Yarravalleymodeller

1 minute ago, AY Mod said:

 

Well done on being patronising, we do know what we're doing. A basic Google image search won't give you a lot before it heads off on alternatives; it's better to know the sites that are likely to have the type of images you need and a wide slelection e.g. Paul Bartlett's wagon shots for that era where better detail is captured rather than the cursory stuff you'll find on a basic search.

Yes, and your first point of call to find those sites is probably a sniff around and a look at what sites the results google spits out come from. Then as you say once you gain some familiarity with the regular likely places you can check them first then go looking further if needed. Point being it isn't quite the 6 month research assignment to the archives It's made out to be, it's just a pleasant afternoon with a cuppa and some understanding of how to go about it. 

It is a model review mind, not saying you could research the model this way to produce it, but it will put you in a good place to say if there are any glaring errors or not.

Just now, Phil Parker said:

 

So a plan with some dimensions on isn't useful? You'd be hard put to tell is the wheelbase is slightly off from photos found on Google.

But, and this is basically the case for 99% of things you see produced ready to run, there are readily available data sheets online that will tell you what the wheel spacing should be. I struggle to think of any thing produced that would come up against much issue to finding its wheel spacing listed online with a very very good chance of being able to be cross referenced and established to be good information. 

4 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

Which will partly determined by the return on that investment in time and research materials. It would be lovely to spend a day in the NRM library for every single model, but realistically, for magazine work, there's nothing like that luxury of time. Nor do many of us have an enormous collection of books and photos covering every possible prototype. Sometimes you have someone who is an expert in an area - Tony Wright can cover the LNER for example, but he'd struggle with London Underground.

 

Online reviews may be different. You will aquire only the models you are interested in, so you will be likely to have a pile of research you've already done. Or you simply just film opening the box and read the sides... 😉

Realistically you don't even need to go to the NRM, there's this thing called google images, seriously stuffed with plenty of images to get a very reasonable understanding of what you are looking at on the desk vs what existed at a given time. 

The idea that owning the model also makes the review any better is... interesting when you delve into how it might effect your perceptions of value of that model... every model you buy kinda devalues any use you may have for every other model you own. We only have so much track, so much time, if you buy literally more models than you can enjoy within those two limitations then your opinion of any of them and the value of them begins to suffer consciously or subconsciously. What value has it once a certain point is passed beyond a thing to review. It's sentimental value is limited to your familiarity and emotional investment in the real thing or some connection born of a past experience with a previous iteration of it and from here it just slides into a review mired in the fact you paid for it, not improved by the fact you paid for it. There becomes a subconscious or concious imperative to maximise the return on any  information you trade with you viewer in exchange for their viewing your review that comes at the expense of maximising the information exchanged in that transaction because that is just further effort put into something that rather than representing a more ethereal emotional value is now just an item you need to make your investment back on. 

The modeller, be it someone from P4 or someone playing with it on a loop of track experiences an utterly different construct of value to the person buying it just to make their money back on it. The end result is usually a review where an undue weight is placed on cost, a lack of valuable information is present, and the transaction becomes one devoid of much use mainly because the person purchased the model.

5 minutes ago, eldomtom2 said:

Something that I don't think's been mentioned, but that I think is definitely worth mentioning and probably explains a lot of stuff about the Fell reviews, is that if you're an actual reviewer - that is, someone who buys or is given models for the primary purpose of reviewing them - as opposed to someone who reviews items bought for other reasons you're probably going to be in a situation where you have to review a model of something that's outside your area of expertise. Something like performance is easy enough to determine, but an inaccuracy is something you'll only know if you know the prototype. Obviously this can be mitigated somewhat if you're a magazine with multiple reviewers, but you're unlikely to have an expert in everything.

 

And of course, if you're familiar with the prototype you're probably going to have a more negative view of any inaccuracies on the model.

You need not necessarily know everything as a base point only have a good understanding of how to go about finding pertinent information of which there is thanks to this interconnected web of devices we are on now an even greater ease than ever of finding. Thankfully the model its self also affords you chances to find things more easily: it ran in this livery, okay so what time period, okay so find photographs within that time frame, okay now play spot the difference. It is perhaps naive to think that anyone knows everything there is to know about anything and thus the question shouldn't be how much does the person know when we come to assess the value of their opinion it should be how much willingness and effort do they put in to know as much as they reasonably can given what information is likely available which as above is what the French would term a sh*t load. And we are not talking about secondary source information we are talking primary source photographs you can cross reference to assure the date is correct in all but a few cases for most major classes and major railways for the majority of periods and subject matters covered by ready to run items.(this is as far as locomotives go, obviously carriages and wagons... not so much because people tended not to run around taking pictures of specific wagons or carriages) 

7 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

 For obvious reasons these sort of tactics tend to be associated with products where reasonable sums of money are involved, and even there for reviewers to be worth supporting they have to have a certain credibility to influence anybody ('influences' who can't influence aren't useful to anybody). In audio gear a good indicator is whether any measured data is shown in support of opinions, usually reviewers who make the effort to take measurements are more knowledgeable and less likely to just spin a good yarn (some audio gear reviews can be entertaining for the wrong reasons).

Measurement is an interesting thing. To someone who isn't particularly up to scratch on measurement methods and the faults that can develope along the way by getting one step here or there wrong in order to come to that final piece of measured information any measurement is a good measurement. The length of the piece of string comes to mind, how interested and invested the person personally is in knowing the length of the piece of string will dictate how much scrutiny they place on the measurement of the piece of string and this allows for some placement of different levels of expert in the length of string at different points on the spectrum of potential consumers of the information regarding the length of the piece of string. 

You can easily end up with a situation where someone with no interest in furthering the knowledge of the length of the piece of string sets up business providing the length of the piece of string to people who may not openly wish to know the length of the piece of string and will happily settle to know this version of the length of the piece of string and get stuck here to the detriment of their progression of knowledge of the length of the piece of string and to the great benefit of this provider of string related data who then also feels no need to improve their knowledge of the piece of string or their output on the piece of string. This new entrant to the piece of string measurement data market unwittingly creates a situation where they hold back the human potential that might be unleased, sorry, unstrung by furthering peoples understanding of the length of the piece of string which has a knock on effect moving up the market for data on the length of a piece of string where returns deminish at the top due to ever decreasing upward mobility of new seekers of more accurate data on the length of a piece of string creating a downward pressure to reduce data on the length of a piece of string into simpler forms that serve this less interested less mobile market which creates a situation where good data becomes a scarce resource over data that says what the market wants to hear. We suffer stagnation, we see people strung up for highlighting this by people strung along by it. 

Can I say one more word, string. 🤣

31 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

The Earth rotates? Now that would explain a few things - thanks!

I shall have to report this post for misinformation, we all know the earth is a flat dinner plate full of yummy human morsels held up by a 5 armed waiter named Duncan in the restraunt Evolutionary Eats located on the planet Vennms. A very special restaurant where you may order one of the best primordial soups on offer  and await the delights that evolve as it travels to your table. 

11 hours ago, westernviscount said:

My modelling mojo plummeted last year. I have barely been near the bench, not helped by moving and starting a new job. 

 

I set out some new years resolutions elsewhere on the forum but instantly knew it was unlikely to happen. 

 

I have been dwelling on how my hobby has changed and whether I still enjoy it. When I started I just loved making models and building things. I built a layout fairly ignorant of the wider hobby. But now I see all the highflying elite of the hobby and just wonder how on earth anything I do could ever be satisfying when there is lasercut this, 3d printed that, dcc sound the other, making tracks, you tubers etc etc. I am finding it all overwhelming. 

 

I did write an article about my motivation funnily enough but it seems to have left me completely. Nothing I can build will ever meet my expectations which have been drastically altered because of the abilities and means of others which are so readily apparent because of new media. Comparison is as we know, the thief of joy. 

Perhaps you need to use this place to its fullest. Rekindle the love of the build by building something and showing it off here. 

You'll find people asking questions, people telling you its good, people offering advice, people enjoying it, joy is not always in you looking at it and feeling joy, joy can be in bringing others joy showing off things you make that heck might even inspire them to pick up a knife or some paint and glue and get cracking. Then you get to sit back, sip your nice cuppa and feel good knowing you helped spur that on. You might even find yourself feeling more positive of your own work as a result.

All the best, other people have theirs, you have yours, it's not a competition unless you enter it in one. 

34 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

She doesn't buy me trains; I don't buy her clothes. Sensible.

Spot on. 

And the one year she did, let's say I'm still in trouble for repainting the gift I was given rather than cherishing it as is.

2 hours ago, Coldgunner said:

Work still sucks today, had a particularly rude "colleague" that I've just refused point blank to deal with.

On the plus side though, I've got a crate of 12x 1901 recipe IRN BRU bottles and a new CPU, Motherboard and RAM coming to upgrade my PC. The latter cost £850, I can remember speccing a decent gaming PC for about £600 all in.

For £850 it best have some of those gamer lights my old PC's never had.

I hear they add buoyancy to the floating points.....

10 hours ago, Coldgunner said:

Getting there I think. Been having serious black dog due to an old trauma that's resurfaced, as well as all the crap with work. SAD has really kicked in due to being the first xmas and birthday without dad too. Feel like everything has come along at once. I've been talking openly with friends and family and getting through it, but my modelling mojo has gone again. New year will mean a new start for me. I'm starting to think about a job change as I don't feel very valued.

 

I know that come the new year I will be happier. I'm planning a trip to Brussels in the spring, as I really want to see Bond in Motion, as I missed it in London. Can then make my excuses to have a trip on Eurostar and also visit the Belgian railway museum.

SAD is an odd thing really, marked by both seasons in the sense of weather seasons but also cultural/emotional seasons as eluded to with Christmas and the loss of your father, my condolence. Vastly impractical as it is as an aide to most people I found the year or two I spent doing the back and forth between the UK and Australia to be very beneficial to breaking down some of those ties of seasons being marked by traumatic experiences which had become seated in the flow of each subsequent years events. What was a cold Christmas confined to home by pressures of bad weather and shorter daylight hours leading to rumination on past events in a cycle that was unhealthy became an all together different outlook. It's a very hard thing to explain with lots of odd perceptive outcomes such as the sky somehow seeming bigger and the curiosity for new  things flooding back at a times usually consumed with old things but definately worth a go if the means are available to do it.

Belgium does sound gun though, never did get to ride eurostar before abandoning the northern hemisphere🤔

Does it matter if the tooling is original? Because I'm quite sure a lot of these physical mould tools have been replaced over the years as they degrade. The Hornby GWR single was from memory(correct me please) entirely replaced at some point as have been the toolings of many a wagon kit, Ian kirk, the o gauge stuff, (memory again) even mentions this on the website or did as a reason for the temporary unavailablity of some kits. 

Likewise that Hornby 08, yes was still produced but heavily modified in terms of the chassis the motor etc etc. 

Long and short where do we draw the line to say it is still the same product? 

39 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That's just the working classes having to make the best of the difficulties foisted on them by incompetent management, as ever. (The locomotive, that is, not the sports car; nobody has to drive the latter.)

There's pecking orders and badge of honour mentalities among every class, certain drivers would seek certain duties above others it's just known to be the case. Still kinda is, some seek a position in freight, some in passenger, some seek to migrate to certain routes, some seek training on certain motive power. 

Way of the world.

30 minutes ago, rogerzilla said:

Adhesive weight is usually boiled down to factor of adhesion, which is loco weight on the driven wheels divided by tractive effort.  The design target is at least 4, reflecting a typical friction coefficient at the rail of 0.25.  Locos with a factor of less than 4 are more prone to wheelslip.  Having 3 cylinders helps, as the power pulses are lower and more even, but a Schools class, with one of the lowest factors of adhesion, is still hard to start with a load on.

But reportedly loved by crews and couldn't half put in a good show once you got it going. It's likely one of those impracticalities that became a badge of honour to overcome, much like buying a sports car with no traction control and not ending up in a hedge. 😅 It's a machine that demands skill and respect and you gain respect being able to handle it. 

25 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

It is the ability of a loco to "pull", the ability to start a train; the force exerted by a locomotive,  in the case of a steam locomotive,  usually quoted at 85% of maximum boiler pressure,  and with part-worn tyres. It is a function of cylinder dia & stroke, boiler pressure,  wheel dia, no. of coupled wheels.

The ability of a loco to use its tractive effort is dependent on its adhesive weight ( the weight on the driving wheels) and the amount of friction between the wheels & rails. Too little adhesive weight, or a slippery rail, and the wheels will slip.

Tractive effort is at a maximum when just starting to move, and tails off as speed increases. In Imperial units, T.E. is quoted in lb force, in SI units it is given in Newtons (N or kN), occasionally in kg.

Not to be confused with power. Power is force x speed, i. e.  The power at a given speed is given by the tractive effort x the speed. If TE is in N, speed in metres/second, power will be in Watts. Power at starting is 0 (as speed =0, so force x speed =0), and usually increases with speed up to a point, at which it will tail off.

This is good. 

Now given that as we've learned we start with maxium tractive effort and we descend on a curve as our speed increases let us ask what effect our maximum line speed would have on our requirements for tractive effort and ponder weather low tractive effort in the case of the M class is in fact an indicator of lacklustre design or failiure given the maxium line speed is 60 compared with the maxium line speed of (guessing) 80? London to Brighton etc. Let us also ask, by how much would we have to change the specifications to reach equilibrium with the atlantic mentioned. This will be a fun bit of number crunching. 

9 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

I'm inclined to discount them as they had 8 cylinders yet only had the tractive effort of the LBSC Marsh H2 Atlantics post-1938.

What is a tractive effort and why does one matter?

* stands back *

On 28/11/2022 at 04:41, Rivercider said:

I wonder how many of us have formed an allegiance from a very early age?

 

 

Yup, all big all boring. 

Once you see some tiny 0-4-0 working it's guts out pulling above its weight in industry these big toys become a bit dull to look at.

That said GWR if only because of the variety of exotic stuff they took on via absorption that started before grouping was even a thing. 

Rest, yeah nah. 

Given the fondness of late for the industrial loco, Hornby doing many, rapido in on it, Dapol, hattons etc etc 

For next year a little industrials category might be an idea, otherwise good stuff, votes added. 

1 hour ago, Blandford1969 said:

You know I thought escaping my last employer (well they made me redundant) would help shake off the anxiety. Yes being out of work for a couple of months was challenging but it seemed to stay away. 

 

I finally started a new job in October, great. Then this week my boss asked if I would take on 2 other departments and their people and that anxiety either whilst awake or in my dreams was back with a jolt. Even while typing I can feel it in my legs and some of those other darker feelings have popped up a few times, which are always kept in check by not wanting my family to be dramatically worse off financially .

 

As for modelling I'm back to just looking at it and moving things around, whilst the mess around me increases again. 

You can always so no to more responsibility, much easier to stop climbing the ladder and take a break where you are than climb it only to have to climb back down and then back up having taken on too much. Look after you cause if you aren't looked after who looks after your family? Best to make sure there is enough coming in and you're 100% before chasing lots coming in at the expense of anything coming in at all if that makes sense. 

5 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Surely the point was that a locomotive was part of the capitalisation of the company; once the locomotive was worn out, it was renewed.

The idea that you're paying to replace the whole loco with new materials is also a bit misleading, in the case of crewe they were more than capable of taking a loco, scraping it internally and reprocessing most of the materials. They had on site their own steel processing and much more, even their own brick works. 

In the case of locos purchased from other sources yes it may represent more of a loss but ultimately when you have that much in house expertise your costs on just about every process are basically labour and energy if you are scrapping and reprocessing for the most part.

11 hours ago, Northmoor said:

Do you actually mean a Decade?  A loco with an operating life of only a decade really would be a failure, it would be withdrawn once the first boiler overhaul was due.  Locomotives were expected to operate for 30 years plus.

Well over a decade means... well over a decade. The actually bad ones lasted much less, the ones that find alternate use cases last much longer, the ones that are superseded with no practical other place to go or potential buyers end up gone. 

There is no hard and fast rule of life expectancy for a good loco. That is a modern apparition. There's what made sense to each railway for each loco or class at that point. 

7 hours ago, Nick C said:

It won't be long before you've made more Pecketts than Peckett did!

If we hassle him nicely he might get to scratch building that christmas island peckett in a what if form for british industry. That would make for quite the sight on a layout

18 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Certainly. I don't think that at the turn of the century, any of the railway companies foresaw that the era of continuous growth was over and that they were on the brink of the long downward spiral of rising costs and diminishing returns. Whoever invented the corridor carriage had a lot to answer for...

As a quick side note, before I start work, there's human factors to consider whenever we talk coal consumption, humans are very much creatures of habit. If you get used to firing in a particular way you tend to get stuck firing that way. I've witnessed this play out with preservation era firemen coming for a play on locos they don't usually use. 

All it takes is for one design to supersede another and the firemen to remain stuck in their ways and you can have an apparent poor coal consumption caused by them laying it on thick when not needed. Might not seem much at first glance but add it up over the sheer number of trips and yes you end up with a big bill for coal. 

Equaly applies to steaming capabilities, the person controlling use of that steam can be doing so in a poorly managed way and if you apply that to many people you end up with reports of poor steaming. 

Sure if we fire something up tomorrow when I go play trains then there would be among the people there those who can get a long way on a little and those who go nowhere for a full tank of water and all the coal. It's a very difficult one to judge even by the account books unless they are wildly consistently terrible numbers.

Also other things like size of the coal play into it but again, whole other rabbit hole to go down to try and find the truth to any of it

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

If one takes the Churchward Saint as a yardstick of success - which is, admittedly, setting a very high bar, then the Whale Experiments were less than a success. There is Churchward's famous reposte to one of the GWR directors who complained of the relative cost of 4-6-0s from Swindon and from Crewe - one would like to have seen that put to the test! Whale's engines were very heavy on coal, which was unfortunate in the light of the labour unrest of the period. Bowen-Cooke addressed that issue with superheating, leading to the Prince of Wales class. Once could argue that they were the most successful of pre-grouping 4-6-0s and were being built right up to and beyond the grouping; their numerical superiority over the Saints (and that of the Claughtons over the Stars) is simply an indicator of the vast size of the LNWR's passenger and fast freight business over that of the Great Western. But by 1930 there was a clear need for an "Improved Prince of Wales", which in due course appeared as the Class 5MT.

Hindsight is the great twister of reality. 

I don't think any railway particularly foresaw labour disputes or rising coal prices, while this may have not been ideal for the balance sheet or indeed the firemans back does it mean they were bad locomotives that couldn't do the job. Nope. 

Is your car bad because oil prices went up? 

Is the plane badly designed because the price of the gate at the airport went up and you got the knock on cost?

As long as it goes, as long as it doesn't actively lose money just loses some % of profitability for the railway even these business based arguments don't make the design bad they just make it less than perfect at that moment in time.

More interestingly, name a perfect loco capable of weathering any economic condition or traffic demand, I don't think one exists, even the mighty GWR couldn't really do that.

10 minutes ago, SHMD said:

RC?

 

If you are struggling to find space to store a few seconds worth of "motion" then finding the space for a battery would be even harder.

(Especially if you insist on keeping the original 12v motor.)

 

...but Giles, of this parish - and others - have produced some excellent RC models.

 

 

Kev.

Even more difficult if, as a manufacturer, you insist on making hyper realistic models, yet also insist on them being able to pull a huge rake of coaches. Sacrifice the ability of your 1830s esq 0-4-2 to pull an 18 coach train and set the goal somewhere more realistic and the RC option becomes far more workable because you're not looking to make it heavy as possible by havingas much solid material as possible you're instead looking to fill that space with equipment to ensure it goes and keeps going when asked(until whatever enegery storage gives out). We sacrifice running quality to the demands of massively heavy diecast blocks to satisify pulling power. It's a vicious cycle predominately perpetuated making everything rule 1 compatible in the extreme only to have everyone from rule 1 to the most diehard realist have a bad time. 

Nothing implicitly wrong with rule 1 before anyone says but I to that... just it is the cause of issues and the prevention of solutions in some ways for both sets of modellers when it comes to how to get the electrons to the right places.