Harlequin

I’ve just caught up. I had to watch on catch up because it clashed with my guilty pleasure, “I’m a Celebrity...”. But maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty because "I’m a Celebrity" was more entertaining, better scripted and had more depth... The casual use of the wrong train in Ep1 was a sign! We’d been given sign! Remember, you might be able to delete it from your personal recorders but it will be available on the iPlayer for ever, and ever, and ever...

Maybe "London &" is simply covered by the sheeting?

Hi Campion, Hmmm... Without a fiddle yard your plan will be difficult to operate in any sensible way. You might say that doesn’t matter to you but it means that you can’t find out whether operating a layout is an important part of the hobby for you. It is for a lot of people - not everyone admittedly. What you have is more a diorama - which might satisfy your goals. You could add a very simple fiddle yard if you wanted in the form of some simple cassettes that you can slide around and butt up against the main line and the headshunt. Then it would be worth fixing the track plan. Such as changing the loco release crossover to be the right way round (or maybe ignoring it and saying it’s offscene since you’re relying on DMUs). And straightening the sidings a bit - the points you’ve picked up don’t help implement Clevedon properly.

Thanks Mike. Yes, the first drawing I did for Steve was not in a consistent style. I have learned much more about the period styles since then, with your help and from books, and I hope to be able to do something more specifically 1950s BR(WR) style this time.

Hi Campion, What was the prototype? Is there a fiddle yard to the right and does it allow easy movement of goods trains between the two main lines (to simulate the missing pointwork)? Have you thought about using LEDs for lighting instead of 12v?

Thanks guys, I hadn’t thought about oxidation. I will get some darker True Metal Wax and report back.

Do we have any experts on Transylvanian railways to point out the inevitable gaffes for us? Maybe we won’t need one if the Beeb just use their favourite all-purpose steam loco, 3205, again.

I said above that the current finish is pre-weathering. It’s surely better to weather on top of the correct colour than loco green. Furthermore, I reckon that they would have been wiped with an oily rag during boiler washouts, every 10-30 days depending on which source you read and the period under consideration.

The point for the model is that they are brass coloured, of course. https://www.heritagesteamsupplies.co.uk/fusible-washout-plugs.html?cat=5554 This is 6000 King George V at STEAM, Swindon:

Locos are wonderfully detailed these days (although not all the details are always correct!) but I realised that all my GWR locos were missing something: Brass washout plugs. The plugs themselves are usually very carefully moulded but they are not coloured... So I had a go at addressing this using some ATK Brass True Metal Wax: This product is thick and has a high pigment level, which means that just a touch completely obscures whatever colour is underneath. This is important because it would be unthinkable to try to paint such small, recessed details let alone having to use multiple coats! I picked up some of the wax on the end of a cocktail stick and, using an optivisor to magnify the view, very carefully touched each plug-head to transfer the colour. The results are very pleasing. Maybe the brass is a bit too shiny but that will get toned down when the locos are weathered. There are a few mistakes to be cleaned up but not so many to put me off doing more in future.

I didn't say it was wrong to ask for advice. I meant that if you had planned more thoroughly and taken more advice before you actually built or bought anything you could have done things differently. Specifically, you could have built the baseboards differently so that access under and reach over was easier. Anyway, what's done is done. All the best.

This is very frustrating because you could have worked all this out and made life much easier for yourself if you had taken your time and planned things better! I think it would be possible to do a simple DCC electrical installation above the boards, relying on fishplates and point blades, without a bus or any switched sections. You will always need some IRJs. Wiring aside, DCC is wonderful but you do need to be willing to get to grips with some IT to make the most of it.

Well... DCC is not about saving wiring, despite the popular myth. It's about making the locos more driveable and more indvidual. You can give locos different acceleration and deceleration characteristics. So big locos pull away slowly and little shunters can zip around in the yard. A loco with a good sound project and lights really comes to life. For diesels you get things like clunks and rev drops when changing gear, horn blasts and idling sounds when standing. Old steam locos do things like wheezing when they start off, giving a toot when they pass and cruising into the station with just valves spitting when you lift off the regulator.

Hi Julian, David makes a good point about dividing the track into separately switched sections rather than the one "bus" feeding everything. (Technically, they would not be "power districts" - DCC Power Districts each have a separate power supply or "booster".) It means a bit more wiring, however. Your DCC controller would feed into a switch panel and then from each switch out to a separate "bus" for each section. The sections might be: The two main circuits The goods yard The loco shed The carriage sidings You'd have to decide where to use insulating rail joints to separate the sections from each other.

Er, yes, but my point was really about CGI: If they can summon up a horde of Martian tripods why not a CGI period train? Obviously the quality of the production would have to justify the cost and as we can see now that this is pretty low quality stuff, unfortunately. It's a shame because it could have been so much better.

My Grandma did a lot of research into our family history and she published the collected results. Consequently, I’ve known for a while that the famous LNER driver, Albert Pibworth (known as “Old Pib”), was a distant relative of mine. The Pibworth family can be traced back to the village of Pebworth in Worcestershire in the 16th century. Although they spread far and wide, the branch leading to Albert Pibworth (and me!) came from the villages to the south west of Newbury. He was born at Enborne in 1864, very much in Great Western territory but in 1883, after a brief stint on the Western, he moved on to become a GNR railwayman. This relocation and change of employer causes some minor confusion with casual railway historians and irks me slightly because I’m a GWR fan. To me, it would be more satisfying if he’d been a famous GWR driver! However, the story and the modelling possibilities got more interesting recently when I discovered that he drove an LNER A1 Pacific on GWR rails in the famous 1925 exchange trials. I wonder if his Berkshire origins gave him any prior knowledge of the route? References: https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Mecmag/MMissue.php?MID=5932&Missue=3001&id=1632768767 https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Mecmag/MMissue.php?MID=5945&Missue=3001&id=1632768980 From “Our Family Story” by E. A. Martin James Pibworth, Albert's father, born 1821 at East Woodhay. His brother Thomas Pibworth, my ancestor, born East Woodhay 1830. Thomas Pibworth was listed as a Linseed Oil Maker in the 1861 census. Thomas would have walked to his work in Newbury. He was unlikely to have used the train that passed through Enbourne on its way from Southampton to Newbury, though many later Pibworths were to find eventual employment on that railway. Thomas had a great many relations! His elder brother James, the third of the family, was married and had four children. The fourth of these was the only Pibworth to achieve national fame! His name was Albert, and he was born in 1865. When old enough to begin working he got a job on the railway - the employment that seems to have been favoured by many Pibworth men. At that time, Newbury was a junction of some importance, with lines going off in five directions. Albert worked on the railway (not for long in the Newbury area) for 46 years. He became one of the best-known drivers of his time, known affectionately as “Old Pib”. He was the driver in charge of the train that made the first non-stop run from Kings Cross to Newcastle, with the engine “Flying Fox”. In 1928 he won even greater praise for the longer run from Kings Cross to Edinburgh, with the “Flying Scotsman”! Soon after this achievement, he had to retire because of ill-health (1929). About this time he and his wife were living at Wash Common, in a house he called “Belitha Villa”. Why did he choose this name, “Belitha”? - Was it the name of an engine he specially remembered, or perhaps even the first that he drove? In September 1929 he died, and was buried in the churchyard at Enborne. A simple gravestone gives his name and the relevant dates, but there is no mention of his achievements. Newbury Weekly News - 1965 ‘Old Pib’ - buried at Enborne - used to drive crack ‘Flying Scotsman’ The “FLYING SCOTSMAN” presented an unforgettable sight for railway enthusiasts lining the platform as with whistle shrieking she roared through Newbury at 80 m.p.h. on Sunday evening. This famous locomotive, now privately owned and restored to her former LNER appearance, was pulling a special excursion from Weymouth to London. The “Flying Scotsman” took just six minutes to cover the distance between Hungerford and Newbury, and unknown to many of the enthusiasts aboard her passed within half a mile of the grave of the man who drove the locomotive on the first non-stop London-Edinburgh run in 1928. He was Mr. Albert Pibworth, who is buried in Enborne churchyard. A simple stone makes no reference to his record-breaking achievement or to the fact that at the time he was regarded as one of the greatest engine drivers in the world. Career’s Peak “Old Pib” as he was known to thousands of railwaymen, reached the pinnacle of his career towards the end of his 46 years on the railway. At the age of 63 he made history by driving the “Flying Fox” non-stop from Kings Cross to Newcastle. He shared the footplate on the even longer record-breaking run to Edinburgh. Mr. Pibworth, a member of an old Newbury railway family, who lived at Wash Common, retired in January 1929, through ill-health and died a few months later aged 65, on September 16. Pendennis Castle and Flying Fox publicity photo Victor Wild Driver Pibworth’s regular engine from new was 4475 “Flying Fox”. It was selected for the 1925 trials but it ran hot and it was replaced by 4474 “Victor Wild”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Gresley_Classes_A1_and_A3#/media/File:LNER_Pacific_4474_on_King's_Cross_turntable_(CJ_Allen,_Steel_Highway,_1928).jpg

That’s half true. You need the same droppers in both cases but with DCC you can run a “bus wire” all round and you don’t need to bring wires back to switches on a control panel, so a few less wires for DCC. However, Point motor wires may still need to come back to a control panel. So in the end it doesn’t make much difference! Yes. You just need to route a pair of substantial cables around to get close enough to the dropper wire positions so that the dropper wires aren’t too long, say 1ft maximum. You can connect branches off the bus (and branches off the branches) and the main bus can be a complete ring if you want - the topology doesn’t matter. What cable you use for the bus depends on how you want to connect the droppers to it. For my little test layout I used B&Q speaker cable. It’s flexible, multi strand copper with a red orientation mark along one wire. I then wired the bus and the droppers together in chocolate blocks, which work ok if you make sure the wires are inserted and gripped properly. They allow mistakes to be fixed easily but I don’t think they are best practice - not permanent enough and maybe affected by corrosion. The dropper wires can be much thinner than the bus wires. You’ll get lots of alternative suggestions!

Helps keep the spending down, as well! Scanners and a sniffer dog on Sunday morning, sniffing bags held out to him.

I caught up this morning. Spoiler Alert! Ep2 was dire! No wonder the Beeb didn't promote it very heavily. The only promotion I did see concerned the actors making fun of reacting to CGI horrors - so I suspect they could tell it was a lemon. I thought it was disjointed and way too much time was spent watching people being anguished. Why was the girl from the boat dropped into the storyline and why was she not anguished at losing her mother??? (The girl and the crystals growing out of the ground may be significant plot elements...) Worst of all, no railways to laugh at!

Hattons email now says, "We are expecting the models to arrive by Mid-2020".

The seven variants are listed in the flyers that were being handed out and on the similar, but slightly less recent, online catalogue: http://www.Dapol.co.uk/Catalogue/82/index.html

Thanks! Yes, the Austin was something special!

My RMWeb badge was not a great success, by the way. Not one person showed any sign of noticing it, let alone saying hello, with the honourable exception of Andy Y. But then, he knew I was coming and I walked up to him and, forgetting I was wearing the badge, I said, "Hello I'm Phil, Harlequin from RMWeb". @chuffinghell our paths evidently didn't cross. Shame because I had a badge for you in my pocket! And I didn't see anyone else wearing one... Ho hum <shrugs>

The goods headshunt and the goods siding are very short now, unfortunately. The facing crossover into the goods area niggles me. You could make it trailing, actually, but I'd still do the crossover from the Down line, single slip into the goods yard if it were me. (BTW: See EB10 in my gallery... ) Sorry @Chimer, I feel bad criticising when you've done all the hard work on this! I have some other thoughts and ideas building on Chimer's plan but I don't want to tread on anyone's toes, or spend much on it time if Julian's going to starting building tomorrow! Julian: Was your problem with slips about the wiring or operational reliability? Whatever the issue was I'm sure between us we could help you get them under control, if you wanted.