Martin S-C

She is just a huge softy. Timid as a mouse. That evil look is all bark no bite. Her name is Pepsi. Her sister is Skye. Pepsi always hangs around me everywhere I go, hence her supervisory role in the railway room. Skye is a real tomboy and always off in the next doors garden somewhere up to no good.

Oh, I don't know... Gosh. I'm not sure how to react to that. It could vary from the demure and sociably elegant to the downright risqué and X rated. Anyhow, over in sunny Peterborough (and boy has it been sunny!) we have a new Superintendent of Works. However attention span is an issue and sleeping is eminently more enjoyable that watching me curse over PECO flextrack. Note that the Superintendent has taken up residence in the new container specifically set aside to receive said sworn at PECO offcuts. There has also been testing of the capacity of the goods arrival and departure road which it was intended would accept 12 x 10ft WB wagons and what is considered in the Forest a "big" brake van. It seems said road will happily accept 14 wagons plus brake. This sets my freight train length limit but 12 will be the usual norm. The colliery is designed to shuffle coal wagons in rakes of 6 so 12 is the optimum. As well as the lovely weather today has been an absolute corker.

Gods, the pedants even attack your schoolboy French that you haven't used in 50 years! Argh!

Indeed. In the golden age of trainspotting which was probably the late 50s to the late 60s, all the little lads wanted to be "engine drivers" and not "train drivers." But language is a fluid creature and is always changing, never fixed. Shakespeare himself is said to have invented some words in his plays and I expect the low-lifes down in the pit below the stage at the Globe probably thought he was talking rubbish and making stuff up!

We have a few nutters who think Magna Carta has never been superceded as well... I have encountered a few Americans who are not fans of our monarchy though, one even calling Her Majesty a "tyrant", a word used to describe George III during that unhappy divorce during the 1770s and 1780s. Mind you the use of that word only reveals how clueless that one person was about our constitutional monarchy. On the other hand the wonderful Americans I've met far outnumber the less... "fully mentally engaged" ones I have had the amusement to encounter. So on the whole a wonderful race of ex-Europeans :) Moving swiftly on and desperately trying to encompass Dutch cheese, Ardennes paté and railway modelling in the same sentence we are now about to embark on a most relaxing mild spring Thursday evening of railway modelling. Le cork sheet rolls est arrivé, the doors and windows are flung open, the sun is westering, the kitties are keeping me company and I shall crack on. After supper, of course.

I shall absolutely furnish the relevant doors of the RAILWAY station(*) facilities with the requisite and correct miniature signage at the appropriate time. And the silver lining is I now know who to turn to in order to get it correct. (*) or RAILWAY TERMINUS to give it it's more correct functional and operational title when the little continuous-run-facilitating-board across the doorway is not in use.

Mention of such activities always reminds of that scene in "Titanic". Sadly none of *that* will be happening at Nether Madder either, more's the pity.

Gosh. We'll have none of that at Nether Madder I hope, or old Sent Thropnose will have something to say about the matter.

Oh woe is me! The plebeians rise up! A flippant line spake in ribald humour doth return to bite me upon the posterior region. I shall in future quoth not in comedy and shall endure the truly dullest and most stoic layout thread known to gentlemen, ladies or patrons of rest rooms, whomsoever they may be.

No cork sheet in the post yet so unable to begin fixing track down today. Instead I loosely placed and trimmed sleepers off all the station throat pointwork. PECO still have not released their bullhead code 75 medium radius points so I'm having to use the flat-bottomed rail ones and they do look a bit rubbish when placed against the wider radius BH points. My intent though is to try for a deep ash ballast look so I *hope* the sleepers will be buried. No doubt PECO will release their medium radius BH points when the layout is just about finished.

I'm sure they are but my space for text in the .any file was limited and I had no need to be specific at that point.

That's Edwardian for ladies and gentlemen's gender-specific facilities.

Both release crossovers for platforms 1 & 2 cut and loosely placed. Some minor gaps in the sleepers will need filling with small offcuts. This process shortens the crossover as well of course so I grabbed an extra inch of loco release track to the buffer stops. Time for a G&T now and some fresh eyes tomorrow. I have some rolls of 3mm and 2mm cork sheet on order which will raise the track up to match the DCC concepts foam underlay and will infill the surface to sleeper level in the goods yard and between the platform tracks.

*shock horror* After months of prevaricating, time wasting, doing other hobbies and a really *fun* period of depression (not) I have begun work again. Neil Mason of the Little Layout Company is at work finishing off the baseboards. I have pasted down the 1:1 scale track plan over the main station boards and begun to fiddle about with track-laying. I'm going to steal Graham's ( @LNER4479 's ) clever wheeze of cutting a little off the PECO points to get the correct double track spacing. This will only apply in this area of the layout though I may do it in the colliery area as well where a lot of tracks are close together. Just trying to build up the confidence to razor-saw through two £16 points...

@LNER4479 Hi Graham I appreciate this advice was given yonks ago and I absolutely know I took copies of the pictures and text but I'm blowed if I can find them now - and after the RMWeb host change the pics are lost. I don't suppose you'd be happy to re-upload these pics again pretty please? Incredible as it may seem I am actually about to get off my lazy behind and begin track-laying on my second attempt at Nether Madder and I need to get my head around these points cutting tricks again. I do need to ask however - and sorry to Barry for hi-jacking his topic but is there any practical reason why one cannot just cut across the two points like so - cutting through just a single sleeper? (this is a pair of medium radius code 75 points). As long as one preserves the straight sleeper alignment and you have enough rail to slide a fishplate onto is there a particular reason for your method of asymmetric cuts? Thanks.

Plus enough space for all my railway books. *probably*

*plans ultimate model railway*

That's a nice cranky corrugated tin sheet building. Easy to cobble together out of Wills sheets I'd have thought.

That's the one I've ordered. When I'm able to sneak another package into the house I'll get Robert Cunliffe's book as well. I see that salt was a principal traffic for the line which is unusual and not something I've ever seen as a main freight on a model. *thinks idly about what kind of industry might need to bring in lots of salt as a feature on Nether Madder*

7ft wb? Wow. I do like short wb stock. Very cute. Does anyone know of a book that covers the Garstang & Knott End? I feel like its a railway company I should know more about. EDIT: After a little rummage about I have found and ordered Dave Richardson's book on this line.

No reason at all you cannot just use the conversion as inspiration and find old RTR open and van body donors. The lower half of the van body can then go in a farmyard as a sheep pen or something. Even a compost/dung heap retainer or a coal store. Waste not, want not.

I hope the change in use from fish to fruit also involved a very good interior clean! BTW, Annie, if you'd find more photos of the model useful I can do some square-on shots from all 4 directions.

Yes, very much so and I plan to take good care of it. No weathering or any other paintwork changes, just a regauging exercise. The strange thing was the collection didn't cost me very much on e-Bay. I suspect it was the wrong place for the seller to sell it. An auction house may have been a better choice. P4 models often go for low prices on e-Bay presumably because there's not many modellers in that scale compared to 00 so almost no-one will look at it and if they do a bidding war is even less likely.

Iain is still going, but getting well on in years now.

Its an Iain Rice model I was lucky enough to get on e-Bay about 3 years ago. Its from his East Suffolk Light Railway. I managed to get all the locos and stock from that layout and I have converted the stock from P4 to 00. For the 4 locos my plan is to have new chassis/gears/motor units built to 00 gauge that will slot under the bodies and to store the P4 mechanisms so that the original Rice models can be reassembled if the owner after me wishes to.