Harlequin

Remember what a hash Heljan made of the 47XX… We should maybe consider ourselves lucky! 😉

Here's a photo showing the new GWR locomotive green of Caldicot Castle compared to others: From left to right: Lode Star (most recent version) Caldicot Castle Tintagel Castle (older version) You might spot another disappointing omission from Caldicot: No top lamp iron. Should be on top of the smokebox on this model but nothing there nor on the smokebox door... Edit: The brass beading on the splashers is present but is much finer than on previous models. That's great but when you look closely the beading on the front corner of the cab has not been picked out as brass strip, as it should have been.

Someone at the Beeb realised the original picture was not quite right - they've changed it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspernstraße_station

I received Caldicot Castle today! Haven't had time to run it yet but it does have a very different rendition of loco green than previous castles and the oil pipe cover is missing, as we feared. The loco box is larger than usual with black foam around the "ice cube". That was inside a slightly bigger Hornby box with foam ends and that was inside an even bigger box from Derails with foam corners and a lot of shredded newspaper (and a packet of biscuits). No chance of this loco being damaged in transit! 😃 I'll check out the new 21-pin decoder socket in the tender later.

You've got two methods of alignment, the clips and the slot in the surface. Might be simpler to avoid the slot, just set the "cassette table" at the level of the bottom of the slot. Then it's really easy to slide cassettes around to make up the train at the front. The less often you have to lift cassettes the safer their contents! The cassette table surface can be made from an offcut of kitchen work surface or a melamine-faced shelf board, for example, to help the cassettes slide around more easily.

I broadly agree but I think there is a bit of a market for a newly tooled Castle: Returnees to the hobby who are seeing the latest "Hi-Fi" models from Dapol, Rapido, Accurascale, etc. would much rather buy a Castle up to those standards than shell out £200 for a 13 year old tooling from Hornby. (Especially when H leave off fundamental details that were on every class member and have been on every previous iteration of the model except this newest one...) This year, the Centenary year of the Castles, would have been a great marketing opportunity but sadly it has been missed.

Sorry, I'm a bit late to the party but if you're going to be drilling lots of holes for screws that implies you are going to be driving in a lot of screws, right? So wouldn't a little drill/driver be more appropriate than a Dremel style tool? They usually have torque adjustment so that you can drive screws just tight enough without grinding out the tops and they have a nice pistol grip that's much easier to hold and push than a Dremel.

😞 Perhaps this is something that @Tony Wright could mention, being the forthright reviewer that he is.

Yes, very odd. The blisters seem to be separate parts on my existing Castles (and Stars and Kings) so we can hope that it's an omission unique to this particular model... Either a manufacturing error in an early sample or perhaps it's fallen off?

No. C J Allen says:

I guess you mean the famous 1925 exchange trials? Flying Fox was slated to take part in the home runs on the LNER, and was used in the publicity photos, but she ran hot during the first run and was replaced. The loco that ran on the GWR was Victor Wild, driven by Albert Pibworth, "Old Pib".

Here it is, on Flickr: Starcross, July 1957 according to the caption.

You are Terry Griffiths and I claim my £5.

In what way is the sound “terrible”? Is it too quiet or is it being distorted? If the speakers are in the body then the sound can be muffled because there are no vents in the body. It’s probably better to mount the speaker in the chassis, under the floor, so that the sound is directed downwards and out through the bottom vent. There is an install guide that suggests a way to do this on the Youchoos website.

Yes exactly, it's the orthogonal planes that give the structures their strength. I made 3 identically sized open frame baseboards out of 9mm ply. They use L girders along the sides with cross pieces joining the two side girders together to form a grid. So the ply was joined in the X Y and Z planes, each piece giving the others more strength. Not a pure girder construction as Rice conceived it, but the same basic principle. No timber fillets were used at the joints. The first two units were screwed and glued and in places pinned and glued. By the last unit I realised that the pins and screws were really redundant and so it, and a further bridging piece, are glued only. Absolutely no problems - they are super strong, super rigid with no warping 5 1/2 years later. The ply edges are uniform enough to be glued if cut by a plunge saw using a guide rail or a table saw. And you need some means of holding the parts together correctly while the glue dries. I haven't tried the same technique with 6mm ply yet but I’m reasonably confident it would work.

I can see why that jumped out at you. The King has real presence in that image! Very nice! Check the Modelu replacement lamps carefully - they have changed the lenses and you might not like them...

It would ideally need to be resin printed but the CAD process would take many hundreds of hours if you want more than a simple outline. I.e. if you want details like rivets included and placed correctly. Do you have original engineering drawings for the loco?

I love the DMU hiding place. That makes the Halt much more interesting as a through station on the way to somewhere else. The hiding place is, in reality, part of the fiddle yard and you could swap vehicles over in there to suggest that the branch line connects into the wider network at the other end. The inside curve into the platforms is a bit sharp. Could you get the mainline to sweep into the station a bit more? There might be a small operational glitch: Any freight movements will block access to the stabling point. To address that maybe you could swap the stabling point with the freight sidings? So then the freight would be where a legacy goods yard would have been and the stabling point would be kicking back off the throat, a useful position for a station pilot to hang around with it's bigger pals.

You could keep them clean and fill them up with cauliflowers or broccoli...

"Too loud, man!" Only me?

I came across an interesting reference that explains the origins of the Brake Whistle. In his book, "The Armstrongs of the Great Western", Harold Holcroft says that in the early days of the railways, the braking of passenger trains was accomplished by having several brake compartments staffed by "auxiliary guards".

They aren't complete sh*t, though. The modifications are fairly simple. I think I posted photos of what I did somewhere and other folks had different solutions. So long as they can start smoothly and pull representative loads at normal speeds it doesn't actually matter what the top speed is, does it?

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about the bunker floor and the wiring channel. Good points, both.

The Dapol Large Prairie's running qualities and haulage capacity were affected by the flawed rear pony design on anything but dead flat track. If the pony is tweaked (reduce spring strength and increase the vertical travel of the axle) then they are fine machines. The Dapol is the heavier of the two and has the neat decoder installation method in the smokebox, including basic sound, whereas the Hornby has to be opened up and makes no allowance for sound at all. Very few people feel the need to reprofile the wheels... Visually, it's 50/50. Dapol are developing and improving the product whereas Hornby are almost certainly not - they have other fish to fry. So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that in my opinion the Dapol is the better of the two - but either is a good loco.