HonestTom

I wonder if they'll release Taw Valley in its current purple...

Depends how you intend to market it - I was thinking that given that Lion in preservation differs significantly from its original outline, and that the LMR coaches are based on the 1930 replicas, it would be a good centenary train pack.

It doesn't look dissimilar to the images of carriage wagons, but I would question the fact that there doesn't appear to be any means of actually keeping the carriage in place on top of the wagon. The LNWR example in the NRM has slats running across the deck to keep the carriage wheels in place.

I find it curious if they have abandoned it, given how all-out they're going with Liverpool and Manchester Railway rolling stock. I think Lion with some LMR coaches would be a good seller if marketed right.

When I first started modelling the Port of London Authority railways, there was nothing available ready-to-run. Now I have three locomotives to play with. What an age we live in.

This sounds very interesting. I'm familiar with the Wimbledon to West Croydon route, and of course these days there is an IKEA next to the Ampere Way tram stop, so it's thematically appropriate... I believe one early iteration of Bachman's 2-EPB actually had the correct headcode, 2, for this line. I say "I believe," because I have that model, but I lent it to a friend before the first lockdown and have yet to get it back.

If I'm a curator at the NRM, they have bigger problems on their hands.

The Underground version has my attention.

Hornby, Bachmann, Rapido and Dapol certainly have their own channels.

One I discovered this weekend was the Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street - it's the old Great Eastern hotel and they've kept the interior decor. The staff seemed bored out of their skulls though.

I think it's very much horses for courses. Some things are most easily explained in a visual medium and some in a written medium. I think it also depends on how you learn best - I find that watching a demonstration works better for me than reading instructions.

An oddity is the Moon Under Water in Watford. This isn't a pub at a station so much as a pub that, had history gone differently, might have been a station. The Metropolitan Railway bought the site to extend their line into the centre of Watford, but abandoned the project. Then the site got turned into a Wetherspoons.

It has the look of something that might have seen service on the Eastern Region to me, perhaps on the Woodhead route or on the lines out of Liverpool Street.

Well basically there are five direct forms of monetisation. 1. Advertising. This is on a per-view basis. The more views you get, the more money you make. However, you are at the mercy of the advertisers. For instance, revenue goes up in December and down in January, due to spending trends either side of Christmas. If your content is viewed as "advertiser unfriendly," you'll likely get fewer or lower-paying advertisers. If your channel is specialised, that can make it worth more to advertisers, as while it gets fewer views, viewers are more likely to be engaged. 2. Direct payment from YouTube. YouTube has a membership scheme whereby people can pay to become a "member" of your channel. I don't use this myself, so I don't know a lot about it. There's also YouTube Premium, where people pay a fee not to see ads - a proportion of this goes to your channel depending on how much of it they watch. 3. Sponsorship. You approach a company or a company approaches you to advertise directly in a video, for which you're paid a fee. I usually get my sponsors through an agency. It's independent of YouTube, but you do have to declare if you're being sponsored in the video. 4. Donations. Probably the most popular platform is Patreon, whereby people can sign up and pay a regular donation to your channel in return for exclusive content. I also use Ko-Fi, which is more for one-off small donations. 5. Merchandise. This is another thing I haven't tried yet. I totally agree. That's why I express them in a discussion forum, where people can respond and rebut.

That's all you ever had to say. I am a professional YouTuber, it's a thread about YouTubers. I'm going to have strong opinions.

My suggestion would be to carve the walls from expanded polystyrene, coat them with a sealant such as Mod Podge and then add the external wall texture using either air dry clay or card cut from egg cartons.

I made a little ruined castle based on no particular prototype as a lockdown project back in 2020. For what it's worth, here's how I did it.

Apparently this was something of an issue with the TV adaptations, and producer Britt Allcroft was concerned that by using real life engines, it opened up the possibility of people quite legitimately making models of Thomas characters but being able to claim they were just producing models of the real life engines. So in the TV series, the only real engines that appear are Stepney (who is specifically identified as not working on the real Bluebell Railway, but on a fictional branch line on Sodor) and City of Truro (who is never named in dialogue). Where the TV series does use real life railway companies, it alters the liveries. Thomas wears a sort of bluish green LBSC livery, Ryan is in GNR purple, Flying Scotsman has two tenders but also smoke deflectors (a combo the real engine never carried).

London The Tap on the Line, Kew Gardens. Part of the station - built by the LSWR to take advantage of thirsty visitors to the gardens (which had no tea room) The Metropolitan, Baker Street. Originally the restaurant at Chiltern Court, still bears the Met coats of arms inside. The Swiss Cottage, Swiss Cottage. The station was named after the pub.

I suspect that if some manufacturer took the plunge and made CIWL coaches in 00, they would sell. There might not be many people modelling CIWL, but that doesn't mean that people wouldn't buy the coaches if they were available. There are certainly enough Southern express locos out there. I think the Night Ferry has the same glamour factor as something like the Coronation Scot, which certainly does have coaches available, and I doubt everyone who buys the Coronation Scot set is doing so because they model the WCML in LMS days.

It depends on the circumstances. Is our imagined beginner asking whether such a combination is realistic? How is the advice presented? If I genuinely wanted to know whether I could get away with running two items together, then I would be glad to receive that information. On the other hand, if I'd spent a lot of time. money and effort on something I was proud of and then someone just shot it down, I think I'd be at least a little irritated. I'm reminded of Peter Denny's reasoning for modelling the GCR - that the signals were easy to scratchbuild and the company wasn't well-known enough for people to be able to nitpick his rolling stock as they had his GWR models. Hard disagree on this I'm afraid. YouTube has a comments section and "like" and "dislike" buttons, and I speak from experience when I say that people are not shy about using them. You can turn commenting off, but everyone can see that you've done it. People make response videos all the time. I myself have made videos correcting previous errors, and openly state that that's what I'm doing. Videos generally judged good, with a lot of "likes," get favoured by the algorithm and pushed to the front in searches. Which means more views and more income. The motivation is there to produce quality content. Furthermore, videos tend to get grouped together - if one person reviews X locomotive and you click on their video, YouTube will also suggest other reviews, so you can get more than one opinion. Critique of videos is also available elsewhere online, such as on this forum. As they would on a YouTube video. Furthermore, you could see that they were talking out of their backsides. If they're saying something about the model and they're not backing it up in their footage, you can ask them why not. Why would they not stay in business for long? Sure, if a magazine is consistently and obviously bad, then it might well suffer a decline. But if a well-regarded reviewer says something about a locomotive, I don't really have any way of knowing whether that's right or wrong unless I'm already familiar with the subject. And mistakes do creep in. Misprints or wrongly-captioned photos certainly do happen. I'm not saying "don't read magazines," but I don't think any source is beyond error. Doing my own research, I have become increasingly sceptical of "trusted sources." As per my example above regarding West Finchley, this hobby relies on a relatively small number of sources, and there is a tendency to think, "Well, if this expert said it, it must be true." So-called facts get passed from book to book to magazine without question. Errors, omissions, misinterpretations and biases of respected authors are set in stone as historical fact - I find Hamilton Ellis particularly irritating in this regard. The more obscure the subject, the fewer the sources available to us and the greater the scope for error. The original authors are often long-deceased, as is anyone with the firsthand knowledge to correct them. I think we need to define what we mean by "accessible" here, because there seem to be three or four different interpretations going around. I accept that I should have been clearer in what I meant. Can a person just buy a train set and get into modelling? Yes. In that sense, the hobby is very accessible. But where do you go from there? Magazines are a good source of information, but by their very nature, they don't necessarily provide the information you need. Sure, there's the odd article aimed at beginners, but it's luck of the draw whether this month there's an article that provides what you want. Given that most magazines are hovering around the £5 mark, and the price of models in general, that's quite an investment. I could join a club, if I have one locally, if they meet at times that are convenient for me. I could go to a model railway exhibition and ask someone, if there's one I can get to, if I know it's happening. Or I could type a basic modelling technique that I'm curious about into Google and come across several video tutorials right now that will not only tell me how things are done, but show me. I can see what tools and techniques they use, even if they don't describe them in detail. I can even ask the videographer how they did it if there's anything unclear. When I say that YouTube makes the hobby more accessible, I mean that it makes obtaining information easier. Again, I'm not suggesting that YouTube is the only way to get information, or that it will be best for everyone, or that there can be only one medium for obtaining information. I'm not suggesting that people have to turn to YouTube if they don't want to. They don't even have to like it. But I do believe that YouTube can be useful to the hobby. I believe this is borne out by the fact that so many companies involved in the hobby, including manufacturers, retailers and magazine publishers, have their own YouTube channels.

Yeah, that one kind of stands out. It was originally a starter set Thomas aimed at very young children, so minimal detail and few parts that could get knocked off. I suspect that's also why they seem to favour the Bagnall over the 06 as a starter diesel these days. I also suspect that's why they tooled up the GKN D - there's basically nothing on that that could be broken by rough handling.

I think it's a real shame that Hornby no longer manufacture those (I guess the tooling was sacrificed for those push-along versions?). I had Polly and the SDJR version when I was a kid, and to my eyes they made for a nice little factory shunter.

I have a book from the 80s on budget modelling that includes a bit about a layout based on Robin Hood's Bay whose builder went representative rather than literal, with a "close enough" approach. So passenger trains were Hornby Gresleys hauled by an Airfix N2 with a Mainline J72 on shunting and a Lima J50 on goods. I think there's a lot to be said for that approach if you want to dip your toe into modelling a subject without making a huge time/money commitment. Then you can upgrade if you like it or sell if you don't.

Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. I don't know what his average viewer looks for. As I say, for me personally, he's one of a number of reviewers I look to. Accuracy is a factor for me, but I also want to know about the mechanism, performance and build quality, and I want to see as much as possible what the model looks like. Nobody is saying that. If kids want to follow that path, then good news! They can, assuming they have a local library, a dad who is proficient in woodwork and a means to spark that enthusiasm. Nobody is stopping them. Nobody is suggesting they should be stopped. The response to the question posed by OP is that the value lies in making model railways more accessible. The Internet is a fact of life these days, for better or for worse. For many if not most people, it will be their first port of call for information. If I'm curious about model railways, I can Google them and instantly find lots of videos of layouts and tutorials on getting started - it's quick and easy. Or if I want to know, say, how to use an airbrush or how to cut card for building, I can find lots of videos that will show me how to do that right away. I recently serviced an elderly loco using a tutorial from Sam's Trains - I had the engine up and running within half an hour. ... said the guy who just used the phrase "some berk on a computer screen." Why do you feel that you're being attacked? I'm not aware of anyone here or on YouTube who's denigrating people for being skilled.