FarrMan

Just for information, Tony wright has a number of GWR items for sale on his forum.

Lloyd

On 01/07/2023 at 21:47, Tony Wright said:

Good evening Richard, and thanks.

 

It's gone very well indeed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there have been more visitors today than on both days combined last year. I think one of the reasons might be the not-so-hot weather this time - very pleasant. 

 

Now, one or two items of interest.................

 

 

I mentioned that there were some GWR locos for sale. 

 

This was one, a scratch-built Hall. There were some dozen metal GWR locos on offer at Ruddington, apart from two of which I got running well. Most just needed a clean, oil and pick-up adjustment, and away they went. The pair, an Aberdare and a 28XX needed a lot of remedial work, so they were sold as spares/repairs for about £10.00. 

 

And, the price for the one above once I'd got it running? An amazing £20.00! Admittedly, at some time during its life a tender-swop seems to have taken place (did the early Halls have smaller tenders?). However, some lining and a touch of overall weathering and the two should match. My intention is to tidy this up a bit, then offer it for sale (for more than £20.00!), donating any 'profit' to CRUK. What price a tidied-up, sweet running (fully-compensated), scratch-built Hall (the first one, I think)? 

 

Needless to say, all the locos were snapped up!

 

But, there was some other stuff on the Bulwell second-hand stand at Ruddington, all from the same source.

 

 

What price this trio of rather nice kit-built GWR vans (a Python, Prize Beast van and a Bloater?), all just needing a tiny bit of repair? With my repairs done (I've been busy!), how about £15.00?! Yes, that's all, for the three. There was some reluctance among purchasers because all the models had Peco/Hornby Dublo-style couplings (which I've now removed). I'll fit proper couplings and, again, offer them for sale, with profits to CRUK. 

 

I think these are Parkside kits. I think the price of one un-made kit is more than this trio put together. 

 

There are still some left at Ruddington, all around those prices.

 

 

Or even cheaper! This pair went for £8.00.

 

If you want this sort of bargain, get to Ruddington tomorrow.

 

 

There are several left of these as well, all for the princely sum of £7.00 each (note the couplings, which put some folk off. How difficult is it to change couplings? Too difficult it would seem for some in the hobby).

 

Once again, I'll tidy this up and offer it for sale in due course. I might even buy more! 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

 

P.S. There are also some unmade LNER/BR ER/LMS/BR MR loco kits for sale as well. I bought a Nu-Cast K2 (with all wheels and a brass chassis) for £45.00 (no instructions), and a friend bought a Nu-Cast J6 (all wheels and a brass chassis) for £50.00 (with instructions). Absolute bargains! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony

Are the brown vehicles still available?

Lloyd

On 25/06/2023 at 07:56, Tony Wright said:

But not if the tracks were lifted, and the formation then used as a footpath/cycle path. 

 

Perhaps not so interesting to die-hard railway enthusiasts, but of great interest to those who subsequently use it for leisure.

 

The abandoned branch from Oxley to Wombourne and beyond used to run no more than 100 yards from one of our homes in Wolverhampton (we didn't have lots of homes, just four different ones in the place over the years). It had closed years before, but it was an ideal (and safe) route for me to accompany my two young (at the time) sons as we cycled from Tettenhall to Wombourne. To those interested in botany (not me) or ornithology (me), it was a marvellous environment, especially where it ran adjacent to the canal. Had the railway still been extant, it would have been inaccessible.

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

Agreed, Tony. The Avoch (pronounced 'Och') to Fortrose track bed is another. Excellent for several kinds of wild fruit in the summer.

Lloyd

12 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

Late first wife Deb used, in the late '70s,  to have riding lessons on a Saturday afternoon, with a few others. Among them was a bumptious cove, who announced one day "I've been picked for Wimbledon!" prompting another there present to enquire "Tennis or Wombles?" as the bumptious one was very short. A decade later he became Britain's shortest MP.

Shortest in height or duration?

Lloyd

2 hours ago, Buhar said:

They were indeed built with flangeless middle driving wheels and remained so while they worked the Highland main line.  In the early thirties improvements to the infrastructure of the Kyle line allowed them to work there to, but this required the fitting of flanged centre drivers.  The main line is hilly (to put it mildly) but not tortuously curved whereas the Kyle line is, like the West Highland and C&O, very sinuous.

 

Alan

Like West Highland roads. I think that they were designed on the principle that one good turn deserves another.

Lloyd

1 hour ago, Jol Wilkinson said:

 

The LNWR 0-8-0s had one axle with flangeless drivers, but in their case the third axle. I doubt that the crank axle would have had flangeless wheels.

According to GWR Engines Vol 2 (page 121), 'One point not generally known, is that these big 2-8-0's (i.e. the 4700 class) in common with the other 8 coupled classes of the GWR, had thinner flanges on the two inner pairs of driving wheels, and also, to allow a modicum of side play, the coupling rods had spherical seatings at the joints in the rods.'

Lloyd

1 hour ago, john new said:

Possibly auto-colourised?

Surely they didn't nip down to halfords. How many rattle cans would a deltic need?

Lloyd

12 hours ago, Tony Wright said:

Good evening Rich,

 

I have no idea if any member of of the group who came today has anything to do with 'Technology Forge'.

 

What I would say............................

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is that they all operated LB brilliantly. In fact, probably better than many of the 'regular' operators!

 

Everyone had a fantastic day. If anyone else has a trainset they can use in this manner, I thoroughly recommend it. 

 

Regards,

 

Tony. 

Excellent, and I fully agree with the last paragraph as well.

Lloyd

21 hours ago, MrWolf said:

Coal ash has been used in cement for years. You can often see it in old cement. Similarly it and iron slag has been used in brick making.

The driveway and part of the yard at my old house was ash and sold enough to jack up cars.

PFA (pulverised fly ash from coal fired power stations) and GGBS (Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag) are standard cement replacement products often used these days to reduce the cement content of concrete and hence the carbon equivalent on construction products. What will happen when the last coal fired power station and the last steel works close? 

Lloyd

4 minutes ago, Tony Wright said:

Speaking of teaching/exams/etc, it's a big occasion for Little Bytham today......

 

Civica, a technology company, is bringing along seven of its employees for a team-building session. The only one who knows anything about model railways (the organiser) is hoping that a group with no prior experience will successfully operate the sequence on LB, but only by working together. The participants will be given a 'crash' course in Bytham's operation and then (to begin with, under supervision) will run some 50 trains, all in the correct order. The plan is for a kind of 'round-robin' to occur, where everyone has a go at all the positions in turn - driver, signaller, fiddle yard operator and so on. Breaking for lunch, the team should be 'built' by late-afternoon. What can go wrong? Does it matter if it does, as long as teamwork takes place? 

 

Because Bytham is really old-fashioned in its electrical operation (with separate positions for driving, signalling and fiddle yard offering/accepting), then it lends itself to this kind of thing - no single control, for instance; meaning that unless everyone performs their 'independent' task correctly, it won't run! 

 

And the best part about it? The firm is donating £1,000.00 to CRUK for this exercise, with promises of further donations from companies it works with! 

 

I'll be filming it (still and video) for BRM, beginning in just under an hour's time (after tea/coffee/biscuits). I'll report accordingly.

 

I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's a brilliant idea (not mine, of course), so thanks Phil.

What a brilliant idea! and what an excellent way to raise money for charity, and hopefully raise the status of railway modelling in some folks eyes. Hope all goes well. The company are probably getting what they want on the cheap as well. Benefits all round. I look forward to hearing how it works in practise.

Lloyd

1 hour ago, Coach bogie said:

 In my teaching days, the vocational teaching days, before it was decided it was cheaper just to sit an exam, students had to produce practical or project work to prove their understanding as part of their assessment.

 

Mike Wiltshire

The most important exams for most of our courses (Civil Engineering, Construction Management and Quantity Surveying) took the form of a real life project within the 'local' area (The Highland region represents app 10% of the land area of the UK, and students came over from the islands, Argyll, Moray, etc., with some from further afield). They had to prepare a report indicating their own research, etc, into several different aspects of the project. They were also encouraged to show and discuss their progress with their tutors and others, so that we could encourage them and guide them along the right lines. We tried to design it to be as near to a normal work situation as possible. Part of the submission was a presentation in front of two tutors, which included answering questions. I always asked them what they had learnt by doing the project, and usually they explained how they would do it differently the next time, which showed us how well they were learning.

Lloyd

6 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

The ones I took were good coz I passed!

Not one I set!!!

Lloyd

A good exam will test comprehension rather than memory. Fact sheets will be included, or you may be allowed to bring your own notes up to a given number of pages. But what proportion of exams are good exams?

Lloyd

57 minutes ago, Dunsignalling said:

Nice, my first four should arrive today, but I ordered another one yesterday.

 

I had failed to notice the BR departmental one until then! Ash destined for Exmouth Junction, presumably to be processed for use in the concrete works there?

 

John

Had the pozzilanic qualities of ash been identified at that time?

Lloyd

2 hours ago, Clive Mortimore said:

Lloyd

 

Now that is an idea of what traffic could be coming over the bridge....sheep being taken to market!!

More likely over Spittol Bridge. Nearer for cattle market.

Lloyd

1 hour ago, great northern said:

These things are intensely personal to the owner of the layout though, aren't they?  My very simplistic view is that there wasn't any such damage on the real thing, so there can't be any on my layout. I know having a half building is in itself illogical, but at least I do have some of what was there.

 

I'd really like more, not just the whole of that building, but the wagon repair works building behind it, and the turntable, and some more sidings, and I could even give Peter Leyland a real challenge by asking him to build the Cathedral if only the room was about twenty feet wider. A sense of proportion and some common sense too says leave it as it is.

If you decide to include the cathedral, (he says tongue in cheek), don't forget to include the scratches on the lectern  from the time when Oliver Cromwell kept his sheep and goats in there. I never did discover if he kept the sheep on one side and the goats on the other!

Lloyd

23 hours ago, Clive Mortimore said:

That bridge would look so much better with a nice spanking new Bristol/ECW LD in Tilling Red passing over it.

 

The only routes crossing that bridge at that time to use that type of bus would be the longer distance routes to Castor and Ailsworth and beyond, which were not very frequent.

Lloyd

3 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

We had our third running session of the year today and it went quite well. With nine of us present, we started with the first train in the sequence (exactly a year since we started the last cycle) and worked our way through a total of 29, taking us to just before noon on Friday (Mid-Cornwall Summer Time). We also ran one ad-hoc return trip each for the auto train and the SPC on the Polperran line - congratulations to Bill for driving the first Polperran to Pentowan service at a running session! Perhaps the ACE will make an appearance next time...

 

All very encouraging and I'm now keen to finish the trackwork at Pentowan as soon as I can, to bring the implementation of the full sequence a little bit closer.

SPC?

Lloyd

2 hours ago, 5 C said:

There have been numerous advances in the area of rustproofing by vehicle manufacturers. Dipping of the entire steel shell rather than spraying undercoat, galvanising metal, use of seam sealers and waxing in voids that might trap moisture are just some of the treatments employed. Anti-corrosion warranties are the norm on new vehicles. 

 

Some parts are still susceptible to rot though. The use of plastic covers and trays on the underside and in wheel arches protect those areas but exposed subframes, suspension arms etc. are still vulnerable, especially when the powder coating flakes off.

 

The used car trade will be wary of vehicles registered or used in Scotland due to the greater use of salt in the winter. 

 

It's probably less common for vehicles to require the extensive welding and patching that was commonplace in years gone by but it's not unheard of. The cost of such repairs can be enough to send a car to the scrapyard but it's just as likely the cost of repairing or replacing a mechanical or increasingly, electronic component can spell the end of a vehicle with an otherwise sound shell. 

That is why we always go south of the border to buy cars.

As for rust, he obviously does not have a land rover! I remember spending most of one christmas day on my back - underneath a land rover removing rust from the chassis.

Lloyd

29 minutes ago, drmditch said:

 

Yes indeed. I understand however that  Ellerman Lines has developed problems, largely to do with weight distribution.

I know the feeling!

Lloyd

2 hours ago, 16Brunel said:

 

As mentioned, I was parked (and personally absent).  The other driver was parking opposite me - nose-to-nose with a raised footpath between the aisles, and those wheel stops thingies (like a railway sleeper, about 4-5" sqaure in cross-section).  Didn't like the alignment, backed up and re-entered the spot, and obviously hit the accelerator not the brake...  Pushed my Outback back about 20"/half a metre, the bonnet was like a humpback bridge and jammed shut, the radiator tilted backwards, headlights now cross-eyed, and the gaps between each front fender and their respective front door rendered non-existent.  Insurance says it's all too much.  The most annoying bit was that on perpetrator's little Kia Rio you had to look hard to detect a mark on it!  A true automotive Liverpool kiss.  Thankfully, the other driver was merely a bit shaken up.  I hope your son is coping well, Lloyd.

 

Now to plan my new railway empire...

Thanks. It was quite a few years ago now, probably about 10 or more. The reason he does not drive just now is that the cornea transplant he had about three years ago needed to be rest earlier this year.

Lloyd

9 hours ago, 16Brunel said:

 

Got told yesterday that my Outback is a ("repairable") write-off - it got beaten up in a shopping centre car park (I was in the shops at the time) by a little Kia Rio that looked untouched!  So the plan to sell my daughter's car is off; we'll keep it instead of mine.  Maybe there's a silver lining - some of the insurance money might end up going "choo chooooo"...

 

And congrats on the triple century!

 

- Scott

My son had an outback. It was written off when a motorcyclist overtook too near a corner and got a bullseye on my son's headlamp. Sadly, the motorcyclist was a write off too.

I think we still have some spare wheels for it somewhere.

Lloyd

Glad that you enjoyed yourself, John, in the better antipodean country!

Lloyd

17 hours ago, great northern said:

I wasn't happy with that overgrown garden, so I got some more stuff and had another go. There are a lot of clumps of rough grass, and some dandelions, which like the real thing have long roots and have to be planted. On with my very close up glasses and a pair of tweezers and I somehow managed in the end. Actually, getting the photos was as hard, if not harder, as it has to be done by using a tripod and craning my neck to see the viewing scene. This is what I got. A bit of tidying up and tamping down to be done, but an improvement, I think?

 

The angle gives a bit of foreshortening, but the path between house and garden is still there, I assure you.

Now that looks a lot more realistic. I have seen what abandoned gardens look like! Though I am surprised that the dandelions have not spread further yet. Also, just noticed, how do they get to their front doors? Not as bad as an exhibition house I once saw, that had the front door at first floor level - and no steps.

Lloyd

13 hours ago, great northern said:

Yes indeed, a very pleasant few hours. Clive's coaches were indeed impressive, all the more so because they are almost all one colour, and as you remarked, from a shortish distance we couldn't even see that they were cut and shuts. Will this inspire him to start painting? I doubt it, but would like to be proved wrong.

 

Of course Clive's other highlight of the day came when he did the double crawl under to survey Station Road from the window side. He normally sits on the window sill and all is well, but today he decided he wanted to move further down towards Crescent Bridge. The baseboard gap narrows to 11 inches, but Clive doesn't, and for a short while he became wedged. Fortunately he managed to extricate himself. Good to see you both, as always, and to exchang a few things.

If not, you would have to starve him there until his girth was sufficiently reduced!

Lloyd