, especially in a front or rear view, and splashers and brake detail would fall naturally into the correct places. More room would be available between frames, perhaps for working inside motion. And the sort of layours that we are used to in 00 4mm would still be capable of being fitted into spaces only a little bigger. My own railway would not be possible in EM or P4 despite being 'only a small BLT' because of exactly the curvature issues you have pointed out; it wouldn't fit in the room. Like (I suspect) the majority of our layouts, it exploits the space available for it to the maximum and gets away with it because of the leeway granted it by sloppy sideplay and overscale flanges, i.e. commercial 00 scale standards. Interestingly, when I commenced building it, I intended to use scale couplings and a minimum 30" radius curve to prevent buffer locking, because that is what my stock was fitted with from previous layouts. I rapidly came to realise that my eyesight and steadiness of hand had deteriorated in the decades since I last had a railway, and I had to revert to tension locks because I couldn't manage the scale couplings. Once I had accepted this compromise and decided to live with it, the sharper curvature I was able to deploy at the fiddle yard entrance enabled an increase in length of my coal trains from 7 to 11 wagons and a van, and I was able to convert a 4 road fiddle yard to a 7 roader; it has transformed the operating and the timetable I am able to run to. This very succinctly summarises the points you were making! The 30" minimum still applies on the scenic section of the layout, except for 24" loco release crossover, and the gentle curvature of the formation, intended to evoke a railway built on a ledge on a hillside, a very typical South Wales valleys situation, looks well (well, it does to me, anyway!). I have achieved the overall appearance I was trying to achieve, running standards are good, and operation very satisfying, though this sort of thing isn't for everyone. It is not a model railway, it is a real railway that serves an imaginary mining village, it's colliery, it's populace, and it's local businesses in the 1950s, but small. It is operated to the 1955 BR Rule Book and General Appendix with some imagined Sectional Appendix instructions. I'm happy with it, and as much as I would love to portray it in in P4, I would be unable to because of lack of space even before considering my lack of modelling skill and ability to build models of that sort.

More empty promises than a prime minister, but I've actually made a start on the glazing today. This has proven more fiddly than I'd planned, there being very little room because of the inside shape of the side castings and the various positioning and assembly ridges to just cut a piece of glazing and back glue them. There is only about a scale inch above and below the window reveals. Jobs about ¾ done, but my hands have gone all trembly and that's my lot for today. I'm using the same back glazing technique with Glue'n'Glaze as glue as I did on the E116; this at least dries clear and seems to hold the glazing in place reliably. Should finish tomoz, or whenever the next session is, and once the no smoking triangles are in place and I make a decision about passengers, the roof can go on. Passengers are a bit of a problem, ones that look like workaday valleys types from the 50s and not brightly dressed stylish holidaymakers or city gents are thin on the ground, and my coaching stock spends the bulk of it's time on the visible part of the layout standing in the platform anyway and proportionally not much being hauled about in revenue service; not the end of the world if I leave it empty. Another Dart Castings detailing kit for the cab will have to go in before I permanently fix the roof on, though. I'm modelling the rh cab window open.

I believe they were intended to replace the M7s on their original outer suburban heavy commuter duties, or at least such of them as were not to be electrified for a while. The M7s were never really branch engines either, but had by BR days been cascaded on to all sorts of minor work, including push-pulls.

Turnouts are the vital point (sorry, there really was no excuse for that!). I reckon I am capable of building plain chaired track in P4, having done it in 00, but not a turnout, having tried and failed in 00. And, sadly, I think the stable door closed after the horse bolted about 30 years ago, both in terms of scale gauge 4mm track or scale H0 British outline stock. The trade is very firmly committed to current 00 standards, which ensure compatible running and at least a nod to compatible couplings; it would, I suspect be very difficult (read, pretty much impossible) to get a stock exchange floated manufacturer to back anything other than the current 00 setup. The Hornby Dublo lesson of not toeing the line and going under while deluding themselves that the customers would still buy higher quality but more expensive models (that weren't actually higher quality but could be argued to have been better engineered) still lurks in the minds of their managements and the better informed of their investors. Wrenn never made much money off them.

When the railway was nationalised, the beginning of 1948, orders that had already been made by the previous companies for materials with which to build projected stock and had bee accepted by the suppliers had to be honoured. There was little to lose by building the projected locos, which had been already paid for and took until the mid 50s at Swindon. As well as the 'lots' already in progress at nationalisation, new locos were laid down having been fully authorised by BR. These were the 'production' lower boiler pressure 94xx, 15xx, and 16xx. The thinking behind the 94xx was a continuation of the policy of replacing pre-grouping South Wales locos with modern GW standard equipment, the 15xx was an adaptation of the USATC 0-6-0s which had proved very useful as dock shunters, and the 16xx was a modern version of the 2021 lightweight panniers being withdrawn then; there were still jobs that needed their route availability. In the same way, the last lot of 96xx series 8750s were being built until 1950 to replace 2721s. In fact the 15xx found their most well known use as Paddington ecs pilots, which they were not suitable for but 'looked modern' (nobody minded the antediluvian looking M7s over at Waterloo) to the public. The last panniers produced were the 84xx series of 94xx in 1955. A loco on my layout, 8448, was built in 1954 and withdrawn in 1959, barely run in. The 1951 J72s were produced at Darlington, where they'd been originally designed and built, and are often cited as a case of short sighted policy, but there was a perceived need to replace older J71 locos that were life expired and the diesel shunters did not have the speed or stability required for some of the trip and pickup freight work they were to do. Requested to provide such locos, Darlington built the most suitable they had in the drawing office, J72s; had the order gone to Doncaster, J50s might have resulted, and maybe Stratford would have turned out J69s... Regarding the 57xx as the largest class depends on period and what you define as a class. The LNWR had over a thousand 'Cauliflower' 0-6-0 goods engines, but they were on their way out as the last 8750s were built in 1950. The GW regarded the 8750 as a different class to the 57xx because of weight differences, and this does not address the 67xx, 6750, and 97xx variants (steam reverse/no vacuum brake, and condensing locos for the 'widened lines'. Black 5s had several variations of boilers, fireboxes, valve gears, chimneys, and running plates, all of which affected the weight. The Cauliflowers were far more 'standard' in this respect.

It is my view that the GW missed an opportunity at the grouping to concentrate Pontypridd-Cardiff passenger traffic on the Cardiff Railway, which ran through the more heavily populated eastern side of the Taff valley, releasing the 4 track TVR for more mineral paths or a faster non-stop to Ponty passenger service. The outcome of this by the 70s would have probably been that the A470 would have obliterated the TVR between Radyr and Pontypridd, regaining it's current route near Treforest.

I have now some experience of Parkside NEM pockets which I have fitted to various non-NEM stock, and found that cyano is fine for sticking 'em to the chassis floor, but be careful of your positioning so that the coupling neither sticks out too much but still clears the buffers. I attach it to the pocket, line it up on the floor of the wagon, and scratch a mark on the floor for the back of it to align to. If I were to have any more Airfix/Dapol/Kitmaster wagons (and I'm thinking about another meat van) now, I'd fit couplings using this method. I am trying to standardise on Bachmann straight shank short NEMs where possible, but ensuring the heights match on what should be a standard system is a whole nother thing!

Having suffered a loft layout in my teens, which tore itself apart with expansion and contraction because of the temperature range, which made it uncomfortable for much of the year; even on cold winter days it was uncomfortably hot if the sun was out, and below freezing otherwise. And, at the risk of sounding like a typical ancient curmudgeon, we had proper winters in those days, kids terday, don't know they're born.. I had previously had the layout banished to the garage, which was not quite as bad, but was evicted when father bought a cheap car that needed working up. Since then, I have managed to stick to the principle that my railway must be housed in the living area of the home, where the environment is suitable for human occupation in terms of heating, ventilation, and humidity. This has meant that for a good part of my life I have had to forego having a railway at all, but I have been re-assured that this is the correct approach by some time involved with a club that occupied unheated premises. I deserve better than that for myself. So, my opinion about loft or shed/garage layouts is that they are all very well, but you must spend a good bit of time and money making them habitable, at which time the household authorities have other ideas and boot you out. Sadly, few UK homes really have the space for layouts, unlike the US where most homes have cellars the size of the building's footprint that can be used for such activity. Modern, by which I mean post 1960s, British homes often do not have suitably built attics even for anything more than storage of light items. Inglenooks and planks are one of the results. A childhood friend whose layout I often visited who lived in a similar early Edwardian terrace to me had what I thought at the time was an excellent situation, a partitioned room about 10' x 8' for an 8' x 4' layout in an attic space, well insulated from the attic and effectively warmed and dehumidified by heat rising from the house below. It was accessed by a retracting ladder in a ladder cupboard on the upstairs landing, separate from the trapdoor accessing the water header tank. This made the room safe from the acquisitive eye of his mum! I had much more space and a bigger, though not better, layout in my attic, and learned my lesson!

What Trevor said. Back in those days, it was still considered that to break into the market you had to produce a basic range of train sets, and these had to be compatible in terms of ride height and buffer position, not to mention couplings and a standard flangeways for standard running with the other manufacturers, which at that time was effectively Triang Hornby and maybe Peco. Hornby Dublo had paid the price of resisting this and the market was unforgiving, and the newcomers must have been well aware of this. The only people who made a significant attempt to bring HO to the UK market were Lima, who were castigated for their efforts. They were very much orientated to the train set market, and might have made more impact had they gone a bit more 'scale', but the modeller business was less important to the manufacturers. An opportunity was certainly missed, attention being perhaps unintentionally diverted by EM and P4 and the hope that somebody would someday produce track, turnouts, and RTR stock or at least retrofit chassis for this. The 00 compromise affected splashers and other measurements too much for this to ever happen, but I believe, and I was there at the time, that lack of RTP track and especially turnouts was and still is the main barrier to the adoption of EM or P4 standards. Please, don't use this as an excuse to re-open the gauge debate... I am guessing that the Fleischmann models referred to would have been at the same 3.8mm to the foot scale that Trix produced UK outline models in. I had a Trix Western CKD in this scale, which was a fine runner though the bogies were a bit wierd, but it had incompatible couplings and looked very obviously too small, which of course it was, against my Triang scale length coaches. It's too late now; the trade is absolutely committed to the 00 compromise, and does, IMHO, very well in providing us with realistic, accurate, well detailed models within it's frustrating limitations.

This is not a million miles away sizewise from my layout, Cwmdimbath , a location not a million miles away from the ‘Llantrisant valleys’ in a time period not a million miles away from 1952. The saga of this layout’s continuing development can be found as ‘South Wales in the 1950s’ over on Layout topics, but you’ve probably got a life... If not, and my feeble scribblings and crude modelling are any help to you, I’d be delighted! I chose to model my colliery offstage, but with a connection demanding that both loaded and empties have to be run around and the vans shunted. This saves the length required for a colliery extension further up the valley, almost the default in South Wales. The track ace plan is not rocket science, a passenger terminus with a run around, ‘inspired by’ Abergwynfi, but with the addition of a goods platform and a kickback to light industry. If is deceptively difficult to shunt efficiently in real time and clear the platform road for timetabled traffic; this means that I am unlikely to get tired of operating it within the 20 years (if I’m lucky) I have before I’ve gone too gaga for it to matter... It is, as the above suggests, intended to be my final layout, and aside from that grim thought, I am thoroughly enjoying it; if you get anything like the amount of pleasure out of yours as this is continuing to give me, you’ll be very satisfied with it!

I agree, but past experience suggests that this cannot be made to work without regulation, as private investment insists on cherry picking the big payouts (as they are duty bound to their shareholders to do), and we live in a culturally competitive society that promotes enterprise and individual effort and decries collective or centralised interference, i.e. regulatory control. The result is that such control is often ineffective, almost by design. Meanwhile, academics propose well intentioned integrated transport networks (in South Wales we have the ‘Cardiff Metro’, and you’ve prolly got some similar plan in your area) that’ll never be implemented and which diverts attention from the lack of effort to tackle existing problems.

120s frequently appear on wishlist polls. My view is that they are the biggest open goal in the business; a good period and geographical spread and including the very popular WR 'green diesel/steam' changeover period. Maybe Bachmann, using their new 117 underpinnings...

Agree with almost all of these last few posts; Bob Reid was the boss who turned the tide, best boss BR ever had and it was when I was on the railway... Hindsight is always 20/20, foresight isn't ever 20/20, which is why I made the point that long term forward planning is not as easy as it looks. Easy now to forget and dismiss the general zeitgeist of the early 60s. My father, a fairly intelligent sort of bloke (certainly more so than me), predicted the closure of all railways with the possible exception of some the London commuter network and the Underground for their trackbeds to be converted to high speed roads, 2 lane mostly but on which lorries could be easily overtaken when a gap in the oncoming presented itself. Even when I was 10 years old I thought the traffic levels would make this a bad idea, but many people thought like dad did, and I had no concept of how much road use would actually increase over the next 2 decades. A few years later, 1966/7, my older sister was married and living in Selby, Yorkshire; you can guess how much a railway-minded teenager imprisoned in steamless South Wales by limited pocket money liked that arrangement. We would drive up to visit two or three times a year, at a time when each journey revealed more motorway construction and main road improvement. The key to this journey from Cardiff was the then new M50 'Ross Spur', now almost a 'Heritage Motorway' and the ever expanding improvements to the A40, M5, and A1(M). Each successive journey took less time despite the road works as more fast road became available. Dad had a big old Riley 2.6 which could sit at 100mph all day on the new motorways and dual carriageways, with not much to get in the way... And you still had to negotiate central Brum and the Nottingham Ring Road! At Strensham Services on the M5/50 junction, there used to be a covered footbridge connecting the 'up' and 'down' sides, and you would stand on this and watch the cars whizzing underneath at much higher speeds than nowadays, remarking when a Jag or Austin Healey would flash past, it's progress unimpeded in a way a modern driver can only dream of. Even the lorries were doing 40 or 50, incredible speeds for them at that time. This was THE FUTURE, and it was all going to be brilliant! At Aust on the old M4, now the A48(M), a massive glass fronted restaurant gave a superb vista of the new Severn Bridge; you could almost have been in Amurriker... Nowhere is the public's disillusion with motorways better encapsulated than the bleak collection of huts that look out over the empty car park these days. UK population growth since those days has not been massive (look at China and India), but two very big changes have taken place. Car ownership has increased exponentially and the increase has only recently slowed despite much higher running costs in real terms, and commuting has also increased as homes have moved to the edges of cities or outside them altogether. A century ago, when 'Metroland' had not yet been built to upset that nice Mr Betjeman, this was starting and continues; building on greenfield sites has trebled the physical size of Cardiff in my lifetime and the wealthy middle classes who usually get the blame for wanting to live in the leafy suburbs are not the only culprits; to the east of the city and closer to Newport than to the centre of Cardiff, are estates of mostly public housing which taken as a single entity are the largest such by area in Europe, and they are replicated to the west of the city as well. Even in the 1960s, most people outside the London area of whatever social class lived within walking, cycling, or a short bus ride of where they worked. This is IMHO the root of the massive increase in demand for both private and public transport and their failure to efficiently manage the massive traffic levels. Inner cities have been gutted of residential housing and the workplaces that provided an income for those who lived in the housing, and 'redeveloped'; residential, office, and industrial facilities are on 'estates', and many of the office and industrial estates are difficult to access other than by car. If I was cynical, I'd suspect an active conspiracy between property developers, car manufacturers, the oil industry, road hauliers, corrupt local councils, and their parliamentary puppets to generate wealth for themselves by bringing this perfect storm about. Just as well I'm not cynical, then, isn't it? Future planning for housing and industrial/office development still seems to rely on separating the two by considerable distance without paying more than lip service to either the public transport, road congestion, or car parking ramifications. When did you last see a factory open offering 500 new jobs with 500 new parking spaces on site?

To be fair to BR, they always thought that the answer was 25kv electrification on the UIC model, and to be fair they were by and large right. The problem was that the Treasury was unwilling to stump up the ackkers to install it except in discrete and therefore less effective stages (still are), and we had to 'make do' with diesels until such time as electrification could be paid for. Only in the UK; other countries bit the bullet and benefitted from it! Part of the reason for this may lie in a cultural reluctance in the UK to trust railways with money, either private investment or taxpayers. This is, I believe, rooted in 2 seminal events in the 19th century; the Railway Bubble of the 1840s which was overseen by the fraudulent and mendacious George Hudson (who nevertheless provided us with the central core of the current network), and the later collapse of the Overend Gurney bank, which had overinvested in railways which could not return dividends quickly enough to satisfy the creditors. Both these events caused genuine hardship and distress for the new middle classes who had been encouraged to put their money behind the white heat of the new technology, entering the National Consciousness, and the mistrust lingers even now. It is not difficult to portray railways as profligrate wasters of investors' or taxpayers' money capitalising on their monopoly! The British seem, in consequence, culturally incapable of coming to terms with the concept that railways are profitable but only if you are willing to play the Long Game, and that some railways are never going to turn a profit but are necessary to keep other railways in business; it's a network. The trunk and branch tree analogy is apt; cut the branches and the twigs and the tree dies because there is nowhere for the leaves to grow, but the branches and twigs cannot survive without the support and nutrition provided by the trunk. Beeching, bean counter that he was, reckoned he could stem the losses by closing unprofitable parts (and in all fairness to him that was the exact job he was hired to do). but almost fatally damaged the whole, which was only saved by the failure of the motorway network to provide an efficient and effective transportation network in the 70s and 80s, and since, due to fuel costs and congestion.

Irony just leaves me flat, mate. O, no, hang on, that's ironing... Each mark of mark 2 made an early appearance on the WR, with air conditioned mk2D stock for the Bristol and South Wales trains in 1971 or 2. Sets of 9 coaches, from the Paddington end 2 FO, mk1 RMB, 5 SO, and a mk1 BG at the country end, all on B4 100mph bogies hauled by class 47s in South Wales, mix of 47s and 50s on the Bristols, most of which extended to Weston Super Mare. No BFOs or BFKs were allocated to the WR. Again, motorway competition from the M4 was the driving force, the Severn Bridge having opened in 1969. The M5 was still being extended past Bristol during this period. The Hymeks and Warships were unable to work air braked stock, and while the Westerns could, they could not work ETH or Airco stock. They were used on vacuum and air braked freight work all across the region though, and found work on such West of England trains as were still steam heated

Secondhand Mainline locos are easy enough to find on the Site That Dare Not Speak It's Name, which I describe here as 'Bay, and are often quite cheap, but there is a reason for this. It is that their owners have become aware that the mechanisms have a limited service life and that modern replacements are more reliable and perform better, and no doubt in some cases problems have already started to rear their head even when the loco is described as a runner. Personally, I'd avoid any secondhand Mainline whatever the source; the best you'll do is to defer the problems. A secondhand Hornby Grange as a chassis donor, on the other hand, will be much more use to you, but it'll cost you more as well! As they tell you when you want to buy a small motorboat, there's no such thing as a free launch... Mainline designed a split chassis at a time when scratchbuilders were employing such devices and enthusing about them in magazines. A properly designed and built split chassis with a coreless motor is in theory capable of completely free running with no friction whatever, and phenomenal slow running was achieved by some builders. Mainline, sadly, used a combination of cheap poor quality plastic spur gear drive to reduce the gearing from the very fast speed their small motors had to run at to develop sufficient power (it still didn't develop sufficient power and they weren't the only ones; Lima and Hornby employed similar mechanisms in those days), and plastic stub axles to achieve split current pickup. The gears split or went out of alignment, and the wheels would go out of quarter if you looked at them a bit harshly, so the stub axles wore out where they interfaced with the plastic axle centres. And the axles, running in channels in the brass chassis blocks instead of proper brass bearings, wore the channel through to the top at which point the loco seized irreversably; this happened to 3 of mine! In other words, it was a good idea spoiled by poor quality build and materials. Split chassis are still used on some models, but their reputation and popularity has been seriously lessened by experience with Mainline locos. Bachmann, Mainline's successors, do not use them AFAIK in anything. 'Conventional' open frame motors driving through worm and cog gears, the predecessors of modern can motors with integral gearboxes, were out of favour as being expensive to manufacture and taking up a lot of room; much store was being placed at the time in having cabs without motors protruding into them so that there could be detail there, and in having daylight visible beneath boilers or between frames. This is the reason for the small pancake motors and spur reduction gears, Airfix continued with traditional motors and drives, but used pancake motors and plastic spur gears in tender drives. It's worth remembering how crude RTR models were before the likes of Mainline and Airfix started giving us brake and other detail below the footplate instead of just plain wheels, and abandoned flangeless centre drivers before being too critical of Mainline, who were breaking new ground and one of the companies that revolutionised RTR in the late 70s and early 80s; we have them and Airfix to thank for the very good models we are now able to take out of boxes and run.

Smoothing and touching up went well. The coach had got to look distinctly scruffy with all the continual handling and working, and looks a lot better this evening. Glazing tomorrow, and possibly a temporary roof fixing. Roof could do with a coat of grey as well. Priority is is rapidly shifting towards buffers and housings.

This certainly made a difference on the Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and eventually Glasgow trains, where the main motorway competition was before the M1 was extended North. ETH stock on the Midland, ECML, and GW routes made a big impact as well, but it was the HST that really turned things around; the right train at the right price at exactly the right time.

Just suggestions; glad you reckon they're useful, Nova!

Good tips, 31, especially about the Parkside Grampus being suitable. I've made up a couple of Parksides and their chassis kits and they are well within my comfort zone, and I imagine CCT have suitable number for 'converting them to XPO, not a bad idea as the LNER is a bit overrepresented with my minerals!

They 'scrubs up tidy like, innit', as we say in Wales, but as well as the Dart Castings kit the bogies can be improved with current Hornby ones (these are not fitted to the coach but reserved for the Hawksworth stock) and Comet can sell you better ventilators. I am going to be enquiring about cast buffers and shanks from them over the next few days, so keep an eye on my 'W 207 W' topic in kits and scratches; they'll be an improvement on the Airfix/Dapol ones and better than the current Hornby version, which at least has metal buffer heads. Worth painting the interior and putting no smoking transfers on as well. Brassmasters do an etch for luggage compartment window bars. Drivers are a moot point, as they would only be in the cab for half of the duty anyway. I have them in my auto trailers as they cab end is leading for most of the time they are on the scenic part of the layout, but one of my auto locos has a driver and fireman on the footplate, so the driver in the trailer cab is riding home or to book on duty. If anyone asks, and nobody has yet... This is not a dead scale model of either an A28 or A30 trailer, but a sort of hybrid between the two. Despite this, it is a good enough for most of us and repays a bit of working up very well indeed. If yours is old enough to have plastic wheels, you can replace them with current Hornby metal ones as a straight swap.